operation: fuck yourself
so, this is from a way, way left website, but i think they actually might have something here:
White House outlines new "Fuck Yourself" initiative
socialized health care? fuck yourself.
higher taxes? fuck yourself.
terroist? fuck you! (BLAM)
now that is a progressive policy i can get behind.
and on a related note, a local lib talkshow host was making big time hay about this, about once every five freaking seconds mentioning that no profanity was allowed on his show, so "dick cheney, please don't call".
nevermind that kerry has used the f-word every chance he gets, right? i think he said it in church the this weekend. "sorry, senator, no communion for you"...."fuck YOU, father!"
whatever. i thought the whole episode was rather amusing, much ado about nothing. i've seen them all think it in press interviews about a thousand times, and sometimes it's just not worth wasing more breath than that. i know profanity is generally the recourse of an inferior argument, but when somebody keeps hounding, wanting to argue about something totally asinine, that simple statement conveys so much more than trying to explain something they will obviously never get anyway.
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trump
i just heard donald trump on the radio arguing against the war.
but...he's rich! he's suppossed to be a limbaugh worshipping hardline republican, one of the guys in the smoky drawing room that "selected" george bush!
i mean, aren't all the rich republicans? like all those hollywood folks and the owners of the new york times and george soros and disney and michael moore and...oh. nevermind.
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trailer trash intelligentsia
stole that title line from
geekward ho, and plan on using it in conversation regularly.
this is rather long, but hopefully interesting. at least, once i get to the point, anyway...i'm going to attempt to describe to you what the atmosphere of a community college is like. if you've never attended one, you're missing an interesting experience. i know what the popular conception of community college is, and while the buildings aren't very pretty and the educational standard probably isn't as high as a "real" college, i'm glad i decided to go there.
breifly, here's why. first off, i don't really need the top of the crop teaching me pre-calculus, i can get just as much out of this as i can from an intro class at a university. and they have it set up so that classes here will transfer to just about anywhere. second, it's cheap as hell. third, the schedule is more flexible since they cater more to workin' folks. and fourth, i needed to get in at the drop of a hat, wanting to get on with my life and not waiting for a lengthy application process.
so, two years here, then, barring any unforseen circumstances, it's off to work on my sheepskin at a real school, potentially even a really good one (i have my best-scenario sights on carnegie mellon, they pull about 10 to 15 people per year coming out of the community college i'm in).
anywho, enough about me, back to the point. i mentioned earlier that i had one well misspent year at a public school, so comparing the atmosphere of this school to a self-proclaimed "party school" is interesting. the most obvious difference is the income disparity, most of the folks there certainly don't have much money. there's a higher minority percentage, a higher handicapped and esl percentage, and the average i.q. is probably lower than at a university. that's the surface stuff. the diversity goes much deeper, in my english class alone we have two high school kids (yeah, that cute girl across the room is 16), a bunch in their mid to late twenties, some with kids, and a retired port authority driver with four grandkids going back to school because she wants to work with children. also in the same class, we have the usual american whites, browns and blacks, as well as an indian (like india indian, not "native american"), a woman from somewhere in eastern europe, and a guy from ireland. i'm not normally big on the whole diversity for diversity's sake thing, but that group makes for some interesting conversations.
but beneath all that, the spirit is different. i remember my time at the university being a very laissez-faire affair, you went to class to pass time between the weekends. the general opinion among a lot of people was that they were at school either to party, or to make friends, or because their parents made them, or just because that's what people are suppossed to do after high school. sure, there were plenty of kids there to actually learn, but i would say overall that motivation often took a back seat to social concerns and societal expectations.
not so at the community college. the underlying emotion in a classroom here is a driven, stubborn, almost desperate need to do what they're there to do, and well. the high school kids are driven by an exceptionally early desire to get ahead, they know what they have to do to be successful and don't intend to let anything stop them. and as for the adults, most seem to know that this is it, their last chance. there's no going back to the parent's house if you don't succeed, no safety net, you're at the point where you move ahead and become a productive person or spend the rest of your life chained to that register at the local quick-e-mart. often there's mouths to feed, jobs to be held, bills to pay, many have passed on or screwed up earlier chances and know it now, have paid for it and now approach school as a mature person looking down the barrell of their future. the sheer grim willful determination is a total 180 from the carefree, lazily cheery atmosphere of a university classroom, and is at once both depressing and inspiring.
if you take the time to notice it, that is. most have something else they need to do.
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we're here from the government, and we're here to help.
i would say shrill hill pretty much summed it up:
We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good
priceless. i want to know who the hell trusts this woman to make their life better, to fix their problems, even more than they trust themselves. that's a sad state of affairs, right there.
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i haven't showered for three weeks
well, not quite that long, but it actually has been a bit now. see, i'm doing school and still working 50+ hours per week, so i'm on the go from about seven a.m. (when i leave for school) until eleven thirty at night(when i get home from work), and even once i get home i still have to eat dinner, and do whatever household stuff i need to, and pay some attention to the geek empress, and maybe even take some time to myself for a bit before going to bed and doing it all over the next day. that dosen't leave much time for luxories like "showering", or "sleeping", or "driving the speed limit".
the point being, thank god i have an extremely slow job, or i would never even have a chance to read my favorite blogs, much less post on my own. hence the lack of material. that, and a lack of anything useful to say lately.
so thanks for reading, i'm amazed (but glad) anybody still stops by here, especially since posting is likely to remain at this level for, oh, the next four years or so. an occasional glance from the blogosphere keeps me happy.
and big ole' yips to
the llamabutchers, the invaluable llamalanche is a big boost to my traffic (and my ego). if you're reading this, you probably got here from there, so you don't need me to tell you that a daily dose of bespeckeled llama is reccommended by the fda to prevent cancer, stupidity, and myxomatosis.
besides,
i think this is probably one of the nicest things anybody's ever said of me. i think.
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delusions of obscurity
Which Historical Lunatic Are You?From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.
now i'm going to go do it again and see if i can get someone i've actually heard of, and who is more...well, more arkham-crazy, and less of that weird guy drooling on himself on the bus.
via
ambient irony.
update: well, that's better. after some fiddlin, i got caligula, which is much crazier.
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it's bush's fault
has anybody else noticed that for folks on the left, especially ones that don't really follow the news, seem to blame every single ill in this country on bush?
a coworker yesterday was bitching about how much our company's health care plan sucks, which it does. then she started reminiscing about how great her health care plan at an old job was, but, you know, "that was when clinton was in office."
in another conversation about pittsburgh's current financial crisis, someone felt the need to bring up the "bush keeps saying the economy is getting better, but i don't see it". i wanted to choke him. i know this seems obvious to most, but...1. bush dosen't have anything to do with pittsburgh, it's the idiot democrat mayor that's been doing his best to drive this city into the ground for years, and b. the economy *is* getting better, numbskull.
abu ghraib: bush held the leash. dead civilians in iraq: bush fired the gun. a beheaded prisoner: bush may as well have held the knife. 9/11: bush flew the airplane.
somebody the other day blamed the fact that my army recruiter lied about a few things to me when i enlisted on bush. huh? again, with the obvious: a. recruiters lie, it's what they do, 2. bush has certainly never heard of either me or my recruiter, and iii. i enlisted in 1998. in pennsylvania. nobody here had ever heard of george w. then either.
i guess it's some sort of victimization thing, they need a villian to blame the problems in their own life on (because it certainly isn't their own fault if something sucks in their life). and it isn't pc or goes against their preconcieved ideas of the way life works to blame larger problems on radical muslims, or the dems, or the french, or whoever is actually to blame.
but it freaks me right out, none the less. i stubbed my toe, evil chimp. i got fired for showing up drunk at work, damn bush. the shitter just overflowed and now i have to mop up, those evil republicans.
people are weird.
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beware the zombocalypce!
it's the day after
28 days later. the
resident evil is out and
the living dead are amassing outiside your door. what do you do?
obviously, you grab the largest caliber handgun nearby, and break out your copy of the
zombie survival guide.
what? you don't have a zombie survival guide?
you better learn to like the tase of brains then, i guess.
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the best video game. ever.
via
asv,
i'm putting
this link here as much so that i can find it later as for sharing it, because it was on michele's front page so everybody has allready seen it.
and because, in my mind, the first zelda is the absolute pinnacle of video games. i've seen and played a lot since, and found a lot that i like, but absolutely nothing touches the original zelda.
when i was a kid, my brother, my dad and i would play this game over, and over, and over. it got to the point where we could beat the game in a few hours, without dying once.
the underlying creativity and ingenuity under that simple eight bit, two dimensional hood lasts forever for those of us who were still kids in the mid-to-late eighties, and probably for alot of our parents as well.
and, hell, it's just plain a fun game, what else do you need?
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word geek
despite my horrible spelling and grammar on this page, i have a fascination with the intricacies of the english language. i haven't used my ability with words (or lack thereof) much since school, since the army dosen't exactly require high sat's and the one year of college i did have was extremely misspent. that's actually one of the points of this blog, to get writing again. which is sortof working, though i obviously don't write often enough
anyway, i'm one of those people that can't be without my s&w "elements of style." i even took it to the desert with me. didn't use it much (right now i can't even remember if the period should be inside the quotes there or not), but i had it. and i love safire's on words column.
there isn't really a point to this bit of rambling...it was inspired by george will's
column on punctuation, so if you are a word geek as well you ought to check it out. it was, as they say, gr8.
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this website is also owned by fox news, in collusion with halliburton
this article from the new york post about the we're lying ignorant bastards (wlib) radio station is interesting, (which i also found at
ace hq) but i really liked the very last, completely unrelated line:
Fox News Channel is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Post.
earlier in the article, the author had cited an interview bill o'reilly had done that franken had taken issue with. it was a passing referance, i actually had to re-read the story to figure out what fox news had to do with any of it.
the interesting correlation here, for me, is from when when sixty minutes ran infomercials for dick clark's book, presenting them as hard news. they never mention that sixty minutes is owned by the same company that publishes the books, and unless you listen to right-wing radio or read conservative websites you never would have even known about this little piece of journalistic incest.
it's not a huge deal, just good to know that somebody out there has the integrity to publicly disclose stuff like that, even with relatively minor referances such as this one.
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the last time?
i don't have much to add to the discussion of the beheading today, except for condolances for the family, and how many dead bodies does it take before people realize that these are not reasonable people that we are dealing with, no matter how nice we are to them, they will not be happy until we are all dead and all america is nothing but a burned wasteland.
too fucking many dead, allready.
and if it is true that we nailed the guy that did this, great. wish we could've done it 24 hours ago, but personally i cheer every time one of these dirtbags assumes room temprature. it gives me that warm fuzzy feeling knowing that there's one less person out there that wants me dead.
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politics making for odd bedfellows
of course, i guess ideologically, they really aren't that different...
Meanwhile, in the United Arab Emirates, the film [farenheight 9/11]is being offered the kind of support it doesn't need. According to Screen International, the UAE-based distributor Front Row Entertainment has been contacted by organisations related to the Hezbollah in Lebanon with offers of help.
"highly entertaining" -yasser arafat
"best infidel film ever!" -osama bin laden
"a must see for all true followers of allah." -muqtada al-sadr
nothing like doing propaganda for the folks that would love nothing more than to see michael moore's fat ass dangling by the neck from a very, very sturdy tree.
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BUI
someday i'll learn not to blog while under the influence...if i'm not saying something stupid here, i'm bringing down the property value on somebody else's site.
i'm not even going to try to explain the point i was so poorly trying to make (there was one, believe it or not).
i have that "i said
what to the boss's wife!" feeling today, gotta love that.
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time on blogs
i'm pretty sure most bloggers are inherintly narcissistic,
so you may be interested in time magazine's take on blogging. it's a bit lenghty, and probably not anything you don't allready know, but interesting anyway, including the interviews with five real live bloggers at the end (including the media darling wonkette and the puppy blender, among others).
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because all the cool kids are doing it...
favorite fiction characters, some of which have allready been mentioned and some which haven't, in no particular order:
22. i can't remember his name, the main male in "tommyknockers"
11. the man with no name, from the leone trilogy
42. ford prefect
057. deadpool, from the self named comic (and others)
16. the black knight, who always triumphs
32. leatherface, the original
22. drizzt
6. roland, from the dark tower series
20. batman/bruce wayne
46. kieffer sutherland
3. dracula, in all his incarnations, except that stupid van helsing movie and especially in the original and the lugosi version
51. althalus, from the redemption of
15. the marine d.i. in full metal jacket
13. merlyn, whom i was obsessed with in high school
666. satan
52. the walrus, koo koo kachoob
1701. captian picard
1. me
ok, some more seriously than others, addendums to come
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hate the sin, cheer the death of the sinner
remember matthew shepard?
i'm one of those people that believe that homosexuality is pretty much considered a sin if you go strictly by the bible. you can work your way around it, but if you want to call yourself a strict believer in the bible then no amount of relevancy or modern interpretation will help. as far as the good book is concerned, it's against the rules.
having said that, celebrating and dancing on the grave of a good person that happened to practice that variety of sin is just as much of a sin.
"god hates fags" as a slogan? a timer ticking down how long matthew shepard has been in hell? an actual church wanting to put up a monument in a public space to the day he "entered into hell?"
sorry folks, that's just sick. we've all been "sinners" at one point or another. celebrating the vicious, disgusting murder of another human being is not only morbid, not only misguided, i'm gonna channel w here and say it's downright evil.
found it
here while surfing blogger pages. i think me and this guy would probably disagree on alot of stuff, but this sure as shit ain't one of them.
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beautiful lies
a wise man once observed that the world's second oldest profession bears a striking resembelance to the first.
between the photo below, the weeklong "i hated him but he sure was 'popular'" lines, and
now w's glorifying of the clintons, i am inclined to agree.
i know politically that his sacchrine niceness just makes hillary's next shreiking hysterical tirade seem that much more shrill, but even still. i thought the saying was "if you can't think of something nice to say, don't say anything at all", not "if you can't think of something nice to say, just make some shit up."
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catastrophic rainbows watch
the weather radio just gave a "severe thunder" warning.
now what the hell am i suppossed to do in preperation for "severe thunder"? plug my ears?
unless mother nature is planning on rearranging my living room by moving it to another state, i don't really need a warning on it, thank you very much.
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that's just odd
that proves it, gorby was a tool of the vrwc all along.
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"offer good in the u.s. only"
is there taco bells in mexico?
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the other michelle
so, i know one is one "l" and one is two, but now that there's two big-time michele's running around the blogosphere, how are we supposed to distinguish when giving attribution?
i'm way too lazy to keep typing full names.
anywho, i found this at
michelle's place, leading me to the natural question that i'm sure you're all thinking:
where do i get an application?
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zero to lib in three minutes
one of the things i like about the radio is that since they're trying to cram the news into those hourly breaks where they have seven minutes for headlines, weather, traffic, and the so-important "male enhancement" ads. there's little space for bias, left or right, in that timeframe, so you actual get some straightforward, if superficial, reporting for once.
so maybe i'm hypersensitive, but last night, the news article went something like this: "colin powell today defended the numbers used by the administration that show decrease in the number of terrorist attacks. the bush administration has been touting these numbers as success in the war on terror, but two professors discovered that they didn't include november and december. when these months are included, there is actually an increase."
it was alot longer than that, it actually ran probably 45 seconds or so, but does anybody else see what's missing here? the news item is that powell was out defending the numbers they used, but
they didn't include a single thing that he said. the entire bit was what other people have said to attack them, without his defense.
so, i don't know, maybe i'm oversensitive, but that struck me as being remarkably biased.
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and if you don't read ace
then what the hell are you doing here? he's about as pissed as i've ever seen him, about the red cross. and for good reason.
i have an amusing but unrelated side note about the red cross. while i was stationed at dix in jersey, my paternal grandmother died. in order to get emergency leave, i had to have my dad petition the red cross. when he called them, they told him i don't exist. i had to call them and had one of the most surreal experiences of my life, trying to convince the red cross receptionist on the other end of the line that i do, in fact, exist, i don't give a shit what they get when they run my social i am here and i need to get home, right freaking now. gotta love the beaurocracy.
other than that, the red cross/red crescent seems hell bent on making sure that every dirtbag asshole murderer we find lives better than we do.
to which i say, fuck them, and their high horse. i know they do alot of good work, both here and abroad, but i wish they could just shut up and do it allready, and stay out of politics. how does standing up for the rights of someone that has killed thousands improve the human condition?
maybe instead they could focus on getting relief to iraqis injured in attacks by "freedom fighters". just for once i would love to see them come down on the wackjobs indsicriminatly killing civilians as hard as they come down on the u.s.
until then, fuck 'em. they don't want us, the people of this country, then we don't need them.
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we've just outlawed iraq, we will begin eating their brains in five minutes.
i know you've allready all seen this, i found it on allah, but damn, that's one of the funniest fuckin things i've ever seen.
two of my heros together, romero and reagan. i wish i knew how to work photoshop, this is a classic just begging for photos.
BRAAAAAAAINS!
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morrissey
michelle says it much better than i, but i love the smiths, and morrissey's later work. people make fun of him and the cure because they are so successful and yet sing such sappy "woe is me" songs, but if you've ever felt like a truly pathetic individual in your life, then there's a song there for you.
and morrissey does it with a sense of humor (see: hang the deejay), which just makes it that much better.
to quote michelle:
But no matter how many goth poems you’ve written, no matter how many times you sighed and declared your life to be meaningless, no matter how many times unrequited love slapped you in the face, you could never, ever pull off patheticness quite like Morrissey.
In the beginning notes of HSIN, we’re there with him. Son, heir, vulgar shyness. If you’ve ever been a wallflower (and if you hero-worshipped Morrissey, I assume you have), you nodded along to those weirds.
You shut your mouth, how can you say, I go about things the wrong way. I am human and I need to be loved, just like everyone else does.
hey, you know what? if i stopped listening to every musician that hates gwb, i'd have no music left, except ted nugent. and don't get me wrong, but one can only listen to sweaty teddy sing cat scratch fever so many times. most of the bands i like hate most of the stuff i stand for, see kmfdm for a good example. but if they put out good music that isn't overly political, then they can take a few of my evil capitalist dollars for it. it's worth it.
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reporting reagan
i have a few thoughts on the rash of people bitching that reagan's death is overreported.
first, in the category of "methinks they doth protest too much": i've heard alot of people whining that they think it's unfair that the right can prather on and on about how great reagan was, but that they are not allowed to talk about his bad points. but i am yet to hear anyone on the right say anything negative about someone who wishes to (politically, not personally) criticise reagan's administration. in fact, the only criticism i've heard is that these people refuse to say what they're really thinking, they feel the need to lie to us instead. if you have something relevant or substantive to say that is less than positive about reagan, or about bush in comparison to reagan, say it allready. if you can think of a way, somehow, that kerry is the actual heir to the reagan legacy, go for it. but quit bitching about how you aren't allowed to say anything, it's your program, say whatever you like. just be ready to back it up, and if you devolve into pointless namecalling and bashing what many consider a dead hero, then expect to get called on it.
second, in the "there's other more important things to talk about" category: again, it's your program. you want to to talk about something else, go for it. of course, there isn't much really going on out there they can use, so all this plea is "can we stop talking about how great reagan was, we hated him then and just want to get back to pictures of nekkid iraqis." and they know they can't do that, because it will reveal them as the partisan hacks they are, and because the people aren't ready to get back to bashing america in this wave of patriotism yet. but hey, it's your show, you want to go on re-rehashing grabanarab prison and helliburton and bushitler, go for it, just watch your ratings go through the floor.
finally, in the category of "oh shit i just sait what i really think out loud", dan rather: "Once
the herd starts moving in one direction, it's very hard to turn it, even slightly," Rather said. "Nationally,
the herd has grown tremendously."
that's right, you stupid cattle you, i want to talk about naked prisoner pyramids, how dare you spend your time revering a president i hated anyway!
but don't blame dan, he's just mad because "the herd" is spooked by the big black storm clouds around his show, and are furiously stampeding in the other direction.
with props to
4rwws for the blather quote.
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a rebuttal to a rebuttal to a rebuttal...
the washington post writes a story about those big mean campaign ads being run by the bush administration. that's fair, except they krughman-esquely forget a number of ads run by kerry attacking bush, and misstate, misquote, or mislead the reader in trying to prove unfairness or inaccuracy by the bush campaign.
ace has some commentary on what the ombudsman for wapo has to say about it's blatant overwhelming partisinship...favoring bush.
and
byron york has the numbers for all the misleading statements and outright lies is this piece of "objective" (don't laugh) journalism.
oh, as they say,
that liberal media.
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the gipper
RIP, President Reagan
i was born in 1981, so you could say i didn't exactly follow reagan's presidency. which is a shame, because i wish i knew more about the president that is the architect of the political movement of which i am a part. i have a book of his quotations and have read alot of the history of his presidency, but reading the history is nowhere near the same as living the history.
but i have an understanding of what he did for politics in this country, especially for bringing the right into fruition as a current political force in this country. he embodies what many conservatives believe to be the ideal.
and i understand what he did for the world, being the primary force in bringing about the downfall of the blight called communism. that single act, along with all of the other things he did, raised the bar on the human condition both in america and around the world more than anything else since ww2
it saddens me that i never really knew him, only what i read of him in books. and it saddens me even more that he is gone. but i am very glad that he lived, that he did the things he did, that he had the courage to say what he believed, said it clearly, and that he was there to help build the better world in which we are living.
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your mother's army
via
curmodgeonly & skeptical (whose entire site is not work safe)
kerry has named
claudia kennedy as a military advisor. i didn't recognize the name, but it turns out that she is likely to be single handedly responsible for every single mushy namby pamby wussified army policy and program i have ever been subjected to. pretty well illustrates how he envisions the military should be.
if he gets elected, it will just make me that much happier i get out soon. as if clinton didn't frig it up enough...
and on a lighter not, while you're over at c&s, check
this out. perhaps kerry should ditch kennedy and name daryl as an advisor, he'd do much better among swing voters.
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evangelical environmentalism
found it in this also-worth-reading comment thread at ace's.
i don't know much about michael chriton's politics, but judging by the books i have read of his i had always thought of him as more of a lefty. the tone of human arrogance causing massive destruction via science always smacked of liberalism to me, but i could be mistaken.
having said that, he has
an excellent piece on how environmentalism has become the religion of many these days. you know the type, absolutely invincible to facts, always blathering some odd statistics that show that every time we fart it kills a tree in the rainforest, etc, etc, etc. and it is a shame, because the sheer nuttiness of it turns so many off what is an important issue, that needs to be discussed rationally. it's hard to do when the picture of an environmentalism is an anti-capitalist stoner college dropout.
anyway, his piece is one of the best articles on the modern environmental movement i've read, he pleads for the return of environmentalism from space cadet nutters to the realm of real science, where we can dispassionately find out what is actually going on and realistically do something about it.
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gratutious bird blogging
meet the newest member of the geek menagerie, a pearl cockatiel. added to the existing critters, one chinchilla, and one beta fish. plus, the most ferocious of all, my girlfriend. all of us living happily in our two bedroom filing cabinet.
the bird is really cool, and they're suppossed to make great pets, although this one has been nothing but a total dick since we got him. i wanted to post a pic of a pissed off tiel ruthlessly attacking somebody's finger, because that would be a little closer to reality. but we're working with him, i think he just misses his buddies at the pet store and everything. at least, i hope that's it, and i just didn't get a bitchy birdie. i'm sure enough overdone sacchrine lovin' and he'll come around eventually.
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