Pathetic, Gutless Poseurs

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Easily the best commentary on politically correct but truly wannabee avant-garde artists… publicly funded, the bastards.

Why Wikileaks

Instapundit » Blog Archive » THOUGHTS ON THE POLITICS OF WIKILEAKS, from Pejman Yousefzadeh. “In addition to their being no big …

Been trying to figure out the whole Wikileaks thing – not the good or bad of it so much as why it’s allowed to happen. When someone is allowed to embarrass a president and powerful country, there must be a reason all the powers involved have been either limited or released.

Glenn Reynold’s comments in the above link come the closest to explaining things:

If I were more suspicious, I would say that this is someone’s effort — perhaps someone burned by leaks in the past Administration — to teach the career bureaucrats who were behind those leaks that leaking may be a bad thing, and that a world in which any statement may be leaked to the press is not a world that’s good for them.

Homeland Security & Hollywood

Homeland Security seizes domain names – The Hills Hillicon Valley

Can someone explain to me why the Department of Homeland Security is doing dirty work for the entertainment industry? Web domains are being shut down due to copyright violations.

And this is a threat to the national security because…?

TSA is for the Little People

TSA: Some govt officials to skip airport security – Yahoo! News

Christie in 2012

For those who don’t know about Chris Christie, this is just one of the reasons why he’s projected as a possible 2012 presidential candidate for the Republicans.

Don’t Touch My Junk

Charles Krauthammer – Dont touch my junk

As usual, Mr. K zeros in on the point while cutting away all the nonsense that tries to hide it.

Good quote…

In “Up in the Air,” that ironic take on the cramped freneticism of airport life, George Clooney explains why he always follows Asians in the security line:

“They pack light, travel efficiently, and they got a thing for slip-on shoes, God love ’em.”

“That’s racist!”

“I’m like my mother. I stereotype. It’s faster.”

That riff is a crowd-pleaser because everyone knows that the entire apparatus of the security line is a national homage to political correctness. Nowhere do more people meekly acquiesce to more useless inconvenience and needless indignity for less purpose. Wizened seniors strain to untie their shoes; beltless salesmen struggle comically to hold up their pants; 3-year-olds scream while being searched insanely for explosives – when everyone, everyone, knows that none of these people is a threat to anyone.

And another…

We pretend that we go through this nonsense as a small price paid to ensure the safety of air travel. Rubbish. This has nothing to do with safety – 95 percent of these inspections, searches, shoe removals and pat-downs are ridiculously unnecessary. The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling – when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known. So instead of seeking out terrorists, we seek out tubes of gel in stroller pouches.

Gotta love the K man.

SEC Laws For The Little People

Capitol Hill’s Stock Trading: What the Academic Research Concludes – Deal Journal – WSJ

Did you know Congress is exempt from stock insider trading laws?

As the Journal points out, a piece of legislation called the STOCK Act proposes to bar members of Congress from trading securities based on nonpublic information they obtain. The bill so far has languished.

“Is it really surprising that this has gotten stuck?” Bainbridge said in an interview. “Until there is a very big scandal, it’s one of those classic good government reforms that will go nowhere.”

Bastards.

Tax Laws For The Little People

Proof Positive: A Tale of Four Tax Cheats

This is just disgusting…

Short story – of these four people who didn’t pay taxes, the only one scheduled for jail time is the one who ISN’T a politician.

I just went from having no opinion about Wesley Snipes to rooting for him to beat the system.

Human Brain – Simply Awesome

Human brain has more switches than all computers on Earth | Health Tech – CNET News

We are wonderfully made. The quote I loved:

They found that the brain’s complexity is beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief, says Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology and senior author of the paper describing the study:

One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor–with both memory-storage and information-processing elements–than a mere on/off switch. In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth.

Way cool…

Why Apple Sucks

The Beatles arrive on iTunes, at last – Yahoo! News

Here again we have build up of an exciting announcement from Apple, only to be let down… the Beatles, fully 40 years after they broke up, are now available on iTunes.

Wow.

Pardon my yawn but I’ve been playing Beatles songs on my iPod for so long now that I’m pretty much sick of them. Bought the CDs… ripped to mp3… copied to iTunes… sync with iPod – don’t blink or you’ll miss the magic.

Why does Apple deserve any attention at all, except for the fact that a sizable portion of the population swoons over every Apple event. Some might argue that in itself is newsworthy, but at a certain point it becomes merely predictable and about as newsworthy as a traffic jam during the morning commute.

 

Fake Education

The Shadow Scholar – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Don’t know if this is true or not… a lot of educators in the comment section ridicule the feasibility, but then they have a vested interest in it being not true.

If it is true – simply stunning.

Democrat Disaster Continues to Unfold

Instapundit » Blog Archive » RECLUSIVE LEFTIST: “There is no schadenfreude in the Smoking Lounge. Every single thing I wrote and…

Certainily I’m no political prophet but even I could see this one coming from far away.

To begin with the media was painting Obama as The One. I’m popping brain cells trying to solve the puzzle of this – a POLITICIAN is being hailed as the single person who will solve all problems, not just of our country, but OF THE WORLD. And this was unquestionably true not merely because of what he said, but because of how well he looked and sounded when he said it.

I’m sorry, but I have to pause and ask the question – what kind of mush minded simpletons are granted the authority to sway public opinion with such immature sophomoric crap? I’m talking about news editors and producers, TV talking heads, university intellectuals – people that we assume have some minimum level of intelligence in order to qualify for a seat at the public forum. Boatloads of these people didn’t just swing and strikeout on Obama but they then proceeded to run the bases jumping up and down as if they hit a game winning homer. The reality is stunning in it’s juxtaposition to their imaginations.

This man was allowed DURING A PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN to, within a single week, both swear familial allegence to his pastor of 20 years and then claim to not know who the man was – and everyone was not supposed to notice.

Two years, a trillion dollars, and an epic failure in the mid-term elections later, and now the Democrats notice.

White Culture

Sort of cranky this morning after reading about revisionist history of the civil rights movement. On the heals of electing a black president we Americans, particularly conservatives, are still evil racists who secretly hate blacks and other minorities.

What a load of crap.

This comes after an evening enjoying cigars and beer with a good “white” friend of mine (funny, I never thought of him as being white) who made a statement about enjoying his church because it’s mostly white.

At first I was sort of put off and the racism alarm went off in my head.

But then I started thinking… there are many churches that are all black. There are also many churches that are all Asian and openly advertise Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese. Visit a Mexican neighborhood and you will certainly find churches that are all Mexican.

Certainly nobody has forced these churches to segregate. In fact the assumption is made that people attend the church of their color because they’re comfortable with it. But when white Americans make that choice they instantly transform into racists.

What a load of crap.

Show me the White Entertainment Channel. Show me White History Month. Show me White Pride Month. Show me the National Association for the Advancement of White People.

The usual response to this is everything is already setup to benefit the white race, so there is no need to further emphasize it. That also is a bunch of crap.

In every possible place where highlighting your heritage exists there is political correctness to squash my white Anglo culture. It is taboo. It is racist. It is shameful.

When will I be allowed to proudly proclaim my heritage?

Obama and Apple Marketing

So I was reading this about Obama and the sales job his campaign worked during the 2008 election. And as usual the comments section contained a gem of truth:

4. Jack Olson

Marketers love to create a cult brand because cult status guarantees a hard core of customers so emotionally invested in the brand that they not only won’t switch but they express their contempt for buyers of other brands. When a man buys a Harley Davidson jacket, a Valvoline gimmee cap, or a Smith & Wesson belt buckle, or when he puts a decal on his Ford of a little boy peeing on a Chevy emblem, he’s identifying himself with the cult brand. The marketers have succeeded in making him feel superior through identification with their brand, like a woman who just doesn’t feel right unless her sweater was designed by Donna Karan. Obama created a successful cult brand. The danger of a cult brand, though, is that marketers who overprice the product, oversell it, or let it grow obsolete, lose the customers who bought the product but didn’t join the cult. They feel a sense of disappointment for having bought the product instead of a sense of superiority. They may even join a competitive cult brand. If the creators of the Tea Party fall prey to the temptations which have undermined the Obama cult brand, they will lose popularity, too.

November 7, 2010 – 6:20 am

The thing that struck me was this applies to Apple as well. The statement “…a hard core of customers so emotionally invested in the brand that they not only won’t switch but they express their contempt for buyers of other brands” could be read as the very definition of Apple customers.

And I think that’s why I’ve joined the “competitive cult brand” of PCs. I see Apple products as falling short of the advertising.