(via Yahoo) Family planning groups object to abortion plan.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Family planning groups and at least one member of Congress objected on Tuesday to a Bush administration memo that defines several widely used contraception methods as abortion and protects the right of medical providers to refuse to offer them.

The proposal would cut off federal funds to hospitals and states that attempt to compel medical providers to offer legal abortion and contraception services to women

The proposal circulated to media defines abortion broadly to include many types of contraception, including birth control pills and intrauterine devices.

Health and Human Services officials declined to confirm the proposal, but noted their responsibility to protect against discrimination of doctors and pharmacists who object to abortion or birth control on religious or moral grounds.

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A copy of a memo that appears to be an HHS draft provided to Reuters, carries a broad definition of abortion.

“The Department proposes to define abortion as ‘any of the various procedures — including the prescription and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action — that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation,”‘ it said

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The proposed rule is specifically designed to counter recent state laws enacted to ensure that women can get contraception when they want or need it.

“Despite the fact that several conscience statutes protecting health care entities from discrimination have been in existence for decades, recent events suggest the public and people in the health care industry are largely uninformed of the protections,” the draft reads.

“In May 2007, Connecticut passed a law requiring all hospitals to distribute Plan B to rape victims, despite religious organizations’ objections to the abortifacient nature of the drug,” it adds.

New York Rep. Nita Lowey, a Democrat, said the draft proposal goes too far.
“Federal law currently protects individuals who prefer not to provide abortion services,” Lowey said in a statement.

“This draft regulation would significantly expand the definition of abortion to include birth control for the purpose of conscience clause exemptions. By trumping state laws that guarantee women’s access to prescription contraceptives, this policy would encourage health care institutions seeking to limit access to birth control,” she added.

I mean what the holy fuck? What. The. Holy. Fuck?

WHAT THE FUCK?!

I just… the stupid levels are reaching critical.

George Carlin dies at the age of 71 of heart problems. He had just won the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Carlin was a comedian of… oh fuck this. You know who he was.

You know:

He’ll be missed.

It’s a real fucking unicorn!

(via Yahoo News, via AP) ROME - A deer with a single horn in the center of its head — much like the fabled, mythical unicorn — has been spotted in a nature preserve in Italy, park officials said Wednesday.

The 1-year-old Roe Deer — nicknamed “Unicorn” — was born in captivity in the research center’s park in the Tuscan town of Prato, near Florence, Tozzi said.

He is believed to have been born with a genetic flaw; his twin has two horns.

Calling it the first time he has seen such a case, Tozzi said such anomalies among deer may have inspired the myth of the unicorn.

Single-horned deer are rare but not unheard of — but even more unusual is the central positioning of the horn, experts said.

“Generally, the horn is on one side (of the head) rather than being at the center. This looks like a complex case,” said Fulvio Fraticelli, scientific director of Rome’s zoo. He said the position of the horn could also be the result of a trauma early in the animal’s life.

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Dude! Unicorn! Is this fake? A prank? I dunno. But fuck you, when they find the Gryphon I call dibs, motherfuckers!

DIBS!

(via Boeing, via Gizmodo): ST. LOUIS, June 03, 2008 — The Boeing Company [NYSE: BA] fired its new thin-disk laser system repeatedly in recent tests, achieving the highest known simultaneous power, beam quality and run time for any solid-state laser to date.

In each laser firing at Boeing’s facility in West Hills, Calif., the high-energy laser achieved power levels of over 25 kilowatts for multi-second durations, with a measured beam quality suitable for a tactical weapon system. The Boeing laser integrates multiple thin-disk lasers into a single system. Through these successful tests, the Boeing team has proven the concept of scalability to a 100-kilowatt-class system based on the same architecture and technology.

“Solid-state lasers will revolutionize the battlefield by giving the warfighter an ultra-precision engagement capability that can dramatically reduce collateral damage,” said Scott Fancher, vice president and general manager of Boeing Missile Defense Systems. “These successful tests show that Boeing has made solid progress toward making this revolutionary capability a reality.”

The thin-disk laser is an initiative to demonstrate that solid-state laser technologies are now ready to move out of the laboratory and into full development as weapon systems. Solid-state lasers are powered by electricity, making them highly mobile and supportable on the battlefield. The Boeing laser represents the most electrically efficient solid-state laser technology known. The system is designed to meet the rapid-fire, rapid-retargeting requirements of area-defense, anti-missile and anti-mortar tactical high-energy laser systems. It is also ideal for non-lethal, ultra-precision strike missions urgently needed by warfighters in war zones.

“This accomplishment demonstrates Boeing’s commitment to advancing the state of the art in directed energy technology,” said Gary Fitzmire, vice president and program director of Boeing Directed Energy Systems. “These successful tests are a significant milestone toward providing reliable and supportable lasers to U.S. warfighters.”
Boeing’s approach incorporates a series of commercial-off-the-shelf, state-of-the-art lasers used in the automotive industry. These industrial lasers have demonstrated exceedingly high reliability, supportability and maintainability.

A high-power solid-state laser will damage, disable or destroy targets at the speed of light, with little to no collateral damage, supporting missions on the battlefield and in urban operations.

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Lazlo (to Chris): I’ve been thinking about your laser solution. I figure you’ve increased the output to six megawatts.

Chris: Yeah.

Lazlo: What would you use that for?

Mitch: The applications are unlimited. Industrial for one.

Lazlo:With the gas tanks you’ve designed the beam would only last for forty seconds. What good is that?

Chris: I don’t care, Lazlo. I graduated.

Mitch: Let the engineers figure out a use for it. That’s not our concern.

Lazlo: Maybe somebody already has a use for it, one for which it’s perfectly designed.

Jordan: You mean Hathaway had something in mind all along?

Lazlo: Looks at the facts: very high power, portable, limited firing time, unlimited range. All you’d need is a big spinning mirror and you could vaporize a human target from space.

Chris: This is not good.

Mitch: How big a mirror?

*******

Chris: The mirror is gone, too. Hathaway, you worm! You pig! You fuck! Kent, you too! I should have seen it! How could I have not seen it!

Mitch: He lied to us.

Chris: It’s easy to lie to you. You trust people! I’m cynic! What an asshole I am!

Lazlo: I understand how you feel, Chris, and you’re right. But what we should be doing now is trying to find out what he’s doing.

(via The Huffington Post) MONTERREY, Mexico — A car has plowed into a bike race along a highway near the US-Mexico border, killing one and injuring 10 others.

Police investigator Jose Alfredo Rodriguez says the 28-year-old driver was apparently drunk and fell asleep when he crashed into the race.

A photograph taken by a city official shows bicyclists and equipment being hurled high in to the air by the collision.

Rodriguez says Juan Campos was charged with killing Alejandro Alvarez, 37, of Monterrey.

Authorities say the wreck happened 15 minutes into the race along a highway between Playa Bagdad and Matamoros.

Campos says he is an American citizen living in Brownsville, Texas. U.S. consulate spokesman Todd Huizinga said officials were looking into whether Americans were involved.

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Except then I saw the photo. And it is horrible. And, well, I had an instant thought when I saw it. I mean, I am not apologizing for that just explaining it. And I had this thought, about this picture, and I looked at it and started, well, laughing. So I put the little words in my head onto the image and decided that I simply had to share.

Spaced: The Complete Series is now up for pre-order at Amazon.com for 42 bucks, down from the list price of $60 which is pretty cool. It’ll be released on July 22nd. Spaced! Region 1! At last!

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I also got, from Dom, a wonderful gift recently. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories. It’s a two volume set and the annotations are wonderful. They keep up the gentle fiction that Holmes and Watson are real and keep the tone of them light and tongue-in-cheek while still delivering good information and pointing out inconsistencies (and amusing with the reasons they suggest for them). If you like Holmes at all these are a must have (there is a third volume with the novels) and if you don’t know Holmes these are a good way to read them. I have book love.

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NASA makes video using sound waves and animation to show magnetic fields. Sound controlled CGI and 3D composing? Yeah, NASA had some fun with this.

(via The Consumerist) I just wanted to point something out that is not very publicized yet. On June 29th, the FAA will switch to a different filing method for flights in the USA. They are switching to what is called and “ICAO Flight Plan”, which is the international standard that the rest of the world uses. This is like going from standard to metric for the aviation world.

Because so many airlines and FAA computers are old and talk to so many agencies, there is a strong chance that something will go wrong. At the large airline I work at, some are calling it “D-Day”, since it is a cold-turkey switch. We are talking about a brand-new way for ALL airlines to file domestic flight plans, and they are all doing it for the first time on June 29th.
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Here is the FAA page regarding this.

I can’t think this will be much more fucked up than airtravel has been recently, but hey you never know.

(via NYTimes) Steady work has been scarce for actors in gorilla suits since “The Electric Company” went dark in 1977.

But all that changes this week as shooting begins in Washington Heights and the Lower East Side on an ambitious reboot of the PBS literacy series that turned on a generation of schoolchildren to the rudiments of reading. The first graduates of “Sesame Street” found in “The Electric Company” a companion piece that relied on pun-filled sketches, Spider-Man cameos, and lots of primate shtick, all backed by a Motown beat.

Refitted for the age of hip-hop and informed by decades of further educational research on reading, the 2009 version of “The Electric Company” is a weekly, more danceable version of its former daily self. The series, which is expected to make its debut in January, faces challenges the original never did (trying to stand out amid so much children’s programming and to shake the stigma of educational television) as well as familiar ones (trying to make reading a positive experience for youngsters).

“It’s the old one mixed with ‘High School Musical’ and a Dr Pepper commercial,” said Linda Simensky, senior director of programming for PBS Kids, a block of children’s shows that will include “The Electricity Company.” There’s a touch of “Fame” to it, given its cast of culturally diverse city kids who sing and dance, as well as nods to the original series. (A cameo has been offered to Rita Moreno, a regular on the original “Electric Company,” remembered for her show-opening exultation, “Hey, you guyyyyys!”)

Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit media corporation formerly known as the Children’s Television Workshop, will once again produce. As before, when the show began in 1971, it is still directed at viewers 6 to 9 years old.

In keeping with the original show’s ties to theater (many in the cast, like Morgan Freeman, had stage backgrounds), the new head writer is a Tony-Award-nominated playwright and lyricist, Willie Reale, with experience in children’s theater (“A Year With Frog and Toad”).

In the first episode Mr. Reale establishes the show’s conceit: Somewhere in the big city lies a natural-foods diner that is headquarters to a not-so-secret society known as the Electric Company. The four semi-superheroes who meet there — Keith, Jessica, Lisa and Hector — have pledged not only to use their powers for good but also to eat sensible portions of healthy meals. The gang ranges in age from 13 to 20 and can scramble, recall, project and animate words in astounding ways.

Plotting nefariously is a clutch of comical misfits and poseurs known as the Pranksters. “They’re villains without being villainous,” said Scott Cameron, the show’s research director, “just neighborhood kids who cause chaos.”

The Sesame Workshop hopes to raise $25 million for the project, $17.7 million of which has been provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting through the federal Department of Education. Twenty low-income, low-literacy pockets across the country will also be the focus of an extensive outreach program in the months leading to the show’s premiere.

“There will be billboards, bus ads, notices in their dollar stores, television and radio ads, all about the power of reading,” Randell M. Bynum, who is coordinating the outreach, said. “When the show comes on in January, these communities will have already been primed to the importance of reading and bombarded with resources.”

Ms. Bynum, along with the production team and cast members, has been testing strategies at P.S. 188 on Houston Street in the Lower East Side. A group of that school’s students in first through fourth grades recently screened a 30-minute demonstration of the series, which included a music-video tribute to the transformational power of the silent E, the sneaky letter that can turn cap into cape and at into ate.

Music for the series will come from three people involved in the Broadway rap-salsa-pop musical “In the Heights”: the director Thomas Kail, the co-arranger and orchestrator Bill Sherman and the actor Christopher Jackson.

In a category by himself is the beat-box artist Shockwave (Chris Sullivan). Besides slinging hash at the Electric Diner, he speaks in one-word bursts only — no sentences — and appears in guises like the much missed gorilla and a butcher who cleaves words. But it is his D.J. routine that may be mimicked on playgrounds next year. He appears to be scratching syllables from dueling turntables to form words. It all emanates from his “bruh-bruh-AIN, bruh-bruh-AIN, brain.”

(More at at the link)

(via Reuters)
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict will text message thousands of young Catholics on their mobile phones during World Youth Day in Sydney in July, hoping going digital will help him connect better with a younger audience.

The Pope will text daily messages of inspiration and hope during the six-day Sydney event while digital prayer walls will be erected at event sites and the church will set up a Catholic social networking Web site akin to a Catholic Facebook.

The Catholic Church said it decided to use technology to connect to the estimated 225,000 young Catholics expected to attend the World Youth Day (WYD) celebrations that start on July 15.
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The Pope is going to send txt msgs to the faithful? Like what?

Wtr 2 wine! N00b!

I mean shit, does the Pope get good signal everywhere? I bet he does. I bet he does.

Also “akin to a Catholic Facebook” is a great concept. Think about Facebook for a second, think of how it is used and all the apps you use. Now make Catholic versions of them. And … laugh. Because “Catholic Facebook” is like “Cinemax Original Movie” - you know they’re both cheap bad softcore porn. Except the Catholics don’t do softcore. To be fair. When they do porn they go for the full-on, hardcore, “don’t let the sheep watch” porn.

The kinda stuff you don’t admit to owning, and then have to purge because you run out of space on your hard drive. You know the stuff. That’s a Catholic Facebook.

Actually a “Catholic Facebook” is when you bukkake a nun and then slap her with a Bible. But you didn’t hear it from me. Ahhh, those were the days.

So anyway! Pope Evil is going to send text messages. He will also lead the crowd in a House of Pain style Heyyyyy Hoooooo chant:

I hear tell that he will then partake of a Mango/Strawberry/Banana/Coconut Smoothie and go to watch Home Improvement reruns. The Pope does so love that wacky Tim Allen.

So last summer, August 2007, we kinda, sorta, maybe, almost coulda nuked ourselves. No, really. Way to go Team U.S.A.!

(Via Military.com):

…on Aug. 31, 2007, when crews loaded six live nuclear warheads onto a B-52 bomber and flew from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, cruising over the nation’s heartland. Each warhead was 10 times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

During the analysis of the incident by the Defense Science Board (DSB), released this month, the ugly truth came out: America’s nukes are so neglected that they are stored alongside conventional missiles, with nothing but an 8.5 x 11-in. sheet of paper to differentiate the two. The last day in August, Air Force personnel loaded the nuclear warheads on a routine repositioning of weapons stocks, believing them to be cruise missiles.

The system of checks and balances has degraded to a point that six of the planet’s most powerful weapons were missing for 36 hours — and no one noticed until they had landed in Louisiana. “The process and systemic problems that allowed such an incident have developed over more than a decade and have the potential for much more serious consequences,” the report warns.

So all right. There was a slight error. We loaded some nuclear warheads onto a plane flying over our own country. Six of them. Now, shit happens. I mean, no one is perfect right?

No! No, if you are dealing with nukes you damn well better be closer to perfect than this! Bottom fucking line! And to think, the big sign? A piece of printer paper. Way to go Air Force!

So let’s get this straight, we store nukes in easily accessible places, next to conventional missiles cause we’re just that dumb. I mean, seriously! How stupid do you have to be to be careless with nukes?

The staff at Minot Air Field had neglected to follow procedure for the sake of saving time. The verification of weapons — what kind, what warheads they carry, their armament status — should take about 45 minutes, and be performed before anything else happens.

“But, over time, to speed the process, breakout and convoy crews had established a process of concurrent activity,” the report states. “In this case, the breakout and convoy crew [at Minot] were connecting the trailer to the tow vehicle while the initial status verification was under way.” The checks had become pro forma, and a near disaster slipped through.
…

The task force noted that members “could find no written directive that specifically described the required identifying means [to tell an inert missile from one with a live warhead].” Also, there is only one checklist for verifying the various kinds of missiles that can be loaded onto a B-52 — live, inert, training and test devices. Nukes are treated the same as disarmed missiles when it comes to verifying armament.

Well, fuck a doodle-do. Ok, so this great sign must have not been to good. I mean that is what this comes down to, right? We don’t really care that the Air Force keeps the nukes on the same shelf as the normal missiles, the cheese in a can and the paper party hats, right? That’s to be expected. These are people who deal with nuclear missiles all the time, so what if they leave them out?

Wait, why are the nukes out? Shouldn’t there have to be some big fucking special room with multiple guys standing around getting calls on red phones just to load these fuckers? Ah well. That shit won’t change. I still say the sign is key. To that end I have created a new sign for them to hang between the missile bays that may help some:. Military dudes! If you’re reading this feel free to print this out and hang it near nukes and shit!