If this is authentic, this slide presentation claims that “everything was okay” with the oil rig down in the Gulf then a series of unfortunate incidents caused a big “whoopsie!”– or Oilocolypse. Read the whole BP Washington Debriefing Dated June 7 2010 (PDF) yourself though.
Found this via Dangerous Minds.
I have little to add beyond advising you to clear out an hour to watch this Dutch documentary about the collection of people, practices and ideals that came together to form the punk band Crass. With a militantly anarchist outlook and a very DIY devotion to living what they screamed, Crass was one of the very few in art who lived their ideals 100%. A great hit of inspiration if you’re feeling like you’ve got no option but the treadmill you’re on.
Am I the only one that thinks Muammar al-Qaddafi and Michael Jackson look like the same person? I mean, add 20 pounds and a limp and you’re basically there. Oh and a pulse. And a crack team of lady bodyguards.
Really. MQ? Sleeps in a tent. MJ? Slept in a tent. Face like wood putty? Check. Rambling conspiracy theories, a love for costumes and radical decisions prompted by financial troubles? Check, check and check. Two men, two vast reservoirs of ego and paranoia swirling around in big piles of money, leaking weird gibberish across the land.
Only natural that they’d have the same tailor, eh?
But what if it was more than that? What if Michael Jackson, hounded by his debts and public reputation, entered in a secret pact with mysterious Libyan nationals to support a clandestine coup, a neat little switch that whisked the real Qaddafi off the pedestal and slid the ersatz dictator in his place as smooth as Indy swaps idols for sand? A plausible Michael Jackson corpse wouldn’t be the hardest thing in the world to fabricate and Qaddafi’s strange reputation could be cited to cover up any unaccounted for behavioral changes.
Now, I’m not saying this did happen. I’m just saying for a man as weird and famous as Michael Jackson, there aren’t nearly enough rumors and conspiracy theories surrounding his death. We can do better, people. Give the King of Pop his Elvis treatment. Let’s start reporting Michael skulking around the dumpsters behind Costco at 4 am, breaking open expired boxes of over the counter allergy medicine. Let’s convince each other he ascended into heaven astride a chimpasus, an immortal hoofed and winged primate developed by freakiest of Soviet science in a Kazakhstan lab. WE CAN DO BETTER.
This photo made my day when it arrived in my inbox. I don’t know who snapped it but I figured there had to be a story.
And there is.
William Tradewell, the man who declared General Leigh Read a “Coward and Scoundrel” was a member of the America conservative Whig party and slave owner in the Old South. General Leigh Read was a rising star in the Democrat party whose political naivety cost him.
Tradewell requested a duel with Read because of Read’s refusal to “apologise for the insult offered” and the feud between Tradewell and Read’s respective political parties. Read, being a poor shot turned him down.
Another guy by the name of Augustus Alston also offered Read a duel (but no public notice on his ’scoundrelness.’)
Read accepted knowing he was going up against a man who was a good shot, wealthy, from a nepotistic family, and vehemently opposed the Democrat party’s bank reform bills. Read stood by his position knowing if he was going to go down, it had to be someone who was a “bulldog” of the dying Whig party.
In Alston’s arrogance, he misfired and Read killed him with one shot. Alston– and pretty much everybody– planned on a “victory banquet” but Alston’s itchy trigger finger and cockiness caused him a critical delay and certain death.
Even though this was a duel, that Alston initiated, his sisters deemed it “murder.” Alston’s sisters had the bullet removed and recast. They instructed their brother Willis Alston– then in Texas– to kill General Read with the same bullet that killed Augustus Alston. Willis Alston approached Read at a public speaking event a few weeks later dressed in a cloak and hat to disguise himself. He threw off his disguise and the crowd immediately recognized him. He attempted to stab Read with a knife but was foiled when Read grabbed his gun and grazed Willis Alston’s hand.
A few years later after keeping a low profile Willis Alston caught up to Read and shot him in the back. Willis Alston was arrested but through family connections and $30,000 in bribes managed to escape to Texas.
Dr. Stewart a Tallahassee native son and friend of Read living in Texas became enraged that Read’s killer lived nearby– and said several insults about Willis Alston. Rather than post a public notice to apologize, Willis Alston approached Dr. Stewart on horseback demanding he apologize for those ill remarks.
Stewart refused and shot Willis Alston in the stomach. Though injured, Willis Alston fired back and killed Dr. Stewart.
Again in jail, Willis Alston hatched an escape plan with his family connections. That night though, friends of Dr. Stewart formed a lynch mob and fired endlessly at Willis Alston until he laid dead.
Just goes to show you America was– and probably always will be– pretty fucked up.
Update: @ColinPeters found this wonderful painting by Christopher M. Still check out “18? for more on Tradewell-Read-Alston.
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.
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
Alright, I knew what I was getting into, not going to pretend I didn’t. Obama’s a politician and you don’t get further than your front door in politics if you don’t have a healthy dose of the Zelig in you. Some of the backslapper, the faux everyman, the telegenic blank slate that talks pretty and says little. But c’mon…
CBS says that for his cop and proffessor ‘hey let’s talk about racial profiling bay-bee’ beer session Obama’s choosing Bud Light.
This is intolerable. Are they playing beer pong? Is that why he’s going for watery domestic? I don’t know about you, but I like my elected representatives to be smarter than me, with better taste.
I remain too indignant to say anything useful about the Fourth Amendment or the numerous descendents of Niall.
The United States released more than a thousand intelligence images of Arctic ice to help scientists study the impact of climate change, within hours of a recommendation by the National Academy of Sciences.In an unusually fast move by a U.S. government agency, the Interior Department made the images public on Wednesday. The academy’s report urging this action was released at 11 a.m. on Wednesday.
These images show the possible effects of global warming. Possibly classified by the Bush administration for possible fear that Al Qaeda might take a liking to snow or evil supervillan Lex Luthor might find Superman’s base on Google Earth.
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:
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.
