Showing posts with label events. Show all posts
Showing posts with label events. Show all posts
Friday, July 30, 2010
POLITICS- Obama's War on Privacy
Just another reminder to any of you still naive enough to think that there is really any difference in the political parties, or that either of them are interested in freedom, civil liberties, or privacy. The Obama administration is asking that the FBI have access to your browser history, email history, and even when you send and receive email without having to get a court order! So much for the Democrats protecting civil liberties. Orwell's book is a tired analogy, but that doesn't mean that it isn't frighteningly prophetic or perfectly apt. Bit by bit the government is nibbling away at any privacy you might have left. Doesn't matter if it's the Republicans or Democrats in office, the government is in the business of growing like a malignancy and metastasizing into every part of your life.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
POLITICS- Those Seven Deadly Words
As I’ve said before, in my opinion most of what comprises the political debate in this country is simply a smoke screen to hide the fact that the government and the rich have gone into the business of stealing the citizens blind while we argue over trivialities. Well, here’s a story that encapsulates much of the silliness in our culture (wars). Seems the FCC got schooled the other day when a trio of appellate court judges heard arguments in a case challenging the current rules for what can be broadcast on television. Of course we aren’t talking about showing images of violent brutality, grotesque dismemberment, or graphic sexual congress, we’re talking about somebody saying a dirty word during a live TV broadcast. This has been going on for the last few years, with the FCC all over the highway trying to decide if it can make a little scratch by fining broadcasters if some musician says “fuck” during a show giving out awards for music in which it is perhaps the most common lyric. Or even if some poor interviewee says “shit” about having just watched his house and family blown away in a hurricane during a news telecast.
The judges rightfully pointed out that there are worse things of television than impolite language already. That we seem to be letting little old ladies of both sexes and the most bluenosed self-righteous hypocrites in the country muzzle everyone else. And that the whole thing boils down to the FIRST FUCKING AMMENDMENT! (Ahem… excuse me.)
I’ve always been amused by our obsession with collections of sounds- most especially those nasty old Saxon words that most of us don’t even remember the origin of. And I’ve always been puzzled by the basic dishonesty inherent in getting all bent out of shape over the things that are the most common in human existence. Somehow we can talk about alcoholism, wife-beating, racism, war, famine, and Pat Robertson on television, but the two things every single adult in the world does as often as possible are off limits. As Red Foxx once joked, “I say shit and fuck because- people do. You don’t shit? Fuck! You don’t fuck? SHIT!”
I’m not offended by much. I don’t understand it and, frankly, I think it’s usually passive aggressive bullshit. I’m certainly not offended by any particular collection of phonemes, even if I might be offended by what they signify. That’s the crazy thing in all this juvenile “dirty words” hogwash. Some mental midget is offended by the SOUNDS. (No offence intended to little people- a term I personally find more degrading than midget.) If you don’t have problems with the act of defecating or making love, why do you care what sounds you use to identify them? And if you do have a problem with either act, then you have far bigger problems with what’s between your ears than you do with what’s entering them from the outside.
The judges rightfully pointed out that there are worse things of television than impolite language already. That we seem to be letting little old ladies of both sexes and the most bluenosed self-righteous hypocrites in the country muzzle everyone else. And that the whole thing boils down to the FIRST FUCKING AMMENDMENT! (Ahem… excuse me.)
I’ve always been amused by our obsession with collections of sounds- most especially those nasty old Saxon words that most of us don’t even remember the origin of. And I’ve always been puzzled by the basic dishonesty inherent in getting all bent out of shape over the things that are the most common in human existence. Somehow we can talk about alcoholism, wife-beating, racism, war, famine, and Pat Robertson on television, but the two things every single adult in the world does as often as possible are off limits. As Red Foxx once joked, “I say shit and fuck because- people do. You don’t shit? Fuck! You don’t fuck? SHIT!”
I’m not offended by much. I don’t understand it and, frankly, I think it’s usually passive aggressive bullshit. I’m certainly not offended by any particular collection of phonemes, even if I might be offended by what they signify. That’s the crazy thing in all this juvenile “dirty words” hogwash. Some mental midget is offended by the SOUNDS. (No offence intended to little people- a term I personally find more degrading than midget.) If you don’t have problems with the act of defecating or making love, why do you care what sounds you use to identify them? And if you do have a problem with either act, then you have far bigger problems with what’s between your ears than you do with what’s entering them from the outside.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
The Fall of Empire- America as Rome- Talking to the Police
The other day at work I had a particularly stupid woman say to me that she wasn't worried about the government looking into her private life. She had nothing to worry about because "I've never done anything wrong." You have to realize that this woman is someone who believes that the world was created in six twenty-four hour days, thinks that a hotel she stayed in once near the equator proves corolis force because two sinks in her bathroom drained different ways, and has been a nurse for over thirty years without knowing what the different sounds a lung makes on auscultation are. The infuriating thing about this moron is that she talks to everyone in a condescending tone without realizing that she is little more than an idiot. Making what Harlan Ellison said about arrogant stupidity all the more relivant.
I've debunked her ideas about coralis force by siting Snopes.com without depending on the common sense argument (Common sense is not so common.- Voltare) that her two hotel sinks would have to straddle the equator perfectly to display such a thing even if the laws of centrifugal force didn't apply. I've read medical texts to her about lung sounds only to be told that the words "didn't mean that" even though they were plain. Yet here I am again trying to reason with a person who is, obviously, immune to logic. Thus is the fate of someone with more than a high-school-dropout mentality attempting to live in modern America. Every day you have to "suffer fools gladly" in spite of the fact that they are FOOLS.
But on the subject that innocent people are protected by our American system, I defer to a person who is far more aquainted with the workings of the law than I am. Here is what a law professor has to say about talking to the police. Listen to it and remember it if you have any dealings with the law. I've been a police officer and I can tell you that if you think the cops are looking for the guilty you are as naive and gullible as my friend at work.
("There's nothing worse than arrogant stupidity;
arrogance you can tolerate,idiocy you can get around,
outsmart,
but both together are inscrutable," he said.)
I've debunked her ideas about coralis force by siting Snopes.com without depending on the common sense argument (Common sense is not so common.- Voltare) that her two hotel sinks would have to straddle the equator perfectly to display such a thing even if the laws of centrifugal force didn't apply. I've read medical texts to her about lung sounds only to be told that the words "didn't mean that" even though they were plain. Yet here I am again trying to reason with a person who is, obviously, immune to logic. Thus is the fate of someone with more than a high-school-dropout mentality attempting to live in modern America. Every day you have to "suffer fools gladly" in spite of the fact that they are FOOLS.
But on the subject that innocent people are protected by our American system, I defer to a person who is far more aquainted with the workings of the law than I am. Here is what a law professor has to say about talking to the police. Listen to it and remember it if you have any dealings with the law. I've been a police officer and I can tell you that if you think the cops are looking for the guilty you are as naive and gullible as my friend at work.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Various Stuff
The newest thing in beauty treatments. Although at $250 a pop (heh-heh) it does seem overpriced. Anyone wishing to try this please contact me personally and I'm sure we can work something out.
Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the web when he put the first webserver on a neXT computer in the summer of 1991, has begun to study the web itself. He conserned with a host (heh-heh) of issues from how the web is changing the basic paradigm of human interaction to emergent properties that we may be unaware of. According to Tim, there are currently about as many web pages are their are neurons in the human brain. Although the comparison is basically apples/oranges it is interesting.
One thing he might study is the election of a representative of the Pirate Party to the European Union's Parliament. This may be the first time a political party based on an internet issue (in this case file sharing) has ever been elected to a governing body. Harbinger of things to come.
And on a connected note, when Tim Berners-Lee changed the internet forever with the hypertext transfer protocol he made this story inevetable. AT&T is shutting down their Usenet servers. For those of you too young or not geeky enough to know what Usenet is, that's one of the ways people communicated with each other over the net before webpages and webforums existed. Newsgroups were giant forums where people who shared a particular interest could discuss whatever they wanted to about that interest. If you were a fledgling bagpiper you could subscribe to rec.arts.bagpipes and get information from other bagpipers about which reeds lasted longest or such minutiae. There were thousands of newsgroups on virtually every subject from alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die where haters of purple singing dinosaurs could gather to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated where Michael J. Straczynski was perhaps the first SF television creator to communicate directly with his audience as the show was being aired (similar to what Ron D. Moore did with his Battlestar Galactica podcasts except a lot more interactive and with more typing). AT&T isn't the first big ISP to give up Usenet, Comcast and Time Warner did so almost a year ago, but it's another reminder that the time when the net was the domain (heh-heh) of techies and geeks is long since over. Viva la Endless September!
Unix is 40 this year. It would be almost impossible to state how important this little OS was in the development of the computing technologies we use today. And once again, written by a couple of geeks in their spare time. You have to wonder why more companies don't follow the lead of Bell Labs in the 1960s. Hire smart people and let them invent smart things! Put your management and marketing departments where they belong- in a subordinate role to the creators! I honestly think when the history of the last 20 years is written they will attribute the fall of the American empire to the shift from the way we did things in the 60s and 70s to the rising predominance of management and marketing based thinking. As Frank Herbert once said, "Any bureaucracy immediately establishes as its primary goal the administration of itself." I'm looking at you, Sony.
And a prime example of this is how businesses routinely ruin social networking on the web with their ubiquitous advertising.
Two months ago I gave up cable TV (actually it was satellite) so I thought this article on HULU and web video was interesting. The convergence of home video and the web seems just as inevitable as the death throws of Usenet. The bigger picture may be that the net will actually save mankind. When you consider the economies of scale derived from transitioning from atoms to bits (as Nicholas Negroponte explained so well in his 1995 book Being Digital) it's easy to imagine that the internet may wind up being the greenest technology of all. We already get most of our music over the net. Books are not far behind (I have two friends with Kindles and it is as cool a technology as I've ever seen. I was telling one of these friends about a book I was reading the other day and she pulled out her Kindle and downloaded it while we were talking! It's just a little too fresh in the early adopter phase on price and screen performance for me. ) When we finally figure out what a waste it is to make everybody come downtown every morning to sit at computers and do tasks they could just as easily do at home we will go a long way toward fixing both our dependence on oil and the traffic problem. (Not to mention going back to a family lifestyle that allows families to be together a lot more. The way our agrarian forbears had it for most of human history.) Ditto hi-def teleconferencing and jet travel. Education should be transformed in a similar fashion- no more carting kids back and forth every day. Maybe we'll even decide that the net's peer-to-peer paradigm is the way to generate energy and give up large centralized power generators for individual solar or wind or geothermal generation. Everyone could generate their own energy the same way most people used to grow their own food, using what they needed and selling the rest to the neighbors. The technolgy is coming or already here, the problem is political. People who crave power don't like decentralization. Big Brother likes all of us to drink from the same well (as long as he owns the well). But if we play our cards right the future is going to be more pastoral, local, social, and free-market than it ever has been.
Since 2007 the Japanese spacecraft Kaguya has been orbiting the moon gathering data to determine its origin, among other things. Yesterday it finally crashed into the surface. But as the probe's orbit has decayed it has sent back some extraordinary hi-def video of the moon from very low orbits. This is one such video. (Remember, this is not a computer simulation, this is actual video.)
Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the web when he put the first webserver on a neXT computer in the summer of 1991, has begun to study the web itself. He conserned with a host (heh-heh) of issues from how the web is changing the basic paradigm of human interaction to emergent properties that we may be unaware of. According to Tim, there are currently about as many web pages are their are neurons in the human brain. Although the comparison is basically apples/oranges it is interesting.
One thing he might study is the election of a representative of the Pirate Party to the European Union's Parliament. This may be the first time a political party based on an internet issue (in this case file sharing) has ever been elected to a governing body. Harbinger of things to come.
And on a connected note, when Tim Berners-Lee changed the internet forever with the hypertext transfer protocol he made this story inevetable. AT&T is shutting down their Usenet servers. For those of you too young or not geeky enough to know what Usenet is, that's one of the ways people communicated with each other over the net before webpages and webforums existed. Newsgroups were giant forums where people who shared a particular interest could discuss whatever they wanted to about that interest. If you were a fledgling bagpiper you could subscribe to rec.arts.bagpipes and get information from other bagpipers about which reeds lasted longest or such minutiae. There were thousands of newsgroups on virtually every subject from alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die where haters of purple singing dinosaurs could gather to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated where Michael J. Straczynski was perhaps the first SF television creator to communicate directly with his audience as the show was being aired (similar to what Ron D. Moore did with his Battlestar Galactica podcasts except a lot more interactive and with more typing). AT&T isn't the first big ISP to give up Usenet, Comcast and Time Warner did so almost a year ago, but it's another reminder that the time when the net was the domain (heh-heh) of techies and geeks is long since over. Viva la Endless September!
Unix is 40 this year. It would be almost impossible to state how important this little OS was in the development of the computing technologies we use today. And once again, written by a couple of geeks in their spare time. You have to wonder why more companies don't follow the lead of Bell Labs in the 1960s. Hire smart people and let them invent smart things! Put your management and marketing departments where they belong- in a subordinate role to the creators! I honestly think when the history of the last 20 years is written they will attribute the fall of the American empire to the shift from the way we did things in the 60s and 70s to the rising predominance of management and marketing based thinking. As Frank Herbert once said, "Any bureaucracy immediately establishes as its primary goal the administration of itself." I'm looking at you, Sony.
And a prime example of this is how businesses routinely ruin social networking on the web with their ubiquitous advertising.
Two months ago I gave up cable TV (actually it was satellite) so I thought this article on HULU and web video was interesting. The convergence of home video and the web seems just as inevitable as the death throws of Usenet. The bigger picture may be that the net will actually save mankind. When you consider the economies of scale derived from transitioning from atoms to bits (as Nicholas Negroponte explained so well in his 1995 book Being Digital) it's easy to imagine that the internet may wind up being the greenest technology of all. We already get most of our music over the net. Books are not far behind (I have two friends with Kindles and it is as cool a technology as I've ever seen. I was telling one of these friends about a book I was reading the other day and she pulled out her Kindle and downloaded it while we were talking! It's just a little too fresh in the early adopter phase on price and screen performance for me. ) When we finally figure out what a waste it is to make everybody come downtown every morning to sit at computers and do tasks they could just as easily do at home we will go a long way toward fixing both our dependence on oil and the traffic problem. (Not to mention going back to a family lifestyle that allows families to be together a lot more. The way our agrarian forbears had it for most of human history.) Ditto hi-def teleconferencing and jet travel. Education should be transformed in a similar fashion- no more carting kids back and forth every day. Maybe we'll even decide that the net's peer-to-peer paradigm is the way to generate energy and give up large centralized power generators for individual solar or wind or geothermal generation. Everyone could generate their own energy the same way most people used to grow their own food, using what they needed and selling the rest to the neighbors. The technolgy is coming or already here, the problem is political. People who crave power don't like decentralization. Big Brother likes all of us to drink from the same well (as long as he owns the well). But if we play our cards right the future is going to be more pastoral, local, social, and free-market than it ever has been.
Since 2007 the Japanese spacecraft Kaguya has been orbiting the moon gathering data to determine its origin, among other things. Yesterday it finally crashed into the surface. But as the probe's orbit has decayed it has sent back some extraordinary hi-def video of the moon from very low orbits. This is one such video. (Remember, this is not a computer simulation, this is actual video.)
Monday, May 11, 2009
POLITICS- Dejon Mustard
Cummon. Is this the best the party of William Buckley can do nowadays? You’ve convinced the majority of Americans that you are completely incompetent. Are you not willing to stop until you’ve convinced everyone but your idiotic followers that you have gone full retard? You never go full retard! But there is no way else to interpret this
“On the May 7 edition of The Rush Limbaugh Show, Steyn said of Obama's condiment selection: "He's amazing, Obama. This coverage -- he's a regular guy. He eats a hamburger with Dijon mustard -- Dijon mustard. John Kerry couldn't get away with that stuff, but he makes it seem like just like a regular thing to do. Now there's -- I see that some of the left-wing commentators are saying, 'Why are people making a fuss about the Dijon mustard?' but that's just an example of the way Obama is able to enlighten us."
[I pause here to say that (a) no left-wing commentator that I am aware of has said this and (b) how fucking stupid do you have to be to think that you can be "enlightened" by mustard? But this answer to the latter is obviously "as stupid as this guy".]
Later in the program, Steyn stated: "I deeply resent Barack Obama crashing in as the Grey Poupon spokesperson, because that has been the lifesaver for non-American voiceover artists in this country for years -- getting the gig doing the Grey Poupon voiceover." He added: "[I]f you can't outsource Grey Poupon to foreigners, what can you outsource? And instead now he's apparently the big Grey Poupon spokesperson, putting it all -- putting it all over his hamburger. Barack Obama -- that was -- what was that? That was yesterday, Barack Obama had a hamburger. I don't know what he may do today to prove -- to pass for human."
So Obama isn’t human because he likes mustard that isn’t pure yellow- like Rush Limbaugh and his stooges- (Dijon mustard- the commie!) rather than ketchup on his burger! Is there any evidence that the right wing wants to tell you what you can and can’t do on the most intimate level than this? Submit! Only we know what is the proper condiment to have on your food. If you thought freedom was having the government tell you how to worship the creator, who you could love and marry, what words you could say, and look at the books you took out of the library, how you used your credit card, what conversations you're having on the phone, and what you should write in e-mails wasn’t enough, now the rich, fat, white guys who have made a living telling you that rich, fat, white guys aren’t the problem have decided what the proper garnish is for your hamburger.
Really? Tell me Rush, am I holding my dick the right way when I take a piss? I’m sure you hold yours with tweezers but somehow I can't seem to manage that. Perhaps that’s why I don’t think I should be interested in WHAT FUCKING CONDIMENT PEOPLE USE ON THEIR FOOD!
All this talk about personal freedom and tyranny and all these shitheads want to do is tell everybody else how to live. It's the same thing with gay marrage. There is a simple reason I don't care if gay people want to get married. I’M NOT A HOMOSEXUAL. In fact, the only way I can imagine being interested in gay men, in any way other than to thank them for taking themselves out of the competition for women I might want, is to be friends with them because they are decent human beings. I’ve got news for you Rush and all you right wingers who think you ought to be telling everybody else how they can live their lives- self-confident people DON’T CARE! I asked a gay friend several years ago why so many men were so threatened by homosexuality. His answer, without a microsecond of hesitation, was that they were fighting their own impulses to take it in the keister. Truthfully, I couldn’t understand that anymore than I could understand hating gay people for their sexual preferences. It actually doesn’t come up in casual conversation with even intimate friends. “So, Bob, you’ve been married for 15 years. Do you do it doggy style or what?” just hasn’t been a conversation I’ve ever been a party to. In fact, I’ve only discussed my sexual preferences with a sexual partner, and then only in bed (or on the couch, or the floor, or the woods, or in the car, or…well- you get the idea). If you really think sex is something sublime and sacred and intimate then you don’t discuss it in casual conversation. And if you think it isn't anything but a pleasurable pastime you don’t need to be talking about God in the same sentence unless you are screaming his name in the midst of the act. OK, Rush (and Hannity and all the other anacephalics at FOX who are going through withdrawal because they have quit being taken seriously because of all the inane shit like this that they've said over the last decade) I understand that you are still plumbing the depths of the stupidest redneck element of the American population. The kind of people who will turn out to protest a tax hike on people making over a quarter of a million dollars a year even though they just got a tax break and would have to think for a few seconds before they could tell you how many zeros a quarter of a million has (and the answer, from the teabagger’s turnout, seems to be less that .005. I wanted so badly to take my videocamera and ask the local protest of mentally and mathematically challenged sheeple how many of them made over $250.000 annually and whether they realized that they had already gotten a tax cut from Obama, but unfortunately I had to work.)
But anyway, back to the important point- which mustard is the most patriotic? Personally, I like Dejon mustard. In fact, I like the brown mustard that has horseradish in it. So obviously I must be a socialist-fascist-terrorist. Nothing else would make sense. It can’t just be that I like a little spice on my burger. My burger has to be a symptom of deeper hatred of America. Yeah, that’s it. My taste buds must hate America. And I wasn’t even aware of it! Thank you for pointing out that my taste buds are traitors and that you are marginally smarter than they are. Not as smart as my dog, but a little, little bit smarter than the papilla on my tongue.
Imagine how many votes you could get if you were as smart as the neurons in my big toe!
I don't want to be accused of advocating violence but truthfully, if you have been taken in by the right wing rhetoric for the last few years, do the species a favor and take one of those guns you love so much an put it in your mouth. After you pull the trigger you will have done the best thing for mankind that you have probably ever done. You will have raised the average IQ by a small, but measurable percentage. I know you love to think, talk, and post about how liberals are stupid but it's not them that's buying the bullshit. The saving grace of being a moron is that you get to think you are as smart as everyone else because you aren't smart enough to tell the difference. And while the kind of mustard you like isn't indicative of anything but the kind of mustard you like, thinking it might be, even for a minute, is sure an indicator of teh stupid. God, it even sounds like a National Enquirer article- "The Kind of Mustard You Like Reveals Your Personality!".
Think about the gun in the mouth thing. If you think liking Dejon mustard is a political statement then the taste of hard, blue gunmetal is the only solution.
“On the May 7 edition of The Rush Limbaugh Show, Steyn said of Obama's condiment selection: "He's amazing, Obama. This coverage -- he's a regular guy. He eats a hamburger with Dijon mustard -- Dijon mustard. John Kerry couldn't get away with that stuff, but he makes it seem like just like a regular thing to do. Now there's -- I see that some of the left-wing commentators are saying, 'Why are people making a fuss about the Dijon mustard?' but that's just an example of the way Obama is able to enlighten us."
[I pause here to say that (a) no left-wing commentator that I am aware of has said this and (b) how fucking stupid do you have to be to think that you can be "enlightened" by mustard? But this answer to the latter is obviously "as stupid as this guy".]
Later in the program, Steyn stated: "I deeply resent Barack Obama crashing in as the Grey Poupon spokesperson, because that has been the lifesaver for non-American voiceover artists in this country for years -- getting the gig doing the Grey Poupon voiceover." He added: "[I]f you can't outsource Grey Poupon to foreigners, what can you outsource? And instead now he's apparently the big Grey Poupon spokesperson, putting it all -- putting it all over his hamburger. Barack Obama -- that was -- what was that? That was yesterday, Barack Obama had a hamburger. I don't know what he may do today to prove -- to pass for human."
So Obama isn’t human because he likes mustard that isn’t pure yellow- like Rush Limbaugh and his stooges- (Dijon mustard- the commie!) rather than ketchup on his burger! Is there any evidence that the right wing wants to tell you what you can and can’t do on the most intimate level than this? Submit! Only we know what is the proper condiment to have on your food. If you thought freedom was having the government tell you how to worship the creator, who you could love and marry, what words you could say, and look at the books you took out of the library, how you used your credit card, what conversations you're having on the phone, and what you should write in e-mails wasn’t enough, now the rich, fat, white guys who have made a living telling you that rich, fat, white guys aren’t the problem have decided what the proper garnish is for your hamburger.
Really? Tell me Rush, am I holding my dick the right way when I take a piss? I’m sure you hold yours with tweezers but somehow I can't seem to manage that. Perhaps that’s why I don’t think I should be interested in WHAT FUCKING CONDIMENT PEOPLE USE ON THEIR FOOD!
All this talk about personal freedom and tyranny and all these shitheads want to do is tell everybody else how to live. It's the same thing with gay marrage. There is a simple reason I don't care if gay people want to get married. I’M NOT A HOMOSEXUAL. In fact, the only way I can imagine being interested in gay men, in any way other than to thank them for taking themselves out of the competition for women I might want, is to be friends with them because they are decent human beings. I’ve got news for you Rush and all you right wingers who think you ought to be telling everybody else how they can live their lives- self-confident people DON’T CARE! I asked a gay friend several years ago why so many men were so threatened by homosexuality. His answer, without a microsecond of hesitation, was that they were fighting their own impulses to take it in the keister. Truthfully, I couldn’t understand that anymore than I could understand hating gay people for their sexual preferences. It actually doesn’t come up in casual conversation with even intimate friends. “So, Bob, you’ve been married for 15 years. Do you do it doggy style or what?” just hasn’t been a conversation I’ve ever been a party to. In fact, I’ve only discussed my sexual preferences with a sexual partner, and then only in bed (or on the couch, or the floor, or the woods, or in the car, or…well- you get the idea). If you really think sex is something sublime and sacred and intimate then you don’t discuss it in casual conversation. And if you think it isn't anything but a pleasurable pastime you don’t need to be talking about God in the same sentence unless you are screaming his name in the midst of the act. OK, Rush (and Hannity and all the other anacephalics at FOX who are going through withdrawal because they have quit being taken seriously because of all the inane shit like this that they've said over the last decade) I understand that you are still plumbing the depths of the stupidest redneck element of the American population. The kind of people who will turn out to protest a tax hike on people making over a quarter of a million dollars a year even though they just got a tax break and would have to think for a few seconds before they could tell you how many zeros a quarter of a million has (and the answer, from the teabagger’s turnout, seems to be less that .005. I wanted so badly to take my videocamera and ask the local protest of mentally and mathematically challenged sheeple how many of them made over $250.000 annually and whether they realized that they had already gotten a tax cut from Obama, but unfortunately I had to work.)
But anyway, back to the important point- which mustard is the most patriotic? Personally, I like Dejon mustard. In fact, I like the brown mustard that has horseradish in it. So obviously I must be a socialist-fascist-terrorist. Nothing else would make sense. It can’t just be that I like a little spice on my burger. My burger has to be a symptom of deeper hatred of America. Yeah, that’s it. My taste buds must hate America. And I wasn’t even aware of it! Thank you for pointing out that my taste buds are traitors and that you are marginally smarter than they are. Not as smart as my dog, but a little, little bit smarter than the papilla on my tongue.
Imagine how many votes you could get if you were as smart as the neurons in my big toe!
I don't want to be accused of advocating violence but truthfully, if you have been taken in by the right wing rhetoric for the last few years, do the species a favor and take one of those guns you love so much an put it in your mouth. After you pull the trigger you will have done the best thing for mankind that you have probably ever done. You will have raised the average IQ by a small, but measurable percentage. I know you love to think, talk, and post about how liberals are stupid but it's not them that's buying the bullshit. The saving grace of being a moron is that you get to think you are as smart as everyone else because you aren't smart enough to tell the difference. And while the kind of mustard you like isn't indicative of anything but the kind of mustard you like, thinking it might be, even for a minute, is sure an indicator of teh stupid. God, it even sounds like a National Enquirer article- "The Kind of Mustard You Like Reveals Your Personality!".
Think about the gun in the mouth thing. If you think liking Dejon mustard is a political statement then the taste of hard, blue gunmetal is the only solution.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
POLITICS- The Court Jester (still not Danny Kaye) part two
As I said in the previous post, last night Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was the scene of the best television interview on the boob tube perhaps since Frost sat down with Nixon. The Blogosphere has been buzzing, a few of the large corporate news outlets have mentioned it (Moneyweek, for instance had an article that missed the point so far that you would think it was a NASA Mars shot), and the television media completely ignored it. The last is especially telling about the corporate media and their love of whoring themselves out when a story means nothing
but their complete timidity to report any story where us dumb old Americans might actually hear a little truth. As the TVNEWSER article linked above mentions, one of the foremost apologists for anyone with money and power, Joe Scarborough, was happy enough to play “lets you and him fight” when he thought that Stewart was going to be nice and funny. But when our national Court Jester said what so many of us have been thinking (no matter which side of the aisle you sit on), that the national media is nothing but a conglomeration of whores who will say anything as long as it pleases the people leaving money on the nightstand, he literally proved the point by not mentioning the conclusion of something he had been yapping like the dog he is about for the past week.
So, goodbye, NBC networks. You have showed your true colors and spent your credibility for the sake of a quick buck. Joe Scarburough needs to go on his show Monday morning and felaciate a goat as a visual representation of his “journalistic integrity”. ABC is owned by Disney (the biggest purveyor of child porn in the history of the world- fifty years of enabling middle aged men to ogle pubescent girls since Annette Funicello through Brittany Spears to their current sex slave Miley Cirus. (And Billy Ray, I never believed that people should burn in hell for their mistakes but selling your daughter into sex slavery for another lousey 15 minutes of fame sure qualifies your more that a thousand lifetimes of consensual sex with the same gender ever could. And that excuses you for writing and singing that shitty Achey Breaky Heart song.) CBS emasculated the story that our previous president dodged the war in Vietnam and didn’t even fulfil his National Guard service by doing such a crappy job of investigation that they missed the fact that the documents they “exposed” used laser printer fonts rather than typewriter fonts which would have been time appropriate (and crucified their news reader, Dan Rather, making their penance a joke). And now, finally, NBC has laid to rest any concept of journalistic integrity by being caught with their pants down, in bed with the very Wall Street theives that have literally wrecked the world’s economy, and then hoping nobody noticed rather than facing their shame. They say their job is to report the news. Instead they have all made it obvious that their job is to be the propaganda arm of the plutocracy that runs this country.
Take it from Memphisto, Hell's gonna be packed with so many "journalists" that you won't have to worry when the coffee break is over.
but their complete timidity to report any story where us dumb old Americans might actually hear a little truth. As the TVNEWSER article linked above mentions, one of the foremost apologists for anyone with money and power, Joe Scarborough, was happy enough to play “lets you and him fight” when he thought that Stewart was going to be nice and funny. But when our national Court Jester said what so many of us have been thinking (no matter which side of the aisle you sit on), that the national media is nothing but a conglomeration of whores who will say anything as long as it pleases the people leaving money on the nightstand, he literally proved the point by not mentioning the conclusion of something he had been yapping like the dog he is about for the past week.
So, goodbye, NBC networks. You have showed your true colors and spent your credibility for the sake of a quick buck. Joe Scarburough needs to go on his show Monday morning and felaciate a goat as a visual representation of his “journalistic integrity”. ABC is owned by Disney (the biggest purveyor of child porn in the history of the world- fifty years of enabling middle aged men to ogle pubescent girls since Annette Funicello through Brittany Spears to their current sex slave Miley Cirus. (And Billy Ray, I never believed that people should burn in hell for their mistakes but selling your daughter into sex slavery for another lousey 15 minutes of fame sure qualifies your more that a thousand lifetimes of consensual sex with the same gender ever could. And that excuses you for writing and singing that shitty Achey Breaky Heart song.) CBS emasculated the story that our previous president dodged the war in Vietnam and didn’t even fulfil his National Guard service by doing such a crappy job of investigation that they missed the fact that the documents they “exposed” used laser printer fonts rather than typewriter fonts which would have been time appropriate (and crucified their news reader, Dan Rather, making their penance a joke). And now, finally, NBC has laid to rest any concept of journalistic integrity by being caught with their pants down, in bed with the very Wall Street theives that have literally wrecked the world’s economy, and then hoping nobody noticed rather than facing their shame. They say their job is to report the news. Instead they have all made it obvious that their job is to be the propaganda arm of the plutocracy that runs this country.
Take it from Memphisto, Hell's gonna be packed with so many "journalists" that you won't have to worry when the coffee break is over.
Friday, February 27, 2009
MOVIES- The Man with the Initial for a Name
The postman brought me the movie W. from Netflix today. It has to be Oliver Stone’s best film in years. It’s much more a straight biography than I expected. It isn’t a polemic and it isn’t played for laughs. But it isn’t a whitewash either. I’m sure that Bush’s hardcore supporters will find plenty to dislike but as far as being a movie biography it’s an entertaining and engrossing look at one of the most important and divisive presidents in history.
Much of the credit goes to the cast. Josh Brolin is simply spot-on in the lead role. So much so that while looking away from the screen during one of the documentaries included in the supplemental materials I was surprised to look back and find it was actual film of President Bush rather than a scene from the movie that I was hearing. Richard Dreyfuss is the second immediate standout as Cheney. He underplays, as does most of the cast. It’s a good choice. The public personas of most of these people are so cartoonish that had they been played as broadly as they appear on Meet the Press the movie would have quickly devolved into caricature. Dreyfuss is arguably a more believable Cheney than Cheney is. I never got the idea that Dreyfuss was auditioning for the role of the Penguin in the next Batman movie, while I always got that feeling from the actual vice-president. Toby Jones, who is fast becoming one of the finest character actors working today, is somehow sympathetic as Karl Rove. Thandie Newton might brush more closely against that cartoon boundry, but again, the actual Condoleezza Rice is such a cartoon that to do anything less might have rendered the character unrecognizable. As it is, I defy you to recognize her from other things you might have seen her in- INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK, CRASH, or MISSION IMPOSSIBLE II. If you saw JEFFERSON IN PARIS you might recognize her as Sally Hemmings but here she disappears into the role. Scott Glenn as Rumsfeld, Jeffery Wright as Colin Powell, Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush, and Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush, all are simply wonderful. Even the small roles stand out. Ioan Gruffudd, Colin Hanks (son of Tom Hanks), and even Daily Show alumni Rob Corddry never hit a wrong note in their brief time on screen. The only gripe I might have is with the portrayal of President George H. W. Bush by James Cromwell, who normally I find inimitably watchable. It’s not that Cromwell does a bad job as an actor, it’s just that every other person makes it a point to at least attempt to vanish into their well known roles and Cromwell doesn’t seem to even bother to try.
If the movie has an agenda, it only presents in subtle ways. I don’t for a minute think that Stone isn’t aware of these little digs but considering his reputation for bombast I’m still amazed at the restraint. The way Bush eats by stuffing his cheeks full and chewing with his mouth open, or cuts down a tree by sawing the chain saw back and forth (a good way to get your leg cut off), or considers confidence superior to ability. Especially revealing is the portrayal of Barbara Bush. Whitewashed and airbrushed the way the public personas of all the Bush family were, most people still think of mother Bush as being some sort of kindly grandmother. Only if you have done extensive reading do you start to realize what a vindictive, mean, aristocratic old bitch the portly matron actually was. Here you get just a hint but even that is such a rare glimpse into her real character that it is very telling.
All in all, the movie is one of the best of the last year. It keeps you watching, it tells you something you may not know, and it doesn’t stray too far from what seems to be objective (as far as such things go in the public forum) truth. Veracity is paramount if you’re going to make a biographical movie about a sitting president. Everybody knows how these people look and sound. Likewise, being careful not to take liberties with rumor or innuendo is very important. It could easily have been a hatchet job. The movie is anything but that. Instead it seems to give real insight into a man who changed the presidency and the country, who presided in a time of American crisis unknown in recent history.
“Faith frees me. From my past, myself, from the expectorations of others.”
Much of the credit goes to the cast. Josh Brolin is simply spot-on in the lead role. So much so that while looking away from the screen during one of the documentaries included in the supplemental materials I was surprised to look back and find it was actual film of President Bush rather than a scene from the movie that I was hearing. Richard Dreyfuss is the second immediate standout as Cheney. He underplays, as does most of the cast. It’s a good choice. The public personas of most of these people are so cartoonish that had they been played as broadly as they appear on Meet the Press the movie would have quickly devolved into caricature. Dreyfuss is arguably a more believable Cheney than Cheney is. I never got the idea that Dreyfuss was auditioning for the role of the Penguin in the next Batman movie, while I always got that feeling from the actual vice-president. Toby Jones, who is fast becoming one of the finest character actors working today, is somehow sympathetic as Karl Rove. Thandie Newton might brush more closely against that cartoon boundry, but again, the actual Condoleezza Rice is such a cartoon that to do anything less might have rendered the character unrecognizable. As it is, I defy you to recognize her from other things you might have seen her in- INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK, CRASH, or MISSION IMPOSSIBLE II. If you saw JEFFERSON IN PARIS you might recognize her as Sally Hemmings but here she disappears into the role. Scott Glenn as Rumsfeld, Jeffery Wright as Colin Powell, Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush, and Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush, all are simply wonderful. Even the small roles stand out. Ioan Gruffudd, Colin Hanks (son of Tom Hanks), and even Daily Show alumni Rob Corddry never hit a wrong note in their brief time on screen. The only gripe I might have is with the portrayal of President George H. W. Bush by James Cromwell, who normally I find inimitably watchable. It’s not that Cromwell does a bad job as an actor, it’s just that every other person makes it a point to at least attempt to vanish into their well known roles and Cromwell doesn’t seem to even bother to try.
If the movie has an agenda, it only presents in subtle ways. I don’t for a minute think that Stone isn’t aware of these little digs but considering his reputation for bombast I’m still amazed at the restraint. The way Bush eats by stuffing his cheeks full and chewing with his mouth open, or cuts down a tree by sawing the chain saw back and forth (a good way to get your leg cut off), or considers confidence superior to ability. Especially revealing is the portrayal of Barbara Bush. Whitewashed and airbrushed the way the public personas of all the Bush family were, most people still think of mother Bush as being some sort of kindly grandmother. Only if you have done extensive reading do you start to realize what a vindictive, mean, aristocratic old bitch the portly matron actually was. Here you get just a hint but even that is such a rare glimpse into her real character that it is very telling.
All in all, the movie is one of the best of the last year. It keeps you watching, it tells you something you may not know, and it doesn’t stray too far from what seems to be objective (as far as such things go in the public forum) truth. Veracity is paramount if you’re going to make a biographical movie about a sitting president. Everybody knows how these people look and sound. Likewise, being careful not to take liberties with rumor or innuendo is very important. It could easily have been a hatchet job. The movie is anything but that. Instead it seems to give real insight into a man who changed the presidency and the country, who presided in a time of American crisis unknown in recent history.
“Faith frees me. From my past, myself, from the expectorations of others.”
Thursday, September 4, 2008
abbreviated post this morning because I’m in away from home.
Cool tech thingie- an ink-jet printer for concrete buildings.
An article at the NEW YORK TIMES website where Peter Leeson (in their Freakanomics column, and if you haven’t read the book go to Amazon or your local library and do so right now) realizes that UFO sightings and Bigfoot sightings statistically occur in the same states. (bonus surprise, none of them is below the Mason-Dixon line). This either means that (a) UFOs are actually looking for bigfoot, (b) wookies are piloting UFOs, or (c) this should be a three dimensional (or three-dementia-onal) graph where the third axis is alcohol consumption.
In a UFO thread on FARK I was the only person to get a song lyric challenge.
And yet more astronauts are saying that the government has been covering up UFO contact. (And shame on Discovery.com for not having a dateline on the story.)
Cool tech thingie- an ink-jet printer for concrete buildings.
An article at the NEW YORK TIMES website where Peter Leeson (in their Freakanomics column, and if you haven’t read the book go to Amazon or your local library and do so right now) realizes that UFO sightings and Bigfoot sightings statistically occur in the same states. (bonus surprise, none of them is below the Mason-Dixon line). This either means that (a) UFOs are actually looking for bigfoot, (b) wookies are piloting UFOs, or (c) this should be a three dimensional (or three-dementia-onal) graph where the third axis is alcohol consumption.
In a UFO thread on FARK I was the only person to get a song lyric challenge.
And yet more astronauts are saying that the government has been covering up UFO contact. (And shame on Discovery.com for not having a dateline on the story.)
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
PERSONAL- Happy New Year
Not really a lot to post about today. Been spending my time alternating between Portal and Half-Life 2 out of the Orange Box for the PS3. Best buy in gaming right now, this Orange Box thing.So as soon as it loads I'm back for more. In the meantime, here is something cool. In fact it's about the only thing Quicktime VR is still used for, as far as I know.
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