Quotulatiousness

November 16, 2012

This week in Guild Wars 2

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:26

My usual Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week is all about the upcoming Lost Shores event, plus all the usual blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction.

Reason.tv: Ladies, We’re Screwed: Why Obama’s Re-election is Bad for Choice

Filed under: Economics, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:03

Obama’s re-election is great for moms, right? Aren’t we just a bunch of mindless free spenders, so in love with humanity we want to support every cause and child as though they were each our own? Oh, hells no.

From jobs to health care to education, let’s face it ladies, we’re screwed…and not in the much needed 50 Shades of Grey way.

This election all boils down to choice. Because ours are now sadly limited. To make a simplistic sexist argument, how would you like it if you waltzed into the shoe department at Nordstrom’s or Bloomingdale’s and instead of ankle booties and wedges you found one or two styles of sensible, comfortable clogs? To borrow a term from Joe Biden, malarkey!

With the employer mandate, small businesses are now compelled by law to provide health care for their full-time employees. What will this do? Will it bolster families and working moms by offering free medical care to those in need? Hardly!

SEC employee stress levels must be down because they’re not surfing for porn during “98% of the workday”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:49

Ah, the hard life of the SEC employee must have gotten a bit less stressful recently. Tim Cushing has the, um, sordid details:

An internal investigative report of the SEC’s Trading and Markets division has been recently been reviewed by Reuters. After reading its rundown of the misdeeds and abuses uncovered, I’m left with the urge to laugh maniacally in the manner of someone having just cleared the tipping point and now sliding irretrievably into insanity. The sheer irresponsibility on display here springs from the sort of irredeemable carelessness that comes with spending other people’s money (taxes) and operating without any credible oversight or accountability (a large percentage of government entities).

Bess Levin at Dealbreaker points out that while the SEC’s internal investigation may have turned up several misdeeds, ranging from the merely stupid to the positively horrendous, it is quite a step up from the insatiable pornhounds that used to populate the Commission:

    If you had asked us two years or two months or two days ago if we thought that there would be a time in the near future when Securities and Exchange employees would not be regularly reprimanded for watching porn on their work-issued computers for 98 percent of the workday, we would have said absolutely not. No judgment, but in our professional opinion, people do not go from, among other things:

    * Receiving “over 16,000 access denials for Internet websites classified by the Commission’s Internet filter as either “Sex” or “Pornography” in a one-month period”

    * Accessing “Internet pornography and downloading pornographic images to his SEC computer during work hours so frequently that, on some days, he spent eight hours accessing Internet pornography…downloading so much pornography to his government computer that he exhausted the available space on the computer hard drive and downloaded pornography to CDs or DVDs that he accumulated in boxes in his office.”

    …to living a porn-free existence at l’office.

Truly a mind-boggling set of employees. One regional staff accountant ran into the “no-porn” wall 1,800 times in a two week period, yet remained undeterred. Those caught accessing porn with ridiculous frequency cited the “stress” of their jobs as the underlying reason for the nearly uninterrupted pornathons.

Waiting for the Feds to respond to legal marijuana in Colorado and Washington

Filed under: Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:38

Phillip Smith examines the changed situation in Colorado and Washington in the wake of the marijuana legalization votes and what the federal government may do:

While the legal possession — and in the case of Colorado, cultivation — provisions of the respective initiatives will go into effect in a matter of weeks (December 6 in Washington and no later than January 5 in Colorado), officials in both states have about a year to come up with regulations for commercial cultivation, processing, and distribution. That means the federal government also has some time to craft its response, and it sounds like it’s going to need it.

So far, the federal response has been muted. The White House has not commented, the Office of National Drug Control Policy has not commented, and the Department of Justice has limited its comments to observing that it will continue to enforce the federal Controlled Substances Act.

“My understanding is that Justice was completely taken aback by this and by the wide margin of passage,” said Eric Sterling, former counsel to the House Judiciary Committee and currently the executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. “They believed this would be a repeat of 2010, and they are really kind of astonished because they understand that this is a big thing politically and a complicated problem legally. People are writing memos, thinking about the relationship between federal and state law, doctrines of preemption, and what might be permitted under the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.”

What is clear is that marijuana remains illegal under federal law. In theory an army of DEA agents could swoop down on every joint-smoker in Washington or pot-grower in Colorado and haul them off to federal court and thence to federal prison. But that would require either a huge shift in Justice Department resources or a huge increase in federal marijuana enforcement funding, or both, and neither seems likely. More likely is selective, exemplary enforcement aimed at commercial operations, said one former White House anti-drug official.

Windsor’s new city slogan, courtesy of Stephen Colbert

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

American comedian Stephen Colbert just can’t seem to get off the back of Windsor, Ontario, and now he has dragged Winnipeg and the CBC into his attack routine.

If you could reply to Colbert’s comment, what would you say? Leave a comment below or on our Facebook Page (facebook.com/cbcmanitoba), and our Trending Now team will select the best comments to send back to Colbert!

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