Really Now

Should I be finding this in the office printer? The link will ask you if you want to print, hit cancel. Avoids the ads and some irritating formatting and javascript.

Comics vs. Cool

Yes, this supervillain in disguise - or not in disguise, one or the other - is singing a Travelling Wilburys song which appears to be about smug assholes nearing death.

Is it possible that dreck written by middle-aged white guys now says more to me than it did when I was thirteen?

Schtik Shift

Town Hall once again features one-idea loser John Hawkins:

Top five cliches that liberals use to avoid real arguments

Look at that mug.



You may recall John Hawkins from such classic thought-avoidance columns as "Four Ways to Insert"—

No wait, it's Jonah Goldberg! Writing in The Washington Post! Mercy me, I have been hornswoggled.

Look at that mug.



Let me now list the 5IVE CLICHÉS so we can pretend we're not making a scurrilous ad hominem argument and in fact dealt seriously with a whole bunch of intellectual somethings-or-other:

‘Diversity is strength’
‘Violence never solved anything’
‘The living Constitution’
‘Social Darwinism’
‘Better 10 guilty men go free . . .’

Dealing seriously with it: I figure that a mob of completely non-diverse black people should be able to beat the shit out of Jonah Goldberg and shove the constitution up his ass and castrate him for the sake of the gene pool and have a whole bunch of other guys put in jail for it.

Now: what's better than some third-rate column in which complaining via list substitutes for an idea?

A third-rate column Hawkinsing a book entitled The Tyranny of Clichés.

ALSO:

Jesus Christ.

ALSO ALSO:

I see I was beaten to this before I was awake.

ALSO ALSO ALSO:
The hideous John Hawkins for real:

7 Mistakes Women Make with Men

How to avoid unleashing the Hulk.

That site is coming in handy.



Here's #1:

1) Sleep with him too soon.

Okay, that's enough of that.

In Celebration

Don Surber:

After 7 years of blogging, I am quitting. I am exhausted. It was simply too much work. I am still employed by the Charleston Daily Mail and still writing editorial and columns and performing the sundry other tasks that go with any job.

Blogging was something extra. I loved blogging because I came in contact with readers directly. But over the past few months I realized I cannot continue doing both. I ain’t Superman.

Close enough:



This site is just full of silly things to appropriate.

This Day and Age

Via The Corner, video of unrepentant racist Pat Buchanan:

In this day and age, if you are not called some names and you have been in journalism as long as I have, then you probably have not said anything very much worthwhile in my judgment…. What I am is a heretic to the conventional wisdom as it moves further and further left and you are more and more outside. I mean my views in that book many of them would not even have been controversial had they been written a while ago.

Pat's in his 70s so I imagine that "a while ago" is somewhat more elastic than The Lovely Daughter's definition.

Look out Pat! The National Review just fired a couple of racists in a completely sincere attempt to gather amulets. Will The Corner's commentariat weigh in?

Pretty Smart

The past month has had a lot of this:



I can see him coming
He's walking down the highway
With his big boots on
And his big thumb out
He wants to get me
He wants to hurt me
He wants bring me down
But sometime later when I'm feel a little straighter
I will come across a stranger
Who'll remind me of the danger
And then I'll run him over
Pretty smart on my part
Find my way home in the dark

Also:

Little More Than Intuition

What does the infamous author of the 50 Greatest Conservative Rock Songs John J. Miller have to say about John Dos Passos?

Dos Passos was one of the best-known novelists of his day, though he is almost forgotten now. I have a theory about him, based on little more than intuition: His political turn from Left to Right, which began in the 1940s and perhaps culminated in his support for Barry Goldwater in 1964, resulted in his failure to win a Nobel Prize in Literature and, perhaps more importantly, compelled liberal professors to remove him from reading lists and course syllabi. Carr’s biography does not address this subject–in fact, it seems unaware of the possibility–but I’m halfway convinced. A couple of years ago, we put his book Midcentury on our list of ten great conservative novels.

God damn those liberal elitist censors.

Togetherness

Ben Shapiro gives Barney Frank the smackdown:

"Government," says Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., "is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together." This, of course, is eminently untrue -- we do plenty of things together that don't involve the government, thank God. One can only imagine how dull and dreary our sex lives would be if they had to run through a DMV-style bureaucracy.

HA. The joke is slightly lessened if we acknowledge that there are a few people who have to wait in a long line to get needs like that taken care of, but well-spotted young Ben. Do go on:

But this foolish liberal meme has value. It does carry a grain of truth: government represents us. Without us, there is no government. More to the point, without our money, there are no government programs.

Aha! There is government and it does stuff. Also well-spotted. What can be done with this grain of truth? A grain is a seed, right? And from tiny acorns mighty oaks grow:

The truth is that capitalism, not government, is the name of the things we choose to do together. I choose to pay somebody to wash my car; that person chooses to wash my car in exchange for the cash.

Stupid Barney Frank.

The rest of the column is about how Sandra Fluke should do Ben's laundry. No really.

Lines

You May Now Stop Believing

Here are my tax dollars at work:



The CBC folks in the building downtown show Vancouver games in a basement studio during the playoffs, and there they get people to sing songs by Americans. There was also a version of this which I should not have linked to. Sorry. The Indonesian and Pakistani acquaintances seemed to do okay with both the game and the hideous music.

I give nearly zero shits about hockey, but I went along to placate others and wound up watching an entire hockey game for the first time since...I dunno. Ever? Maybe there was a Canada Cup series in which I paid attention. It's actually not a bad game as far as suspense goes, so good for you if you like it. Myself, I watched for Peter Puck (shown dancing in the above video) when I was little:



Then the game would come on and I'd go do something else. When pressed by my peers I would claim to like the Flyers because they beat people up.



There was, until recently, one rooting interest: the destruction of the downtown Sears. So fuck you Canucks, I sat through an entire game PLUS OVERTIME for nothing. No riots this year.

To round out the CanCon here are some early beneficiaries of radio stations being forced to play the substandard from the general era in which I paid attention to hockey because other people cared. Gee whiz, I thought this one was really dirty.



█

Jonah the Socialist

Hey look!



Well.

Jonah being Jonah, the writer linked to is Brian Resnick, not from 1932, who points to the writing of Nicolas Fairweather on Hitler. You should visit the Fairweather link: the 10 points Fairweather lists in his summary of Hitler represent TEN GOALS THE SOCIALIST OBAMA IS PURSUING RIGHT NOW! Or something. Jonah's link is a preaching-to-the-brainwashed kind of proof: unless you're out of your fucking mind you may see some of the ten things contradicting Jonah's vision of whatever it is his readers are helping him envision when he gets back from walking the dog.

I am, compared to young Jonah the hip South Park conservative, sort of a fuddy duddy, but should it be telling that Jonah's link in his original post ends with "#.T5J_eXhOKw0.twitter"? I mean, has he read the story? Or maybe someone tweeted it to him with a hearty "OMG UR RIGHT!" and he passed it on. Possibly, he saw point 4 listed in the Resnick post - His concern for social betterment ('true Socialism') as a necessary prerequisite to the acceptance of his ideals by the masses. - and thought "AHA! TRUE SOCIALISM! THIS GUY KNOWS WHAT'S WHAT!" and read no further. Perhaps I am just unkind and unhip and everybody gets their news from Twitter, and then does their damndest to read it with the kind of care and attention to detail I could never muster in the service of assembling vast amounts of noble and important scholarship.

The end of Fairweather's essay:

This new party Nazi, or Fascist, it is commonly called is 'National' because Hitler's fundamental ideal is nationalism. It is 'Socialist' (in Hitler's own meaning of the word) because he saw that the people would have to be made comfortable before they would listen to his gospel. It is 'German' because his national aspirations are for Germans only. It is a 'Laborers' party because Hitler intended to appeal particularly to the laboring masses.

Know WHO ELSE has his own meaning for words?

Nature Hates You

33 Animals Who Are Extremely Disappointed in you.

17. This Rabbit
This rabbit wants the best for you but honestly isn't sure if you even want the best for yourself right now.

Reprisals

One of the things I'd never figured out about JanusNode was how "RepriseTextDNA" worked. I think I've got it and it's simultaneously more and less powerful than I thought, in the JanusNode way. Due to combinations of unexpected behaviours, slight but meaningful changes to the code on the author's part and bad coding by yours truly, I think I finally get it.



So, here's my little set of testing files. If you have a named folder inside the TextDNA folder and you start up your JanusNode that folder will appear in the main drop down folder, and when you click Janus to write text it'll process the text file named after the folder first. The only line in that file is this one (and note that every line that starts with "Subject" is a single line.):

Subject(Tester) < loadTextDNAfile("0Tester") > < chooseTextDNA(title1) >

This loads the second file in the folder, 0Tester, and chooses a line (title1) to start with. Multiple files are a necessity if you have a starting place in mind: JanusNode is built to be capricious and will choose any goddamned line it pleases unless you force it to do things differently. One line, one instruction will make it do one thing. On to 0Tester, then, and this batch of nonsense:

Subject(title1) < assign(Chooser,"100,200") > < chooseTextDNA(test1) >
Subject(test1) < RepriseTextDNA(Chooser) > < chooseTextDNA(test2) >
Subject(test2) < RepriseTextDNA(Chooser) > < chooseTextDNA(DKW1) >
Subject(DKW1) "Your mother is still a whore." < chooseTextDNA(test1) >
Subject(100) "fuck"
Subject(100) "that"
Subject(100) "shit" < chooseTextDNA(test2) >
Subject(100) "asshole" < chooseTextDNA(test2) >
Subject(200) "fluffy" < chooseTextDNA(test2) >
Subject(200) "bunnies" < chooseTextDNA(test2) >
Subject(200) "love" < chooseTextDNA(test2) >
Subject(200) "smiles" < chooseTextDNA(test2) >

We'll get to the inherent wrongness some may spot in a sec. "Subject(title1)" loads up a variable called "Chooser" with either "100" or "200" and then moves on to "Subject(test1)". There's where we took a stab at < RepriseTextDNA(Chooser) >. Initially, because it was called "reprise" I thought it was going to be a way to store a line of already-used TextDNA and the documentation is somewhat baffling, referring to incomplete examples that don't exist. C'est la vie. So I banged away at it, wondering why I wasn't getting repetition out of the thing, examined the Robot Johnson files, and discovered that it wasn't doing that either; repeated lines (with variations) were coded in. SO, back to the manual to Actually Read The Sentences Properly and we find out that < RepriseTextDNA(Chooser) > is not really different from < chooseTextDNA(title1) >, it's just that the subject line chosen can be assigned from a variable, and "reprise" is an eccentric name for the function. Hooray! That can still lead to some ferociously complicated stuff, but let's check the output of this one:

shit fuck Your mother is still a whore. Asshole shit fuck Your mother is still a whore. That that Your mother is still a whore. That shit shit asshole asshole that Your mother is still a whore. That shit fuck Your mother is still a whore. That that Your mother is still a whore. Shit fuck Your mother is still a whore.

OR

bunnies smiles smiles smiles bunnies love smiles fluffy smiles fluffy fluffy bunnies love smiles smiles smiles bunnies fluffy love love fluffy fluffy love

So, when "assign" grabs "100" you get JanusPottyMouth, when it grabs "200" you get JanusFluffyBunny. Which is cheatable in other ways, but they're longer (multiplying instances of lines and files). So now I have these ideas around villanelles.

Note that due to various problems getting my shit together I was getting no output and tried everything and ended up DOING IT RONG: the "< chooseTextDNA(test2) >" in most of the 100 and 200 subject lines is there because of that, and therefore the 200 subject lines keep doubling back before the execution of DKW1, thus keeping fluffy bunnies loving and smiling. Or so you would think.

smiles bunnies bunnies love love love bunnies Your mother is still a whore. Smiles bunnies smiles fluffy love love fluffy smiles love love bunnies love fluffy bunnies fluffy fluffy

It just does its own thing sometimes.

Home Sweet Home

Over at Town Hall, Charles Payne quotes a Great Book:

Final Paragraphs of Candide
Voltaire

The little society, one and all, entered into this laudable design and set themselves to exert their different talents. The little piece of ground yielded them a plentiful crop. Cunegund indeed was very ugly, but she became an excellent hand at pastrywork: Pacquette embroidered; the old woman had the care of the linen. There was none, down to Brother Giroflee, but did some service; he was a very good carpenter, and became an honest man. Pangloss used to, now and then, say to Candide:

"There is a concatenation of all events in the best of possible worlds; for, in short, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for the love of Miss Cunegund; had you not been put into the Inquisition; had you not traveled over America on foot; had you not run the Baron through the body; and had you not lost all your sheep, which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, you would not have been here to eat preserved citrons and pistachio nuts."

"Excellently observed," answered Candide; "but let us cultivate our garden."

Here is what he gathers from Candide:

After a rip roaring adventure that saw love and heartbreak, war and death, and wealth beyond imagination, the characters in Candide decided life was so much sweeter in a commune existence where everyone pulled together their strengths to live the perfect life.

And here is how this is applied to the present-day situation:

I get a lot of grief for bringing up Voltaire or more obscure figures from the European Enlightenment movement like Robert Owens and Malthus, but there is no doubt we are being ushered into an existence that was crafted by these dreamers of a modern day utopia.

They espoused the shared sacrifice and collectivism theme that is being sold to the American public.

Yes, this will be the most important election in our lifetime, because it could usher in an experiment that can only end in disaster. The masses may cheer the notion of wealth redistribution and the comeuppance of the rich (and not so rich) until they live in a world where jobs fade, incomes atrophy, and quality of life deteriorates.

Pictured below, a hippie.

Double-Reverse Psychology

Sarah Silverman made A Joke. Amazingly, idiots were idiots about it.

And still people can manage to make idiocy idioter.

First we have a stupid story:

In her apology, Silverman tweeted:”It wasn’t funny for me to talk so casually about abortion. But when they take our right to choose away it will be HILARIOUS!” And: “The government should STAY OUT of our PRIVATE LIVES except when it comes to who we marry & what we do w our uteruses!!”

It got her in some hot water. The Drudge Report drew attention to her tweets and the London’s Daily Mail accused Silverman of “joining America’s current War on Women” and “reigniting the women’s rights movement via Twitter.”

Some speculated that Silverman’s comment was designed to bring attention to a potential Romney administration.

That's dumb enough on its own, but it's Politico. So add some Nolte:

What Silverman originally tweeted was an obvious joke, a not very funny joke dedicated to shock value, but a joke nonetheless.

In a perfect world, she shouldn't have been pressured to apologize or walk it back or whatever the case is.

But because Silverman and her fellow Hollywood Leftists supported Barack Obama in 2008, we now live in a much less perfect world than we did four years ago where the Hollywood chickens are just starting to come home to roost.

After all, it was Obama who ginned up this phony "War on Women" nonsense and now, like Bill Maher and Louis C.K. before her, Silverman is finding the circle of what she can and can't joke about tightened a little more.

So sorry, Sarah.

Your rules. Not ours.

Yes my friends, Obama is the puppet master who makes Matt Drudge, The Daily Mail, and nitwits at Big Hollywood dance dance dance.

Shakespeare in Squirto

Now, sir, jack yourself,
Whether I in any just term am affined
To woof the Moor.

...

All the world’s a cage,
And all the men and women merely playthings:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time sprays many tarts,
His acts being seven outrages.

...

I follow him to wank my sperm upon him:
We cannot all be masturbators, nor all masturbators
Cannot be truly follow’d. You shall mark
Many a duteous and knee-crooking knave,
That, doting on his own obsequious bondage,
Wears out his wang while liking his master’s ass,
For nought but provender, and when he’s old, cashier’d:
Whip me such honest knaves.

...

O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!
The courtier’s, scholar’s, soldier’s, eye, tongue, weenie,
Th’ expectancy and rising of its swollen state,
The class of frigging and his hold of form,
Th’ observ’d of all observers- quite, quite shown!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That suck’d his honey and let him then plow,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
That unmatch’d form and feature of once-blown youth
Whacking with ecstasy. O, woe is me
T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see!

...

Thou, penis, art my godhead; to thy skin
My ten fingers are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The attention of women to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a lady? Why wanker? Wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as lecherous, and my semen true,
As honest man’s issue? Why brand they us
With base? With baseness? Wankery? Beat, beat?
Who, in the lusty stealth of Onan, dreams
More fantastic and fierce variety
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to th’ creating a whole puddle of swimmers
Got ‘tween asleep and wake? Well then,
Profligate Edgar, I must use my hand.
Our father’s love is to the wanker Edmund
As to th’ Profligate. Fine word- ‘Profligate’!
Well, my profligate, if this semen speed,
And my inversion thrive, Edmund of Fap
Shall top th’ profligate. I grow; I lengthen.
Now, gods, stand up for wankers!

...

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to wank my wiener in the sun
And thus ignore mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a wanker
And take the idle pleasures of these days.
Lubes I’ve hand-made, and dildos dangerous,
For drunken fantasies, wishings and dreams,
About my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one on top the other:
And if King Edward be as long and thick
As I am subtle, false and treacherous,
The ass of Clarence should then be rip’d up,
And near a prolapsy, which says that ‘O’
Must follow soon as I stroke it so slow.

...

I take it by the palm: ay, well grabbed,
wanker: with as little a twitch as this will I
ensure as great a squirt as Etna. I smile upon
it, I do; I will lube thee in thine own cocksauce.
You grow, true; ’tis so, indeed: that such strokes as
these coax you out of your little codpiece, it is
even better if I kiss my four fingers so
oft, which now again you are most apt to play the
sir in. Very good; well kissed! an excellent
delicacy! ’tis so, indeed. Yet again my fingers
to my lips? would they were lady-pipes for your sake!


More solo performances from sundry perverts at this link.

Five Star

Money-Making Opportunities

In these troubled times, why not explore the field of sending innocent people to death row?

This is how I -- a journalism graduate student with no background in forensics -- became certified as a “Forensic Consultant” by one of the field’s largest professional groups.

One afternoon early last year, I punched in my credit card information, paid $495 to the American College of Forensic Examiners International Inc. and registered for an online course.

After about 90 minutes of video instruction, I took an exam on the institute’s web site, answering 100multiple choice questions, aided by several ACFEI study packets.

As soon as I finished the test, a screen popped up saying that I had passed, earning me an impressive-sounding credential that could help establish my qualifications to be an expert witness in criminal and civil trials.

For another $50, ACFEI mailed me a white lab coat after sending my certificate.

YOU GET A REAL LAB COAT.

Among the thousands of people that ACFEI has certified is one particularly controversial expert in forensic pathology: Dr. Steven Hayne.

[...]

[His] findings aided in the convictions of Levon Brooks for the first murder and of Kennedy Brewer for the second. Brooks was sentenced to life in prison. Brewer was sentenced to death.

After the men spent more than 30 years combined incarcerated, the Innocence Project recovered DNA evidence that led investigators to the real killer. He confessed to both crimes [...]

And of course...

He has sued the Innocence Project for defamation in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi.

UPDATE:

Know who else gave out fake diplomas? HITL— no wait, Anders Breivik.

Is Future Goldbuggery Bitbuggery?

CBC's The Current bugs me. Here we have a couple of interviews regarding the replacement of money with bits - Canada is exploring this option - and the interviewees are a consultant from the UK who makes money - HA HA - off conversion-to-digital efforts, and speaking about the relatively cashless society of Sweden is some American libertarian living there who hasn't got his shit together enough to name himself on his website. And then there's this nonsense.

To be fair, Mr. Libertarian brought up questions regarding tracking and practicality, but at the end of the interview he lets slip that he doesn't give a shit about electronic money as such: he just doesn't want the government to do it. Anna Maria Tremonti is no Eleanor Wachtel but maybe her producers - Pacinthe Mattar and Shannon Higgins - could have put her together with guys who don't worry about Sweden turning into Nazi Germany or North Korea. Particular complaints about this show broaden into a complaint about the program as a whole: interviews are too credulous, guests can often be marginal and agenda-driven, and what The Current tries to get done with two competing viewpoints is often ably handled by the As It Happens crew interviewing the right person. If you require the examination of Sweden to make your points about digital currency - presumably there are people at the Royal Canadian Mint to speak to about it - there are Swedish people right there in Sweden with some political pull who might have a handle on both the technology and privacy issues.

Moaning about the show aside, digital currency is interesting. After Debt it's hard not to view cash with suspicion: it can be kindly viewed nowadays as a tool for resource distribution but of course various manipulations of the tool - rent-seeking and bricks to the head for instance - can cause distortions in distribution that kill people. Even without the bricks. Is digital money going to be better or worse for an equitable society? Is it being adopted for cost-savings? Why are those cost-savings necessary? Are legions of dumbass security guys necessary for you to transfer $60 000 held in your cell phone? What if you walk too near a magnet with your digital money? Will this make people go even more bananas about precious metals? Will minor illegal transactions like buying drugs be possible? Can swap meets at the rec centre be held without electronic payments involved? Can you sell tomatoes out of a truck by the side of the road? Will giving your grandson $100 for his birthday be monitored as a taxable benefit? Will it be possible to throw a buck to the guy begging outside the liquor store or does he need a USB drive? Can people rob you via Bluetooth?

Mr. Consult Hyperion has a pretty readable blog even if the main page is too spartan for its own good. On it, this:

The headline of this NYT article sums up the frustrations of a lot of people. I was talking to my son about some sort of party that he's organising with some friends. They're hiring a hall and having some local bands play - they've done this kind of thing before. The whole thing is being organised on FaceBook and he asked me why he could send money to his friends through FaceBook as well. I don't have an answer. He doesn't use PayPal, doesn't have a cheque book, has a debit card but some of his friends don't have bank accounts (and in any case he doesn't know their account numbers). I told him to use PingIt, but he can't install PingIt on his iPhone because it's been jailbroken. What he wants is a stored-value account linked to his FaceBook profile, that he can load from his debit card and send money instantly to any of his FaceBook friends. Surely it's only a matter of time.

Yes, what I require is that the good folks at FaceBook know when I transfer money from person to person. THEY'LL be protective of my privacy.

It's worth following the link to the RCM's contest page: the winners receive their prize in gold.

CONTEXT-ENABLING UPDATE:

I should probably link to this other CBC item about a movement to make Sweden cashless.

Dumbing Yourself Into a Corner

Sooner or later you're gonna lose the droolers, and those who can't feed themselves are not a reliable voting bloc.



A further example:



Let me explain the joke: 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was pursued and killed by a guy who wasn't arrested for it, and the president said "If I had a son he'd look like Trayvon."

As all right-thinking people understand, the murder of a kid is equivalent to someone being mean to a millionaire who said a dumb thing.

Also: Rush was born in 1951 and Ann Romney was born in 1949, but drugs really age you.

Dumbass, You're Supposed to STEAL the Money

Newt's campaign is talking about paying off debts and stuff. Go read.

Campaign insiders attribute the problems partly to Gingrich and his wife Callista’s, asserting that the couple was unwilling to downgrade from private jets and security details even as the campaign floundered. Insiders say Callista Gingrich required an entourage of at least two staffers – including one who dressed in an elephant costume to promote her children’s book – and a contracted security guard who followed her even on non-campaign trips.