Sunday, February 20, 2011

Wikipedia City Slickers

"The episode makes frequent references to dialogue gaffes in the film, such as Luther Strickland referring to his farm as a 'walnut ranch,' and the gas attendant's pronunciation of 'homicidal' and 'fromokaidal.' "

Them there damn city slickers ain't got no clue nohow. Can't talk shop about no walnut ranching until you've broken in your first walnut.

Ornery little bastards. Have your both hands full just staying in the saddle.

I still remember my first walnut rodeo back in '86. The dust, the sweat, and the blood.

Was that little fucker or me in the end. He broke my leg; I broke hisn.

Had to shoot him. Did you ever try shooting a walnut bucking on three legs?

Emptied a whole mag of .45 ACP at him. Was all over the corral, that fucker.

Government should have bombed Wikipedia long ago. Little bastard commie compadres of that pinko traitor Assange.

Come to my walnut ranch and wrestle some bull nuts before you spread un-American stories about hardworking, taxpaying, god-fearing country folks. You go take yourself a leaf out of Sarah Palin's books. Never seen a cowgirl shoot them nuts quite like she does, no, sir.

'Cept maybe Dick Cheney. And before I had her books read out to me, we never had any toilet paper on the ranch nohow.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Cool Atlas Shrugged Trailer

(HT to Joshua Zader.)

(Should rather be called a freight car than a trailer, 'cause the movie's not about trucking.)



Boy, am I glad they updated this one. With 1950s buildings, trains, and cars, the movie would not only have been uncool, but unwatchable. The plot theme is grim and dystopian enough, and this way there's at least some eye candy to make it bearable.

I don't care shit about the ass pull with the airline bankruptcies. It pales in comparison with the train wreck the alternative would have been.

For all the fan boys who disagree, go read that 1,000+ page doorstopper over and over until you turn into Officer Barbrady. :P

Oh, and it's us who move the world.* Welcome to the twenty-first century.

You could take the Twenty-First Century Limited to get here. But that's another story entirely.

* "Although the nominative case is traditionally required after the verb 'to be', even careful speakers say 'it is me' (or him, her, etc.) rather than 'it is I' in informal contexts."

— Collins English Dictionary

Usage Note:

Traditional grammar requires the nominative form of the pronoun in the predicate of the verb be: It is I (not me); That must be they (not them), and so forth. Nearly every speaker of Modern English finds this rule difficult to follow. Even if everyone could follow it, in informal contexts the nominative pronoun often sounds pedantic and even ridiculous, especially when the verb is contracted, as in It's we. But constructions like It is me have been condemned in the classroom and in writing handbooks for so long that there seems little likelihood that they will ever be entirely acceptable in formal writing. The traditional rule creates additional problems when the pronoun following be also functions as the object of a verb or preposition in a relative clause, as in It is not them/they that we have in mind when we talk about "crime in the streets" nowadays, where the plural pronoun serves as both the predicate of is and the object of have. In this example, 57 percent of the Usage Panel prefers the nominative form they, 33 percent prefer the objective them, and 10 percent accept both versions. Writers can usually revise their sentences to avoid this problem: They are not the ones we have in mind, We have someone else in mind, and so on.

Put that in your pipes and smoke it, grammar nazis.

No grammar for you! Come back one year!

Thursday, February 03, 2011

These Boots Are Made for Vegas?

Web page segment to edit: "Shop hoes"

Must have been meant to read: "Shop shoes"

Must have been embarrassing for certain conservatives if they happened to surf to that page.

"Willard Mitten Romney! So you're picking up hookers from the internet now?!"

"I swear, my dear, I was just trying to buy you a pair of shoes for your birthday."

"How stupid do you think I am? I'm leaving you! I'm getting a divorce!"

(Darn freaking interweb. Worse than gambling. I try it once, and my marriage is down the drain. Need to get those intertubes banned ASAP.)

"And don't think you'll ever be president! Don't even think you'll have a chance at any career in politics when this is over!"

(Must get this hell spawn banned now.)

Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Groundhog Day 2011 Prediction

Staten Island Chuck has seen Ayn Rand's shadow.

That means at least six more months of heavy tea party effect precipitation.

Happy Ayn Rand Day!

Tuesday, February 01, 2011

Assange vs. the Galactically Stupid

There's this galactically stupid letter on Julian Assange at The Atlasphere.



The government has a legitimate interest in the secrecy of negotiations, of its estimations of foreign leaders, things like that, because sometimes secrets like this are in our national security interest or help the government achieve needed goals.

Assange's wanton release of this information will do what he wanted, embarassment [sic] and damage to America's foreign policy endeavors — some of which are critical to our nation's very survival, such as the efforts to find allies against Iran's nuclear ambitions.

(Insulting your allies behind their backs and then hoping it stays secret is a good way to find allies?!)

As all things in the universe are connected, everything is remotely connected to national security in some way. By this fascist (or rather objecto-fascist*) "logic," the government could do anything, confiscate anything, kidnap anybody, assassinate anybody, as long as it cries "national security" while doing it.

BTW, the government would not even have to prove the tenuous connection to national security. The proof, you know, is secret, too.

By this "logic," the government might just as well shoot random people in Times Square that "look Iranian" because "they might be carrying nukes under their coats." That would serve the cause of nuclear security about as well as kidnapping or assassinating people who publish "secret" information on hopelessly inept government negotiations that may or may not tangentially concern nukes.

That's how today's neo-fascism or, in this case, objecto-fascism works: Blind fear of terrorism and nukes, blind faith in the government's ability to do something about it, and a willingness to give said government carte blanche every time it cries "national security." Disgusting.

As an added bonus, here another letter that is not quite as stupid and fascist, and that asks a question that deserves to be answered:

"Does Assange ever release secret documents from our enemies?"

Well, I guess Assange releases whatever he gets hold of. So why doesn't he release documents from axis of evil governments?

Probably 'cause he ain't got any. Why ain't he got any?

Probably because those governments are even more fascist and better at silencing, kidnapping, and assassinating whistleblowers than the US government, by several orders of magnitude. So the US government is several rungs in hell above virtually any other government. Does that mean that it should be given leeway to kidnap or assassinate an odd dissenter every now and then, just because other governments do it regularly?

Finally, for fascists' favorite fervor, the "hundred Afghans," whose identity and collaboration with US forces the leak allegedly revealed to vengeful taliban, and whose blood accordingly is according to Palin et al. on Assange's hands:

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said there is still concern Afghans named in the published documents could be retaliated against by the Taliban, though a NATO official said there has been no indication that this has happened.



The defense secretary said that the published documents do contain names of some cooperating Afghans, who could face reprisal by Taliban.

But a senior NATO official in Kabul told CNN that there has not been a single case of Afghans needing protection or to be moved because of the leak.

And…

Administration officials said they were not aware of anyone who has been attacked or imprisoned as a direct result of information in the 2,700 cables that have been made public to date by WikiLeaks, The New York Times and several other publications, many with some names removed.



A Pentagon spokesman, Maj. Chris Perrine, said Thursday that the military was not aware of any confirmed case of harm to anyone as a result of being named in the Afghan war documents.

Of course it would have been better if WikiLeaks had redacted those names. But as long as this kind of thing goes on, your average soldier of whatever affiliation — and every yahoo rooting for them like a Palin — has more blood on their hands than Assange.



The fascists didn't care shit about collateral damage among Iraqis and Afghans while US troops did the killing. Again, the core idea(l) of statism at work: States may cause any number of carnage, casualties, and collateral damage they want; an individual may cause none.

But morality does not come in numbers. Just because there are 300,000,000 of you, that does not mean you collectively have any more right to harm or kill anyone than any lone dude has.

Sarah Palin said: "Julian Assange has blood on his hands!"

Then she removed her hands out of the caribou carcass.

Not that caribous are humans, but that bitch really got a lot of nerve.



And finally, here the latest proof that truth beats secrecy:

The latest WikiLeaks revelation — detailing a memo which suggests that the British government advised Libya on how to secure the release from jail on compassionate grounds of the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing — opens a can of worms on both sides of the Atlantic.

First, it puts David Cameron under renewed pressure. He has consistently adopted the line taken by the last Labor government that the devolved Scottish government took the decision to release Abdelbaset al-Megrahi in August 2009 independently and without pressure from London.

Today's leak appears to blows a hole in that story.

Second, it surely forces American politicians to rethink their view of Julian Assange.

US politicians — led by four senators from New York and New Jersey, where many of the families of the Lockerbie victims live — have been pushing for an inquiry into their deeply-held suspicions that the Labor government encouraged the release of Megrahi in order to open up trade with Libya.

If, as seems likely, today's leak pushes Cameron closer to such an inquiry, will Capitol Hill begin to realize that WikiLeaks can be a force for good?

Take that, dumb bitch, pee king, and all the other galactically stupid among you.



* Objecto-fascism is the use of objectivist arguments to promote fascism or in a way that might as well be used to promote fascism.