The Role of the Devil in the Modern Age

PDF link to 999,
the "society and security monthly" of the United Arab Emirates:

Diaries of an ‘emo’ girl

M.S., says she became an emo girl at the age of 15. She describes herself as melancholic, quiet and mysterious and does not like to mix with others. Her friendships are limited.

She is addicted to foreign movies. One day, she watched a movie on emo and liked the idea. She embraced the new lifestyle and eventually became an emo girl.

“I feel that I am different from ordinary people. I know it’s not a familiar thing and will continue to be so”, she says. She is now 19.

Her favourite colour is black, which she describes as the colour of darkness and the devil. She loves to listen to Rock music, and her hobby is to take photographs of bloody wounds and different hair cuts.

Her own hair style covers part of the face; if it covers the right side of the face, then the emo person is a ‘greenhorn emo’, and if it’s on the left side of the face, then the person is a ‘pro emo’. The hair is short from the back, and cut in the style of a ponytail.

M.S. likes her personality and does not want to be like ordinary ‘others’. Otherwise, “the devil will not like me”, she says. She always carries the devil logo, and says she loves the devils and wants to satisfy them by drawing on her body with a blade. This, she says, gives her a feeling of comfort!

She spends her free time in watching foreign movies and playing ‘wega’ that involves witchcraft and the devil.

There is more material there on the plague of emo material besetting Arab nations. Such material is contrary to the will of God.

Almighty God, protect us from ‘wega’.

The Bicyclist's Airbag

Candidates Who Care About Poverty

Byron York:

CINCINNATI - There's an odd imbalance that few have noticed in this presidential campaign. In the midst of a continuing economic downturn, one candidate talks regularly about poverty, and the other doesn't. The one who does is the Republican, Mitt Romney.

Indeed. Here he is:

Boring Enough to Sleep To

Let's see if this works. It required a fairly crazy amount of cutting and pasting in the tag salad that YouTube provides: that was much more painful than making a sound, getting a half-minute of it, fading it in and out, then adding a picture to it to make sure YouTube would take it, then exporting it to a format YouTube would take, then uploading it.

The deal is I was always impressed with the Hunter S. Thompson trick of turning the TV channel - remember turning the things? - in between stations to get white noise to sleep to. The thing is that while white noise provides a lot of sound cover, it's the same sound from moment to moment, and if you're in the insomniac way then your mind is racing. If you use some hippie-style synth drones, though, the sound can get to this happy balance between enough variance to be distracting but not quite enough variance to be rousing.

Lately I've been letting this go all night: it's around Hallowe'en and here that means fireworks season. Not that we take anything away from The Lovely Daughter's ability to make crashing noises.











Neato! Works fine. They're all timed a little bit differently so once they get out of phase they shouldn't line up again for...too much math. Plus there are bound to be load-time issues.

Libyagate!

John O'Sullivan:

In several insomniac posts on Twitter in the small hours, I pointed out that the Libyagate scandal is metastasizing in ways that echo three previous scandals.

Scandals one and three are gated: Watergate and Irangate. Scandal two remains mercifully ungated, but here it is:

The second scandal is the anti-Kerry video put out by the Swift Boat veterans. As during the Swift Boat ads, the establishment media has done its best to ignore or even repress news about the developing scandal of Libyagate. The New York Times has distinguished itself by its dignified silence on both occasions. It eventually broke that silence over the Swift Boaters with a front-page story that assured readers there was nothing in it. That was difficult to believe about the allegations of Kerry’s former shipmates; it was impossible to believe about the second Swift Boat advertisement which consisted of a long extract of Kerry’s own congressional testimony about U.S. war crimes. Kerry’s attempt to present himself as a war hero was undercut completely by his own earlier appearances as an anti-war hero. The self-contradiction destroyed the desired “narrative” of his campaign, slowed him down, and ultimately weakened him terminally.

The scandal is that bullshit is not sticking.

A Life Well-Dreamed

An obit:



What was up with this guy?

1893: Born in Hubei province to a family famous for martial arts
1900: At age seven, Lu “follows his mother” and starts training in martial arts
190_: Lu becomes a close associate of Huo Yuanjia (霍元甲), the famous Chinese martial arts fighter who defeated foreign fighters in publicized fights
1911: At 18, Lu arrives in Beijing and takes as his master a former bodyguard of the empress dowager Cixi (慈禧太后) named Ding Shirong (丁世荣). Lu starts studying the martial art form Xingyiquan (形意拳)
1912: Lu moves to E Mei Mountain (峨眉山) in Sichuan province to train in baguazhang (八卦掌)
1920: Lu takes part in martial arts competition in Nanjing and wins first prize
1924: “Patriotic industrialist” Lu Zuofu (卢作孚) asks Lu to help him take back shipping rights on the Yangtze from imperial powers. Lu proceeds to fight and win a duel with a famous Japanese samurai. Henceforth Lu is known as the “Knight of the Yangtze”
1945: Lu is appointed as martial arts instructor by KMT generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (蒋介石). A bodyguard of US General Marshall called Tom John challenges any Chinese to a fight. Lu takes up the offer to fight the 1.9 meter American and beats him using baguazhang
1979: Lu Zijian is elected a member of the Chongqing Municipal People’s Political Consultative Conference. Lu starts to participate in martial arts competitions
2002: Lu obtains the highest rank in the Chinese martial arts association

Some clarification:

So there you have it, a swashbuckling, ever-unbeaten, patriotic and long-living fighter, teacher, man of peace and member of government. Its a great series of events but it is filled with inaccuracies and much of its is patently untrue. Firstly, when exactly did Lu die? Chongqing Economic Daily tells us that Lu died ‘yesterday’, which is 21 October 2012. This would have made Lu 119 years old, not 118. While the Chongqing Economic Daily keeps using the word ‘yesterday’, it is unclear when ‘yesterday’ actually was.

Secondly, there is evidence to suggest that Lu was nowhere near 119 when he died. The Chinese Wikipedia entry on Lu points to an entry in a collection of documents entitled Yichang City Literature and History Materials (宜昌市文史资料) from 1986 stating that Lu was in his seventies at the time, meaning that he was actually born sometime after 1907. In fact, this same collection of archival material on the city of Yichang (where Lu was from) has information that contradicts virtually every aspect of Lu’s resume for the first third of his life. For example, another entry from 1992 records that Lu stayed on in Yichang until the 1930s, when he was forced to flee to Sichuan because he beat up a bodyguard at a brothel. Lu then went on to establish a clinic in Chongqing in 1938. He thus never became a close associate of the legendary Huo Yuanjia (who died in 1910 and may not even have fought any foreigners), and never fought General Marshall’s bodyguard.

Yet what a tale. And how ever old he was, he has now passed on. Of that at least we can be sure.

'Tis the Season

Dispatches was a fine and now-cancelled radio show featuring documentaries from around the world. Listen to this creepy piece about the fetishization of corpses that float down a river in Colombia.

The site's going to go away, but there's plenty of material to listen to if you want to discover that it's not just your neighbours who are out of their minds.

Beez for Thundra in this one.

The Act of Love

Guess who!

If we don't love the poor and do all we can to improve their lot, we're going to go to hell, the Catholic archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles J. Chaput, recently said. It's not pretty, but it is real. And not just if you believe in hell, but if you care about the future of the country, of civilization.

We actually are a people of compassion, and we happen to believe that people who want to serve their neighbors out of love of God and humanity are a necessary thing for our neighborhoods, for civil society, for the life of our nation. And perhaps it is largely out of a fear that there are not enough of those people that so many of us have fallen into a reflexive, default position that the government must provide.

But the government can't give love like a woman who has devoted her life to Christ, forgoing marriage and children so that she can serve; American history was built on the service of Catholic sisters, running hospitals and schools. The government cannot provide palliative care like them. Our default position must be ensuring such women have the space and latitude to serve.

Yes, that is unmarried childless Catholic loon Kathryn Jean Lopez, offering us a tasty meal of word salad for no compensation whatsoever.

Psychic Research

Telepathic Ed:

I've never seen his TV Show as my Curiosity about other Psychics is almost None. Those people who help to solve Murders are very good but that's nothing that I want for myself (I can feel him getting his throat cut he's making gurgling sounds). There's many different types of Intelligence and I'm very happy with what I can do. I went to the Library once to research my Ability in Others I didn't find anything.

Holy Shit

I'm only a year late to this superconducting levitation demo.

Playing Dice With the Looniverse

Charles C. W. Cooke:

We live in a world of soundbites, in which context is breezily relegated to the shadows and hysteria is positively encouraged. As Aldous Huxley observed, “an unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood” — and, in our age, how they are. We are subject, as Huxley predicted, to “the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant.” Take a look, for example, at what Richard Murdock, a Republican running for the Senate from the state of Indiana, said yesterday:

I believe life begins at conception. The only exception I have for to have an abortion is in the case of the life of the mother. I struggled with myself for a long time but I came to realize life is that gift from God, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape. It is something that God intended to happen.

Okay! I looked, and he seems like a thoroughly awful human being.

Now, compare this with the headlines today:

Talking Points Memo: GOP Senate Nominee: Rape Pregnancies Are The Will of God
Salon: Richard Mourdock, misogynist
Huffington Post: Richard Mourdock Slammed For Saying Pregnancy Resulting From Rape Is ‘Something God Intended’
ThinkProgress: GOP U.S. Senate Candidate Calls Rape Pregnancies A ‘Gift From God’
Associated Press: Mourdock: God at Work When Rape Leads to Pregnancy
Daily Kos: Another crazy Republican rape theory
The Atlantic: Republican Senate Candidate Says Rape Pregnancies Are a ‘Gift from God’
BBC: Fury at US candidate rape comment

Okay, I looked at those too. They are reasonable.

It was unwise of Mourdock to range into discussion of theodicy in the current environment. He, as Huxley might have put it, “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” Nonetheless, it was clear what he was saying. For anyone possessed of even a passing familiarity with the argument against rape and incest exceptions, his point should not have been difficult to grasp. (Therein, one suspects, lies the problem.) To wit: If an unborn child is indeed a life, then how it became one — however ghastly that was — is rendered irrelevant. This position could be summed up by saying that “life is life is life,” and that its sanctity cannot be diminished by the circumstances of its creation.

Oh, I get it. This is why the word "plan" does not mean "plan" and in fact a "plan" is irrelevant and THAT is the "plan".

There are myriad philosophical and moral arguments to be offered on this question, but Richard Mourdock has made no secret about the position he takes.

It says right there in small print on the label: "*Myriad philosophical and moral arguments may not include those around destiny." SUCK IT MILTON!

This is not news, and to pretend otherwise is disingenuous. As Mourdock subsequently explained:

“What I said was, in answering the question form my position of faith, I said I believe that God creates life. I believe that as wholly and as fully as I can believe it. That God creates life. Are you trying to suggest that somehow I think that God pre-ordained rape? No, I don’t think that. That’s sick. Twisted. That’s not even close to what I said. What I said is that God creates life.”

Glad that's settled. Nothing in there about fore-ordained rape at all. God is a gift-giver, the gift is life, and if his instrument is sometimes a rapist's penis, well, BABY SHOWER!

OKAY THEN UPDATE:

Baby shower as requested.



This is my present to the world.

Knowing Your History

Scottie Hughes has written a piece called "Silent Scream":

This is not about the 1960’s book Silent Spring, written by the environmentalist Rachael Carson.

Uh, gee, why would I make that mistake? After all, The Silent Scream is among the most famous of right-wing-lunatic cudgels and I expect nothing less than the standard blood-curdling gore and fulmination about genocide. On to it!

It is about the 1960’s people who read the book and who fought against the pesticides released in the environment about which Carson wrote. Now known as the Baby Boomers, they went on to fight against civil rights injustice and fight against the Viet Nam war.

It is about a group of people who read Hegel and Marx.

Okay, still not seeing any fetus gross-outs...

They were misguided but willing, in their youthful idealism, to stand up and protest the perceived wrongs they saw occurring in their country and their culture. They became the teachers and Professors in our Universities. They trained and taught the next generation of Americans, who are the Obama voters today. Looking back now it is apparent that the push towards Socialism which drove this 60’s revolution, was actually the sword of Damocles which Barak Obama has used skillfully to destroy this country. It is from these people, the Boomers, whose head the sword hangs over, that a silent scream can be heard.

Okay, just stop. DOG-WHISTLE REVOKED.

Not only is the Boomer generation suffering because of their Marxist ideologies but they are suffering at the hands of their offspring. The socialist push, so pervasive in the Obama administration, has fallen on complacent if not compliant ears. These are the Americans, in their twenties and thirties that have been nursed on the tit of Karl Marx. They have very little knowledge of history

JUST SHUT UP.

Writing ONE MINUTE FURTHER Into the Future

Via this at Pharyngula we have this unbelievable shit from The Amazing Atheist and more cranky misogynist shit detailed here.

I appreciate that there are many awesome atheists out there - LIKE ME - but holy shit it's like some people think they have to be against anything that smacks of doing unto others as you would yadda yadda yadda. Which of course is what this happy-go-lucky atheist lady was all about and I think most people understand that she was stupid and awful and full of shit. Unless they're stupid and awful and full of shit of course.

I guess the gist of the complaints in the latter link's threads is that it's worse to notice someone is horrible than that they do horrible things. THEY JUST WANNA BE LOVED! Which might make them, you know, better off if they went down to the local place of worship where everyone pretends to like you.

I am hopeful that this undercurrent in whatever the atheism movement consists of is just a loud and laughable and dumb minority like libertarians, but who can tell in this crazy world?

Nevertheless, jerkiness is just jerkiness. News from the other side:

All canonizations are political to some degree, but the canonization of Kateri Tekakwitha, the first indigenous Canadian saint, was more political than most. The First Nations considered it a key step in the Vatican’s long and haphazard campaign to repair relations with a people it had mistreated for centuries.

Kateri, who was born in what is now upstate New York and who died in 1680 near Montreal after a short, miserable life, was canonized Sunday in St. Peter’s Square by Pope Benedict XVI, along with six other saints.

Rape and abuse slate WIPED CLEAN!

Automation and Advertising

Thank god the little ones know where to get their evil queen lingerie.

David Maisel:

History’s Shadow comprises my series of re-photographed x-rays of art objects from antiquity. I have culled these x-rays from museum archives, which utilize them for conservation purposes.

There follows some annoying commentary in which the artist tries to explain what's up. Not necessary though; the images are good.

Clear Discrimination

Best of Craigslist:

Are You a Ghost Surfing the Web?
Date: 2011-10-18, 7:10PM EDT

Documentary style program is looking to contact a ghost on the internet. If you are DEAD and reading this, please respond!

What is your name?
How did you pass away?
Why are you surfing the internet?

The set of the undead includes more than ghosts. DUH.

ALSO:

Patterns

Here's a website for the photoshoppy types called Subtle Patterns, which is self-explanatory I think. Except maybe for that insane Steve Jobs pattern: sucking the cock of a zombie is never subtle. The "Snacks" link is worth a peek if you find this useful.

Also: some free "paint" splatters.

Slash

Sorry.

Hotel Transilvania

As with a lot of computer-animated kiddie movies, the technical staff outshine the material in Hotel Transilvania. But that makes sense: the director is Genndy Tartakovsky, who knows how cartoons should be made, and he's working for a large company with a so-so record.

The way the shots are framed and the physical business and the comic timing are all there and familiar (as well as secondary characters who are almost all more interesting than the leads) but the story is shit, Adam Sandler as overprotective vampire dad isn't funny, vampire daughter is completely unremarkable, and her eventual human beau is just stupid and irritating. In other words it's fine for kids and more trouble for adults. Eventually I felt sad for Tartakovsky, who probably made a bad product (five writers and Adam Sandler producing spells GREATNESS!) as good as it could possibly be.

There are enough decent jokes to make it a reasonable fulfillment of familial togetherness obligations, although there were sometimes points at which I wished the monsters would just eat the kid already: THAT IS WHAT MONSTERS DO.



Here's an interview that might not get Tartakovsky a lot of work:

Wired: [...] You gave Dracula impressive range, which gave Sandler much to do. I’ve also read some reviews that said you rehabilitated his sagging brand, which is Hollywood-speak but still carries some truth considering how bad his recent films have been. Has he called to thank you yet?

Tartakovsky: I mean, Adam’s actually very happy with how it’s played, but that’s the extent of it. But you know I don’t really think about that. That’s not my job. We tried to make the best movie we could make, and I’m happy with the way Adam performed. He’s a really funny person; it’s not like I actually had to push him. He did what he did, but I think the animation elevated it. I like to think we enhanced his performance to a more manic level. Because that’s the thing, this movie could’ve have been made where the animation didn’t push him, and it could’ve worked. The reviews that killed me are the ones complaining about cameras going all over the place.

Our Monkeylike Behaviour

Elsewhere:



In a shocking surprise he is in the field of evolutionary psychology.

The Public Image of Anonymous

Nutpick:

AedanP
Occasional Visitor
Re: My skype sends messages saying "lol is this your new profile pic."

I've had this virus and i've found out how to get rid off it.

For Windows 7/Vista:

Go to the start menu and search for %appdata% then press enter. At the bottom of that folder there will be files which has random numbers and a skype thing. Delete all of them. If you can't delete one of them open up task manager. ( ctrl + shift + escape) Then go to processes. Then at the top of the list there should be a file with the same name. Delete that file. Now there should be no virus.
Message 11 of 14 (685 Views)

Wlille
Occasional Visitor
Re: My skype sends messages saying "lol is this your new profile pic."

This is a virus sent out by The Hacker group Anonymous. They have hacked The Swedish Governments homepage etc...

Next commenter after that corrects (?) Wlille, but I don't think you're gonna be masters of illegal computer wizardry without scaring the non-masters. (And you know, decades along from my first fiddlings with computers, people growing up with them aren't much good at them.)

More flailing about from Skype users here.

I Trust This Guy Somehow

Robert Knight on the darned fact-checking about Benghazi:

On Oct. 12, the Washington Post’s lead editorial advised everyone to “Forget the ‘coverup’” and called Republican claims “overblown.” The Obama administration had fallen victim to “confused assessments and even more confused rhetoric.”

But the colossal prevarications make the Watergate scandal look like petty politics. Americans don’t like being lied to about matters of life and death. We can forgive a lot, apparently, if the lies are merely sordid. After all, Bill Clinton got re-elected even though nobody mistook him for George Washington. It helped that he had a Republican Congress that reformed welfare and held down spending. And it helped that Mr. Clinton seemed a likeable lug. He has a way of winking at you without winking.

Well, he says they've never done this before. But seeing as it's special circumstances and all, he says I can have that Trucoat for a hundred dollars off .

I Could Totally Do That, I Just Don't Want To

One of the things about electronic music is that it's hard to be impressed by it - even if it's likeable and listenable - once you know what it takes to make it. So for instance I have a bunch of deadmau5 at work that's useful and memorable, but what's most interesting to me about it is how he gets away with long pieces in which very little that's technically or sonically remarkable happens. Maybe he just has a long and productive bus route (and the ability to wait out sixteen bars instead of four or two).

What eventually becomes more impressive is DAMMIT I SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT OF THAT such as the Anthony Braxton samples* at around 2:30 here:



That weird skittering Braxton does is a good match for hyperkinetic pseudo-percussion. CURSE YOU AMON TOBIN.

Also the amount of effort put into this piece will clearly never ever come from me unless I am paid, (no not then either) so there's that.

So:



*Pretty sure, open to correction...

On Twin Earth He Is Smirnoff Yakov

Hype:

The closest planet yet outside of our solar system has been found by European astronomers orbiting Alpha Centauri B, one of the three stars that make up the Alpha Centauri system, which, at 4.3 light years away, is the nearest star system past our Sun.

“This result represents a major step towards the detection of a twin Earth in the immediate vicinity of the Sun,” said Xavier Dumusque, an astronomer at the Universidade do Porto, Portugal, and the lead author of a new paper on the discovery, in a statement on Wednesday. “We live in exciting times!”

Once we detect a twin Earth the obvious next step in the research is to nuke one to see if the other feels it.

From the Fires of Hell

Gee, it turns out that other script is indeed way better fire. Thanks fence-post!

The thing is it has so many goddamned options I don't know how to deal with it yet: I don't know if it'll stick to the edge of a colour or anything.

UPDATE:

Two Covers

Going through some stuff in the library...D-related:





ALSO:

Burned

It turns out the FX Foundry plug-ins for The GIMP have a cheapo fire generator, which is fun but makes for overlarge files.

Make an image two-tone, get rid of one colour, apply fire to the other, add the background in with an included plugin.



Also: you get to choose whatever gradient you like and the angle of your crappy fire. So it's probably also a blood and ichor pony rainbow generator. Gotta get back on zombie Pony Paul Ryan.

Also too: an online encrappinator for text.

Possibly a better fire script here. Who knows, he might have written what I used, in which case thanks guy.

Self-Promotion

Apparently in my always-being-culled-because-it's-overstuffed-but-always-being-added-to-because-I-am-packratty bundle of RSS feeds (latest update today somewhere down at the bottom-right of the page) I have a guy called Dan Zarrella, the Social Media Scientist. Old post, but see if you can get why brogrammer culture takes a beating from just one tiny excerpt:

In preperation for my upcoming webinar, The Science of Social Media (register now!), I’ve developed a new tool: WhoReTweetedMe.com.

Bro's Notes

Philosophy Bro:

Look, so, nothing matters, right? Shit's fucking weird. We all want to know how the universe ultimately works or who's running the show or whatever, and it turns out - TRICK. FUCKING. QUESTION. No one's running the show, and the world is unreasonable. Ever had some shit happen to you that made you go, "Why the fuck did that happen? There's no reason for that." Turns out, you were right. So our attempts to impose reason on the world will fail. Death and taxes, my friend. Death and motherfucking taxes.

So what do we do? What's the point? Should we just end it if nothing matters? No, says Camus, thats the pussy way out. Instead, we should embrace the fact that nothing makes sense. Don Juan, the fuckaholic that started it all, he embraced the absurd. Life has no meaning, so he. fucked. everything. He didn't try to impose meaning or find meaning or make his own meaning - that shit is useless, and Camus says there's no hope for that, so cut it the fuck out.

FORGOT THE ILLUSTRATION UPDATE:

The Obvious

Couldn't help it.

A Possibly Useful Idea

Utility suggestion:

Sunday, 24 July, 2011
Make your caps lock key do something useful


I think that I use the the capslock key about 3 times a year - accidently that is. Having it on my keyboard all the time is just taking up valuable home-row space that can be used for something else. I'm certainly not the first to propose the idea of repurposing the key for a better use, but after seeing Google's chromebook notebook without a caps lock key (well, without a capslock key by default it seems) really motivated me to do something similar.

Here's how you can remap that key to something more useful on a Mac:

PERSONALLY I USE THE CAPS LOCK KEY ALL THE TIME.

Windows/Linux hints available at the link. The always-handy Windows thingie AutoHotkey can remap everything of course, with the advantage that you can just quit the program and everything goes back to what it was.

Green Lights on the (Death) Panel

Wesley J. Smith:

Look into the future if Obamacare remains. Texas has a futile care law permitting a hospital bioethics panel to refuse wanted life-sustaining treatment if they don’t think the patient’s life is worth the cost or has sufficient quality.  It is like the old signs over restaurant doors, “We reserve the right to refuse service.” (I have warned against Futile Care Theory often, including here at NRO.)

Last August, I reported on a boy shot in the head, and only one week after the injury, doctors wanted to pull all plugs.  But the administrative procedure wasn’t followed correctly and they had to start over.  Well, guess what: The boy is now fully awake.

God will surely force a drink of scalding water and a painful punishment on the muslamo-commie who signed that atrocity into law.

Another Processing Check

Processing is a nifty little package of graphical fun, and if you host your creation at openprocessing.org you can embed it in a web page. Last time I tried it a bunch of browsers were messed with, but that was a version ago. One more shot, this time with grabby flingy cubes:

And...

A gentleman with a hard-to-pronounce name at Townhall:

In Michigan, union bosses are testing a new strategy to increase their power and clout within the state. A constitutional amendment known locally as Proposal 2, or the “Protect Our Jobs” (POJ) amendment, would invalidate much of the common-sense progress that Governor Rick Snyder has made as it relates to public-sector unions, potentially overturning upwards of 170 pieces of legislation.

In Michigan, union bosses are testing a new strategy to increase their power and clout within the state. A constitutional amendment known locally as Proposal 2, or the “Protect Our Jobs” (POJ) amendment, would invalidate much of the common-sense progress that Governor Rick Snyder has made as it relates to public-sector unions, potentially overturning upwards of 170 pieces of legislation.

Beyond that, the amendment has frighteningly broad language, overturning any state law that might “abridge, impair, or limit” collective-bargaining rights for private and public employees.

Here is the headline:

Labor Bosses Fight Only to Protect their Jobs

I suppose if I write a headline like "Republican Bosses Fight Only to Protect Their Money" Fred, um, Wzlkkdjhasek would say "Darn tootin'!" so fair play.

Failed

Just testing something...

That didn't work. Have a video.



Or two.

Supercuts

Supercut is the result of a collaboration between a couple of art/tech types... hmmm... arttechtypes... Anyway, according to people who may or may not have invented a word, a supercut is a "fast-paced montage of short video clips that obsessively isolates a single element from its source, usually a word, phrase, or cliche from film and TV." Or it's a bargain hairstyling place.

So:

Lazy Sniffles Posting

At some point I'm going to have to steal some animation methods from CSSPlay. The linked method looks pretty simple in the source (keeping in mind that I know nothing about CSS but I'm willing to cause problems) and might be recyclable site-wide, and there is much more stuff there besides. If the site ever goes utterly loopy you'll know I have broken the CSS. I wonder if CSS has been used as an attack method.

best of craigslist > hartford > Large Cat Statue Originally Posted: Sat, 26 Mar 21:56 EDT

Large Cat Statue

---

Date: 2011-03-26, 9:56PM EDT

---

Large Cat Statue made of porcelain and is white in color it is 8 feet tall and about 5 feet wide. The reason I am giving this away is because some neighborhood vandals have painted a rather large penis on the front of it. Email me if you are interested.

• Location: Portland
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

PostingID: 2288729704

UNERHÖRT BUMM!



From here:



I did not know that Sai Baba was dead, but good.

best of craigslist > san diego > Manhood Camping Originally Posted: Sun, 8 May 19:35 PDT
Manhood Camping

---

Date: 2011-05-08, 7:35PM PDT

---

Manhood Camping Firequest. Lookin' for a 100% for real bros to share/experience manhood in all its glory. This is for real, I don't want to waste my time or yours. 100% JO and manhood, no sugar added. I AM NOT GAY. Don't even think this is a sex thing, it's all about manhood.

Looking for bros to head into the woods and bond by fire, experience life as men once lived it, JO circle, and fire/vision quests.

THIS IS NOT A SEX THING.

Gonna need some basic things/skills, I don't want to be slowed down by fools:

- must be in reasonable shape, if you get winded walking then stay home
- Ed Hardy camping gear, it's really good gear and it's awesome
- desire to be a man among men
- not afraid to wield a blade
- crystal, I'm not sharing mine
- must be able to make a fire
- gloves
- a knowledge of native vegetation (knowledge of psychotropic fungus a plus)
- knowledge of modern music
- protective/splash resistant eye wear
- 5 - 10 of those clip things that rock climbers use

We are gonna need a mobile music device, ipod or something. I'm bringing the music for the firequests and visionquests, Nickleback's The Long Road. I only have it on CD, so I'll have my discman as a last resort, an ipod would be nicer. Just sayin'.

Dont' want to see"

- bad attitudes
- gay/homoerotic behavior, this is a manhood thing. I AM NOT GAY.
- cock rings, can't keep it up w/o help, you aren't gonna make it on this quest
- firearms, there's gonna be enough guns going off and spent shells to pick up
- the nerds/dorks/lames/and anyone less than 100% into manhood.

If you are serious, then I promise you this will be the trip of your life. It will change the way you think. I'm serious, and I AM NOT GAY. To see a group of bros being men, a JO circle by a camp fire. The charge/energy in the air. Crystals get jacked, no lie. You will slip into a different frame of mind, you will feel electric.

Last outing, we had a group that was so charged we attracted bears. It was no deal, nature knew man was in the forest, the crystals gave us the confidence to own those bears. I saw it, I was there.

100% SERIOUS, NO FAKERS

• Location: Aqua Caliente
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

A wordle of the Craigslist feed (which is huge):

I think we have settled on who is to blame.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Glories of Yaletown

Every now and then there is a nice surprise in the city:



Not that we flout standards at will. OH NO. Where socks are required, we INSIST you wear them.

Just Eat Me

In the Times a while ago:

[Naomi Wolf] added: “In 2012 we’re still living in the Victorian age when it comes to sexuality. Vagina has to be a household word. It should be a topic discussed at the dinner table when you’re having a dinner party.”

It will be a long time before readers of the new book hear the words “dinner party” without thinking of “Vagina.” Not because of Judy Chicago’s gynocentric artwork “Dinner Party,” a beloved touchstone for Ms. Wolf, but because of the party an unnamed friend gave to celebrate the book deal for “Vagina,” published by Ecco.

She wrote that when she arrived, guests were shaping homemade pasta dough into vulvas. Sausages sizzled on the stove, salmon fillets graced a platter. Her “depression that a friend would think this was funny,” Ms. Wolf wrote, rendered her unable to “type a word of the book — not even research notes for six months.” Her writer’s block was explained by what she said was the book’s “big message.”

“When you honor a woman’s sexuality,” she wrote, “you support her intellectual creativity; when you threaten and insult her sexuality and her very sex, you do exactly the opposite.”

The rest of the article presents the usual balance: the noted onslaught of terrible reviews is set against the good of argument for its own sake.

Nice Try

Over at The Corner:

The ’07 Obama Video

By Stanley Kurtz

October 2, 2012 11:19 P.M

So here’s Obama proudly advertising his relationship with Reverend Wright, and even imitating Wright’s divisive rhetoric on Katrina. Is anyone surprised? Essentially, every excuse Obama used to explain away his relationship with Reverend Wright during campaign 2008 was a lie. But we already knew that.

Hmm, a candidate has a controversial religious affiliation you say? THIS should be the weapon* that takes Obama down!

*Purely metaphorical of course.

Freedom

Via Boing Boing, this:

Cody Wilson planned in the coming weeks to make and test a 3-D printed pistol. Now those plans have been put on hold as desktop-manufacturing company Stratasys pulled the lease on a printer rented out for Wiki Weapon, the internet project lead by Wilson and dedicated to sharing open-source blueprints for 3-D printed guns. Stratasys even sent a team to seize the printer from Wilson’s home.

“They came for it straight up,” Cody Wilson, director of Defense Distributed, the online collective that oversees the Wiki project, tells Danger Room. “I didn’t even have it out of the box.” Wilson, who is a second-year law student at the University of Texas at Austin, had leased the printer earlier in September after his group raised $20,000 online. As well as using the funds to build a pistol, the Wiki Weapon project aimed to eventually provide a platform for anyone to share 3-D weapons schematics online. Eventually, the group hoped, anyone could download the open source blueprints and build weapons at home.

That is a weird hope to have.

Butt-Chugging

From here on this thread the rarely-tended garden of Sadly, No! became a depraved orgy of butt-chugging.

Collected here are my own lyrical contributions because POSTERIORITY:

Oh, that little bitty teeny weeny thing they call the butt-chug
Nobody’s ever seen it, but it’s got the whole world shook up
It all started with a bunch of frat boys and a jug
It’s a little bitty teeny weeny thing they call the butt-chug

I don’t care what’s right or wrong,I won’t try to understand.
Let the devil take tomorrow, Lord tonight I need a hand.
Yesterday is dead and gone and tomorrow’s out of sight
And I can’t do this alone. Help me butt-chug through the night.

C
I say C-H
C-H-U
C-H-U-G
Chug
C-H-U-G
Chug Chug Chug Chug

B
I say B-U
B-U-T
B-U-T-T
Butt
B-U-T-T C-H-U-G
Butt Chug

Doo-doo-doo-DAH-dee-ah-dah
Butt Chug
Doo-doo-doo-DAH-dee-ah-dah
Butt Chug
Doo-doo-doo-DAH-dee-ah-dah
Butt Chug
Doo-doo-doo-DAH-dee-ah-dah
Butt Chug
Doo-doo-doo-DAH-dee-ah-dah
B-U-T-T C-H-U-G
Butt Chug!

They got box-wine in their pelvic colon
They’ve plugged their Hershey Highway
They’re piping in more Carlo Rossi
They’re butt chuggin’ everyday
Come on, come on, come on let’s go butt chuggin’
Come on, come on, come on butt chuggin’
Come on, come on, come on let’s go butt chuggin’
Come on, come on, come on butt chuggin’
Yeah yeah yeah butt chuggin’
Yeah yeah yeah butt chuggin’
Yeah yeah yeah butt chuggin’
Yeah yeah yeah

Have you seen the well-to-do, up and down Park Avenue
On that famous thoroughfare, with their noses in the air
High hats and Arrowed collars, white spats and lots of dollars
Spending every dime, for wonderful wine
If you’re blue and you don’t know which end to do
Why don’t you drink behind your nuts?
Chuggin’ in the butt.
Different types who wear a frat shirt, chaps with stripes
And cut away jeans, doing what?
Chuggin’ in the butt.

Buttchugging away
With my beautiful, my beautiful balloon
The world’s a nicer place with my beautiful balloon
I get totally shitfaced my beautiful balloon
I can run the tube straight up my ass and squeeze it dry
And I get high, I get high
Buttchugging away
With my beautiful, my beautiful balloon

I met you in somebody’s frat house
You thought you had known me before
I brought you a crate of Franzia
It went right on in your back door
You probably wouldn’t remember
I probably couldn’t forget
Buttchug love in the tub driving me insane
I envy your enema set

Buttchug love it’s drivin’ me mad
It’s makin’ me crazy
Buttchug love it’s drivin’ me mad
It’s makin’ me crazy

Well I never kept a bottle past sunset,
It always burned a hole in my pants.
Never made me feel less than crappy,
Even when the juice came from France, oh no

I need a buttchug to keep me happy,
I need a buttchug to keep me happy.
Baby, baby keep me happy.
Baby, baby keep me happy.

Grape wine in an enema bag
Homemade and brought to school
By a friend of mine after class
Me and him and this other fool
Decided that we’ll butt-chug whats left
Butt-chug so I plugged myself
first time for everything
umm my ass still stings

Butt-chug butt-chug
Make u wanna holla hidy hole,
Burns your asshole don’t you know
Butt-chug butt-chug

Kinda Christmasy, but holy hell does the Compose screen ever love adding span tags.

OH HEY HERE IS A SOUNDTRACK UPDATE: