Shocking News: Libertarians Object to Basic Truth

Another one of these? Fuck it horror movie villain on the left, just kill me and get it over with… what do you mean that I’m thinking of the nice young man on the right? I see your serial killer smile!

Bob in Himmel, this election season is going to kill me.

I mean, the right-wing is usually pretty terrible overall. An unhinged band of assorted wackaloons and sociopaths all circle jerking over the latest manufactured outrage.

But now?

Now these repetitive outrage junkies are being co-ordinated. For the good of the party, they are being ordered to cover the same manufactured outrages and quote each other in masturbatory glory.

If you thought they were tiring before? Hoo boy!

So yeah, the right wing have grown tired of doing their standard “guns don’t kill people, people kill people, so let’s just kill some more people and call it a day” dance. And are starting to suspect that it’s only a matter of hours before the media are forced to circle back to talking about Mitt Romney’s Failapalooza regarding Bain Capital.

So in an attempt to head it off at the pass, they have decided to manufacture a def com 12 whine about how it’s unfair and wrong for Obama to campaign in this election.

Today’s flavor? A speech President Obama made in Roanoke, Virginia.

Now why this speech, besides convenient timing? Did he let slip the time co-ordinates cloaking his African birth certificate? Detail exactly how he’ll liquidate old people in the Obama death panels? Maybe let slip his Ryexillian heritage and how his zombie alien overlords were preparing the Harvesting Beacon as we speak?

Of course not, and besides he already detailed all of that in the weekly telepathic conference with loyal Soros Stormtroopers.

No, instead he dared note that despite all the noise by right-wing fantasists, the John Galts of the World are not actually propping up the world on their giant shoulders made of money. That every successful business has required and relied on massive public infrastructure in the form of roads, bridges, infrastructure, and often direct subsidies.

Now, you or I or a theoretical sane person might go, “well no shit sherlock”, but that’s just the problem. Wingnuts have spent decades solely on a battle to get people not to think sanely on this issue. Instead to react like Pavlov’s dog to the word “government” and bare our teeth and bark furiously. To assume that anything tainted by “public funds” must be pure evil and destroyed or at least defunded. To view the Capitalist Rapers of the Earth as demigods we must bow and scrape before begging the right to be owned… I mean employed. That criticizing these Masters of the Universe is in essence treason against the God, Capitalism, and that people should put all their faith into the “Free Market” and hope that it solves all our ills.

So, the Democrats pointing out the sky-clad erect micropenii of our Corrupt Plutocrat Overlords is a big fucking deal and a gentle reminder to an ignorant populace that no one, not even John Galt Wannabes, really want to live in a country without government. It could be a good first step in ensuring that the broken infrastructure we do have has the funds to keep operating and be repaired. It might even allow us to install new infrastructure we can all forget was provided to us by the government.

And that’s pretty much the exact reason his speech must be destroyed. So in typical Rove fashion, the call has gone out to turn this “no shit” observation into some sort of gaffe and misstep that Obama must apologize for*. Mostly by trying to make it into some sort of meta-commentary on business owners not building their businesses…

I tell a lie, it’s mostly by ranting really loudly, trusting our Bought and Sold Media to amplify it even louder, and then declaring victory and high-fiving each other.

Yeah, there’s a reason I haven’t yet put up a single post yet and that’s because finding one that wasn’t just the usual high-fives or “ipso facto” assumptions was a goddamn chore.

Hell, one post from the American Thinker has no less than 10 fucking articles from various nutjobs it quotes, two of which extensively quote some other fucker. And if you want to know how many of those posts actually included some link to the transcipt or video of the speech itself, oh, deary me do I envy your innocence.

By the time I found the Ground Zero Douchebag many of them were quoting. That being Charles Murray of the AEI, I found I just couldn’t care about his lazy sideswipe of an entry. I mean seriously, here’s a free shorter of the most quoted dickwad on the penis-pile:

Shorter Charles Murray:

  • Um… uh… er… that is to say… Fuck it. Obama’s Un-American.

So with an endless display of “me-too”s and “telling the truth is the greatest gaffe in gaffe history” posturing, who wins the booby-prize of being the lazy hack featured here?

Mark Steyn, National Withdrew:
Golden Gateway Dependency

Yes, this douchenozzle again.

But I’m going to be frank. After article after article of lazy paycheck-clearing noise-filler, this bloated piece of swamp gas was a relative breath of fresh air.

Not because it actually made some sort of salient point against Obama’s remarks or actually refrained from the same tired formula. I mean, we’re not working with miracles here. But because it at least puts in effort in being the lazy dribblings of an unthinking hack trying to distract the reader.

It actually recognizes Obama’s no shit remark as the sort of thing one wants to bring their A-hack-game to.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

  • Ha ha! You may think Libertarian Douchenozzles like I to be the fools who don’t understand that government projects built and funded by the people allow Businessmen to run their businesses, but I put forth to you that it is actually Governmental Nogoodniks like Obama who don’t understand that! Even though this whole thing is a response to his speech chiding us for that… uh… Well, fuck, I guess we’ll go with chiding Obama for not using the Governnment to do enough even though we are endlessly scree-ing over his Republican Lite attempts to do anything. And since I’m an incredible douchebag I’ll end by noting that everyone on Disability is a lying fraud who should immediately be put to work on their one good leg.

Hey, I did say their A-game. There’s only so much talent these fuckers can summon in a pinch.

On the evidence of last week’s Republican campaign events, President Obama’s instant classic — “You didn’t build that” — is to Mitt Romney what that radioactive arachnid is to Spider-Man: It got under his skin, and, in an instant, the geeky stiff was transformed into a muscular Captain Capitalism swinging through the streets and deftly squirting his webbing all over Community-Organizerman.

Well, we now know what recent blockbuster had Marky Mark here creaming his pants over in erotic dreams.

I’m just going to be over here trying to repress that knowledge with a claw hammer.

Rattled by the reborn Romney, the Obama campaign launched an attack on Romney’s attack on Obama’s attack on American business. First they showed Romney quoting Obama: “He said, ‘If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.’” And then the Obama team moved in for the kill: “The only problem? That’s not what he said.”

Indeed. What Obama actually said was:

“If you’ve got a business, you, you didn’t build that. [Interjection by fawning supporters: “Yeeaaaaah!”] “Somebody else made that happen.”

I must admit, I have great respect for modern politicians. I mean, they pretty much have to insure that each single sentence they ever utter can work independently with zero additional context and wouldn’t sound silly dragged out of context by the willfully idiotic.

Like this sentence where everyone is pretending that speeches are just so terribly hard to find in an era of nearly unlimited information on the internet. And thus everyone is prevented rewinding two seconds to the immediate preceding sentence where he was talking about roads and infrastructure.

Sure, the sentence doesn’t really make sense on its own and in fact, you really have to stretch to read it as the “business owners” don’t create their businesses shite that the right-wing is trying to mean, but that seems meaningless.

Mostly because even if we were to accept that horseshit and look at this sentence on its own and with the preferred wingnut interpretation…

It’s still correct.

Most business owners didn’t create their businesses. Most either inherited them or bought them off people who worked their ass off making them successful in order to run them into the ground for short-term profit.

Fuck, the story of the entrepreneur who raises their company from start-up to industry behemoth is so rare that their stories are big news.

No one would know this better than Mitt Romney seeing as how he has never built anything with his own wealth, instead inheriting money from his dad that he used to buy up “successful” companies and run them into the ground to earn more money to buy more companies.

Which might be why his response name-checked Steve Jobs and Henry Ford, but left his own name off.

And now I wish I could refind the one whiny post I stumbled across where one of those wingnut “small business owner” people ranted about how unfair the comment was because damnitt he personally built his daddy’s company that he inherited with nothing but his tears, sweat, and good ol’ American ingenuity.

I’m telling you, it was priceless.

Since the president is widely agreed to be “the smartest guy ever to become president” (Michael Beschloss, presidential historian), the problem can’t be “what he said” but that you dummies aren’t smart enough to get the point he was trying to make. According to Slate’s David Weigel, the “you didn’t build that” bit referred back to something he’d said earlier in the speech — “somebody invested in roads and bridges.” You didn’t build those, did you? Or maybe he was referring back to “this unbelievable American system we have that allowed you to thrive.” You didn’t build the system, did you? Or maybe he was referring to the teleprompter. You didn’t build that, did you? Well, unless you’re Rajiv or Suresh from the teleprompter factory in Bangalore, you didn’t. Maybe he was referring back to something he said in a totally different speech — the Berlin Wall one, perhaps. You didn’t build that, did you? Who are we to say which of these highly nuanced interpretations of the presidential text is correct?

I strongly suspect that the SAT test added a section about reading a paragraph for meaning entirely because the team in charge of the test read too many posts like this one.

I mean, I understand, it’s really hard getting through a paragraph like:

“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen,” he said. “The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”

I mean, there’s all those words and thinking makes the brain go owie. I mean, if Candidates aren’t willing to give people simple bumper sticker sized slogans and tweets then they shouldn’t be so upset when we just take a sentence at random and use that instead.

It’s like those elitest Democrats expect people to have at least Middle School level education to be likely voters or something.

If this is the best all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can do to put Humpty Dumpty’s silver-tongued oratory together again, they might as well cut to the chase and argue that accurately quoting President Obama is racist. The obvious interpretation sticks because it fits with the reality of the last three and a half years — that America’s chief executive is a man entirely ignorant of business who presides over an administration profoundly hostile to it.

QED, ipso facto word salad! Who just scored 3 points? I did. Fuck, I scored all the points. I found the super secret All the Points point on the court, but you can’t use it because I already used it up and besides the game is over. Sure, it may have looked like it didn’t enter the basket so much as nail me in the crotch and bounce out of bounds, but that’s how you score on the Super Secret All Points position! Woo! Victory lap!

And yes, this is less lazy than the usual wingnut output on this one. Just let that sink in for a bit. This is the one that took effort.

But, just for the record, I did “invest in roads and bridges,” and so did you. In fact, every dime in those roads and bridges comes from taxpayers, because government doesn’t have any money except for what it takes from the citizenry. And the more successful you are, the more you pay for those roads and bridges.

Now here is a delicate tight-rope. He’s trying to argue that government projects are actually super secret funded entirely by rich capitalists. (Who are, of course, all Mark Steyn, but totally not because Libertarianism Anti-Government Theology is based in a desperate need to feel like the endless handouts of society are all a result of your individualistic hard work in order to make unremarkable lives of greedy short-sightedness seem like the well-earned reward of stalwart heroes). Because obviously the only tax money that matters is rich white tax money.

But that can be a problem. Remember the end goal is to protect the whole “Government can’t do anything” / “Government’s just stealing your money to give to brown people” racket. By acknowledging that government builds useful things we all need, including said capitalists, it might reveal that said capitalists are being greedy bastards by demanding they don’t need to pay the government anything for the goods and services they make the most use of.

And once Idiot America realizes that the Corporate America that keeps threatening to send them to jail for not paying their bills has been essentially spending the last couple of decades whining that rich people who have the money to pay their bills shouldn’t be forced to pay their bills, it’s all over for the long con.

So how will Mark Steyn avoid this potentially fatal pratfall?

So here’s a breaking-news alert for President Nuance: We small-government guys are in favor of roads. Hard as it may be to credit, roads predated Big Government. Which came first, the chicken crossing the road or the Egg Regulatory Agency? That’s an easy one: Halfway through the first millennium b.c., the nomadic Yuezhi of Central Asia had well-traveled trading routes for getting nephrite jade from the Tarim Basin to their customers at the Chinese court over 2,500 miles away. On the other hand, the Yuezhi did not have a federal contraceptive mandate or a Bloombergian enforcement regime for carbonated beverages at concession stands at the rest area two days out of Khotan, so that probably explains why they’re not in the G-7 today.

That’s certainly a… novel approach to the problem.

So I suppose we’ll start at the top by noting that they may be in favor of roads, but they sure ain’t in favor of paying for them. Especially as seeing funds for roads, highways, and basic infrastructure maintenance was the majority of the non-wingnut-state-bailout money in the woefully inadequate Stimulus package. And was the part that wingnuts most whined to be removed in favor of even more useless tax cuts to the upper class who caused the Depression.

And then I might have to play historian and note that by that definition of road, um, no. Fuck, humans have learned how to use animal trails as well-traveled pathways since the time they first speciated. And have formed their own well-trod pathways between villages since before agricultural advances made it necessary to do so as basic infrastructure.

Hell, the first stone roads that have been discovered were found in the city of Ur as part of the first known major civilization and date back to 4000 BC.

But that fail sidetrack aside, I’m not sure how this late blooming Chinese trading route road escapes being a government and culture creation just because it was constructed in service to commerce.

Especially seeing how Obama’s original point was that government builds public goods in service to commerce so that individual companies don’t have to.

I mean, yes, I get that this is all just hand-waving and parlor tricks to confuse the rubes and let them get back to going “government bad, Free Market Jesus good” in peace, but still.

In Obama’s world, businessmen build nothing, whereas government are the hardest hard-hats on the planet.

This would be the ordered spin on this one. That Obama said no businessman anywhere has ever done anything on their own while government does everything everywhere always.

And… whoops, even if we were to take them on this Straw Collosus, we run into the slight problem of it still being mostly true. Most of our “successful businessmen” these days whining about taxes being too high do absolutely nothing. Most of them either occupy middleman positions or are high-stakes gamblers who’ve found playing the Stock Market a fun way to double their wealth without effort and at the expense of actual businesses and their customers.

Meanwhile our overstressed and underfunded public sector has been trying to keep it from all falling down on everyone as best they can with no money, no support, and no respect.

Huh, not quite the response desired. Better bring in another bizarre anecdote.

So, in his “you didn’t build that” speech, he invoked, yet again, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. “When we invested in the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Internet, sending a man to the moon — all those things benefited everybody. And so that’s the vision that I want to carry forward.”

He certainly carries it forward from one dam speech to another. He was doing his Hoover Dam shtick only last month, and I pointed out that there seemed to be a certain inconsistency between his enthusiasm for federal dam-building and the definitive administration pronouncement on the subject, by Deanna Archuleta, his deputy assistant secretary of the Interior, in a speech to Democrat environmentalists in Nevada:

“You will never see another federal dam.”

Yeah, pointing out that dramatic, at the time useful, projects were accomplished by the government rather than the private industries who want to take credit for and exploit them, is totally not allowed if you don’t think infinite repeats of them would be ethical in modern times.

Cause, see, it ceases to be a government accomplishment if you aren’t turning it into a franchise with a little logo over the top of it.

That there be intellimagent private industry knowledge that knows better than those eggheads and civil engineers who made an important civic service that thousands of businesses have made use of.

Ever. So the president can carry forward his “vision,” but it apparently has no more real-world application than the visions he enjoyed as a member of his high-school “choom gang” back in Hawaii. Incidentally, I was interested to learn from David Maraniss’s enlightening new biography that, during car-chooming sessions, young Barry insisted all the windows be rolled up so that no marijuana smoke would escape. If you can seriously envision President Obama opening a 21st-century Hoover Dam, you need to lower the windows on your Chevy Volt.

This also seems to be the latest attack avenue on Obama, trying to cite his brief youthful experiences with Marijuana into some sort of Cheech and Chong movie.

I’m rather looking forward to the day wingnuts realize that those evil pot-smoking hippies they’ve been snearing at are in their 60s at this point and the wingnuts are quickly running out of generations that have anything but a positive opinion on Marijuana.

The Golden Gate Bridge? As Reason’s Matt Welch pointed out, the Golden Gate cost at the time $35 million — or about $530 million today. So, for the cost of Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill alone, we could have had 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges. Where are they? Where are, say, the first dozen? If you laid 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges end to end, you’d have enough for one Golden Choom Bridge stretching from Obama’s Punahou High School in Honolulu over the Pacific all the way to his Occidental College in Los Angeles, so that his car-chooming chums can commute from one to the other without having to worry about TSA patdowns.

A stimulus bill equivalent to 1,567 Golden Gate bridges. A 2011 federal budget equivalent to 6,788 Golden Gate bridges. And yet we don’t have a single one.

Because that’s not what Big Government does: Money-no-object government spends more and more money for less and less objects. For all the American economy has to show for it, President Bob the Builder took just shy of a trillion dollars in stimulus, stuck it in his wheelbarrow, pushed it halfway across the Golden Gate bridge, and tossed it into the Pacific.

Yeah, I said it was coming and here it is.

After doing the most frantic 3-card-monte in history to try and bamboozle his readers back into their rage sleep, he realizes that he really can’t keep his hand in any longer without giving up the game.

And so we get this little tidbit stapled on. Now, you might go, “hey, doesn’t putting the ‘wah, Obama didn’t do enough with the Government money we didn’t let him do anything with’ whine next to the ‘how dare you criticize anti-government zealots for being anti-government zealots’ kind of reveal the inherent dishonesty of both?”

Oh, your naivety brings a tear to my heart! If anyone cared about obvious dishonesty, they wouldn’t be reading J-Load’s National Review.

But yeah, this and every other example of this should be stapled onto the forehead of every cowardly Democrat shaking in their boots because “no, if we try to do things to help people, then we’ll be nailed on increasing government”.

See this? See how they are using their own obstruction to argue you didn’t do anything? See how they are using your dithering on debt relief to argue you didn’t build enough useful infrastructure and create a robust enough safety net? See how they’ve been bitching about the health care plan they wanted passed before you adopted it?

There is no magical path you can take that won’t get you bitched at, so how about you stop cowering in the corner and actually fight back so that the rest of us aren’t being forced to die so you can look “bipartisan” before a media that couldn’t possibly care less.

Instead of roads and bridges, Obama-sized government funds stasis and sclerosis: The Hoover Dam of regulatory obstruction, the Golden Gateway to dependency. Last month, 80,000 Americans signed on to new jobs, but 85,000 Americans signed on for Social Security disability checks. Most of these people are not “disabled” as that term is generally understood. Rather, it’s the U.S. economy that’s disabled, and thus Obama incentivizes dependency. What Big Government is doing to those 85,000 “disabled” is profoundly wicked.

Oh Mark Steyn, you incomparable douchebag, this is why we say Jason Voorhees has more compassion and empathy than you.

I mean, I know I should be pissed at this. He is literally saying that every single person who has applied for disability is a lying sack of shit who should be forced to work on their currently useless limbs. Oh sure, he tries to cover his ass, but he comes back at the end to use every single number in his count of the liars.

And note this is from a dickweed who a) has scored himself a job where the only chance he has of getting injured is getting a paper cut when he uses a dollar bill to cut his daily coke supply despite having zero talent and b) is part of a political movement that has been slashing federal safety regulations and blocking improvements that would decrease crippling workplace injuries.

And that’s before we note that 25% of workers will be disabled before they retire and 8.3 million workers are on SSDI, thus making that 85,000 number kind of meaningless except as a “big number” to wave around like a dickwad working a safe white collar job with extensive ironclad benefits.

Millions of Americans have looked at the road ahead, and figured it goes nowhere. Best to pull off into the Social Security parking lot. Don’t worry, it’s not your fault. As the president would say, you didn’t build the express check-in to the Disability Office. Government built it, and, because they built it, you came. In Obama’s “visions,” he builds roads and bridges. In reality, the president of Dependistan has put nothing but roadblocks in the path to opportunity and growth.

That he can build. That’s all he can build.

I mean, it wouldn’t be a Mark Steyn post if it wasn’t filled with the most clinically sociopathic douchery on the planet.

It’s what he does. It’s all he can do.


‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. I too am every businessman everywhere and I protest my tax money not being used to fleece me out of all my ill-gotten gains. Calvinball’s in your court Markie. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™


*Okay, seriously, what the fuck is with all these demands for apologies? I mean, yes, I get that they are designed to try and hamstring the President from campaigning and set forth a precedent of “Democratic candidates aren’t allowed to campaign for things”. And I get they are about trying to make the notion of a black man speaking into some sort of inherently offensive thing. But I still don’t see how this is supposed to help with the mouth-breathers. I don’t see how the masculinity fetishists are supposed to look at this wilting flower pantomine and go “YES! He strokes my daddy complex to completion! He’s got my vote!” if they weren’t already so racist they’d vote for the Smiler just to get rid of the scary black man.

 

Comments: 684

 
 
 

A) I may squirt my webbing, but “deft” is probably not the proper descriptor.

B) I have “built” a business from scratch* to eight people in the last six years. I created nothing, because whatever demand we have served would have been addressed by a competitor if my business didn’t exist. I did nothing on my own, because I drew on existing businesses, government agencies, and nonprofits for services, referrals, and talent. I am in favor of big-government policies not because my clients are government agencies (95% are not) but because I am paying through the nose for health care and am tired of poorly regulated businesses screwing with me. So, are these the reasons that I am not worshipped and feted by the wingnuts?

*I had previously workd as a freelancer and had an existing client list.

 
 

There won’t ever be another Golden Gate Bridge, either, wtf, man? You can only build so many of an object before you filled all available space. I suppose we could keep building dams until every flat piece of land was filled with water, but that’d be stupid. Every river has been damed at some point, what else do you want?

 
 

Is it just me, or when Obama said “You didn’t build that” he was referring to the physical building that houses the businesses?

 
 

I believe he was referring to transportation infrastructure in general.

 
 

If Obama was such a great man he would have traveled beck in time and built the Golden Gate Bridge himself, with his own hands.

 
 

I also would like to correct: Whackaloon is properly speeled with an ‘H’, no matter what Clippy tells you.

 
 

Clippy? I HATE HIM SO MUCH!

 
 

B) I have “built” a business from scratch* to eight people in the last six years.

Hey! Me too! Actually, nine people, including two pregnant peoples.

But then 2007/2008 happened. Hel-LO layoff interviews! It was one of the worst things I ever had to do.

And the way things are going, I suspect I will never have to do it again. ENTREMANURESHIP IS GO!

 
 

Clippy? I HATE HIM SO MUCH!

I kind of regret not putting Microsoft Bob into that comment, now.

 
 

Although, now that MS has hired Mark Penn to head up their Customer Outreach and Development, I expect we won’t have them to kick around much longer.

Maybe Bill Gates can get a job with Apple.

 
 

If Obama was such a great man he would have traveled beck in time

That was such an awesome Freudian Typoo that I had to repost it.

 
 

Look, I’ve been gone a long time. I figure if I post a shitload of comments all at once, a’ la Troofy, I can make it all balance out.

 
 

Plus, that fucker N__B has a toddler. There’s NO WAY he can keep up with me.

 
 

I will, of course, eventually go back and read Cerb’s post. But for now, I got a Cuba Zombre….

 
 

I will say, however, that with the way Cerb arranged the graphics, it seems Jason is preparing to chop off Steyn’s melon.

 
 

Hi, ZRM. We missed you.

 
 

Also, I believe Geddy Lee has a nutpunch for Mark Steyn waiting, one Canuck to another.

 
 

Uh oh, Zombie’s running naked through the thread, watch out for detached bits.

 
 

Hey, wait! Didn’t the TSA send a couple of Canadians to another country who was willing to torture more egregiously than we currently do? Can we manage to do that with Mark Steyn? I am sure he is supportive of ‘enhanced interrogation’ and that if he has nothing to hide, he has nothing to fear!

Seriously, what an asshole No wonder Canada kicked him out.

 
 

tigris starts up with the anti-zombie comments.

 
 

Sorry, zombie out. Playing with markers and floor plans.

 
 

You’d be amazed at the land speed of Mini__B. My retirement plan iof getting him to the major leagues is looking better and better.

 
 

Omfg, would you goddamn Canucks take this neckbearded fuckface back? Jesus Christ.

 
 

Hey, wait. Can I revise my snarky comment about Mark Stain and add VS’ to it?

Thanks to the Sadly No hamsters.

 
 

Omfg, would you goddamn Canucks take this neckbearded fuckface back? Jesus Christ.

Although, frankly, he obviously fits in WAY more down here than he does up there,

I say we ship him to Saudi Arabia or Iran. You know, hyper-religious idealogues seems to be his thing. I am sure that after a short interval of changing the names on his prayer-things, he will be perfectly comfortable.

 
 

Ran out of crayon, did you?

 
 

Also, Hi, Tintin! We miss you at the Bulls.

 
 

Geddy Lee has a nutpunch for Mark Steyn

I would buy a ticket to see that happen.

 
 

N__B said,

July 23, 2012 at 2:22

Ran out of crayon, did you?

Nah. Had to loan most of them out to the structural engineers. Also some sippy cups.

Although with the upcoming project, I must say that I am very impressed with the local geo-tech engineers.

 
 

Please, please tell me they tasted the dirt as part of their testing.

 
 

Oh, my, I did not watch the horrible things they did with dirt.

However, maybe the owner told them “hey, taste the clay or read a Mark Stain column”.

 
 

Tasting the Clay.

..do you guys still do that here?

 
 

My first big project, 25 years ago, the geotechnical ate dirt right in front of me. I resisted the temptation to tell him to get a room.

 
 

Amusing the zombie.

 
 

he geotechnical ate dirt right in front of me

the wingnuts are right. you east coast elitists are all perverts.

 
 

“geotech” and “elite” don’t belong in the same sentence.

 
 

I resisted the temptation to tell him to get a room.

My respect for you has declined.

 
 

“geotech” and “elite” don’t belong in the same sentence.

jeez, you don’t get along with ANYBODY, do you?

 
 

Ooooooh. Negative numbers!

 
 

Ooooooh. Negative numbers!

hey, I bought your book, you magnificent bastard!

 
 

The drafting table had a short leg that needed shimming?

 
 

no, I actually read the thing.

 
 

Pull over, zrm, we’re going to have award you a citation.
~

 
 

True story: during final proofs, I found a place where, in the middle of a carefully constructed logical argument, I had left out the word “not.”

Oops.

 
 

Hah. I did that, once, but it was during my freshman Logic class. Not as if I got paid for it.

But you’ve got several books, right? How do you know you fucked up on the one I bought?

And if you did, you owe me, motherfucker.

 
 

Nobody pay attention to thunder, he’s been taken over by the Pod Moths of Virginia.

 
 

N__B said,

July 23, 2012 at 2:39

Ooooooh. Negative numbers!

well, look. if you are not willing to ridicule a geo-tech engineer to their face, I fear you are kind of squishy.

 
 

I hate that, N_B, even worse when you find it after you’re re-read it five times and published it.

 
 

Although I imagine Ned still cashed the checks.

 
 

Oops.

Yeah, THAT’S what I want to hear from a structural engineer.

 
 

West Virginia.

These are hick Pod Moths.
~

 
 

West Virginia.

yeah, I forgetted, and am too drunk to go look it up. Thank you, Pod Moth Thunder!

Also, drive the fuck up here for the party already! people are demanding thundra participation, you magnificent bastard!

 
 

Yeah, THAT’S what I want to hear from a structural engineer.

Although to be fair, it is not the first time.

 
 

zombie rotten mcdonald skrev:

I will say, however, that with the way Cerb arranged the graphics, it seems Jason is preparing to chop off Steyn’s melon.

…dammit, stop getting my hopes up like that. Seriously, the environment for which Wank Stain is the fittest probably involves the major intestine of a rat.

 
 

The drafting table had a short leg that needed shimming?

As an OT aside, my office is in a 130 year old building that has had an HEROIC amount of differential settlement, but non-structurally threatening and is now at rest… but it sometimes results in wheeled office furniture breaking loose and rolling one way or the other,

I love old buildings, but it is a difficult love.

 
 

Oops.

Yeah, THAT’S what I want to hear from a structural engineer.

Better than over the pilot’s PA in a 767. THAT’S RIGHT, MAJOR, I’M DRUNK ENOUGH TO CALL YOU OUT!

 
 

, my office is in a 130 year old building that has had an HEROIC amount of differential settlement,

The olde-timey geotech didn’t eat enough dirt.

 
 

If Obama was such a great man he would have traveled beck in time

But he did, he did! The great Birfer Caper! Christ, don’t you people read teh news?!

So, if I read Mdme Steyn correctly, a couple years ago, when Lil’ Gov Timmy V-Paw was trying to give my corporation a couple dozen million and infrastructure, and far more in loan guarantees, he was trying to destroy us? Well, thank FSM I voted DFL!

 
 

I hate that, N_B, even worse when you find it after you’re re-read it five times and published it.

It was a fun conversation with my editor. “Do you know how hard it is to make text changes at this stage?” “If we don’t, I’m saying the opposite of what I mean in an engineering book.

 
 

Lil’ Gov Timmy V-Paw was trying to give my corporation a couple dozen million and infrastructure

Jeez. I can’t even get a reach-around from Rat-Boy Cuomo.

 
 

Oops.

Yeah, THAT’S what I want to hear from a structural engineer . teh doc doing the vasectomy.

Flaxseeded it for you…

 
 

I’d rather have a vase in front of me than a frontal vasectomy.

 
 

If yer getting a dorsal vasectomy, either the doc’s an idiot or there’s a textbook in it.

 
 

dorsal vasectomy

I think that’s what sharks call the preparation of shark-fin soup.

 
 

he olde-timey geotech didn’t eat enough dirt.

Where the building is, it would have been better termed as ‘swamp’

 
 

THAT’S RIGHT, MAJOR, I’M DRUNK ENOUGH TO CALL YOU OUT!

I am putting that on a t-shirt.

 
 

I demand attribution and cut of the profits.

 
 

It was a fun conversation with my editor. “Do you know how hard it is to make text changes at this stage?” “If we don’t, I’m saying the opposite of what I mean in an engineering book.

Actually, I am sending all of this to my liability insurer.

 
 

N__B said,

July 23, 2012 at 4:29

I demand attribution and cut of the profits.

OK. just as soon as you send me proof that you are, in fact, named Ned.

 
 

OK. just as soon as you send me proof that you are, in fact, named Ned.

You mail me some decaying flesh to prove you’re a zombie and my birf cert will be on it’s way to you.

 
 

Geddy Lee has a nutpunch for Mark Steyn

Let’s play to Geddy’s strengths as a petite man who’s been a bass virtuoso for decades … he should squeeze those nuts.

Fucker probably has a grip.

 
 

Let’s play to Geddy’s strengths as a petite man who’s been a bass virtuoso for decade

I’ve heard him sing. He’s more of a alto virtuoso.

 
 

“an” too.

 
 

Let’s play to Geddy’s strengths as a petite man who’s been a bass virtuoso for decades … he should squeeze those nuts.

Point of order. Bass strings are visible.

 
 


You mail me some decaying flesh to prove you’re a zombie and my birf cert will be on it’s way to you.

That is surpringly unspecific.

Although I would be so much more supportive of Obama if he responded to Arpaio with that line.

 
 

OK, I will concede that maybe it would be more appropriate if Neil Peart handled the nutpunch.

 
 

OK. just as soon as you send me proof that you are, in fact, named Ned.

Zom-didily Ombie wants him some proof!

 
 

BLOOD YUEZHI LIBEL!!!!!!!!!

Warm welcome back dudehug for teh Prodigal Zombie!
*me dudehugs zrm*

PLEASE tell me you’re done threadstreaking, man.

Omfg, would you goddamn Canucks take this neckbearded fuckface back?

Only on a ten-part installment plan. Followed by nuking the sundry bits from orbit, just to make sure. SRSLY.

 
bughunter, a die-hard Rush fan
 

if Neil Peart handled the nutpunch.

Also ticketworthy.

 
 

Decaying flesh on the way, N__B

Enjoy.

 
 

*me dudehugs zrm*

Don’t cross the streams! So to speak.

 
 

Barbecue at my place! Whenever the mail comes.

 
 

Also ticketworthy.

I already have a copy of the Time Machine viddy, but if they add tag-team nut-punchery of Steyn, I will buy it again.

 
 

Barbecue at my place! Whenever the mail comes.

OK, Usinger’s online ordering is kind of fucked up for me, so I have to walk the half-block from my office tomorrow.

I will be sending the most repellent meat products they have, however. You may need to enlist BBBB to take care of the entrails.

 
 

Yeah, THAT’S what I want to hear from teh doc doing the vasectomy.
It is a source of lasting regret to me that the venerable Dr Dame Margaret Sparrow — doyenne of family planning in NZ, and performer of nearly 7000 vasectomies in the course of her career — would never stoop to signing her work.

She was presented with a very nice appropriately-shaped cake after the 6000th, but I cannot find an image on the Intertuba.

 
 

OK, I am gonna apologize to Cerberus for sidetracking this fucking thread. Gonna load up the drink and go back to read the whole post now, which will be amazing, I know.

 
 

Point of order. Bass strings are visible.

Well yeah. I am reckoning that Geddy’s biceps are not terrific, but his hands are crushers.

 
 

THAT’S RIGHT, MAJOR, I’M DRUNK ENOUGH TO CALL YOU OUT!

Oh I’ve said much worse than “Oops!” over the intercom but the chickens didn’t seem to care much (I fly freight and not passengers).

I did once deliver a lengthy and profanity-laden rant to a student pilot in the T-38 and then realized to my horror that I still had the radio transmit button pressed. My entire rant had gone out over control tower frequency.

 
 

OK, I read the post now.

So, for the cost of Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill alone, we could have had 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges. Where are they?

eat my fucking turds, you lying, innumerate asshole Steyn. I will tell you where they are.

They are spread out throughout the country. They are spread thin and wide, because you and your fucking rightwing compatriots REFUSED to allow any of them to be significant enough to be a Golden Gate bridge. You fuckers insisted that the whole fucking bill be punctured with useless tax cuts, that pretty much invalidated most of the actual funding; tax cuts that resulted in the same rate of job creation that the prior ten years of Bush tax cuts did; ZERO.

And besides that, I will tell you, you smarmy gobbler of rich people’s knobs , that even from my SINGLE point of view, I participated in two projects that were partially funded by ARRA that resulted in 58 brand new moderate income apartments in Wisconsin, you fucking squeezebag, and that those projects resulted in 10 million dollars worth of construction in two separate communities, and the related construction jobs.

Not the least of which is my actual career, you fucking asshole. You come down here and tell me to my face about how the ARRA was pointless and a waste, and I will fucking kick you in your head.

Where are the jobs? Where are the projects? THEY ARE ALL OVER THE FUCKING COUNTRY, you illegal immigrant douche-canoe. I recognize that you must ignore that in order to cash your weasel-wingnut checks, but that doesn’t mean that you aren’t lying, and that you don’t recognize it. And that I am not entitled to punch that smirky, wingnut mullet face off of your head for saying something so egregiously stupid and wrong.

 
 

“I recognize that you must ignore that in order to cash your weasel-wingnut checks, but that doesn’t mean that you aren’t lying, and that you don’t recognize it. And that I am not entitled to punch that smirky, wingnut mullet face off of your head for saying something so egregiously stupid and wrong.”

Don’t bruise you hands; karate kick him instead.

 
 

I forgot to add this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/21/offshore-wealth-global-economy-tax-havens?newsfeed=true

Article from “The Guardian” – wealth does not trickle down, the wealthy just stick the money in offshore accounts to dodge taxes….3 trillion dollars in the case of the US.

I would like to take 1/100th of that wealth, convert it into gold bars, then throw the bars right at Mark Steyn’s smug face. Let us see the effects of mineral wealth on his nose and teeth.

 
 

I weep for the indifference of the Major’s chickens.

 
 

I weep for the indifference of the Major’s chickens.

A Captain once asked me “What temperature are we supposed to keep the chickens at?”

I said “350 degrees for 45 minutes ought to about do it”.

 
 

I can’t think of a single place where we need another Golden Gate Bridge, but there are 70,000 smaller bridges that need repair. Many were repaired with stimulus funds (I know of 3 within a few miles of my house).. Maybe if the stimulus hadn’t been watered down with ineffectual tax cuts, we could have fixed a few more of them.

 
 

Dog whistle alert, the Yuezhi are the aryans that Hitler had archaeologists coming central asia for in the 30’s.

Nothing like a little crypto fascist psuedo history to lighten up the argument that selectively quoting the president is super american and not racist.

fucking nazis.

 
 

I can’t think of a single place where we need another Golden Gate Bridge

In Lake Havasu City, spanning over London Bridge, for the meta-bridge win!

 
 

In Lake Havasu City, spanning over London Bridge, for the meta-bridge win!

But that would interfere with filming Piranha II 3-D, Electric Boogaloo!

Not to mention all the beach-themed soft-core that Zombie Andy Sedaris has planned.

 
 

In other news, Penn State got spanked hard (and deservingly so).

 
 

Not hard enough. I’m hoping Middle States gets more serious with them.

 
 

In other news, Penn State got spanked hard (and deservingly so).

Word is the football program makes more than $70 million a year, so it’s the bowl game ban that’ll hurt more.

 
 

Did you see the part about voiding all the team victories from 1998-2012? That’s a doozy in and of itself.

 
 

Did you see the part about voiding all the team victories from 1998-2012? That’s a doozy in and of itself.

Sure. But it’s aimed at football alone, and the upper reaches of the administration were complicit. I want every university president to have Spanier’s (metaphorically) bleached bones as a warning.

 
 

Don’t have time to read the whole post/comments, so maybe it has already come up, but I thought the standard righty-tighty merry-go-round of an “argument” in response to the sort of thing Obama finally came out and said is

You liberals should hate big government then, because all it does is help rich people stay rich. In spite of liberal claims to want to help the poor, it is liberals, not conservatives, who are pushing policies that help the rich at the expense of the poor who would, if it weren’t for big government — and the corrupt culture of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll, which are all the fault of liberals and the teachers’ unions and are not in any way pushed by big business for profit — all be pulling themselves by their bootstraps and becoming wealthy, which liberals don’t want because they hate rich people. And since you liberals hate rich people, you should hate, rather than love, big government, because big government helps rich people.

 
 

I’ve never quite understood what it means to have a victory “voided.” Does that mean it’s like the games were never played? Are all records from those games trashed and not allowed to enter into players’ career stats? Players on both sides? Does Penn State have to give back the ticket proceeds? Are standings going to be adjusted retroactively?

Or does this simply mean that a bunch of victories get knocked off Paterno’s career total? Thus handing the title to Bobby Bowden. Yay.

I think the bowl ban and the scholarship trimming will be more of a punishment in the long run. Yes, that will cripple Penn State’s football program for many years to come. Which is the point.

Attention Penn State apologists: There is nothing exceptional or special about your football program. There are many, many colleges in the United States with football programs whose fans are every bit as dedicated and loyal as yours, and they manage to operate without covering up children being raped in the showers.

 
 

I’m not sure its the place of the NCAA to mete out that punishment. PSU’s infractions weren’t against NCAA rules but against civil law. “They can spend the next four years rebuilding…”. Well, JoePa is rotting in hell, AD Curley is going to jail along with Gary Schultz and possibly Graham Spanier. Penn State is going to be punished pretty severely outside of the NCAA’s actions. Seems to me like the football culture was going to change without NCAA help. There’s not really anything corrective in it, it’s just punishment. Does it send a message to all the other schools? Well if any other schools are protecting pedos in the athletics department they should worry more about the civil penalties than NCAA sanctions.

I can see some punishment but this is excessive, it’s the NCAA trying to stake a moral claim. Hey, why don’t we suspend the Catholic Church or at least Notre Dame?

 
 

I’m the seventh of my siblings to graduate from Penn State. I lived in State College for twenty years afterwards. I know the culture. It’s not so much a culture of football as the cult of Joe Paterno at work there. That’s why I don’t think your comment is on target, Scribe. We didn’t idolize football, we deified Paterno.

 
 

And by “we” I don’t mean “me,” ive never given a shit about Paterno.

 
 

My parents are 72 years old and Paterno was at Penn State when they went there.

 
 

15 hours later, thread combed, no ‘ahem’ in sight:

Shimming the short leg.

 
 

We didn’t idolize football, we deified Paterno.

OK, maybe this is because I’m on the outside, but to me that’s a distinction without a difference. Paterno was all about football and would never have attained the status he did without it.

 
 

PSU’s infractions weren’t against NCAA rules but against civil law.

True enough but maybe the biggest reason it was covered up was because of the damage they worried that would be done to the football program. I don’t think it’s a bad thing for the NCAA to say “the damage we can do is worse you fuckers, get your priorities straight.”

 
 

True enough but maybe the biggest reason it was covered up was because of the damage they worried that would be done to the football program.

Bingo.

 
 

The GOP are a cult. It functions like organized religion, but those who preach blind faith want you to be blind for a reason. They teach you not to question and make it a sin to think for yourself outside of their bubble. The greatest brainwashing occurs when a hierarchy exists to make you think that some Americans are better then others.
While the whole time those being sold this crap are on the lower rung of society and will take the same hit as the brown and black people.
The “liberal” education is the very thing that shows them there is life outside of their bubble, so it must be made unaffordable and tagged with the name “elitist”.
It’s no secret, the right wingers do not like free thinkers, they like blind followers.

 
 

While the whole time those being sold this crap are on the lower rung of society and will take the same hit as the brown and black people.

They’ve been conditioned to think that minorities are the Balrog in the woodpile, rather than the canary in the coalmine.

 
 

True enough but maybe the biggest reason it was covered up was because of the damage they worried that would be done to the football program. I don’t think it’s a bad thing for the NCAA to say “the damage we can do is worse you fuckers, get your priorities straight.

Partly worries for the damage it would do to the program but moreso the damage it would do to Paterno’s rep. It was Paterno who called the shots. He could have named Sandusky long ago and it wouldn’t do much damage to the _program_. Single bad actor, we are appalled etc. But joe, the happy valley genii would have suffered a great blow to his rep and that was unthinkable. Again, it is and was always about joe. Joe _was_ the football program.

 
 

In other news, Penn State got spanked hard (and deservingly so).

Even Joe Connolly, the Wall Street Journal flak who reads the talking points of the US Chamber of Commerce, a fully owned subsidiary of Big Business, Inc. does the business news on one of our local CSB/infinity affiliates, said something to the effect that “if only corporations were subject to the same sorts of punishment that Penn State received, we’d see a lot better corporate behavior”.

Of course, as my wife (who used to work as an investigator with a shady — e.g. she was conveniently laid off before she was fully vested in her pension — local authority) points out, that Louis Freeh felt he had to actually produce the report he did means that there was so much to cover up that Freeh couldn’t cover up all of it. IOW, we only have the tip of the iceberg as far as Penn State (or college athletics in general) is concerned.

 
 

The GOP are a cult

What, theyre cultists?!!!?! GET OUTTA TOWN!

 
 

Fuck, a wingnut former co-worker e-mailed me a “Newsmax” article:

Some people will blame it on guns, although countries that have tried hard to crack down on guns, like England, are now finding that knives and head butting are out of control. Thus, it isn’t the head-butting or the knives, but the fact that people are stewing in the juice of their own wickedness, because, as the Bible says, they don’t know the loving God who gave us a way of salvation through Jesus Christ from the wickedness of the human heart.

Remember when that football hooligan head-butted 12 people to death at a B.C.F.C. match?

 
 

When they outlaw heads, the GOP will rule the earth.

 
 

N_B wins the thread. And the Internet.

 
 

Note the win for Pam Geller.

When it comes to First Amendment victories, I’m going to rank this one somewhere below the one that found nude dancing to be protected speech.

 
 

When they outlaw heads, the GOP will rule the earth.

The upside is I’ll never lose another coin toss.

 
 

From the quote at DAS July 23, 2012 at 18:04

and the corrupt culture of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll, which are all the fault of liberals and the teachers’ unions and are not in any way pushed by big business for profit

This merits a ROFLMAO. My first thought was that surely even wingnuts do not believe this — big business most certainly makes money off sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. But then I remembered that liberalism is blamed for anything bad having to do with capitalism.

 
Wayne LaPierre, President, Head-Butters of America
 

The Second Amendment assures the right of every American to be armed with a head with which to butt.

 
 

to be armed with a head with which to butt.

I, too, played Twister in my youth.

 
 

Did you see the part about voiding all the team victories from 1998-2012?

I’ve been wondering about that one…does that mean that their opponents get the win? How does that work for teams that were on the bubble for a bowl game?

 
 

My first thought was that surely even wingnuts do not believe this — big business most certainly makes money off sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.

I usually hated Dave Berg’s “The Lighter Side of…” comics in Mad but I’ve never forgotten the one where the dad’s kids are calling him out for idolizing people with money, and they say he probably hasn’t heard of this or that hippie musician. He says something like “Sure I have. They’re all millionaires.”

 
 

[repost from previous unoccupied thread]

The usual nonsense is over at the WSJ comments section on the article about the advisement hearing of the shooter.

1. Statists* want to take your guns
2. Car crashes kill people, why don’t we ban cars
3. Liberals are the real bigots
4. Tyranny of government (no mention of said government’s drones, tanks, aero-planes)
5. You’re a pansy

*Could someone explain this Liberals = Statists meme? I’ve heard it a lot recently and I’m confused. Could it be because I know the definition of “statist”?

 
 

…aaaand I see everyone else has pretty much asked this question before mine could post. FYWP.

 
 

Conservatives: preferring butt-heads to head-butts since time immemorial.

 
Pupienus Maximus
 

Oh for fuck sake. The Paterno family made some douchey statement after the Freeh report “that’s not true because Joe would NEVER do that” and so on. Lying in bed this morning listening to Morning Edition we simultaneously asked each other “think the P family is going to make another stupid statement?” Yep, they’re digging in even deeper. I know one the sons pretty damn well, didn’t think he would go there. Or maybe it’s all Sue’s doing. Sue has always been a douche.

http://www.statecollege.com/news/local-news/penn-state-football-paterno-family-responds-to-ncaa-sanctions-1096984/

 
 

From Pup’s link: “The sanctions announced by the NCAA today defame the legacy and contributions of a great coach and educator without any input from our family or those who knew him best.”

Yes, Joe Paterno’s friends and family should determine the sanctions against PSU. Because that would be fair.

 
 

Yes, Joe Paterno’s friends and family should determine the sanctions against PSU. Because that would be fair.

Hey, it’s good enough for the Catholic Church, It should be good enough for the NCAA.

 
 

The usual nonsense is over at the WSJ comments section on the article about the advisement hearing of the shooter.

1. Statists* want to take your guns ( we only care about state rights unless health care or gay marriage is involved )
2. Car crashes kill people, why don’t we ban cars ( who cares if we don’t have to go to gun school or that auto companies don’t make cars specifically to kill people? )
3. Liberals are the real bigots ( because gun ownership is a minority, like being a gay Muslim woman who’s confined to a wheelchair )
4. Tyranny of government (no mention of said government’s drones, tanks, aero-planes) ( We don’t know what “tyranny” means because if we did, we’d realize that we wouldn’t be able to talk about it on the Internet )
5. You’re a pansy ( “We’re too lazy to try and articulate any of the other four arguments,” OR “having a gun compensates for my sexual inferiority complex” )

The sad truth is, the gun debate was settled long ago…hence the continued shootings. There was a belief that once the violence reached the surburbs (read: white people) someone or some group would make a major push to curb it. The only threshold now is the super-rich (they have security) or influential wingers (they’re usually the instigators).

 
 

From Pup’s link: “The sanctions announced by the NCAA today defame the legacy and contributions of a great coach and educator without any input from our family or those who knew him best.”

Jesus, now I hope they throw his fucking corpse in prison because BOO FUCKING HOO. Assholes.

 
Helmut Monotreme
 

Yes. The Paterno family should double down on protecting Joe Paterno’s so-called legacy (I am beginning to be nauseated by this word). Clearly they shouldn’t shut up and allow Joe’s memory to take his lumps. Clearly they shouldn’t keep reminding people of how Joe kept winning games and cashing checks while a predator was abusing children on his watch. It would be terrible if people figured out that Joe Paterno would have been facing criminal charges if lung cancer hadn’t given him an early escape. If the family of Joe Paterno, don’t realize that his estate may not be safe from civil suits for damages stemming from his neglect of his duty, I sure don’t want to be the one to remind them.

And by the way could we tear down happy valley and salt the turf until people stop taking about this fucker’s legacy? The only legacy of Joe Paterno that matters is the scores of victims that were abused while he was looking the other way as hard as he could.

Vacating his wins was a wuss move. He deserves a full-on damnato memoriae.

 
 

Jesus, now I hope they throw his fucking corpse in prison because BOO FUCKING HOO.

You didn’t before? SPLITTER.

 
 

WHAT IS THIS I DONT EVEN

From the Comments:

Russell Crowe knows comedy, “Robin Hood” was fucking hilarious.

Heh!

 
 

I’ve been wondering about that one…does that mean that their opponents get the win? How does that work for teams that were on the bubble for a bowl game?

Retroactive victories work much like retroactive retirements.

 
 

“Jesus, now I hope they throw his fucking corpse in prison because BOO FUCKING HOO.”

My memory of JoePa will be of the doddering old fool that he became in his last years. Kinda like Floyd the barber as played by Eugene Levy on SCTV.

 
 

Who is the best person to host a NO MR. PRESIDENT I BUILT THIS circle-jerk? Bristol Palin.

 
 

I usually hated Dave Berg’s “The Lighter Side of…” comics in Mad but I’ve never forgotten the one where the dad’s kids are calling him out for idolizing people with money, and they say he probably hasn’t heard of this or that hippie musician. He says something like “Sure I have. They’re all millionaires.”

Hehe. Thinking back, what bugs me about those Dave Berg comics was that Berg was framing topical issues for me. I started reading that stuff at a pretty young age, and so Berg’s take on “co-eds” or “health nuts” or whatever was formative. Initially I had no context for evaluating his cultural observations.

 
 

Jesus Christ, 150-some posts and nobody has brought up “Hey Freepers! Mark Steyn Hates You”?

Spoiler warning: Mark Steyn is the worst kind of shitbeard Red Tory pencil dick, and he hates nothing and no one as much as he hates America and Americans. Not just in the usual hippie-dippie “I wish America were better” sense, or even the usual national security “Finally it’s Batman time” sense, but I mean in the sense that a part of him thrills with actual pleasure when we are killed. The Batman shooting gave him an erection on account of 71 Americans were shot, and then he blamed the shooting and the erection on gun control for a paycheck.

He is the filth. Who will cleanse?

 
 

Mark Steyn is the worst kind of shitbeard Red Tory pencil dick

The Red Tories are/were the best Tories and Mark Steyn represents the best of nothing at all.

 
 

Never heard of Red Tories, are they like Red Lorries?

 
 

*Could someone explain this Liberals = Statists meme? I’ve heard it a lot recently and I’m confused. Could it be because I know the definition of “statist”?

In principle yes, but the original definiton of “statist” is

Statist (stA??·tist; sta?·test), n. pers. (Pejorative, inkhorn) – Someone to the political left of the speaker whose clear motives the speaker wishes to misinterpret. “Why would those statists stab our honorable front soldiers in the back, with a dagger? They must worship the state in those synagogues of theirs.” See also idiotarian, Antinomian, relativist.

 
 

I dunno: the distinction I’m comfortable with is traditionally that Red Tories are more reactionary/traditionalist and they do in fact sound pretty comfortably fascist to me. I threw that out there because I’m pretty sure Steyn’s fondest desire is to have Lizzy Windsor’s old queen dick worked up ins.

(Also, a view of current Toryism in Canada flattens the distinction between Canadian nationalists and Anglo chauvinists, because the Canadian nationalists won and now Anglo chauvinists have to settle for really hating the frogs a whole bunch instead of pretending to be British all day.)

 
 

holy crap…hubbkf is still undergoing emg…he has been back there for over an hour and a half…

 
 

(Wholly possible I have that backwards, because Canada is a fake country whose “citizens” mostly make weird contradictory bullshit up to confuse and anger us. Yeah, I totally believe you have a conservative party called the “Wild Rose Party”, bros. Totally got me.)

 
Pupienus Maximus
 

emg was fucking horrible. I was in pain to begin with and then that. I was crying it hurt so bad. He’s gonna need some special lovin afterwards.

 
 

holy crap…hubbkf is still undergoing emg…he has been back there for over an hour and a half…

Are you saying that Obama himself didn’t interrupt the procedure after ten minutes, thus “rationing” hubbkf’s healthcare?

All kidding aside, good luck!

 
 

I dunno: the distinction I’m comfortable with is traditionally that Red Tories are more reactionary/traditionalist and they do in fact sound pretty comfortably fascist to me.

They were about preservation of the status quo via buying off the lower classes with goodies, said goodies not being a bad thing in themselves. They did not give a shit about the concerns of social conservatives. Therefore, in the eyes of the Tories who were crazier, they were reds.

 
Pupienus Maximus
 

Why is that funny, jim?

 
 

I think we can at least be agreed on shitbeard and pencil-dick. He is a criminal and a playboy and a fraud, and he has shit on his beard and a small, thin penis.

 
 

Synopsis: Sniff, sniff,sniff … nom-nom-nom-nom-nom-nom … sniff,sniff … ZOMGWTFBBQ?!?!!

 
Helmut Monotreme
 

He is a criminal and a playboy and a fraud

Playboy?

 
 

I know everybody’s linked to this, but one of the linkers at Boing Boing has written a bunch of good stuff about her abortion and people should read that stuff too.

 
 

“The sanctions announced by the NCAA today defame the legacy and contributions of a great coach and educator without any input from our family or those who knew him best.”

What WERE they thinking by not asking the rest of the Paternos how to handle this? Those NCAA people are CRAZY!

 
 

Putting aside the severity of the punishment handed down by the NCAA (some people, including me, would argue that it should have been worse), they did do the right thing and let any athletes transfer and play immediately (rather than wait the compulsory year), or they can just finish out their scholarship and not play football.

The vacated wins strip Paterno of his title as all time winingest coach, and the fines and scholarship cuts and reductions decimate the program for years to come.

Most importantly, I think it sends a faint but barely audible message to the victims saying that they give just enough of a shit about them to do something about this.

I’m pretty happy with the whole thing.

 
 

Playboy?

A boy in the body of a man; a man of excessive and excessively exploited leisure. It is the best insult in our language and it needs more play.

The classic playboy gets more action, but who would that specific denotation apply to nowadays? Charlie Sheen?

 
 

The classic playboy gets more action, but who would that specific denotation apply to nowadays?

There is still this creepy admiration of playboys, similar to the admiration of bikers, mobsters and corporate executives. People love to romanticize shit humping weasels for some inexplicable reason.

 
 

One last request on the Paterno thing. I say we commision a sculpter to build a statue of Sandusky committing a rape and permanently plant that in the center of Penn State. Maybe a second statue of Paterno with his head buried in the sand…

 
 

I know this isn’t a reality where college football programs are commemorated with sculptures of famous rapes they’re complicit in, but how I’d like to live in that one.

 
 

holy crap…hubbkf is still undergoing emg…he has been back there for over an hour and a half…

I don’t know what emg is but it doesn’t sound like something you’d want.

 
 

Maybe a second statue of Paterno with his head buried in the sand…

Or, as more than one commentor has said, keep the original but turn it so it’s looking away.

 
 

Hardcore gonzo nerdp0rn ——-> VERY DO WANT!

“Such a laser would have many important uses…”

 
 

There is still this creepy admiration of playboys, similar to the admiration of bikers, mobsters and corporate executives. People love to romanticize shit humping weasels for some inexplicable reason.

I am beyond sick of mobsters in pop culture. Every angle and variant has been done to death, but why? They all suck major balls. Let’s call a moratorium.

In Los Angeles I knew a screenwriter (not a student) who was obsessed with The Sopranos and spent his creative juices trying for something similar. Always with the Sopranos talk. I said I never saw the show, but it did me no good.

 
 

Oh, look here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002998261

You’ve got you’re anti-muslim peanut butter in my anti-tax chocolate!

 
 

Every angle and variant has been done to death, but why?

Because it allowed post-Nixonian culture industrialists to produce success porn in a working-class idiom without blatant Ragged Dick inauthenticity.

 
 

I’d make a joke about Ragged Dick, but given Horatio Alger’s proclivities and the fact we’re already talking about Joe Sandusky it’d be redundant.

 
 

(Jerry, for fuck’s sake! O, for an edit button.)

You’ve got you’re anti-muslim peanut butter in my anti-tax chocolate!

Oh my god, this might be the most delicious thing I’ve read all day. I love when different kinds of phony-ass true believers cannibalize each other.

 
 

Hardcore gonzo nerdp0rn ——-> VERY DO WANT!

Like the LGM said, “HyperDeath Ray! Want one!”

 
 

That’s a good, dense answer, alec. It does suggest there’s no end in sight, tho.

 
 

You’ve got you’re anti-muslim peanut butter in my anti-tax chocolate!

Quick! Photoshop Grover in a keffiyeh and send it on to Pammycakes and the Shrieking Majorette – that’ll learn him.

 
 

The Norquist/Muslim bit has been going on for quite a while, and really, if Republican bosses have any sense they’ll go for it. It’s hard to get elected when you can’t offer goodies and Norquist is the enforcer on that score.

 
 

When the NCAA shows up and penalizes a franchise before the civil and criminal authorities have cleaned house I think will send a message.

The message I think today was sent was, ‘don’t get caught, ’cause you’re okay until then.’

 
 

I am beyond sick of mobsters in pop culture.

I’m becoming very tired of the whole genre of exploring the antihero and his/her supposedly redeeming qualities and humanity. (As if there was any humanity to a person who commits murders to protect or expand his business).

It’s a huge thing for Tarentino types and I’m pretty bored with all of it too. Of course we can be pretty sure the whole thing is dying out due to the arrival of that Mob Wives reality* show.

*LOL

 
 

Horatio Alger’s proclivities

Ragged Dick, or How To Succeed In Pederasty Without Really Trying.

 
 

You’ve got you’re anti-muslim peanut butter in my anti-tax chocolate!

Alien vs Predator!

 
 

Alternatively titled, The Road Not Taken Is A Tight Squeeze.

 
 

Did you know that while other losers his age were sneaking liquor and risking life and limb to fiddle around in the undergarments of others Barack Hussein Obama was being teleported to Mars by the CIA? IT IS TRUE.

 
 

The message I think today was sent was, ‘don’t get caught, ’cause you’re okay until then.’

I disagree. You could argue that all criminal and civil punishments encourage bad actors to avoid being caught. I think the message is a pretty sharp smack to the face of the institutional monsters that fed children to this monster. I think (or hope, I guess) that other individuals within these institutions now have more accurate data to plug into their cost/benefit analyses when they’re trying to decide if they want to actually get law enforcement involved when they have knowledge of a crime.

I think your interpretation applies very well to every previous NCAA sanction/punishment I can think of, however.

 
 

Here’s what Bobby Bowden had to say about the sanctions against Paterno making Bowden the winningest coach in NCAA history…

“There’s no rejoicing in the Bowden household,” Bowden said when reached Monday. “The most important matter is the young men who suffered. I won’t be able to enjoy it under the circumstances.”

 
 

The Road Not Taken Is A Tight Squeeze

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

 
 

Barack Hussein Obama was being teleported to Mars by the CIA?
Old story, Mr McGravitas.

 
 

To add to my point, Crissa;

I share your disgust at the idea that any person would actually feel in the least bit conflicted when trying to decide what to do about witnessing or having knowledge of a child rape. I’m hoping that this punishment (which literally decimates that program for years to come) will help these fuckheads make the decision to do the right fucking thing. Imagine how Paterno would have looked if he had handed Sandusky and all evidence over to law enforcement the moment he became aware of this. His statue would still stand, his legacy would still be comprised of his coaching rather than his complicity in several heinous crimes, and the program would have suffered no NCAA sanctions. Instead, he will forever be known to people who aren’t batshit insane or child molesters themselves as the piece of shit who put his precious fucking football empire way ahead of the welfare of a bunch of innocent children. He was the person who thought a fucking game was more important than human lives.

 
 

Penn State’s new school song: Fiddle About / The Who

 
 

Incidentally, if you haven’t seen Charlie Brooker’s segment on reality TV, you should. It’s an elegant little bit of sausage-makery that people in the industry seem reticient to discuss.

The flip side: even if you could follow around the crazy-making morons reality TV is in love with, they’d be boring 90%+ of the time. There is a fantasy that things are (at least) Always Interesting with such people, but that’s just a fantasy, like what that one writer on Victorian erotica called “pornotopia”, a world where all bosoms are pert and all members strong and all is fucking.

So if Quentin Tarantino makes movies about nothin’ but psychopaths, it’s for the same general reason Ron Jeremy was up to his neck in (ahem) film work.

 
 

Old story, Mr McGravitas.

By that you must mean “Now well-established enough to build a university on.” Feel the Canadian pride!

 
 

Google Trying to Destroy Values with Gay Rights Initiative, Should Expect Blow Back

The Family Research Council should put some of its best minds to work on a search algorithm. God-fearing Real Americans deserve their own engine!

 
 

tsam said,
July 23, 2012 at 23:28

I agree.

 
 

Proof that blowjobs is good.

 
 

Er, Family Resource Council “blow back” wise.

 
 

Feel the Canadian pride!

Like I keep on saying, made up country. Have you ever taken a “road trip” to “Toronto”? They drive in circles for a few hours and drop you off in Edison Park. “Vancouver”? Just a really nice neighborhood of Seattle. (They even took the name from Vancouver, WA! A transparent fraud.)

Quebec? A secret French lumberjack foray into bootlegging established west by northwest of Ashland, ME in 1922; undiscovered by the federal government by the ratification of the twenty-first amendment, it “went legit” and has gone steeply downhill ever since. Not to be confused with Montreal, the secret center of their shadow empire, from which it is said no Anglophone can return alive and unchanged.

The foreign country across the border from Alaska? Russia! I mean, duh. That’s just how the north pole works.

 
 

Google Trying to Destroy Values with Gay Rights Initiative, Should Expect Blow Back

This was the product of a truly beautiful mind. Trouble them not with requests for satanic math functions, my son.

 
 

Have you ever taken a “road trip” to “Toronto”?

BLAAAAAACK METTTALLLLLLLLLLLLL BRRRRRRRUUUUUUNNNNNNNCH!

 
 

Not doing a great job keeping up the pretense. “Hellbound.ca”? I don’t recall shopping for Metallica merchandise and tickets to the next Metallica show and posting about how Metallica is my favorite band in the whole world at “Metallica.co.us”. Which, as an American, is important to me.

 
 

Bacon, Eggs and Sacrilege: Toronto’s Most Blasphemous Brunch

This cracked me straight the fuck up.

 
 

Google Trying to Destroy Values with Gay Rights Initiative, Should Expect Blow Back
So the payment for destroying Values comes in the form of cocaine? Good to know.

 
 

Vancouver”? Just a really nice neighborhood of Seattle. (They even took the name from Vancouver, WA! A transparent fraud.)

Seattle gave us Nirvana. Vancouver BeeSee gave us The Kings. Case closed.

 
 

Bacon, Eggs and Sacrilege: Toronto’s Most Blasphemous Brunch
B & E seems to be traditional.

 
 

HAHAHAHAHAHAAA Jim Henson Company pulls Muppets from Chick-fil-a and Lisa Henson donates all proceeds to GLAAD. Mick huckster (okay autocorrect, you seem to be right for once) decries the vitriol of the left. YOU’RE THE REAL BIGOTS!

 
 

Seattle gave us Nirvana.

And Starbucks. I’d say it’s a wash.

 
 

Seattle also gave us Soundgarden, Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam. Three things for which I’m grateful.

 
 

And Bill Gates, to whom we are eternally grateful.

 
 

Founder Joel Simkhai said in Los Angeles: “I want to personally apologize to users. I know it was frustrating. I was frustrated myself. I also rely on Grindr in my day-to-day personal life. It made me feel disconnected.”

Now everybody in the office knows he passed them up.

 
 

Thanks, Pryme — that was a detailed explanation!

I hadn’t realized I was a pansy until I was called one on the Internet.

 
 

Barack Hussein Obama was being teleported to Mars by the CIA… IT IS TRUE.
– – – – – – –
The two chrononauts then appeared on late night talk radio’s Coast-to-Coast AM with Laura Magdalene Eisenhower, the great-granddaughter of US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, to discuss their involvement in the US secret space program.

If it’s good enough for the great-granddaughter of Dwight D. Eisenhower, it’s good enough for me.

 
 

Proof that blowjobs is good.

The proof is in the pudding.

 
 

And Bill Gates, to whom we are eternally grateful.

Oh yes! Do you think HIS fanboys will compare him to Edison and Jesus when he dies?

 
 

I hadn’t realized I was a pansy until I was called one on the Internet.

I know I am cuz I gots guns.

 
 

Oh yes! Do you think HIS fanboys will compare him to Edison and Jesus when he dies?

Also da Vinci.

 
 

I do NOT support wealthy marriage.

 
 

I do NOT support wealthy marriage.

Next thing you know, some rich person will want to marry their bank! (*GASP*)

 
 

Next thing you know, some rich person will want to marry their bank! (*GASP*)

That’s why I choose to ignore the reality of lynchings of the wealthy. It’s their own fault, really. If they’d stay away from our women and quit asking for special rights, we wouldn’t hafta murder them.

 
 

Oh yes! Do you think HIS fanboys will compare him to Edison and Jesus when he dies?

On the one hand, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a cynical attempt to build good PR for someone who used cutthroat business practices to become richer than God. On the other hand, it is at least an attempt.

or

At least Potemkin villages represent some interest in clean, prosperous villages.

or

CANDLELIGHT FUCKING VIGIL AT FUCKING APPLE STORES FUCKING WORLDWIDE THAT’S A THING THAT FUCKING HAPPENED FOR A GUY WHO EVADED TAXES AND SOLD BULLSHIT COMPUTERS AT A PRESTIGE MARKUP TO CUSTOMERS HELD CAPTIVE IN A RESALE-AND-PERIPHERAL-CONTROL GHETTO AND WENT TO HIS GRAVE WITH AN ILLICITLY PURCHASED ORGAN, THE BETTER TO DIE OF LATE-STAGE CANCER HE DETECTED EARLY WITH THE BEST MEDICAL CARE IN THE WORLD AND REFUSED TO TREAT WITH THE SAME BECAUSE IT FUCKING MATTERED TO HIM ALL OF THAT TURTLENECK BULLSHIT WASN’T JUST A FUCKING GAME HE REALLY BOUGHT INTO HIS OWN LINE OF HORSE SHIT BUT HE FUCKING DEPRIVED SOMEONE ELSE OF A FUCKING TRANSPLANT ANYWAY JUST BECAUSE HE COULD AFFORD TO AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
JESUS CHRIST JESUS CHRIST JESUS CHRIST JESUS CHRIST JESUS CHRIST JESUS CHRIST

And that’s not even getting into the rent-seeking patent lawsuits as front and center in the business model, taking front-and-center role in the bully ramming Obama with tech industry talking points on tech industry offshoring, the ongoing effort to make computers smaller and meaner and less important, the monopoly, the exploitation of the free music culture for commercial gain, the career built on cruel betrayals of Steve Wozniak, the pro-quality destruction of a respectable computer marque. I’m not even a guy who follows this kind of inside baseball horseshit, and I know that Steve Jobs makes William Randolph Hearst look like a piker.

 
 

I’m not even a guy who follows this kind of inside baseball horseshit, and I know that Steve Jobs makes William Randolph Hearst look like a piker.

That he did. I go back and forth with the Gates’. On the one hand, I always see their foundation listed as particularly generous donors to causes I like in muches. However, there is the whole empire built on anti-competitive and shady business practices. When I get to reminding myself of that, I try to think of a single one of those Wall Street thugs that I can remember making any noteworthy charitable contribution, let alone setting up a monstrous foundation with that sole purpose in mind and conclude that Gates is complicated, but essentially an alright guy–a lot like Ted Turner I guess. Kind of a dick, but has his fingerprints on a lot of helpful and cool things.

 
 

I’m not even a guy who follows this kind of inside baseball horseshit, and I know that Steve Jobs makes William Randolph Hearst look like a piker.

You have to read more about Hearst. Jobs was a run-of-the-mill rich asshole but with better taste. Now he is dead.

 
 

Oh, I almost forgot: Jobs would boast about never having given a penny in charity (probably an exaggeration). I ran into a fawning article about the 11 best things about him and that was one of them, one of those real spin-a-negative-as-a-positive thing, and the comments were split 20-70-10 between gloating pissmouths like me, people who liked Apple as a brand but were deeply ill at ease with the John Galt picture painted by the writer, and people who went along thinking that because Steve Jobs had refused to give even a tiny amount of his money back that was what was cool now.

That’s not really a defense of Bill Gates, it just came up. The whole charity-thus-virtue thing is overrated – the commonwealth is better served by people who make money from the good graces of the public remitting a substantial part of it back the better to fund those good graces. There’s a fantastic article I read a while back on even the old “charity as giving back” model being flawed but its main troubling quality now being propping up a system in which businesses make charitable donations for the expectation of a deferred return, e.g. Coke giving “charitably” to ALEC in the expectation of future margins going up from more viciously negligent labor, marketing, and sponsorship laws, and getting a tax refund to boot.

But, like, it seems kind of out of character for the classic hipster – ostensibly a liberal, at least in culture – to lionize a horrible bunched-up Ayn Rand protagonist who couldn’t even die without injuring other people with money-power. Nobody’s gonna be especially sad when Bill Gates dies, and that’s right and proper.

 
 

Jobs was a run-of-the-mill rich asshole but with better taste. Now he is dead.

I’d argue the thing about Jobs and Hearst was that both were rich assholes, but a new and queasyingly adaptive kind of rich asshole – that the bad thing about them wasn’t in and of themselves, but as a moral lesson to other rich assholes. “See? You can start a war. You can ship one of the most company-profitable manufacturing jobs in America overseas out of spite. You can flop around the political map like a fascist salmon. You can do nothing that isn’t in your own interest, and you can make the world a stupider and meaner place for everyone. And people will still love you, and cry when you die.

Maybe if he hadn’t died at 56 he would have found time to do something really heinous like cozying up to Hitler or buttering up the public to invade Cuba. We were spared, because he wasn’t fully “retired” yet (or at least only was by virtue of ill health), his inevitable transition into politics. Can you even fucking imagine Steve Jobs as T. Boone Pickens, Billionaire Job-Creator Who Will Save Us From Ourselves?

 
Pupienus Maximus
 

I’m not even a guy who follows this kind of inside baseball horseshit, and I know that Steve Jobs makes William Randolph Hearst look like a piker.

Most people think Citizen Kane was a biography. He was a lot more complex than that. Not to say he was a good man or any such shit, his bad rep really was deserved, His taste however, as anyone who has toured Xanadu er, Hearst Castle can say, was absolutely execrable.

 
 

You have to read more about Hearst.

But he looked like such a nice man.

 
 

Barack Hussein Obama was being teleported to Mars by the CIA… IT IS TRUE.

I’ll believe it’s true when the CIA denies it and not a moment before.

 
 

For those of you discussing this with your friends, take note that the takeaway is not “Obama was involved in teleportation experiments”, which is false, but “Obama is a teleport”, which is false, but sounds cool.

Apropos of nothing, why aren’t you watching Brasseye.

 
 

One of Hearst’s competitors commenting on his decision to run for President in 1904:
…a low voluptuary trying to sting his senses to a fresh thrill by turning from private to public corruption is a new horror in American politics.

 
 

I’d argue the thing about Jobs and Hearst was that both were rich assholes, but a new and queasyingly adaptive kind of rich asshole – that the bad thing about them wasn’t in and of themselves, but as a moral lesson to other rich assholes.

Hearst was a bad thing in and of himself. People lived and died based on what he said and did. Jobs was a dick, and there was/is of course the Foxconn debacle, but his manipulation generally involved making a buck, in the course of which people got stuff they seem to really really like and lets them do stuff that might otherwise be hard.

Hearst==>Murdoch
Ford==>Jobs (with Jobs nicer and less fascist in the tenor of the time)

The Lovely Daughter is big on gods lately and one of the things about the Greek ones was that staying the hell away from them was absolutely the best thing to do. I’d fear Hearst but not Jobs.

 
 

But he looked like such a nice man.

That one always makes me think of Chinatown.

 
 

Most people think Citizen Kane was a biography. He was a lot more complex than that.

The claim has taken hold that Citizen Kane was partially a story about Orson Welles himself. I don’t know whether to buy that. For his part, Hearst had a way less empty, hostile relationship with his mistress than the movie lets on. Which is an opportunity to mention Steve Jobs screwing the mother of his bastard child out of child support, even though the amount of money at stake was literally inconsequential to him.

I might not follow him onto a yacht party (I value my life), but I’d much sooner turn my back on Hearst than Jobs, on balance.

 
 

Ford==>Jobs (with Jobs nicer and less fascist in the tenor of the time)

Ford’s answer to labor activism was “pay them well enough they think of themselves as our customers and not our workers”. Jobs’s answer to labor activism was that the very idea was an insult and it was better the jobs be destroyed than such things raise their ugly head.

He was the horrible genius loci of the hateful Atlas-shruggin’ factory-shutterin’ rent-seekin’ Silicon Valley startup culture, and the best that can be said of him is that he’s no longer alive. I feel like even Hearst rates better than that, to say nothing of Ford – whose anti-Semitism was at least evidence of a personal conviction in there somewhere.

 
 

Jobs was an asshole and Gates is one too. Jobs’s company makes better products due some of the most strategically brilliant vertical integration ever practiced in American business. So I buy products from Jobs’s company. For me, not a hard decision.

 
 

Ford’s answer to labor activism was “pay them well enough they think of themselves as our customers and not our workers”.

Also hire people to beat up union activists. I think Jobs would have done that too had he lived at the time, and Ford, had he lived now, would be shipping jobs wherever he could make them happen. He tried! Enjoy the glory of Fordlândia.

 
 

TIL Sally Ride was a lesbian. ‘Scuse me while I go make some bigot heads asplode.

 
 

‘Scuse me while I go make some bigot heads asplode.

Good luck!

 
 

He tried! Enjoy the glory of Fordlândia.

Amazon Trail attempted to teach me about that. Every time I’m reminded about it it cracks me up as the way it clearly cracked up the developers – square dancing, of all Goddamn things.

The analogy is inexact, because it was an outsourcing from Goodyear-owned plantations in the Philippines – in a loose political fashion “American jobs”, but not voluntarily.

Ultimately, most of what I’m objecting to is not offshoring per se – gross, but as you’re saying, SOP. What I’m objecting to is the offshoring of productivity-sensitive jobs, a trend which in the tech industry Jobs helped make acceptable and fashionable. That’s why I said earlier, “out of spite”. We’re not talking about a Spaulding factory using human beings with lower standards of living as an alternative to robots; we’re talking about intricate, delicate electronics for which mechanization is incomplete and quality control complex. In terms of productivity versus training costs versus wages, there’s no reason to think Apple gains anything substantial by manufacturing via Foxconn rather than some American contractor. It’s a naked display of political and economic power, a thing above and beyond the economic logic that ostensibly undergirds it.

Side point: you know what Microsoft spent a significant amount of their subcultural clout on in the 80s and 90s? Pioneering LGBT rights in the workplace. If they weren’t the first company to make a policy of pressure in favor of trans rights they were damn close to it. Yeah, it was a calculated decision to get them good press and good talent at below their market value, but even with that in mind it’s not really one they get enough credit for. Having a cool ad campaign, meanwhile, meant Apple could arrogate science-cool types like Curie and Einstein and Edison and the Butt Head Astronomer (but curiously not Turing, for some reason) to their own brand.

In business, you can ultimately break the assholes who rise to the top into two camps: the people who abuse power to get money and the people who abuse money to get power. There are things the former will not stoop to because there’s not a percentage in it, and God knows there’s little else answering for a moral code in the neoliberal order.

 
 

I meant Spalding. I can’t comment on the manufacturing processes involved in Pam Spaulding at this time.

 
 

… the ongoing effort to make computers smaller and meaner…

… meaner?

 
 

Also, in fairness, it seems like the main competitor anyone talks about for Apple anymore is Google, which exhibits an identical level of moralizing hipster sanctimony and naked power-lust. Yeah, about that “making the world a meaner and stupider place for everyone” thing!

 
 

meaner?

The copout answer would be “meaner in the [anachronistic] sense of more trivial” but I’m not wholly sure what I meant there – probably interference from “meaner and stupider” elsewhere.

I guess in a sense a tablet computer has way more intrinsic upwards pressure on price and is a way harder market for independent developers to enter (by design – Apple owns a number of patents that see to that). So if a tablet equivalent of the “laptops for every child” business ever emerges, more of the money spent in that way will be overhead and less utility will attend to the devices themselves. Smartphones and tablets have been a massive leap away from consumer electronics as adaptable multi-use tools and towards consumer electronics as branded executive toys, and my intrinsic bias here is that I hate ’em, hate everything about ’em, and nothing’s gonna change my mind about that.

Like, the best analogy I can think of? I spent years and years on AOL, and didn’t realize until I had a normal cable Internet connection how much I was missing and how little consolation the admittedly slick, professional design on that gated Internet community was. Watching the iPad and its (un-supported) bastard children take over the marketplace is like watching AOL take over the Internet, somehow. At least we had the excuse of not knowing any better.

 
 

. In terms of productivity versus training costs versus wages, there’s no reason to think Apple gains anything substantial by manufacturing via Foxconn rather than some American contractor. .

That may be true (it sounds reasonable but id like to see some supoorting evidence) but there’s also the matter of all the components being made locally (for reasonable values of ‘local’) that contributes to the economy of production.

It’s a naked display of political and economic power, a thing above and beyond the economic logic that ostensibly undergirds it

Like I said, I’ll need to see some evidence before accepting that assertion.

 
 

Smartphones and tablets have been a massive leap away from consumer electronics as adaptable multi-use tools and towards consumer electronics as branded executive toys, and my intrinsic bias here is that I hate ‘em, hate everything about ‘em, and nothing’s gonna change my mind about that.

And yet multi-use tool computers are still selling briskly. Smartphones (and thus far, tablets) do not replace our beloved computers but supplement them. I love my iPad. It’s a great toy. I would never try to do any real work with it, that’d be silly.

 
 

PS – which is why I still have a couple high powered desktops.

 
 

What I’m objecting to is the offshoring of productivity-sensitive jobs, a trend which in the tech industry Jobs helped make acceptable and fashionable.

I don’t think he was any different from any other exec. Chips and printed circuit boards had been coming from offshore for a long long time; Apple IIs were at least assembled in the US. IBM, with the PC, took Apple (and themselves when the clones ate their market) to school with modularity and foreign parts.

Steve Jobs just isn’t a uniquely evil guy on this score, he’s run-of-the-mill. He was, however, the successful guy.

 
 

That may be true (it sounds reasonable but id like to see some supoorting evidence) but there’s also the matter of all the components being made locally (for reasonable values of ‘local’) that contributes to the economy of production.

The parts come from all four corners of the Earth, unless something has drastically changed about consumer electronics since the last time I went on a reading binge: at that time the cheapest source of complex metal parts was Germany and the circuit industry was so heavily clustered on southern Luzon a single warehouse fire there could cause a years-long spike in prices globally. The Pearl River industrial cluster does make economic sense for a lot of things, but I’m fairly positive that’s not the underlying economic reason here. (That and the fact that many of Foxconn’s factories are located in Chinese special economic zones, which are successful top-down attempts to attract factories with tax and labor policy rather than industrial clusters, speaks to a different story.)

I can point to evidence suggesting that in general the ratio of productivity to expected wage in the US is among the lowest in the world; that doesn’t make up for jobs where productivity is irrelevant (like sporting goods, clothes, that kind of thing) but the continuing outflow of American manufacturing jobs makes very little economic sense in that context. A citation directly on Foxconn will take longer; that Awl piece was sitting in my bookmarks. The fact that every pro- analysis I’ve read has pointed (in willful falsehood) to declining US productivity – fat, lazy, unionized US workers – tells you something. But I’m going to hunt down a link.

Also, I’ve been pasting Jobs specifically a lot for this, so I should emphasize that in general he is just one of many pioneers in a neo-feudal post-capitalist aggression against humanity. Also, the idea that owning their products makes you complicit is as bullshit an idea as the idea that owning their products makes you cool. They’re products. You didn’t hold a gun to their head and demand they hold a gun to America’s head and demand tax amnesty.

 
 

Steve Jobs just isn’t a uniquely evil guy on this score, he’s run-of-the-mill. He was, however, the successful guy.

And as the successful guy he gets called a genius and a hero by mouth-breathing news-watchers. Surely there should be a little countervailing abuse, even abuse he doesn’t uniquely deserve, for that alone.

 
 

As with presidents, the proper form of address for billionaires is “Fuck you, asshole.”

 
 

Along the tech line, watch the WSJ – owned by Hearst-like monster Rupert Murdoch – pretend the internet was all private enterprise. Comments flay the narrative to death.

 
 

I love my iPad. It’s a great toy. I would never try to do any real work with it, that’d be silly.

The proposition has been in the tech marketing culture that they are the New Thing and the Old Thing is obsolete, including by people who ought to know better. It is in fact silly.

 
 

Any discussion of the ancient history of the Internet combined with wingnut dogmatism literally obligates me to repost How Jerry Pournelle got kicked off the ARPANET. It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.

 
 

I use my iPad for real work all the time. I use my desktop for the things it can’t do. It’s the laptop that I no longer see a use for.

 
 

But that’s just me.

 
 

Please elucidate. What is this “real work” that you perform via your apparently supernaturally powerful iPad? What values of “real” and “work” are we using?

 
 

I mainly use my iPad to send offensive comments Ned’s way.

 
 

What is this “real work” that you perform

Apparently he sends “oops” emails to his clients….

 
 

Please elucidate. What is this “real work” that you perform via your apparently supernaturally powerful iPad? What values of “real” and “work” are we using?

1. Mark-up electronic copies of drawings on site. Much cleaner annotation than my shitty hand-writing, easy to get the notes on the server where they belong (and are backed up) without having to scan (the previous method). I can also get the field notes on the server from the field, which means no more lost notes.

2. Create annotated pictures of conditions on site which can be immediately (while standing there) distributed to clients and contractors.

3. Perform structural analysis ( http://www.intesym.com/mobile.php ) while on site rather than at my desk. This is, IMO, a qualitative change in my work, since having a rough idea about structural action changes how I conduct a field investigation. *When I started work in 1986, the office I worker in did analysis on a VAX. We filled out a paper form, handed it to the data-entry operator, and a day later got back a stack of greenbar. Recently I analyzed some roof trusses at a church while standing in the attic looking at them.)

Like I said, that’s just me. Whether or not you can do useful work on a pad depends on what kind of work you do and what type of apps you need.

 
 

What is this “real work” that you perform

Apparently he sends “oops” emails to his clients….

Being an architect means never saying “oops” when you can say “live with it for ten years and you’ll see I’m right.”

 
 

HAH! You call that “work?” no wonder you’re an entrepreneur-hating socialamest Kenyan-loving fascist tax and spend LIEBERAL!

 
 

You call that “work?

I used to call it “sex” but my accountant got confused.

 
 

More proof Obama’s a stealth Republican. He was even conservative about marijuana smoke when he was a kid.

 
 

PS. There’s a nice, absolutely free course on the history of the Internet just starting this week at Coursera. It’s taught by a University of Michigan prof. It’s looking good.

 
 

Architects are never wrong. Wasn’t it Frank Lloyd Wright who said don’t worry about the budget, the client will always cou up the money. Or something like that.

 
 

I can’t remember if I remember the Pournelle episode or if I only remember it from reading about it later. :-/. I’m getting too old for this game.

 
 

Architects are never wrong.

“Later on, you look behind your couch and there’s your architect saying ‘Fuckin’ meow.'” /Carlin

 
 

By “later” mean a year or two later. See how old I am?

 
 

Incidentally, I made a monumentally stupid error: the ratio of productivity to expected wage in the US is in fact the highest in the world (what I meant; I’m stupid today, dunno why) by a significant margin, “one of” nothing. There are countries with higher productivity but their wages are more than commensurately higher. Our ratio is the best a potential employer can get.

The pay rate of Foxconn’s workers is usually ballparked at a minimum rate of $400 a month, which is nearly twice the Chinese minimum of $240 – actually not a fantastic ratio for a manufacturing plant in any country and especially not for an electronics plant in a developing one. (An auto plant worker in America wouldn’t pick up tools for $12 an hour.)

Neither is it a fantastic savings generally; if we’re to assume that the minimum of $400 is for a 160-hour month (not a huge assumption, incidentally – this is one area in which China’s labor standards aren’t substantially worse than ours, with stolen overtime being a common consequence of a similar managerial culture rather than officially sanctioned by the law) that’s a minimum wage of $2.50 an hour. For the most basic jobs possible, stuff that in the West would in fact involve a robot, they’re paying around a quarter what they would an American worker. The first thing I can find on US/China productivity suggests a work-per-unit-produced ratio of 11:100, which feels pretty reasonable to me considering the greatly more advanced economy and technical sophistication of America.

If this holds true with Foxconn (and productivity tends to happen because of systemic factors like education quality, technical literacy, experience with complex apparatus, etc, so no reason to think it wouldn’t) then they’re paying 100 workers $2.50 an hour to do a job 11 Americans could do – which divided 11 ways comes out to $22 an hour, or $47,000 a year. Which they wouldn’t pay ground-level workers at a hypothetical San Cupertino plant in a million years.

Even if half of the productivity difference is in capital in a way that wouldn’t cross-apply, they’d still be paying for labor as if they had an American plant with workers earning $11 an hour.

So based on those back-of-the-envelope calculations, at best the gain on labor costs is minimal and at worst they’re taking a loss on labor to work in China’s more lax, employer-friendly laws. The classic “we outsourced jobs because they’re cheaper” narrative is only part of the story, and sometimes not a part at all.

 
 

PS. There’s a nice, absolutely free course on the history of the Internet just starting this week at Coursera. It’s taught by a University of Michigan prof. It’s looking good.

Link? That sounds rad as hell.

 
 

I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.

 
 

What did the plan examiner say?

 
 

https://www.coursera.org/#course/insidetheinternet

There you go, alec. There’s a lot of other courses there besides.

 
 

What did the plan examiner say?

“You’re right.”

 
 

I admire the depth and richness of your fantasy life.

 
 

A GUY WHO […] WENT TO HIS GRAVE WITH AN ILLICITLY PURCHASED ORGAN

Too strong. It was my understanding that Jobs’ liver transplant was above-board. The system, in its infinite majesty and impartiality, allows *anyone* to join separate queues for organ transplants in multiple states, as long as they have a private jet to be there the moment an organ comes available.

The two chrononauts then appeared on late night talk radio’s Coast-to-Coast AM

But did they TELEPORT into the studio?

 
 

San Jose / Cupertino.

Also, the focus on China is because I expect this analysis would break down with computers as opposed to modern consumer electronics, which when assembled as modules and put together by a vendor or an end-user requires significantly less skill in the factory than putting together and non-destructively testing a single-unit phone or tablet. Also because that would have been labor migration from California garages to border maquiladoras, at higher productivity ratios and relative wage rates. (America would have a decade and change more years of flatline compensation and increasing productivity before it became what it is now and the iPhone was launched.)

Crediting him single-handedly with the decision to produce the iPhone in Chinese factories is a little unfair, because that was in fact the industry trend when he made that decision: fuck American workers, be damned the cost. He did have every opportunity (during a creative process he had unprecedented and ridiculous levels of control over) to reverse course on it, and he did basically lie to the President about American tech jobs. In this respect he simply acted as a medium-level industry propagandist who swoll up to such importance he was invited to offer his expert opinion to the President.

“Worse than Hearst” cheerfully withdrawn, but still not gonna accept that he was an exact match for Ford, who kept a flaccid, deformed human conscience under that stupid haircut and weirdly smooth brow and secret compartment for mash notes to/from Hitler. Hmm. Maybe that’s not exactly right either. Eh, fuck ’em both.

When I started work in 1986, the office I worker in did analysis on a VAX. We filled out a paper form, handed it to the data-entry operator, and a day later got back a stack of greenbar. Recently I analyzed some roof trusses at a church while standing in the attic looking at them.

Right. I get where you’re coming from here, but I’d argue that the qualitative difference is more in that any computer of sufficient size could now perform that analysis faster than it would take you to enter data for it. The VAX-11 operated at 5 MHz, which you can trivially get out of a cell phone now; a laptop could equally do the same calculations, or a computer in the office. I’m not discounting the ease of presentation and portability advantages, but I’m equally unsure as to whether they balance out the much higher cost per unit of storage / processing / display power, or just how much easier it is to brick a tablet than a laptop and how much more limited the tablet repair market is.

Example: the missus works out of a basically non-portable laptop, and she’s had to drag it to the vendor (they have a warranty on it) to re-solder the loose power jack. This is a job I could do myself with a soldering iron and five minutes looking up the configuration of the particular jack online, and she could do with that plus a two-minute review of electronics fundamentals. I not only couldn’t repair anything that breaks on an iPad, I wouldn’t even know where to start learning – and that takes the power away when I’m dealing with whoever the fuck proposes to repair it when it breaks.

 
 

Too strong. It was my understanding that Jobs’ liver transplant was above-board. The system, in its infinite majesty and impartiality, allows *anyone* to join separate queues for organ transplants in multiple states, as long as they have a private jet to be there the moment an organ comes available.

And our private insurance system, in its infinite majesty and impartiality, allows *anyone* to pay for an available organ privately at a vastly inflated cost when no doctor will unreservedly recommend a transplant into a patient with late-stage pancreatic cancer. (Healthcare rationing? What’s that?)

 
 

The VAX’s processor, in sheer FLOP power (I promise you, if you ever want an endless string of stuff that sounds like a very specialized fetish but isn’t, look up processor nerds sometime; you’ll be glad you did), fits onto my Bush II-era processor a little under 545 times, and you could probably stuff my whole computer, monitor and all, into a VAX-11’s case and still have it work perfectly.

 
 

Thanks, Joseph Nobles.

I don’t suppose people who think that Al Gore claimed to invent the internet will sign up for a free online History of the Internet course — but I might.

 
 

Cerberus, I want you to know that I love your posts. I relish them. I look forward to them like I look forward to reading a wonderful book recently discovered. I read and read and read again, stopping along the way to wisper the words so that I can pretend to hear you speaking them to me. My God you have an incredible gift! But maybe that’s not a nice thing to say. Because it might not be a gift at all but the result of hard work and paying attention to everything around you, all at the same time. Well, that’s a gift isn’t it? I try to pay attention but 99% flies past me like the wind. Perhaps you could loan me a percent or two. Thank you is what I’m trying to say. Thank you very much.

 
 

Right. I get where you’re coming from here, but I’d argue that the qualitative difference is more in that any computer of sufficient size could now perform that analysis faster than it would take you to enter data for it. The VAX-11 operated at 5 MHz, which you can trivially get out of a cell phone now; a laptop could equally do the same calculations, or a computer in the office. I’m not discounting the ease of presentation and portability advantages, but I’m equally unsure as to whether they balance out the much higher cost per unit of storage / processing / display power, or just how much easier it is to brick a tablet than a laptop and how much more limited the tablet repair market is.

The short version: I’ve had laptop analysis software for some time but never found it practical to carry a laptop around on site. So for my method of work, it’s a real difference. And a phone screen is too damned small, particularly with my middle-aged vision and undainty fingers.

 
 

And our private insurance system, in its infinite majesty and impartiality, allows *anyone* to pay for an available organ privately at a vastly inflated cost when no doctor will unreservedly recommend a transplant into a patient with late-stage pancreatic cancer.

Opinions differ about the “unreserved recommendation” part. Sounds like a transplant has a good prognosis for Jobs’ specific variety of insulinoma. Teh money quote:

There is no legal way for a patient, even one as wealthy as Jobs, to jump the queue, and he didn’t. Recipients are chosen based on their MELD score (Model for End-stage Liver Disease), which uses lab tests of hormone levels to determine how urgently a transplant is needed and on the length of time they have been waiting. Every donation is closely audited, data are available on public websites (optn.transplant.hrsa.gov), and you can monitor your status on the wait list at any time.

Apparently Jobs had extra-hepatic metastases, which would have been a contra-indication for a liver transplant, but they were not found until during the transplant operation itself.

 
 

Apparently Jobs had extra-hepatic metastases, which would have been a contra-indication for a liver transplant, but they were not found until during the transplant operation itself.

Obviously the doctor needed an iPad with the “medical tricorder” attachment.

 
 

N__B is UNSERIOUS.

 
 

Better than being CURIOUS YELLOW.

 
 

Apparently Jobs had extra-hepatic metastases, which would have been a contra-indication for a liver transplant, but they were not found until during the transplant operation itself.

…so someone signed off on a full liver transplant without doing exploratory laparoscopy? Because that totally sounds like something a billionaire would forego the most basic due diligence on, and it’s not possible if someone did that incredibly basic outpatient diagnostic procedure it didn’t wind up on the books.

My second-hand experience with medicine sez that “no legal way” is a figleaf, and one to be laughed behind as well. Certainly it’s putting it too baldly to say he just straight-up bought a liver, but the spectacular constellation of what would in any other case be considered malpractice required for him to have a healthy liver put in his cancerous body is, well, let’s just say available for unofficial consideration.

Like, the doctor attending the routine laparoscopy might have just forgotten to put it down in the records, anywhere, and as far as anyone would know Steve Jobs would just have spent an hour in his hospital doing nothing in particular. It wouldn’t even take that; all it would take is it slipping that busy, busy doctor’s mind to hit the “record” button while noting the presence of metastases. They can always go back and correct that.

Some of these doctors work sixty-hour shifts sometimes. The transcriptionists have to write down things like “tigers tumbling out of my ass” on official documents. Mistakes happen all the time. That’s what we have insurance for – health insurance, malpractice insurance. How much would you pay to be insured?

As neither a doctor or a lawyer, I’m not accusing Steve Jobs or his associates of any criminal wrongdoing. And if some oncologist somewhere were to be very rich for no apparent reason, that’s hardly a crime. They work hard for that money.

 
 

Also, in the 00s, at the height of the DEA’s increasing scrutiny on meth production and sale, Hunter Thompson got a series of doctors to prescribe him recreational amphetamines and every doctor has horror stories about a guy they knew who was basically using his pad to run drugs for walking-around money. Nobody’s going to actual prison over a cancerous mass where it shouldn’t be.

But surely the lax morality of a profession that selects for people who don’t have loved ones they can’t be incommunicado with for 60 hours at a time and who can watch human beings die in a way they’re responsible for all day and not have a quaver of work-interrupting guilt and the fortuitous coincidence of an extra-hepatic cancer mass being found in a patient richer than God just late enough not to matter – surely those are two unrelated things that go unrelatedly together.

Yes.

 
 

Because that totally sounds like something a billionaire would forego the most basic due diligence on

Apparently he was kind of a nut about real medicine and preferred a bunch of hippie bullshit to it. Oops.

 
 

Apparently he was kind of a nut about real medicine and preferred a bunch of hippie bullshit to it. Oops.

Yeah, the bribery enterprise I’m absolutely not proposing took place was a suboptimal solution in the long run, but in the short run would have been the only way in which the transplant could go ahead if a quick, routine, inexpensive preoperative exploration had been undertaken to improve outcomes for a risky surgery and had revealed metastasis.

It’s not a course of action I’d recommend, waiting out cancer with wheatgrass and peach pits until it gets so bad you might find yourself bribing an oncologist to live out the month. And it’s also absolutely not a course of action I’m claiming he undertook. I mean, laetrile? In 2011? Please.

 
 

A GUY WHO […] WENT TO HIS GRAVE WITH AN ILLICITLY PURCHASED ORGAN

Did he pull out all the stops to get it?

 
 

It’s simultaneously glorious and horrifying …like finding out that the Kate Upton is the Devil, and she’s asking you out for drinks.

Please be real. Please.

 
 

A GUY WHO […] WENT TO HIS GRAVE WITH AN ILLICITLY PURCHASED ORGAN

I guess you can take it with you.

 
 

How about finding out Kate Upton is boring and then longing for better-quality soft-core?

 
 

How about finding out Kate Upton is boring and then longing for better-quality soft-core?

Oh, her “Wait, guys find me hot? Wow!” shtick is starting to get old, no doubt. Gretzky’s daughter appears to be more fun anyway (and everyone, feel free to sub in Channing Tatum or whoever you want for the too-good-to-be-true analogy).

But that girl’s website…it’s…just…whoa.

 
 

How about finding out Kate Upton is boring?

Let him who hath eyes to see know that this is unpossible.

 
 

Conservative Republican Mindy Meyer…Orthodox Jewish woman

Sounds like a real fucking genius. I’m finding it difficult to refrain from throwing out a gas chamber joke.

 
 

I’m finding it difficult to refrain from throwing out Mork from Ork jokes.

Ar, ar, humor.

 
 

My baloney has a first name, it’s M.I.N.D.Y
My baloney has a second name, it’s M.E.Y.E.R
Oh, I love to eat it every day and if you ask my why I’ll say… hehe.
Cuz Mindy Meyer has a way with (Help me out here, brothers and sisters)

 
 

Cuz Mindy Meyer has a way with rockin’ LMFOA.
(wait, not quite right)
Cuz Mindy Meyer has a way with obnoxious web display.
(hmm, maybe not)
Cuz Mindy Meyer has a way to get on the wingnut welfare pay.

Sorry, that’s all I got right now.

 
 

Cuz Mindy Meyer has a way to get on the wingnut welfare pay.

I like this one. But I like the original format too, where the lyrics make it perfectly clear that I intend to eat it every day.

 
Lurking Canadian
 

How about finding out Kate Upton is boring?

How about getting so fucking old and married that you have to resort to Google to find out Kate Upton is the New Hot Swimsuit Model! My Elle MacPherson-worshipping teenaged self would slap me upside the head if he knew.

 
 

A little help for Lurking Canadian’s inner teenager

 
 

LC – Speaking as a NY Rangers fan, Carol Alt.

 
 

I like this one. But I like the original format too, where the lyrics make it perfectly clear that I intend to eat it every day.

I thought about rhyming it with something to do with T&A, but I didn’t want to get too sexist on such a nice liberal blog.

 
 

Please elucidate. What is this “real work” that you perform via your apparently supernaturally powerful iPad? What values of “real” and “work” are we using?

Penises don’t masturbate themselves, dummy.

 
 

Penises don’t masturbate themselves, dummy.

Man’s gotta have a dream.

 
Lurking Canadian
 

Penises don’t masturbate themselves, dummy.

You mean…there’s an app for that?

 
 

I thought about rhyming it with something to do with T&A, but I didn’t want to get too sexist on such a nice liberal blog.

I DO! Feel free to nymjack me.

 
 

Nymjacking the tsam.

 
 

How about getting so fucking old and married that you have to resort to Google to find out Kate Upton is the New Hot Swimsuit Model!

Well, her uncle is conservative Republican Fred Upton*, so I guess there’s a political relevance with this blog?

*no, he was never (thank God) a swimsuit model.

P.S.: married ppl can’t look at swimsuit models? Is that new law?

 
 

“Penises don’t masturbate themselves, dummy.”

Well, at least not since I was 13 and had the most wonderful dreams………

 
 

Sorry, that’s all I got right now.

Best to get the the mocking started now, I have a feeling Cerb will be doing posts on this one in a few months.

 
 

Penises don’t masturbate themselves, dummy.

No, but if they ever do, you’ll be seeing even less of me up in this joint.

 
 

“Penises don’t masturbate themselves, dummy.”

Said the non-penised person. The PENIS is an organ of mysteries, I’ll have you know.

 
 

‘Cause Mindy Meyer has a way to put me off of T&A

No, wait…you implied eating it every day. Hm….

‘Cause Mindy Meyer has a way to make me eat pink every day.

Hm, too obvious?

‘Cause Mindy Meyer is OK for giving tongue baths every day.

Greatness eludes me.

 
 

The PENIS is an organ of mysteries, I’ll have you know.

Mine prefers sci-fi actually.

 
Lurking Canadian
 

Thread Bear is Erik Erickson, and I claim my five pounds.

 
 

Roads build themselves! Just like evolution! You can’t explain that! God made eyes, god made roads, we just stumbled across them and there they are! How dare you insult the Creator by arrogantly asserting that human hands can improve upon God’s perfection!

 
 

In re “the sanctions against Paterno making Bowden the winningest coach in NCAA history” …

I, who was a post-doc at FSU (and thus required to be a U. of Fl fan) raised this point with my wife (about Bowden). She figures that Bowden’s hoping nothing comes out about FSU’s program (whether Bowden actually knows anything or not).

 
 

So, are these the reasons that I am not worshipped and feted by the wingnuts?

No, the reason is that you do not confess by your mouth your faith on Jesus.

 
 

The PENIS is an organ of mysteries, I’ll have you know

Speaking as a penis possessing American, I take issue with that claim. Penises are hardly mysterious — just make sure there is plenty of lubrication but also enough pressure/tight-squeezing in appropriate places and you’re good to go … so to speak …

OTOH, so long as non-penis possessing Americans (or depending on your proclivities, other penis possessing Americans) find penises to be mysterious enough to be endlessly fascinating, it’s all for the better.

 
 

Not the least of which is my actual career, you fucking asshole. You come down here and tell me to my face about how the ARRA was pointless and a waste, and I will fucking kick you in your head.

I made a point of letting my coworkers know they were DRIVING an ARRA project. (The boss surely didn’t. It turned out that money was included for worker salaries but they refused to use it for that purpose and bought more equipment instead.)

Certainly looks different around here since ARRA. Dems don’t toot their own horn very well it seems like.

 
 

Improving upon God’s perfection.

 
 

A little help for Lurking Canadian’s inner teenager

Now, that’s a little something to make one’s swagman jolly.

 
 

Jobs’s answer to labor activism was that the very idea was an insult and it was better the jobs be destroyed than such things raise their ugly head.

I hate do say it, but do you have some evidence of that, not just some random rumor mill crap?

 
 

P.S.: married ppl can’t look at swimsuit models? Is that new law?

Absolutely not. Not to eat meat, that is the law. Not to go on all fours, that is the law. Not to spill blood, that is the law.

Are we not men?

 
 

What is the law? No Spill Blood!

 
 

The penis: is there anything it CAN’T screw?

 
 

Unfortunately there is insufficient blood supply for simultaneous operation of the brain and the penis.

 
 

Unfortunately there is insufficient blood supply for simultaneous operation of the brain and the penis.

Unfair! Though I tend to wonder if maybe the race wouldn’t die out. With all the puritanical fearmongering out there, it seems like a guy needs to put the brain in neutral to keep it up, so ta speak.

 
Lurking Canadian
 

Unfortunately there is insufficient blood supply for simultaneous operation of the brain and the penis.

Which explains the career of the average adolescent male. It’s a miracle any of us survive past eighteen.

My son is already crazy. I shy away from imagining what he will be like once he discovers girls, skateboards, girls, weed, girls, fast cars, girls and girls.

 
 

Unfortunately there is insufficient blood supply for simultaneous operation of the brain and the penis.

They don’t call it “thinking with your smaller head” for nothing.

 
 

Yes, how?

In food terms, Republicans are the healthy (yet boring and tedious) meat, potatoes and vegetables of a meal. They are there to nourish, and to keep you strong and fit. Although Republicans represent the most responsible and important part of the meal, they’re nothing to really get excited about–unlike the sugary, yummy excesses of dessert.

Which is exactly the part of the meal that Democrats symbolize.

Ah, dessert. It’s what most children would rather eat first, skipping the “healthy” portions altogether.

Children don’t care about nutrients, vitamins, minerals—they just want the stuff that tastes good in their mouths. They don’t care how it’s made, who made it, how it got there–they just want it in front of them so they can scarf it all down. Or as Veruca Salt famously said in Willie Wonka, “I want it and I want it NOW!”

In real-life terms, Republicans will talk a thing to death, providing details and data and reasonable, logical facts while Democrats thrive on as few words and sentences as humanly possible: Things are fine! Go Green!

Sigh.

So how can boring, wordy Republicans compete with the “desserts” of the world?

 
 

Yes, how?

BEST tortured, inappropriate metaphor EVER!

 
Lurking Canadian
 

Yes. We all remember the “details, data and reasonable logical facts” behind “tax cuts raise revenue”, “they will welcome us as liberators” and “global warming is a hoax”.

Holy crap, do these people listen to themselves?

 
 

In real-life terms, Republicans will talk a thing to death, providing details and data and reasonable, logical facts while Democrats thrive on as few words and sentences as humanly possible: Things are fine! Go Green!

WTF? Aren’t Republicans the “Drill, baby, drill!” ad nauseam people?

 
 

In food terms, Republicans are the healthy (yet boring and tedious) meat, potatoes and vegetables of a meal. They are there to nourish, and to keep you strong and fit. Although Republicans represent the most responsible and important part of the meal, they’re nothing to really get excited about–unlike the sugary, yummy excesses of dessert.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA (*cough-cough, choke, cough*)HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

In real-life terms, Republicans will talk a thing to death, providing details and data and reasonable, logical facts while Democrats thrive on as few words and sentences as humanly possible: Things are fine! Go Green!

And I guess “death panels,” “class warfare” and “they wanna take our guns” qualify as detailed and reasonable. Ye gods.

 
 

Well, to be fair, if all you watch is Faux News then yes, the Democrats will be seen as being of few words. That’s because Hannity or O’Rielley or whoever will be sure to shout them down before they can say anything that might make sense. However, I wouldn’t call all that shouting down the same as “providing details and data and reasonable, logical facts”.

 
 

I remember conservatives blasting out volumes of logic and data in their fight against gay marriage. QED, libtards. QE to the D.

 
Marion in Savannah
 

Late to this, but TBogg had some fun with Mindy Meyer:

http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2012/07/23/mindy-for-bestie/

Lord, but her site is PINK…

 
 

In food terms, Republicans are the healthy (yet boring and tedious) meat, potatoes and vegetables of a meal.

Yeah, just ask Mike Huckabee!

 
 

In food terms, Republicans are a shit sandwich on barbed-wire bread.

 
 

Free online book written by a psychology professor that will enlighten you as to how the teapubs think and how they act like they do. Read, and be afraid, be very afraid.

Theauthoritarians.com

 
 

Mindy For Bestie

ANYONE WHO LIKES KITTIES MUST VOTE FOR MINDY

 
 

In food terms, Republicans are a shit sandwich on barbed-wire bread.

On the other hand we do see many Republicans depriving themselves of the joy of a good fluffernutter.

 
 

Lord, but her site is PINK…

Heee heee heee heee…..

 
 

WHY is everything a sexual innuendo to me today? WTF?

 
 

No, the reason is that you do not confess by your mouth your faith on Jesus.

That’s right, profess that creed. Profess it with your mouth!

I hate do say it, but do you have some evidence of that, not just some random rumor mill crap?

No. I’d excuse this by saying that reading an actual sourced biography of Steve Jobs (keeping to the stupid-but-oddly-apropos thinko theme, what nearly came out of my fingers was “Bill Jobs”) would make me want to stick a gun in my mouth; by noting that it’s broadly consistent with his militating for offshoring in his official capacity as America’s #1 Hipster Douchebag; by pointing to his notoriously difficult and precise demands and fairly aggressive control even of high-level designers and engineers, unusual for technology in the 80s and the 00s. But those are excuses. I made the assertion that Jobs lived and died a venal, labor-hating shit outside of direct evidence.

Literally the first result for “steve jobs labor record” on Google was this, though. (Nota bene: if Foxconn actually illegally squeezed 320 hours a month out of its employees for its pre-raise salary of $350 all the time, we still come out to a labor cost several dollars above the US minimum wage at US productivity levels – for US workers $1590 a month or $9.95 an hour. Mark my words, it wasn’t a money thing in the final analysis.) Nobody held a gun to his head and made him keep delivering manufacturing contracts to Foxconn.

Here is the meat of my issue: Apple is one of the lyingest companies in the industry. Under Jobs they made constant Rovian exercises in direct, spiteful falsehoods a primary strategy. The whole “there’s an app for that” campaign is a sterling example: at the time of the campaign Apple’s third-party app support was a laughingstock and it arguably still is, in significant part because of Apple’s high-level control lust. They solved that problem not by actually making independent app support better – God no, they’d sue over jailbreaking if they could to this very day – but by an ad blitz advertising the concept of applications as if they had invented them. As far as I’m aware, there’s never been a problem with Apple that Jobs failed to tackle with sleazy public relations horse shit. He always bet on the corruptibility and ignorance of tech nerds, and he was always right, and by his sign has a generation of shitty little men conquered.

Every other major company in the industry has factories run by Foxconn. Only Apple paid a Potemkin labor group to conduct a guided tour of their factory and declare the suicides were due to boredom. That, as precisely as possible, is Jobs’s continuing legacy.

 
Lurking Canadian
 

alec, it isn’t healthy to keep your feelings bottled up like that. If you have something to say about Steve Jobs, you really oughtn’t to keep beating around the bush, and just say what you think.

 
 

The penis: is there anything it CAN’T screw?

It’s not much fun, soft cock. It is like trying to tighten up a screw with a maggot.

Yes. We all remember the “details, data and reasonable logical facts” behind “tax cuts raise revenue”, “they will welcome us as liberators” and “global warming is a hoax”.

Holy crap, do these people listen to themselves?

That’s Rove in action, baby: cheapen the discourse so much you don’t seem to be losing anything by being incapable of the truth, then try and force the media to discuss your position in a way that makes so little sense to anyone informed of the issue they’re forced to jump into your frame just to oppose it. That only lesser lights inhabit the field in the GOP now is evinced by the failure of any Republicans to condemn Obama for humiliating America with his war in error.

 
 

I have tried professing my creed – while standing on a soap box on a street corner – with my asshole, but I gained few followers.

 
 

Yeah, just ask Mike Huckabee!

Rel-(wait for it)-evant.

 
 

ANYONE WHO LIKES KITTIES MUST VOTE FOR MINDY

I’ve been looking for an excuse to get Alicia Silverstone to die her hair black and star in a another movie. and the script writes itself!

(Wait; that one was out loud, wasn’t it? Darn!)

 
 

alec, it isn’t healthy to keep your feelings bottled up like that. If you have something to say about Steve Jobs, you really oughtn’t to keep beating around the bush, and just say what you think.

Candlelight vigils outside of an electronics franchise, man. Blubbering, weeping, thanking God that he lived, right where they could purchase or service Apple-brand products with the friendly help of professional Geniuses.

 
Spengler Dampniche
 

note to self — don’t read the Sadly comments while shaving balls with straight razor.

 
Unspenglered Verydeepniche
 

note to self — don’t read the Sadly comments while shaving balls with straight razor.

 
 

Who is Jon Kyl and why do I want to dance on his scrote with golf spikes?

 
 

note to self — don’t read the Sadly comments while shaving balls with straight razor.

That sounds less like personal hygiene and more like a hostage situation gone comically awry.

 
Lurking Canadian
 

note to selfSpengler — don’t read the Sadly comments while shavinge balls with straight razor.

 
 

In food terms, Republicans are the healthy (yet boring and tedious) meat, potatoes and vegetables of a meal. They are there to nourish, and to keep you strong and fit. Although Republicans represent the most responsible and important part of the meal, they’re nothing to really get excited about–unlike the sugary, yummy excesses of dessert.

Listeria-tainted catsup: there to nourish AND excite!

 
 

Whether or not you should shave balls with a straight razor depends very much on whose balls they are.

 
 

Listeria-tainted catsup: there to nourish AND excite!

Listeria-tainted ketchup is a salmonella-tainted vegetable.

 
 

The penis: is there anything it CAN’T screw?

One of the eternal questions that confounded the great philosophers. I still don’t know how many it takes to screw in a light bulb.

 
Pupienus Maximus
 

Holy crap, do these people listen to themselves?

How can you even ask? Do you live in a shoebox?

 
Pupienus Maximus
 

Oh, alec, your “based on US productivity” “analysis” is seriously flawed. And by “flawed” I mean worthless. The proof is so trivial it is left to the reader as an exercise.

Let it go, son. It’s not good for your health.

 
 

I still don’t know how many it takes to screw in a light bulb.

Only one, but be careful of the filament and any sharp edges.

 
 

The proof is so trivial it is left to the reader as an exercise.

I have this sudden urge to say “A = A.”

 
Lurking Canadian
 

I still don’t know how many it takes to screw in a light bulb.

Well, one, obviously. The hard part is finding a woman willing to get in there with you.

 
 

Under Jobs they made constant Rovian exercises in direct, spiteful falsehoods a primary strategy

Ok, yes, I know Apple made itself a fortune selling what I and lots and lots of others think is an outstanding product, despite their occasional infuriating quirks. (iTunes vs. Windows, for example)

However, I can’t remember a single commercial I’ve ever seen that wasn’t loaded with sillyassed falsehoods. Rove stole that “looookkkkk, SHINY! Looooook, BOOBS! Looook, get this because your jerk neighbor will pwn your toy collection if you don’t.” bullshit from the advertising industry. The fact that Jobs could use that to sucker in millions of hipster douchebags (being the very epitome of douche himself) is more a credit to his marketing skills by comparison to other executive than an indictment of his character, I think.

Aren’t you still seeing the “It’s cool, y’all, we got this” advertisements from BP?

 
 

I still don’t know how many it takes to screw in a light bulb.

Well, one, obviously. The hard part is finding a woman willing to get in there with you.

I’m going to just say, “Craigslist” and leave it at that.

 
 

Even my beloved Mariners used to say “You gotta love these guys!”. But I don’t. I don’t have to if I don’t want to.

 
 

Well, one, obviously. The hard part is finding a woman willing to get in there with you.

specially when she busy makin me a fuckin sammich!

 
 

If you’ve got a fucking sandwich, you don’t need the lightbulb.

 
 

Rove stole that “looookkkkk, SHINY! Looooook, BOOBS! Looook, get this because your jerk neighbor will pwn your toy collection if you don’t.” bullshit from the advertising industry. The fact that Jobs could use that to sucker in millions of hipster douchebags (being the very epitome of douche himself) is more a credit to his marketing skills by comparison to other executive than an indictment of his character, I think.

There’s a subtle difference between advertising and marketing: advertising generally confines itself to creating an anxiety in the customer for a product and marketing is more in the business of woofing and spin. They’re kissing cousins – you can create that anxiety via woofing and spin (classic unique-selling-point advertising) and you can woof and spin by creating anxiety (classic FUD). But they’re basically two different jobs.

Rove’s skill is in a sort of meta-lie. It doesn’t help that the popular record is very confused on what exactly that is; the one that gets batted around most, the one about John McCain’s illegitimate mixed-race baby, is an innovation in ratfucking (the push poll was new on the national scene) but we weren’t witnessing a new sort of rat being fucked. That would wait for “This is the man who’s got great numbers” and the Swift Boat campaign.

Oh, alec, your “based on US productivity” “analysis” is seriously flawed. And by “flawed” I mean worthless. The proof is so trivial it is left to the reader as an exercise.

6/10. Labors the punchline.

Let it go, son. It’s not good for your health.

Not a new variation on “you care, you lose”, but like commedia dell’arte the joy is in the telling and not the tale. 8/10.

 
 

WHY is everything a sexual innuendo to me today? WTF? – tsam

Why should you be any different than the rest of us here? And why should this day be different than any other days?

 
 

And why should this day be different than any other days?

No one told me it was Passover in July. Why am I never informed?

 
 

Passover in July

Worst Preston Sturges movie EVER.

 
 

My eternal gratitude to the writer of that human interest story for making this the pull quote about Palin’s niche market:

In 2008, conservative writer Rich Lowry wrote in National Review that Palin’s smile “was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing” and that “It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.”

That every day could be Christmas, and every week the week after the Republican veep pick.

 
 

“Theauthoritarians.com”

I read that e-book, before the new Tea Party addendum. It was good. Nice free PDF.

 
 

No one told me it was Passover in July. Why am I never informed? – alec

I dunno about Passover, but I guess there are certain similarities between the Omer and the Three Weeks. Nu? I guess the Fast of Tammuz could be renamed “Fast of the First Born in July”, which would make the first week of the Three Weeks Passover in July?

So I guess I missed Passover in July too! I should have raised the question earlier? But because it’s never too late for Passover in July (unless it is already August) … I’ll start our Sadly No-gada:

Why is this thread different than all other threads?

On all other threads we make fun of GOP projection, but on this thread … well, the GOP always PROJECTS. ALWAYS!!!

On all other threads we make penis jokes, but on this thread. He he … I said penis.

On all other threads we fisk GOoPer “reasoning”, but on this thread we fisk the “reasoning” of some Cannuck.

On all other threads, there are references to mangoes, while this thread references sammitches and lightbulbs.

 
 

If you’ve got a fucking sandwich, you don’t need the lightbulb.

Ha! Excellent point. I hadn’t thought of that since I don’t got no fuckin sammich.

 
 

Why should you be any different than the rest of us here? And why should this day be different than any other days?

Usually that’s a crime of opportunity. Today I am stretching and laboring the innuendo until…OH GOD I’M DOING IT AGAIN

 
 

Passover in July

Worst Preston Sturges movie EVER.

Yeah, Brian Donlevy as a rabbi just didn’t do it for me.

 
 

it’s never too late for Passover in July (unless it is already August)

But Passover in July improves with age, like a fine wine. I’ve even heard of some celebrating it as late as April.

 
 

Steve Jones fucked a lot of sandwiches. See the Johnny Rotten autobiography.

 
 

Conceptual art is made by assholes, exhibit 7,636:

“This time the challenge is presented by twenty-one walls, arranged on behind each other, each with a ladder leading up to a narrow opening. This opening permits the participant/viewer to climb to the other side and down into the recess between the walls. The recess is actually a passageway that directs one’s course to the next opening that always appears at the opposite end of the new wall. […] But phase 1 closes on the final passageway in front of the twenty-first wall with disillusionment. Disbelief, frustration, and, finally, anger come over the participant upon finding that there is no opening in the wall — and no other way out but to retrace the exhausting course”

Midwest Art Dec. 1977 re: “Untitled” by Alice Aycock

 
 

Yeah, Brian Donlevy as a rabbi just didn’t do it for me. – Bitter Scribe

I think they meant to cast (more appropriately) Baruch Doniel Levy but something got mixed up in the telephone conversation.

 
 

Steve Jones fucked a lot of sandwiches. – Substance McGravitas paraphrasing Johnny Rotten

Dagwood Bumstead is based on Steve Jones?

 
 

I don’t have a problem with art that makes people mad. I’d have to throw out a lot of records. On the other hand…

Predock’s design philosophy is very concerned with how the structure interacts with its surroundings. He has called his style “abstract landscape”; thus he blends the structure in with the surrounding landscape 1. The building also interacts with the people who use it. It was supposedly designed on purpose to be confusing. Visitors are often forced to talk to someone to find out how to get to where they need to go. Doorways that you need to pass through will sometimes be locked, forcing you to find a new way. The doors that get locked rotate every so often, further confusing the situation. The idea was to force human interaction because it houses the social sciences. The building also has a number of Emergency Buttons, colloquially referred to as “Panic Buttons” located throughout.

 
 

While we’re on conceptual art and assholes, I have to say (wholly out of character for a cynic and a killjoy and a blatherskite) I love the stuff. An Oak Tree is a perfect little Catholic joke, and that so many of both its proponents and its detractors misunderstood the clear artist’s statement as a claim that “if I call water a tree, it’s a tree” speaks to the bankruptcy of international art criticism. (Because we needed evidence of that.)

On an unrelated note, have a bunch of verklempt jagoffs.

 
 

So I guess I missed Passover in July too! I should have raised the question earlier? But because it’s never too late for Passover in July (unless it is already August) …

Summerseder?

Steve Jones fucked a lot of sandwiches. See the Johnny Rotten autobiography.

Ugh, hold the fucking mayo!

 
 

400dth!!11!1!

 
 

That Predock-designed building at UC Davis should not have been built. He seems to have had some shallow ideas about social interaction, fine; but to impose them repetitively on people who are trying to work and learn is high arrogance.

If Predock was bored with combining form and function, why not stop practicing architecture? Fuck this guy. It’s an interesting-looking building and I’d like to wander through it, but fuck him and the people who approved it.

 
 

Smoked turkey on French bread (baked in a loaf pan with a tip of then hat to St. Julia) with Swiss, homemade mayo, and a bit of ajvar. No fucking was involved. It wuz gud sammich!

 
 

P.S.: married ppl can’t look at swimsuit models? Is that new law?
Absolutely not. Not to eat meat, that is the law. Not to go on all fours, that is the law. Not to spill blood, that is the law.

Other body fluids are OK? I do not want the House of Pain.

No Spill Blood!
screamed Baby.

 
 

There’s a Teap Arty addendum? I’m off to snag a new edition! Thanks for the heads up.

 
 

He seems to have had some shallow ideas about social interaction, fine; but to impose them repetitively on people who are trying to work and learn is high arrogance. – Golem Heart

The same point could be made about libertarians or even Republicans. Since it is always projection in GOP-land, they would make the same comment about “liberals” and even use the assholishness of conceptual artists (who must be liberal, of course, because they are all artsy and shit) as evidence that we liberals are assholes.

As to alec’s unrelated note, I was stuck behind a jagoff on my way to work. Actually it was worse than that: I was driving behind a completely lost and dazed and confused jagoff driving at 15 miles per hour and directly in front of a taxi cab.

 
 

Not to go on all fours, that is the law.
No doggy-style? ARFARF AFAF.

 
 

Heh. Alice Aycock. Heh.

 
 

As to alec’s unrelated note, I was stuck behind a jagoff on my way to work. Actually it was worse than that: I was driving behind a completely lost and dazed and confused jagoff driving at 15 miles per hour and directly in front of a taxi cab.

Statistically, at any time one out of every three people is a jagoff. Look to your left and your right – see any? Then it’s you!

Smoked turkey on French bread (baked in a loaf pan with a tip of then hat to St. Julia) with Swiss, homemade mayo, and a bit of ajvar.

That sounds like an about perfect sandwich if you can get the consistency of the swiss and mayo right. What’s pan-baking it add compared to the usual procedure for toasting or grilling?

 
Coach Joe Paterno
 

Wuzza-wuzzup, loony libs? I bet you Obummer-lovin’ silly socialists got your knickers all in a twist off of the National Clown Anarchy Association wrongfully sullied my name and that of ol’ Jerry, the Super Sandusky! Well ya best be believin’ that Da Old Coach didn’t do a thingy dingy wrong, ya jabronis! The funky fact of the matter is, Louis Freeh worked for KKKlinton and his KKKronies, so it’s no wonder he went after Da Old Coach and his SPREAD of CONSERVOMENTUM ’12! So you can try to take away my wins, but check what I’m rip-rappin’ at ya: I won those games fair and square, and the Super Sandusky was framed by a bunch of punks! Badoodle-boo-yeah!

Paterno out, clowns.

 
 

THE SLEEPER HAS AWAKENED

 
 

There’s conceptual art that I like — I’ve encountered alot — but I’ve never been moved by it. Much of the time I’ve had similar ideas, but had better things to do than follow through. Example being some dude that encased rotting carcasses in lucite or whatever. I thought of that as a teenager while on acid, which wore off, mostly.

I intellectualize art as much as anyone, but at core I’m into it for emotional reasons. I replayed Charlie Parker’s “Ko Ko” about ten times on the way to work today. It makes me tear up with joy just thinking about it.

 
 

To me, the only one thing worse than conceptual art is performance art.

 
 

Paterno out, clowns.

Aaaand STAY OUT!

 
 

It’s a fair critique of conceptual art in general, which in tending to prestige the exact inner state of the artist resonates with fewer (and, as that tumblr hints, more intolerable) people.

The other problem is the same as with architecture or Caravaggio: it’s way harder to adapt the Parthenon or Joseph Beuys to a lightbox or a printing press than it is to do so with certain other kinds of visual art, sometimes because of intrinsic limits of a form and sometimes because of a weird visual idiom. In an image the size of your head Caravaggio just looks like he’s painting a lot of black and Christo just looks like he’s bought too much nylon.

(Neither of these are comparisons between equals, and indeed in that last case it’s easy to see it that way even as it’s meant to be seen.)

 
 

The bread itself is my basic French bread recipe that i might form into a baguette or boule but instrad baked in a buttered loaf pan. The top gets covered with buttered foil, a baking sheet and a weight. Makes the most bestest sandwich bread EVAH! It’s dense but light, chewy but tender, … utter perfection.

 
 

Was Spalding Gray considered performance art? I massively enjoyed getting stoned out of y gourd and listening to his monologues. In my experience, performance art is nothing but an excuse for the MFA student to get naked LOOK AT ME IM SO CLEVER USING NUDITY THIS PARTICULAR WAY LOOK AT ME AND BY THE WAY IM NAKED,

 
 

Fuck, zombie JoePa is even more intolerable than the semi-human that preceded it.

 
 

Hat trick! LOOK AT ME IM RUNNING NAKED THROUGH THE THREAD

And get that fucking razor away from me Spengler Dampniche IF THAT IS YOUR REAL NAME.

 
 

In my experience, art is nothing but an excuse for the MFA student to get naked LOOK AT ME IM SO CLEVER USING NUDITY THIS PARTICULAR WAY LOOK AT ME AND BY THE WAY IM NAKED,

FTFY.

Depending on whether it’s considered an art or a craft at the time, most art of any description is churned out quickly and lazily by respectively 20-year-olds looking to get laid or 20-year-olds looking to get paid.

Therefore 90% of concept art should be an elaborate way of getting prospective mates to see and be impressed by your genitals, and the way they can see your genitals. If the move is ever in the other direction, the nudity will be replaced by sign-swinging – or perhaps combined: “As my penis spins, so spins Domino’s Pizza.”

 
 

In my experience, performance art is nothing but an excuse for the MFA student to get naked LOOK AT ME IM SO CLEVER USING NUDITY THIS PARTICULAR WAY LOOK AT ME AND BY THE WAY IM NAKED

Not such a bad thing.

As with other art forms, Sturgeon’s Law applies but I have a lot of respect for some of the people who get lumped into the performance art category. Still, This is a classic.

 
 

In my experience, performance art is nothing but an excuse for the MFA student to get naked LOOK AT ME IM SO CLEVER USING NUDITY THIS PARTICULAR WAY LOOK AT ME AND BY THE WAY IM NAKED

IT WAS A BFA ASSHOLE.

 
 

Mindy Miers site reminds me of lock-down. Pink cups with pink hearts all over them filled with pens with pink hearts stuck all over them and all manner of useless pink bobbles. On pens. What possible reason does anyone have to make the dining room in a nut hatch look like a seven year-old girl’s bedroom?

When you’re dealing with adults about serious matters you should present yourself as an adult in an adult environment and treat other adults like adults. The audience this woman is trying to appeal to can’t vote yet.

Is running for government a hobby for a lot of conservatives?

 
 

There was some pop science bullshit long ago about pink being an aggression-reducing colour. I mean, look at Snagglepuss. He was always exiting stage left instead of tearing shit up like a REAL mountain lion.

 
 

Hilarity…

What’s with the coke-head jaw movements?

 
 

When you’re dealing with adults about serious matters you should present yourself as an adult in an adult environment and treat other adults like adults. The audience this woman is trying to appeal to can’t vote yet.

The audience she appeals to (or tries to appeal to, and anyway belongs to) is one in which everyone thinks they’re the sole sexual adult in the entire world – that they are alone with that shame – and that if they wish hard enough that particular butterfly can retreat back into the chrysalis.

Actual children are not quite so desperate to adhere to childish things.

 
 

Hilarity…

That is great.

 
 

As with other art forms, Sturgeon’s Law applies

Since the second part of Sturgeon’s law is “90% of everything is crap” I should think so.

 
 

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that guy before. He is sincere. Which makes it truly hilarious.

 
 

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that guy before. He is sincere. Which makes it truly hilarious.

At that age, wearing a full but close-cropped beard tells the world the parts of you capable of being insincere about anything for any length of time have withered and died and you do not miss them. (See also Paul Krugman, a wonderful little magic gnome.)

 
 

Hilarity…

Is that conceptual art or performance art?

 
 

WAHHHHH I’m having a shitty day.

My doc didn’t renew my prescription for my anti-depressant (day 4) and I’m a mess

And ASHTON KUTCHER THAT ASSHOLE STOLED MY GIRLFRIEND OH I HATE HIM SO MUCH

 
 

My doc didn’t renew my prescription for my anti-depressant (day 4) and I’m a mess

Talk to the pharmacist. Here in glorious communist Canada they’ll tide you over for a few days.

That’s why I have so much extra dexedrine kicking around.

 
 

My doc didn’t renew my prescription for my anti-depressant (day 4) and I’m a mess

Ugh! I’ve been switching anti-inflammatories because the only one I’ve tried so far that worked has a SSRI effect just minor enough to interfere with any medication for OCD. The absence of a mood leveler sucks even worse than the withdrawals (now over) and all I can do to ease the crushing anxiety is hate celebrities.

Let’s make this a Strangers on a Train deal: I find Ashton Kutcher and you help me out with – uh, shit, someone living – Tim Burton? Yes, Tim Burton. He’s bought his fucking button this time!

 
 

Talk to the pharmacist. Here in glorious communist Canada they’ll tide you over for a few days.

See, if you’d just stuck to the plausible stories about your land of chocolate, like a cool French president who was a ballerina and a cuss lord, or gravy fries, you might have gotten away with it. Universal health care? Please. Next you’ll tell me the most popular donut chain in “Canada” is Tim Hortons, home of conceptual donut orbs.

 
 

Deal. I dont’ like Burton’s shit nohow.

 
 

Talk to the pharmacist. Here in glorious communist Canada they’ll tide you over for a few days.

I did. I got the standard “gosh, I’d love to help you, especially since really don’t like that look in your eye, but I can’t.” Doc never called me, I’ve been trying to get an appt, but they won’t CALL ME BACK. Now I’m getting really really mad.

 
 

American pharmacists are paranoid as hell. I have to assume it’s for good reason because what the fuck else would explain it? I’ve known people who have gotten the full investigative-reporter routine over antibiotics, I guess on account of they’re Rx-only and the SOP is to treat any attitude towards medication except blase indifference as evidence of some manner of crime.

Maybe it’s projection. Maybe one of the main perqs of the job is doing enormous Goddamn rails of Bactrim off a cosmetics mirror.

 
 

For fuck sake tsam, tell the office that you NEED the doctor to CALL IN a renewal. Tell them it’s URGENT, without it you may HURT YOURSELF and doesn’t the doctor care that you are about to HURT YOURSELF?!?

Also, if you find Ashton Kutcher please pass him on to me. I would like to do things to, er, with him.

 
 

If it’s an SSRI, you should be very carefully weaned from it. Stopping abruptly can really do a number on your brain.

 
 

Also, if you find Ashton Kutcher please pass him on to me. I would like to do things to, er, with him.

Oh, we should team up. I’ll club Mila and drag her to my cave, you club Ashton and drag him to yours.

I’ll be ok. I just feel really really really weird.

 
 

Pups, you know those things you’d like to do with AK – me too.
But with only one penis between us (iykwimaityd)

 
 

Your doctor sounds like a real jerk, tsam.

SSRI Discontinuation or Withdrawal Syndrome
By MARGARITA TARTAKOVSKY, M.S.

After some people stop taking a type of antidepressant known as a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), they experience a variety of symptoms. According to Dr. Ross J. Baldessarini, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and director of the psychopharmacology program at McLean Hospital, these symptoms may include “a flu-like reaction, as well as a variety of physical symptoms, that may include headache, gastrointestinal distress, faintness and strange sensations of vision or touch.”

This common phenomenon is known as SSRI discontinuation syndrome. (It may also be known as SSRI withdrawal syndrome.)

Discontinuation symptoms typically arise within days after stopping the medication, particularly if it was stopped abruptly. Stopping a high dose of a relatively short-acting drug also can bring on symptoms. In addition to the previously-mentioned symptoms, “anxiety and depressed or irritable mood are common features that may make it hard to differentiate SSRI discontinuation syndrome from early return of symptoms of depression,” Baldessarini said.

About 20 percent of people experience discontinuation symptoms, according to Dr. Michael D. Banov, medical director of Northwest Behavioral Medicine and Research Center in Atlanta, and author of Taking Antidepressants: Your Comprehensive Guide To Starting, Staying On and Safely Quitting. About 15 percent experience mild to moderately bothersome symptoms while fewer than five percent experience more severe symptoms, he said.

However, the risk for discontinuation syndrome is generally greater with potent, short-acting SSRIs —particularly paroxetine (Paxil and others) and venlafaxine (Effexor and others), Baldessarini said.

Discontinuation symptoms can happen with any antidepressant, but seem to be more common with the following classes of drugs:

SSRIs. These include citalopram (Celexa), escitalopram (Lexapro), fluoxetine (Prozac and others), fluvoxamine (Luvox), paroxetine (Paxil), and sertraline (Zoloft)

Inhibitors of inactivation of both norepinephrine and serotonin (SNRIs). These include chlompramine (Anafranil), venlafaxine (Effexor) and desvenlafaxine (Pristiq). Such drugs are prescribed more often for depression or severe anxiety disorders, so the withdrawal phenomenon is more common.

Whether you experience discontinuation syndrome after stopping an SSRI depends on several factors. These include the amount of time you’ve taken the medication, your dosage level, and the pill’s half-life (how quickly it is eliminated from your body). For instance, Prozac, which has about a five-week half-life, appears to cause discontinuation much less often than drugs with shorter half-lives, such as Paxil.

If discontinuation symptoms last more than a week or two, call your doctor. You may be in the early stages of a relapse.

Preventing Discontinuation Syndrome
There are ways that you can prevent or reduce discontinuation symptoms.

Don’t stop a psychotropic medicine abruptly. People may stop their medicine abruptly for various reasons, including feeling better or experiencing unpleasant side effects, as well as simply forgetting to refill a prescription. But stopping some medicines abruptly or “cold turkey” can cause discontinuation or withdrawal symptoms.
Talk to your doctor. If you’d like to stop your antidepressant, first talk it over with your prescribing clinician. Voice any concerns you have, and do not attempt to stop on your own. “It’s a collaborative venture between patient and doctor,” Baldessarini said. “Don’t be afraid to ask your doctor tough questions.”

Consider if you’ve received a thorough clinical assessment. Before stopping an antidepressant — or any medicine — your doctor should assess whether this is an appropriate time to do so. He or she should consider various factors, “including your past clinical history and current stress level,” Baldessarini said.

Discontinue slowly. One of the best ways to minimize discontinuation syndrome is by reducing doses of medicines, including SSRIs, slowly. Together, you and your doctor should decide how to reduce, then stop, the dose. Based on his and others’ clinical research, Baldessarini said that reducing the dose of an SSRI to zero gradually over two weeks or longer is prudent. Even slower discontinuation may be required if you’ve taken high doses for a long time.

Practice healthy habits. If you’re under a lot of stress, not sleeping well, not eating nourishing foods, or not sticking to a consistent schedule, stopping medicine successfully may be unrealistic. It can increase anxiety and depression, which can make stopping harder.

Is It Discontinuation Or Depression?

Discontinuation reactions are not dangerous. According to Banov, “the bigger concern when stopping your antidepressant is making sure your depression does not return.” Typically, “this risk follows SSRI-discontinuation reactions by considerable time (weeks to a few months), but when depression re-emerges quickly, it can be tough to tell whether you’re experiencing discontinuation symptoms or a recurrence of depression,” Baldessarini said.

If you’re experiencing these symptoms soon after stopping an antidepressant, then the reaction likely is discontinuation syndrome. However, as Banov noted, symptoms such as mood swings, anxiety and depression can make it tricky to distinguish between discontinuation reactions and depression. He suggests that patients and their clinicians consider the symptoms that led to starting the treatment. “If anxiety was initially part of your symptoms, that’s a clue that new symptoms of anxiety during discontinuation of treatment may represent depression, especially if they arise after several weeks after stopping the medicine,” he said.

Risk of discontinuation or withdrawal reactions appears to be greater after stopping prolonged treatment, especially with high doses of an antidepressant, according to Baldessarini. “Although the duration of treatment is less clearly a predictor of relapse of depression or anxiety, symptoms arising many weeks after discontinuing most likely represent relapse.”

In addition to slowly reducing the dose of an antidepressant, Baldessarini emphasized the importance of “thoughtful monitoring by yourself and your doctor, and communicating” with your doctor to limit risks of relapse after stopping an antidepressant.

http://psychcentral.com/lib/2011/ssri-discontinuation-or-withdrawal-syndrome/

 
 

Now doc says he’ll see me Thursday and renew the prescription then. I only have to wait 2 more days. awesome

 
 

TEH BUTTOCKS!

If only one of those moviegoers had been armed, like that guy.

 
 

The cost of freedom is measured in assholes.

 
 

Good luck, tsam.

 
 

Btw, Xanax is awesome.

 
 

You want I should try to score some ludes or something? I could ride up to Spokane, West Idaho, tomorrow. I may have some Valium around here somewhere….

 
 

Now I am jealous of ludes…in the company of such illustrious men…

 
 

Now I am going to google “ludes.”

 
 

Don’t stop a psychotropic medicine abruptly.

I have printed out that message and glued it to the beer fridge.

 
 

Don’t stop a psychotropic medicine abruptly.

I tend to bounce back and forth between caffeine and alcohol. Better living through chemistry.

 
 

Now I am going to google “ludes.”

Gee, thanks for that, whippersnapper.

Also, lawn. Off.

 
 

Oh. Groovy.
Ha! VS misspelled “groooovy”.

 
Lurking Canadian
 

tsam, that really sucks. I left my meds at home one time (yeah, I’m the dumbass in my story) before a two week trip that started over a long weekend. I went to a pharmacist, hoping he’d give me three doses to get me to Tuesday. Smug fucker wouldn’t. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

Seriously? Is there a big trade in illicit Prozac in Kingston? Lots of people dealing the junk three pills at a time?

So, anyway, being in Soviet Canuckistan might not have helped.

 
 

Maybe it’s a provincial deal: Canada is a state’s rights jerkoff’s dream, as each province gets to regulate to its heart’s content.

Clearly British Columbia is the best province.

 
 

I hear Belgian Columbia is brutal.

 
 

I’ve known people who used antidepressants for recreational purposes, but I’m guessing the pharmacist was just following the kind of rules that keep pharmacists from going to jail over other people’s drug interactions and such.

 
 

I’ve known people who used antidepressants for recreational purposes

If you gulp a month’s worth of amitriptyline and wash down the pills with most of a bottle of whisky, you do not remember much of your subsequent behaviour but it provides onlookers with no end of amusement.* Or so I hear from a friend.

* Or your heart goes into fibrillation, mileage may vary.

 
 

I’ve known people who enjoyed a dose of Ritalin now and then but a bunch of SSRIs taken out of the blue sounds like a recipe for a jittery and nauseated headache.

 
 

PRAISE JESUS. Without the Aurora shooting, no miracle.

 
 

When I can’t stop fiddlin’
I just takes me Ritalin
I’m poppin’ and sailin’, man! [Toot toot]

–Bart Simpson

 
 

PRAISE JESUS

Psht. It seems as if the bullet traveled through Petra’s brain without hitting any significant brain areas.

When ya gots no signiferrignant brane areas, it’s childs play.

 
 

M.B. & SSRIs.

Didn’t mention it there, but I stopped the Lexapro® because I called the pharmacy to make sure I didn’t have to have the County Mental Health Dep’t. shrink call in the prescription again; the pharmacy advised I owed Medicare or Medi-Cal something like US$800.00. I called the shrink to find out about this & five yrs. later I still haven’t heard from her. No grim effects from stopping, but of course it had no effect on me to begin w/.

Considering the amount of comment spam I receive for various anti-depressants, there must be some market for abuse thereof.

 
 

Shit, am I here?

Fuckin’ knee.
.

 
 

My next scooter(!) to replace the one stolen by Rutherford County!

(don’t sweat the content — the financing has been arranged, already, so no blegging)
.

 
 

So, you can’t get your current scooter back from the county or would it just not be worth fixing at this point?

 
 


God I hate Flash.

I always thought Superman was faster myself.

 
 

In 2002 Romney tells the Olympians “you didn’t build that.”

You Olympians, however, know you didn’t get here solely on your own power,” said Romney, who on Friday will attend the Opening Ceremonies of this year’s Summer Olympics. “For most of you, loving parents, sisters or brothers, encouraged your hopes, coaches guided, communities built venues in order to organize competitions. All Olympians stand on the shoulders of those who lifted them. We’ve already cheered the Olympians, let’s also cheer the parents, coaches, and communities. All right! [pumps fist]

 
 

ha…

haha…

ha ha ha ha ha…

HAHA HA HA HA HA !

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jul/23/americas-iron-lady/

oh my…

 
 

tsam is happy to report that after two more phone calls that hinted at a suicidal behavior, medicine is in hand and in guts. Dickhead doctor is a dickhead.

 
 

I’m just glad that once Rmoney is installed as preznit we can get back to our Anglo-Saxon hegemony. I’m sick of the white male being a second class citizen; lets take our country back!!!!

 
 

Youse guys are cracking me up.

Otherwise, I gots nuthin.

 
 

In a shocking development, the First Lady of North Korea is a Ju!

 
 

lets take our country back!!!!

Take it Back

 
 

Power Line’s Steve Hayward sits behind Jesse Jackson on a plane, takes creepy stalker pictures of his food and newspaper.

 
 

“I’m not stupid, I’m not going to say ‘no.’ Shame on me if I didn’t use what’s available,” he said. “As a matter of fact, right now, I’m driving on a road.

“So, no,” said Gilchrist, “I don’t feel as though I’ve compromised anything or misled anybody.”

1) Yes, you ARE stupid. No, I take that back, you’re fucking lying sack of slug shit.

2) How is that lying like a rug is not compromising or misleading anybody?

3) Really? Seriously? For real? Ya fucking kidding me?

4) Cool story, bro.

 
 

Gilchrist is a perfect example of what Obama was talking about.

Or, as Craig T. Nelson said, “When I was on welfare, did anybody bail me out? No.”

 
 

#2 sentence is AWESOME. Just sayin’

 
 

[Bachmann and the 5 stooges] had the temerity to send to the federal inspector general formal requests for investigations into Muslim Brotherhood influence operations inside our government. That’s a threat every bit as dangerous as the communist subversion of a generation ago.

Douchebag is inadvertently correct.

 
 

That Iron Lady shit sounded much better in the original German.

 
 

The Iron Lady of America?

I wouldn’t let that crazy broad anywhere near my ironing!

Besides, every true wingnut knows that that is the job of the underpaid Messican help.

 
 

The Iron Lady of America?

Someone left the flake out in the rain…

 
 

[Bachmann and the 5 stooges] had the temerity to send to the federal inspector general formal requests for investigations into Muslim Brotherhood influence operations inside our government.

I’ve actually long suspected that the Iranians had some high level moles in our government and/or the “conservative movement” operating since the days of Iran/Contra. Look at the Team B, et al, track record: arms for Iran, deposing Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, …

 
 

American pharmacists are paranoid as hell. – alec

Given that for all they know you will get addicted to whatever drug they’re giving you and will hold up the place if the insurance company denies you a refill (thanks to the ready availability of guns in this country) or you’re just getting as many drugs as possible on your insurance’s dime to re-sell them on the black market, I can’t blame them. Even if the pharmacist isn’t being a jerk about it, chances are your insurance will be — I used to be on a nasal steroid: I could only get a month’s worth of the stuff once every 30 days (fortunately the bottle always had a few extra doses) — when I wanted to refill a few days early so I wouldn’t have to refill while I was visiting my parents out of state, my insurance company had a fit!

Of course if guns were less available, it might help prevent a few robberies and if drugs were more affordable on the legitamate market, there wouldn’t be such a black market for them … but we can’t have actual solutions to problems in this country.

Heck, Gov. Christie, a northeastern “moderate” has declared that now is not the time to debate gun control. Which means only liberal socialists who hate ‘Murka and have “Muslim” names like Bloomberg want to make political hay out of a tragedy. Of course nobody said after 9/11 “now is not the time to take action to increase national security”. Such a person would have been taken to Gitmo.

And we wonder why we can’t have nice things?

 
 

Given that for all they know you will get addicted to whatever drug they’re giving you and will hold up the place if the insurance company denies you a refill (thanks to the ready availability of guns in this country) or you’re just getting as many drugs as possible on your insurance’s dime to re-sell them on the black market, I can’t blame them.

That doesn’t really hold for most drugs. “For all they know” should mean a lot: they’re pharmacists.

 
Pupienus Maximus
 

I love Portland. http://i.imgur.com/9vtkF.png

 
 

I can’t blame the pharmacy in this case. They have a procedure, they followed it. It’s not their job (and we probably don’t want it to be) to make a spot determination as to whether they should refill an SSRI script without doctor approval because a twitchy weirdo is standing there telling them he’s not doing well without it.

The doctor’s office, on the other hand, blew this operation badly. They never once called me to inform me that I needed to make an appointment, they just let me go into the pharmacy to find that out, then make several attempts to get an appointment and didn’t bother to tell me when that appointment would be or if they would be approving the refill in the interim.

I’m not sure I’d call pharmacists paranoid–they have all manner of laws and regulations they absolutely must comply with if they want to stay in business and even avoid jail in some instances. Truthfully, the lady there totally sympathized with me and did her best to help me. She also called me on her personal cell phone to inform me that they had it filled. So I’m going to have to give Walgreen’s a thumbs up here.

 
 

Heck, Gov. Christie, a northeastern “moderate” has declared that now is not the time to debate gun control.

He also made it pretty clear that decriminalization and treatment is a far more cost effective and socially beneficial than incarceration for drug users. (duh, but it was nice to hear it from a conservadope)

It’s rather sad that Christie is the brightest mind in the Repig party these days, and he’s still just to the right of Napoleon.

 
 

Of course, I’m kinda down with the whole “Republicans are vegetables” idea though.

 
 

Let’s hope they’re beet this November.

 
 

SQUASH ALL PUN THREADS.

 
 

Peas, for goodness sake, stop. Or at least save it for tomato.

 
 

Remember: The military is the only part of government that creates jobs.

Yeah, I watched George Pataki on the Ed Show last night spewing the same garbage. In the wingnut world spending on defense somehow turns into private enterprise creating jobs all by itself. Whereas spending on infrastructure is just the government trying to create jobs, which everyone knows is entirely unpossible.

 
 

The most assholish thing about Aurora that has yet been said. Surprise, surprise: It’s from NRO.

 
Helmut Monotreme
 

In the wingnut world spending on defense somehow turns into private enterprise creating jobs all by itself.

Come on. If the Air Force wasn’t buying, Boeing and all of those other huge defense contractors would totally sit down and design and build cutting edge , billion dollar fighters and bombers just to stay in practice. They would build thousands of them too, just to keep their beloved employees in pocket money. The US government is just doing them a favor by taking all of those extra planes off their hands, they were really starting to clutter up the factories.

 
 

Do the girls that were saved in Aurora make sandwiches and if so where are these sandwiches?

 
 

Because sammiches are always topical; I just went to Cochon Butcher and it is as good as they say. Just what New Orleans needs, even better sammiches.

 
 

And some right-wing blog defends her comments in 3, 2, 1…

Also, it’s interesting how the “apology” comes out only after the repercussion/punishment is dealt.

 
Pupienus Maximus
 

In 15 minutes or so I’m getting on the bike to ride down to Laguna Seca for the MotoGP races. Planning on hitting every interesting road between here and there. Especially this one.

You play nice while I’m gone.

 
 

Truly she has sullied the Olympic spirit of never endangering the cash flow.

 
 

I’m jealous Pup, I’ll be watching on the TV though so wave to the camera.

 
 

“With so many Africans in Greece, the West Nile mosquitoes will be getting home food!!!”

I’m sure Mark Steyn has already mailed her an engagement ring and a copy of his superbutch showtunes album.

 
 

Also too, what a weird picture they chose to accompany the article.

 
 

Come on. If the Air Force wasn’t buying, Boeing and all of those other huge defense contractors would totally sit down and design and build cutting edge , billion dollar fighters and bombers just to stay in practice.

Hey–Isreal can always use a few more fighters and indiscriminate weapons to use on cities.

 
 

Hey–Isreal can always use a few more fighters and indiscriminate weapons to use on cities. – tsam

Israel should just lob barrages of unaimed rockets into Palestinian territories like the people from whom it is trying to defend itself do?

 
 

I’m getting on the bike to ride down to Laguna Seca for the MotoGP races.

Have a great time, ya bastid.

 
 

Hey WC;

Who’s your primary pick for Gov? I’m thinking Inslee. Your thoughts?

 
 

Who’s your primary pick for Gov?

Inslee, who else? Shirley not McKenna, that lying asshole. Jeebus on a pogo stick, I’d vote against him just on the basis of his joining the ACA lawsuit against the wishes of EVERY OTHER BRANCH OF THE WA GOVERNMENT, even if he hadn’t lied his way through the rest of the primary process.

The only other candidates are a Wingnut and a Libertarian (but I repeat myself).

I’m not in love with Inslee but at least there’s a small chance we won’t be circling the toilet in three years with him as gov, unlike the rest of ’em.

 
 

Israel should just lob barrages of unaimed rockets into Palestinian territories like the people from whom it is trying to defend itself do?

Would you prefer the Palestinians had F-16s and Merkava tanks, since that’s the “humane” way to go about it?

 
 

“Also too, what a weird picture they chose to accompany the article.”

Yeah. Is that pose and expression typical of triple-jumping?

 
 

Israel should just lob barrages of unaimed rockets into Palestinian territories like the people from whom it is trying to defend itself do?

“People from whom it is trying to take stuff.”

 
Helmut Monotreme
 

Clearly the only way forward for peace in the Levant, is a screwball comedy on local TV in the same vein as the odd couple or Mork and Mindy. Clearly there should be mixed Palestinian/Israeli couples in an apartment building in the Gaza strip. When Israeli tank and bulldozers roll up to the front door, everyone has to pretend to be Israeli. When Hamas show up to take hostages, everyone has to pretend to be Palestinian. Everyone laughs, everyone cries, half heard conversations lead to wacky hijinks. In the end everyone learns a little something and Zombie Nancy Reagan teaches everyone how important it is to just say no.

 
 

Inslee, who else? Shirley not McKenna, that lying asshole. Jeebus on a pogo stick, I’d vote against him just on the basis of his joining the ACA lawsuit against the wishes of EVERY OTHER BRANCH OF THE WA GOVERNMENT, even if he hadn’t lied his way through the rest of the primary process.

Yeah, McKenna was NEVER a consideration at all. I was fucking LIVID when he joined that ACA suit. I still wonder why Gregoire didn’t put a stop to that.

I’m voting for Cantwell again too. She hasn’t been all that bad, I don’t think.

 
 

Also, where did that fucking greasy weasel Rossi go? I expected to see him on my ballot for something…I think he’s in the state senate at the moment, but he’s always had his beady little eyes aimed higher than that.

 
 

I’m just glad that once Rmoney is installed as preznit we can get back to our Anglo-Saxon hegemony. I’m sick of the white male being a second class citizen; lets take our country back!!!!

Damn peasants aren’t fit to lick my Norman boots!

 
 

I still wonder why Gregoire didn’t put a stop to that.

I don’t think she could. She was pissed too.

I’m voting for Cantwell again too. She hasn’t been all that bad, I don’t think.

OK for a corporate centrist. I’m a little surprised she hasn’t climbed higher in the Senate. I’ll vote for her because again, who else?

where did that fucking greasy weasel Rossi go?

Yup, looks like he’s back in the state senate, licking his wounds. I’d be surprised if he took another statewide run anytime soon, partly because I think the party bosses have IDed him as a loser. It’s about time they joined the club.

 
 

Medical College of Bender. Zero likes.

Shame, they’re really good at restoring “range of motion” to patients.

 
 

NPR said that more Americans now die of pill overdoses than car accidents?!

This is news to me. But hey, Los Angeles is closing its marijuana dispensaries, so at least priorities are straight.

 
 

Zombie Nancy Reagan teaches everyone how important it is to just say no.

Um, doesn’t she have to be dead first?

 
 

Um, doesn’t she have to be dead first?

Have you seen her lately? She might have died already but her corpse continues to be animated by spite and the gallons of jism she swallowed in her “acting” career.

 
 

NPR said that more Americans now die of pill overdoses than car accidents?!

Pills need frontal crumple-zones & airbags.

 
 

When Israeli tank and bulldozers roll up to the front door, everyone has to pretend to be Israeli. When Hamas show up to take hostages, everyone has to pretend to be Palestinian.

“Peace be upon you in the name of the Prophet. Oops! I mean – Oy vey! Morty will ya get the door already!”

 
 

Clearly the only way forward for peace in the Levant, is a screwball comedy on local TV in the same vein as the odd couple or Mork and Mindy

OK so Mindy is the Jewish one, I take it? The goys — I’m sorry, the Palestinians get Mork?

 
 

Medical College of Bender. Zero likes.

How many doctors does one bending robot need?

 
 

Bender needs zero doctors, and zero likes. That much I know about him.

 
 

Jim that chart is at once glib and thought-provoking. Is that you?

 
 

It’s a silly question: you’re a jim, not a John.

 
 

Clearly the only way forward for peace in the Levant, is a screwball comedy on local TV in the same vein as the odd couple or Mork and Mindy… Everyone laughs, everyone cries, half heard conversations lead to wacky hijinks. In the end everyone learns a little something…

We can reanimate William Frawley and cast him as a gruff but lovable Gaza Strip landlord and peace activist! Gosh darn it, it’s just crazy enough to work!

BTW, this is becoming one big-ass thread.

 
 

Hey, can any of the scooter* trash who congregate here advise if Speedy here has a bottle of hand sanitizer on the handlebars of his rice-burner? Or what is that thing?

*Not you, J.P. Real scooter trash.

 
 

Or what is that thing?

Disc brake master cylinder. SO there. 😉
.

 
 

Mastering the cylinder.

 
 

“… bottle of hand sanitizer on the handlebars of his rice-burner?”

Unless I’m looking at the wrong thing, that’s pureed shrimp, firmly mounted. Isn’t hand sanitizer clear? Seen it, don’t use it

 
 

I’m just restin’.

Actually, gearing up to go into DEBT for a new scooter, as the old one was stolen by the cops.

This has left little time for my cats, and the blogs. The cats may never forgive me.
.

 
 

Moondance Jam was fucking awesome.

Next year is set.

Come if you dare.

 
 

No shit. Izzat so the cyclists won’t run out w/o knowing it? A gauge won’t do? (Subtext: ARE THEY THAT FUCKING STUPID?)

I meant you aren’t real trash, btw.

 
 

Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to pay the fine extortion to get your old scooter back instead of buying a new one?

 
 

No shit. Izzat so the cyclists won’t run out w/o knowing it? A gauge won’t do?

A gauge would be ridiculous, and ridiculously-expensive, and would inject an unnecessary point-of-failure in a very simple hydraulic circuit. Unless there’s a leak in the circuit, that fluid level stays pretty constant. The bike in the photo is some really big crotch rocket, and likely has two (2) three- or four-pot calipers up front on two discs. So, big master cylinder (more fluid in the circuit). It may also have had a second, smaller one for the rear brake.

My 250cc scooter (RIP) had two of ’em — one for the front, one for the rear — each about two cubic inches in size.
.

 
 

Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to pay the fine extortion to get your old scooter back instead of buying a new one?

It’s a cost-benefit analysis. $929 for the tow and storage + ~$900 to repair the blown head gasket on a 2007 Kymco of questionable longevity with a max book value of $2000 = I’m buying a new Honda.
.

 
 

I meant you aren’t real trash, btw.

Sure I am!
.

 
 

… and we’ve done this dance with the Kymco (“Bad Penny”), before. This would be the third head gasket repair in four years. Obviously, the head and/or cylinder need machined down to level out the slight warp that is causing a gasket to only last 12-18 months.
.

 
 

[…] Via mark f, who always manages to make me click and immediately regret it, comes this odd tidbit, wherein Powerline’s Steven Hayward creepily stalks and photographs Jesse Jackson. And what does this Seal Team 6*-like recon get him? Confirmation that Jesse Jackson behaves exactly as one might expect Jesse Jackson to behave. When the Rev. Jesse Jackson sat down in the row just ahead of me on yesterday’s connecting flight from Chicago to Las Vegas (where I am today), what does he read?  Why, the editorial page of the New York Times, of course. […]

 
 

I would go to Bender College. That’s where they teach you to drink a lot be rude, right? I would have an advanced degree in no time.

 
 

I graduated with honors from Bender College then went on to Moorehead State for post-grad studies.

 
 

I’ve become a professional student at Bender. SEVEN YEARS OF COLLEGE DOWN THE DRAIN!

 
 

Bender College motto:

Fat, drunk and stupid is THE way to go through life, son.

 
 

Fat, drunk and stupid is THE way to go through life, son.

Amen, brotha. Amen.

 
 

You’re encouraged to go on benders at Bender College.

 
 

Bender? I barely know ‘er!

 
 

Bender? What is this, a yoga class?

 
 

Exxon Mobil reported a quarterly profit of nearly $16 billion Thursday — the highest ever for a U.S. corporation.

Note that this is a QUARTERLY profit.

 
 

Let’s hope Bender’s teams are also Gamecocks. Because anything else would not be as funny.

 
 

Obviously, the head and/or cylinder need machined down to level out the slight warp that is causing a gasket to only last 12-18 months.

Musta got way overheated once or twice. This sounds like an infuriating problem to have.

 
 

Note that this is a QUARTERLY profit.

It is painfully obvious that the oil companies need more tax breaks.

 
 

Let’s hope Bender’s teams are also Gamecocks. Because anything else would not be as funny.

I was thinking Wild Turkeys.

 
 

Wild Cocks

 
 

Let’s hope Bender’s teams are also Gamecocks. Because anything else would not be as funny.

The women’s teams, of course, would be the Lady Cocks.

 
 

It is painfully obvious that the oil companies need more tax breaks.

Seems like an American enterprise can’t catch a break these days, what with all this Obummer socialism and business hatin’ going around.

 
 

would be the Lady Cocks.

I was thinking Honey Cocks…ya know, keep the sexism alive!

 
 

The women’s teams, of course, would be the Lady Cocks.

Unofficially known, of course, as the Shemales.

 
 

Shemales.

Beer from the least of the Stooges?

 
Helmut Monotreme
 

Seriously. the women’s teams wouldn’t have a name that so obviously lends itself to mockery. They would be the Gamehens. Or maybe the Gamechicks.

 
 

In other quite shocking news:

Dodd Says Breaking Up Big Banks Not The Solution

WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T DO ANYTHING!

 
Lurking Canadian
 

Note that this is a QUARTERLY profit.

If only the anti-business Obama administration would remove some of its tree-hugging regulations, somebody could make money in the energy sector.

 
Lurking Canadian
 

Dodd Says Breaking Up Big Banks Not The Solution

Well, OK. I live in a country that has, essentially, only five banks, serving 30 million people. I don’t think banks necessarily need to be small.

What they need to be is REGULATED SIX WAYS FROM SUNDAY. What the US needs is regulators who don’t think their job is to maximize financial sector profitability, not necessarily smaller banks.

 
 

Dodd Says Breaking Up Big Banks Not The Solution

If I recall, M. Moore’s last documentary, Dodd sold his soul to the banks long ago.

 
 

The hotness of Kim Jong-un’s wife is apparently the latest Twitter trend. Of course, this is sparking a larger discussion of hot wives of world leaders/hot female world leaders.

Carla Bruni is attractive, but she just reminds me of Generic Cute Girl In a Sitcom. My vote’s for Jetsun Pema (extra points for awesome name).

 
 

Note that this is a QUARTERLY profit.

Sixty four billion quarters would weigh 800000000 pounds.

In case you were wondering.

 
 

“As with other art forms, Sturgeon’s Law applies but I have a lot of respect for some of the people who get lumped into the performance art category. Still, This is a classic.

I went and read “Onan the Magnificent: Triumph of the Testicle in Contemporary Art,” thinking it was a parody of art criticism. It may be, but its subject, artist Matthew Barney, is real. I sorta liked the Harpers piece better when I thought it was all made up.

 
 

Well, OK. I live in a country that has, essentially, only five banks, serving 30 million people. I don’t think banks necessarily need to be small.

What they need to be is REGULATED SIX WAYS FROM SUNDAY. What the US needs is regulators who don’t think their job is to maximize financial sector profitability, not necessarily smaller banks.

Well, I get that, but here in the US, bigger banks means bigger holdings, means less management, which ultimately will turn into another credit swap mess. It’s exceptionally difficult to regulate and oversee those giant banks. I assume Canada is doing a good job of it, but we also have a nice little lobbying system in place that makes it stupidly easy to deflect regulation and oversight.

If we aren’t going to change how big business appoints our legislators and presidents, then an easier answer might be to break them up and keep banks focused on banking (bring back Glass-Steagel), and regulate the shit out of those. It doesn’t look like either of those things is ever going to happen, but I continue to hope like the idealistic dumbfuck I am…

 
Helmut Monotreme
 

Sixty four billion quarters would weigh 800000000 pounds.

or about the weight of four aircraft carriers.

 
 

Sixty four billion quarters would weigh 800000000 pounds.

or about the weight of four aircraft carriers.

African or European aircraft carriers?

 
 

If I recall, M. Moore’s last documentary, Dodd sold his soul to the banks long ago.

He and Schumer are both known to be in the tank for the financial sector. These two constantly take the lead on “reform”. It’s all quite shammy.

 
 

hey…good news/annoying news for hubbkf…testing showed no signs of neuromuscular disease! annoying news is that there is nothing to be done for the fasiculations…but in the scheme of things, i think we can live with it…the mayo is one freaking amazing place, i tell ya…

 
 

Did they test hubbkf on rye or white?

Congrats on the goodish news.

 
Helmut Monotreme
 

African or European aircraft carriers?

North American actually, and they are totally mobile too, none of your inferior swallow based migratory systems needed. Sadly, however, you cannot make horse galloping noises by banging two halves of an aircraft carrier together.

 
 

Speaking of gamecocks, Mike “Gamecock” DeVine has apparently been to Atlanta:

But seriously, are there enough gays, lesbians, transvestites, transgenders and even gender questioners anywhere except San Francisco and Mid-Town Atlanta to make an ongoing boycott discernible? I’m asking, and shouldn’t boycotting same-sex marriage advocates be defined as intolerant, anti-parental-diversity-for-children-o-phobe bigots?

 
 

*cough*

Not bad, but I still love my latinas best!

 
 

And my vacuumslayers, of course! 🙂

 
 

Idiot, the “once every 150 years” quote was from NASA’s own press release. Oh noes, they hid facts that skeptics later called them on! IN THEIR OWN PRESS RELEASES! Dastardly, that was.

 
 

And my vacuumslayers, of course! 🙂

Sir, my body roils with passionate Latina blood. (All Latinos are passionate, right?)

OK, not really. Dammit!

 
 

“But seriously, are there enough gays, lesbians, transvestites, transgenders and even gender questioners anywhere except San Francisco and Mid-Town Atlanta to make an ongoing boycott discernible?”

This is funny. I have never known businesses to enjoy, say, a 10%*loss in patronage. Does this guy think (1) gays are truly scarce most places, or (2) business will court a measurable decrease, with no upside?

*Second point. This dipshit has not considered that a boycott would include not just LGBT people in the narrow sense, but also their supporters. I am not LGBT, but you can be damn sure I am boycotting Chick-Fil-A. Is Mike Devine really stupid enough not to get this? How does he think we pass laws — sheer gay numbers?

 
 

“It’s somewhat like the rush to blame severe weather and drought on global warming,” Anthony Watts, a noted climate skeptic and the author of the Watts Up With That blog, told FoxNews.com.

“The belief that almost any aberration in weather and climate today can be attributed to global warming is pure folly,” Watts told FoxNews.com.

I don’t know why he would bring this up, there is nothing in the NASA press release about any possible ties to global warming. Oh wait, I know why, manufactured contreversy drives rubes to his blog.

 
 

shouldn’t boycotting same-sex marriage advocates be defined as intolerant, anti-parental-diversity-for-children-o-phobe bigots?

BOO FUCKING HOO the free market just gave you the invisible finger.

 
 

Roiling the body.

Also too: thank heavens there’s a debate over climate change! Wouldn’t want the scientific equivalent of the Flat Earth Society to feel left out, would we?

I think this whole “Fix A Major Problem? No, Wait, Let’s See What The Dipshit Demographic Has To Say First!” approach needs to be taken with ALL scientific controversies. Where’s the Phlogiston Theory coverage of the Midwest wildfires? Or maybe someone should fund a Stork Delivery Theory based fertility clinic! Or how about the Enraged Gnomes Theory of vulcanism?

Stem-cell research? Yeah, okay, it sure looks awesome – but let’s be FAIR here & do some ritual chanting/animal-sacrifice research too, because hey, you never know, amirite?

 
 

Personally, I have been boycotting Chik-Fil-A since their inception. For no other reason than I’ve never had any desire to eat there. Unfortunately, that means they will in no way feel any effect now that I am boycotting them for their bigotry.

 
 

Did they test hubbkf on rye or white?

Congrats on the goodish news.

danke…heh…no rye for hubbkf but he did have the jiffy burger at the blue door pub in st. paul the next day…the son took us there for lunch…i was not as adventurous and went with the merriam park bluicy, which contained molten bleu cheese on the inside and currant jam and pickles on the outside…yum!

 
 

oh…and the reason i popped back in here mid-way through reading teh thread is just to point out that y’all should seriously read the current issue of vanity fair…i know the mittens article was linked to previously, but there’s also an interesting article on microsoft (would not want to be steve ballmer right now)…also a brilliant little essay about our nordic neighbors and a post-humous offering from hitchens…and the alec baldwin article was a delight…

 
 

post-humous

That bears re peating.

 
 

“Personally, I have been boycotting Chik-Fil-A since their inception. For no other reason than I’ve never had any desire to eat there. Unfortunately, that means they will in no way feel any effect now that I am boycotting them for their bigotry.”

Anon. was me. I agree on all counts, but thought those points a little subtle for my post. Surely there are LGBT and allies who eat that stuff. I tried it once, was not bad for what it is. Never went back.

 
 

Sir, my body roils with passionate Latina blood. (All Latinos are passionate, right?)

Yes, they are. Especially in my *** dreams.

 
 

That bears re peating.

The mind bog-gles

 
 

anti-parental-diversity-for-children-o-phobe bigots?

Ummm…WHAT? I don’t remember seeing a question about this on my census form.

 
 

Update. Near Willamette pass last evening. http://imgur.com/djqmw sorry, no POOP related pics this trip. Yet.

 
 

We don’t have Chik-Fil-A up in this joint. We did recently get a Chipotle, which makes me extremely happy. Problem is, we got 300,000 people and one Chipotle. I have to take my pistol along to get a burrito.

 
 

Update. Near Willamette pass last evening. http://imgur.com/djqmw sorry, no POOP related pics this trip. Yet.

YOU FOUND A NEW MOTORCYCLE!

 
 

Now everyone else check that out. THAT’S why we live in the Northwest! Because motorbikes and trees!

 
tsam feels GOOD today and therefore feels it necessary to hog up the thread like some sort of troll with not so much funny shit to say
 

There. FIXTED.

 
 

… and we’ve done this dance with the Kymco (“Bad Penny”), before. This would be the third head gasket repair in four years. Obviously, the head and/or cylinder need machined down to level out the slight warp that is causing a gasket to only last 12-18 months.

Buy. A. Fucking. Honda. What were you even thinking in the first place using that Kymco crap?

 
 

FYiphone. “buying” not “using”

 
 

How about the hot woman who IS IN CHARGE

I swear she looks different in every picture. Does she use body doubles?

*cough*

Well, at least we’ll know who Diane Lane will be playing in the movie.

But yes, both women are suitable entries.

 
 

Went to Chipotle recently. Girl heats up a tortilla and immediately loads it up with rice. I say, “no rice.” She throws away the tortilla and rice.

I say, “if I knew you were going to throw all that food in the trash, I would have kept quiet.” Girl: “It’s OK.” Me: “Whaddaya mean it’s OK? I’m saying I would’ve eaten that rather than waste food.”

I realize there are food safety rules, and that tortillas and rice are cheap, but this sort of thing bugs me. Sure, restaurants throw out a ton of food. In this case, I see no harm in putting the rice back in the freakin steam tray.

 
 

stupid PNWers with your stupid “trees” and beautiful vistas and such. Here in IL all we have is Chicago and shit else. grrr..

 
 

Hilarity…

is he the same d00d who thinks the denver airport is shaped like a penis?

 
 

GH,

Odds are that within 2 minutes someone would have ordered a burrito and wanted rice so she could have just put it to the side and not violated any safety rules or wasted any food.

 
Lurking Canadian
 

Ummm…WHAT? I don’t remember seeing a question about this on my census form.

I was trying, and failing, to parse that as well. Suppose we break it down as follows:

Presumably, and anti-X bigot is somebody who is bigotted against Xs. OK.

In this case X is “parental-diversity-o-phobe”. So we’re talking about the people who don’t like the people who don’t like parental diversity; and “parental diversity”, I guess we are supposed to understand, is bad, even though it sounds kind of good.

He was probably going for something like “the boycotters just hate us regular folks (TM) because we want to maintain traditional (TM) families”. It would still be bullshit, but at least it would be English bullshit.

I am primly not going to comment on the new Sadly, No custom of commenting on the hawtness of female foreign dignitaries.

 
 

Don’t stop a psychotropic medicine abruptly. People may stop their medicine abruptly for various reasons

i usually stop abruptly just because i keep forgetting to get my ass to the drugstore and pick up my refills…also, too…even tho the pharmacist tells me that i WILL wake up in the morning if i take them and then drink, i still don’t believe him, so a drinking binge also has the same effect…if i’m off them for more than 2 or 3 days, my head gets all spinny…

 
 

Here in IL all we have is Chicago and shit else. grrr..

Don’t be dissing the Land of Lincoln!

 
 

I’m from the land of lincoln!!! (even though he wasn’t) but its really short on the foliage and suchlike.

 
 

Here’s the thing I didn’t foresee about withdrawing from anti-depressants.

I started taking half-doses of Zoloft around July. Was in process of moving cross-country. I don’t remember withdrawal symptoms: that whole time of our lives was unusual in many ways. Terrible family stuff. Money pressure. I drank more. There’s no way to gauge how I felt against normalcy.

When I finally got around to seeing a psychiatrist, I was fully off the meds for a couple months. MY POINT — this fact led the psychiatrist to not write a script. He had no fear I was withdrawing willy-nilly. In fact he decided I needed no such meds. He could be right, but under different circumstances he woulda wrote, first to avoid the withdrawal, and then to continue an established pattern.

 
 

I’m from the land of lincoln!!! (even though he wasn’t) but its really short on the foliage and suchlike.

They had to cut down all the trees to make the Lincoln Logs.

 
 

kg, you able to track down any Jack Vance?

 
 

Somebody give me some good swordfish recipes.

 
 

BBBB,
I have some Vance in my queue. I got caught up in this book called “The Wolf’s Hour” by Robert McCammon. Its about a werewolf who fights Nazis.

We did a shitton of work on our yard this summer (installed drain tile, regraded yard and new fence) and are preparing the house to sell so I’ve been averaging about 1 book every 2 months.

I did read the new Dark Tower book, its basically # 4.5 in the series. More of the same but fairly entertaining.

Loving your blog, btw.

 
 

Here in IL all we have is Chicago and shit else. grrr..

land of 10k lakes…booyah!

Moondance Jam was fucking awesome.

Next year is set.

Come if you dare.

i was meaning to ask if you had a delightful time…i take that as a yes…i’m hoping hubbkf and i can make it next year…

 
 

Somebody give me some good swordfish recipes.

Kill swordfish. Cook swordfish. Eat swordfish.

 
 

We did a shitton of work on our yard this summer

hubbkf is blaming his taj mawall experience for the chronic nerve root damage…it started as a smallish retaining wall made of fieldstone…now has a patio, some gardens and stairs…

 
 

Somebody give me some good swordfish recipes.

Grill it then dress it with olive oil, lemon juice, fresh oregano, salt and pepper. If it’s a good piece of fish it shouldn’t need anything else.

 
 

Somebody give me some good swordfish recipes.

Mix soy sauce, sesame oil, grated ginger, and a bit of sugar, grill swordfish and periodically glaze with this mixture.

Loving your blog, btw.

Thanks, have you considered starting one of your own? I haven’t added to my blogroll in months.

 
 

I don’t eat fish, but if I did I might do this: http://fishcooking.about.com/od/saucesforfishandseafood/r/chimichurri.htm

Mostly because the borage is taking over my damn yard and I’d like to teach it a lesson. Instead of fish I’m going to put it on a roasted mushroom pizza.

 
 

“kg, you able to track down any Jack Vance?”

You reminded me to act on my desire for some Vance. I just ordered a copy of The Compleat Dying Earth.

 
 

I don’t eat fish

At last, an eater both pickier & more doctrinaire than I.

 
 

Somebody give me some good swordfish recipes.

All I know is that the password is always swordfish.

 
 

Thanks, everybody. Geez, those are all such great ideas it’s almost like you know me or something.

 
 

There’s a lot of borage around here too. I feel like I’m on the milk run between Tedium & Monotony, & back again.

 
 

i am surprised none have linked this…

 
 

B^4,

I’ve got a Live Journal (I know, I know) but its mostly pictures of my kid. Not very interesting stuff…

 
 

I don’t eat fish

At last, an eater both pickier & more doctrinaire than I.

a lady yelled at me yesterday because she heard me say that hubbkf and i went to red lobster monday night and that i had the maple glazed chicken…fish and all seafood is icky, so there, rude lady!

 
 

There’s a lot of borage around here too.

I’ve been putting up pictures of interesting erections on my blog all week. I can’t help it you’re jaded.

 
 

Other energy & profit news:

Profits at energy giant Shell tumble 53% to $4.063 billion on the back of sliding world oil prices – @AFP

Profits at British Gas have risen by 23% to £345m as the return of the bleak British weather hiked household energy bills by £90 in the first half of the year.

 
 

Oh! The drunken fly in the inn’s privy, enamoured of borage, dissolved by a sunbeam!

 
 

Kg, that’s kooky talk. Kid pictures are always interesting. Right? Right? Also…link?

 
 

interesting erections

There is only one erection that interests me, & not even that much these days.

(Appreciate the effort, ‘though.)

 
 

Consider yourself bookmarked, lib, I mean, kg!

 
 

hubbkf and i went to red lobster monday night

I think I see your problem right there.

 
 

hubbkf and i went to red lobster monday night

I think I see your problem right there.

Her lack of a posse?

 
 

Mostly because the borage is taking over my damn yard and I’d like to teach it a lesson.

Got any purslane? I’ve been scarfing down purslane like it’s going out of style lately. BEST VEGETABLE EVER!!!

You reminded me to act on my desire for some Vance. I just ordered a copy of The Compleat Dying Earth.

You’re in for a treat, also Jack Vance is one “gateway” to Clark Ashton Smith fandom.

I’ve got a Live Journal (I know, I know) but its mostly pictures of my kid. Not very interesting stuff…

Good enough for the blogroll, old chum!

 
tsam feels GOOD today and therefore feels it necessary to hog up the thread like some sort of troll with not so much funny shit to say
 

if i’m off them for more than 2 or 3 days, my head gets all spinny…

That’s what happened to me. The binge drinking, however, just makes the depression symptoms return for a few days.

 
Helmut Monotreme
 

Her lack of a posse?

We roll a little differently in the heartland. We rarely have a posse unless we are pursuing horse thieves, cattle rustlers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers or claim jumpers.

 
 

yes, I’ve actually been thinking that posting (even if just pictures of cute kids and animals) isn’t much fun if I’m the only one checking it out.

 
 

So when you go to the Claim Jumper a posse is required?

Extra weird: Three menus at the Jumper: West Coast (the default) Tenn & Ill.

 
 

hubbkf and i went to red lobster monday night

I think I see your problem right there.

heh…hubbkf has recently become enamored of r.l…i like their chicken…and the biscuits, duh! here in the high plains of nowheresville, we have none super good resties…well, except for the place i work at, natch…

 
 

The binge drinking, however, just makes the depression symptoms return for a few days.

that blows…but, then again, i am probably a bit more experienced at the binge drinking than a youngster such as yerself…

 
 

We roll a little differently in the heartland. We rarely have a posse unless we are pursuing horse thieves, cattle rustlers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers or claim jumpers.

or square heads or hoople heads…

 
 

B^4, I have a ton of purslane; it’s alright, but I prefer goosefoot. I’ve been pulling the outliers of both and moving them to a patch I can let them take over. Planted some nettle seeds this year but no joy.

 
 

We rarely have a posse unless we are pursuing horse thieves, cattle rustlers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers or claim jumpers.

Not for cracker croakers?

 
Helmut Monotreme
 

Not for cracker croakers?

Individually they’re not much of threat. A 10 year old kid can usually handle him- or her- self against 2 or 3 cracker croakers. It’s only when they begin to swarm in early fall that you’d need a posse to handle them.

 
tsam feels GOOD today and therefore feels it necessary to hog up the thread like some sort of troll with not so much funny shit to say
 

that blows…but, then again, i am probably a bit more experienced at the binge drinking than a youngster such as yerself…

I’m not very young, and I can binge the fuck out of some drink.

 
 

Artist’s impression of bbkf with spiny head
Oh. Spinny head. My bad.

 
Helmut Monotreme
 

Binge fight!

 
tsam feels GOOD today and therefore feels it necessary to hog up the thread like some sort of troll with not so much funny shit to say
 
 

Follow the Romneybot’s first test run on foreign soil here:
http://inagist.com/all/228578601497407489/

sample twit:
“KarlFrisch : BREAKING: @MittRomney wins #Olympics gold medal in solo synchronized asshatery. #romneyshambles.”

 
 

OUCH.

 
 

The British reaction to Mitt Romney has gone from openness, to skepticism, to mocking, to concluding that Mitt Romney is worse than Sarah Palin.

Did Sarah Palin go to Britain?

 
 

Go MItt Go!

“The Telegraph is reporting that London Mayor Boris Johnson mocked Romney’s readiness comment, “Quite a moment from the Mayor of London Boris Johnson. Shortly after Rix had lit the flame he really went for it in Hyde Park. He referenced Mitt Romney’s ‘London isn’t ready’ quip and shot back in style. “Are we ready?” he called and the crowd went wild. There may even have been a hint of the Obama-friendly “Yes we can!” in there – he may have jumped into a winning scenario but I’ve not heard a politician get that reaction before.”

For their part, the White House rubbed salt in Romney’s wounds by pointing out that President Obama has full confidence in Britain’s ability to provide a secure Olympics. White House Spokesman Jay Carney said, “In keeping with our special relationship, the president also made it clear that he has the utmost confidence in our close friend and ally, the United Kingdom, as they finalize preparations to host the London Olympics.”

That special relationship is being put in jeopardy by a Republican nominee who can’t stop insulting the British people while making an ass out of himself. Instead of proving that he is Commander in Chief material, Romney is justifying John McCain’s 2008 selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. To think, that the Romney campaign actually agreed to foreign policy being the the topic of the third presidential debate.

The British opinion of Romney has gone from he might be another Bush to oh my God, he makes Sarah Palin seem prepared.

Not since World War II has London seen a bombing as thorough as Mitt Romney’s.”

 
 

Artist’s impression of bbkf with spiny head…

that is actually quite lovely…

Binge fight!

indeed, tsam…i am throwing down and the challenge is afoot…

 
 

indeed, tsam…i am throwing down and the challenge is afoot…

My challenge is ahand! And there’s a gauntlet on it. And I’m throwing IT down! Whatchu know bout that, girl?

 
 

My challenge is ahand! And there’s a gauntlet on it. And I’m throwing IT down! Whatchu know bout that, girl?

I shall keep abreast of the ensuing kerfuffle. Perhaps two abreast even.

 
 

[Romney] admitted that he had been given a secret briefing by MI6.

Oh I bet. I’m sure MI6 rolled out their special “secret” briefing they give to elementary school kids and congressmen / presidential candidates from the US Republican party.

 
 

New post upstairs. But you probably already know that don’t you?

 
 

I shall keep abreast of the ensuing kerfuffle. Perhaps two abreast even.

well, ain’t that a bag of tits?

My challenge is ahand! And there’s a gauntlet on it. And I’m throwing IT down! Whatchu know bout that, girl?

ooooooooooh…getting all shakespearean on me now?

 
 

i am throwing down and the challenge is afoot…

I’d be throwing up.

 
 

Fail, He’s on the right. lol

 
 

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