Our Wacky World—4/20/2011

Roger Ebert savages the film version of "Atlas Shrugged Part 1 [of 3]":

"So OK. Let’s say you know the novel, you agree with Ayn Rand, you’re an objectivist or a libertarian, and you’ve been waiting eagerly for this movie. Man, are you going to get a letdown. It’s not enough that a movie agree with you, in however an incoherent and murky fashion. It would help if it were like, you know, entertaining?"

Roger Ebert

Check out the abysmal ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. Note how the Randtards have voted it up a bit.


Westboro Baptist runs into trouble in Mississippi:

"It seems that certain Rankin county pickup trucks were parked directly behind any car that had Kansas plates in the hotel parking lot and the drivers mysteriously disappeared until after the funeral was over. Police were called but their wrecker service was running behind and it was going to be a few hours before they could tow the trucks so the Kansas plated cars could get out."

The Hayride

"Asked why her children were locked in the room, Higdon said they are hyperactive... she told the officer that she can’t find a special school for their autism and tries to home-school them — even though the 9-year-old told investigators that his mother doesn’t teach them... Eckhart is listed in court papers as unemployed; a search for his Facebook page displays a picture of him making an obscene gesture."

The Columbian

"I just can't believe that it happened -- there are just no words for it," Scott-Gonzalez said Tuesday, as she continued to recover from a broken nose and a fractured jaw after being beaten by her estranged husband in a judge's chambers... "It was from behind, I was blindsided, I was knocked out after the first punch"

CNN

'Homosexuals can't go out into the heterosexual community and try to recruit people, or try to enlist them in homosexual acts," Peterson says. He provides an example: "'Here, young man, your hormones are raging. Let's go in this bedroom, and we'll engage in some homosexual acts. You'll find you like it.'"'

Missoula Independent

"A doctor may get $65 for an office visit to appropriately treat a child with an ear infection. If he codes it as “fever” he can be reimbursed for a barrage of unnecessary tests (flu, rapid Strep test, CBC, tympanometry, reimbursed at $15 per test) and charge for a higher complexity visit ($85), raising the total charge for an office visit to $145. And then if the white blood count is elevated, he can justify giving an antibiotic by intramuscular injection at an additional charge of $30-$50. One doctor told Palmieri he does circumcisions in his office because Medicaid pays for them, but he sends simple lacerations to the ER because Medicaid won’t pay for office suturing."

Science Based Medicine

"They don't call Arizona the "meth lab of Democracy" for nothing -- where else could a lack of foreskin prove citizenship?"

Phoenix New Times

It's so stupid that Jan Brewer actually vetoed it.

'A nurse who was supposed to be caring for elderly people got intoxicated on painkillers, abused patients and even used her teeth to tear open a fluid bag designed for a drip... She forced one patient with a fractured hip to get up and walk and told another who asked for a bedpan: "Wet yourself, then."'

The Scotsman

"...PrimeTel Communications has quietly gained control over nearly a quarter of all the 1-800 numbers in the U.S. and Canada, often by grabbing them the moment they are relinquished by previous users. As of March, it administered more 800 numbers than any other company, including Verizon and AT&T... And many, if not most, of those 1.7 million numbers appear to be used for one thing: redirecting callers to a phone-sex service."

MSNBC

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."

Oregon Live

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?

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.