Observation

If the Christian Right put as much effort into helping the poor as they do into oppressing homosexuals and controlling women, the welfare state would dissolve as there would be no one left to help.

Mississippi about to pown the populace

The Mississippi "life begins at fertilization" amendment is a very clever ploy. If it passes, it will mean most forms of birth control, such as the pill and IUD will be illegal, as they prevent the implantation of fertilized eggs. It means any woman who is on the "wrong" side of a political or religious debate can be dragged into jail on suspicion of murder if anyone suspects she might have had a miscarriage. Teetotalers will be able to jail anyone who drinks or is suspected of drinking while pregnant, especially if they go on to have a miscarriage. Pregnancies resulting from incest or rape will have to be carried to term, as aborting them would, under the state constitution, be murder. This isn't just an effective tool for controlling and manipulating women. If a man is giving you grief, all you have to do is use the threat of jailing his wife, sister, daughter or other friend or relative as leverage to shut him up. Even proving her innocence will result in a humiliating set of medical exams and detailed examination of her medical history. It's pretty much an all-in-one political trump card for the people in power. This is one of the cleanest and most intelligent back door police state moves I've ever seen. If this passes and stands up in court for any length of time, The Good Old Boys in Mississippi will have bought the entire state as effectively as if they were slave owners buying up a fresh shipment from Africa.

Word World MIA on Netflix Streaming

My son loves "Word World." Not long after being introduced to it he started sounding out words, eventually learning how to spell "BAT" at the age of three and a half. Sadly, Word World is no longer available on Netflix streaming. There was supposed to be a notice for two weeks before the show was removed. There wasn't, even through Netflix is apparently insisting there was. My son was not pleased.

The kicker is that Word World is not available as an entire season on the DVD service. Only a handful of episodes are available.

To whomever was responsible for removing Word World from instant streaming: YOU are one of the reasons people end up pirating videos. I'll bet there are a few parents who will learn how to use bittorrent and rip DVDs as a result of no longer having access to Word World when their child wants it. I'm not interested in adding ANOTHER streaming service just to get content whose copyright holder can't be bothered to do business with Netflix. I'm not interested in adding more hardware so I can stream Hulu or whatever the hell else comes down the pipe to my TV. I don't have the time or the money for such nonsense.

Right now there's only one Word World episode being seeded on PirateBay. I wonder how long it will take for more to crop up. There's only four distinct "Thomas the Tank Engine" torrents out there. It looks like more because of some duplication. There used to be more, a lot more, but they all faded away not long after Netflix started streaming Thomas. Funny that, making it easy for people to get programs when and how they want, keeps them from pirating it.

My son is Kryptonite to Bitches

My three and a half year old son and I went to the grocery store today. While in line at the cash register the woman in front of us was being a cast iron bitch to the cashier. I don't mean she was being rude. She was being systematically and manipulatively cruel. The cashier was a chubby teenage girl who was having an acne outbreak. The customer was a 20 to 30 something woman who kept raving about how SHE had such clear skin people all thought she HAD to be using SOME kind of product. Every time she raved about her own clear skin she glared at the cashier with open disdain.

"People with really BAD skin," *glare at cashier*, "need to wash their faces properly. Some people who take really bad care of their bodies," *Glare at cashier's belly*, "Were never taught how to take care of themselves."

The bitch finished buying her groceries and left. The cashier was on the verge of tears when my son and I came up.

"HI!" my son said to her.

"Hello," she replied.

"I got a cookie in the car!" he announced. "It has a skull on it for, er, Daddy what hol-i-day is the cookie for?" He sounded out "Holiday", something he's been doing with words he wants to try and spell.

"Halloween" I said. I turned to the cashier, handed her my store discount card and said "Hello."

He continued "And I get to eat the cookie when I get home!" He held his fingers up to his mouth and said "Nom, nom, nom."

The cashier laughed and handed me back my store discount card.

My son laughed back.

It was around this point the bagger, who was clearly a friend of the cashier's, found her voice and started talking about a boy who kept walking past trying to impress them with his swagger.

My son started dancing in the shopping cart. Both women laughed. My son pointed at the cashier and said, "You look like my friend Mary, she has a pretty laugh too."

It was at this point both women were far too interested in the boy's antics to properly ring up and bag up my groceries. The apple cider ended up being rung up and deleted three times. The rebate for bringing my own bags was handed to me in cash instead of being part of the receipt. The ground beef ended up bagged with all the unused cloth bags I'd brought.

I really didn't mind.

As we left my son waved and said "Bye! bye! Have a nice day! Go to the beach!"

The woman who was on the verge of tears when we walked up, was nearly doubled over with laughter by the time we left.

Well done my boy, well done.

Another scam site, cashadvances.co.uk

In a recent post, Payday Loan Scam Site cornerstonepayday.com, I discussed a web site claiming to offer payday loans, but full of enough red flags to make it clear that the site was either a con job, or designed by someone so incompetent at protecting customer data as to make doing business with them a incredibly bad idea. The same vandalized Wiki has introduced me to cashadvances.co.uk. While not QUITE a incompetently assembled as cornerstonepayday.com, it's still pathetic.

The first major red flag is the complete lack of encryption of any kind. Cornerstonepayday.com had a purloined SSL certificate, but the site was designed in such a way as to make it impossible to actually submit your data over SSL even if you tried. Cashadvances.co.uk handles this problem by having NO encryption on it's submission form at all. If you try manually changing the HTTP in the address bar to HTTPS and hit "Enter" you get the following browser error:

Secure Connection Failed
          An error occurred during a connection to www.cashadvances.co.uk.
SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length.
(Error code: ssl_error_rx_record_too_long)
  The page you are trying to view can not be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
  Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem. Alternatively, use the command found in the help menu to report this broken site.

Cashadvances.co.uk is asking for your employment history, birth date, contact information and other personal details but doesn't bother to encrypt it. I don't know if the law is different in the UK, but in the USA, an operation prompting for that kind of data over the Internet without using encryption would be violating of a number of laws and regulations.

In short, don't apply for a loan of any kind through Cashadvances.co.uk. They're probably a con operation, and if they aren't, they're too incompetent to be trusted with your data.