Long Reads and Other Things

Best of 2012 long reads on the web, as chosen by various people I've never heard of.

Here is a not-so-long read containing this paragraph:

That isn’t to say, thought, that things weren’t weird. Because they definitely were. Like the time Neil Patrick Harris, old Doogie Howser himself, called our house to talk to Larry (character motivation, I guess). Or the fact that we all sat together as a family and watched that made for TV movie -- I’m pretty sure the dictionary definition for meta-surreal is something like "Watch the scene where Doogie Howser, playing your adopted brother, brutally kills his parents on TV, as the real killer, your actual brother, eats popcorn in your living room."

Here is a database for doctors of Things Not To Do.

Interview:

Why does the rise of digital technology have to result in the death of print technology?

Because Mr. Ford ate the last working horse, thus making room for the racing horse. Technologically, the horse is a skeuomorph, but symbolically its power is increased tenfold by its selectively bred descendent. What we call "book" now will also likely be a magical thing that was once common. They symbolic book of the future will be a deluxe object related only slightly to its current Random House ancestor. Current print technology is dying as a mass-tool and will be reborn as art. Art is the last stage of capitalism.

Crime hype!

Russian cybercriminals are proceeding with an ambitious assault on U.S. banks. A new McAfee Labs report claims that Project Blitzkrieg, a multiplatform mass theft scheme that has its own promotional YouTube videos, has been slowed down but is still underway.
Unlike most Internet-based, white-collar crime schemes, Project Blitzkrieg has embraced publicity and hype. The brains behind the assault are advertising their scheme on Russian Underweb forums and using social media to recruit accomplices. According to McAfee, a variant of the Prinimalka Trojan is being used to primarily target investment banks and national banks.

Cancelling the apocalypse?

Ladies Love Cool Jonah

Via Roy we discover Jonah Goldberg backing the Glenn-Reynolds-proposed invasion of women's media by conservatives:

More Thinking Like This Please
By Jonah Goldberg
December 14, 2012 9:04 A.M.

I know super rich people like to launch PACs and brag to their friends that they’ve got “ads up in Milwaukee.” But, as the last election showed, such expenditures — while no doubt important — are of diminishing utility. Glenn Reynolds suggests that some of that money could be better spent elsewhere, like women’s magazines for instance.

Previously:

Worst Movie Girlfriends
By Jonah Goldberg
December 12, 2012 12:56 P.M.

Over on Twitter I started a conversation about bad girlfriends in movies, by noting that Bruce Willis’s gal pal in Pulp Fiction is simply awful and deserves to be on any top-ten list of worst movie girlfriends. She forgets his watch. Cries at the drop of a hat. Goes off to a lavish breakfast while Willis is risking his life. Etc. This sparked other suggestions and a short-lived hashtag game #WorstMovieGirlfriends. Among the nominees [...]

Hits (Also the New iTunes Sucks)

Statistics prove that the new iTunes sucks:



Just put the goddamn DJ back. It was fun. You can still find old versions over here.

Have a video.

Today's True Facts

Now there's a headline:



Nevertheless the important news at World Nut Daily is THIS:

Frightened residents in western Sweden reported seeing a bright, blue light racing across the night sky on Tuesday before an orange-coloured orb smashed into the ground in a mysterious phenomenon that has yet to be explained.

You'll figure it out when the Christmas presents don't arrive.

The State of the Entertainment Industry

The Lovely Daughter is not amused.

There Will Be Soup

Crybabies:

BILL O'REILLY: All right, fair share. You're a rich guy now -- fair share in taxes. Now, I think, your state is up to about 14 percent state income tax.

President Obama wants to raise it up to about 40 percent Federal. That's 54 percent. If he knocks out the deduction for state income taxes which he wants to do, you'd be paying 54. What's fair.

ADAM CAROLLA: Well, first off, we should stop saying, "tax the rich," and say, "tax the successful." Because I'm not rich, I'm successful. And rich is easy to tax because that's just the guy who inherited daddy's money, whose dad was the Monopoly man and he lives up on the hill.

I'm successful, you're successful because we worked our tails off. And it's harder to take money away from people that work very hard for it.

And it's very easy to say, "Tax the rich." But, really, it should be "Tax the successful." But I've done the math.

O'REILLY: Yes, Miller says that, too. And Miller is mad. I mean, he's angry about it because he's saying, "Look, I'm getting targeted, me, Dennis Miller, because I have achieved something."

So, it's really, it is taxing the successful. But it's also taxing achievement. And, to some extent, rewarding non-achievement is what it is.

Below is an artist's rendering of a composite of Bill O'Reilly and Adam Carolla and Dennis Miller as they might look should they have to pay taxes.

Fortunately, there will be soup.

Bye Ravi!

It takes genius to make Philip Glass all sexy and shit.

The Republican Race

Daniel Foster is amused:

David Sirota at Salon thinks this Crossroads GPS ad is racist:

Specifically, Sirota thinks Karl Rove is, with a genius as evil as it is subtle, “present[ing] the image of an African-American man as an evildoer, referring to him as the tax-raising “he,” and pitting him against the “we” in classic demagogic “us versus them” terms.”

Once you’re done laughing, you’ll probably feel a little guilty, clear your throat, and in your least-condescending-sounding voice tell Sirota that maybe it’s a bit hasty to read racial code into a set of signifiers when Bill Ockham would say plain-old politics explains them just fine.

Bill Ockham might point out that plain-old politics could pretty easily include racism: it did before, it does now. Watch the video, it's pretty obvious what's going on with the colour tones. The item's entitled "Also Racist Now: Pronouns" so I worry that there's blood all over Foster's desk from razor-mishandling.

Jay Nordlinger follows up, somehow managing to type whole paragraphs without fainting:

I was just thinking: I’ve had many years to get used to the Left, but, still, I found it hard to read Dan Foster’s post. I guess I’m still not used to them.

As Dan informed us, we have a Salonista railing against Republicans for expressing an “us versus them” mentality. We’re racists, we’re evil, we’re KKK, blah, blah, blah. In the recent campaign — it ended only a few weeks ago — Barack Obama ran an ad saying, “Mitt Romney. Not one of us.”

That was not the implication. That was not what Obama was hinting at. That’s exactly, explicitly what he said in his ad.

I can only ask the Joseph Welch question — the answer to which, I’m afraid, is no.

Who's Joseph Welch? Oh, him, the guy who humiliated the Republican blowhard. In this case the analogy is absolutely perfect because Obama was attempting to destroy Mitt Romney's career as a serial loser of elections and similarly David Sirota's outsized influence as a writer for Salon puts a worried and sweating Rove in the same position as Fred Fisher. How dare anyone cast aspersions on the noble race of Republicans.

The Free Market

Zachary Leeman presents the top 5 conservative films of the year! Hooray!

The last 12 months may have been disappointing overall for conservatives. However, film-wise, it was actually a pretty good year.

First let us investigate the year's big films:

1. Marvel's The Avengers - $623,357,910
2. The Dark Knight Rises - $448,106,311
3. The Hunger Games - $408,010,692
4. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2 - $262,355,000
5. The Amazing Spider-Man - $262,030,663 - $62,004,688
6. Skyfall - $253,720,000
7. Brave - $237,093,265
8. Ted - $218,665,740
9. Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted - $216,391,482
10. Dr. Seuss' The Lorax - $214,030,500

Leeman's list:

1. "The Dark Knight Rises" - $448,106,311
2. "Atlas Shrugged: Part II" - $3,336,053
3. "The Expendables 2" - $85,028,192
4. "Red Dawn" - $34,305,000
5. "Lockout" - $14,326,864

It is safe to conclude that America is a communist nation and patriots should fear for their lives.

240 Layers, Weaklings

Four planes occupy the same space in Quartz Composer, but a little tilt on the X and Y axes makes them poke through each other.

And with that idea comes this additional horrification:



Now 50% more layers! Looks much "nicer" as a screensaver I must say.

Where the Elite Meet for a Neat-to-Eat DECEIT, SHEEPLE!

Maggie Gallagher:

Have you noticed how much of Hollywood is preoccupied with thoughts of God?

"Life of Pi" is the latest example of a movie with essentially religious themes.

Artists in a postmodern culture are thinking about the relationship between story and truth. Even the movie "Lincoln" is organized around the idea that false narratives can serve the greater good in politics. When the people are bad, the politician must lie or mislead to serve the good.

It's rather discomfiting to see so many liberal elites embrace this movie, isn't it?

That is about as blindingly stupid an opening as you can hope for, but Maggie has hit upon a chilling thought: just how many of these awful liberal elites are out there?

Let us ask Professor JanusNode:

The aqueous humour-drinking elite
The chai-sipping elite
The chicken-hugging elite
The childhood-loving elite
The desert-half-orc-hugging elite
The garbage-dumps-going elite
The happy-affairs-loving elite
The hardware-loving elite
The how-to-manuals-loving elite
The lymph-sipping elite
The marketing-loving elite
The mix-sipping elite
The monster-hugging elite
The parable-loving elite
The plasma-sipping elite
The plastic-surgery-loving elite
The political-ranting-loving elite
The post-general-insurrection-loving elite
The primal-elemental-hugging elite
The pseudo-landscape-loving elite
The pseudo-nog-sipping elite
The psycho-capuchin-monkey-hugging elite
The quasi-AM-radio-loving elite
The quasi-Italian-design-loving elite
The quasi-truth-loving elite
The quasi-views-of-a-naked-body-going elite
The religious-lies-loving elite
The religious-sermonizing-loving elite
The saliva-sipping elite
The science-going elite
The sermonizing-loving elite
The southern-hairy-nosed-wombat-hugging elite
The space/time-loving elite
The structuralism-loving elite
The super-little-penguin-hugging elite
The tea-sipping elite
The über-semen-drinking elite
The ultra-top-40-music-going elite
The urban-waste-loving elite
The water-drinking elite

If you have the heart to go on, you may also explore what follows this:

"Cloud Atlas" is one of an increasing number of films I would call "religious porn."

Think for a moment about the relationship between that little god Eros and standard porn.

Addendum

...to post no bills.

Smientific Malfeasance

The results looked good initially, but Riddled Research Laboratories tipped their hand; we at Substance Labs™ thoroughly condemn them for cheating on doggie driving tests by using zoanthropes.



And so pointless. The technology has existed in the enlightened portions of the world for decades.



BREAD AND JAM FOR FRANCIS UPDATE:

You've Buttered Your Bread, Now You Have to Lie In It

David Welch:

In the 1960s, Buckley, largely through his position at the helm of National Review, displayed political courage and sanity by taking on the John Birch Society, an influential anti-Communist group whose members saw conspiracies everywhere they looked.

Fast forward half a century. The modern-day Birchers are the Tea Party. By loudly espousing extreme rhetoric, yet holding untenable beliefs, they have run virtually unchallenged by the Republican leadership, aided by irresponsible radio talk-show hosts and right-wing pundits. While the Tea Party grew, respected moderate voices in the party were further pushed toward extinction. Republicans need a Buckley to bring us back.

Who could that Buckley be?

David Welch is a former research director for the Republican National Committee.

I gather it's not you.

Here is where Soul Asylum doing "It's Not My Fault" would go.

Oh wait:



Oh dear, crazy conspiracy types are the base.

Quality Education

Via The Corner, AN OUTRAGE:



No, the outrage is not eye-strain. It seems a "political science professor" at a "university" wants you to write and speak as if your "audience" in a might be someone other than White and Male and Middle-Class!

Someone whose name recalls the most famous blowjob artist of the 20th century is NOT HAVING IT:

My name is Ryan Lovelace, and I dropped that politically correct political science class.

Clearly, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Butler University believes its students were raised as racist and misogynist homophobes who have grown to harbor many prejudices, a stance that is both offensive and hostile to any student’s ability to learn.

Leftists demand redistribution of the middle, but middles should remain UNDISTRIBUTED. Where there is a rule against being an asshole, that rule specifically describes YOU, the potential rule follower, as an asshole! See also laws against pedophilia and kill yourself.

Clearly the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Butler University's requirement to consider a broad audience in your communications is a stricture nobody taking...what was that again? Oh yes, the requirement to consider a broad audience in your communications is a stricture nobody taking political science should have to appreciate. It's been proven by not-political science!

What is Ryan's solution?

As a journalism major, I will now strive to avoid the liberal arts college as much as possible, not because the college fails to provide its students with any practical knowledge, but because the college seeks to indoctrinate its students with a hostile paradigm that views people like me—an American, white, heterosexual male from a middle-class background—as evil; whitey-righty need not attend.

I agree. The best option for a journalism major in your unfortunate position is avoid actuarial science and anthropology and biology and chemistry and classical studies and computer science and criminology and engineering and English and exploratory studies and French and gender/women/sexuality studies and German and history and international studies and mathematics and natural science and philosophy and physics and political science and psychology and religion and science, technology and society and social work and psychology and sociology and software engineering and Spanish.

Then and only then, after all these subjects have been avoided, will you feel confident and assured that you can leave the hallowed halls of academia with the best journalism education possible.

Gold

Lookit:



Elsewhere, animals made of words:



Mint Sprite.

Re-Education Camps Revisited

Michael Walsh, November 5th:

Romney by an electoral college landslide — more than 300 votes. The swing states will all swing the same way; Romney stuns Obama early in Pennsylvania, then cruises through Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida.

Romney’s upper Midwest strategy pays off when bellwether Wisconsin pays back the Democrats for their recall treachery and delivers the state to the GOP.

The Republicans keep the House and narrowly retake the Senate, even without Todd Akin, who’s this year’s Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell rolled into one.
There are minor civil disturbances, quickly quelled. On Wednesday, the stock market goes up 300 points. Hiring booms. Flowers bloom. Pretty girls smile again. The sun comes out.

And we do it again four years later.

– Michael Walsh is  weekly op-ed columnist for the New York Post and a regular contributor to National Review Online.

The Free Market requires that Michael Walsh never be hustled out the door.

Michael Walsh today:

But hey — why let a little thing like two devastating losses in the most important election since 1860 get you down? November 6 was just another day in the lives of the GOP’s krack kadre of kampaign konsultants who — as Pat Caddell points out here — have now lost four of the last six presidential elections, essentially by running the same candidate (wealthy scion of the Republican establishment with zero personal downside to a loss) over and over again, and expecting a different result.

What a totally obvious problem that nobody saw that isn't a political problem in itself that will never get fixed if Republicans have their dream slate of policies enacted!

I like, though, this idea of the Candidate With Something To Lose being in the race. Free Market principles of reward and punishment that won't result in the firing of Michael Walsh should be brought to bear on Republican candidates. Grover Norquist should come up with another pledge: all Republican candidates who lose must take jobs as Wal-Mart greeters for the length of the term they run for, and they must forego all other income for that period.

A Mouth Full of Ship

The thing is you have to hide the ships because someone's always producing another big fat steamer.



What the hell's she up to anyway? Oh. I feel pretty good about the crap I produce.

J. NEO MARVIN UPDATE:

The New iTunes Sucks

Feature removal, specifically, iTunes DJ (the shuffle play I so love) is kind of a sucky way to go about "upgrades".

Lotsa confused folks in the forums at Apple about iTunes 11.  I'm not downloading.

Hey, Blogger is putting double-spaces in sentences in the "Compose" screen. Gotta watch that.

Have a video.

Adventures in Scrabble

The Lovely Daughter, despite her insane proficiency in languages (currently watching this) needs a little help with creation and causation as opposed to memorization and so we've been, among other things, putting letters on the Scrabble board.

The Lovely Daughter: D E P. Is dep a word?
Me: No but you're pretty close to a word. Look at your other letters.
TLD: E T G A. (She puts the E on the board.) DEPE. Is that a word?
M: No, but you're really close to a word if you just rearrange the letters.
TLD: (Moves the final E away. Puts it back.)
M: You're really really close. There's a word there with a little rearranging.
TLD: (Lost.) DEPE.
M: Okay, think of a pool.
TLD: Peed?