The First Problem

John Nolte:

There are two major problems with director Peter Weir’s “The Way Back,” a film “inspired” by the incredible story of seven prisoners who escape from a Soviet gulag circa 1940 only to discover that 4500 miles of hostile terrain lies between them and freedom. The first problem is that the story feels like one big anachronism. We’re twenty-plus years past the Cold War and, in the form of Islamic terrorism, facing an entirely new and different kind of evil. The point of telling this story decades after it might have actually done some good for the millions who died in these Siberian death camps is never made clear.

Anti-Socialist Anti-Islamist Realism is a stern taskmaster.

What Might Have Been

Yesterday in non-news:

Former Van Halen singer Sammy Hagar says he was offered the chance to replace Steven Tyler as the frontman of Aerosmith but that he turned down the opportunity because it would have been a difficult transition.

Hagar tells Forbes magazine he has been approached over the years to join a string of top bands. "I was asked at one time to be in Motley Crue," he says. "I was asked at one time to be in Pantera by their managers. I was asked to be in Velvet Revolver when Scott Weiland quit."

[...]

Hagar suggests he would not have done Tyler's distinctive vocals justice, and takes a swipe at David Lee Roth, the man he replaced in Van Halen. He adds, "It was easy because Dave wasn't a great singer."

Other groups Sammy Hagar passed up:

Devo
The Travelling Wilburys
White Stripes



Come on lil' Piplups! I know you can poop on Sammy's head if you try.

The Best Places to Mother

Source.

Up Next: Weaponized Jokes

Here is a headline, the gravity of which is making my monitor tilt:

Shocker: ‘Daily Show’ Writer Wrote Obama’s Trump Attack

Hey, maybe BH was being a little jokey, but um, probably not.

Well That Was Surprising

Tory majority. We'll suffer through four or five years of penny-pinching mean-spiritedness for masses, buying fighter jets and building prisons so the elite can feel powerful. How bad can it get? I am not really sure of that.

Of course I blame the Green Party.

The Bottom Twenty

In one of those relentless updates to iTunes in which nothing good happens an at-work library file was lost (although songs were not). So for some completely stupid reason I decided the songs re-imported into the library, being relatively new adds, should all be listened to five times as most of the others were well worn. The task is almost finished, and these songs are the bottom 20 that the iTunes shuffle left until last.

So iTunes discriminates against nostalgia in general and country music in particular.

Free At Last | Antony & The Johnsons
Fratres | Arvo Pärt
Tabula Rasa | Arvo Pärt
When I'm Sixty-Four | The Beatles
On To the Show | The Beau Hunks
Under the Anheuser Busch | Billy Murray
Mental Cruelty | Buck Owens and Rose Maddox (substitute hasn't got the verve)
Le Freak | Chic
Marriage | DRI
Miller's Cave | Hank Snow
What's The Good Word Mr. Bluebird? | The Hoosier Hot Shots (no suitable link exists so here is a horrifying video)
El Pito (I'll Never Go Back To Georgia) | Joe Cuba
What's Golden | Jurassic 5
Mama Tried | Merle Haggard
Where Eagles Dare | Misfits
(You've Got) The Magic Touch | The Platters
Next To You | The Police
Poor Folks Town | Porter Wagoner & Dolly Parton
Beat On The Brat | Ramones
How My Yodelling Days Began | Wilf Carter (you'll have to make do with a song about a DEAD DOG)

Voting Day

Remind T&U. The lovely daughter will be helping me vote, and she has been trained to say "Conservatives are mean" in the cutest way possible.

Free Time Sweepstakes

All sounds courtesy an alternate version of this, which I heard recently and thought would be easy to chop up and reorganize since it's pretty much a one-key bluesy jam. Turns out my attention span is not quite up to recomposing it; I found a bit I liked and stuck with it. Feel free to add DOPE RHYMES.

Photoshopportunities

A headline:

Breitbart Dominates Maher on 'Real Time'

Video at the link, if you have the strength for it. I do not.

Problem Solved!

Some follow-up:

The spate of suicides made headlines around the world. Last May, seven young Chinese workers producing Apple iPads for consumers across the globe took their own lives, prompting an investigation into working conditions at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, southern China.

[...]

One year on, swaths of anti-suicide netting surround the huge worker dormitories in Shenzhen.

It's all about innovation.

Maybe they could clean out that netting though.

Chester Brown: Libertarian

I just did not know:

As the Libertarian Party candidate for the Toronto riding of Trinity-Spadina in Monday’s vote, Chester Brown didn’t plan on having to promote a new book at the same time.

Brown, renowned in the comic book world for his 2006 graphic biography Louis Riel and other works, is preoccupied with the publication of Paying for It: A Comic-Strip Memoir About Being a John. Graphic in more ways than one, the unvarnished and unapologetic diary of the author’s experiences procuring sex isn’t the sort of baggage most candidates would care to haul around on the hustings.

What odd people these comics artists are.

Brown is an orthodox libertarian, both socially and economically. He not only believes that the authorities have no business in the bedrooms, rec rooms or any other rooms of the nation but also favours smaller government, reduced taxation and the elimination of the welfare state.

Given these views, some have questioned the consistency of his acceptance of public money to write Paying for It and Louis Riel.

“If I ever did get elected, I would oppose the Canada Council, so it certainly seems hypocritical,” he says. “But to me, there’s a difference between giving money and taking money. The government shouldn’t be giving out money, but I have no problem taking it if they are giving it out.”

The Riel book is really good, and of course no library is complete without Ed the Happy Clown. Shame about the bonehead politics, but his head is awfully bony.

Here's an interview about Paying for It.

UPDATE:

The Fact Is, The Facts Is WRONG

The WikiLeaked embarrassments continue:

OTTAWA — A U.S. Embassy official studying at the University of Ottawa apparently experienced first-hand what American officials describe as the “anti-American biases” of Canada’s universities and academics.

The story is told in a diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa, which was written in 2009 and released publicly this past week by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

Ooh, what does this anti-Americanism consist of? WEDGIES? SWIRLIES?

During an international human rights law class, the professor would routinely ask students which country was “again noticeably absent” from those that had ratified international human rights treaties, the cable says.

Instead of answering, students in the class reportedly would point at the embassy official to indicate the U.S. as the country in question.

Aww, poor embassy guy was ashamed. Anything else?

The cable said the professor slammed the U.S. as an embarrassment when it came to equality and equal opportunity, blaming then-U.S. president George W. Bush for the declining percentage of women in the workforce. The professor also labelled the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and UN as ineffective “captives” of the U.S.

All those criticisms came in the first class, the cable notes.

The incidents at the university are used to illustrate what the cable portrays as an overarching tradition of anti-Americanism in Canada.

An overarching tradition of not having governments fulla assholes might go some distance to redressing this genocidal hatred.

Via the Lovely Daughter

Any Publicity is Good Publicity

What is the root word of "dignitary" anyhow?

The Vatican yesterday said it had "nothing to hide" after it emerged that Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe, widely condemned over human rights abuses, would be among the dignitaries attending Sunday's beatification of Pope John Paul II.

I Remain Skeptical

Canadian election discussion. My guys are doing absurdly well in popularity polls. I don't believe it'll translate to the amount of seats necessary to govern or even be the official opposition. If I am wrong I will be very happy.

PDF of poll results supplied by vasi in comments.

The Sneer Goggles

Instaputz:

WOW: Sarah Palin is a lot better looking than Julianne Moore. I wouldn’t have guessed that. What’s with those protruding teeth?

The picture in question:



Not that I want to get into a beauty contest thread, but I'm not seeing a lotta distance here between Palin and faux Palin. What's in those glasses he's wearing?

Proportion

Veronique de Rugy:

My colleague Matt Michell sends me this remarkable chart courtesy of Catherine Rampell of Economix. It is from a new book, The Haves and the Have Nots, by the World Bank’s Branko Milanovic. It takes a moment to wrap your head around it, but it’s worth the time.

The chart:



The conclusion:

Debate over the data aside, the most striking point on this chart is that even the poorest 5 percent of Americans are among the richest people in the world — richer than nearly 70 percent of the world’s population.

[Quote from the chart's author omitted]

I doubt this is comforting to the poorest Americans, but it does show that America is doing something right.

Why don't America's poorest simply buy a plane ticket to India to become the richest peasant in the village?

Doing It Well

I don't really have much to add to this column by Ben Shapiro except that I wish all right-wing writing could be so clearly spiteful. It'd save a lot of time. Excerpts:

While Christians across the world marked Easter and Jews marked Passover, liberals marked their annual ode to neo-paganism with hippy-dippy exercises in green self-righteousness. Of course, they neglected to mention that Gaia herself was a Greek hussy who mythologically created the oceans and the depths by an incestuous relationship with her son, Uranus. They also neglected to mention that one original co-founder of Earth Day was a murderer, that its first backers were tie-dyed socialists who hated capitalism, and that Earth Day itself was timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Lenin.

That is an action-packed paragraph. There's more!

The dirtiest secret of all with regard to Earth Day is that one of its co-founders, Ira Einhorn, would go on to murder his girlfriend and stuff her in a closet beneath environmentally-unfriendly Styrofoam. After fleeing the United States and spending 23 years abroad, France finally extradited Einhorn. Upon his return, Einhorn explained that the CIA had framed him after discovering that Einhorn had uncovered their paranormal military weaponry plans. Einhorn is currently sitting in prison.

The biggest problem with Earth Day was not Earth Day itself, which was little more than a showcase for the smelliest, highest, dirtiest group of college students ever to live off the parental dime.

Okay, I snipped some boring stuff about regulations off that last part. But there's more!

Earth Day, Newsweek magazine reported in 1970, was a "bizarre nationwide rain dance." Today, it is a government-sponsored rain dance that's devoted to the promotion of secularism and the worship of a pagan ethos that values dirt and trees rather than people -- or at least pretends to in order to achieve redistributionist ends. If we're going to start cutting the deficit, the first place we should look to cut is Earth Day nonsense designed to indoctrinate children with the watermelon value system: green on the outside, red on the inside.

Have we reached peak Shapiro?

Sexy Librarian Alert!

Christian Schneider:

Yesterday, public-library officials in New York City made official what we all knew what was coming: They declared watching pornography on public-library computers to be permissible, protected by the First Amendment.

There follows the usual pearl-necklace clutching that befits ninnies who pretend to morality. I feel somewhat bad for patrons and employees that have to be near the inevitably weird scenes such boldness will entail, but oh well, people will get their porn one way or another, whacking off in public remains illegal, and I haven't found the general-purpose library yet without a stock of filthy novels.

Libraries are now equipped with full multimedia capabilities and serve less as educational opportunities and more as neighborhood entertainment centers. Library patrons have expanded from those who need no-cost materials to free-riding wealthy people looking for some free entertainment. Get a library card and you now have full access to a wide variety of music CDs, DVD movies, and video games, all for free — which is to say all at taxpayer expense.

GOD SAVE US FROM THE FREE-RIDING WEALTHY PEOPLE! Yes, yacht-racing jet-setters are taking advantage of libraries everywhere. What is comes down to for Schneider is this:

When we consider the proper scope of government, do we really think of free entertainment as a basic public service?

Er, um, ah, yes we do, but I suppose a law could be passed so that on the evening of July 4th everyone must wear blindfolds unless a ten dollar fee is paid.

Here, though, is the creepy-guy tell:

With local and state governments facing significant budget challenges, it might be time to take a closer look at the non-essential services they are providing. Nobody is facing imminent death because they haven’t seen season one of Who’s the Boss? on DVD. Yet local libraries might be soaking the taxpayers to make watching Alyssa Milano’s pre-teen years a reality for all.

That's Derbyshire territory right there, but I take solace in the idea that Schneider is a sucker enough to pay for his perversions.

Assumptions