04.16.11
Posted in Extremism, Phlogiston at 8:11 am by George Smith
A handful of lines from reviews of the alleged first part of Atlas Shrugged:
“I’m cultivating a society that honors individual achievement” and “Businesses die because people are paid by need, not ability” don’t exactly roll off the tongue. — Rickey, the Philly Inquirer
The dialogue seems to have been ripped throbbing with passion from the pages of Investors’ Business Daily. Much of the excitement centers on the tensile strength of steel …
Oh, and there is Wisconsin. Dagny and Hank ride blissfully in Taggart’s new high-speed train, and then Hank suggests they take a trip to Wisconsin, where the state’s policies caused the suppression of an engine that runs on the ozone in the air, or something (the film’s detailed explanation won’t clear this up). They decide to drive there. That’s when you’ll enjoy the beautiful landscape photography of the deserts of Wisconsin. — Ebert
“We don’t want Atlas shrugging in America,” said the movie’s producer today on Stossel.
Too late! 26 out of 100 on Metacritic. 5.9 out of 10 on the user view scale.
Speaking of an engine that runs on ozone from the air brings us to Gashole, a documentary made by two Republicans.
DD noticed it being pumped earlier this week at lunchtime by Dylan Ratigan on MSNBC.
Ratigan is frequently a flat-out sucker for really stupid shit revealing only the laziness of him and his minders.
So immediately the show pegs the bogometer by plugging that Gashole has uncovered the suppression of the dead Tom Ogle’s magical water vapor 100-mpg car.
As a conspiracy theory, this one’s about as popular as any other on perpetual motion machines and free energy devices. Which is to say not at all.
Gashole, 5.8 on a ten scale at IMdb and failing due to disinterest.
And here’s a ragingly incoherent/incompetent piece on the same by Allison Kilkenny of Huffington Post/The Nation who also misses the one sinker that rips the entire bottom out of the boat.
My theory as to why Republicans can’t make documentaries with any legs: To make a documentary, particularly if it has anything to do with science or laws of nature, you have to actually have some talent for understanding such matters.
The GOP hates these things. So even when there’s no political agenda, embedded dummkopf-ism spoils everything.
There’s also some wry humor to be found in the fact that the Libertarian/GOP/Tea Party won’t even patronize the stuff made exclusively for it.
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04.11.11
Posted in Permanent Fail, Phlogiston at 12:19 pm by George Smith
Over the lunch hour Cornel West was briefly on MSNBC, calling the GOP mean-spirited and the Democratic Party “spineless.” He politely brushed off the host’s wish to discuss TIME magazine’s cover story on a ‘new civil war’ calling what we have now ‘a class war’ between the oligarchs, the government taken over by their henchmen and everyone else.
The Democratic Party is, indeed, spineless. Last week, the Internet gave it a gift-wrapped insult by linking the GOP and Paul Ryan with Soylent Green.
In the hands of merciless people with rapier wits, it would be devastating. In the hands of the Dems, forget it.
Now, all I need is someone to come up with a picture of Paul Ryan or Eric Cantor with the word balloon, “I CAN HAZ SOYLENT?” Maybe with a little green wafer in there somewhere, too.
Alternative word balloon:
“I NOT HAZ SOYLENT, YOU NOT HAZ CUNTREE!”
Go! A free No-Prize and my undying gratitude if I see one.
MSNBC masquerades as the anti-Fox but it’s often just the pits. Two minutes ago the news host introduced a teaser for the next segment on — bacon-scented men’s cologne.
Wait, it gets worse. The intro music was Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “That Smell,” which was on “Street Survivors,” the album they were touring when the plane crash occurred. “That Smell” was a song about death and drug addiction.
Lyric:
Angel of darkness is upon you
Stuck a needle in your arm
So take another toke, have a blow for your nose
One more drink fool, will drown you
Ooooh that smell
Can’t you smell that smell
Ooooh that smell
The smell of death surrounds you
If you could push a button to have the host and his producer thrown off the top of a three-story building, you’d push that button.
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04.07.11
Posted in Extremism, Phlogiston at 11:07 am by George Smith
Pine View Farm picks up a humorist’s joke on Glenn Beck leaving Fox for the SyFy Channel. If you want the laughs go here.
The subtext is that SyFy is dogshit — like Beck.
However, there are different kinds of dogshit. Beck is toxic excrement.
SyFy is just stinky.
Toxic excrement threatens existence. Stinky shit just bores and stupefies.
Beck is malevolent and malicious crap, as described earlier today.
SyFy Channel, on the other hand, is not a national venue for the regular condemning of Jews, academics and the entire world Muslim poor class for an audience of frightened fat white men and women.
SyFy Channel, for example, focuses on frightening stupid fat white men and women with harmless stories about trash like something called the Pet Phret demon from Thailand.
The Phret is a giant ghost, according to Destination Truth, a reality show which aired alleged video of it lurking around a tower the other day.
SyFy features reality shows where the hosts are far less in the money than Beck. The stars of Ghost Hunters and Destination Truth are more meagerly intelligence-insulting and benign.
You never worry that the ghost-hunting idiots scouring haunted houses with their budget Radio Shack gear and green night-vision tint will suddenly go anti-Semite and take a significant part of the country down with them.
Advertising on SyFy is also not exclusively exhortations to buy gold by Gordon Liddy.
SyFy does have professional wrestling.
And well over half its audience must now surely physically resemble the characters known as Dickie and Coover in Justified.
Which is kind of mildly bad.
Beck’s ejection from Fox does present a problem for Ted Nugent. Since about half his columns at the Washington Times stem from stuff Nugent
sees on Beck’s show, he’s lost a significant source of material that will resonate with his readers.
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03.31.11
Posted in Bombing Moe, Phlogiston at 7:31 am by George Smith
From Yahoo, where the on-line news staff collects a daily pile for your pleasure — stories about the richest places to live in the US, stories about which careers in the US make the most money (financialization, fossil fuel), stories on which cities to flee because of raging unemployment, stories about the most opulent mansions, pieces on which made-in-China gadgets to buy right now and fantasies like the next one — on ‘bio-oil’, the algae cure all, ready to replace the Middle East.
Excerpt of press release journalism:
At a time when companies are redoubling their efforts to find alternative energy sources, the idea is to reproduce and speed up a process which has taken millions of years and which has led to the production of fossil fuels.
“We are trying to simulate the conditions which existed millions of years ago, when the phytoplankton was transformed into oil,” said engineer Eloy Chapuli. “In this way, we obtain oil that is the same as oil today.”
The microalgae reproduces at high speed in the tubes by photosynthesis and from the CO2 released from the cement factory.
Every day some of this highly concentrated liquid is extracted and filtered to produce a biomass that is turned into bio-oil.
The other great advantage of the system is that it is a depollutant — it absorbs the C02 which would otherwise be released into the atmosphere.
“It’s ecological oil,” said the founder and chairman of BFS, French engineer Bernard Stroiazzo-Mougin, who worked in oil fields in the Middle East before coming to Spain.
Ecological oil, as if the new ‘oil’, when burned doesn’t release all the alleged CO2 used making it. All the laws of chemistry, mass action and combustion rewritten.
Five to ten years and we’ll replace Iraq, says the man.
“US oil giant ExxonMobil plans to invest up to $600 million in research on oil produced from algae,” it is said.
About the same amount of money for the first two weeks of the war on Libya. That’s pretty niggardly, considering they’re going to rewrite history and physics.
“Companies, in particular those in the aeronautic sector, have shown keen interest in this research, hoping to find a replacement for classic oil,” it concludes.
And finally, the dilemma of training and weaponizing the Libyan rebel rabble. Can the CIA do it? Or special ops? And what heavy weapons can we ship them, cadged up from eastern bloc and Chinese surplus on the arms trader market?
Which leads to bringing in the ‘coalition’s’ best fence, Qatar.
On the nature of armed rabble:
They would have more ammunition if they did not keep firing into the air … Decisions are often made after heated arguments or by following whoever shouts loudest and despite the courage of some, the tendency is to flee in disarray …
Don’t forget the talent for V-signs.
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03.29.11
Posted in Bombing Moe, Permanent Fail, Phlogiston at 7:45 am by George Smith
Posting has been low because I’m taking care of an ailing cat for a friend who has to be away.
Anyway, I was eating dinner with another acquaintance yesterday when I mentioned one line from the atrocious blog I linked to over the weekend.
“How was California lost?” it asked plaintively. Keep in mind, this is from someone who puts a picture of Ronald Reagan at the top while peddling a T-shirt with the somewhat baffling Tea Party-esque motto: “This Abdication Nation will not stand!”
So my friend almost fell off the chair laughing when I quoted this line to him:
Was it the communism and socialism promulgated through Hollywood?
It is momentarily amusing in it’s total lack of clue. Here’s a young guy who has been to the other side of the world — Afghanistan. But geographic travel, even being part of a long war, hasn’t broadened him. He dumbly believes Hollywood was a source of commies.
However, it’s also a pathetic indication of why the US isn’t much of an overachieving country these days unless one counts the executed technical perfection of bombing a feeble enemy’s military.
Next, small items from Bombing Moe. When the A-10 Thunderbolts and Spectre gunships were ordered up for Libya it more-or-less confirmed that we’re in a war aimed at dissecting all of Moe’s military.
These are very close air support assets, used for blowing tanks and artillery out of the way in deserts, hamlets or cities, so the rabble parade of small pick-up trucks with old commie machine guns mounted in the back can pass by and flash the victory sign to western cameras. At those times, of course, when they’re not stopping the parade to jump up and down on one of the blown up remnants of Moe’s army.
The Qatar Emiri Air Force is still listed as part of Odyssey Dawn’s order of battle.
Remember to get those T-shirts ready!
QAF Flying Emirs! Odyssey Dawn 2011! We stayed out of the way and helped fence the oil!
Spam funny of the day: More fake neighborly comment on politics and national debt by the bot-person trying to get an ad pointing to a service that facilitates offshoring and tax-avoidance in Panama published.
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03.22.11
Posted in Bombing Moe, Phlogiston at 2:17 pm by George Smith
Another Asterpix content link cloud spun off a mirrored Bombing Moe article at Globalsecurity.
Almost as good as this bit of Microsoft Paint jokery, surprisingly stuck into searches for images of Jonathan Alter on Google.
On the other hand, if — at this point, you don’t see another war as an unfunny sick national joke that just gets told over and over — you need to visit a psychiatrist, for many other problems as well.
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03.18.11
Posted in Census, Permanent Fail, Phlogiston at 9:31 am by George Smith
On a suggestion from a friend, if I’m to have Google AdSense for Chinese sex slaves on GlobalSecurity territory, than maybe I ought to have some suggestive images of them, real or not, here.
Plus, now that everything has turned to crap and the President is starting another war, the better to distract from the impression that he’d rather not doing anything here, hey!
You can look at naughty Internet pictures until the money runs out and the high speed line is discontinued.
From Krugman:
More than three years after we entered the worst economic slump since the 1930s, a strange and disturbing thing has happened to our political discourse: Washington has lost interest in the unemployed …
So one-sixth of America’s workers — all those who can’t find any job or are stuck with part-time work when they want a full-time job — have, in effect, been abandoned.
It might not be so bad if the jobless could expect to find new employment fairly soon. But unemployment has become a trap, one that’s very difficult to escape. There are almost five times as many unemployed workers as there are job openings; the average unemployed worker has been jobless for 37 weeks, a post-World War II record …
“[The] next time you hear Mr. Obama talk about winning the future …” he continues. “It’s bullshit,” he politely adds, not in those precise words.
It was about this time last year that the 2010 Decennial Census was warming a temporary jobs surge that would last into the beginning of summer.
I wrote about that here. Truly a waste.
Good news, lads! Good news! Our johnsons still work.
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03.15.11
Posted in Phlogiston at 9:31 am by George Smith
The USMC gets its money’s worth from Aaron Eckhart in Battle: Los Angeles. His Sgt. Rock/Nick Fury chin displays like a wall in virtually every scene, even when his gyrenes are getting ground up by the alien troops. Which is for most of this thing.
However, even when losing they’re winning, displaying to-the-last-man fanatical grit wrapped around hearts of gold. It’s royally corny but as a pure combat film for the sake of mindless entertainment it’s fine.
The grime, ruins and explosions are as real as Hollywood can make them even if the story isn’t. But no one comes to the movie for the dialogue or characters any more sophisticated than those in Marvel Comics’ Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos in the Sixties.
(Actually, the Howling Commandos were more colorful than Eckhart’s bunch. The exception is Michelle Rodriguez who’d fit right in with Nick Fury. Rodriguez now utterly owns the role of the heavy-weapon slinging woman in uniform twice as tough as the men surrounding her.)
If you go for the military tactics, you’ll be a bit disappointed. The Marines show almost no common sense. Right off they cluster in a bunch and neglect looking up in house-to-house fighting. Naturally, they’re ambushed from the “Santa Monica” rooftops.
The US military gives the alien force a long window of opportunity after it storms ashore before scheduling a shellacking from the air. This is one of those deus ex machina plot devices that allows the aliens to muster their own air power — drones, as it happens. They immediately tip the battle in the invading force’s favor.
The air strike never occurs. The aliens overrun the forward operating base. Everything looks lost.
The aliens, it’s said, are here for the water which they use as a fuel source. Don’t think too hard about that one.
Energy-wise, water isn’t trivial to split and because of that and a few other things particular to it we have life. So the vast power resources needed to do the physical-law breaking stuff the alien air does is unreachable by explanation.
Where are the salvos of cruise missiles? Where are the Linebacker B-52 strikes from superhigh when it’s obvious all of LA has been reduced to rubble?
Any alien shore-invading force that’s kinetically of a kind with the US military — that is they stock assault troops and crew-served weapons, mostly — can’t persist with supply that’s win with what you’ve brought.
[Spoiler alert]
When things finally look darkest, the Marines cut down by half and in retreat, it’s an electromagnetic pulse — another deus ex machina — that sets the stage for the inevitable reversal. The alien command center emits one, revealing its position, just as our boys are flying away overhead.
Let’s go get ’em, signals Eckhart’s staff sergeant.
There’s time for one more pitched desperate battle and then you know what happens.
Give it a B for volumes of ammo expended and hearty heroism.
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03.08.11
Posted in Phlogiston at 3:14 pm by George Smith
Signs You’re About to Get Fired
Dr. Hugh Akston, On Friday March 4, 2011, 12:35 pm EST
Too many times after someone gets fired, they say, “I should have seen it coming.” But most of us don’t see the signs because we don’t want to see them. Dolts! They’re there, right in front of you.
Here are some signs your last day is nigh:
There’s been a “change” in your boss’ behavior. He keeps taking long meetings with security. This is always a fatal indicator.
[See 15 Ways Good Bosses Keep Their Best Suck-Ups.]
Your boss speaks admiringly of Scott Walker. Beyond your boss’ attitude or changing behavior, if he starts doing something like this it’s because he considers current workers to be vexing grains of sand in the great machine of commerce.
The boss becomes obsessed with things like ” innovation,” “efficiency” and “labor costs” accompanied by clippings from business news stories on China and Bangladesh. A Chief Innovation Officer is hired who immediately begins sending out company-wide memos on how everything you know is obsolete. The memos are filled with misspellings, tangled gibberish, and inappropriate stabs at humor using non-sequiturs like “It’s un-American to not like pussy!”
The boss talks loudly about the great work of the US Chamber of Commerce and how he’d kill to play golf with William Hickey in Prizzi’s Honor Tom J. Donohue. Start learning how to file for unemployment benefits.
[See How to Convince Your Employer to Fire the Guy Next to You First.]
The office sycophant stops talking to you. Every team has someone we know is the boss’ boot-licker. This is the person who your boss talks to more than anyone else, always looking for self-validation. If someone you know is the boss’ lickspittle stops talking to you or begins avoiding you, then it could be that he knows more than you do and is reacting accordingly.
[For more headache-inspiring career advice, visit U.S. News Careers, or find us on Facebook or Twitter.]
You work for a company acutely sensitive to Wall Street directives.
The clock’s ticking.
When you panic and think you’re going to lose your job tomorrow morning, realize only that it’s a sign you’re still sane and possess a functioning intellect.
Dr. Hugh Akston, director and career expert for jobs and career website TheBottomsofTomFriedmansShoes.com has been a CEO, led HR in global companies and is co-author of Labor Force: A New Manifesto for Getting Rid of the Minimum Wage.
Vote for TheBottomsofTomFriedman’sShoes in Readers’ Choice Awards as Best Career Resource Website.
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Posted in Permanent Fail, Phlogiston at 10:21 am by George Smith
Best story of the day from the news wires, easy, is the LA Times piece on the 76-year old Japanese porn star, Shigeo Tokuda.
John Glionna tells the story of how Tokuda stumbled into his new career. Which took off because of the emerging market for elderly porn in Japan, which has an aging population.
A light bulb went off over your host’s head. As it must have with many others in the stricken US economy.
We have lots and lots of old people, too. With more coming everyday. And a lot of them either need work outright or need supplemental income.
Put this together with the unsurprising idea that a constant diet of bionic young porn actors and actresses, whose clips you can steal anyway on the Internet, gets old. As you grow old.
Some choice moments from the LA Times piece:
Tokuda has emerged as a major player in Japan’s emerging adult movie genre known as “elder porn.” He says he has appeared in more than 350 films such as “Prohibited Nursing” and “Maniac Training of Lolitas.” In these scripts, Tokuda always gets the girl.
The films play upon well-documented Japanese male fantasies. In each, Tokuda plays a gray-haired master of sex who teaches his ways to an assortment of young nurses and secretaries. Whips and sex aides often factor in the plotlines.
“I’m a role model for a lot of men,” he says. “I do my best.”
And:
But after a 2005 stroke (not on the set, he says), he was moved to a desk job by his travel agency.
With no opportunity to slip out unnoticed, he retired — not from porn but from the travel industry. The rest, as they say, is Japanese porn history.
Tokuda earns $500/day on a shoot.
The elder porn business “is a burgeoning industry in a nation that features the world’s oldest population and ranks second (behind the U.S.) in the personal consumption of pornography,” the Times informs. It makes up a fifth of the Japanese porn industry, earning $200 million dollars a year.
Undiscovered territory in the US, I tell ya. Ways to make people feel useful again, something this place sorely lacks.
Again, the LA Times piece is here.
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