Saturday, June 26, 2010

Saturday Youtube Post

Saturday, June 19, 2010

I wasn't planning on really posting anything significant during my time at camp, but this is just too embarrassing and depressing, and I have to share.

Study Shows That Obama Should Use Simple Words and Treat Americans Like They're Children

President Obama’s speech on the gulf oil disaster may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday.

Tuesday night’s speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor. The Austin, Texas-based company analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture.

Though the president used slightly less than four sentences per paragraph, his 19.8 words per sentence “added some difficulty for his target audience,” Payack said. He singled out this sentence from Obama as unfortunate: “That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge—a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s secretary of energy.”

“A little less professorial, less academic and more ordinary,” Payack recommended. “That’s the type of phraseology that makes you (appear) aloof and out of touch.”


I want everyone to read the underlined sentences again.

1) He singled out this sentence from Obama as unfortunate: “That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge—a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s secretary of energy.”

When Americans elect dumbshits like Joe Barton, then it's no wonder they think this is a difficult sentence. Here's Joe Barton convincing himself that he's smarter than that Nobel Prize winning physicist Obama mentioned.



Can anybody even tell what point he was trying to make? I can't tell if he was arguing against global warming, or arguing for creationism. Or arguing that God put the oil in America specifically for us?

"My third grade education sure showed him."

2) “That’s the type of phraseology that makes you (appear) aloof and out of touch.”

This confuses me more than anything. How the fuck does having a vocabulary of words with more than two syllables make you appear "out of touch?" Smart people know things. I don't want a retarded person running the most powerful nation on the fucking planet. I want someone who is really smart. That is why I voted for Barack Obama, and that is why the thought of Sarah Palin in the White House sends shivers down my spine. I know I could not run the country, and I want someone in there who is smarter than me. It's very sad that the nation that walked on the moon now sees intelligence as a fault.

Saturday Youtube Post

I posted this on facebook a couple weeks ago, but I'll put it here now because God is an Astronaut + 2001 is just so fucking epic.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Saturday Youtube Post

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Saturday Youtube Post

Leaving for camp tomorrow for the summer. Won't be back until July 19th, with a week off somewhere in there. I'll only be back Saturday nights, so Sunday Youtube Posts will be Saturday Youtube Posts for the summer.

Friday, June 4, 2010

What did come, with ever growing intensity, was the roar of Jupiter's own radio voice. In 1955, just before the dawn of the space age, astronomers had been astonished to find that Jupiter was blasting out millions of horsepower on the ten-meter band. It was merely raw noise, associated with the haloes of charged particles circling the planet like the Van Allen belts of Earth, but on a far greater scale.

Sometimes, during the lonely hours on the control deck, Bowman would listen to this radiation. He would turn up the gain until the room filled with a crackling, hissing roar; out of this background, at irregular intervals, emerged brief whistles and peeps like the cries of demented birds. It was an eerie sound, for it had nothing to do with Man; it was as lonely and as meaningless as the murmur of waves on a beach, or the distant crash of thunder on the horizon.

Excerpt from 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

A lot of right wing conspiracy theorists are saying that Obama's going to exploit this disaster in order to push for alternate energy sources. Not a single one of them have explained why that would be bad. Remember how Carter warned us all to get off oil back in the 70s? And how everyone laughed at him? Obama needs to exploit the fuck out of this.



Courtesy of The Big Picture. Click on the images for higher resolutions.

















Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Shitty Movie Review - Sex and the City 2



Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.

My review of the first Sex and the City is a personal favorite of mine for this blog, but dear god in heaven, what a price I had to pay for it. At least this time I was with friends who endured it with me. We went in with the idea of making fun of it. We immediately regretted the decision when we found out it was over two and half hours long. It was my idea.

Somehow, some way, Sex and the City 2 was an even more terrible film than its predecessor. That is an achievement. I don't think it had as much of a damaging effect on me because I knew what to expect. Either that, or my soul was destroyed the first time around, and I've lost the ability to experience feelings.

The first thing I noticed was that this film was not called Sex and the City 2: I Got It. It is not about Mr. Boyfriend struggling to keep up with the demands of his succubus master Carrie. Well, it sort of is, but not in the way I envisioned. Boyfriend (Husband?) buys Carrie a kickass flatscreen TV near the beginning. Now, the reaction of a normal human being to this should be joy. However, Carrie Bradshaw is not a human being. She is a horse. And it is a well known fact that all horses are allergic to expensive flatscreen TVs.

Carrie was pissed. Girls don't watch TV, that's what boys do, you insensitive prick. Carrie is a woman Mr. Boyfriend, and you apparently have not heard her roar: "Jewelry would've been nice." This guy should break out his Succubi 101 books again from college. Everyone knows that succubi cannot eat electronics, they must feed on a steady diet of shiny rocks and penises.

For a movie called Sex and the City, there's not really a whole lot of sex going on. Three of the four squabbling bitches are married, and they spend most of the movie away from their husbands in Abu Dhabi. That's right, Abu Dhabi. So for a movie called Sex and the City, there's not a whole lot of city either. Carrie, now married, spends the movie worrying about her and Mr. Boyfriend turning into a (gasp!) married couple. Yackity Bitch #2 feels threatened by her demonspawn's nanny, who has huge fucking knockers and refuses to wear a bra. Yackity Bitch #3 quits her job for her family I guess, but not really, because it was her business arrangements that made the trip to Abu Dhabi possible sort of? And Yackity Bitch #4, you guessed it, goes about stuffing oodles of penises inside of her.


I'm totally Yackity Bitch #2, I'm like the drama queen, you know? I think my friend read a book once, so she's the intelligent one.

Let me walk you through how they got to Abu Dhabi. Actually I don't really know, and I wish someone would tell me. Yackity Bitch #3 met someone who was not white at a nightclub. Mr. Notwhite was in fact a huge businessman in an exotic faraway country called Brownpeopleistan. The conversation went a little something like this.

Mr. Notwhite: "Hello I am Guy Businessman, and I come from an exotic faraway land totally unlike New York City.
Yackity Bitch #3: "Oooooh, exotic!"
Mr. Notwhite: I don't know you at all, but I think you should come to my land to take part in a business deal I won't describe.
Yackity Bitch #3: "How exotic and exciting! Sign me up!"
Mr. Notwhite: "Excellent. I find that nightclubs are the perfect places to find people to do these kinds of things."

The movie never explained what the hell she was actually doing in Abu Dhabi.  Not once did she ever do business of any kind, and every time business was mentioned, it was treated in much the same way as on Rifftrax:



Quick: when you were a child, what did you imagine that area of the world to be like? If you were like me, you were slightly racist because the only exposure you had to Arabia was Looney Tunes and Aladdin. That's what the Middle East is like in Sex and the City 2.  Most of the evil or stupid people they meet in Abu Dhabi act like your stereotypical Arab with thick, scruffy facial hair and heavy accents, while the friendly people they interact with look like clean shaven Westerners with little to no accent at all. Don't believe me? Here, watch this clip from the film.



I was shocked. I expected more of a film made for rich white sluts starring rich white sluts.

And if you think Sex and the City is not high brow enough for commentary on society, religion, or culture, then go fuck yourself San Diego. When The Girls (tm) saw the way other women were treated in the Middle East, they were horrified. They, like, totally saw these women around Brownpeopleistan with, like, these mask things on their faces. Men silence their voices, because that's all men do (paraphrased, but this was really said). We are so lucky that there's nothing wrong with our own superior culture where we use purity rings instead of burqas. Have some dignity, Middle East.

A couple years ago before I knew anything about Sex and the City, a girl I met explained to me that the movie's release is a lot like "the opening of Star Wars, but for women." First of all, women are allowed to like Star Wars. I don't think I've ever met a woman who doesn't like Star Wars. Second, most women I've talked to hates this series just as much as me. I can't think of a male equivalent to this. The sluts in this film literally do nothing but sit around and laugh at penis jokes. So would a male equivalent be nothing but male sluts laughing at jokes about boobies? Like Wedding Crashers or something? Wedding Crashers had a plot.

The most cringe-worthy scene from the first film was the photoshoot of Carrie in her wedding dress. This time around, it was when all four of them hopped up on stage in an Abu Dhabi nightclub and sang "I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar." They really did this.



I suppose I can understand. I'm pro-feminism, I hear ya grrlz. I guess it just would've been a little out of place to get up there and recite "My Angry Vagina" for no reason in front of a bunch of drunk Muslims.

There's an important distinction between fake feminism and real feminism that I think I should go into. Sometimes people feel the need to attach themselves to causes larger than themselves. This is a good thing, and it should be encouraged. The problem is that everyone wants to do it, and not everyone has the ability to form logical opinions. When you get uninformed people trying to act like they are informed, you get fake activism. Look at any legal protest that takes place today in the United States. Chances are, four out of five people who show up to those things only do it as a form of mental masturbation. Ignore the fact that absolutely nothing is being accomplished! We're making a difference, guys!

When fake activism is translated into feminism, you get lipstick feminism. Lipstick feminists might have heard a professor talking about sex-positive feminism once. They don't understand most of it, so they just go ahead and fill in the blanks. It basically gives them an excuse to dress and act like complete whores without the guilt. I heard somebody somewhere explain this to me once, it's okay! You'll understand once you get to college!

Here's the deal. Lipstick feminism is not sex-positive feminism. If you're really shallow enough to associate sex with power, and you hold the belief that your own sexual allure has power over men, then you are forced to admit that the door swings both ways. Are you saying you don't find men sexually attractive? Are only men robbed of power when they find people attractive, but not women? You're arguing that everyone who has sexual parts is powerless, and then your fake feminism doesn't empower anyone, and it completely contradicts itself. If you're okay with that, then go right ahead you dumb slut.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

"If you do build a Mosque, I hope somebody blows it up."

Huh, well what a wonderful followup to my post about Republican fascists.



BERRY: No, Tony, you can’t build a mosque at the site of 9/11.

TONY: Why not? Why not?

BERRY: No, you can’t. And I’ll tell you this: If you do build a mosque, I hope somebody blows it up. ... I hope the mosque isn’t built, and if it is, I hope it’s blown up. And I mean that.

Let me tell you something, Tony. It's the right-wing nutjobs that are gonna keep this for people like you from the people that come for ... It’s right-wing radicals like me that are going to keep this country safe for you and everyone else from the people who are flying the planes from the country you fled from. If you want to identify with those people, go live with them.


I like how he never answers Tony's question. As if that didn't send enough chills down your spine, there's also this.

But I'll tell you this -- whatever country you came from? If a Christian in the name of Christianity or a Jew in the name of Judaism had dared do what you did, you would issue a fatwa for everyone looked just like 'em! And for a thousand years you wouldn't allow a temple or a Christian church to be built there. And you damned well know it!


That underlined word there speaks volumes about the mindset of these god damn lunatics -- all Muslims flew the planes into the World Trade Center. All Muslims are responsible.

As usual with "apologies" from the right wing, he apologized without actually apologizing.

While I stand by my disagreement of the building of the mosque on the site, I SHOULD NOT have said “I hope someone blows it up.” That was dumb, and beneath me. I was trying to show “Tony” how much I opposed his opinion, but I went too far. For that, I apologize to my listeners.

Instead of apologizing to your dumbfuck listeners who agreed with every word, why don't you apologize to the Muslims you threatened to murder? Why don't you go and turn yourself in for incitement, you disgusting piece of shit? Have fun being waterboarded, it's necessary to protect the country. You are a fucking traitor and I hope you choke.

Oh wait, I'm sorry. While I stand by my disagreement of America being transformed into a Fascist Theocracy, I SHOULD NOT have said "I hope you choke." That was dumb, and beneath me. I was trying to show "this sack of waste" how much I opposed his opinion, but I went too far. For that, I apologize to my listeners.

I have a lot of criticisms about the Democratic party. I would not vote for them if America had a party that was actually liberal. But the reason why I vote Democrat is because Republicans would have a better chance at winning if I didn't. I do it to stop them. The thought of Republicans ever gaining control of the United States again, especially in their state of mind right now -- one that even tolerates these things being said -- scares the everloving fuck out of me. America was founded on the idea that you can believe in whatever the hell you want to. Republicans don't think you're an American if you don't believe in the same God as they do. Instead of seeing free public discourse as a beautiful celebration of the democracy we live in, this guy sees it as an enemy to be destroyed. He can't stand the fact that anything American about America exists. I vote for Democrats because xenophobic fascists vote for Republicans.