The Enemy of My Enemy Has Good Taste

Leigh Scott*:

The media, instead of being the check and balance to the system existing in direct opposition to it, have become part of it. Modern film critics, from the pages of popular websites and newspapers down to the trolls trashing movies from their basements, have become a de facto division of the film industry’s marketing departments. They don’t think for themselves, they don’t judge the film before them, and they certainly exist to reinforce the leftist stranglehold on the entertainment industry.

Surely there is some critic out there who is not spouting the communist party line. Right? Who do the other critics hate?

I don’t take the media at face value. Decades of being lied to have taught me to research on my own and develop my own, educated opinions. Is [Armond] White simply an Internet troll, purposely dissing what others praise in an attempt to gain attention? Or is he something more, a critic not only of film, but of the entire media? And, in what is truly relevant to Big Hollywood, what do White’s reviews and media criticisms tell us about the ingrained leftist thought in the Hollywood/Media complex?

My research revealed that White may be the last, best hope for real, intellectual film criticism left in the age of the Internet.

If you are not giggling this may help.

*Note that because I am a fiendish lying communist I have reordered Mr. Scott's writing in order to manufacture a punchline that he had the poor taste to ruin in his very first sentence.

Careers Ruined By Politics

TRAGEDY WRIT LARGISHLY!

[Clint] Howard, an actor since 1961 and the younger brother of filmmaker Ron Howard, said that while he is comfortable speaking publicly about his conservatism, his advice to Republicans looking to break into the industry is to keep their political opinions to themselves, even though Hollywood liberals seldom do.

About five years ago "I came out of the closet. In Hollywood. I certainly understand that's dangerous," he said.

"If the entertainment industry should turn on me, I'd say, 'well fine.' But for young conservatives, you may hear me speak out but let me tell you: Be careful," he said.

Howard was joined by Morgan Brittany, one of the stars of the 1980s nighttime soap opera Dallas. The pair have more than 100 years of acting experience between them (Brittany's first job was as a child in the late 1950s), and they've noted a leftward slide in the industry and an intolerance for political dissent over the decades.

Here I just wanna include a picture of Clint Howard because he looks awesome:



Why shouldn't he have work forever?

Three careers snuffed out in their infancy below:





UPDATE!

I have beaten Big Hollywood to the punch, although our perspectives are somewhat different as John Nolte is an idiot.

Important Perspective on the Middle East

Kristinn Taylor and Andrea Shea King would have you believe it took more than one lone nut to come up with this:

The question is begged: What have Obama’s allies Ayers, Dohrn and Code Pink taught the Muslim Brotherhood and other anti-Mubarak organizations in Egypt about using protests, riots and the modern social media to coordinate their actions to undermine the Mubarak regime?

American leftists were so successful in turning the USA into the communist paradise it is today that they are exporting the revolution WORLD WIDE.

Comments are simply awesome in their stupidity.

Opportunity Descends From the Skies in Saucers

Crop circle news:

JAKARTA, Indonesia—Thousands of curious onlookers are flocking to central Indonesia to look at a "crop circle" in a rice field following rumors it was formed by a UFO.

Though clearly sculptured by humans -- it looks like an intricately designed flower -- the 70-yard-wide (70-meter-wide) circle has drawn so much attention that police have blocked off the area with yellow tape.

"Though clearly sculptured by humans" is a soothing bit of editorial comment, and helps me avoid the usual soreness in the eye-sockets after seeing a story like this. Picture at the link.

There's a measure of justice, I guess, in this particular manifestation of the paranormal:

Villagers have started charging entrance fees.

Never give a sucker an even break.

The Evolution of Style

A long time ago I was kinda mean to legendary crazy fuckbeast Rachel Marsden and somehow my generous readership - which could otherwise have been half-filling a small room - let me get away with it. Here she is again:

...There may be some talk of inflation in China due to rising food prices, but the Chinese economy is diversified enough to reel in the slack. The really hot chick who downsizes her D-cup implants to B-cups is still going to be just as hot, and at least hotter than everyone else.

Right now, China is International Playboy Playmate 2011, making her world tour and being propositioned left and right by fiscally slutty world leaders. She’s playing on their most obvious vice in a time of economic crisis: not sex, but money. The words of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev are coming back to haunt. He predicted that Communism would one day hang Capitalism, and that Capitalism would sell us the rope to do it. Tap into someone’s vice when they’re desperate enough, and they will find a way to compromise everything else they claim to value. What does a married man caught cheating with a mistress do when he gets busted? He rationalizes.

Well what an interesting way of putting things. More:

Sources have told me, via indiscretions, that Obama and his envoys have told David Cameron and Britain’s Conservative government that he expects them to take a lead in Europe because Obama plans to distance himself from the EU to focus on China. It’s worth noting that he’s running from the most unionized block in the world towards the least. Via another indiscretion, I’ve been told that China runs outsourced book printing presses 24/7 inside tankers criss-crossing the oceans.

Last time I felt kinda bad about that "who'd she blow" stuff, but I guess I can get over that:


Hey, she has a teaching gig, with which she can pass those lessons for success on to the next generation. (The whole moving-to-another-country deal seems pretty sharp.)

Se7en

John Hawkins has a list (!!!) of seven differences between conservatives and liberals:

1) Conservatives are more patriotic than liberals.

2) It's socially acceptable for liberals to lie about conservatives.

3) Conservatives are results-oriented. Liberals are not.

4) Conservatives care about the Constitution. Liberals don't.

5) Liberals are much more misogynistic than conservatives.

6) Conservatives are happier people than liberals.

7) Conservatives are better Christians than liberals.

Gay Thor

One day I'll find the RIGHT Gay Thor.

The Modern Era

Cheer up little lady! These days YOU CAN get a man with a gun!

What Constitutes Proof

Seymour Hersh said a bunch of weird things recently:

He then alleged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before briefly becoming the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, "are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta."

Hersh may have been referring to the Sovereign Order of Malta, a Roman Catholic organization commited to "defence of the Faith and assistance to the poor and the suffering," according to its website.

"Many of them are members of Opus Dei," Hersh continued. "They do see what they're doing -- and this is not an atypical attitude among some military -- it's a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They're protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function."

Now there are some dim bulbs in the military camp and always have been, but I think Hersh is going a little far there, and there were people pushing for the Iraq war who do not give a single shit about Jesus or puppies or rainbows. My own feeling is that the camp of cynical exploitation was enough to get that godforsaken - HA - war going. Mind you I am not Seymour Hersh and I know nobody and nothing and I have never been anywhere or broken a story and he has and so I will give the benefit of the doubt to him, hoping that he comes up with the goods even though, you know, woo woo. But look at Charles Lane's take on it:

What I find bizarre about Hersh's latest iteration is how blatantly it flies in the face of the tragic facts about Christianity in Iraq since the U.S. invasion. Specifically, and as reported just two days ago in the New York Times, Iraq's Christian population has plunged: by about half since March 2003.

Far from securing the Middle East for Christians, the U.S. has done little or nothing to stem or reverse the exodus, which is due in large part to harassment and violence by Muslim extremists.

Hersh says: "We're gonna change mosques into cathedrals. That's an attitude that pervades, I'm here to say, a large percentage of the Joint Special Operations Command."

You would have thought these covert warriors would have tried to keep some Christians around to attend mass in their newly converted houses of worship. But apparently their crusade has been a failure. Or maybe it's all just a part of the cover-up.

Yes, of course, the best anti-Hersh argument is that the Christian Cabal didn't manage to create a Christian paradise in Iraq. Because, of course, if there was a Christian Cabal, they would have succeeded.

Pope Calls Kettle Black

The Pope thinks Silvio Berlusconi is immoral:

The biggest opposition party is aiming to collect 10 million signatures on a petition for Mr Berlusconi to resign. The Catholic Church is turning against him, with the Pope unmistakably referring to Mr Berlusconi when he called on Friday for public officials to ''rediscover their spiritual and moral roots''.

Shake that stinky finger.

A Hot Rodent

Wiki Shit

Keeping in mind that I'm stupid and I'm not willing to make that much effort to test stuff in a short period of time, here are some yes/no judgments on wikis for my purposes:

Bitweaver - I can't make this go.
Daisy - Too much command-line crap to deal with to install.
DokuWiki - No, CamelCase is not user friendly.
Drupal - Nice looking, respected, but baffling to me. Not really a wiki.
Foswiki - No, CamelCase is not user friendly.
JSPWiki - No, CamelCase is not user friendly.
MediaWiki - No, no good WYSIWYG.
MindTouch - No, commercial.
MojoMojo - No, no good WYSIWYG.
MoniWiki - No, CamelCase is not user friendly.
Oddmuse - Not full-featured.
PhpWiki - Can't make it go, little meaningful online support.
PmWiki - No, no good WYSIWYG.
ScrewTurn Wiki - Still getting to this.
Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware - I like this.
TWiki - No, commercial.
WackoWiki - No, no good WYSIWYG.
XWiki - I like this.

Naturally there are ways in which I am wrong on some of these: there are ways to have links without CamelCase where I say there are not, and there are ways to get WYSIWYG editing and so on. But I'm a dummy and dummies want what they want NOW NOW NOW and don't wanna spend time fucking around with configuration and plugins and permissions and so on. Maybe some touchy developers will come by and explain things after they tell me what an asshole I am.

As an out-of-the-box instant wiki to test XWiki comes with a nice installer for Windows - Mac zombies left out - and you just have to remember to point your browser at http://localhost:8080/xwiki/ after it's done because it assumes you're smart enough to know that.

Apart from the standard wiki one of the things I need to help do is put together at least two documents of a similar form with similar tables of contents: XWiki sets up namespaces pretty quickly so you can have two different areas accessible from your home page that are populated with wiki pages of the same goddamned name without conflicts; that is, a page called "History" in one namespace doesn't encroach upon a page called "History" in another namespace. Quick and easy, the way it should be, although further testing may reveal that it's too easy to leave a trail of orphaned pages everywhere.

Tiki seems way more powerful than XWiki in a bunch of respects, but I haven't figured out how to keep a "History" page in one section separate from a "History" page in another - look at this baffling bullshit about "workspaces" and let me know if it makes sense - although a cheap and dirty solution is just to set up another MySQL database and start up another Tiki folder on the same server, but that seems dumb. There's probably just something I'm missing, but hello, more documentation for the morons please. My hope is that I figure out a solution in Tiki because administration seems easier than in XWiki and it does more stuff, but the instant and obvious utility presented to the user of an XWiki site is powerful stuff.

FIRE

Rubber

Boring Wiki Bleg

I'm working on a project which will require a wiki, so maybe somebody can help me out. and I figure some folks here have some experience with what a useful one might do. I run one at work, but it's super-old and super simple because I don't really have the technical skill to run better stuff, and just unleashing that would neither be acceptable nor secure. Anyway, what I'm looking for is one with more options and flexibility regarding access control. Maybe the "CMS" acronym fits better here, I dunno, as I'd like something with a public face - maybe some static pages - and then a whole lotta backstage space for a small community of experts to arrange more stuff to show a wider audience (and to give each other access to their knowledge)

Somebody else is going to make it go, so I guess I'm not personally worried about the difficulty of installation, but it would be nice to try before buying, so to speak.

Here's a wishlist, most of which is blindingly obvious, but:

Styled text
Uploads
WYSIWYG Editing
Image display
Comments or discussion (as with Mediawiki) - maybe someone has a question about the information on the page but doesn't want to edit it
Recent Change Information - Pages on the wiki, RSS or email
Attaching pages to other pages
Sectional editing (in the Wikipedia you can have sections of pages that are individually editable which is good for long documents...kinda like the above in a way)
Alternate character display (ie Russian, Arabic, Chinese)
Access control such that individual pages or whole areas (or wikis I guess) can be invisible depending on user privileges

Any and all advice happily accepted, from users to administrators.

Currently I'm fucking around with Tiki which might be the solution (if I can make a WYSIWYG plugin work) although I probably wouldn't have been able to make it go without the ease of use packed into XAMPP and kind folks who make handy roadmaps for XAMPP users.

Since I guess this kind of post should give out a little more if I'm begging for free stuff, here's WikiMatrix where you can run through a choice wizard and at least knock out a few of your choices.

Lotus Notes Sucks

The workplace is getting rid of Lotus Notes - good for them! Soon I will begin complaining about Outlook. In the meantime I am grateful for these email exporting scripts, which so far work well and should allow me to sidestep the workplace's complaints about the size of my in-box (I do a lotta scanning and need to mail and remail that stuff everywhere).

Captain Cock

In Orly news, a Paragraph Of Note:

Is a crazed former Orly Taitz patient who may be violent, used to be a lawyer, is now a florist, may need boner pills, may or may not be from the Valley, more than likely resides in Lake Forest or Coto de Caza, and goes by the nickname "Foggy" when he is not going by the nickname "Captain Cock" stalking the dentist/lawyer/real-estate saleswoman/birther queen?

Also:

Often, when a person is feared, she is hated. What do some people with law IQ do, when they hate somebody, but cannot win an argument on the merits? They resort to retarded, infantile techniques. What out retarded members of the media do? They photo-shop and torture my pictures in order to make me look bad, hardly recognizable even by my own children. First, they paid some demented artist to paint inappropriate pictures of me. When that didn’t work, they started torturing my pictures to the point of me being unrecognizable. I am wondering how far this media retardation can go?

Pretty far.



Roll in, sweet Soros bucks!

All in the Family

The bum of your pa is a cavernous place
Home to a new kind of tapewormy race
Its depths plumbed by punks run afoul of the law
But that ain’t the half of what’s wrong with your ma.

Your dad loves an ass-bang from ravers or punkers
His butt’s been the object of scores of spelunkers
When not felching that one he felches the other
But even with all that the whore’s still your mother.

Your dad’s got a weakness for shit-covered dicks
When he’s dirtied them up then he cleans off the pricks
He spins ’round the cocks like a fast-whorling top
But really the whore here’s your mom, not your pop.

Your dad has been gangbanged by Mormons and Turks
It’s a wonder his slime-laden butthole still works
And still, when the bus leaves he hollers out “MORE!”
But when all’s said and done it’s your mom that’s the whore.

METRICAL BREAK!

Your dad has been had by many rough lads
He’s a vector for rectum infection
He spends his time dreamin’ of gallons of semen
But your mom is the whore for erections.

UPDATE!

The Ziffle Ga Niff, when he's done with your pa
Cleans the lube off his antlers with one giant claw
And then he cleans THAT with a Giant Claw Grater
And starts on round two with your whore of a mater.

Fucking your dad is the habit of many
Some are selective but he will take any
He'll take any penis, sore-covered or runny
But the real whore's your mom 'cuz she does it for money.

Your dad takes an ass pounding from Mr. Plow
The Plow King soon stretches his asshole and how!
There follows a train: here pusher, there shover
But that just kills time ’til they’re on to your muvver.

Amazingly Little

The hideous Jay Nordlinger:

Such a weird, weird age, the one we’re living in. I’ve said it a thousand times: It takes amazingly little to be considered a conservative. Think Paradise Lost is better than I, Rigoberta Menchú? Think the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ought to be guided by science, instead of political emotions and desires? Think Cubans ought to be able to read a book of their choosing, or open a store, or leave the country on a raft without being shot to death in the water? Welcome to the “fascist” fold, my friend.

Think someone should be shot to death in the water before landing on America's shores? Welcome to the “fascist” fold, my friend. It takes amazingly little to be considered a conservative.

You know, along that they-know-not-what-they-speak theme here's Chuck Norris speaking up for the snowflake babies:

That is exactly why Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1809 at the end of his presidency, "The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government."

Washington, could wording be any clearer?

FREE HEALTHCARE NOW, a guaranteed minimum income, and, oh, let's see, gay marriage must be included in those clear words mustn't they?

No Real Purpose to Posting

This guy reviewing James Bond movies for Big Hollywood is funny-looking.



That is all.

Accuracy in Media

Oh my stars!

(CNN) -- The e-mail messages began filling astrologer Shelley Ackerman's inbox as soon as the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported the zodiac chart is off by about a month.

OMG I'm not a Leo help me with that

My daughter and her friends are very upset. Have they changed signs?

I'm not worried I KNOW I'm a true Scorp

Darling, what does this mean in our world? I couldn't be a Pisces

Is the kafuffle really over...NOTHING?

"This story is born periodically as if someone has discovered some truth. It's not news," said Jeff Jawer, an astrologer with Tarot.com, told CNN's This Just In news blog.

Astrology experts say the shift in zodiac signs does not apply to most Westerners, who follow the tropical zodiac, which is fixed to the seasons. In contrast, the Star Tribune article referred to the sidereal zodiac, which is fixed to constellations and is followed more in the East.

There we go then. The stars that influence your life and everything you do are really about your choice of hemisphere. What a shock to find that astrology fanatics get upset over recycled news, as if they forget that there are cycles and cycles...

After news of the shifting zodiac signs went viral, some people may be rethinking their lucky lotto numbers or reassessing their spouse's compatibility.

That last link there? I know it's HuffPo and all, but the slideshow it reaches bears the tags "Comedy News". Also:

Westerners are most familiar with sun signs, which became popular in the late 1800s when newspapers added horoscopes to attract readers, astrologers say. But sun signs alone are not considered reliable tools of prediction. Most astrologers say accurate readings require information such as time of birth, birth place and date of birth.

The Unspeakable Names of the Old Ones

Via MetaFilter here's a documentary about HP Lovecraft.

It's An Outrage!

The very stupid Jeffrey Jena:

Thank God civility is returning to literature! Thanks to some faceless editor at New South Books and alleged Twain scholar Dr. Alan Gribben, a new sanitized versions of “Huckleberry Finn” will be published. The word so offensive that it can’t even be printed here has been removed. All is now safe.

That's right, Jeffrey Jena is outraged about the censorship of a book Big Hollywood does not allow him to quote.

The comments are, as always, fabulous:



No wonder the Confederate Army won.

ORLY!

Poor Orly:

WASHINGTON — The US Supreme Court refused Monday to take up the question of President Barack Obama's citizenship, which a core group of skeptics continues to challenge despite presentation of his US birth certificate.

The high court, without comment, rejected the request by Orly Taitz, a California lawyer who has emerged as a leader of the "birther" movement of mainly rightwing protesters who question where Obama was born.

Yes, mainly rightwing protesters.

On Monday Taitz said she would not let the case rest.

"I will file a motion for reconsideration," she said on her website, adding that she has "evidence of highly suspicious activity in several federal courts."

"If we don't clean up corruption in the judiciary, in the White House, citizens of this country will have no trust in the system and will take justice in their own hands. This is dangerous," she wrote.

Who gave her the evidence? Did they supply long-form evidence?

A somewhat surprising strategy caught here:

And if that motion is denied, "I will go to an international court," she says. "I will be filing a proper complaint with the Committee of the Judiciary with the U.S. House.”

Ummm...

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

The usual stupid shit from Pakistan:

A court in Pakistan has sentenced a Muslim prayer leader and his son to life in jail for blasphemy.

The pair were found guilty in Punjab province of tearing down a poster of a gathering to mark the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad. They deny blasphemy.

Round up those Muslim prayer leaders for insulting Islam!

The sentence was handed down by an anti-terrorism court in the city of Dera Ghazi Khan in eastern Punjab province on Tuesday.

Yessir, where there's tearing there's terrorism.

The complainant, Phool Khan, alleged that the pair had ripped down and trampled a poster of a gathering to mark the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad. It had been posted on a pillar outside the grocery shop.

Other stories, should you care to look them up, mention religious verses appearing on the poster, which makes it immune to any and all depredations the hand of man can offer, I guess. Clever folks should, about now, be painting everything they think is worth preserving with the requisite verses.

Differences

When The Left cynically took advantage of the fact that a congresswoman got shot by pointing out that there were a lot of people using shooting metaphors in reference to her (METAPHORS people, MEANINGLESS METAPHORS and anyone who says otherwise is very much like someone I would shoot shoot shoot until they collapsed in a pool of blood (but of course they're not really that person OR ARE THEY (KIDDING))) Jay Nordlinger jumped to the defense of - well really didn't jump to anyone's defense, he remembered something I guess, and what he remembered was that somebody else wrote something at the time of another massacre by a loon that happened when lots of folks were using a lot of other metaphors involving...oh what was it, the black helicopter era or something?

Well anyway he remembers that he was grateful that this guy Charles Krauthammer wrote something about the tragedy of potentially being chided for calling liberals crazy insane tyrants after a bunch of people got slaughtered by a guy who thought liberals were crazy insane tyrants. And of course when this latest tragedy happened - the tragedy of people pointing fingers at people who use harmless metaphors to do with putting holes in people after a bunch of people get holes put in them - Jay Nordlinger, Action Man Extraordinaire, leapt to the hope that this Krauthammer guy would write something again, something like the kind of thing he wrote before. And Krauthammer did! Oh happy day, that a guy who hoped someone else would do something, just like he hoped that same someone else would do something way back when, gets his fondest wish fulfilled and he gets paid to write a column to tell people that.

But back to the first thing Jay remembered. Here's a young spry Krauthammer leaping to make a point like a jumping leaping strong-legged guy at the, at the, well this metaphor thing is hard isn't it?

In the 1920s, historians estimate, the Ku Klux Klan had between 1.5 million and 5 million members. Its 1925 march on Washington attracted 50,000 people. The ’60s, with its bombings and riots, Panthers and Weathermen, were a time of generalized madness. Even in the placid ’50s and early ’60s, the John Birch Society — which held, among other lunacies, that President Eisenhower was a Communist agent — was a political force to be reckoned with. Its tattered descendants now run around the wilds of Michigan playing soldier.

Well, the Klan is still marginal and nobody can really tell if their numbers have fluctuated since Krauthammer's 1995 column. But welcome, John Birch Society, back to your rightful place at CPAC. May all your money remain green.

The Great Old Race

Sarah Palin:

If you don’t like a person’s vision for the country, you’re free to debate that vision. If you don’t like their ideas, you’re free to propose better ideas. But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.

While I, as all Broderian citizens must, condemn the blood libel of Bad Talk Or Something against the race of conservatives, I have not yet seen it demonstrated to my satisfaction that the conservative race is free of the taint of child-eating. Perhaps when I run into a conservative down at the country club (HA!*) I will see if he dabs his lips with an AB/CD shirt.

In any case, to which appendage does one address a question?



*As if a scuttling penny-pinching conservative would cough up the dough to join a country club even if we let them in. Which we WILL NOT.

Lessons In Equivalence

Andrew Klavan:

The Times’s Paul Krugman — who once encouraged readers to hang pro-war Democratic senator Joseph Lieberman in effigy — chimed in on his blog, deploring right-wing political rhetoric and linking a Sarah Palin–backed political ad to the murders.

Could this effigy-hanging example involve a straw man?

As for leftists’ reaction to the Arizona shooting, call it Narrative Hysteria: a frantic attempt to capitalize on calamity by casting their opponents, not merely as racist or sexist or Islamophobic this time, but as somehow responsible for an act of madness and evil.

It's impossible to understand why these demon liberals could imagine that their opponents might be racist or sexist or Islamophobic; that they could think their ideological opponents capable of an act of madness and evil is beyond the pale.

SURVEY THE HEAD OF ANDREW KLAVAN.

Copyright Infringement and the New Technology

You know what's fun? Sharing the stuff in the public folders of strangers when you're at the airport. Enjoy your free music, people I will never meet!



Goddamn, I forgot to distribute the goatse!

A Shooting War

Over at The Politico, a well-timed metaphor:

Friction between parts of the social conservative and libertarian wings of the conservative movement has escalated into a shooting war in the run-up to the Conservative Political Action Conference, with accusations of embezzlement (true), homosexuality (true), and creeping sharia (disputed) hurled against the 38-year old conservative institution.

Hey, you know what would constitute a shooting war? People getting shot.

The Mousetache

Peter Kirsanow doesn't seem to have been up to much lately but I can't think of anyone better to wear the mousetache.