radical

this information is more relevant to the 2016 presidential campaign than any of the posturing the media-infotainment complex will bestow upon shrillary.

you got to know when to folder

"Eric Holder, the Consigliere of the Obama Crime Syndicate, has resigned his office. This crooked figure has long been the subject of multiple investigations for his criminal misconduct and for abusing his position to persecute political enemies... Goodbye to a racebaiting thug who understands nothing about the law but plenty about petty personal feuds."

read the rest


(via dustbury)

Is his last name Streisand?

"The Reddit user responsible for bringing the hacked photos into the public eye has decried an invasion of his privacy by the media."

To rephrase, John Menese, a 33-year-old onanism promoter from Nevada, is upset that his privacy has been violated because he violated the privacy of others.

(title reference)

Washington DC wants to host the 2024 Olympics

DC is a perfect host city for the games. They already have the infrastructure for gridlock, corruption, raw ambition, and hollow pageantry.

"We will bury you"

Kruschev just forgot to mention that the USSR would do it posthumously:

"...ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for... America’s (major recent) adversaries — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists. All three put substantial effort into cultivating American proxies to influence U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy in favorable directions... like the (Nazi) “German-American Bund”... Today, the Islamists are having some success at manipulating our politics through... organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

But it was the Soviet Union, in its day, that was the master of this game. They made dezinformatsiya (disinformation) a central weapon of their war against... the U.S. They conducted memetic subversion against the U.S. on many levels at a scale that is only now becoming clear as historians burrow through their archives and ex-KGB officers sell their memoirs.

The Soviets had an entire “active measures” department devoted to churning out anti-American dezinformatsiya... (and) their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood.

Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering... to realize that there was a time... when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people — at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.

Koch shows us that the worst-case scenario was, as it turns out now, the correct one; these ideas (were) deliberately designed to destroy the American way of life. Another index of their success is that most members of the bicoastal elite can no longer speak of “the American way of life” without deprecation (or) irony... In this and other ways, the corrosive effects of Stalin’s meme war have come to utterly pervade our culture.

The most paranoid and xenophobic conservatives of the Cold War were... the closest to the truth in estimating the magnitude and subtlety of Soviet subversion. (Though anticommunists) dismissed half of the Right’s complaint as crude blather. We were wrong; the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss really were guilty, the Hollywood Ten really were Stalinist tools, and all of Joseph McCarthy’s rants about “Communists in the State Department” were essentially true. The Venona transcripts and other new material leave no room for reasonable doubt on this score.

While the espionage apparatus of the Soviet Union didn’t outlast it, their memetic weapons did. These memes are now coming near to crippling our culture’s response to Islamic terrorism."

read it all

update: then read this somewhat-related piece

that news conference

i saw that obama was talking on tv the other day. the room was noisy so i couldn't quite hear, but i'm guessing he didn't say "i've signed legislation declaring isis illegal and we begin bombing in five minutes".

random pun of the day

i'd like to start a band that plays muzak versions of mariachi songs and call it...

iowahawk

via twitter:

Curious; what was the Congressional vote tally on this Iraq invasion?

If ISIS captures the Yazidis, I hope they won't waterboard them or put underpants on their heads and stuff. That would be wrong.

I wonder if Thomas Jefferson and George Carlin ever argue about who gets fake-quoted the most.

Israel builds bomb shelters for its kids; Hamas uses kids as bomb shelters.

he also links to the sadly-necessary israelhasbeenrocketfreefor.com

Cow. Horn.

Not since Andy Warhol has there been such a surreally humorous and perfect summary of pop culture.

missing inaction

both harvey and i were gone last week, but his (niece's) excuse is funnier than mine

On Spec

A must-read by Michael Crichton from 2002.

Razing Awareness

This shirt design reminded me of one of my favorite (and few) long blog posts.

The Gratingest Show On Earth!

"There's a Democrat born every minute."

Declaration of Independence

Were that founding document to be rewritten for modern audiences, it might be titled

"Use this ONE WEIRD TRICK to eliminate tyranny!"

YOLO!

today i figured out what it really means:

quotes of the day

Lileks at StartRibune:

...the original story seemed “fishy” in the sense that a trawler coming back to the docks after a week of dragging the ocean with enormous nets is “fishy.”

...when you enter the parallel world of Twitter, where people who cannot spell and have the sense of history that makes a fish’s experience look like the recollections of Methuselah, you know that it’s not an inherently wise medium.

seen online

there are two types of countries in the world:
1) ones that use the metric system.
2) ones that have been to the moon.

this is a song of hope... eventually

 "If you have a feeling that the seventies have rumbled up from their grave and are walking forward like zombies in an apocalyptic movie you might just be right."

read it all

soundtrack for the upcoming star wars movie

newsflash: an unnamed disney source has leaked this clip of the soundtrack for the upcoming star wars movie!

too long for lolbama

and not exactly the right subject...