The Stiff Upper Lip

David Pryce-Jones on some fucking jubilee thing:

The weather was miserable, with much cold rain. Nevertheless a million people at the lowest estimate lined the river’s embankments, and they cheered and waved Union Jack flags all day long. What explains the enthusiasm running so wild? Well, the boats were an unforgettable spectacle, a Canaletto painting come to life for an occasion that will never be repeated, with allusions to Handel’s “Water Music” and Dunkirk 1940. It was also possible to sense in the camaraderie of the crowd something more profound. The standing of the country is not what it was; the Empire is no more; nobody can be sure whether there are now any moral absolutes governing behavior; and tomorrow may see a variety of political and economic crashes. None of this is the Queen’s fault. She’s setting the example of how to carry on regardless.

You'd all stop your whining if you'd just be billionaires.

Don't Learn This Stuff and America Will Be Stronger

Mr. Atrios often points out that trains don't seem to have TSA issues, but across borders they do.

MONTREAL (CUP) — On May 1, 2010, Pascal Abidor was riding an Amtrak train from Montreal to New York. His parents live in Brooklyn, and he was on his way to visit them. The school year at McGill had just ended, and he felt relieved and calm as the train rolled south towards America.

At about 11 a.m., the train arrived at the U.S. border and made a routine stop. A team of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers boarded the train and advanced through each car, questioning passengers. Pascal had made this trip countless times before, so when a customs officer approached him, he didn’t give it a second thought.

But Pascal had never met Officer Tulip.

After looking over Pascal’s U.S. passport and customs declaration, Officer Tulip asked two simple questions: Where do you live, and why?

Pascal answered that he lived in Canada. He lived in Canada because that’s where he was pursuing a PhD in Islamic Studies.

The rest is the standard story, but at least he didn't end up tortured in prison.

The Happy Warrior Is Called Home

Via this.

SCAM UPDATE!

Via Smut someone with a good memory remembers where the original of this image came from.

It is a sad sad day when cynical individuals exploit the purity of the Tea Party movement for personal gain.

War

I wonder what the response would be if Iran unleashed this on America:

WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

Stuxnet was an impressive weapon and quite destructive:

The first attacks were small, and when the centrifuges began spinning out of control in 2008, the Iranians were mystified about the cause, according to intercepts that the United States later picked up. “The thinking was that the Iranians would blame bad parts, or bad engineering, or just incompetence,” one of the architects of the early attack said.

The Iranians were confused partly because no two attacks were exactly alike. Moreover, the code would lurk inside the plant for weeks, recording normal operations; when it attacked, it sent signals to the Natanz control room indicating that everything downstairs was operating normally. “This may have been the most brilliant part of the code,” one American official said.

Later, word circulated through the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based nuclear watchdog, that the Iranians had grown so distrustful of their own instruments that they had assigned people to sit in the plant and radio back what they saw.

“The intent was that the failures should make them feel they were stupid, which is what happened,” the participant in the attacks said. When a few centrifuges failed, the Iranians would close down whole “stands” that linked 164 machines, looking for signs of sabotage in all of them. “They overreacted,” one official said. “We soon discovered they fired people.”

The Economy Would Improve If You Could Beat Your Wife

David French:

My favorite chapter of Jonah’s book was his multi-page exploration of the utter meaninglessness of the term “social justice.” Yet the term’s almost infinite malleability doesn’t stop progressives from browbeating Evangelical Christians in particular with the idea that pro-life conservatism is inconsistent with Christ’s alleged devotion to this extra-biblical socialist construct.

Well, after three-plus years of high unemployment, stagnant wages, crippling debt, and — oh yes — absolute commitment to abortion on demand (including sex-selective abortions), I must ask: Is this what social justice looks like? One of the most striking aspects of the social-justice movement is its unyielding devotion to economic, cultural, and moral principles that are least likely to bring about the outcomes they so fervently desire. Give a social-justice advocate the policies they want, and the social injustice only deepens.

The Golden Age happened centuries ago.

News On Shuffle

I'm visiting fewer websites directly for news and using an RSS newsreader to skim headlines. Unfortunately I had a hard drive die and I hadn't exported an OPML file from the program I'm using, so getting all my feeds back as they were will likely never happen. I suppose that I wouldn't have had a problem if I used Google Reader, but why encourage those fucks?

So, for the Mac folks out there, what I use is NetNewsWire, which at this point is adware: a corner on the bottom left is an ad until you cough up dough. Not too bad. It has a built-in browser but I have it spit the linkage into Firefox, which I have set to open new tabs when another application knocks on its door: do a little headline skimming and soon you have 50 tabs loaded up in the background and you close tabs as you're done with the items. If you're on some kinda portable thingie that's going to be out of range of wireless for a while that's pretty useful.

So about the feeds: I did have a very old OPML file around so I added that, and then I found a bunch of news and photography and design and geek stuff. Most of the nifty OPML files you can find around are pretty old though, as it seems to have been a Hot Thing for a little while and then people forgot they could share. This is one of the easiest-to-find files out there, but it's got a lot of computer stuff and business stuff and a bunch of the feeds are dead (NetNewsWire is pretty good at letting you know which feeds are toast).

The real strength of NetNewsWire is this: it can line up all the headlines from every feed in alphabetical order.



Here you can see that only news organizations start items with quotes.

Mashing all the headlines together means that it isn't absurd to have a bazillion feeds, because you're skimming every feed at once and the luck of the draw pushes items to the top of the list. As with iTunes and shuffle it suits the way I like to do things in any case, and it pushes things in front of my eyes that I otherwise wouldn't choose to navigate to out of the blue.

So: this may be unwise to download and use unless you're some future version of me with the same kind of reading style, as adding thousands of feeds to the average newsreader might not work out so well and I haven't yet deleted all the .NET developers and venture capitalist assholes, but all of these feeds have been updated in the last three months. There's a bunch of news, a far larger amount of geeks (geeks are good because they can't maintain a focus and throw out good links now and again), a bunch of pretty graphics stuff for computers, some photography, some chemistry for some reason, and god knows what else. Instapundit I think, HA HA. Nearly nobody from my blogroll: I like to actually visit those sites and not lose them to the chaos of thousands of other items.

If I have any sense I'll post an updated version once I've done some more culling. If you can export an OPML file share it: I will incorporate it into this mess and maybe post a consolidated file one day.

ALSO:

But for the single item in the feed for A Welsh View I would never have seen this:



Boy am I grateful.

Another Kooky Libertarian Thread at Crooked Timber

Given that the title is "Fuck me or you’re fired!" it could have been far worse, but comments are still open.

News

From here.



Even worse:

“Rudy was not a face-eating zombie monster,” said his high school friend Victoria Forte. “The Rudy we know was a nice gentleman with a warm smile, and funny.”

Sequencing

The little black bits from the Conrad Black post were actually supposed to make a travelling line: the GIFs are really three layers, two transparent and one black layer in the middle, and I change the timing of the preceding and following layers while keeping the total timing the same. It seems most web browsers just won't load the fucking things in order though, and maybe can't keep them in sync anyway. You may put them in proper sequence if you wish.

The Hideous Rebekah Brooks

Via Crooked Timber a story about Rebekah Brooks:

He said: "It was hardly appropriate... At that time, [September 12, 2001] [when] we were working on the assumption that up to 50,000 people had been killed, I was required to parade myself around morning conference dressed as Harry Potter.

"What person with any journalistic integrity can be humiliated like that or told to perform like that?"

Begley then told assistant news editor Greg Miskiw: "I don't want to criticise [Rebekah] in a phone call, but I can't see how the editor of the - as we're always reminded - best paper in the country could expect a reporter to do that... That was just too much."

When Miskiw asked Begley to return to work, Begley refused, stating: "I haven't toed the line for the editor's pet project. I didn't prance around while the World Trade Center was being bombed for her personal amusement. I can't just stroll in."

Miskiw responded: "Why not? Charles, that is what we do. We go out and destroy other people's lives."

The problem with suicide is that it requires you to feel bad about yourself. How can we encourage the people without any feelings at all to kill themselves?

The Business

Let's guess!

It was close, but no cigar for former media baron and convicted felon Conrad Black at this year’s XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX Book Award ceremony in Toronto.

This year's what? Oh right, that's the guessing part.

Black, one of three nominees, was a candidate for the prize for penning A Matter of Principal, an autobiographical yarn about his conviction and 42-month jail sentence in the United States for fraud and obstruction of justice. The award, sponsored by XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, was given out Monday at the Ritz-Carlton hotel.

Well done, Toronto Sun! I believe A Matter of Principal is Seymour Skinner's autobiography.

The 67-year-old Black, who returned to Canada on May 4 after serving time in a Florida prison, told the Toronto Sun he was “astounded” he had been nominated, and never expected to win.

“I’m not disappointed,” said Black, who lost to veteran XXXXXXXX and his book, XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX: XXXXX XXXXXX XX XXX XXXX XXX XXXX, XXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXX.

Whoa, that is a long title for a book competing with Mr. Black's no-doubt succinct boo-hoo for getting caught on video carting off evidence.

“I was astounded that I was nominated ... I didn’t expect to win. I don’t win an awful lot of CanLit awards, you know,” said Black.

Are you Canadian or something?

Also nominated was XXXXX XXXXXX for his book, XXX XXXX: XXX XX XXXXXXX XXX XXXXXX XX XXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX.

Last year’s winner was XXXX XXXXXX for his book, XXXXXXX XXX: XXX XXXX XXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXXX.

All right then, three books with colons in the title and at least one written by an asshole can only mean Conrad Black was nominated for the National Business Book Award. I may have to borrow the Riddled Time Machine and steal the American Psycho manuscript for nomination at next year's ceremony.

ALSO:

Love! You don't love anybody! Me or anybody else! You want to be loved - that's all you want!

Black said he intends to apply for full citizenship in two years when "it is clear that I don't have cloven feet and wear horns."

He said he would reconsider applying to regain his citizenship if there were significant public backlash against his bid.

"I am not going to do anything that is going to lead to gratuitously antagonistic people making apparently plausible claims that I am morally unsuited to be a citizen of this country," Black said.

NDP leader Thomas Mulcair:

“Mr. Speaker, the member for Trinity-Spadina and I last year asked why Gary Freeman, who lived in this country peaceably for 40 years and had several children, was not being allowed back in the country. The answer was an event that happened in Chicago in the sixties and he had served a short jail time. They said that because he was not a Canadian he was not allowed back in,” the leader of the opposition recounted.

“We just learned that the British criminal Conrad Black will be allowed in despite serving a second term in a federal American penitentiary,” he reported. “Why the double standard?”

The New Democrats seated around him stood to applaud.

If that keeps Conrad Black out of the country Mulcair will win votes.

How to Improve Pornography

It WAS Natural

Today I was driving around and getting shit done before a wedding with the lovely daughter.

On comes this:



Quoth the lovely daughter:

"Who is this rapping?"

WEDDING UPDATE!

Not a bad place to get hitched. Join me, won't you? It's just down here...






The last time I was in this room I had to sneak by security to do it. Oh hey, there's a balcony down at the end:







Have I mentioned that I moved to Vancouver because it was pretty? And you can score heroin only four blocks to the west.

The Beclowning

John Nolte:

The evolution of CNN's ongoing collapse can be found here, here, and here. Even during an election year, the "most trusted name in news" is imploding and as I've mentioned numerous times before, the reason for this is obvious. CNN insults their audience -- left, right, and middle -- on a daily basis with their superior and utterly false pose that it is an objective outlet for news.

Am I missing something? The first link is to a piece noting that Breitbart supporters cheerfully call Meghan McCain "Porkchop Barbie". Which they do.

Anyway, yes, CNN is bad. What is making Americans turn away from it?

But dishonest, left-wing CNN and Brooke Baldwin beclown themselves from behind their phony shield of objectivity when, among other things, Tony Perkins is asked, when did you stop beating your wife? "Why do homosexuals bother you so much?" And then CNN acts all surprised as their brand swirls the drain.

I had been under the impression that homosexuals bother Tony Perkins. Doesn't he lead a lobbying effort against gay marriage? In any case, the assumption that asking honest questions of Tony Perkins is a negative for CNN may be changing.

THINKING BETTER THOUGHTS UPDATE

Look behind me. It is a nice day.

Kill Everything

I think I may have hurt my ears this morning listening to this over and over again.

Trolling continues:

Damn Yankers

Hustler photoshopped S.E. Cupp with a cock in her mouth. That's not nice and Hustler is not very nice, is it?

Cupp essentially laughed off the idea of any feminist organizations coming to her defense.

“The National Organization for Women, NOW, will not come out and say liberal women deserve more respect than conservative women and we are not going to defend conservative women. They’re not going to admit to that but let me tell you that is exactly how they feel,” she said.

In the event that a feminist organization comes to her defense, they can't mean it! After all, she hates them and they hate her and nobody can want the rules to be the same for everyone, can they? A fairly old link:

b. As usual, you're looking for any way to discredit NOW. You claim we care and work only for liberal women, but that's a LIE. We have defended Sarah Palin and other conservative women from sexist attacks. Maybe not on your schedule, but we've done so. And by the way, all those laws we advocate for -- we don't ask that they include a clause saying only certified liberal women can benefit from them. Conservative women benefit from them, too! Just because we don't open up a Palin wing on the NOW website doesn't mean we don't think that every single woman -- right, left and in-between -- deserves equal pay, full reproductive rights, justice in the courts, etc. So knock off the facetious whining that right-wing women are not represented by NOW's work.

That was easy. A simple site search of now.org would come up with quite a bit on sexism directed at various conservative women if anyone bothered to look.

“The outrage of Sandra Fluke will not be matched on my side,” Cupp told The Blaze. “It seems that feminism has devolved into an institution that has picked losers and winners and has decided that some women qualify for respect and other women do not.”

Indeed, it might be a different situation if a nobody is attacked by The Voice of the Republican Party vs. a celebrity columnist/radio host objectified by a porn magazine. And John Hawkins and Jim Hoft and David Limbaugh and Adam Baldwin and assorted other nitwits. Mind you they'd never imagine getting a blowjob from a cute girl would they?



The Blaze does investigative reporting:

A copy of the image was sent to the National Organization for Women. A press aide told The Blaze she was not authorized to speak for the organization and could not say whether NOW would speak out against it.

Geez, if you can get paid for trolling I'm gonna get to work.

Sweet Gig

TPM:

Not to be outdone by the Arizona secretary of state’s recent flirtation with birtherism, Sheriff Joe Arpaio escalated his probe into President Obama’s birth certificate this week by dispatching a deputy from his “threats unit” to Hawaii.

[...]

The Star-Advertiser reported that Zullo and Mackiewcz flashed badges on Monday when they showed up at the Hawaii Department of Health. Mackiewcz apparently also handed over a business card showing he is part of the Arizona sheriff’s “Threats Management Unit.”

Lots of crime and threats in resorts in Mexico too. Any threats in Bangkok?

Contingencies

Remember that stupid Keystone Pipeline? It was going to send even-more-planet-destroying-than-usual oil products south from Alberta to various places in M. Bouffant's United Snakes with the ultimate purpose of shipping the crap to China just a little bit more cheaply. Filthy hippies and grasping bastards were outraged - OUTRAGED I TELL YOU - so Mr. Obama has put decisions on hold until 2013 so the disappointment can be post-election.

But what if the disappointment happens to the right people and not the wrong people? Build another pipeline. Once I had some irrelevant thoughts about how the obvious destination for such a pipeline was the politically-untenable Vancouver: we have infrastructure and rail and a decent port and so forth. Also a lot of hippies who would make such a thing impossible, including a well-dressed hippie mayor (he owns a fucking hippie juice company). Of course I was right about Vancouver in a sense (not even on the drawing board) but I did not remember the alternate outlet of tiny Kitimat which has to have one of the cutest town names ever. It also has a giant aluminum company and export facilities to help it do its thing.

Now I gather the big deal around the contingency plan is to avoid the United States, and I suppose pie-eyed optimists are hoping that's the result of the pipeline's potential environmental impact, locally and globally. But hey, what's that yellow line just 150km northwest of Kitimat and along one of the potential routes for the toxic sludge everybody wants?



Why that is the border of Alaska, which as far as I recall has had no issues whatsoever with oil shipping. Plus we got other pipelines on the go already so nyah.

I Don't Understand Either

Sounds like he's kidding, right?

Dear Mr. Goldberg

Allow me to express my heartfelt congratulations on your two successful books. Since I am an illustrator, and it falls within my professional interests, I must profess admiration for the covers of both your books. The smiley face with the Hitler mustache is iconic and jarring. Furthermore, the cover’s simple design intertwines nicely with the books academic leanings, but the smiley prevents it from appearing humorless.

...

I just can't tell these days.

Anyway, it gets more graphic later on:



Shoulders!

As usual, the internet provides a rejoinder:



GREENVILLE SOUTH CAROLINA UPDATE!

Talented yet incomprehensible illustrator Zach Franzen, author of the work above the shitty picture I did, lives in Greenville, South Carolina. Where that asshole George Tierney lives.

Telepathic Ed is Not Dead

Welcome back Ed:

I just got back from a combo Greyhound with a 60 day Pass and 20 days in the Caribbean a total of 50 days of travel. I was in Barbados, Grenada, St. Vincent and St. Lucia. When I was in Cincinnati I met a Black Girl who went to Ohio State who was making her first Greyhound Trip going from Atlanta to Columbus and she told me that she had just called her girlfriend to say that a lot of Trashy People take the Greyhound (I don't know where she got that idea) she told me that some guy with half his teeth missing had asked her if she wanted to smoke reefer in the bus' restroom and that after sitting next to some other guy that she had washed her arms (maybe that'll make its way into the common parlance He Made Me Wash My Arms).

Bathrooms in bus depots are unsavoury places.