Thursday, April 14, 2011

Our Wacky World—4/14/2011

Click for more lady-like pics
Fox News—America's most trusted source of soft-core porn:

“...THE FOX NEWS BLONDE BIMBOS WILL REVEAL MORE THAN JUST THE CURRENT LIES AND BULLCRAP ABOUT LIBERALS!! IN FACT SKIRTS WILL BE HIGHER AND LEGS WILL BE OILER!!!"

Chris Bearde

"Keemonta Peterson told police she watched some YouTube videos about circumcisions. Then around midnight on the morning of Oct. 24 - using a box cutter as a scalpel and a pair of pliers as a tourniquet - she began the procedure."


Ex-Senator Rick "man on dog" Santorum opines about the dangers of addiction to decent healthcare:
“Think about how they view you,” he told the crowd of Republicans. “They view you no different than the drug dealer views the little kid in the school yard. They want to get you hooked, they want to get you dependent. They want to get you relying upon them for your wellbeing [sic]. And once they’ve satisfied you, giving them [sic] that drug, that narcotic, then you’ll be reliant on them and, by the way, you’ll also be less than what God created you to be.”
Crooks & Liars

God wants you to get sick and die in misery. Got it? I give his grasp of the language a C.


Christian teen sensation and lesbian impersonator Justin Bieber is not leaving it to the Almighty to watch over his pretty ass:
"The children had disembarked from a school bus just before it was hit by a Hamas rocket last Thursday, critically wounded a teen and moderately wounding the bus driver... Bieber reportedly refused to meet the children, which led Netanyahu to cancel the meeting."
Haaretz

"While Disneyland sells itself as the ‘The Happiest Place On Earth!’ and Alton Towers goes with ‘The Fun Never Stops!’, Hezbollah’s Resistance Park, up on a hill in Southern Lebanon, greets visitors with the promise that ‘Israel Is Weaker Than A Spider’s Web!’"
Viceland (includes pictures)

"Newly released Federal Aviation Administration documents and audiotapes shed a scary new light on a bizarre incident late last year during which U.S. Senator James Inhofe landed his Cessna on a closed runway at a south Texas airport, scattering construction workers who ran for their lives as the politician’s plane hopscotched over them and six vehicles."
The Smoking Gun

Bullshit. Anyone else would have had their pilot's license license revoked. No questions asked.

Click for treatment pictures
'The "treatment" for the emphysema sufferer includes the blowing of smoke from "divine cigarettes" infused with "nanotechnology" to remove their cancer-causing "free radicals", through a tube into her diseased lungs... Smoke is also blown into her ears and nose, while she holds a cup of aspirin over her right eye. The Phil Collins music, it seems, has no curative properties.'
Yahoo News

"An Indonesian lawmaker who helped pass a tough anti-pornography law resigned Monday after he got caught watching sexually explicit videos on his computer during a parliamentary debate."
CBS (picture)


When it comes to vaccinating children there is no "personal choice":
'Blue Mountain School, an “alternative” private school in Floyd County, had to shut down for a full week after twenty-three of its forty-five students came down with pertussis. According to the Times, every single one of those children was unvaccinated.'
Seth Mnookin

"Thousands of copies of a new book about the Catholic Church's teachings will have to be pulped after a translation error suggested that the Vatican had radically changed its views on contraception."
Telegraph


Keep the pumps running:
"Hall says his silo will have a military-grade security system and electricity powered by geothermal energy and wind turbines, as well as a theater, workout area, and pool with a waterfall. Not a bad place to wait out the apocalypse."
Wired

"Evan Mills, who works at Lawrence Livermore Labs but conducted the study in his own time, estimates that indoor pot growing accounts for 1 per cent of energy usage in the United States, with each spliff representing two pounds of CO2 emission."
The Register

Who would Jesus pwn?

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Fashion class

Here's a post from 2009 by inside-the-beltway conservative pundit George Will that was just brought to my attention:
'Denim is the infantile uniform of a nation in which entertainment frequently features childlike adults... Seventy-five percent of American "gamers" -- people who play video games -- are older than 18 and nevertheless are allowed to vote... Denim is the clerical vestment for the priesthood of all believers in democracy's catechism of leveling -- thou shalt not dress better than society's most slovenly. To do so would be to commit the sin of lookism -- of believing that appearance matters. That heresy leads to denying the universal appropriateness of everything, and then to the elitist assertion that there is good and bad taste.
Denim is the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances. But the appearances that people choose to present in public are cues from which we make inferences about their maturity and respect for those to whom they are presenting themselves.'
Update: here's the link to the entire daft editorial (why doesn't anyone point stuff like this out?)

Washington Post

Oh dear. Old man Grumpy stopped yelling at the kids to get off his lawn and went inside and watched "King O' The Mountain Of Debt" or "Narcissistic Women Who Have Too Much Money, Failing Looks And No Fucking Brains At All" on cable TV channel #13013.

Mr. Will's Sunday-Morning-Insider-Roundtable opinions are comically out of touch. Ever since the the rise of the "Middle" Class a few centuries back there has been a steady market for ersatz luxury goods.  The Industrial Revolution made it possible for everyone with increasingly abundant money to ape their "betters" with increasingly cheaper imitations. The trend continues although the only real difference today seems to be how far the masses will go into debt to maintain their kids' hi-tech lifestyle and how grandiosely the wealthy overspend all the cash they have. But now this state of affairs has taken a disastrous turn as shabby-chic has now afflicted the Upper Class.

Why are people wearing jeans? Why do middle-aged men buy Harleys? Because they have the cachet of a Bad Boy past that has become acceptable and chic, their edginess worn down by years of desensitization and the onset of rose-colored amnesia. Motorcycle gangs are selling meth while mid-life-crisis men with money to burn are cruising the Interstates on two wheels. What was once openly rebellious or uncouth is now simply "cool" (and the Hells Angels just another drug cartel). So it is with denim, along with the other minor little point that jeans also happen to be comfortable and low-maintenance. For those wishing to actually make a statement there are $1000 jeans at upscale shoppes which have a superficial gloss of class and the same degree of comfort when you squeeze your ass into them.

Will is right about one thing: jeans (and the state of contemporary dress in general) are class-leveling (in both directions) and that's what's really eating this Goldwater conservative. "Beauty before comfort" is now a nostalgic by-gone; today well-to-do women shop at Food Lion in spandex and crocs while bedecked with bling. The old notion of "dressing one's class" is laughably archaic. Today's moneyed interests, staunchly backed by old-school players like Will, are fed by a consumer culture that steamrollers over "appearances". This unfortunate side-effect of the current state of capitalism must be absolutely galling to a man who is still desperately clinging to the last visible vestige of being "above" almost everyone else, his fucking precious uniform.