SCRIPTOIDS

The point at which I stopped reading

2009-12-10T18:10:00.001-05:00

"The forebodings the Jews of Europe had as they were herded onto cattle cars to an unknown destination are the same feelings of helplessness I have as the Copenhagen Climate Summit reaches its conclusion."

From Musings From Sanibel Island, here.

No global warming?! Look, she’s bare armed in December. In Norway!

2009-12-10T03:33:00.002-05:00

Via Yahoo!

Fair warning

2009-12-09T18:31:00.002-05:00

Found somewhere.

At some point there’d be a post like this

2009-12-07T21:09:00.003-05:00

He wouldn't bow to Hitler but American Democrats/trial lawyers expect him to bow to … his Homeowners Association! -- Town Hall

There’s a contradictory impulse in America. Okay, two contradictory impulses if you include our sex-is-sacred-everybody-lets-fuck hypocrisy. The other one is our love/hate relationship with homeowners associations.

Twice a year -- usually around Memorial Day/Fourth of July and then again around Veterans Day -- there’s the inevitable story of a war vet (or sometimes the parents of a deployed soldier) engaged in a war (obligatory metaphor) with his/her homeowners association.

Now, the whole idea of an HOA is to protect everybody from everybody else’s bad taste, lax attitudes about lawn grooming, unclaimed dog poop, overly exuberant holiday displays, and the covert installation of 2 ½-story high flagpoles.

But nobody ever reads the g-dang HOA manual, except for the HOA board members themselves. In fact, homeowner-members are shocked to discover that such a manual actually exists, usually because it was included with copies of all the legal papers they signed, dazed and confused, on closing day. Sadly, the discovery of the HOA manual usually follows the arrival of a threatening letter about some infraction or another.

The latest story involves a 90-year-old (nice touch, that) Medal of Honor recipient (really nice touch) and the 21-foot-tall flagpole (really big touch) he decided to put up in his front yard last September.

Did he double check with his HOA before the work crew arrived? Fark no. This is America. He’s a Medal of Honor recipient. Did I mention he’s 90?

And so because it involves the Most Sacred and Holy Shroud of the Nation as well as a very old and well honored veteran, the media are alerted, national politicians get involved, neighbors’ homes are threatened with being torched (because apparently there are roving gangs of arsonists-with-a-cause out there), and everyone heaps scorn on the unpatriotic, fascistic, terrorist-loving HOA.

The HOA will explain over and over that it’s not the flag that’s the problem, it’s the flagpole. But they lost this battle before it began. They will inevitably back down or offer some special one-time-only dispensation for vets in their tenth decade of life with Purple Hearts and Medals of Honor.

And then it will all stop. Until the next time.

America the dsylexic (and fritely dressed)

2009-12-07T00:05:00.000-05:00

Farksters have fun with Buzzfeed’s 50 Best Protest Signs of 2009 and add of few of their own as well, as featured below.

Why God created politicians

2009-12-06T20:27:00.002-05:00

Conservative columnist Warner Todd Huston grumps that for decades American schools (surely only the non-voucher ones) have been creating "citizens that mindlessly expect that politicians exist only to ‘give us stuff.’"

You, me, our families, our neighbors, we’re all gimme-gimmee-gimmee all the time. We wussified Americans have been indoctrinated into wanting stuff like, you know, untainted food, uncrashing planes, undrunk truck drivers, uncontaminated water, uncollasping economic markets, unpolluted air, unpandemic-ed communities, unexploding microwave ovens, and on and on.

Warner Todd Huston is having none of that. He wants to revive American’s independent spirit, one salmonella outbreak at a time.

But if politicians don’t exist "to give us stuff" like, you know, good government, then why do they exist at all?

Well, if we all hadn’t been so thoroughly indoctrinated by our grammar-school teachers, the answer would seem perfectly logical and obvious to us: Politicians exist to make sure that only the market determines whether we get stuff like untainted food, uncrashing planes, undrunk truck drivers, uncontaminated water, uncollasping economic markets, unpolluted air, unpandemic-ed communities, unexploding microwave ovens, and on and on.

How does the market decide? Only God knows -- and stop asking such silly questions.

That, says Warner Todd Huston, is what America’s schools should be teaching.

Cross-posted at Rattlebrained

We don’t need no stinkin’ "successful conclusions"

2009-12-03T23:50:00.002-05:00

Conservative columnist Bill Dupray huffed deep and heavy on the talking point about the V-word missing from Obama’s West Point speech. Hissy and pissy, he mocked "the cold gruel of a Harvard politician" that offered no Dupray kind of victory -- the kind involving still-beating hearts carved out of the enemy’s chest and raised above one‘s head with great whoops -- but only wars brought to successful conclusions and responsible ends.

For some reason, the use of "milestones" ticked him off too. You can almost hear his fist pounding the table next to the mouse pad. Our guys don’t fight for frickin’ milestones, those are rocks on the side of the road, he digitally bellows -- Bush’s sliding-scale "benchmarks" and gauzy "aspirational goals" rather conveniently having been forgotten. Personally, I’m convinced the dead no longer express a preference.

Anyway, Dupray had to take to the comments thread to defend himself, and jeebus what a glass chin this guy has!

(Large view.)

Karma on the cheap, no exchanges

2009-12-02T23:01:00.001-05:00

Oh big deal! Don’t act so surprised.

2009-12-02T18:34:00.002-05:00

So we are going to send more troops into Afghanistan. There is no other way, karma-wise. It’s our national Lieutenant Dan fate. We think we have this honorable destiny to fulfill (droning comparatively unarmed countries into some vague idea of submission in order to achieve something TBA later) when all we’re really doing is getting our psychic legs amputated and our national treasury tapped out.

We’re an empire. That’s what empires do. Noblesse oblige -- even if you're an unemployed roofer living in a ramshackle ~~trailer~~ manufactured home with an adult Down syndrome child afflicted with a badly abscessed tooth. Remember: You and your adult Down syndrome child are God's chosen citizens. You are AMERICAN.

It finally came

2009-12-01T18:37:00.003-05:00

The 2009 Bad Sex in Fiction Award has been copiously discharged to Jonathan Littell for his novel, The Kindly Ones, particularly for a passage involving sex on (in?) a guillotine and an orgasmic “jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg.”

For true devotees of Bad Sex, here are the notable excerpts for this year’s short-listed works.

Guess who said this

2009-12-01T01:31:00.004-05:00

Two weeks ago Rush Limbaugh, citing a RedState blog post, went all asshole profondo, declaring that the "Obama administration intends to purge Republicans from the civil service retroactive to five years ago, starting in the year 2010."

It was all crap, of course, but it did remind me about someone who seriously wanted to purge (and still does) the ideologically unsuitable from government.

First, we want to remove liberal personnel from the political process. Then we want to capture those positions of power and influence for conservatives. Stalin taught the importance of this principle. He was running the personnel department, while Trotsky was fighting the White Army. When push came to shove for control of the Soviet Union, Stalin won. His people were in place and Trotsky’s were not…. With this principle in mind, conservatives must do all they can to make sure that they get jobs in Washington.*

Indeed, that is the conservative‘s conservative, Grover Norquist, the guy who absolutely adores Stalin and Lenin and absolutely detests government.
__________

*As quoted on p. 160 of Benjamin Hart’s The Third Generation: Young Conservatives Look to the Future; published by the Heritage Foundation in 1987.

Certain ridicule is one man’s most feared weapon

2009-11-29T18:43:00.003-05:00

I don’t know why Snarky Basterd at Feed Your ADHD won’t post my reply to his compassionate conservative sans compassion comment about food stamps.

(Enlarge)

For a site whose mantra is Ridicule is man's most potent weapon, they really can’t take it.

Maybe not such a good idea

2009-11-29T16:05:00.003-05:00

Local news station posts breaking news tweets to billboard. Awful juxtaposition occurs. Drivers drop cell phones while laughing, forced to drive erratically with both hands on wheel.

(Via)

ThanxGiven

2009-11-26T12:05:00.000-05:00

Image via Fark’s Annual Thanksgiving Eve Draw a Hand Turkey Contest.

Sarah Goes Mad

2009-11-25T19:05:00.008-05:00

On Thanksgiving, gather your slightly buzzed family and friends to play Mad-Libs, Going Rogue-style. Text is based on the first few pages of Palin’s memoir.

It was the Alaska State Fair, August 2008. With the gray Talkeeta Mountains in the distance and the first light covering of volcanic ash about to descend on Pioneer Peak, I breathed in an autumn bouquet of everything small-town America with rugged splashes of _____.

Crystal meth and foot-long _____. Reindeer _____ on a stick. _____-___ed salmonberry wine. Banjo music played. Aborted fetus posters flapped in the wafting Arctic breeze. Bristol gasped at the record-breaking giant __________ grown under the midnight sun.

Since being elected governor in 2006, I had managed to rack up _____, though I didn’t _____. To me, it signaled that Alaskans, with their _____ spirit, wanted _____ and not _____-as-usual. In the Right to Life Booth, I smiled, dropped _____ into the can, and didn’t care who might be _____, including local reporters. Alaskans knew my _____. No news there.

At that moment, _____ vibrated me back to work. I ducked behind the booth, hoping it wasn't some _____ political _____.

I punched the green _____ and moaned, This is Sarah.

It was Senator John McCain, asking if I wanted to help him change _____.

UPDATE
Click here for my fill-in answers.

Image via Fark.

Things I just learned I didn’t know

2009-11-24T00:05:00.000-05:00

South Africa did not have television until 1975. Although the country was technologically and economically advanced enough to support broadcast television -- and although it would be another 25 years before the creation of Family Guy, South Africa's censorial government and church leaders viewed “the devil’s box” as a threat to their authority.

Someone should have thought this through

2009-11-23T10:35:00.000-05:00

Click here for full-size image.

From the opening web page of Vision: Catholic Religious Vocation Network.

No cute puppies in Asia

2009-11-23T09:55:00.003-05:00

"[I]t's bad all around when American press coverage makes people feel that perfectly predictable results constitute a shameful failure for the country and its leadership."

James Fallows “marvel[s] at how badly the mainstream American press distorted the picture of what happened during Barack Obama’s just-ended tour of Asia.” (See here, here, and here.)

Or you could just read this NYT’s “news analysis” piece, which really gives the game away. While the article pretends to examine why “Asia was always going to be a tough nut for [Obama] to crack,” what it admits, right up front, is that Obama’s Asia trip was a media failure because:

(1) Michelle Obama didn’t go, so there were no ladies fashions to cover.

(2) Israel wasn’t involved, so there was nothing of interest to Christian Zionists.

(3) There were no side trips to Indonesia, so there were no soft and fuzzy stories to crank out about Obama’s boyhood days in the Pacific.

Dagnabbit

2009-11-21T14:08:00.004-05:00

Too bad -- some of my friends had a pool going on the date of the first exchange of gunfire by drunk patrons once the Tennessee law allowing people with handgun permits to be armed in alcohol-serving bars and restaurants went into effect.

Judge Strikes Down Tennessee Guns-in-Bars Law

"Tennessee's new law allowing people with handgun permits to be armed in bars and restaurants that serve alcohol is unconstitutionally vague, a judge ruled on Friday."

The unconstitutional vagueness in question? This: "Tennessee previously banned handguns in all locations where alcohol was served. The new law made an exception for establishments that serve at least one meal on five days per week and that 'the serving of such meals shall be the principal business conducted.' Tennessee has no legal definition to distinguish bars from restaurants."

In addition to getting around to legally defining what a bar is and what a restaurant, Tennessee lawmakers might want to establish a legal definition for what a meal is.

Anonymously attributed direct quotes of indirect quotes of paraphrased presumed translations taken out of context: Great American journalism!

2009-11-20T17:52:00.004-05:00

Today, instead of mocking rank amateurs such as the indefatigable Pastor Grant Swank and the lowest-tier digital rags such as WorldNetDaily, I am focusing my ~~wrath~~ attention on this update from ABC News The Blotter From Brian Ross, both for its suspiciously diced-and-sliced quote-in-title and its astonishing lack of detail.

In Major Hasan’s E-Mail: “I Can’t Wait to Join You” in Afterlife, Ross’ source is identified as “an American official” who claims he has top secret access (even though he blabs things to ABC News’ Brian Ross) to 18 e-mails exchanged between Hasan and cleric Anwar al Awlaki. The scuttlebutt, you see, is that "Hasan told Awlaki he couldn't wait to join him in the discussions they would having [sic] over non-alcoholic wine in the afterlife.”

I don’t know, isn’t that a semi-standard Islamic e-mail closing?

At least Brian Ross & the ABC Investigative Team got a great quote from Lt Col Tony Shaffer, who I’m guessing is retired from the military because Ross doesn’t bother to say. Ross identifies him as a “military analyst” with the nonmilitary, nongovernmental, nonprofit (I had to look it up because Ross didn’t say) Center for Advanced Defense Studies. Shaffer’s got quite an impressive google trail, but it’s unclear whether he’s actually seen the e-mails themselves because, of course, Ross doesn’t say. We’ll assume Shaffer is responding to Ross’ iteration of the anonymously attributed direct quote of the indirect quote of the paraphrased presumed translation taken out of context. And this is what Lt Col Shaffer says:

“It sounds like code words.”

Never give up, never surrender

2009-11-20T01:38:00.002-05:00

Of course, it’s WorldNetDaily.

Men married to smart women live longer

2009-11-19T11:52:00.002-05:00

Swedish scientists have the proof!

Mr. Nearing, aspiring chef and reformed food sanitation scoffer, learned this the hard way when I solved the mystery of his repeated bouts of salmonella poisoning.

Do we have to argue about abortion over our Lucky Charms?

2009-11-17T13:03:00.003-05:00

It’s 8 something in the morning and Morning Joe brings out the hedgehog-headed Rep. Bart Stupak to discuss abortion.

Zap.

FOX News has some twitchy-eyed bogeyman on to tell us that a civil trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed means certain death -- of New Yorkers, not KSM.

Zap.

CNN’s got something on about the possible sex-trafficking death of a little girl in one of the Carolinas -- does it make any difference which one?

Zap.

The local news is giving us live coverage of some horrific concrete-divider launched flying car accident on some 1950s designed highway.

Zap.

Now CNN is promoting a story about why scientists are taking cinema apocalyptica -- in this case, 2012 -- very seriously. Shouldn’t these scientists be working on stuff for the upcoming techno-cornucopian triumphalism exhibit?

Come on guys. Whatever happened to “happy news” -- you know, the stuff that got us through the 70s before we all discovered cocaine?

I finally settle on a rebroadcast of some monster truck competition. It is a thing of beauty.

Things I just learned I didn't know

2009-11-15T19:00:00.003-05:00

Baron Georg von Trapp, the patriarch of The Sound of Music family, was first married to Agathe Whitehead, granddaughter of the inventor of the modern self-propelled torpedo, Robert Whitehead.

(Via)

Adhesive-backed hate

2009-11-15T07:50:00.002-05:00

This seemingly innocent bumpersticker (available from CafePress) has been stirring up chatter on wingnut sites. Here’s the psalm in its entirety.

Here are the lines the wingnuts say they are joking about:

8 May his days be few;
may another take his place of leadership.

And here are the lines that immediately follow:

9 May his children be fatherless
and his wife a widow.