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Archive for the ‘politics’ Category

Mad Palin: A Sarah Palin Speech Generator

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Ever wonder how you could write an eloquent speech as eloquent as former Alaska governor Sarah Palin? Well now you can. At least the first couple paragraphs. It’s a bit long and rambling, but then again so is her 2,500 word speech. Share you results below. Fill in your own nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs after the jump.

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Tags: conservative, madlibs, palin, politics
Posted in politics | 1 Comment »

Demand Celebrity Death Panel Choice, Patriot!

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Remember when the thick rich soup of internet infotainment was touted as the food of a new race of superintelligent uber-citizens who would zoom from source to source with a keen eye for the facts?

Yeah.  The future has always been full of shit.

So instead we get Sarah Palin’s pearls of wisdom drooled out via Facebook, raising the specter of government death panels chomping at the bit to liquidate her Down syndrome baby’.

As an aside, whenever challenged about anything, from now on, I’m going to reply ‘You want to kill my baby with Down syndrome.’  Bulletproof.

In this brave new post-facts reality, I think Obama would be foolish to try to refute this charge by say, calmly refuting the death panel rumor as weird gibberish and talking some sense. No way, once an idea gets dipped in the delicious candy coating that is a buzzword like ‘death panel’ there’s no way something wimpy like multi-syllabic facts could combat it.

No sir.  In the heartland, the small towns, in the Real America, they only want three things: Freedom.  Celebrities.  And meth.  Let’s give them two of the three, shall we?

Celebrity Death Panels! All Americans should go get their freak on as loud as possible at their local town hall, scaring the beejezus out of their elected representatives by bellowing support for the right to choose a panel of the famous to decide whether one lives or dies once they near that border line of one’s worth to society.

I’ve already got mine picked out:  Celine Dion (don’t ask me to explain this one), Henry Rollins (after studying his lyrics, I think he’d reliably vote to pull the plug should I be wired to a ventilator and a poop tube), that pneumatic JFK from Sans Soleil, and Kevin Federline (he’s made a career out of looking like he could use the work)

Fellow TITLEr Mr. Veer puts in his request for Bob Saget, Alan Thicke, Tony Danza, and Dave Couiler, possibly so as to be gently ushered off to death’s door with some learning-a-valuable-lesson music and a lingering sitcom father figure glow.

Hit the comments and name your dream panel or twitter it with #celebdeathpanel

Tags: celeb, celebrity detrius, health care, meme, obama, palin, politics, twitter
Posted in politics | 2 Comments »

If X => Then the Owls Will Surely Rape Our Faces as We Sleep

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

A lot of useless things get shoveled into the brain of a young inmate of the public education system.  Like factorials or peanut-based inventions numbers 4 – 2,000 of George Washington Carver.  One thing I am grateful to my middle school math classes for is a careful study of logic.  It helps me read the news and see little flashing bursts of color as brain cells seize, choke and blow up like a meth lab. (high school chemistry!)

Exhibit A, from the New York Post:

A Brooklyn grandma got more than she’d bargained for when she rented a copy of “Austin Powers” from her local library and found it spliced with long pornographic scenes.

…

Klein contacted her assemblyman, Dov Hikind — and he’s now demanding that local libraries ban all VHS tapes.

“This is unbelievable,” Hikind fumed. “The bottom line is that the local library can be unsafe for young children. It’s pretty sick stuff.”

Really, Dov?  Ban all VHS tapes?

Exhibit B, via a Wired blog post on pending Congressional legislation to allow prisons to jam cellphones used illegally by prisoners:

But public interest groups, including Public Knowledge, the New America Foundation, and the Main Street Project, told the committee in a letter that cited a Wired magazine story that blocking technology is unproven and that blocking is not possible without causing collateral damage.

“Allowing the legal manufacture, importation and sale of jamming equipment will create a loophole that history shows the FCC will find impossible to close,” the groups wrote.

“Jamming prison cellphones would jeopardize public safety because there is no way to jam only phones used by prisoners,” said Harold Feld, legal director for Public Knowledge. “All wireless communications could be shut down within a prison.”

…

“Once such a jamming device is built, it will inevitably become available on a wider basis. Who knows what chaos that will cause?” Feld said.

So what do these two stories have in common?  A similar psuedo-logical leap that I like to call If X =>Then the Owls Will Surely Rape Our Faces as We Sleep.* This is a favored tactic of those we pay to freak out about things on our behalf (politicians, lawyers, PR, lobbyists) wherein the master logician in question takes scant evidence, an anecdotal isolated incident or something they hope the listener is ignorant about and label it the surest route to a doomsday of owl-on-face-sexual-assault proportions.

This is how Assemblyman Dov “Hey can we get some more racial profiling over here?” Hikind goes from a random porno dub on an Austin Powers tape to populist rage against an entire A/V format to protect the children from sexual relations.  (Of which there is no mention in Austin Powers, mind you)

And he even manages to get in a WTF-worthy dig at the wretched hive of scum and villiany, oh, and child seduction, that is the library.  Dammit, Dov, that’s the Queens Public Library System, get it straight.

Then we’ve got Harold Feld hearing the desperate hooting and mad sex-crazed flapping of some dystopic future where owls rule and cell phones are jammed everywhere, all because we tried to stop a few measly contract killings.  While it should be said that I support a lot of what Public Knowledge says they’re for, Feld is either banking on our ignorance and sitting in a warm puddle of his own.

Anyone with access to another dangerous technology, The Googles, can find plans and providers for exactly the sort of cell phone jammers (DIY here, commercial there) that he fears will lead to some kind of ambiguous large bad thing.

That’s another piece of this tactic: keep the threat ambiguously defined but big.  The human brain automatically fills that void with, you guessed it, feathers everywhere and a taste no amount of mouth wash will cleanse.

*Feel free to replace face rape by owls with the worst case scenario of your choice.  I spent a lot of my upbringing in a sleeping bag in the woods so y’know.

Tags: austin powers, cell phones, Dov Hikind, education, feathers, freak out, Harold Feld, horny flapping, jammers, jamming, logic, owl rape, owls, porno, Public Knowledge, signals, vhs, wireless
Posted in News, politics | No Comments »

NATO Makes Raves Happen

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

Did you know the North Atlantic Treaty Organization loves ravers? Neither did I, but for 60 years they have been making them happen. What the hell?

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

So next time you pop so ecstasy, thank NATO. There are more equally surreal attempts at viral marketing by our forced military alliance overlords on their 60 Years of NATO propaganda public relations site.

Tags: empty promises, internet, video, weird
Posted in Uncategorized, World, politics | 1 Comment »

Enemy Combatants Don’t Surf

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Palau Map

The Guantanamo beat and News of the Weird collided last week when it was announced that the likely destination of 13 soon to be released Uighur “non-terrorists”/”possible nationalist separatists”/”guys we mistakenly imprisoned for seven years” is the island nation of Palau.  This move, of course, has nothing to do with any upcoming U.S. aid package to Palau, a small cluster of islands administered by the U.S. until 1994.

While the opinions of China (‘hey, let us get a crack at ‘em’), the Palau tourist industry (’shit.’) and the U.S. (‘anywhere but a swing state’) were duly recorded by journalists, absent from any of the news reports was mention of how the Uighur ex-suspecteds (let’s start calling them ‘mistainees’) felt about moving to a tropical paradise.

Carnival Cruise ads aside, it is not the dream of every human to sweat glamourously near a vast blue ocean.  Xinjiang, the region that the Uighur people come from, is more of a mountains, snow, camels and roasted meat on a stick kind of place.  For context, the Toronto Star reports: “Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the most remote city from any sea in the world.”

Palau sounds like kind of a tough sell to that crowd.  Factor in that the type of guys who head down to Taliban-run Tora Bora to learn how to shoot an AK just might like their Islam flavored conservative, the bikini beaches and being nearly only Muslims for hundreds of miles around might not be considered pluses.

This is all speculation of course.  A decent barometer would be to check in with Uighur ex-detainees in Albania, Sweden and Bermuda but reports seem decidedly mised, depending on who’s telling the story.  Foreign Affairs reports that they will be at least hooked up with some time in Palau’s fine community colleges.  I smell a wacky fish-out-of-water college movie brewing.

And then there’s this clip, which I will take advantage of the flimsiest reason to post:

Tags: detainees, guantanamo, News, palau, politics, surfing, uighurs
Posted in politics | 2 Comments »

China Needs More Gay

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Two China-related stories kept coming up in the blog chum bucket today, one sounding like a clear solution for the other.

First there was this look at China’s surplus of young men in the Wall Street Journal:

Thanks to its 30-year-old population-planning policy and customary preference for boys, China has one of the largest male-to-female ratios in the world. Using data from the 2005 China census — the most recent — a study published in last month’s British Journal of Medicine estimates there was a surplus of 32 million males under the age of 20 at the time the census was taken. That’s roughly the size of Canada’s population.

32 Million males who can’t get laid is a lot of Limp Bizkit concerts.

On this point, Kenneth Anderson notes that with such a gender difference, you’ve ended up in a situation similar to polygamous societies, with their accompanying troubles with social unrest:

The inequality that is baked into a society in which one husband has multiple exclusive wives is perhaps not primarily or necessarily about the wives, if one makes (extremely, fantastically heroic assumptions, in actual social fact) about their freedom to choose, and if it included the right to divorce not only the husband, but other wives (however that might work in some idealized world). The intrinsic inequality is about the mateless men, deprived of the opportunity to even have a chance to marry and have families and children.

Now, the argument can be made that polygamy comes naturally, as that nature made men as canon fodder and equipped the canny survivors with the ability to spread seed on a mass scale without hardly breaking a sweat. (Though you should.  Put your damn back into it!)  However, in this modern era with our crazily low homicide rate as compared to the bulk of human history, we men are much better at surviving long enough to be sexually frustrated, often without a socially-sanctioned outlet for hot sex or, barring that, heinous violence.

And then there’s Shanghai this week:

The visibility of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) community in China has been growing fast recently but its profile became more prominent this week as Shanghai hosted the country’s first gay pride festival.

What an elegant solution.  Too many unmatched males?  Why not try gay?  Sure beats all the slaughter, exile and slaving that other folks have tried.

Even the numbers look pretty good, according to China Daily:

China has a homosexual population of 30 million people – 20 million gays and 10 million lesbians, said Zhang Beichuan, China’s leading scholar in the field of homosexuality. The government puts the figure at between 5 and 10 million.

OK, so that breaks down to just a 10 million man gay offset in the ranks of all the young dudes. Using the 32 million figure as a target, that means you’ve got 22 million left to convert, boys.

So how might the Chinese government encourage this?

Well first off, letting Shanghai fully get its queer on would help.  This is a bit of a difficult proposition, seeing as how the Chinese government is basically an East Asian version of the stodgy town elders from Footloose.  If they really want this to work, they need to acknowledge that dancing is the surest slippery slope to gaydom.  (Dancing With the Stars… I’m on to you.)

Other, more People’s Republican options exist.  The Finns seem to be working on some kind of ‘gay gas‘ but the reports are sketchy and juvenile.  The Pentagon might have something to that effect too.

Note on Flag Graphic: Made it myself.  Feel free to swipe it and use it wherever.

Tags: china, equality, gay, gay bomb, politics, polygamy, shanghai, World
Posted in News, World, politics | 1 Comment »