Google gets evil in Cuba

Well, well, well. What have we here? Someone trying to turn Cuba into a closed society…and it ain’t Fidel Castro!

Cuba on Tuesday accused Google of “outrageous censorship” after the US internet giant blocked access to a web traffic analysis tool to comply with US sanctions against Havana.

Google Analytics, a free tool allowing website operators to see when people visit and from where, stopped working in Cuba after a software update that brought it in line with US restrictions.

“As a US company, we comply with US export controls and trade sanctions that limit us from offering certain services in certain countries,” Google said in an emailed reply to an AFP inquiry.

“In order to abide by these laws, our terms of service have always prohibited the use of Google Analytics in sanctioned countries,” it said. “There’s now a technical block in place as well.”

The list of countries where Google products or services face sanctions included Cuba, Burma, Iran, Syria, Sudan, and North Korea.

In other words, a corporation is kowtowing to state censorship…not by the Cuban state, which doesn’t censor any information (Cuban newspapers are concise, but accurate), but by the United States of So-Called Freedom-Loving America.

And of course, this being corporate news, it’s justified with the usual drivel:

US sanctions have been in place against Cuba since 1962.

Limited political debate in the Communist-ruled island nation is carried out on blogs and social networking websites, but opposition to the ruling party is banned and the media is under state control.

Actually, opposition isn’t banned (they’re merely unpopular, but nobody’s stopping them from believing what they will), and the debate isn’t limited; internet access in Cuba is, because the infrastructure is severely underfunded. (That would be the fault of those fifty-year-old sanctions by you-know-who.)

It’s interesting, however, that one prominent opposition voice hasn’t been silenced, as is commonly asserted; indeed, she has dedicated servers (conveniently located outside of Cuba!) and non-Google translation into numerous languages, and one wonders where she got the considerable money needed for that. Bet Google Analytics won’t be blocking her, though, since her incessant (uncensored! in Cuba!) whinings about how repressed she is conveniently serve the corporatist agenda.

In other words, all that hoary commie rhetoric about capitalist running dogs…is correct. Who’d of thunk it?

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Posted in Crapagandarati, Cuba, Libre (de los Yanquis), Do As I Say..., Fascism Without Swastikas, Filthy Stinking Rich, Isn't It Ironic?, Law-Law Land, Newspeak is Nospeak, Socialism is Good for Capitalism! | 1 Comment

Quotable: Utah Phillips on child labor laws

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Coke adds racism? Sure smells that way.

Courtesy of Ad Age, by way of Gawker, we learn what the Coca-Cola Company (and a certain adman) really thinks of non-white people…and it ain’t pretty:

In the interest of transparency, let me confess my bias. I’ve done a lot of work over the years for one of the big soft-drink companies. Let me point out that I’ve seen that company do a lot to increase consumption of its diet drinks, bottled water, juice and healthy snacks. But let’s face it. Hispanics and African Americans are much less interested in diet products. Sugary drinks — often the sweeter the better — do well with them. There are a lot of cultural barriers to getting both these groups to understand the importance of being lean.

That was David Morse…in Gawker’s words, a “professional multicultural marketer of sugar water to minorities”. Sounds about right. And David Morse has no idea of just how racist he sounds when he asserts that blacks and Latin@s have more of a taste for sugar than white people (who, as we all know, NEVER get fat, much less obese. People of Wal-Mart tells us so!)

And of course, black and Latin@ consumers are breaking down Coke’s door BEGGING for ever huger servings of fizzy high-fructose corn syrup, right? Only them…not white people, who have the will-power and self-control needed to bolt down that atrocious aspartame swill known as Diet Coke:

Multicultural marketing is about talking to minorities — or if you prefer, the new mainstream — and representing them, acknowledging them and showing them that you care about their business. Could soft-drink companies and others in the sugar business do a better job of promoting healthy food and beverage consumption, particularly among African Americans and Hispanics? Absolutely. Do they owe these groups an apology? I don’t think so.

In a criticism of Mr. Bloomberg, Stefan Friedman, a spokesperson for the New York City Beverage Association said, “The city is not going to address the obesity issue by attacking soda because soda is not driving the obesity rates.” I tend to agree. The fault is with overconsumption. Responsibility lies with parents. A contributing factor is culture. On many levels, the soft-drink industry is being demonized as if it were the new big tobacco.

Hate to say it, David, but that demonization is richly earned. After all, you’re the ones profiting off those raised mortality rates of visible minorities, and off their so-called lack of self-control, which you slickly pass off as being a “culture” problem.

Those kids are growing up in the same culture as we white folk…a culture saturated in junk food, endless junk food. Ads for junk food are all around us, and the message is the same whether you’re black, brown or white: CONSUME THIS! CONSUME THIS IN MASSIVE QUANTITIES, FAR MORE THAN YOUR BODY EVER WILL NEED!

And Coke, to make it even more insidious, is liquid junk food. Whether sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup or aspartame (which, more insidiously still, causes us to crave sugar to make up for what our taste buds are being tricked into only thinking we’re getting), it is devoid of nutritional value. I’ve heard it called “liquid candy”, which is rather too nice a way of putting it, since even the junkiest candy has more nutritional value than Coke. (And it’s less fattening, too. You consume less because you fill up on it sooner.)

But yeah, Dave, keep patting yourself on the back about how Coke bears zero responsibility, and it’s all the fault of those unself-controlled black and brown people, who are more sugar-happy by nature and culture than the white people who consume the exact same slop in the exact same hugely bloated quantities per capita.

I’ve never been a cola drinker, but I don’t blame it so much on my German genes and Canadian upbringing as I do on the fact that being constantly, incessantly told what to consume by big corporations just utterly repulses me. Especially when I consider what Coke is doing in Latin America.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if learning this has a similar effect on the very target audiences you Coke-heads pride yourselves so much on penetrating with your racialized drivel.

PS: Courtesy of Gawker’s comment section, we learn that the high preference for sugary foods by minorities is a direct result of…are you sitting down for this?…MARKETING.

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Quotable: Alex Carey on corporate propaganda

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And the jokes just write themselves

Ah, Michigan. Looks like you’re not just famous for ridiculous right-wing legislators anymore, but also for shit-stupid gun guys. Take, for instance, this poor bastard, who accidentally discovered irony while trying to compensate for his lack of endowments:

A Michigan man is recovering after shooting himself through the crotch while adjusting his .40-caliber Glock, reports The Detroit Free Press.

According to police in the Detroit suburb of Birmingham, it could have been worse.

“You think about it — your femoral artery runs down there,” Deputy Chief Mark Clemence said. “He could have shot it off. It could have been a lot worse. It’s a big bullet; you’re not talking a small bullet.”

* * *

But there still might be injury to add to the insult: though the man does have a permit to carry the gun, Clemence said local prosecutors will decide whether to charge the man with reckless discharge of a firearm.

Careless storage would also be an issue. Only a macho fucktard stuffs his loaded gun in the waist of his pants; it’s a sure tip-off that he hasn’t got much else in there. (Or in his brain pan, either.)

Meanwhile, the commentariat at Raw Story was full of “gone off half-cocked” jokes and nominations for the Darwin Award. Sadly, this guy’s only good for an honorable mention, since he lived to tell (or, as I suspect, keep a very painful secret.) Best comments:

Guess we’ll have to wait and see if any penis-related inanities come off the floor of the Michigan statehouse, eh?

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Posted in Guns, Guns, Guns, Isn't It Ironic?, Isn't That Illegal?, Men Who Just Don't Get It, Schadenfreude, The Hardcore Stupid, The United States of Amnesia | Comments Off on And the jokes just write themselves

Music for a Sunday: A single perfect sphere

What happens when your ship gets sucked down a big black hole? You come out on the other side…into a world where Heart and Mind are in conflict, and humanity is in chaos. Your mission: to heal the rift and unify the whole.

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Wankers of the Week: Crappy Father’s Day!

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Crappy weekend, everyone! And to all the dads out there, crappy Father’s Day. Well, wasn’t this the crap-daddy of all weeks for you, too? It was for me. I lost this entire list somewhere between Wednesday and Thursday, so now I’ve had to start over from scratch. Meaning, it’s gonna be nasty, brutish…and, unfortunately, SHORT. So, here come the wanks, in no particular order…

1. Barry James Fucking Hickey. Old men who are presumably celibate have no business telling the young and sexually active what to do. I’ve said it before, but it always bears repeating. And when more than 90% of all sexually active Catholics are using birth control, it doesn’t do to rail at them and tell them they’re “not respecting the truth”. There is nothing “tragic” about limiting one’s childbearing to where, when and how often one really wants to do it. The truth is, there are 7 billion people on this Earth. That’s far too many. And reproducing willy-nilly out of a mistaken belief that “God wants it that way” is just plain irresponsible. As is any old presumably celibate man telling Catholics to stop using birth control. The only one who doesn’t respect the truth is the one who keeps blindly insisting that God will provide when it’s manifestly clear that God doesn’t work that way.

2. John Fucking McGuinness. I wonder what #1 would say to #2, who chose to punish his girlfriend for the sin of receiving a text message from another man…by soaking her horrendously expensive jeans in wasabi and hitting her in the face with them. I have a hunch he’d approve, and tell her to stop being such a provocative fucking jezebel.

3. Victoria Fucking Hearst. The only thing worse than a person who got rich without working for it…is one who got religion without thinking anything through. Such is the case for Patty Hearst’s younger sister, who is a born-again lackwit. She grew up reading Cosmopolitan, just as I did. And for all the sex and sex info in there, she didn’t go out having random sex with random dicks; same here. But when she got religion, she forgot all that, and now she wants Cosmo (which, in its present iteration, is VERY watered-down from when Helen Gurley Brown ran the show in the good old days) to be sold in a concealing wrapper. As though that would make teens any less likely to reach for it. Especially in these days of abstinence-only disaster, when kids are desperate for any kind of information, even if it’s presented in a coy and/or ridiculous manner. An analogous argument, I’m guessing, is that any teenager reading Camus will suddenly go out and kill Arabs just for the hell of it. BTW, I read L’étranger in the original French as part of an actual classroom assignment, and I turned out okay, too. Haven’t killed a single Arab yet, and don’t expect I ever will. But then again, I’m a Pagan. And I have no intention of getting any other religion.

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4. Ezra Fucking Levant. Considering how often I’ve had hypocritical right-wing fucktards railing at me for my use of bad fuckin’ language (right before they turned around and called me a cunt, with the added wish that I’d soon be violently sodomized), I find it more than a little ironic how few of them are scolding Ezzy the Mother-Fucking Putz for his use of the same. Maybe because he said it in Spanish, to someone who thinks his hypocritical “Ethical Oil” schtick is just a bunch of mierda? Or maybe just because right-wingers are, without exception, all fucking hypocrites who are so full of shit that it’s a wonder they can walk?

5. Vic Fucking Toews. Time for Icky Vic to step down as public-safety minister. It’s clear that he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about gunshot victims, any more than he did for the missing women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, when he told the RCMP to “back off and tone down” their apology to the families of the missing women. There really are not enough ugly words in the dictionary to adequately express my distaste for the Adulterer, who is clearly one sick, callous old fuck. And who is, at best, criminally incompetent when it comes to protecting the public safety of Canadians.

6. Van Fucking Butler Fucking Perry. Why the double Fucking? Because he’s doubly stupid. And because I hold in double contempt anyone who beats a woman for being free with her language. And also because he inspired the fucktarded fucking fuckheads of Fucking Freeperville to double down on THEIR collective dumbth. Like they really needed to be any more fucking stupid.

7. Michelle Fucking Malkin. As usual, totally fucking unhinged. Somebody please confiscate her meth stash, and lock her up in a rubber room. She’s about to splatter on the ceiling.

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8. Bryan Fucking Fischer. Once again, the creepy old closet case rears his frothy head, and once again he spews outdated studies proving nothing at all. Can we lock him up too, please, so he stops masturbating on the air? Thanks awfully.

9. Mitt Fucking Romney. I had a nightmare about Mittens this past week, in which I met him in person and found him to be not so much robotic and out of touch as just plain mean, nasty and frankly terrifying. It was like being back in school and facing the bullies all over again; I’m sure the late John Lauber knew that feeling all too well. I woke up with residual fear and loathing of Willard the Cop Impersonator still swirling around my head. Looks like someone else had the same nightmare, only she had it for real. Oy fucking vey!

10. and 11. Buddy Fucking Valastro and Anthony Fucking Bellefemine. Both should be heartily ashamed of themselves for making a transgender woman into a punchline and an “it” respectively. As the victim of their unfunny prank says, people like her are being killed every day because of attitudes like these. This sort of thing is only a “joke” when you’re not on the receiving end of the punches. And even then, it’s not fucking funny.

12. Ihor Fucking Stetkewycz. Clean up your fucking mess and do as the lady tells you, you sexist fucking pig. And keep your dick in your pants. And shave off that ugly fucking goatee. Stop whining about your mother, nobody wants to hear it. And while you’re at it, iron my silk blouse and make me a fucking sandwich!

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13. Jim Fucking Stamas. So, the medically correct term for one of our female parts can’t be said in the Michigan House of Representatives anymore because it offends the delicate sensibilities of the poor widdle Repugnican speaker? Well, I have just one thing to say to that: VAGINA VAGINA VAGINA VAGINA VAGIIIIIIINAAAAAAAAAA!!!

14. Brian Fucking Storseth. Smooth move, Ex-Lax, you just made the fucking neo-Nazis very happy with your big dumb hate-on for human rights and your idiotic notions of what constitutes freedom of speech. Bill C-304 is a total fucking miscarriage. And the irony of it is, it empowers the very people who would be the first to take ALL our freedoms away if they ever got into office…oh wait, the Nazis are already there. Only they call themselves CONSERVATIVES!

15. Steve Fucking Doocy. You fuckin’ idiot, now look what you’ve gone and done. You’ve made Wretched Gretchen Fucking Carlson accidentally discover FEMINISM! And when she learns that it really was cooked up by a bunch of Marxists for the benefit of all humankind, it’s not only gonna wreck the entire FUX Snooze paradigm, it is gonna open a motherfucking black hole in the Space-Time Continuum!

16. Huben Fucking Hubenov. Words mean things, and so do pictures (unless we’re talking abstract expressionism, in which case it’s often not even a picture, it’s just weird shit with an unconscionable price tag). And divorcing fashion photos of models made up to look horrendously beaten and abused from any semblance of context does not make those pictures “beautiful”. It does, however, make you absolutely clueless about how violence against women looks in the real world, where it isn’t even remotely pretty. Meanwhile, with regard to your snippy defensive posture…carry on and dig in. You should be reaching China any day now!

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17. Neil Fucking Munro. You work for Tucker Fucking Carlson! Which is a nicer way of saying You lie! PS: Who the fuck imported YOU, anyway? And WHY? Dude, you are like tits on a bull!

18. Danielle Fucking Harkins. Lady, get with the program. Everybody knows that exorcism is NOT performed by cutting oneself and then cauterizing the wound with a burning-hot key. It involves Catholic priests, Linda Blair, and gallons of flying pea soup. Jesus H. Christ on a condom wrapper, get it STRAIGHT!

19. Beryl Fucking Bailey. If you cannot tell us what is “inappropriate” about a fifth-grader’s speech in favor of same-sex marriage (which, BTW, won a school contest for speeches about democracy!), then maybe something is inappropriate about YOU. “Any topic” means ANY TOPIC. You don’t arbitrarily get to say “but not THAT one!” after the fact.

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And finally, to the oh-so-original troll who calls himself “Name”, whose IP number is 173.160.195.150, and who slithered out of the greasy Comcast pipe at Bellevue, Washington, only to leave the following oh-so-polite and well-thought-out missive, appropriately enough, on my last weekly wankapedia:

What a fucking douche-canoe you are! FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, “Name”, I’m rubber, and you’re glue. That is to say, I’m awesome, and you’re banned. Sorry I have nothing more original to throw back at you than that, but you don’t merit the effort. If you’re gonna spew shit at me, try fewer caps and less cut ‘n’ paste. And only one exclamation mark per non-run-on sentence, please.

Goodnight, and get fucked!

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A little sing-along tune for Michigan…

…and any other place where the War on Women is currently being waged:

Also, VAGINA.

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Posted in Fetus Fetishists, Men Who Just Don't Get It, Not So Compassionate Conservatism, The United States of Amnesia, Uppity Wimmin | Comments Off on A little sing-along tune for Michigan…

Clip ‘n’ Save: A handy-dandy map of Alberta

All that bloody, bloody red? That’s pipelines. Sure would be a shame if anything ever happened to them, eh?

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Festive Left Friday Blogging: A new monument to Che

A plaque marking a special place in Venezuela where Che Guevara himself set foot in the early 1950s, on the Collado del Condor in the Venezuelan Andes, was unveiled today, on the 84th anniversary of his birth, and the 60th anniversary of that day in 1952 when the young Eresto, who was not yet widely called Che, came to this spot on the same journey he recorded in The Motorcycle Diaries. Here’s what it reads:

He passed through here, he went in the footsteps of Bolívar, riding on the back of his same dreams, he bore the same hurricane in his wake. He passed through here, retracing his own steps, seeking the Revolution, even though he did know he carried it in his heart. He came from the land of the gaucho, he carried in his footsteps the groan of the wounded Inca, and on his forehead the mark of those who love Humanity. An immense tree grew, its roots feed upon America, and one day with its branches it filled the world with hope. With this monument we remember Che and we follow in his footsteps. This monument might be destroyed a thousand times by infamy, but, we are sure, there will always be an honest man who will erect it again, and this will be the sign that there is still hope for Humanity.

Translation mine.

The line about how “this monument might be destroyed a thousand times by infamy” refers to an ugly incident in 2007, when unidentified vandals destroyed a sculpture of Che that used to be located on the same mountain. Let’s hope this bronze plaque proves harder to deface. In any event, what it says is true; Che’s imprint on the world will never be erased, no matter what infamies are concocted to desecrate his memorials.

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