The New Road

Beckinsale's Vajayjay

Apparently Kate Beckinsale believes her best asset is her vajayjay. For a woman whose acting credits include Pearl Harbor, Van Helsing and both of the Underworld movies, that's saying a lot. I mean, come on, we saw so... little of her in the Underworld movies. Come to think of it, all I remember about Underworld is the leather body suit she wore, which looked exceedingly good. Very shiny.

Anyway, back to this vajayjay thing. That's great. Have pride in your bits. But to call it her "pharoah's tomb" and say that only three men have "looked inside it". Yeah, Kate, a pharoah's tomb is big, you know, like cavernous. That's not the image you want to be going for here. And what kind of guys are you going out with who are peering around down there? Gynecologists? Or maybe Indiana Jones; "Hello, is there anyone in there?"

What I would really like to see is some guy come out and say that his pecker is his best asset. And not a porn star mind you. But some regular actor type. Like Sean Connery. That would be a laugh riot. Can you imagine Connery going on and on about his johnson in that scottish brouge. That would make the years best of videos immediately. It would be a culturally defining moment.

Ah, well, more tales from the really stupid starlets who inhabit my Google Reader account.

McCains Evangelical Support

This quote from Pastor Hagee:

"The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West… a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ."

Haven't I been saying this for years? And everybody is like "Oh, no way, evangelicals don't think that.". Riiight. Just read the Left Behind series for fracks sake.

Karl Rove on Hussein

Rove:

“The context was, you’re not going to stigmatize this guy. You shouldn’t underestimate him,” one of the executive directors said. Rove said that the use of “Barack Hussein Obama” would perpetuate the notion that Republicans were bigoted and would hurt the party."

Hey! For once I actually agree with the guy!

900,000+ people on terrorist watchlist

The terrorism watchlist, which airlines use to look for suspicious people on their manifests, has grown to over 900,000 names. Being on the list can get you barred from flying, and there is no way to legally fight if you have your name put on the list in error. First off, this number is insane. It implies that one in every three hundred Americans is a terrorist. Second, it's crazy from a security standpoint. If everyone is on the list, then what is the point of having the list? The list should be proven, small, maintained regularly, and entry on the list should set of serious alarm bells, not just a few more questions at the ticket counter.

And get Cat Stevens off the list for goodness sakes. He is not a terrorist. At worst it's just that his songs are criminally boring.

Starship Troopers 3

Nothing says cheeseball like Starship Troopers.

I can't wait for this to come out. Instant classic!

Confederate Heritage Plate

Oh man, Florida is so fucked up.

Hell's Best Kept Secret

I was intrigued by some anti-evolution stuff I saw on "The Way of the Master", so I looked into some other topics. The fun parts begin in the 'Answers to 100 common questions' section, where you find nuggets like this:

Imagine for a moment that you are standing on the sea-shore gazing at a large ocean liner. The sun is shining. There is no wind and the sea is calm. To your amazement, about thirty people suddenly dive off the end of the ship and cling to a lifeboat. You shake your head in disbelief at their foolishness. Then without warning, the great ocean liner strikes an iceberg and suddenly sinks, taking all on board with it.

Those who looked like fools in abandoning the ship were actually wise, and those who seemed wise by staying on board were, in truth, fools.

The world scoffs at those who abandon the ship of this world and cling to the lifeboat of the Savior. But Christians know that this great pleasure-cruiser will eventually come into contact with the immovable iceberg of the Law of God, sink into hell ...and take all those on board with it.

Hmmm... Ok, right. That's if the boat actually sinks. What happens when the boat doesn't sink. To use this analogy, they would have gotten off the boat 2000 years ago and would still be waiting in the middle of the sea while the boat went into port.

Some Evangelicals believe that we are all going down the tubes "Real Soon Now"™, but that's been the case for 2000 years. What makes anyone believe it's going to happen tomorrow, this year, or any time soon?

Anyway, reading that lead me to "Hell's Best Kept Secret". Which basically tells evangelicals that to preach that God is love and such won't work. In fact, according to these guys, 80-90% of people who take Jesus Christ as their savior bail out after a short time. Wow! That's an amazing statistic.

So what these guys want evangelicals to do is to go up to random people, spout a personalized doom and gloom story, then talk about how Jesus can save them. And apparently, this "Way Of The Master" is a new idea. Which, I can personally attest, is not new at all. In fact, it's the only experience I've ever had with any form of Christianity. It's always been about the threat of eternal damnation.

You can watch the video or not, I don't care, but there is one interesting little segment in it where the Aussie dude talks about this 'parachute' scenario. Basically our hero is a guy sitting in his seat, with a parachute on, waiting for the plane to crash because the flight attendant told him that was going to happen. Then another flight attendant spills hot coffee on him. The Aussie explains that our hero isn't troubled by this (because he knows the plane is going to crash) or is even more eager now to see the plane crash. Whoa! Wait a second! So this silly analogy ends up telling evangelicals that they should be eager to see the rapture where everyone dies? Nice.

Listen, I've got no problem with people following lots of Jesus' teachings. He was clearly a great guy and did a lot of good stuff. And if you follow his philosophy you will do well by yourself and others. If your church is preaching that then good on them. But when your church starts saying that you should pray for rapture when we all die, doesn't that seem like a big red flag? Does to me.

As an aside I find this type of confrontational proselytization extremely rude. Clearly I can't just go up to someone and start bashing their faith, nor do I want to. So why do these folks feel they have the right to bash my faith and my beliefs?

Republicans pushing it

The Republicans are trying to see just how far they can push it against a woman or a black man when they are running for president. The survey is pretty amazing. Women are painted as complainers, and black people as untrustworthy (amongst many other things). Ugh. And this is the official Republican line. Some of the stuff that's been coming around on the rightie blogs and emails have been far far worse. This is going to be one seriously ugly election.

McCain Pulls The Rip-Cord

Ten days into being the frontrunner McCain has already had to pull the parachute to try and get revelations about his cozy relations with special interests off the front pages. And I reckon it might have even been his emergency parachute given that he has now flip-flopped, at least rhetorically, on the Iraq war. Just a month ago he was saying we would be in Iraq for 100 or 1000 years, and that there would be 'many more wars'. Now he is saying that the Iraq war is almost over.

That is a flip-flop on it's face, but is actually just more of the same in reality. If you listen closely to what he says he makes it clear that he is using the term 'war' in a very limited scope and that most of what we are embroiled in now would be a 'counter-insurgency' and thus not counted in the 'almost over' calculation.

So, once again, people will hear what they want to hear. McCain supporters squeamish about the war will hear that we are almost out. While hawks will look deeper to find that it's all just campaign rhetoric. But the Democrats get the best present of all which is great tape of McCain pulling a flip-flop on the central issue of his campaign.

The only two questions that remain are; how long will this flip-flop staunch the blood flow from the New York Times story, and will Romney jump back into the race to 'save the party'. What is certain is that McCain has few, if any, remaining parachutes he can use to slow down his rapid descent.

NYT Movie Revenue Visualization

I love great visualizations. Here is a new one from the New York Times that shows movie revenues going back into the mid-1980s. It's interesting to note how peaky films are recently, where as in the 1980s films had a much more consistent (and longer) run in the theaters. This really gets the point across that movies need to make their money in the first two weekends or they are done.

I'm not quite sure how the smoothing is done. There are some interesting waves just on the landing page. For example, note the double spike on 'Harry Potter an the Order of the Phoenix'. And the long hump on 'Alvin and the Chipmunks'. 'Juno' also has an interesting curve as it did almost nothing for a month before popping out later in it's run. Though that may be because it was released in just enough theaters to become Oscars eligible before going into wide release.

ID on a placemat

Well, if you can't get ID in the schools, perhaps you can get it on a lunch mat.

Wow! T-Rex can breath fire! Awesome!

Bush at 19%

Given our experience with Nixon it was commonly held wisdom that a president's approval rating would never go under 20%. There is just a solid group of staunch supporters who no matter what will always approve of the person they put in office no matter how corrupt or awful. Nixon got close with 24% right around the time he resigned. Bush, being a maverick, has now plumbed new depths and sent his approval rating to a jaw dropping 19% with 77% disapproval. Truly remarkable. A watershed moment in American politics!

Flat Earth: It's back

The Flat Earth theory is back, this time supported by the Koran. Is it safe to go back into our spaceships?

Hat tip to Joe for this video. I... I... (sigh)... just don't know what to say. This may seem ludicrous, but is it any less ludicrous to try and teach creationism in science class? Both of these would be supported by the same amount of evidence (zero).

Gone Baby Gone

Gone Baby Gone was one of those movies I really wanted to catch in the theaters and it was gone, baby, gone before I could do it. I was really impressed from the start with the grittiness of the film. Ben Affleck, in the first part of the movie, has an eye for the real urban feel of the street. And it's not a jaundiced view. It's just very real, very intense. Unfortunately it's not consistent through the entire film, which devolves in the second and third acts into a CSI. The third act in particular seems particularly campy in comparison to the first part. Not that it really is very campy, it's just like any regular procedural movie. It just seems campy when compared to the first part which was so genuine.

All in all. A great effort for a first time director. I can't wait to see what projects he takes on next. Well, actually, he did direct "I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney" in 1993.

Some more yokel video

This time from the evolution debate in Florida:

It would surely get my vote if someone said that I was the fusion of a maggot and a turkey.

Cletus The Slack Jawed Yokel

I know we are a democracy and all, and I believe that everyone should have some kind of voice in the process, but this kind of thing gets me wondering...

These folks are beyond uniformed. They are clueless to an extraordinary degree. I honestly don't believe that, in their current state of understanding, they have anything substantive to offer to the national debate about where our country is going.

This is why I keep coming back to the economic impact argument, that the areas of this country with the greatest impact on our nations economy should have the largest say about the direction our country will take. I'm certainly favoring that equation in this case.

$275/Month

Here is a great commercial about the Iraq war.

I love the bit about the 'Iran War charge'.

Let me try and work out McCain's position here; more wars, more tax money on the wars, more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, more social regulation which will incur even more costs which we won't be able to pay for, and no support for people who lose their jobs. Yeah, good luck with that.

BTW, on a related note, this years budget from Bush includes a 30% increase in the pentagon spending and that doesn't include the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. The money will be spent on traditional large hardware expenditures like submarines, destroyers, tanks, etc. Explain to me again how buying submarines helps us fight Al Qaeda?

Europeans Keep You Safe

When we first went to Australia I bought a power converter in the US to go from 220V to 110V. The power converter consisted of a brick to do the conversion, and a bunch of different plugs. The 'plugs' were two ended power cords. One end plugged into the wall and the other end plugged into the brick. The end going into the brick was just a two pronged male power plug.

Think about that for a second. One end of the line plugged into the wall, the other end was just a male power plug. If you plug that into a 220V outlet you have a weapon. If you touch the end you will be badly hurt and might die. This device, which was extremely dangerous was legal for sale in the US. I showed it to a hardware engineer in Australia and he was shocked. You could never sell such a thing in Australia or Europe because of their product safety requirements.

This is an amazing example of what you can get away with when you only sell your product in the US. You can sell anything in the US as long as you are willing to face possible liability claims. And why wouldn't you when the courts are packed with business friendly conservatives?

To sell products in Europe (and commonwealth countries) their designs have to be certified by CE and ISO, which have stringent safety regulations on consumer goods. Companies that sell both in the US and Europe design to European standards because those products will always pass US standards. That's how Europe standards are the ones keeping you safe.

Product safety standards, like CE and ISO make a lot of sense because they reduce defective product litigation. If you build a safe product then people don't die and don't sue you. It's a lesson we need to learn here. But unfortunately if we tried to enforce product safety controls on US-only products I'm sure those laws would be challenged and overturned by the packed courts.

Oh well, for the moment thank the Europeans for making sure that your copier doesn't take your hand off and your coffee maker doesn't blow up in your face.

Bush on Obama

Bush continues on with his audacity; in an interview with Fox (who else) he remarked that he doesn't know Obama's foreign policy ideas other than that he intends to 'attack Pakistan'. This gross mischaracterization is par for the course with Bush, but it's of course, completely out of touch with reality. That's what happens when you live in 'happy bubble boy world' while reality goes to shit around you. If I were to apply Bush's rhetorical standards to himself I could say that he intends to 'torture anyone' and 'kill all Muslims'.

I like the fact that he also threw in the 'democrat party' neocon buzzword in there. Neocons believe that the Democratic party is inherently socialist/fascist/communist (take your pick) so they refuse to call it the Democratic party and instead say either 'democrat party' or 'little d democrat party'.

Is he so completely out of touch that he believes that any of this neocon bullshit still plays? The neocon economic policy has been a complete disaster both at home and in Iraq (which was intended to be a Libertarian free market utopia). And it's foreign policy caused the worst military blunder in the history of our country. The social agenda (packing the courts) is still playing out. We will be feeling the ramifications of a hard right 'pro-Christian' and 'pro-business at all costs' court for generations to come.

For those of you who yearn for more of this neocon bullshit you might want to check out World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, a book "almost wholly unencumbered by evidence". Which is perfect for extreme right wingers fond of the art of the sweeping generalization.

Amazing Obama Supporter

Watch this right winger video interviewer just get smoked by this Obama supporter:

The kid not only knows his stuff but is seamlessly articulate. He should be working on the campaign. I certainly couldn't answer questions this well. Not by a long shot.

So much for the 'Obama supporters are clueless cultists' line.