Coltrane's beloved nightmare

SRV is playing third stone from the sun. It sucks--and yet it's beautiful. It's music and noise. Coltrane needed electric music to get where he was trying to get and SRV and Hendrix had it in spades. Or maybe Coltrane needed to try to break in vs. try to break out. No matter--I can't begin to keep up with all the aforementioned. If you like:

Ah, Schadenfreude

Christian love on display again. Happy Holidays.

Huckabee's other message

Maybe this is why he's in the lead. I thought it was pretty funny but, withal, about right politically.

I miss these guys

No idea what this dude worked on, but this great--better than most shows on TV. Purportedly, late night TV (to include the Comedy Central shows) are coming back in January with or without writers, with Letterman and the Late Late Show possibly working out an agreement. We'll see, but with everything going on in the elections, we could use them.



Hat Tip: Mickey Kaus.

The Ron Paul Fascination

It's hard not to route for him reading stuff like this. As much as I disagree with him on so many things, mark my words, Ron Paul has hit a nerve that American politics will have to deal with for a long, long time. Americans are more and more becoming islands unto themselves and would love nothing more than to have government leave them the hell alone. It's cross-party, cross-lifestyle, cross-religious identity, cross-everything, and the party that can capture it will capture national politics for the next 20 years. And how does one capture it? Easy. Do what Dr. Paul does and read the Constitution--a very carefully and economically worded document that espouses the same principles. Then, have the conviction to follow it.

Ron Paul's historical assessment is actually quite right. Tyranny is old, and an easy choice. Liberty, i.e. self-reliance, individual rights, personal freedom--*that* is new in the world of political ideas. And it is the only idea that can unite prostitutes, academics, pot-heads, ranchers, rednecks, urbanites, and whatever other stripe of American is out there (read the article linked above for that to make any sense).

Go Ron Paul!

Stairway to Heaven

Never heard it quite like this, I'll bet you. An album was released about 10 years ago with covers of the famous Led Zeppelin tune and now, with the magic of youtube, we have accompanying videos to go with it, though the Beatles one is the best, I think:



The Doors version is here. The video kinda sux, but it's very musically true--a lot of fun.

And so it begins

Already wrote about it, but here it comes. China begins its aerospace industry and it may be the beginning of the end of the US and European aerospace industry. I anticipate the talk of "how could they have come so far so fast?" and "how ingenious they are" when none of it is true. We all but gave it to them.

For all those CIOs out there in the US aerospace industry that know exactly what I'm talking about, drink this in. You are fat, dumb, and happy multi-millionaires that seem to have no other quality than being both untouchable *and* incompetent at the same time--so congratulations. But you helped destroy a multi-billion dollar industry in your country through your stupidity, sloth, cowardice, and inaction. Sleep well.

Anger Issues

No graphic imagery, but still not for the squeamish. OJ and Manson were gentile compared to this cat. Can't imagine what that woman could have done to deserve that.

When Galaxies Collide

Holy shmokes! Check this out:















From the article:

"This composite image shows the jet from a black hole at the center of a galaxy striking the edge of another galaxy, the first time such an interaction has been found. In the image, data from several wavelengths have been combined. X-rays from Chandra (colored purple), optical and ultraviolet (UV) data from Hubble (red and orange), and radio emission from the Very Large Array (VLA) and MERLIN (blue) show how the jet from the main galaxy on the lower left is striking its companion galaxy to the upper right. The jet impacts the companion galaxy at its edge and is then disrupted and deflected, much like how a stream of water from a hose will splay out after hitting a wall at an angle."

One question though. If not even light can escape a black hole, how can a "jet" shoot out of it?

Sadly familiar

Maybe I really should get married to avoid stuff like this.

What a Whore

Thank Goodness the Onion is on the case.

Not Very Nice, Hitch

Christopher Hitchens is his normal pugilistic self here, and I enjoyed it immensely, but if Huckabee is an irretrievably idiotic Jesus freak, what does that make his Man, W? That president dude that likes to play cowboy and fighter pilot...remember him, Hitch?

I've wondered for years now how Hitchens can continue to hold his nose and still support that disaster of man because of a war that he grotesquely mismanaged. I understand how important the war is and how much Hitch wants to fight it, but one would think that would make him more angry--like supporting an orphanage just to find out that it's being run by child abusers.

I just don't understand how Hitchens--a guy who has utter contempt for religion and who has always been a fierce civil libertarian--can continue to support W. And I think it a bit hypocritical of him to publicly skewer Huckabee with that kind of nastiness when W has largely received a pass from him for years now. About the only major differences between Huckabee and W, from what I can see is (1) Huckabee is not morally lazy and (2) he can out-think W with half his brain tied behind his back.

The Softer Side of Hillarah

Get your Kleenex ready. When Oprah pitches for the competition, I suppose you have to think of something like this instead (though I could very comfortably live without either).

Chinese "Cyber Militia"

Or, "Reason Number 286 or so to Drop Microsoft."

This is old news to anyone in IT security (and Time first wrote about the subject years ago), but the article might be interesting to those who don't work in the field.

What is interesting to me--apart from the article--are all the Fortune 1000 companies that are all too eager to do business with, and in, China when China's government all but openly sponsors intellectual property theft. Believe me, it was just not the US government that was hit by Titan Rain and other coordinated attacks from China. In fact, the running gag amongst some of us IT security weenies is something akin to "why don't we just give them all of our intellectual property and save everyone a lot of time and money?"

Then again, I suppose I would be out of a job if they did. So...I guess we will just have to get used to blatant, state-sponsored, multi-billion dollar theft and hope it doesn't hurt us too badly. The US government is so beholden to Chinese loans that nothing substantial will be done about it for years, if within our lifetimes. I would love to be wrong about that--but I don't think I will be.

Cruella DeVille

Except this one is real life. Take a look at this broad:















She and her husband are accused of, basically, enslaving two Indonesian women and could face 40 years in prison.

From the article:

"They described how the two Indonesian women had been punished for misbehaviour such as sleeping late and stealing food from the dustbin to supplement their meagre meals.

The women said they had been beaten with brooms and umbrellas, slashed with knives, made to take freezing showers and climb stairs repeatedly.

One said she had been forced to eat several hot chillies and then her own vomit."

Hot Chicks for Ron Paul

Two of the best candidates getting some free (and cheap) publicity. The US is an interesting place--particularly around election time:



Obama Girl Nightmare - video powered by Metacafe

Putin the Sweetheart

Awwwwwwww. Putin will agree to become the Prime Minister if Medvedev becomes President. How sweet.

Coronation in Jeopardy?

Billy is unhappy. And ummmm, sorry. That's just too damn bad, Bubba--interesting as you might be.

Getting Interesting

Lieberman endorses McCain as McCain continues to raise his numbers in New Hampshire and the Portsmouth Herald gives a strong endorsement of McCain. Ron Paul breaks his own record of raising over four million dollars by raising over *six* million in 24 hours. He will likely raise more than any other candidate in the GOP and is getting close to double-digit numbers in the NH polls.

Obama is still leading in Iowa, but not much (if at all) outside the margin of error and Edwards may receive a large endorsement in Iowa. And all of this has the big asterisk next to it in that many of Iowa's caucus goers still claim to be undecided. Bumpy ride ahead for the D's--making NH hyper-critical for Hillarah and SC hyper-critical for both Obama and Edwards. And, perhaps sentimentally, I wouldn't count out Biden too terribly much just yet. If Edwards or Hillarah slip, he could have some big numbers swing his way as he is commonly called the "second choice" candidate for many in both Iowa and NH, if we are to believe the reports. I wouldn't put a lot of money down on the prospect, but who knows what can/will happen in a democracy and a race like this?

Mental Health Break

There is that certain level of "suckiness" that just can't be put into words--very intangible. One has to be good enough to resemble sincere effort, but still be irretrievably awful. These guys suck at levels hitherto unknown.

Psycho in Chief

No, this isn't about W, but Nixon. W isn't clever enough to be a psycho. To call W retarded begs forgiveness of the reader, as it should, since he is ferociously morally lazy more than anything and retarded people are often far from that. But Nixon was clever--even brilliant at times. Only now has his GOP coalition showed signs of cracking. But enough of that. Have a listen. (And, I would be remiss not to mention three words as a summary: Koo ka-phukin Koo).

Whatever Dude

Whenever Ratzinger (aka, the Pope) wants to publicly state that raping children is a bad idea--and, in fact, a crime--*and* actually does something about it, maybe then I'll start to think his moral views are worth listening to. Actually, he will then have to state that AIDS is worse than condoms and that he would actually like to see his sub-Sahara African parishioners live instead of dying at the rate of 600-1000 a day.

Gay marriage is an 'obstacle' to world peace? WTF? Well, with respect to his Holiness, what better moral leaders can one have on the teachings of the family than the Vatican? After all, they are largely old, celibate, men that gather wisdom from millenia-old stories/nightmares about turning women into salt, slaughtering neighboring villagers and enslaving their virgins, and stoning disobedient children that were written by other old (and probably also sexually frustrated, if not celibate) men chasing goats around a rock. Not sure they were pederasts, but who knows? After all, who doesn't want to rape a child? It's just the way God made us, right?

Or.......we can choose to ignore this guy who is, by all appearances, gayer than a maypole. He criticizes gay marriage as an obstacle to peace in the world?! What, as opposed to Vatican bath house adorned in supple young boys? Phuk you, Ratzinger. Phuk you and the ground you walk on (and kneel supplicantly upon--and no, not talking about prayer).

More 'MS is Lame' fun

A nice parodied voice over of an MS ad.

MS on the cutting edge

Oh goody, ads on mobile devices brought to you by Microsoft. Just what we've always wanted. From the article:

"Going forward, people will be able to see mini banner ads optimized for their browser type and screen size on their mobile devices when they visit the MSN Mobile portal..."

And--hope you are sitting down--"MSN Mobile will also now enable users to buy movie tickets over the phone with a credit card and download background images and ringtones." Wow! That technology has only been around for about 5 years or so! How do they do it?

Whatever. (cough) douchebags (cough).

SwiftKids

I love these little youtube vids. I hope we get more comedy vids like this and just simply laugh at the idiocy of it all.

The one on Edwards here:


And check out the ones for Hillarah, Obama, and Giuliani as well.

More Obama Propoganda

Andrew Sullivan states it more articulately than I can here. To underscore the article a bit, Sullivan is a conservative who regularly pseudo-worships Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher--as any conservative English immigrant to the US should, I suppose.

I really like the article, but the parts that get me most are:

"At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce."

And, in speaking of Obama vs. Hillarah:

"The paradox is that Hillary makes far more sense if you believe that times are actually pretty good. If you believe that America’s current crisis is not a deep one, if you think that pragmatism alone will be enough to navigate a world on the verge of even more religious warfare, if you believe that today’s ideological polarization is not dangerous, and that what appears dark today is an illusion fostered by the lingering trauma of the Bush presidency, then the argument for Obama is not that strong. Clinton will do. And a Clinton-Giuliani race could be as invigorating as it is utterly predictable.

But if you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.

We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama."

It's not that Hillarah might be "fine" as a president, it's because--at best--she will be "fine" as president. Predictable, practical, triangulating, safe, and, in the end, potentially dangerous for us by being all the latter. Politics as a board game is not what is needed *if* you agree that we are in uniquely challenged times, as I believe we are.

I don't think Obama is anything close to a panacea and, if I read him right, neither does he. But he represents an entirely new chapter for the US in policy, party, foreign relations, race relations, and--perhaps most importantly--what the American Dream and what America really is today. 50 years ago the US was arguing about whether or not a man like Obama should be allowed to stay at a hotel, eat in a restaurant, walk down the sidewalk, or go to school with white people. Now he may become president of this same nation despite not having the support of much of Black Congressional and Civil Rights leaders. What a country. What a country, indeed.

Shweeeet

Making beer beautiful and heartfelt in time for the holidays. And, from the story, another reason to drink Fat Tire beer.

Another Look at McCain

The Economist argues the pro-McCain case. I would love to have an Obama-McCain debate for the presidency, personally. Don't know if it can happen, but a boy can dream.

Gitmo and Habeus Corpus

Let us hope W and the US Congress get their frightening legislation overturned. SCOTUS agrees to hear the case afterall.

The parts I especially liked:

"The final argument of the day was the rebuttal from former Solicitor General Waxman. The writ of habeas corpus, he contended, has always allowed prisoners to challenge their detention if they claim they are not warriors and are being wrongly held. The current system, he argued, does not allow for such an argument.

To illustrate his point, Waxman pointed to a case in which he said a detainee was finally released after four years in detention because the detainee, a German man, had "what other detainees have not had — a lawyer." And when the lawyer filed a habeas petition in the federal courts, and the government filed a reply with its evidence, the lawyer saw that the government claimed the detainee had associated with a named terrorist who had blown himself up.

"Within 24 hours, his counsel had affidavits not only from the German prosecuter, but from the supposedly deceased Mr. Bilgen, who is a resident of Dresden, never involved in terrorism, and fully getting on with his life," Waxman said."

FOUR YEARS we held an innocent man and he is only free because he is German...!?! Not exactly winning hearts and minds or demonstrating the US as a shining beacon of democracy, is it?

Then there is there is Scalia, proving himself ever the blowhard, pedantic douchebag:

"Do you have a single case in the 220 years of our country, or for that matter, in the five centuries of the English empire, in which habeas was granted to an alien in a territory that was not under the sovereign control of either the United States or England?" Scalia asked.

"The answer to that is a resounding yes," Waxman said."

Listen to the full exchange on C-SPAN, if fully interested, but Waxman had a hard time convincing Scalia. Waxman is obviously extremely capable, but I wish it was just a bit more of a barroom argument.

One should think that it is astonishingly palpable that the US controls the Guantanamo Bay Marine Base since we've been there for decades. If the Constitution and US law is inapplicable to detainees there in our custody because we don't include Guantanamo Bay within the borders of the United States, is it fully legal to take people out of their homes--to include US citizens--from anywhere in the world, take them out on a boat and slit their throats? Could we put them on a raft in international waters, but guarded by US military personnel, and forget about Habeus Corpus? As Waxman finally stated later, the British Parliament suspended the writ of Habeus Corpus on the High Seas for US Seamen in 1777. If it wasn't applicable, why did it have to be lifted?

Besides which, and what should seem most obvious most of all is, just how in the fuck does someone being denied the writ of Habeus Corpus, held against their will, in strict confinement, appeal to the court system?!?! Especially a seaman in shackles and the bottom of a boat. Just how in the hell is he supposed to pick up his cell phone and call his attorney? OF COURSE there aren't going to be numerous examples of Habeus extended! How are the prisoners supposed to appeal to the court system to get it extended? It's plain phuking bizarre. We're going to forgo 700 years of legal history because of a particular part of a particular war because of a, very arguably, lack of a particular precedent. I hope Kennedy does get in line and help overturn this. What a humiliation otherwise.

sXe Phil

Not bad. In fact pretty good this time. Sometimes he falls a little flat with the 20-something "aren't-I-cute-and-funny?" style, but I'm sure I did that in my 20s. Anyway, should you want to give him 3 minutes of your time (price is right and, no, there is no nudity).

US Pres Primary watch

Looks like Obama's lead in Iowa might be growing a bit more. Hillarah is still holding in New Hampshire and South Carolina, but if Obama takes Iowa, things could get interesting--particularly if Edwards drops out as he said he would.

Even more interesting is the rise of Huckabee. He was single digits as late as September and is now in the lead for the GOP. Don't know how well he will sell in NH (and, so far, the answer is "not well"), but an Iowa win could change his fortunes quite a bit and SC is wide open right now. Guess there is something funny in the water of Arkansas. And, perhaps most encouraging, is that the constant bickering of Giuliani and Romney may have been a waste of time. Huckabee seems to have slid in behind their sniping by like...talking about issues. That seems like a good thing.