Finally updating again - 2-4 February 2011

Up top, get your favorite music ready, for it's another installment of the Head-Desk Chorus. Tonight's entry? 10 Secrets Men Keep From Women, all of them relating to how much men really hate things that are stereotypically feminine, and how much they believe the women they're dating are shrews, but they'll put up with them to get sex. To debunk these rather stupid allegations, we turn to wookiemonster who says, No, it's not secrets men keep from women, it's secrets Morons and douchebags keep from women, because otherwise they wouldn't get past the first date.

Then there's the letter from Mickey Mantle about his best experience at Yankee Stadium - a blowjob, apparently.

That said, have an account of how the National Organization for Marriage learned about not hotlinking images by having a rainbow flag and equality quote displayed on their front page, after the comic creator they hotlinked decided that he didn't want them using his comic about the future as a commentary on how traditional marraige is being destroyed.

Google introduces a way of examining the collections of several Museums of Art, through the aptly named Art Project.

Last before headlines, the annual proclamation of the gophers about the advent of spring. For those suffering under massive snowstorms, the rainy season can probably not arrive fast enough.

Out in the world today, the plagues of Australia continue, this time with a cyclone ripping through the country, causing severe crop damage and wiping out the local banana set. Sri Lanka has major flooding. And people in the United States still deny that humans can cause changes to their climate.

The United States continues to be unsure that Iraq's security forces are adequate for the job as the deadline that requires their withdrawal looms. Althoguh I'm not sure how much of that is genuine concerns about security and how much of it is trying to find any excuse to stay longer. The Iraqi government is making no overtures that they want us to stay on.

A United Kingdom border patrol worker was sacked after it was revealed that he had stranded his wife in Pakistan for three years by puting her on the no-fly list.

The organization Wikileaks is nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize on the strength of their anti-secrecy successes, including accusations of other nations arming and supplying insurgents in Iraq. This will likely result in a re-run of the Julian Assange Hates America, Hates Freedom, and Is A Terrorist columns.

In Egypt, Mr. Mubarak tried to placate the crowd by saying he wouldn't run for another term of the Presidency. It didn't work. Let the speculation begin.

For those of us reporting or blogging on the matter, here's a handy guide of what things should not be said about the situation, unless you like being called an idiot and worse. Armed with that guide, you can now take apart Mr. Brown's column on how much the Bloodthirsty Religion will be able to waltz into power under the Muslim Brotherhood name and then set up another Iran-like state in Egypt, a position encouraged by FOX to keep you afraid of democracy.

We could have a better picture of things going on in the ground, were it not for things like the continued unofficial censorship and propaganda against al-Jazeera in the United States, including the continued refusal to carry it on most major cable and satellite services. That's not stopping them from getting the message out as many ways as they can, even as their office in Cairo is burnt to the ground by pro-Mubarak forces. Internet simulcasts and other ways of getting around the blockages are now the way that information gets out and into the country. And for those who are in the area, many of them report harrassment or attacks from government entities and other people taking advantage of the relative lack of strongman control. For example, have a first-hand account of the targeted violence against journalists happening now. Despite that, we can see it all in pictures still.

But also, when reporting on violence in the area, if you equate both sides with each other and do not differentiate who was being violent to whom, it muddies the waters and makes it seem less like a democratic uprising as a mass riot. (To their credit, Fox appears to have gotten their heads on straight and delineated whom was attaching whom.) And then you can supplement that with claimed firsthand accouns of chaos, looting, and scared people in the streets, instead of the mass of protesters demonstrating peacefully just to make sure that there's always the seed of doubt or to try and force someone to lay in with a heavy hand to fix the problem. Or, if your tastes run to the more extreme ends, have any number of conspiracy theories or other extreme ideas. Truthfully, though, most of the people who have been looking at it or living in it have come to the same conclusion - time to go.

What's also being hidden is how much United States corporations are working against the protesters, as are companies based in the United Kingdom, and the continued killing of searches regarding Egypt by China. Even if the governments are supposed to be relatively pro-democracy, the corporations and their interests are not always aligned with the democratic will of the people. It's not profitable.

The country, and all the protests across the region, are a reminder of what kinds of forces are really at play when the government oppresses the people, instead of working for them. Perhaps in response to that, the King of Jordan sacked his cabinet over protests building in his country, hoping to head them off before they erupted into similar mass demonstrations.

Domestically, the last known United States veteran of the First Great War turns 110 years of age today.

Leaked Wikileaks cables indicate that the United States was investigating more men in connection with the 11 September attacks, but ultimately decided the evidence was insufficient to charge them.

A Senate report on the Fort Hood incident was sharply criticial of everyone who should have seen the problems coming and didn't communicate or intervene in the matter. The FBI apparently didn't communicate what they knew, and the report blames the Pentagon for not training their commanders to recognize when someone has become an Islamic extremist and has to be stopped.

Governments looking to cut money from their budgets are considering removing assistance for HIV/AIDS treatment for the poor and those who will be made poor without it, to advance an agenda that still stigmatizes HIV infection and claims that those People Deserve It, The Perverts.

Into technology, where the recent move by Apple to block applications has a financial motive - they want a cut of the possible profits of e-book sales, so they require developers to ensure that content that can be bought outside Apple's Walled Fortress can also be bought inside the Walled Fortress, with Apple getting its appropriate cut from those who go that route.

Speaking of iProducts, AT&T may have to pay for supposedly charging someone for 2MB of data usage on a new iPhone plan, despite the phone having no apps on nor receiving any calls.

And speaking of charges for bandwidth, a decision that would have imposed usage-based billing on Canadian Internet users is going to be reversed.

The Kepler observatory's short resume of work has found several possible habitable exoplanets, some of which are close to Terra-size, and one of which is very close...which means that the possibility of another Terra-like planet in the universe is pretty damn good - which might also mean that there's some other group of beings peering into their deep-space observatories and wodnering whether there are more like them in the universe.

Finally, the case of the statistician who figured out secrets to winning at certain types of scratch lottery games. All scratch games have a weakness - their randomness cannot be true, because they have to control the amount of winners and the winning amounts. Eventually, someone will discover the pattern and exploit it. It becomes a question at that point as to whether the pattern is sufficiently complex to discourage trying.

In opinions, Mr. Blackwell accuses the President of trying to find as many ways as he can of humiliating the country by bowing to other leaders, hosting State dinners for those who imprison Nobel laureates, and other ways that conflict with jingoist arrogance.

Mr. Carrol advocates for using the cheapest energy available regardless of its other consequences, because doing anything else raises energy prices for United States consumers, against the will of The Market (A.P.T.I.N.), to be used in subsidies and requirements for things that just won't work due to their inefficiency.

Mr. Morris and Ms. McGann are prematurely jubilant at the latest ruling on the health care bill, taking the opportunity to also re-declare all the other efforts of this presidency so far to be failures, including any statement that says the economy is improving, and to exonerate corporations of any economic blame as he shows in detail that they're hoarding and stockpiling. He probably chalks it up to "uncertainty". Tait Trussel says new government regulations are killing hospitals from being constructed and that the Supreme Court ruling that says resident medical students should be treated as employees for FICA and not as students will kill the health-care industry. The residents are practicing medicine as workers, and they do fit the definition of full-time workers as well as being students. As for reulations supposedly stopping hospitals, that seems rather odd when it's also mentioned that hospitals are folding up because their poorest customers can't pay for the care they're getting. That sounds like the bigger problem to me. Mr. Rove attacks his critics by going into the nuance of the polls and claiming those nuanced people are totally on his side and want what he wants, whent he truth of the matter is that they could go either way, toward his position or his critics. But at least we know that Mr. Rove can use the argument of "look at the poll data" when he thinks it suits his position.

Mr. Stossel claims that its very easy to turn defecits into surpluses through merely cutting things he doesn't like, which run the gamut from stopping NPR subsidies to recalling all military personnel from foreign missions in Germany, Japan, and other allied countries. He sees the budget possibilities, but says the politics will get in the way. It's a much more sensible position than his previous ones, and progress could be made - if we were actually willing to have a serious discussion about the matter.

Mr. Perkins is unimpressed with the UK's laws regarding political asylum, claiming that they make it so the UK becomes a terrorist haven by not being able to send suspects back to their countries if there's a danger of them being tortured or killed. Those refugee laws matter to more than just accused terrorists, Mr. Perkins. They mattter to people coming from Uganda who are certain their sexual orientation will get them killed, for example.

Mr. Cannon writes his history of the Great Saint Reagan, sticking mostly to the positive things and the conservative things that made him the icon of the conservative movement.

Mr. Sowell finds the most silly example he can think of for a new regulation, and then claims that most government regulations are like that, clear over-reaches of their authority that cost a lot to comply with to provide little to no benefit. If only we followed the demands of The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) and really only regulated the kinds of things that businesses and consumers want to spend money on, we would be just that much better and less intrusive. At least until the next "unforseen" disaster.

Mr. Chavous sees aprents becoming increasingly involved in school selection and reform in the upcoming times, which is fantastic, and hopefully means that they will be able to pressure the government into fixing the problem of the lottery and removing the powerful incentive for "School choice" based on the fact that the public school system isn't able to actually educate.

Mr. G. Friedman examines how the 11 September attacks knocked the United States off of its grand plan, and how we need to get beyond the obsession with terrorism and bring it back into balance with the rest of our foreign policy.

Last out, Mr. Kit asks where have all the American actors playing American superheroes gone, with the bold statement that Americans aren't turning out square-jawed actors to take on those roles any more. The article, though, mostly concerns itself with other white people taking those roles (and a lot of other roles, too) and leaves any mention of how people of color are still routinely being shut out of casting, despite the Internet and the ability to supposedly be more widespread in searching.

Last for tonight, a map of college radio stations - so you can get formats and musical styles that you would never hear on commercial radio or the ClearChannel conglomerate. And being in college, one can read the publication of the Journal of Universal Rejection.

Ah, and a way of opting out of receiving the Yellow Pages Directory.