loliticz.com

You will be remembered for all the good work you did, kittehs will be purring for your family.

RIP sir, Teh kitteh’s are purring for ur fambly and peer group.

A good man died today, someone who probably should have lived longer. We feel for your loved ones.

Check out the Wiki article found here for more information about this stranger in a strange land.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Heinlein

ICC charge u, prolly never stand trial, but shining light into dark corners gud job anyways.

Sorry about the absence… Kitteh’s are most peeved, hair standing on end, hissing sounds coming out of there tiny mouths. The site got hacked by some spammer or other, and we got google listed for malware. We have fixed the security hole that we believe was responsible for the issue.

More political humor to follow, since the presidential campaign is really starting here in the US.

Elswhere, there are some events to notice.

bonafide, kitteh tender and litterbox cleaner.

No greater love can be found than in the sacrifice and example of laying down one’s life for another.

War, hunh, what is it good for? You all know the words to that popular song, yet war has a purpose, a demonstrable useful function for states and tribes when waged in a correct manner, with definable goals and “righteous” purposes. It also has a dark side, when the beast emerges to simply feed lives into a furnace to no end.

But honoring your fallen is a great good, a purpose which cages the beast in chains stronger than steel, or law.

Honor our dead, remember their names, and forgive their loss.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_casualties.htm

I was randomly reading in teh interwebs and came across this little book review on a favorite comic site.
The author, J.D. Frazer is a longtime cartoonist, whose work has been published on the web since 1997, and whose geek culture references are avidly read by sysadmins and other slaves in the IT world. I’m publishing this without permission, exactly as my cut and paste and link insert skills allow, and I’m including the link to the article on his site so you all can compare to see if I messed up really badly.

bonafide
Teh Kitteh’s luv teh dustpuppy!
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[Illiad] BOOK REVIEW - “RISK:THE SCIENCE AND POLITICS OF FEAR” Posted:Sun May 18 12:45:52 2008

Visit Userfriendly.org for the source

Some of you are too young to relate to this, but North American Gen-Xers like myself remember childhood summers where we would leave home after breakfast to play and not come home for eight or nine hours. As long as we were home in time for dinner, our parents didn’t raise an eyebrow. It was considered normal. If you’re a ten-year old, try that today and see what happens. Amber Alerts will rain down from the heavens in an organized fury!

This isn’t a criticism of the Amber Alert system. The idea of your child going missing is a nightmare of unparalleled scope to a parent, and having a system in place to find them as soon as possible is a good thing. But the fear to be found in a society that needs such a system is unbelievably destructive, and many factors dovetail to create this fear.

Many of you won’t believe this, but Western societies are safer than they ever have been in history. This is hard to believe because of a constant struggle between two human factors, the Head (rational thought) and the Gut (hard-wired survival instincts). This conflict is laid bare in a new book by Dan Gardner: RISK:The Science and Politics of Fear. Within this 300+ page book, Mr. Gardner, a journalist and historian, throws the fear that pervades our lives into sharp relief. He not only shows how we’re all wired to be terrified of unrealistically small risks, he also shows that the media, our governments, and big corporations encourage these fears. Sometimes they encourage them for mercenary reasons; other times, the fear is encouraged inadvertently.

There is a constant battle being fought in our psyches between these two 800-lb. gorillas within our behaviourial matrix. Generally, we rely on Gut to guide us in making decisions, with Head stepping in to ameliorate the more extreme reactions with rational assessments. For example, if we hear an ominous sound in a dark alley, Gut sets off the alarm and tells us to leave. Head, however, also notes that there’s quite a wind blowing, and the sound we heard could be easily explained by boxes and cans being knocked over. We adjust our reaction and carry on.

Sometimes though, Head isn’t given enough (or any!) information to be helpful in adjusting Gut’s reactions. Gardner explains that much of this comes from the advent of mass communications, which is no real surprise. A century ago, your window to the world was in fact the front window of your house. You paid attention to threats that were local. You could read the paper and note the threats that were far away, but they had little impact on your daily assessments. Fifty years ago, your window to the world was the television. With visuals and the humanizing effect of in-person interviews, distant threats became more real and pertinent to Gut. Today, what you see on television has become your local community, with all of the rapes, murders and abductions from around the world neatly organized and queued up for your consumption. When a sweet little girl 1400 km away goes missing, Gut tells you that all little children in your immediate community are at risk. The truth, of course, is quite different.

But the truth, the hard numbers that make sense to Head, are decidedly unavailable. When you watch the news, you’re told truthfully that cancer rates are set to rise sharply over the next 15 to 25 years. What the newscasters (and cancer foundations) don’t give you is the context, that due to dramatic improvements in health care, people are living much longer and cancer is by and large a disease of the elderly. An aging population will by definition become one where incidents of cancer will rise. Without that latter piece of information, Gut is left to shriek in fear in the corner, and money flows into the coffers of Big Pharma, sunscreen manufacturers and cancer research foundations. Funding going to research to fight cancer is certainly an excellent thing, but this example serves to show you that even noble, altruistic organizations have no problem with manipulating the public to help serve their ends.

Where were you on 9/11? Everyone remembers. I also remember that the U.S. airline industry took it in the pouch for a full year after that tragic day. Almost no one wanted to fly, because Gut said that the risk was too great, and Head had no data to mitigate that fear. Everyone decided to drive instead, and this choice caused a spike in driving deaths. In the U.S., there is a 1-in-135,000 chance of being killed in a hijacking if you fly once a month for a year — trivial odds, especially when you consider that there is an annual 1-in-6,000 chance of being killed in a car crash. Nearly 3,000 people lost their lives on 9/11. The switch from flying-to-driving caused an additional 1,595 people to die the year following 9/11. The news media didn’t notice, because it wasn’t spectacular like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina. Only the loved ones of the dead paid any attention.

The “spectacular” litmus test for today’s news channels is what helps drive so much of this unreasoning fear. Gut believes that what we see on the news, the spectacular tragedies of serial killings, child abductions, terrorism, ad infinitum ad nauseum is a truthful representation of our world. So Gut rightfully judges our world to be a terrifying place, where paedophiles, terrorists, murderers and cyclones lurk around every corner, to pounce on us the instant that we stop being careful. We vilify the news media for being merchants of fear, yet what the news media offers is what we want. Gut is always looking for examples of threats to help protect us, and eats up what CNN and its brethren have to offer. The more we watch, the more scared we become, and the more scared we become, the more we want to watch. In many ways, we created what the media have become today.

I picked up Gardner’s book and consumed it in two sittings, then went back to read it again. His writing style is clear and his research is impeccable. The only agenda he has in this book is to educate the reader on how we are doing a fantastic job of undermining our own world by scaring ourselves and allowing ourselves to be scared. In an age where fear is the coin of the realm, learning of what we should be reasonably scared about (and it’s none of the things you hear about on the news on a daily basis) is priceless. I highly recommend Gardner’s book: 5/5.

By the way, in Canada, the number of children under the age of fourteen that were abducted during the years 2000 and 2001 by someone other than a parent was exactly one. That’s an annual risk rate of 1 in 5.8 million. And yet you can bet junior isn’t allowed to go out to the park to play hide-and-seek alone with his friends. Imagine what he’s going to teach his kids.

We here at loliticz would like to take the time to spread a little holiday well wishing to all our readers, and those folks out in the blogospere who contribute to the general knowledge and laughter in the world.

Seriously laughter is truly a gift from “Insert appropriate higher power here.” Everyone on this planet should make sure to laugh at least one time everyday. We try to do our part to make you laugh, not only at the politicians antics, but at yourself, and all those situations that sometimes just make you want to smile, or guffaw, or LOL.

Our kittehs are very amusing, and almost everyday can make us smile, with just their normal cat antics. Teh kitteh’s r amuzin. U be amuzin too? Pols they iz alwayz amuzin.

Merry Christmas all, may this holiday season bring blessings and joy to each and everyone of you.

Don’t worry Jack, you and yours and your service will live on in hearts and history.

U remember, difficult patients live longer!