Nearly everything these days is made in China, which is not necessarily a bad thing. What may be a bad thing is the compulsive way the Chinese factories seem to produce Chinese-designed bargain knock-offs of just about everything - sometimes, it seems, without a complete grasp of just how it is you’re supposed to use the item in question. (One of my favorite Chinese drop-shipping sites, DealExtreme, has started carrying “personal massagers”, as I discovered when browsing their “new arrivals”. One of these “massagers” bears a striking resemblance to a surprised porcupine, i.e. it’s covered in a gajillion quite long, hard plastic spikes, sticking out at acute angles. Either there was a great untapped market for, um, custom-designed tools to exfoliate the inside of your yoohoo, or the people who developed this painful-looking thing don’t quite grasp how phallic “personal massagers” are normally used.)

Anyway, I really like pickles. So do my roommates.

What does this have to do with China? Well, there’s a family at the local farmer’s market who sell extremely tasty homemade pickles…
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Imbeciles:

Last weekend [Minneapolis Police Department] mounted officers had their horses assaulted after bar-closing by five men, reflecting horsing around that police say is on the increase in recent years.

The men were jailed and cited with assault on a police horse and other misdemeanors. The incidents doubled the number of assaults on police horses this year and put the city on last year’s pace, which far exceeded earlier years.

(Minneapolis Star-Tribune.)

The first instance this past weekend occurred about 1:50 a.m. Saturday on 1st Avenue N. near 4th Street, with Kyle Soderberg, 22, of northeast Minneapolis, being arrested.

Less than 30 minutes later and a block away on 1st Avenue, Anthony William Gonzalez, 22, of Brooklyn Center, slapped police horse Jesse after being told he had to leave the area, the police report read.

About 2:20 a.m. Sunday, police arrested Matthew J. Semler of Glenshaw, Pa., and Randy D. Schock of Eden Prairie outside Sneaky Pete’s on 5th Street N. Semler, 24, and Schock, 35, were also cited for obstructing the legal process.

About 45 minutes later, Justin M. Mobley of Eagan was arrested outside Brothers Bar & Grill in the 400 block of 1st Avenue. Along with assaulting the horse, Mobley, 25, was accused of fleeing a police officer.

What is the world coming to?

Last month, an immensely forgettable group of boffins released a hopefully-doomed-to-obscurity 92-page report (7.9MB PDF). The Report of the Joint Defense Science Board / Threat Reduction Advisory Committee Task Force on The Nuclear Weapons Effects National Enterprise - and how’s that for a ponderously long name? - argues not-very-convincingly that America’s ability to engage in military operations in a nuclear environment has atrophied - that’s a word they seem really infatuated with, by the way - since the glory years of the Cold War. This may or may not actually be true; keep in mind that the U.S. military has never actually operated in a nuclear environment, so all the nostalgic bluster about Cold War-era readiness and capabilities is at least partially wishful thinking.

The Task Force further alleges that this is a ginormous problem that poses an imminent danger to capitalism, democracy, and the American Way of Life(TM) in part because our conventional military forces are just so gosh-darned awesome that the only way a deranged third-world tyrant could ever hope to defeat us is through the use of nuclear weapons.

This is the point, dear reader, where I sincerely hope you just did the whole facepalm thing.

But wait. It gets worse.
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Last week, an alert reader notified me that an ad-laden spamblog had reproduced several posts from this site in full. This wasn’t the first time this has happened, and I don’t always bother to do anything about it, but this was a particularly egregious example. So, I contacted my webhost, and asked if they’d be willing to file a DMCA complaint on my behalf, since I haven’t the foggiest clue how to go about doing so, and had better things to do than figure it out.

Sure, they said. Bring it on.

So I gave them the info, and written authorization to act on my behalf in the matter. On the 17th, they sent off a nice legal-looking DMCA notice to The Planet, the datacenter where the spamblog is hosted. They sent me a copy of the notice as well, as a courtesy.

Just now I check my email, and learn that today - six days later - The Planet have responded:

To Whom It May Concern:

Please note that below-referenced copyright infringement notice does not
substantially comply with the required notification elements of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (”DMCA”).

Please note that we have not passed on the substantive merits of your claim.

Gee, guys. Thanks for filling me with awe and respect at the incredibly speedy way you respond to these sorts of things. It’s almostas if you actually give a rat’s ass, or something. Almost.

Things like this are why I rarely bother with DMCA takedown notices in the first place; getting to wait a week just to be told to go pound sand is not a productive use of my time.

Time for plan B, I think. The spamblog hotlinked to some images of mine as well, so I think I’ll rename the legitimate versions and leave the spammer linking to something reasonably horrific. Hmmn, I wonder what awful horrors the internet can provide me with…

The Associated Press (AP) late yesterday “broke” the story that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had been investigating FOIA requestors and their backgrounds for over a year.

This is not news. Anyone who makes a lot of FOIA requests is very much aware of this going on, and not just at DHS - most branches of the military perform similar inquries, too… and have since well before July 2009. (I can document it in mid-2008 via server logs, and know it was going on well before that.)

Now, it is sort of newsworthy that DHS ‘fessed up about this, and was stupid enough to claim that they were doing it for “awareness purposes”. But these are not exactly earth-shattering revealations, when all is said and done. (I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it here on Entropic Memes at least once in the past, though I can’t immediately find mention of it… having to dig through 1300 posts will do that to you.)

Oh, and the absurd claims that DHS never blocked release of documents, and is being all responsive and stuff? Bullshit. They’ve been stonewalling at least one of my requests for well over a year now, and in October 2009 I was informed of another request that DHS process requests on a first-in, first-out basis, and “there are currently three (3) open requests ahead of yours”. Nine months have since passed… you figure out what’s going on.