It’s a Spın̈lal Tap thing
And yes, it has its own Facebook page.
If you haven’t seen the move, you’ve missed a good laugh.
Today is Nigel Tufnel Day
It’s a Spın̈lal Tap thing
Category: Culture
It’s a Spın̈lal Tap thing
Taibbi Explains it All
While I have been generally supportive of Occupy Wall Street, I’ve also had a problem wrapping my head about the specifics of what they want.
Well, Matt Taibb had the same problem, but he grocks it now:
People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It’s about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a “beloved community” free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn’t need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.
Just go read the rest.
Why Some Annoying People Are Not on the List…
Submitted for your approval, Carlos Irwin Estevez
The They Who Must Not Be Named list, of course.
You see, some of the people who appear to be worthless are actually talented.
Charlie Sheen is a really funny guy, as this sketch shows, and I’m not sure if he’s crazy or not, because, unlike Bill Frist and Charles Krauthammer, I don’t do diagnoses long distance, but it seems to me that even if he is a bit nuts, he is less nuts than he appears.
In any case, this video is hysterically funny, and the butt of Charlie Sheen’s jokes is one Charlie Sheen.
So he has been removed from the list.
God Bless The Onion
Don’t be drinking anything when you read the rest of This:
U.S. Authorities Can’t Really Fault Al-Qaeda For Deadly Bombing Of Carnival Cruise Ship
‘Those Things Represent Everything That’s Wrong With America,’ Officials SayFebruary 9, 2011 | ISSUE 47•06
WASHINGTON—Following Monday’s deadly terrorist attack on a Carnival Cruise Line ship, U.S. officials have had difficulty issuing a stern condemnation of the incident, saying that while any act of terrorism is inexcusable, they couldn’t completely blame al-Qaeda for wanting to blow up what is essentially a giant, floating symbol of everything that is truly god-awful about America.
………
OMFSM, this is funny!
Seriously, This is What is Wrong with America
Ben Bradley’s wife, otherwise known as Sally Quinn, is a fixture in Washington, and Jamison Foser has a good rundown on just what exactly she is:
You cannot caricature Sally Quinn. Don’t even try. It simply can’t be done. No matter how hard you try to exaggerate her preening self-regard and utter frivolity, she comes right along and shows herself to be worse than you could possibly imagine.
Quinn — who gained fame when The Washington Post was forced to retract her false claim that Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser unzipped his fly during an interview — makes the extraordinary claim in her January 26 column that Carter lost his re-election campaign due to his failure to attend Washington dinner parties. Not only that — according to Quinn, Ted Kennedy ran against Carter because of it:…
She is a failed newspaper reporter (see above), a failed TV reporter, I saw her on the CBS Morning News in the 1970s, and a failed novelist, and is now a serial party girl and hostess.
As was noted some years back in Salon Magazine, “She would go to the opening of an envelope.”
Basically, she married into Washington, DC royalty, in the person of former Post Editor-in-Chief Ben Bradlee, and then did her best to become the queen bee of the Washington social circle.
So, what does this mean? It means that when she writes about why things happen in Washington, DC, it’s because they don’t kiss the ass of the party crowd:
- Carter lost his bid for reelection, and got a primary challenge from Ted Kennedy, because he and Rosalynn didn’t go to the the Washington parties.
- Watergate took down Nixon because he didn’t go to the the Washington parties, so he had no support from people like Sally Quinn.
- The Republicans attempted coup masquerading as an impeachment investigation against Bill Clinton because he and Hillary didn’t go to the the Washington parties.
- George W. Bush was bad, because, “The Bushes almost never went out and the president was in bed by 9:30, even when they entertained, which was rare,” so they did not go to the the Washington parties.
- That Barack Obama is icky, because he’s making people work so hard that they do not have time to go to the the Washington parties.
Beginning to see a pattern?
I am beginning to pine for Madame la Guillotine.
It’s Called Doing Your Homework
And Rachael Maddow, with the aid of a John Waters film, shows how the Teabaggers chose the name because they simply did not do the research on what the term meant in the first place, and not something that Maddow and Ana Marie Cox invented out of thin air, but was actually a cultural/sexual reference of long standing. (or squatting, see pic)
Deep Thought
True dat
I Say 72 Hours Before the “Stalin Show Trial” Type Recantation
So, Republican Whip Eric Cantor (VA-7) has criticized Rush Limbaugh for his divisive languate:
“The Republican Party in its roots is a party of inclusion and we ought to be promoting that and making sure that voices are heard,” Cantor, of Virginia, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing today.
Cantor, when asked about Limbaugh’s comments that “Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate” and his comparison of the administration’s health-care logo to a swastika, said his comparisons were wrong.
“Do I condone the mention of Hitler in any discussion about politics?” Cantor said. “No, I don’t, because obviously that is something that conjures up images that frankly are not, I think, very helpful.”
Mr. Cantor will be groveling at Rush Limbaugh’s feet before Monday evening, mark my words. We’ve seen this happen again, and again, and again, and again….
Ready, Fire, Aim
The USAF is looking at how new technologies might provide a diction for the service’s future:
The study will look 20 years ahead, with an eye toward implementing near-term investment decisions aimed at producing relevant military systems. “We are not talking about pie in the sky,” Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz said last month.
The problem ain’t technology, it’s the contracting, and cost control. At the rate things are going, all of the USAF’s budget will go to just buying one aircraft somewhere around 2075.
After all, the F-22 already costs almost ½ as much as the first nuclear aircraft carrier, the Enterprise.
Their future is bleak until costs come under control, which is true of most of the military, but the US Air Force appears to be in the worst position regarding this.
And Then My Head Exploded
So, I’m getting Charlie up for school, and he wants to talk about NASA’s decision make its new Orion crew capsule reusable.
I told him that it really did not make a whole bunch of sense: It’s a minuscule part of the cost of a launch, but if it were not reusable, it would be a very public admission by NASA that the entire shuttle program was a failure, and that they were unwilling to do this as an organization.
He asked why this would be a problem, since everyone else saw that this was a true, so their admission would not materially effect their budget (not an exact quote, but the gist is the same. He turns 10 tomorrow, which means that yes, he is scary smart).
I explained that, like many stupid decisions, this was driven by pride: NASA was unwilling to admit that the Shuttle was a failure because this conflicted with their self image.
They think that they are Captain Kirk.
His reply:
Who is Captain Kirk?
Excuse me, while I scrape bits of my skull off the ceiling.
Quote of the Day
There’s an important general lesson here: If you want to say batsh*t-crazy stuff and still be treated as a respectable participant in the national debate, you’d better be a Republican.
—Mark Kleiman, on the resignation of Van Jones
There Can Only Be One
It appears that someone idiot at AT&T’s ISP division decided to block the anarcho-absurdist site 4chan from their customers.
Within hours a fictitious report of the death of AT&T’s CEO from a cocaine overdose following a gay prostitution binge (it implies that he was a “bottom”) appeared on CNN’s “citizen journalism” site iReport.
Seriously, while the folks at 4chan are nice people, much like Bruce Banner, you really don’t want to make them angry, because if they put their minds to it, it can get ugly.
Postscript: ATT has apparently removed the block.
Disclaimer: I have only visited 4chan briefly, and my experience was that everyone there was swell, totally righteous, and that under no circumstances should anyone, ever, frack with them.
Furthermore, nothing in this post should be construed as a criticism of 4chan. I am criticizing AT&T, and the “stupid” and “wanker” tags are directed at the telecommunications company.
Jeepers????
I was just on the phone with a recruiter for an agency, a very nice guy, and in the course of our phone conversation, I related my background:
- Medical Test Equipment
- Nuclear Power
- Military Vehicles
- Automotive
- Locomotive
- Missiles and space
- Food processing equipment
- Sheet metal
- Shop floor interface
- Electronics packaging
- CAD
- FEA
In response, he said, “Jeepers.”
He said it, and he said it without any intent of irony.
Woah. I guess it must be a Midwest thing.
Well, That’s a Relief
It appears that, according to Matthew Lynn, the credit crunch was not caused by Lap Dancers, Cocaine, £900 bottles of wine, sexual promiscuity, and general hedonism.
Whoa, that’s such a relief.
Actually, it’s not a relief, because fixing this problem will be much more complex, and much more painful than anything we would have to do in the hedonism scenario.
The South Fell This November
Kevin Drum makes a very good point about the south, specifically from 1932 on, reactionary southerners have controlled much of American politics.
First, they were the tail wagging the dog for the Democratic party through until 1994, when they had completely become Republicans, and from 1968 or so through the present, they were, and are, the backbone of the Republican party.
This is the first time since at least the 1930s, and Kevin Drum argues that it’s since Reconstruction, when we have had a government in power which was not beholden to them.
I am sure that Democratic strategist, and advocate for capitulation to so-called Southern values, Dave “Mudcat” Saunders is crushed, but for the rest of us, and for the nation, the idea that a group of reactionary, bigoted, and small minded Neo-Confederate assholes are out of power is a very good thing.
Why China’s Military May Be a Paper Tiger
I’m not sure how I found it, but there is a blog out there, 傻冒儿 Stupid Hat aka ShaMao’er that I check out regularly.
He has some very good insights into China, being of Chinese ancestry, having gone to PRC in the in the 1990s, and now working on issues of US/Chinese trade.
Truth be told, that there is a lot that Chinese and Americans don’t understand about each other, and his posts, roughly biweekly or so, tend to provide a lot of insight through the little things that reflect on culture.
Case in point: a few days ago, he was mused in a post titled Demographic defeat on the capabilities of the Chinese army to manage a protracted struggle.
He wondered whether the long standing one child per family policy may be making the PLA a hollow force:
Basically, my friend’s argument boils down to the fact that in Chinese culture, both traditional and modern, the family name is sacrosanct. It is intolerable for a family to be left without sons to carry on the name and lineage. While there is some semblance of this sentiment in the West as well, I came to appreciate that it is a far more important matter to Chinese than it is to Westerners. That is why people know the story of Marshall Peng. [The possibly apocryphal tale of Chinese army in Korea during the war being mobilized to “Save Private Ryan”] That is why people know some poems that deal with this subject. It is apparently a recurrent tragic theme in Chinese art and culture and is simply intolerable.
So, according to this theory, given the one-child policy that has been in place since the mid-1970’s, a good portion of the Red Army’s rank and file are currently single children. Given the exemptions for some rural people and for ethnic minorities and others some maybe in 2 child families but in any case the fact remains that a very large portion of the Army will be the single male child. In the event of a serious military conflict, this fact would render China unable to wage a protracted and costly struggle. The tearing of the social fabric that the loss of so many male family heirs would entail would break Chinese society and public outrage would end the conflict. Although Nationalism is a very potent force in China that would propel conflict, the decimation of family lines would easily trump it.
Obviously the death of a child in wartime is always a personal tragedy, but he makes an interesting point, which I would like to discuss with my neighbor, who works with Army Intel with a specialization in China and the Chinese language.
Another Reason to Remember Zeppo Marx
He founded Marman Products, an aerospace manufacturing firm, which purchased the patent for a new type of hose clamp, now called the Marman Clamp, which found its way onto all sorts high pressure hoses in aerospace, and were particularly useful for turbochargers, an area where the US excelled in WWII.
Additionally, they found their way into space applications, “When John Glenn rode into orbit aboard Friendship 7 in 1962, a six-foot-diameter Marman-type clamp released the capsule from the Atlas rocket, with explosive bolts blasting open the clamp,” and is still widely used today.
Gates Bitch Slaps Fighter Mafia
Since 1984, the Air force chiefs have staff have all been former fighter pilots. Before that, they were all bomber pilots.
With the appointment of General Norton Schwartz, who flew C-130s and AC-130s, it’s clear that Robert Gates is slapping down the so called “fighter mafia” hard.
What’s more, Vice Chief is now General William Fraser III, a former bomber pilot, which is another slap at the fighter jock leadership culture.
Maybe now, we can start seeing the Air Force do something useful at the upper leadership.
The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class
Very good, but it’s about an hour long, so have the time to be really depressed.
In listening to the changes, I can only conclude that this is a direct result of avarice, stupidity, and malice by the leaders in the US in the political and business spheres.
The unspoken meme of the Reagan revolution was that if you were not rich, it was because you are evil, and thus the not rich must be punished.
Why India (and China) Won’t Catch Up With The West Soon
While this article on issues with India’s procurement of a military helicopter purchase, it acutally shows a deep problem throughout Indian society that can be extrapolated to most of the emerging Asian economies. (Paid subscription required)
The illegal use of middlemen, impending 2009 elections and regional geopolitical issues are all likely to slow India’s weapons acquisition process just as the world’s industry is gaining unprecedented access to what is expected to be a $40-billion market.
India’s army is the most recent casualty. The government halted the acquisition of 197 Eurocopter AS550 C3 Fennec helicopters as replacements for 1970s-vintage Chetak and Cheetahs when allegations surfaced that middlemen had been used to seal the deal. Indian law prohibits their involvement in military procurements.
As corrupt and self-serving as the Western and Russian defense industries are, you don’t find this as the rule. It’s the exception.
In the West, they shave the rules, in much of the developing world, the rules are observed, at best, in the breach.
I think that this will present a barrier to further development at some point.