When Pancakes Attack

More News

Via LG&M there's a much more complete run-down of breaking news at Al-Jazeera.

Proportionality

Michael Rubin at the National Review:

One final note on proportionality: Fifteen “peace” activists dead is a tragedy, but they represent only one one-thousandth of the death toll of a French heatwave.

My math is not the best, but I'd say five French heatwaves may equal the wrong person getting a blowjob.

I Am Entertained.

A woman sues Google for giving her bad walking directions. This guy writes about it:

Why trust the machines when you can trust your own eyes, your own brain, your own basic sense of survival?

This philosophical question comes to mind after reading the tragic tale of a woman, her eyes, her brain, her BlackBerry, and her Google Maps.

According to an exhaustive analysis presented by Search Engine Land, Lauren Rosenberg decided to take a walk in Park City, Utah, on January 19, 2009.

I will try and ignore just how fundamentally un-American this act was in order to focus on some of the ensuing action.

Activism

News:

The latest developments on the overnight raid by Israeli commandos on the flotilla of Palestinian activists trying to break the blockade of Gaza to bring in relief supplies:

[...]

08:53 ET: The death toll among the activists stands at 10, though it is believed to be higher.

So...who's up for Talk Like a Pirate Day?

The TPM link is still updating as of 10:25am PST. Videos included.

Here Is Where The Vacation Went Wrong

Apropos of Nothing

From Plutarch's Life of Theseus:

As geographers, Sosius, crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect, that beyond this lies nothing but the sandy deserts full of wild beasts, unapproachable bogs, Scythian ice, or a frozen sea, so in this work of mine, in which I have compared the lives of the greatest men with one another, after passing through those periods which probable reasoning can reach to and real history find a footing in, I might very well say of those that are farther off: "Beyond this there is nothing but prodigies and fictions, the only inhabitants are the poets and inventors of fables; there is no credit, or certainty any farther."

The Greatest Trailer Ever*

*For fans of animated GIFs.

ALSO:

An interview with the director:

Q: The special effects of the birds look a little weak. Is that something you would have liked to have changed?

A: Let's put it this way. From a distance I think those eagles and vultures look pretty real. As they come a little closer, maybe a little shocking and terrifying. In the close-ups, something unique, something different, something you haven't seen before. The scene with the coat hangers, maybe; the animator, the kid who did that scene flaked out on me so I had to work with what I had. So yes, it could have been better. That's one thing I'd like to fix, but it's too late now.

It's Funny to Think

It's funny to think that a conservative would dedicate an enthusiastic and cheerful post to the Dead Kennedys. Well okay, it's not really about the band as much as about the song California Über Alles and the candidacy of Jerry Brown.

You better believe I bought that mp3 in about 5 seconds, by the way! Gonna wear that sucker out this summer…*

What's also funny is that the current governor of California is the son of an actual Nazi and has a thick accent because he is from Austria**, but there you go, the world is mysterious.

*Note also the kickback links through Amazon.
**Know WHO ELSE was born in Austria?

Zombie News

John Nolte attends a press event at which George Romero plugs Survival of the Dead. John Nolte is such an "unabashed George Romero fan" that in 1600 words he manages to quote his hero directly once for a grand total of 31 words.

THANK FUCKING GOD IT'S FRIDAY.

Dance of the Legless Orangutan

Pure Data

Speaking of Open Source stuff, Pure Data looks really interesting, at least for electronic music geeks. Cross platform.

Wealth

Apple Makes Cool Stuff!

That's why I give them all my money!

The move came after another employee at the plant died after falling off a building yesterday morning. Shenzhen police confirmed the death but said they were still investigating whether it was suicide. Nine people have died this year in the series of incidents among workers, while there have been two failed suicide attempts.

Foxconn is the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer, making devices for leading global electronics brands.

Labour activists in Hong Kong have threatened to start a campaign for a boycott of Apple's iPhone, one of the many electronic devices made by the 300,000 workers at the Shenzhen plant. Workers are paid the minimum wage and regularly work heavy overtime.

Getting most of my gizmos used seems somehow nicer. Doesn't it? DOESN'T IT?

I may need to drink some fancy bottled water.

The Darkness

This goes well with that Shins song. Except it's more like Sweet.

They Are Just Like Jesus Too

A Fox News headline:

Rand Paul is Learning What It's Like to Be Me, Says Sarah Palin

Rand Paul used to be just stupid, but now he's stupid and famous.

Yes they`re morons
Identical morons and you`ll find
They laugh alike, they walk alike
At times they even talk alike
You can lose your mind
When morons are two of a kind

Things You Can Do On the Bus to Work

Dig Through My Mind

For some reason I larded up a comments section with videos of cover songs. Mainly from the 3000 songs at work.

Libertarians Are Stupid

Zachary Roth at TPM establishes that Rand Paul is a mainstream libertarian. And in the middle of that:

Walter Block, a libertarian professor of economics at Loyola University, and a senior fellow with the libertarian Ludwig Von Mises Institute, went further. "I think anyone who doesn't believe that isn't a libertarian," he said, calling Paul's comment "a very mainstream libertarianism."

"I'm delighted that Rand Paul said that," an enthusiastic Block added. "I think it's magnificent. I didn't realize that he was that good."

"The spirit of non-discrimination," said Block "ends you right up in compulsory bisexuality."

HOT!

Daughterly Wisdom

"Elegant is a fancy word for fancy."

The Usual

Just so you know...

"What they've done in the field now is, they tell the troops, you have to make a determination within a day or two or so whether or not the prisoners you have, the detainees, are Taliban," Hersh added. "You must extract whatever tactical intelligence you can get, as opposed to strategic, long-range intelligence, immediately. And if you cannot conclude they're Taliban, you must turn them free.

"What it means is, and I've been told this anecdotally by five or six different people, battlefield executions are taking place," he continued. "Well, if they can't prove they're Taliban, bam. If we don't do it ourselves, we turn them over to the nearby Afghan troops and by the time we walk three feet the bullets are flying. And that's going on now."

Orly Taitz vs. Dan Lacey, Painter of Pancakes

OMG can there be a comic book of this with a death-metal soundtrack? Made of chocolate?

But Taitz doesn't feel flattered to be in such company. She maintains that the painting titled Orly Taitz, Pancake Birther actually portrays her holding a placenta rather than a pancake. "This is really despicable,” she says, theorizing that one of her many political enemies put Lacey up to the work. But she says she’s more concerned about the effect the paintings are having on her children.

For his part, Lacey quips, "I thought all of these were rather sweet paintings of her giving birth so I don't know why her family would be upset. Perhaps her children now suspect that they are actually pancakes." He confirms that some of the original Taitz paintings were commissioned (though he won't say by who). But most of them, he says, were his own inspiration. Lacey listed the paintings on eBay, where one sold for about $200. "Orly remains a popular auction subject,” he explains, "though not quite as popular as Michael Jackson."

More at the link.


Orly Taitz discussing the threat of pancakes (artist's impression).

Fuckin' Shit Up

Hooray!

OTTAWA — An anti-establishment group claimed responsibility for the firebombing of an Ottawa bank early Tuesday morning, and vowed to "be there" at the upcoming G8 and G20 summits in Ontario in an online video that shows a massive fireball exploding from the front window of a Royal Bank of Canada branch.

AWWWWWW...

Police said witnesses saw three or four people leave the branch at around the time of the fire, then enter a sport utility vehicle.

Hooray for Saudi Arabia!

Don't write that too often.

Questions

Robert Davi attempts to out-Gary-Graham Gary Graham:

What the hell is going on in this great country of ours?

First, let me say I am sick and tired of The Left destroying the values this country was built on. And not being held accountable! I see the attacks made daily and most are oblivious. If your child was drowning would you just sit there and sip a mint julep? We are all fiddling as our country is being capsized. Like on the Titanic, the quintet keeps playing as the ship sinks.

Questions in order of appearance:

1. What exactly is going on that is the problem?
2. Is it a great country?
3. Are you sick and tired? You are still typing.
4. Which values?
5. What would accountability entail?
6. What attacks?
7. Which attacks are comparable to my child drowning?
8. Got anything else besides mint juleps?
9. Who is "we"? Anything to do with the "most are oblivious" above?
10. Is "fiddling" anything like "acting" Mr. Actor Guy?
11. Do countries capsize?
12. Did the Titanic capsize or did it sink?
13. Did the Titanic sing because of The Iceberg of Terrorism or The Iceberg of Immigrants or The Iceberg of Taxes or The Iceberg of Black Presidenting or what?
14. Is the quintet the "we"? Because there were other people on the Titanic besides those guys. If I have properly followed the advice of Elmo as stated in his most recent colloquy with Grover, that quintet is not even "most".
15. Do people want musicians in charge of rescue efforts?
16. Was playing music to passengers who could die doing nothing?

It turns out that the rest of the article - it is long - is all about how his grandparents were immigrants so he knows from immigrants. A unique story to be sure. Also SPEAK ENGLISH and PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE as free people always do what they're told when they're told by Ruff Tuff Creampuffs.

Good luck to Mr. Davi in his pursuit of the old-timey America in which everyone arrived with the proper paperwork speaking mellifluous Yankee talk.

Golden Showerage of Comics

Lee and Kirby were deep and all, and I understand the point about the atomization of culture, but maybe another approach was necessary.

Testing, Testing...

K-Lo:

I understand why many in the media worked overtime spinning the pill as good for man- -- and woman- -- this Mother's Day. But the truth is that motherhood is at the heart of what it means to be a woman, and the pill has helped deny that reality. Mind you, you don't have to have children to be in tune with that great gift to the world, but you do have to know it, acknowledge it, and not pop a pill whose purpose is to treat fertility as if it were a disease rather than a tremendous power.

Simulation below:

One Childhood to Rulle Them All

Michael S. Rulle, as we know, likes The Red Hot Chili Peppers. He's also concerned about some damned TV show I don't watch. What interests me is this:

I think Coppola’s Godfather series created the modern heroic Sociopath. We rooted for Brando’s and Pacino’s characters, although Michael Corleone became unlikable by the end of Godfather II. Coppola was the first to romanticize the familiar character of the gangster in movies.

I am sorry Mr. Rulle, I think some film that I SAW when I WAS YOUNG set the standard there.

Also, you can get with this:

Or you can get with that:

I am concerned that one of these candy-ass images is more sociopathic than the other but WHICH ONE?

NO!

NO!

The Chron picks a NON-VOTER over Orly Taitz!

Damon Dunn, a 34-year-old Orange County real estate developer, is well aware of the first obstacle facing his candidacy for secretary of state: his failure to vote in any election until May 2009.

[...]

His primary opponent, attorney and dental surgeon Orly Taitz, is one of the leaders of the "birther" movement, which has challenged President Obama's claim that he is a natural-born citizen, and thus the legitimacy of his election. If elected secretary of state, Taitz would pursue the legal challenge before the 2012 election. She also suggested that she would sue the federal government to stop water diversions from the Central Valley.

Dunn is much more focused on the actual duties of the office, and he would provide a more credible challenge to Bowen. He should get the GOP nomination.

Where is the love?

Good News Everyone!

A breakthrough!

Humans have a common facial expression that conveys pain – and now Canadian researchers have shown that mice make a similar “pain face.”

A new “mouse grimace scale” will make it easier for researchers to assess the pain-control benefits of new drugs in lab animals, says Jeff Mogil, a pain researcher at McGill University in Montreal.

I'm looking forward to the “kitten grimace scale” and the “puppy grimace scale” on which I expect the research to be THOROUGH.

Frank Sinatra Jr.

Took Ma out to see Frank Sinatra Jr. An odd show, not least him doing "My Way" as close to his dad's way as he could. Apart from that, there was something unsettling about it. Don't know what it was.

Curses!

Meddlers!

Smut Clyde said...

Stardust's retarding ray is no match for my ray-proof spaceship!

May 9, 2010 3:51 PM

The Explanation

Insight

Alicia Colon:

Thanks to the Internet and its online encyclopedias and newspaper archives I’ve discovered that many films based on the truth are not even close to it. Even documentaries edited by the likes of a Michael Moore are not to be trusted. All films should be regarded as entertaining fiction unless thoroughly vetted.

You kids wouldn't understand, but before the internet THIS was not fantasy but FACT:

The President Made Me Beg You For More Money That I Will Use To Complain About The President And His Opposition To Free Market Principles

Republistiltskin

Burt Prelutsky wakes up and smells the coffee:

Monday, May 3, 2010

Politics, 2010

by Burt Prelutsky

The danger of the Tea Party movement, a movement I very much applaud, is that they will insist on litmus tests for GOP candidates, while ignoring geography and constituencies. The problem is that if you insist on comparing every Republican to, say, a Paul Ryan or a Michele Bachmann, and withholding your support if they don’t quite measure up, you make it easier for Democrats to be elected.

This year, we need to win an additional 41 seats in order to wrench the speakership away from Mrs. Pelosi, otherwise known as the Wicked Witch of the West, and if some of those 41 aren’t exactly clones of Ronald Reagan, I’m here to remind you that if you had tested the Gipper for conservative purity, even he would have failed!

And then he goes to sleep and forgets he woke up to smell the coffee:

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Oxymorons And Non-Oxymorons

by Burt Prelutsky

Liberals like to use “military intelligence” and “compassionate conservatives” as prime examples of oxymorons, but I think better ones are “civil servants” and “tolerant liberals”.

If there’s one form of animal life that irritates me even more than gophers, rattlesnakes and run-of-the-mill socialists like Henry Waxman and Barney Frank, it’s so-called Republicans like John McCain and Lindsey Graham who are convinced that the more they reach across the aisle and the less partisan they are in their politics, the more statesmanlike they’ll appear. In much the same way that a conservative used to be described as a liberal who’d just been mugged, my working definition of a statesman is a politician who’s just lost an election. And in the case of McCain and Graham, I say the sooner, the better.

Mind you, he was asleep for three days.

Dialogue on Myth

Daughter: What does a satyr look like?
Me: A satyr is a man from the waist up, but with goat legs and goat horns.
D: For goat's sake.
M: !!!

Moron The Blacklist

Andrew Klavan:

Can I prove conservatives are excluded from work in the movie business? Of course not—not without revealing the identities of the frightened people who tell me their horror stories. Even I, who will speak openly in general, won’t name the names of blacklisters because it would violate the trust of business interactions and close specific markets irretrievably.

Let's see, these people who have been blacklisted are on the blacklist so they're already gonna lose the work. And the trust of business interactions prevents Klavan from talking about these people who would never hire him anyway.

Case closed!

The Culture Wars

Michael Rubin:

Iraqi president Jalal Talabani has called Iran "Iraq's Real Friend."

Whenever any Iraqi politician — Chalabi, Talabani, Maliki, Barzani, Muqtada al-Sadr or anyone else — hugs Iran, there's a tendency in Washington to say "Aha! They were pro-Iranian all along." This is dead wrong. They're all politicians and can waffle with the best of them.

The real issue is that these politicians are barometers of power. Iraqi politicians are survivors, and they will align themselves with and accommodate power while fleeing weakness. No one will sacrifice himself to be pro-American if America is weak.

Okay, fine, the usual "we didn't screw up" line on the Iraq invasion. But here's the magic:

The question U.S. officials should ask themselves is: After expending so much blood and treasure, is it really noble to abandon influence, or should we recalibrate policy to surge influence? The hostility of the Obama administration to power and influence is sadly a tragedy upon which historians will comment.

Read that last paragraph and try to tell me this gentleman's work is done.

Laid Back

Feet not pictured, but here's an artist's conception:



And polite? Just look!



That, friends, is a spraypainting vandal THINKING OF THE CHILDREN. Amen!

It's a Fine Line Between Clever and Stupid

What's up at The Corner?

If You Say So [Jonah Goldberg]

Richard Cohen writes:

This business about socialism has become a conservative trope — as loony on the right as is some of the left's admiration for Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. The current issue of Commentary, a magazine that virtually created the neoconservative movement, devotes about 4,500 words to the subject. It asks: "What Kind of Socialist Is Barack Obama?" To which any sane person would have to reply: "Not a Very Good One."

I'll let Cohen's suggestion that anyone who disagrees on this matter is not "sane" slide, to make an easier point. If Barack Obama isn't a very good socialist, never mind a Very Good One — in super-serious capital letters — doesn't that mean he's still a socialist? Bob Ueker was not a very good baseball player, but he was a baseball player.

05/04 10:21 AM

Below: not a very good superhero:



OR:

Pictured below, a fascist.



God damn it, I can't believe I didn't have that one out of the gate.

ALSO, TOO:

Watch Jonah have a bad time:

My Tax Dollars At Work

Whining

Gary Graham:

“Am I being black-listed?” This question, that sent waves of terror throughout the Hollywood community a generation ago, does so again…but for entirely different reasons. The notion of a Hollywood blacklist that once represented a scourge of ‘outing’ actors, writers, directors and producers who had had involvement with the Communist party, now vilifies, sequesters and persecutes a different caste of working American: the Hollywood Conservative.

[...]

There are very dire consequences to being in this town, working in this industry – and speaking out against the sort of leftist agenda that is now racing though our government at every level – from city to state to federal. It pisses them off. And unfortunately for those who speak out, they control the gates to the kingdom.

There has been a long-suspected bias in this town against conservatives by what most agree is run primarily by liberals. Progressives, if you will. Those who welcome a move towards socialism that our President is ushering into the nation’s daily playlist of What’s Happening Now? These progressive producers, directors, writers, actors and studio heads all agree on one thing, it seems – This is a brave new world, an Obama world…and those damn Conservatives are just trying to mess things up. In fact, it was Those Conservatives and George Bush who got us into this mess in the first place!

It is terrible that employers won't hire people they think are assholes. There should be some kind of asshole affirmative action.

Conservative actors are people too. We just want to work. Buddy, can you spare a cool guest-starring role? I’m joking – and personally I don’t know if I’m on any sort of black-list or not. I tend to equate any sort of success or the lack thereof to my own efforts and past performances, not whether I make my conservative voice heard. But that’s just me.

EAT INVISIBLE HAND!

The Big Snit

Go There

Funny.

"Choose Your Own Ending" Posts

Snorghagen said,
May 2, 2010 at 13:23

Don’t miss this chance to own your very own bankrupt Moonie rag. It costs only $35 million a year to maintain and comes complete with its own snakes.

And from the article:

The finances are so tight that the newspaper hasn't paid some of its bills or tended to basic maintenance issues -- such as hiring an exterminator to deal with mice and snakes sneaking into the building on New York Avenue in Northeast.

Comment on A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

Second in a series.

The Cloaca of Conservative Rhetoric

Andy McCarthy:

Linda is actually advancing progressive notions under the cloak of conservative rhetoric. "We conservatives can’t have it both ways," she says, "either we’re for race-neutral justice or we’re not." That turns “race-neutral justice” into a phrase as vaporously promiscuous as “social justice.” The conservative case is for common sense not sloganeering. "Race-neutral justice" is not an abstract ideal divorced from all factual context. We are for race-neutral justice when considerations of race have no proper place in the matter at hand. But I can’t imagine that Linda would prevent a prosecutor in a mafia case from proving that "membership" in a Cosa Nostra "family" requires Italian heritage. And based on our many conversations about national security, I’m betting she does not support purging terms like "jihadist" and "Islamist terror" in favor of "violent extremist" and "man-caused disaster" on the rationale that our commitment to "race-neutral justice" requires us to ignore the ideology that inspires modern terrorism.

I think I'd point out here that the Italians mentioned are probably in court because they've been arrested for an actual crime - and the crime would exist outside racial identity - and also that "jihadist" is not a racial category.

Attention Stoners: March On the Ground