Justice

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PLUS

PLUS

PLUS

=
THE BARE MINIMUM ACCEPTABLE BY LAW.

Andrew, on vaca, had this to say:

It was a function of a policy of abuse and torture and mistreatment of prisoners in the war on terror in every theater of combat, directed and emanating from the will of Dick Cheney via the pen of George W Bush. It is simply impossible to review the evidence and conclude otherwise and no one, outside the Cheney cocoon, has been able to sustain the fiction that Cheney proposes as fact. The attempt to separate this from his own highly controlled, personally directed program of torture and abuse and coercion is a deep and malicious and wilfull lie. It may be what Bush wishes to believe. But Cheney knows otherwise. His speech was therefore not a patriotic defense of what he thinks is best for this country; it was a vile and deliberately divisive attempt to use the politics of fear and false machismo against the stability of the American polity.

He has clearly learned nothing; and will remain a threat to this country's ability to fight terror and defend its values. The president will remain above this, as he should, as Cheney seeks further to divide and destabilize this country in a futile attempt to rescue his reputation. But his reputation is unrescuable, his crimes a matter of record, and his character now indelibly written in history. Our job is to never let him forget it, to never let history be re-written and to remain resolute in bringing both him and those who attacked us to justice. And that is in the presidential oath of office.

Chest-thumping Bedwetter. Maybe the next stroke will actually make him think he's O'Brien.

O'Brien: Power is not a means, it's an end.
-
O'Brien: Power is tearing human minds apart and putting them back together in new shapes of your own choosing.
-
Winston Smith: I know you'll fail. Something in this world... some spirit you will never overcome...
O'Brien: What is it, this principle?
Winston Smith: I don't know. The spirit of man.
O'Brien: And do you consider yourself a man?
Winston Smith: Yes.
O'Brien: If you're a man, Winston, you're the last man. Your kind is extinct. We are the inheritors. Do you realize that you are alone? You are outside history. You unexist. Get up.
[Winston gets up and O'Brien shows him his reflection in a mirror. Winston is disheveled and beaten]
O'Brien: *That* is the last man. If you are human, *that* is humanity.
-
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.
-
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

From Nov 2007:

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I don't like Fmr. Gov. "I ain't got time to bleed" Ventura. I don't hate the guy. I admire his service, and I thought he was a fluke politician. He's ex-military, a former SEAL, so he not in bed with the left, and he describes himself as a Goldwater Conservative. (Fiscal, Non-interventional foreign policy, social liberal aka doesn't hate fags to get the dumbass religious vote). That said, it is really sad to see him destroy the bimbos that are the modern conservative voices.



I have caught and had 16-year-old kids arrested for $100 theft. This villain Cheney is a threat to the priceless American way of life and everything we have stood for, for over 230 years. He is a criminal. Prosecute him.

Humpday AWE

Via sulli's surrogate:

Wire Frame sculpture of a Toyota Corolla, not a Photoshop or CGI effect. More here. Other crazy photos here.

Via BadAstronomy:

"Watching this video brings to mind the astronauts’ claim that they’re just people who work in space. But you know what? They’re people who work in space.

Look what we do."

Wow.
And, the milky-way by way of animated multiple extended-shutter photos at the 2009 Texas Star Party:

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

Via Pharyngula and google:

"This is an important new fossil, a 47 million year old primate nicknamed Ida. She's a female juvenile who was probably caught in a toxic gas cloud from a volcanic lake, and her body settled into the soft sediments of the lake, where she was buried undisturbed.
What's so cool about it?

Age. It's 47 million years old. That's interestingly old…it puts us deep into the primate family tree.

Preservation. This is an awesome fossil: it's almost perfectly complete, with all the bones in place, preserved in its death posture. There is a halo of darkly stained material around it; this is a remnant of the flesh and fur that rotted in place, and allows us to see a rough outline of the body and make estimates of muscle size. Furthermore, the guts and stomach contents are preserved. Ida's last meal was fruit and leaves, in case you wanted to know.

Life stage. Ida is a young juvenile, estimate to be right on the transition from requiring parental care to independent living. That means she has a mix of baby teeth and adult teeth — she's a two-fer, giving us information about both.

Phylogeny. A cladistic analysis of the fossil revealed another interesting point. There are two broad groups of primates: the strepsirrhines, which includes the lemurs and lorises, and the haplorhines, which includes monkeys and apes…and us, of course. Ida's anatomy places her in the haplorhines with us, but at the same time she's primitive. This is an animal caught shortly after a major branch point in primate evolutionary history."

That's the cool I found for today, what do you got?

Also, see Infowars.com about chemtrails, the Illuminati, and their role in the New World Order

Can we get the guy from timecube his own show on Fox?

Smurf City in a blood red summer

We've gone blue again.

One could make a pretty compelling argument that the biggest upset of 2008 at the presidential level, bigger than even the Obama victory in Indiana, was the fact that Barack Obama stole an electoral vote from John McCain in, of all places, Nebraska.

Nebraska, which awards its electoral votes piecemeal (two for winning the state, one for winning each congressional district), gave Obama one of its five electoral votes by virtue of his victory over John McCain in its Omaha-based 2nd District.

Tuesday night, the Democratic Party, and the voters of Omaha, made it clear that Obama's surprise single electoral vote in Nebraska was not an isolated incident.

Democrat Jim Suttle, a city councilman, scored the narrow win over former Republican mayor Hal Daub. Suttle won 50.7% of the vote, to Daub's 48.7% of the vote.

Go Big Red! Go Little Blue!

Bronze-Age Myths

Religion poisons everything, Ctd:

13-year old with Hodgkin's Lymphoma ordered by court to see oncologist abducted by fundie mom.
***
EDIT, correction: Bad headline writing Fundie mom abducted her son, not the oncologist.
***

SLEEPY EYE, MINN. -- The father of Daniel Hauser said today he believes his son and his wife have left the country, but won't say where he thinks they have gone to keep out of reach of authorities.
"I have an opinion where they are, but I can't say I know," said Anthony Hauser, adding that he has placed a call to a telephone where he believes he can reach them.
Hauser specifically said he does not believe Daniel and Colleen Hauser have fled to Canada rather than subject their 13-year-old son to the chemotherapy that doctors believe is his only hope to survive cancer.

Daniel btw, is a product of homeschooling and is so completely illiterate, he couldn't identify the word "THE".

In NY, the Catholic Archdiocese isn't spending a lot of money lobbying legislators on the fight against gay marriage because they're using their political capital tring to kill a bill extending the statute of limitations on prosecutions for sexual abuse. From the NYTimes:

In New York, the National Organization for Marriage, whose resources have been stretched thin from other campaigns in the Northeast, began making phone calls to recruit supporters only late last week.
The state’s Roman Catholic bishops have been somewhat distracted, too, having focused their lobbying energies this session on defeating a bill that would extend the statute of limitations for victims of sexual abuse to bring civil claims, and have appeared unprepared for the battle over marriage.

You stay classy, bishops.

UPDATE: PZ has it cold:

These are cases of religion gone pathological, of belief so absurd and so deep that it denies truth and has overt negative consequences. Moderate Christian believers will read about this and dismiss it as irrelevant to their faith; sure, they'd pray, but they'd also get their children in to legitimate doctors who would give them effective treatment.
I have to say something that is heartfelt, and is also meant to offend. I do not absolve you mealy-mouthed moderates, I do not regard your beliefs as harmless. If Colleen Hauser or Leilani Neumann were in your church, you'd tell them to get medical care, but you'd also validate their belief in prayers. You would provide the soothing background muzak that says prayer is good, prayer is virtuous, prayer will connect you to the great lord who can do anything, prayer will give you solace in your time of worry. You would not raise your voice to say that prayer is useless, prayer is self-defeating, that while prayer might make you feel better while your child is suffering, that is no virtue. You pray yourselves. You think it is a noble and generous act for your representatives to prowl the corridors of hospitals, preying on the desperation of the sick. You abase yourselves before false hopes, and sacrifice human dignity on an altar built from the bones of the dead. You would spread the poison, piously excusing yourselves because you only want to administer sub-lethal doses.
You are Abraham's enablers. I hope you all feel a small tremor of guilt when you sit your own children down at bedtime to beg a nonexistent being for aid, when you plant the seed of futile supplication and surrender to delusions in their trusting minds. Damn you all.

Also:

Having read the bible, it seems as if when Yahweh really wanted people to have their prayers noticed or answered, he'd require/request that the prayer be supplemented with Animal Sacrifice. Whenever I notice an overt act of prayer, at a family dinner for example, I can't help but think to myself "If they really wanted to make this stick, they'd bleed out a goat on the counter."

UPDATE II: Thousands Beaten, Raped in Irish Reform Schools

"A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from," the final report of Ireland's Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse concluded.

More than 30,000 children deemed to be petty thieves, truants or from dysfunctional families _ a category that often included unmarried mothers _ were sent to Ireland's austere network of industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages and hostels from the 1930s until the last church-run facilities shut in the 1990s.

The report, unveiled by High Court Justice Sean Ryan, found that molestation and rape were "endemic" in boys' facilities, chiefly run by the Christian Brothers order, and supervisors pursued policies that increased the danger. Girls supervised by orders of nuns, chiefly the Sisters of Mercy, suffered much less sexual abuse but frequent assaults and humiliation designed to make them feel worthless.

"In some schools a high level of ritualized beating was routine. ... Girls were struck with implements designed to maximize pain and were struck on all parts of the body," the report said. "Personal and family denigration was widespread."

Irish-Catholic Guilt culture of "don't acknowledge anything, keep it in the family, sweep it under the rug."
To requote PZ, Damn you all.

Hubris always triumphs in the end.

Cooked a frozen pizza last night, well I needed more than one take:



That "remove the cardboard" part is very important.

25 minutes later, I get a fully cooked pizza but the bottom part of the dough and crust is uncooked. Remedy? I lowered the temp and cooked it for another half hour; it didn't burn the top. I feel so proud about that.

And in local news, local news' website copy editor makes inadvertant graphic pun...

Lawls!
(via WOWT)

UPDATE:


"Crime Beat" indeed.

Auto-What the what?!

I love Rachel Maddow. She's funny, charming, very intelligent, charming, and she's a dork...and charming. On the one hand she has the unique ability to take a series of related, but seemingly one-off 24hr news cycle stories, and nutshell them into an accurate, informative narrative:

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and

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On the other hand, she points out awesome stuff I'd never heard of before:

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More Here and Here.

...A little bit louder and a little bit worse

(via Onegoodmove)

Stanly Fish, New York Times WAHmbulance chaser, in part 2 of an ongoing spat against the primitive, unthinking nature of atheism:

If there is no thought without constraints (chains) and if the constraints cannot be the object of thought because they mark out the space in which thought will go on, what is noticed and perspicuous will always be a function of what cannot be noticed because it cannot be seen. [...]

Pking gets it right. “To torpedo faith is to destroy the roots of . . . any system of knowledge . . . I challenge anyone to construct an argument proving reason’s legitimacy without presupposing it . . . Faith is the base, completely unavoidable. Get used to it. It’s the human condition.” (All of us, not just believers, see through a glass darkly.) Religious thought may be vulnerable on any number of fronts, but it is not vulnerable to the criticism that in contrast to scientific or empirical thought, it rests on mere faith.

The first quote is absolutely meaningless. He utilizes a run-on sentence to wind a blathering thread around the pointless sophistry of theology.
The second is a declaration that reason and logic, without a pre-requisite acknowledgment that God is responsible for them, are no more helpful or valid than any nebulous opinion.

Don't read the rest of the article, there's not enough advil in close proximity, I assure you. Stanley Fish is old hat, and a blathering egotist. He wraps the article by linking to an op-ed saying that Fish is smarter than Richard Dawkins.

One more thing. A number of readers chided Eagleton and me for daring to enter the lists against the superior intellects of Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. E.R. Wood predicts that “if Fish debated Dawkins, Fish would lose by KO in every round.”

It would be hard to reply to that without seeming either defensive or boastful, so I’m happy to leave it to someone else. I refer you to a piece by syndicated columnist Paul Campos, which begins by asking, “Why is Stanley Fish so much smarter than Richard Dawkins?” Darned if I know.

Guy's a special kind of dick-suck, neh?

Inshallah means "God Wills It" or "God Willing"; Allahu Ackbar means "God is Great".

Religion poisons everything: (via GQ magazine)
Robert Draper:

On the morning of Thursday, April 10, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House. The briefing’s cover sheet generally featured triumphant, color images from the previous days’ war efforts: On this particular morning, it showed the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Firdos Square, a grateful Iraqi child kissing an American soldier, and jubilant crowds thronging the streets of newly liberated Baghdad. And above these images, and just below the headline secretary of defense, was a quote that may have raised some eyebrows. It came from the Bible, from the book of Psalms: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death.”
This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine.

Click to embiggen:












Frank Rich at the NYT:

What’s up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”

It would be helpful if we didn't give our enemies blatant in-your-face evidence for their propaganda when they say that our war is a Crusade against all of Islam, mKay?

Again, NOT WHAT WE'RE DOING OVER THERE.

A cynical, calculating amoral badger in charge of the nation's military apparatus used religious language to bolster the confidence and war-lust of a credulous, incurious, simpleton boob of a man in the Oval Office.

Former Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith is claiming President George W. Bush was unaware that there were two major sects of Islam just two months before the President ordered troops to invade Iraq, RAW STORY has learned.

In his new book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created A War Without End, Galbraith, the son of the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith, claims that American leadership knew very little about the nature of Iraqi society and the problems it would face after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

A year after his “Axis of Evil” speech before the U.S. Congress, President Bush met with three Iraqi Americans, one of whom became postwar Iraq’s first representative to the United States. The three described what they thought would be the political situation after the fall of Saddam Hussein. During their conversation with the President, Galbraith claims, it became apparent to them that Bush was unfamiliar with the distinction between Sunnis and Shiites.

Galbraith reports that the three of them spent some time explaining to Bush that there are two different sects in Islam--to which the President allegedly responded, “I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!”

But I digress, the talking point is still that because Pelosi was briefed about torture, she must step down. Prosecuting those who ordered and enabled torture as the policy though would, of course, be a partisan witch hunt. Also, the President should have anything to do with Notre Dame, because they're Catholic and he's not. And he should know the ONLY thing Catholics care about is abortion.

But at the school's front gate at intersection of Angela and Notre Dame Avenue, more than 100 people gathered to protest the decision to invite Obama to speak at commencement and receive an honorary degree. They said he shouldn't be allowed to speak at the Roman Catholic university because of his support of abortion rights and embryonic stem-cell research.

Can I just say I might start considering the church's position on reproductive issues without outright laughter when 1)their leaders no longer need be celibate and 2)they decide that Mary conceiving Jesus as a virgin need not be a linchpin tenet of their faith.
[/snark][drink]

McKenzie sez teh gays makes small business owners cry

and then today:

Republicans can reach a broader base by recasting gay marriage as an issue that could dent pocketbooks as small businesses spend more on health care and other benefits, GOP Chairman Michael Steele said Saturday.

Steele said that was just an example of how the party can retool its message to appeal to young voters and minorities without sacrificing core conservative principles. Steele said he used the argument weeks ago while chatting on a flight with a college student who described herself as fiscally conservative but socially liberal on issues like gay marriage.

"Now all of a sudden I've got someone who wasn't a spouse before, that I had no responsibility for, who is now getting claimed as a spouse that I now have financial responsibility for," Steele told Republicans at the state convention in traditionally conservative Georgia. "So how do I pay for that? Who pays for that? You just cost me money."

Couldn't this possibly be also (mis)interpreted as a corporate argument against ALL marriage, because adding someone, anyone, to the family, and on to your benefits kills your bosses overhead?

Steele is a bigger moron than Glenn Beck. And he has about as little appeal to the younger generation as well, even though he tries to urban-suburbanize the GOP.

Watch more Futurama videos on AOL Video

"Whimmy wam wam wozzle!
Now let's go have a vote!"

Don't Let Oklahoma Hit You On the Ass...

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For eight solid years, the rhetoric from those in power on the right, and the morans who voted them in was if you don't like it, LEAVE! This is the greatest country in the world, aren't you Patriotic? If you're against the war, that's akin to Treason.

Now then, it hasn't even been 4 months, but the right is amping up the chest-thumping, but as far as love of country, they are whizzing it right down their legs. The last hundred days has seen Gun Sales go up 35%, calls for Obama's impeachment, throwing every name at him from Socialist, to Dictator; Totalitarian, to Fascist.

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And they haven't heard that, even though they need to. The right-wing fringe used to be the Patriot Movement, Militia-men/survivalist gun-nut Anarchy cookbook, and they were ignored or snubbed by the media. The bretheren of Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols are now having their views embraced by "true conservatism" and broadcast nightly on Fox News.

In the movie the hero is offered two pills: red to learn the truth about the Matrix; blue to go on living blissfully ignorant to what is really going on.

The way to take our country back will short-circuit the Matrix we are living in. And it has to do with gun rights, state's rights and what I call the civilest war.

Along with the gun bill, Montana legislators are considering a resolution that affirms the 10th Amendment principle that the federal government only has those powers that are specifically given to it by the U.S. Constitution.

“The whole goal is to awaken the people so that we can return to a properly grounded republic,” Rep. Michael More, R-Gallatin Gateway and the Montana resolution’s sponsor, said at a House committee hearing Wednesday.

As many as fifteen other Legislatures have also been mulling resolutions that buck federal control in states such as New Hampshire, South Carolina, Missouri and Oklahoma.

Okay, you won't secede, but you're going to have your state governments declare by fiat that Federal Laws now no longer apply?

"The government is afraid of the guns people have because they have to have control of the people at all times. Once you take away the guns, you can do anything to the people. You give them an inch and they take a mile. I believe we are slowly turning into a socialist government. The government is continually growing bigger and more powerful, and the people need to prepare to defend themselves against government control"
-Tim McVeigh, interviewed by a student reporter at the Waco Siege of the Branch Davidian compound, 1993.

David Neiwert, an expert in the Patriot movement, had this to say about Glen Beck and the similarities between his paranoia and the militia's.

The hyper-normality is a kind of intentional camouflage. The Patriot movement, and militias in particular, were a very specific and intentional strategy adopted in the 1990s by the white supremacists and radical tax protesters of the American far right -- and the whole purpose of the strategy was to mainstream their belief systems and their agendas. The tactic was to adopt the appearance of normal, "red-blooded" Americanism as a way of pushing out the idea that their radical beliefs are "normal" too.

In the process, they often adopted time-worn "patriotic" sayings and symbols, such as the "Don't Tread On Me" flag Beck wears, as their own -- though with a much more menacing meaning. If you've seen that flag at an Aryan Nations compound, as I have, you never quite look at it the same.

This is why the meaning of Thomas Jefferson's quote above ["The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."] is quite different for them than it is for you and me. To all outward appearances, it is just an expression of avid patriotism. But to a Patriot movement follower, it means something potentially deadly.

These people have the paranoia of New World Order Conspiracy Theorist Alex Jones, they have the gun lust of Ted Nugent, the global voice of Rupert Murdoch, the pride, irresponsibility, and stupidity of Jenny McCarthy, coupled with the eliminationist vitriol of David Duke and Fred Phelps. There may have enough chest-thumping bedwetters in their audience to keep a show on the air and make it a ratings hit, but they will never get back to 51% with shit like this.

Suck on it, wingnuts.


Erm, case in point, from today.

FUJM

Purity Ball

Former #2 of a Nation of 300 Million People:

"I think my take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn't know he was still a Republican," Cheney said on "Face the Nation" when asked about controversy surrounding Powell's remarks that the Republican Party should become more centrist.

Cough. Cough. OUT OF CONTEXT! BULLSHIT! Cough.

Okay, here's a little more context than Google news wanted to provide:

Asked about recent verbal broadsides between Limbaugh and Powell, Cheney said, "If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I'd go with Rush Limbaugh. My take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn't know he was still a Republican."

Also, No More Rats!

A Sinking Ship: “Yay! We’re rat free! We have no more rats! Not a single rat on boa…glub! Glub! Glub! sputter! Glub! Glub! gasp! Not one single ra… glub! Glub! GLUB! Gurgle… gurgle….

glub…”

[an eerie silence, as the waters close and become still]

Add Captain Ed in an eye patch, sword raised, yelling “Porkulus!”, as the Crow’s Nest submerges and the image is complete.

Jack, Nina, Mason, Sawyer, Kate, Juliette, Jack...

Wow,

Was the season finale to LOST worthless or what?
Best season, most useless conclusion.

I’d spoil another show, but I won’t, so lets just say the feeling is still familiar.

---
@freelancer:

Was the season finale to LOST worthless or what?

I don’t know much about Lost. But everyone on Twitter seems to be befuddled by it or completely confused (is “befuddled” and “completely confused” redundant?.)

What’s the deal? (without giving anything away, of course.

---
okay well the best moments in lost usually happen in the last few minutes of each ep. The writer’s have a scene that turns the story on its head or reveal something so astounding that the whole audience is like WTF? Usually its a denouement or okay, the ep has climaxed, here’s your post coital smoke, but did you know that cig is laced w/ PCP? WTF? and so they have some kind of narrative device, don’t push the red button scenario. The red button gets pushed, something changes and we see everything anew, and say WTF?
Last night the show smash-cut to white on the pushing of the proverbial red-button. It was pretty weak sauce.

---
@freelancer: So basically, it is completely unpredictable…?

I don’t necessarily like predictable, but I like to be able to guess. Are you saying “It is so ‘Out there’ that you can’t even guess”

Because I hate that.

I have a love-hate relationship with “24” because it is somewhere in between.

---
@Michael D:

My friend Alex and I had this same conversation while watching Lost last night.
The appeal of Lost, to me so far is that it has been completely incomprehensible, surprising, and yet it has felt right. The show is internally consistent in its logic. While I absolutely despise fantasy and magical thinking in my recent, but inevitable conversion to skepticism, I will readily allow it to be present in the name of telling a good story. Lost’s story, so far, has shown an amazing dedication to continuity, that rivals The Venture Bros. in terms of the lengths its producers have been willing to go to preserve the validity of its earlier volumes.

My gripe with last night’s finale, isn’t that it doesn’t continue the story in a manner unfaithful with the rest of the series, but that this season, awesome as it has been, taking a mysterious, on-its-face fantasy tale which veers sharply into a science fiction narrative, failed to reward its viewers on a purely narrative scale. The show stopped short.

There is one more season to be made, and the story will pick up from there, but to offer an analogy, it is as if the Godfather faded to credits after the Baptism montage and the killing of Moe Green…

and we are left in the dark as to the plot and drama of what happened next until the sequel comes out two years later in 1974. It’s not a bad story, but it is cheap storytelling.

As far as 24 is concerned, the show lost me completely when one of the techie characters was sequestered for suspicions of being a security threat, and Milo was like “OMG, are they kidding? She’s a loyal American, she votes Republican for crying out loud!”
I have the first 5 seasons on DVD, but even my Navy, semi-wingnut uncle has aptly summarized the show as Kiefer Sutherland screaming at a locked door:

“We’re running out of TIME!”
“Who are you working for?!”
“I’m your only chance!”
“Tell me what you know!”

Wingnut Diet: How to feast like a Patriot

From Renato at BJ

Dear Prospective Republican:

Congratulations! You’re just one small step from joining God’s Own Party!

Please fill out the attached form in full. Also, please be sure to read in full the 3 pages long (front and back) document which contains the Republican Dietary Laws, which are summarized here:

1) Whenever ordering a philly cheese steak, first make sure to enquire as to which cheese the locals like to put on theirs. Failure to do so may result in your being branded as an elitist.

2) Diet soda is for fags.

3) When selecting mustard as a condiment, please ensure that it is common yellow American mustard. No imported french mustards, not even Grey Poupon (even if it is made in America). “French’s” mustard, though technically permissible, should probably be avoided for obvious reasons.

4) No Heinz ketchup.

5) No imported beer. Bud and Coors are acceptable, in that order of preference. Miller is not acceptable.

6) Consumption of the following fresh vegetables is permitted: iceberg lettuce, ‘regular’ tomatoes, celery, corn, carrots and cucumbers. Any other variety of lettuce such as romaine lettuce or butter lettuce is prohibited. When choosing a salad dressing, a good choice is 1000 Island or Ranch. Never select anything with the word ‘vinagrette’ in its name. French dressing is right out.

Arugula is for fags, as are organic vegetables. All other vegetables should be consumed cooked and topped with butter or as heavy of a cream sauce as possible.

7) Eat as much red meat as possible. This really pisses off PETA, vegetarians, and Al Gore. As we all know, the ultimate goal of conservatism is to annoy liberals as much as possible.

8) All grocery shopping should be done by your girlfriend or wife. Should you be required to go to the grocery store as well (perhaps to give her instruction in how to properly follow these dietary laws), do not push the cart as this is a sign of an emasculated boyfriend or husband. Do not shop at Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods or other pinko commie elitist grocery stores such as these. When asked ‘paper or plastic’, request that your purchases be bagged individually and triple-bagged with non-recyclable plastic bags. Discard the excess bags in the parking lot. This also annoys Al Gore.

Finally, please be sure to read and sign the “I Am Not A Secret Fag” document. It’s just a formality but we’ve had a real problem with this lately so it is necessary. Be sure to remember that it still counts as faggotry if you only pitch and never catch. If you don’t know what this means, don’t worry about it. We don’t want you getting curious.

Welcome to the Republican party! You betcha!

Hippity-hoppity yours fo’ shizzle,


Michael Steele

You texted it, you can't un-text it!

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Back the wrong horse?

Warner Bros will now swap your rarely watched HD-DVD's for rarely watched Bluray discs, for only $5 a pop. If Universal does this, too, I'll be set.

Confusion/Awe Concentrate - Add 2 Cups Saccharine*

WTF?!









*THIS PRODUCT CONTAINS A CHEMICAL(S) KNOWN TO THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE CANCER.

In defense of Madlibs

Yesterday, I was struck dumb by Tbogg's post regarding William Kristol. He quoted the King of Fractal Wrongness verbatim from his column:

"Of course, everyone’s first choice for president in 2012 is Dick Cheney."

And as I was walking back to my car from my job, wherein, unlike Kristol, I sometimes serve a useful purpose to humanity, health, and truth, I was gobsmacked by the ability to write that sentence without any sense of irony. I was wracked by a misanthropic, Lewis Black felt urge to figure it out, irregardless of the possibility of bringing on a cerebral aneurysm, or two.

William Kristol is an intellectual thought-experimenter. He experiments on ideas the way make-up companies flood the eyes of rabbits with mascara to test any ill-effects. (Animal testing is okay with me, btw, for biological research) He composes a sentence, a few ideas, up to and almost including a thesis, innocuous at best, ends it with a fill in the blank, and emails it to the kid in the mailroom at the Weekly Standard. This 13-year old conservative author and keynote speaker decides to challenge Kristol, so he plays Madlibs with the column and Replies back to Kristol with his new, revised column. Kristol, bored with life, "success", and his own trumpeting the sewage-bound of recent history, takes his newly formed thesis and musters a defense. He has become opposition-prep for himself, arguing the inarguable:

"Of course, everyone’s first choice for president in 2012 is __________."

"Dick Cheney"

"Okay, I'll bite. Now Dick Cheney is SO obvious I can't go with him, but there's another Cheney I want you to know about who was in enemy territory recently..."


Wow, so much for being an electable demographic ever again. One of the most popular shows on TV, week to week is CSI with a 18 million households watching, but as an electorate, well, Marg Helgenberger isn't going to be elected to local or national office anytime soon. Conservatives tend to hate science, "liberal" colleges or anything resembling anything "elite", but as a math equation, out of 300 million (that's another six zeros after that), does 20-60/300 million = 50+/-%?

A hit show does not mean you've created a massive new political party, or wield a heft of national influence over the culture at large. Just ask any Browncoat or fan of Jericho.

I wouldn't take these guys seriously unless I had evidence I was supposed to take them seriously. Washington Post, Major Cable News, The first new column for the Conservative Op-Ed slot of the NEW YORK TIMES?!

"Cheney for President

[...]it's been hard to escape the impression that both the Republican Party and the country would be better off today if Cheney, rather than John McCain, had been a candidate for president in 2008.[...]
[...]At the very least, a Cheney-Obama contest would have clarified conservatism’s present political predicament.[...]
[...]He was for tax cuts at home and pre-emptive warfare overseas; anything else he seemed to disdain as sentimentalism.

This is precisely the sort of conservatism that’s ascendant in today’s much-reduced Republican Party, from the talk radio dials to the party’s grassroots. And a Cheney-for-President campaign would have been an instructive test of its political viability.

As a candidate, Cheney would have doubtless been as disciplined and ideologically consistent as McCain was feckless. [...]

[...]A large swath of the political class wants to avoid the torture debate. Ed, "Sadly, no!" The Obama administration backed into it last week, and obviously wants to back right out again.[...]"

Are they that cynical? Are they fucking kidding me? Torture is defensible. Torture was practiced, even though they knew it didn't work, because people will say anything under extreme duress. They don't come clean, they bow to the will of their interrogators, and if the questions lead them in the direction of Iraq, SURE they helped Iraq, and spilled the beans in that direction. Even though none of it was independently verifiable, sustained, or corroborated, it, along with volumes of horseshit spewed by "Curveball" made it into the January 2003 SOTU.

The wingnuts need a dictionary, and a remedial class on American History, Civics, and its Government. We're supposed to be the good guys, assholes!
But just keep walking forward, and Clap Louder!

Unintentional Comedy

Over the winter, I got roped into seeing Twilight. An hour into the movie, I was reconsidering the value I placed on the friendship between me and the person who had suggested seeing it. Fortunately, we decided to walk out. As a general rule, I don't dig vampire movies, but if you must, Let the Right One In is a total gem, a really brilliant movie (and if you have Netflix you can watch it online/on your Xbox 360 for free).

Last Tuesday, the former members of MST3K released their latest ravaging of horrid pop culture. A riff of Twilight, I highly recommend:

In the vein of Shamblog

I'm about to take a shit on popular opinion. I found the woman through of all filters, Sully.
but the rest of the world noticed in the meantime. The UK laughed at her mere appearance, and People embraced her wholeheartedly. Somewhere in the middle is John Cole, who is rolling his eyes at the pure obsession of any infantile masses. I just think that the best will prevail. Musically,

Susan Boyle vs. a DJ



VS.

High Contrast - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang




She definitely loses this battle, but the woman has never been kissed. To me, that's a fundamental human experience. Who's going to step up?

PS - I think in terms of songs named "Cry me a river" one can do no better than a punk/metal cover:

Kinda like "Where's waldo?", but with potential world leaders

Find the individual in this clip dumber than Sarah Palin.

HINT: He's the Secretary of Education.

Breaking News: Oprah buys into ex-gay BS while interviewing closeted gay pastor

Plus THIS:


























EQUALS THIS:














See also this.

I decided to watch Haggard on Oprah. The man is deeply in the closet, and she did NOTHING to even argue that he could in fact be a repressed gay man, or do anything to counter his promotion of an ex-gay evangelical worldview. When he started in talking about Demonic Spirits and how Demons are all around us, with Angels as well, and there wasn't the faintest bit of laughter in Winfrey's studio audience, I gave up and changed it to Jeopardy.

FIN

The Bends...

How about you?

Wow, just wow...

Why they can't all be right,









"It's amazing that brain can generate enough power to keep those legs moving."

Man vs. (Big Dog) Machine

Robotics is becoming more and more of a creepy field as researchers come closer and closer with each iteration to making more accurate analogs of human/animal behavior/movement. For example "Big Dog" via BostonDynamics,



However, I choose to remain unimpressed until such time that robots surpass our talent for parody:



That is all.

Lost's J. J. Abrams @ TED

Best Music Video of the 21st century

Weezer - Pork And Beans
Uploaded by Weezer

*Swoon*

When Heroes and Genius goddesses chat
[/fawning]

The moment that gave birth to imagination...

39 years ago yesterday, humankind first set foot on another celestial body.

Most think it routine, but most are not aware of our long, arduous, millennial, triumphant path from single-celled organism to trilobite along the way to Neanderthal and our most recent inception as Homo Sapiens.

Only approximately 4 billion years of the 4.6 billion years since Earth's formation have passed since the estimated origin of life on Earth first began, yet in our planet's and our species young emergence, we have found several Revolutionary schisms between times past and times present, one might say a Cambrian explosion of thought, or a moment where our species defied previous, non-existent expectations, and leaped forward exponentially:
In the last 400-500 years of scientific discovery that have given rise to everything from Boeing 747s to nuclear weapons to Wi-Fi internet and the Apple iPod Touch, there have been several moments that stand alone in the upright and righteous herald and royalty of reason and the scientific method over the stagnant and static status quo of ever-present human dogma:

-Copernicus's notion of Heliocentric astronomy

-Newtonian Physics

-Darwin's Theory of the Origin of Species, later dubbed Evolution

-Einstein's Theory of Relativity

These are the Biggies, but Nothing in our so recent and temporally blind memory trumpeted the genius and profundity of human ambition, goodness, or discovery more than this moment:


As Phil has said, it is a definitive Before and After Moment.

It is a moment that our species has chosen to fixate upon, and some have speculated, may have philosophical implications for the rest of us, ideology or no, that will echo throughout our own lives and those of our children and grandchildren. To realize our place and time in our own personal, ephemeral universe is to know greatness and at its very least, galactic, perhaps a universal sense of humility. Drawing upon my list of heroes, Dr. Carl Sagan identified this idea long before I was aware of it, but his phrasing drew him, among many fellow scientists from the venue of the empirical to the vast and beautiful forum of meaningful, modern, existential, and appreciative human literature. His efforts should be viewed as if produced among the works of our greatest philosophers in conjunction with our most talented poets. READ HIS BOOKS! Beyond that, we only have the draw of the devotion of his fans:




(if I had $16 million dollars extra, I'd air this during the superbowl, SERIOUSLY)

NASA releases world premiere video of unseen communication with Apollo 11

Fitting that this was taken 39 years ago to the day.

Has anybody in this family even SEEN a chicken?!

Pure Awesome:



PLEASE say the movie is a GO.

Education in the classics

I mentioned BSG, and other returning shows I like, but time for a bit of
Brilliant but canceled/over.

Funniest. Thing. Ever:


Homicide: Life on the Street, the major network true crime drama.


The Wire, child of NBC's Homicide on HBO. Best. Show. Ever.


Six Feet Under, Alan Ball can do no wrong in entertaining you.


Firefly, the best show FOX never gave a shot


Sports Night, Aaron Sorkin does Olbermann in his ESPN years, with brilliant character actors to flesh out the ensemble. AKA when are the networks going to realize the laugh track is DEAD?!


"What's the deal with sitcoms?"


The West Wing, the liberal political fantasy of flawed, yet intelligent and good-hearted humans with leadership qualities in the White House.


Futurama




Nuff Said.

In which we imitate "This Recording" to make BSG that much more accessible and hip to "Losties", "Whedonites", and "Jerichoans?"

The mid-season break of Battlestar Galactica's Final Season, ended on a note.

A minor note.

It must be said that the off-key ending between the six to seven month hiatus was NOT disappointing nor could be savaged in any negative light given the original premise of the show itself. In point of fact, it was Jaw-dropping, for an EP like Ron Moore to anticipate this audience's expectations, and go ALL IN, oh so early.

It leaves so many questions, it leaves so many speculations, it leaves so many opportunities for further narratives (We shall wait and see whether this is sequel-ism for dollars-sake, or an artistic smoothing of the edges.)
beyond spin-off TV series.
In the last hours of the show, recently completed, and aired next January 2009, I beg that I'm not disappointed, only that my enthusiasm for the material has been vindicated. Not only in terms of plot and character, but for its mere aesthetic value, How fucking cool is this final tracking shot? :


That said, the new shows I'm looking forward to the most are Joss Whedon's "Dollhouse", Alan Ball's "True Blood", and while I despise a writer's foray into the supernatural, J.J. Abrams's "The Fringe" still looks promising.

My returning shows still hold up (for the most part):
House
Lost (if you abandoned it because season 2 dragged, you missed out. I skipped the last half of S1, all of S2, and caught up with recaps. The show has been on high octane since S3 and is astounding.)
Flight of the Conchords
Futurama
Friday Night Lights
Psych
Dexter
The Venture Brothers



Peace,
Nick

Rifftrax Palate Cleanser

Rifftrax.com

Mike Nelson, Kevin "Tom Servo:TNG" Murphy, and Bill "Crow T. Robot:Redux" Corbett.
The Re-imagining, or later writers of MST3K now have a website that produces feature-length mp3's that sync to a specific DVD, whether it be Spiderman 3, The Grudge, or Cloverfield; and in addition, have
Divx based On-Demand products for vids in the public domain that continue in the Genius tradition of mocking what needs/should/shouldn't* be mocked (Youtoob link, Aspect Ratio Compression is not my fault):



*this IS mocked above, and dutifully so (Holy SQEE! wtf would he have done with TMNT?!), however, as far as I'm concerned, there are no Sacred Cows...
with these heroes.
They earn my respect, as a skeptic, as a human, and a person naturally predisposed to self-deprecation when they parse and concurrently trash aforementioned company owner Michael J. Nelson's (as well as one of my and my father's**) favorite movie


to shreds***.

***this sample is not much compared to the humor and scrutiny that it is ultimately subjected to. It is Popcorn, not for the calories, but for the taste and visceral satisfaction alone. It must be stated that there is no wrongdoing in making such a film. In my own opinion, this movie gets a free pass, in as much as its first and only goal is to entertain. But, and I must say "But" to me, the more irreverent and savaging the commentary became between Mike, Kevin, and Bill, the louder I laughed. To me, Rifftrax succeeds not only because they make fun of movies I hate, but because of the fact that they include some of my own sacred cows in the process. I can't wait until they truly rip George Lucas a new one for the Groundhog Abortion that was Indy 4. Anyways, the point is that you're emotionally, or intellectually involved; even if it's anger, skepticism, or joy.

Peace,
Nick