Clipmarks | ratilfar's clips

“I’m a photographer for the DA’s office and there is a women there who makes these models (trains, apts, buildings, etc) for court cases, as a visual aid for the jury. The train is perfectly hamster sized so I brought my super tame hamster into work yesterday for a little photo shoot. They came out better than expected. I’m really excited about them.”

Tags: co, cuteoverload, pics, hammsters, nyc

The GnoViBrator

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 18:33:46 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

[Video]

Tags: wow, warcraft, vibrating gnomes, youtube, video, machinima

Dear Michelle Malkin: Here are some other law-enforcement officers you forgot to mourn

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:40:09 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar
clipper's remarks: Oh, I dunno. Maybe it comes from conservatives like Michelle Malkin, who shriek and holler when mean "liberals" at the Department of Homeland Security issue an important bulletin to law-enforcement officers warning them of the threat posed by right-wing extremists to their health and well-being, crying that in doing so they're just "smearing conservatives."

Clip Source: crooksandliars.com

Michelle Malkin's latest column wants to turn the deaths of police officers around the country -- spurred by the recent horror in Lakewood, WA -- into a chance to blame liberals for the deaths.

The Left has a popular mantra: “Stop the hate.” Why don’t they start applying it to the men and women who protect and serve?

She listed some officers killed in a couple of different incidents involving career criminals and a bizarre recent case here in Seattle.

Well, I've got a few other officers here she seemed to have forgotten about:

Pittsburgh officers Eric Kelly, Paul Sciullo III and Stephen Mayhle, gunned down by budding neo-Nazi Richard Poplawski, because he believed the officers were part of a nefarious plan to take citizens' guns away.

Security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns, shot down by extremist nutcase James von Brunn at the Holocaust Museum.

Later in her column, Malkin asks:

From where does the deadened and deadly callousness toward the thin blue line come?

Tags: michelle malkin, far-right, police, hate crimes, facts

Wal-mart greeters learn....

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:15:42 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar

Clip Source: punditkitchen.com

Tags: ouch, wal-mart, punditkitchen, lol, pics, humor

Caturday: Self-Entertaining Kitten Edition

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:11:48 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar

Clip Source: icanhascheezburger.com

[Video]

Clip Source: icanhascheezburger.com

Tags: caturday, cats, kitten, lol, lolcats, pics, humor, meme

If I Still Worked at Fox News...

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 22:04:23 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar
clipper's remarks: He is John Birch without the Society.

Clip Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

I am not the Eric Burns who heads Media Matters, the liberal watchdog group. I am the Eric Burns who used to host Fox News Watch on the right-wing partial-news-but-mostly-opinion network. In the past year and a half, since departing from Ailes and friends, I have been much more silent about media matters than my namesake.

I speak out now because it is the time of year when one is supposed to count blessings. I have several. Among them is that I do not have to face the ethical problem of sharing an employer with Glenn Beck.

Actually, Beck is a problem of taste as well as ethics. He laughs and cries; he pouts and giggles; he makes funny faces and grins like a cartoon character; he makes earnest faces yet insists he is a clown; he cavorts like a victim of St. Vitus's Dance. His means of communicating are, in other words, so wide-ranging as to suggest derangement as much as versatility.

He is Huey Long without the political office.

He is Father Coughlin without the dour expression.

Tags: eric burns, faux news, glenn "chicken little" beck

The Nation's Jeremy Scahill on the notorious Eric Prince

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:51:13 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

[Video]

Tags: blackwater, cia, mercenaries, war crimes, pakistan, afghanistan

Don't mess with the CDC

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 13:37:46 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar

Clip Source: www.leasticoulddo.com

Tags: cdc, webcomic, flu, humor, vaccine, tough crowd

America's regression

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 19:55:02 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar
clipper's remarks: Pew Poll, today:

Public opinion about the use of torture remains divided, though the share saying it can at least sometimes be justified has edged upward over the past year. Currently just over half of Americans say that the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can either often (19%) or sometimes (35%) be justified. This is the first time in over five years of Pew Research polling on this question that a majority has expressed these views. Another 16% say torture can rarely be justified, while 25% say it can never be justified.

Clip Source: www.salon.com

Detainees in orange jumpsuits sit in a holding area in Camp X-Ray at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in 2002.

Ronald Reagan, May 20, 1988, transmitting the Convention Against Torture to the Senate for ratification:

The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called "universal jurisdiction." Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.

Convention Against Torture, signed and championed by Ronald Reagan, Article II/IV:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture. . . Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law.

Tags: war, terror, torture, guatanamo, war crimes, crimes against humanity, prosecution

Where is my mail?

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 19:48:41 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar
clipper's remarks: I didn’t know this two weeks ago, so when I put my name on the letterbox three days after moving in, the postie then informed me that she had seen mail from the electricity company and the phone company and something else that looked personal. Did she not see the moving boxes stacked inside the door? Had she not seen cars full of boxes being lugged inside just days earlier? Was she not aware that she hadn’t delivered mail to this particular house for more than a year, and that it had a new name anyway (there are no street names or numbers where I live: just house names)? Did she not put two and two together when she saw bills from utility companies arrive that would indicate services being activated for the new people who have just moved in? Did she not? No, she bloody didn’t.

Clip Source: www.lefrancophoney.com

It doesn't matter how fancy it is, make sure your name is on it

Okay, I promise this is the last thing I write about moving house, but it might be valuable to someone out there. In France, or at least in this region, you absolutely must must MUST write your name on your letterbox. When I first moved to France, I thought it was a quaint remnant of the past to let the postie know who you are, if they didn’t already guess from the names on your mail. I was so, so wrong.

If you do not put your name on your letterbox, even if you’ve gone into the post office and filled out the change of address forms and introduced yourself to your new postal staff, you will not receive any mail. Nothing. Nada. Rien. Game over.

Let this be a lesson to anyone moving to France: write your name on that letterbox as soon as you possibly can!

Tags: mail, france, living in, winter, blog

Patrick Stewart: the legacy of domestic violence

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:27:25 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar
clipper's remarks: As a child, the actor regularly saw his father hit his mother. Here he describes how the horrors of his childhood remained with him in his adult life

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Patrick Stewart as a baby with his mother Gladys. Photograph: Collect

My father was, in many ways, a man of discipline, organisation and charisma - a regimental sergeant major no less. One of the very last men to be evacuated from Dunkirk, his third stripe was chalked on to his uniform by an officer when no more senior NCOs were left alive. Parachuted into Crete and Italy, both times under fire, he fought at Monte Casino and was twice mentioned in dispatches. A fellow soldier once told me, "When your father marches on to the parade ground, the birds in the trees stop singing."

In civilian life it was a different story. He was an angry, unhappy and frustrated man who was not able to control his emotions or his hands. As a child I witnessed his repeated violence against my mother, and the terror and misery he caused was such that, if I felt I could have succeeded, I would have killed him. If my mother had attempted it, I would have held him down.