Bits & Pieces (TGIF Edition)

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis

Can’t embed it, but I do recommend Full Metal Disney. Very strange, but well-executed.

If you’re not listening to the My History Can Beat up Your Politics by Bruce Carlson, you’re making a profound error. Here, he discusses the effectiveness of stimulus spending in a historical context.

He quotes Herbert Hoover as saying: “No one is starving. The hobo eats better than ever before.”

That Herbert Hoover was a man after my own heart. If you’ve never read it, you should consult John Hodgman’s Compleat List of Hobo Names. Myself, I am partial to Chicken Nugget Will and Persuasive Fredrick. And Cthulhu Carl. Then, you too, will be an expert on hobos.

Steve Jobs new biography includes a bit on warning Obama that he was going to be a one-term president. It also included the interesting observation that it’s too damned hard to build factories in America, while it’s easy to do in China.

Louisiana law bans cash transactions for second hand goods. Holy crap, why does every politician want to make me a frothing-at-the-mouth libertarian?

According to The Transom, David Frum is not a serious person. You have to scroll down to read it. But it’s there.

 — KW


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OWS Update

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis

Man arrested in Toronto for crawling into tents and sniffing some young lady’s feet. The poor foot-sniffer, just looking for olfactory justice for foot fetishists, was promptly oppressed by The Man™.

Reports of sexual harassment and assault at OWS events continue.

Protesters in L.A. have cost local government $45,000 so far. Redistributing wealth from other city services to protecting (and cleaning up after) the Noble Protestor.

Enthusiasm has apparently waned for some:

Rachel Goldie, 20, decided to leave the protest Wednesday because she felt it had been corrupted by people who didn’t care about economic justice. “Everybody is pretty much just partying it up,” she said.

Harassing people randomly is probably not the best way to sell your message. Occupy Baltimore distributes pamphlet urging victims of sexual assault not to report it to the police. Yay, enlightenment!

Lee Stranahan makes some ironic comments on OWS declaration via the medium of pictures. I especially like this one.

Lee also makes an argument for the fundamental differences between OWS and the Tea Party. Myself, I like Arun Gupta’s reflection upon the similarities of their root causes, while acknowledging various differences.

In NYC, residents are protesting the protestors. Noise pollution and garbage being two major issues.

The WSJ on OWS. Observations, some digs at Obama and MoveOn.org, but . . . I dunno, I expect more from you, WSJ. James Picht blames a sense of entitlement on the behalf of Wall Street bankers and welfare queens as the problem.

And that’s that, for now.

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Bits & Pieces (Thursday Night Open Mic)

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis

Nick Pitera is a one-man Disney movie. His Aladdin is dead-on but, beyond that, his vocal range is very impressive.

So, what’s his day job? An animator for Pixar. I hate him.

Speaking of people to hate. This kid covering Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” is apparently 11 years old. I was drawing comic books filled with stick figures at age 11.

Or, he was 11 at the time. Anyhoo, his name is Greyson Chance and he’s well on his way to Beiber-dom. You will, I expect, be hearing a lot about him in the near future. Especially if you have any Beiber-loving-aged children. He’s been on Ellen. I just stumbled across him, but clearly he’s about 10 minutes from exploding all over pop culture.

That’s been your pop culture minute. — KW

Joe Biden: oppose Obamajobs, oppose rape prevention.

Is this the new civility, the new elder statemanship, the new gravitas? — QB

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Morning Nuggets

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis
Mmm. Why have donuts when you can eat crispy processed O-shaped bits of wheat-and/or-corn paste briefly baked on an industrial conveyor belt? Well, sorry, you can’t—at least not like this. Dunkin’ Donuts Cereal is gone with the wind. 

This News Briefs from the Daily. It talks about the Onion Field Killer, but I was more struck by record number of deportations. The Obama administration (a) isn’t messin’ around and (b) apparently decided the answer to the constant rhetorical question: “What are you doing to do, deport them all?” was “Yes, that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

The problem with protest groups like OWS? There’s no screening. Anybody can come in, claim to be part of the “movement”, and go straight to causing mayhem.

Apparently, a lot of folks at the Occupy Wall Street protests are having their wealth redistributed for them. Smell that? Does it smell like irony?

NewsBusters say the media is not being harder on Obama than GOP candidates, but, even if so, I don’t recall this comparison being made between how the media was treating the Democratic candidates and George W. Bush in 2004. Which would be a more apples to apples comparison.

Is this the OWS folks Declaration of Independence? Thomas Jefferson might be proud (the blood of patriots and tyrants is the natural manure of the Tree of Liberty, after all) but it’s not 1776. Also, I though the grievances in 1776 were a little more concise. Might just be history bias.

If you sold your Apple Stock recently, MG Seigler says your an idiot. My dad sold $10,000 of Apple stock at $14 a share shortly before Steve Jobs came back (with my encouragement). If I’m calculating the splits right (I’m no financial expert), the two 2:1 splits means that each $14 share would be worth $1600 now. For a total of $1,143,514.00 dollars. You want to talk about being an idiot when you sold your Apple stock . . .

Most of that $10,000 went into dot.com stocks that evaporated. Yay, irrational exuberance! I invest in coffee cans now.

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Bits & Pieces (Tuesday Night Open Mic)

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis
Speaking of Calvin and Hobbes:

Other than that, I got nothing. Floor’s yours.  — KW

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Would This Be Acceptable?

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis

Miss Jane Doe recently decided her fat ass wouldn’t fit into the Whitehouse . . .

Or, Miss Jane Doe has thrust her impressively large bosoms into the campaign for governor . . .

From mycentraljersey.com comes this observation:

“Last week, Christie (dramatically) took his big body out of the chase for the GOP presidential nomination.”

Okay, enough of that. The article is interesting, asserting that due to a new redistricting plan authored by state Democrats, the Legislature will be controlled by the Democrats in four weeks and Christie will be hobbled. Could be. If Christie has a number of losses in New Jersey over the next several years, that might not be the most auspicious background from which to start a 2016 presidential campaign.

…

The most exciting news in electric cars ever in the history of the world has been announced.

The guy who current owns the DeLorean Motor Company (and all the old inventory) has been servicing and rebuilding DeLorean’s for years. But now he might actually be making brand new DeLoreans (the photos are are of the prototype, which uses existing Delorean components for the body and interior, but the actual production cars will supposedly be all new fabrication).

More on the future awesomeness of the DMCEV. BTW, the batteries for the DMCEV are coming from a company called Flux Power. Could it be any more perfect?

Expect many updates from me as this story progresses. Suck it, Leaf.

The most. Exciting. And. Awesome. Electric. Car. Evah!


— KW

I think that somehow covers most of our feelings.

—ashotinthedark

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Bits & Pieces (Monday Evening Open Mic)

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis

Turns out that Spock is gay. This news cannot surprise longtime fans of Star Trek, who frequently noticed the homosexual tensions between Kirk and Spock.

Not to mention the many writers of fan fiction out there. 
In another indicator of a tentatively improving economy, charitable giving was up in 2010. 
In Philadelphia, mentally handicapped adults were held captive in a basement while their captors collected their Social Security disability. And the captors clearly didn’t have it all together, mentally, either, which was the only reason they got caught. Makes me wonder how much this sort of fraud is going on. Not so much kidnapping and keeping prisoner in the basement, but handicapped folks getting government assistance where the assistance goes to the “caretaker” and their lifestyle, rather than to support the handicapped individual. 
It’s now well-established that the science is in, and Global Warming is an established fact like the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and taxes must be raised immediately to fund the green energy owned by personal friends of powerful politicians. Although it’s too late to do anything about global warming and we’re almost certainly doomed, it’s even worse than you thought. It’s not just the ice caps that are shrinking. Its the polar bears. 
Aside: I am vaguely irritated that Michael Crichton’s speeches on global warming and other issues have disappeared from his own website. I’m note sure he’d approve of that posthumous revisionary stewardship. 
This post brought to you by parenthood.

— KW

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Bits & Pieces (Sunday Evening Wrap-Up)

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis

Admin note: the Link Dump, despite being unsorted, still puts your new addition in alphabetical order. So, if you add something, think about pressing the little teeny arrow buttons to bump it up in the link rotation. Otherwise, over time, any link that doesn’t start with the number “1” won’t get displayed. Just a suggestion.

The Daily (despite being a Rupert Murdoch publication) seems to have pretty good coverage of the OWS. Not in depth, perhaps, but seems pretty fair to me. Worth a look.

More than a dozen protesters were arrested at a downtown Citibank branch near New York University — including a suit-clad woman who exited the bank and insisted to an apparent police officer dressed in civilian clothes that she was a customer. 

As she was thrown up against a wall and handcuffed, she screamed, “I’m not doing anything wrong! This is wrong!” The incident was caught on video and quickly went viral on Twitter.

Some Daily editorial opinionating on Occupy Wall Street to be found here.

Barack Obama may have an uphill climb when it comes to winning re-election in November, 2012—but he’s going to have a lot of cash, and a lot of deep-pocketed celebrity donors, to help me make that climb.

An odd but important indicator of a potentially rebounding economy: more people are quitting their jobs in search of greener pastures.

Do millionaires really pay a lower effective rate than us regular folks? The Daily (thus, Rupert Murdoch) says it’s so!

As Sunday’s often are, this is pretty much an all The Daily share-fest. And this link is no different, but comes with a question for all: any particular reason Rupert Murdoch or NewsCorp would have it in for Raj Rajartnam? Because I’d never heard of him before The Daily began to constantly pummel him with critical coverage from trial to punishment.

Women’s Museum closes in Dallas, Texas. Not enough coverage of feminism, or an inability to control costs?

Finally: Sure, Single Payer healthcare might help keep healthcare costs down. But would it protect our senior citizens from robot attacks? I don’t think so.

— KW

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Bits & Pieces (Friday Night Buckingham Edition)

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis
Anybody here still watch SNL? I enjoy Kenan Thompson’s bizarre and meta-meta “What’s Up With That” . . . the sketch that always features an unspeaking Bill Hader as Lindsey Buckingham, who never gets to perform. But keeps coming on the show. And eventually, the real Lindsey Buckingham makes an appearance (follow link, I can’t, so it may well be the whole show), but I’m embedding the one where Al Gore shows up as a guest.
Is that enough Lindsey Buckingham? No, it’s not. A very solid live performance of one of my favorite Lindsey Buckingham songs, Street of Dreams:
 

I recommend “D.W. Suite” from Go Insane, though I cannot, myself, verify it (net nanny). Hopefully, it’s the right thing. Here’s a dance rehearsal from a Singapore American School, done to “D.W. Suite”. 
Finally, a link to the actual real stereo track of Mick Fleetwood’s “I Want You Back”, a tune that seems clearly written and mostly sung by Lindsey Buckingham. 
I used to buy a lot of 12″ singles, back in the day. I didn’t get this one, but that’s probably just because I didn’t see it at Peaches Records and Tapes. It’s the 12″ single to “Go Insane”.
I was a fan of the entire Go Insane album. It was Buckingham’s most produced/over-synthesized album, and I loved him for it. 
Finally, the one song of Lindsey Buckingham’s that pretty much everybody on earth has heard, “Holiday Road” from National Lampoon’s Vacation. 
Laters, My Babies — KW

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Lee Stranahan on Pigford

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis

If you’ve followed Pigford at all, you might want to read this article by Lee Stranahan reiterating his belief that the Pgiford settlement was mostly a fraud and black farmers with legitimate claims pretty much got screwed by folks exploiting the controversy for their own gain.

Of course, Lee Stranahan works with Andrew Breitbart, so if you may draw whatever conclusions, based on context, that you please.

On BigGovernment.com (linked above), Lee asserts that there is video of the Pigford Attorney publically revealing conspiracy to defraud the federal government. Watch it, and decide for yourself (if you’re interested in this kind of thing). 

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