Now you too can spam me, for the low-low price of $99 a pop.

Here is something I'd like to learn more about: a service that charges spammers (well, anyone I don't whitelist) a fee to email me. The fee is set by me, is per message, and I get 75% of the proceeds. So far, sounds nice.

"That was before they knew much about long-term soy use."

OK, yeah, This is fairly far-fetched fundamentalist hysteria. (Amusing note: 'hysteria' and it's derivatives stem from the Greek word for 'womb' because the Greeks believed it was a distinctly feminine phenomena.) The guy blames everything from obesity to homosexuality to leukemia on soy products.

Though this guy goes a bit overboard, there are discussion points about the estrogen content of soy on Wikipedia and This BBC article, which are interesting things to think about.

I've been on kind of a hormone kick since that article on the effects of pregnancy on fathers, and it's rather entertaining to wonder exactly how much one's hormones effect who one is and how one behaves, and how much changing or altering or manipulating those hormones could change the person in question. All of which contributes to a number of half-formed, pseudo-scientific Snippets bouncing around my head.

Pay $2 to charge $1?

So, there's this article on BBC News about... well, I think it's about a new agency to enforce Child Support, replacing an old agency that failed to do so. I'm, uhm, not sure though, as I'm having a little trouble with it. Maybe it's the post-lunch lull, but...

From the article:
"It is extremely difficult when the agency is being asked to chase relatively small sums of money from people who don't want to pay in circumstances where the mother often doesn't want that to happen either."

Are they trying to say that the last agency was spending money to chase down small amounts of child-support that Parent A didn't want to pay and parent B didn't want to receive? I'm confused.

Everything News is Old Again

So, for the last five or six months, the great majority of my posts have been related to or spurred by -- or at the very least containing links to -- different news stories that I find on Slashdot, Wired, BBC News, and more-obscure sites while I sit at work drinking coffee and trying to stay concious. It's a tough job, some days.

Anyways, not that it really matters -- it's my journal, and I'm likely to post what I want to anyways -- but seeing as part of this liveJournal of mine is to communicate with all of you and give you insight into who and why I am, I do care a little bit about your opinions.

Plus, I haven't made a poll in ages. So, I present to you:

[Poll #888097]

Merry Christmas

Here is a follow-up on that fiasco a day or so ago at the Seattle-Tacoma airport, where a (I'd argue) well-meaning but misguided rabbi hoped to get his own particular religion acknowledged and instead ended up having all holiday decorations removed.
According to the article, the Christmas trees have been put back up and the (I imagine repentant) rabbi decided not to sue.

Also notable, there is a 1984 'Reindeer Ruling' that states that any symbol that is mostly secular (like a reindeer or a Christmas tree) is not a violation of separation of Church and State (refraining from comment), and so our well-meaning rabbi wouldn't have had a case, anyways.

All's well that ends well, I suppose. Like the article's author, I hope this is a sign of an upward trend out of this unreasoning political correctness.