Scorpio Killer Humanism

Ted Turner said in an interview recently that it was "te[(rrible?) rrific?]...good that (American) troops are committing suicide (in greater numbers than die in combat)." Fuck him and his mother.

 Ted Turner

In recent years I've generally tried to live life with a tolerant, free-market state of mind and as strongly as I rejected Turner's words emotionally, I felt trapped philosophically into giving them credence. If our soldiers are so demoralized, we will recoil and disfavor decisions which might put them in that position. The market of humanity will bias toward peace. And that's good, right? Wait, that can't be right, because that would mean I agree with Ted Turner and he is lower than shit. Luckily that isn't what he said.

A school bus is loaded with children. The bus driver changed a tire the day before and left one of the lugs loose. The tire finally comes off and every inhabitant dies in a crash. Is it good that those children died so that another driver double-checks their own lugs?

NO.

But if a lesson is learned - good. After the evening news, maybe a few people will go out and kick the tires before tomorrow's commute. Check the fluids, get a tune-up. Maybe just be more thoughtful, if only for a day. THAT is good.

Is it good that people will lose their jobs, some even unwittingly as a result of their own vote (for a traitor) in an election?

NO.

But if a lesson is learned - good. Maybe they will sour on the regulation that cost them their temp work or shut down their mine. They might blame the politician and party that passed it. THAT is good.

Is it good that more soldiers are committing suicide than die in combat?

NO.

Ted Turner is an asshole.

(There will be future posts on this subject very soon and I am open for debate in the comments.)

Editor's Note: I know damn well that is not Ted Turner.

Big Bird Already Finding New Work

Today Team Obama tweeted out a picture of a child holding a sign lacking a much-needed apostrophe so I put Big Bird to work.

Photo of the day: twitter.com/BarackObama/st…
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 7, 2012

Exceeding Failure

Obama's America 2012

This is a filmmaker. In America.

What is permissible to say about this?

EXCLUSIVE: Jason Dufner - Unburdened By Destiny

Legendary comedian Norm McDonald has quickly become a bookie's saboteur while hypnotizing the Golf world (and indeed the rest) with masterful sessions of exploration and cold reason, arriving invariably at models of ordained futures. Only a few short days ago he predicted Rory McIlroy's victory at the BMW Championship down to the stroke at -20. Rightly so, his knowledge of next weekend's Tour Championship has been highly sought after and he has delivered this evening...a full 10 days ahead of schedule:

Jason Dufner will win The Tour Championship.
— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) September 13, 2012

 Jason Dufner 3-time winner on the PGA Tour.

Freshly aware of his destiny, Dufner's first response to next weekend's victory was coveted by the Golf press and I am proud to exclusively report his reaction:

@obamuh @normmacdonald naw feels good. Should I go? Or is the check in the mail. Could use the rest before cup week
— Jason Dufner (@JasonDufner) September 14, 2012

Congratulations.

UPDATE: Thanks to @NormMacdonald and OpieRadio for linking to my story!

Just A Teleprompter II

Interdasting...

Demon Veep

Ben at Ace of Spaces HQ tweeted about wanting Paul Ryan and his Mom do some campaign commercials so I threw out an idea which he liked so now I'm going to riff on it. I'm open to improvements, especially the granny's subdued/distant monologue.

(Deep link via http://orangepunch.ocregister.com/)

IDEA 1

Open with a shot of a child's bedroom and an adult black man sleeping on his right side in a child's bed. Next shot is the back of the man's head, which reveals a massive and characteristic ear, as sheep begin to jump over his head. He coos with approval and drifts off to sleep.

A wide shot of what appears to be a man pushing Granny in a wheelchair toward the edge of a cliff. Tight shot on the back of a man's figure with a delicate, fuzzy sheep head and neck, trembling inside a broad and distinguished suit, bouncing as we hear the bouncing of the wheelchair over rocks. [Our dreamer lets out moans of approval throughout]. We now sense the void in front of DemonVeep and his passenger as they slow to a stop at the precipice.

The camera halts, and begins an orbit around DemonVeep which will reveal his face. As the orbit begins, we hear small talk from the elderly passenger about her grand-kids and their activities. Her voice is slightly distant and the orbit and music imply a sinister revelation of the head, but we hear her. "...and the kids are fine..." The orbit completes, and we stare DemonVeep in his terrible eyes. [Our dreamer is giddy with delight] "I'm just glad to know there's enough money left for them. Thanks to..."

DemonVeep shrugs a cold, comical shrug, and with it, dumps granny off the cliff.

"...youuuu..."

[Maniacal laughter]

Maybe a dummy shot where the dummy is obvious. Maybe not, those can be dumb.

Below, a jogging/bow-hunting Paul Ryan is jogging/stalking by and catches Granny heroically, then goes about his business.

[Our dreamer wakes up with a terrible cry]

If possible, it would be cool to sample Vader's infamous "NOOOOOOOOOOO!" to express the cry but any jolt of panic will do.

IDEA 2

My initial tweet about this actually had Evil Paul Ryan with glowing red eyes pushing granny off the cliff and Good Paul Ryan catching her but I totally forgot about that once I started writing. Everything else is the same.

IDEA 3

Ok, I departed almost entirely from my original tweet. Take out the man in the child's bed intro, the moans of approval and the laughter, and just start with the wide shot of the cliff. Evil Paul Ryan and Good Paul Ryan. Obama wakes from dream.

IDEA 4

Seeing Paul Ryan actually catch the Granny might be off-putting and little too much pre-success-hero-worship of the brand we saw for Barry. Maybe instead, since we see Granny forcibly launched down the face, we just see her adjusting her skirt (subliminally now able to stand) and Paul Ryan is already 20 feet away, on about his business. There is no heroic catch and stupid exchange of grins, just a safe Granny and a jogging/stalking-again Paul Ryan.

The Four Judges Theory

I'm not going to spend much time on this but it's a valid theory about the Supreme Court's Obamacare decision and I haven't seen anyone toss it out.

The most popular theory at this point seems to be that Roberts is a fame-whoring shit-ass. Another theory is that Roberts is running a risky yet genius gambit which will lead to the political defeat of Obamacare and arguably a more republican death for this anti-freedom disgrace.

But when I considered the genius theory, I supposed that the genius must also have dawned on the Four justices who dissented. Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Kennedy could not all be blind to the legendary finesse, this gambit of guile. But fidelity to this vision would also mean a 9-0 decision and a fatal rebuke of the sensibilities of the Tea Party and millions of other liberty-loving Americans who are nearly unhinged at this point.

Which is exactly why Four conspired to dissent.

The leaks from the deliberations painted a simple illusion of resentment.

The chatter from the Left before the verdict was whether a 5-4 decision with an activist Roberts could ever be legitimate. They were scared. These baggers might abort their deformed, mutant love child of a law and have a party. We were scared, too. What if Kennedy pulls a Kennedy and drowns us all? No one expected Four activist judges in a dissent to salvage the American psyche - until repeal.

Hey Girl

Obama Ate A Dog

You know Obama ate a dog, right? AllahPundit summed up the story nicely at Hot Air thusly:

"See, I thought the dog-eating thing was a surreal goof on the left’s moronic preoccupation with Romney’s dog..."

Team Barry was actually going to give Romney grief about his dog surviving a family vacation and instead are buried under an avalanche of infinite and unflattering one-liners. Not only is Obama a disgraced failure, he is also now a bona fide joke. I actually had a back and forth with the author of the story on Twitter a couple of days before he became god-king of the internet. Anyway, there are some awesome photoshops out there and I'm just piling onto the bonfire.

Telebone

A couple of weeks ago I told rdbrewer on Twitter that I had a vision of the future and asked him to think "interactive pornography".  It totally slipped my mind and then ironically AceofSpadesHQ had a bit about sex robots in tonight's Overnight Thread and reminded me that I owed rdbrewer that vision. A vision far nobler than animatronic masturbation.

For the life of me I can't find the video (or any video) that inspired the vision.  There were a few people standing around a 3-D model of a skyscraper or hotel or some kind of complex and a fabric descended on the model and sort of vacuum-sealed around it. This is smart fabric or nano fabric, so the dimensions of the fabric are calculated and saved. Halfway around the world, another architect needs the model yesterday and, poof, a 3-D model pops up on their smart fabric printer/modeler. Wherever I saw it, it made an impression.

So obviously I sexualized it almost immediately and thought about a porn star pumping into a sleeve and on the other end a paying customer of any persuasion is getting it from their favorite buck. And then I thought about hundreds of women getting nailed simultaneously by the same stud, who is watching dozens of them live on webcam on a massive display of monitors. Every motion of every session could be recorded and replayed at will.

Female porn stars could wear smart fabric inserts which paying customers could access from anywhere on earth.

I don't know if this is trans-sex or tele-sex or what but at some point in the future it seems viable.

A married couple could use it. They record themselves (with smart fabric) having anal sex, he now enters her vaginally and activates the smart fabric so she receives the anal session and now double penetration.

On a more somber note, widows/widowers could remain intimate with departed lovers.

So yah, that was the vision.

Divided by O

Amazon Is Playing Games

I wrote a review for the Communist Manifesto on March 2, 2012.  Amazon sent a confirmation email on March 2, 2012 letting me know my review was live on their site. It wasn't listed on my profile as my most recent review so I thought maybe there was a lag so I gave it a couple of days - no luck. This morning I just happened to be looking for comments on past reviews and there was my Communist Manifesto review from March 2, 2012...dated June 20, 2011!

You might be wondering why that matters as long as my review was accepted and tallied. The problem is, Amazon keeps a running list of recent reviews on the front page of each product. They feature the top 3 reviews directly under the product, then 10 of the most recent off to the right side.  The very bottom review of the 10 most recent was posted three months ago...meaning that review has stayed on the front page for three months waiting for someone to come along, write a new review, and bump it to another page. Which means my review had a good chance of being on the front page for no less than 3 months! And clearly that was unacceptable to someone at Amazon.

My review submitted on March 2, 2012:

1/5 stars selfish drivel

it takes a soft mind to believe legalizing theft and destroying private property has a prosperous future. had the authors been gainfully employed they might have viewed the world less selfishly. there is no more solipsistic ideology in the world than what is put forth on these pages.

From my email, alerting me my review from 'June 20, 2011' had been accepted.

UPDATE: Welcome to the morons from Ace of Spades. Not sure how you got here but thanks for blowing up my stats.

UPDATE: Same day, just adding some shenanigans that put Amazon on my radar in the first place. Full disclosure, I'm currently a satisfied yet suspicious prime member. They've lost so much money to me in free two-day shipping that I almost feel sorry for them.

At least as early as March 12, 2011, I tried to stream the Ayn Rand documentary A Sense of Life through Amazon's instant video on my television (a service that I also pity them for offering). Sadly, I got a content error and couldn't watch it. Luckily, every single other movie I wanted to watch worked fine. But even from that first attempt I was suspicious because it wasn't happening in a vacuum. At the same time, there was buzz for the upcoming Atlas Shrugged movie and people, such as myself, might just have wanted to prime their pumps for the big show with a little perspective. So I tweeted my disgust. I continued to tweet my disgust until March 21, 2011, at which time the movie's content continued to err but I stopped bitching for whatever reason. All this time, anticipation for the movie's April 15, 2011 release was building and there was probably a larger than normal interest in all things Rand. For at least nine days using Amazon's instant video service, that was a futile desire. I ended up watching A Sense of Life some time in November of 2011 when Atlas Shrugged came out on video.

Probably another update or two coming up.

UPDATE: Over the past year I've probably bought a dozen economics books. Most recent was Hayek's The Fatal Conceit so an economics theme runs through Amazon's book recommendations. There I saw Adam Smith's masterpiece The Wealth of Nations looking for a home. I scrolled down to revel in some 5-star reviews because it sends the purchase off on a good note. And what do you know? The only displayed review in the editorial review section, before the general reviews, is this turd by former socialist Robert L. Heilbroner:

"Adam Smith's enormous authority resides, in the end, in the same property that we discover in Marx: not in any ideology, but in an effort to see to the bottom of things."

Nevermind that Marx was trying to see the bottom of a bottle. Nevermind whatever tenuous comparisons can be made between the men's motivations. The Wealth of Nations was published over 40 years before Marx was born and if either man deserves to be named in the others editorial review section, it is Adam Smith. But you won't see him there, you will only see this olive branch:

"...Marx and Engels's critique of capitalism and its deleterious effect on all aspects of life, from the increasing rift between the classes to the destruction of the nuclear family, has proven remarkably prescient..."

Chupacabra

Today's Overnight Open Thread over at Ace of Spades HQ reminded me of something I took notes on a few months back and didn't end up writing about.  The first topic of that thread is about AMC's show, Walking Dead, and some asinine liberal commentary from the goatsuckers at the Washington Post.

I missed the first season entirely and only heard about it as the second season was gearing up last October. The premiere had me hooked and I thought I'd be settling in for some appointment television for the foreseeable future.  Some of the criticism about deeper-than-necessary character development and low body count was justified, but if the characters were a bunch of rape deniers/enablers, why would I care if anyone survived? I liked the show so much that I even watched the live aftershow, Talking Dead, for no additional benefit.

Everything was going along just fine...until Episode 5, Chupacabra.

Norman Reedus as Daryl Dixon

Daryl is sort of a backwoods, survival type of southerner. His last name is also either a play on Dixie, or just taken straight from the Mason-Dixon Line.  Either way, he's from the south, so his ancestors owned slaves and he has probably lynched someone or burned a cross. In this episode, we find Daryl injured after a fall, trying to climb back up a hill.  I think he has just fallen back down the hill after getting near the top.  As he lies defeated in the mud, his deceased brother, Merle, played by Michael Rooker (the other guy in Days of Thunder), appears to him in a vision. Merle is sass-talkin' Daryl to get his ass up again, basically.  This is the pertinent part of their exhange:


DARYL: I ain't nobody's bitch

MERLE: You're a joke, is what you are. Playing errand boy to a bunch of pansy-asses, niggers, and Democrats.

I finished the episode, but I swore to never watch another.  It isn't enough that Daryl is a southerner...the ghost of his brother has to use slurs to make it authentic. And to top it off, 'Democrats' rounds out the chain, to imply that Daryl and Merle are Republicans.  That 'ni**gers' wasn't edited for television either - we got to look Merle right in the face and hear him say it. Nevermind that Republicans, of all colors, freed the slaves, and still fight to this day for equality. This exchange is just another incremental brainwash of Americans into believing that it wasn't southern Democrats who fought to keep slavery, or who enacted Jim Crow laws, but it was Republicans all this time.

So, like I said, I finished the episode, grumbling, and looked forward to Talking Dead afterwards because it's a live show and thought the use of 'ni**ers' might come up.  Not a peep.

Aisha Tyler

This is Aisha Tyler: a comedian, actress, and the first black guest to appear on the Talking Dead (maybe the last, too, I also stopped watching the aftershow).  I'm not sure why she appeared after this episode - probably a big horror buff.  She has some writing credits to her name so she might be on the Walking Dead team. She and the host, Chris Hardwick, may be old friends, and someone cancelled on him and they needed a filler. I don't know.  But it's not like they just threw her to the wolves; she shared the couch with Michael Rooker (the other guy in Cliffhanger).

Michael Rooker

Dumb (Crowder) and Dumber (Gawker)

So last night at CPAC, Steven Crowder and Chris Loesch performed a rap song called "Mr. America".  It's a catchy, spoofy little number and could be tossed into a dance mix with most people being none the wiser.  But there is a section towards the end that, I think, has justifiably attracted some ire and that is the focus of this post. 

At the 2:49 mark of this music video (the performance video at CPAC plays the same track), the music stops and Crowder unfunnily defends an intentional near-homophone of the n-word.  The relevant stupidity begins around the 2:45 mark:



Yes, 'knickers'. Dumb dumb dumb dumb DUMB! If there was no break in the music, and therefore no spotlight on 'knickers' whatsoever (except the leg-point), any lies by the agenda-driven media (Gawker) would be laughable. But after Crowder utters 'knickers', the music does break, and Crowder protests to the black producer that he can, in fact, say 'knickers'. This is not a dog whistle, this is a bull horn. Notice the music didn't stop at 0:27 to clarify that 'principles' is not in fact 'principals'. 'I can say knickers' belies Crowder's intentions and is what earns him his place as Dumb in my metaphor.  And immature and reckless in addition.


Now for the reliably Dumber.

Crowder has just laid an obnoxious gift at the feet of whichever leftist coyote wants to pick him over. Instead, the ethical luminaries at Gawker decided to lie flatly and claim Crowder said 'ni**er' with the headline, Awful White Rappers Drop The N Word at CPAC, Receive Applause.  Big Journalism has rightfully called for a retraction, and when Gawker does (because they surely must?), Crowder will be granted more victim status than he certainly deserves.  And from Gawker's point of view, with Crowder willingly serving red meat on a silver platter, it does not get any DUMBER.


Evil destroys even itself - Aristotle

UPDATE: Edited for multiple 'Chowders'

In reply to comments I've been getting:

I say all of this as a fan of Crowder's videos and interviews when he legitimately engages and informs his subjects with the principles of freedom.  Let's just imagine for a moment that Crowder is in the same league as Chappell and South Park. His work is political and he is trying to defeat a traitorous president in the most important election of our lifetimes. The future of freedom is literally in the balance.  For better or worse, Crowder is an ambassador of the Tea Party and/or the conservative movement. That traitorous president is black. And you want Crowder's talent pissed away on what is essentially ni**er jokes? Last time I checked, Chappell and South Park don't explicitly endorse a political ideology.  When they piss people off, THEY piss people off.  A conservative conference is not collateral in painfully unfunny sensitivity-baiting as you might put it. Do you REALLY think the leftwing, scumbag media is going to learn a lesson if WE start acting like scumbags? No, sorry. And my beef isn't even really with 'knickers' so much as 'I can say knickers'. That is skull-cracking stupidity, in my opinion.  If you really must race-bait, try subtlety. If you really must dog whistle, don't show people your fucking dog whistle.