Everything Wrong With The Fellowship Of The Ring In 7 Minutes

Awesome, in a film-nerd-nickpicky sort of way.  Make sure you watch all the way to the end for some surprise hilarity.

Progressivism is the Scientology of political philosophies

This hashtag idiocy got me to thinking: why would nominally intelligent (if not well educated, at least credentialed by the Ivy League) people do something so publicly that is so empty of any hope of positive result?

The idea struck that these Hollywood people aren't used to actually doing anything.  They read other people's lines while standing in front of a camera.  That's their job.  And so it likely felt natural to put some words in front of a camera.  It's an easy gesture that is intended to make themselves feel good about themselves, without having to do anything actually difficult.  Without having to challenge their own too-easy and too-comfortable ideas about themselves.  Without having to grapple with real challenges, whether mental or geopolitical.

It's the Scientology of political philosophy.  Just repeat what you are supposed to, pay your money, and you'll be one of the insiders.  Easy peasy.  None of that challenging "give things up for Lent", or that mentally challenging Day of Atonement stuff - that's hard work, work that can make you uncomfortable.  Easier to be a leader with a trending hashtag.

#insteadofdoinganything

Jennifer points to Larry Correia's brutal mockery of the "hash tag diplomacy" that we're seeing:

Seriously folks? Signs and hashtags and selfies? Really? I’m sure those big bad kidnappers that had no problem abducting innocent girls with the plan to sell them are kicking themselves now. I mean, their evilness is totally trending. They’re never going to bring up their Klout score now. #unfriend #unfollow #uncool

I bet they are totes going to give those girls back now. And they’re going to film it so it goes viral on YouTube. #winning

Dance Monkey makes pouty face, changes world. #filmat11 #firstworldsolutions

It's the diplomatic equivalent of gun control.  It's what you do instead of doing anything.

Glen Campbell and Steve Wariner - The Hand That Rocks The Cradle

Mom and Older Brother, 1957

This weekend is Mother's Day, where we express our appreciation for that walking incarnation of Grace that is embodied in our Mothers.  You bet there's a Country song for that.

The roots of the lyrics run deep, all the way back to 1865 and a poem by Ross Wallace.  His poem contained the phrase "The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the World."

A sentimental expression from a sentimental time, one that seems old fashioned in today's jaded and cynical age.  Me, I've long thought that jaded and cynical are over rated, and if you can't be sentimental on Mother's Day then there just isn't any justice left in the world.

Glen Campbell and Steve Warnier took this song and rode it to just about the top of the Country charts in 1987.  It still has that old school Country feeling to it, an unselfconsciousness that doesn't apologize for being human.  Happy Mother's Day to all mothers out there.



The Hand That Rocks The Cradle (Songwriter: Ted Harris)

He got here and wrinkled scared and cryin'
The she took him up and held him to her breast
And he sure was glad to get what mama offered
Then he went to sleep and put his fears to rest

It didn't seem to matter what he needed
He could always count on mama to supply
And regardless of the sleep she might be losin'
He always found a twinkle in her eye

There ought to be a hall of fame for mamas
Creation's most unique and precious pearls
And heaven help us always to remember
That the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world

She taught him all the attributes of greatness
That she knew he couldn't learn away from home
And by the time she wore the coxer off her bible
Her hair was gray and her little man was gone

There ought to be a hall of fame for mamas
Creation's most unique and precious pearls
And heaven help us always to remember
That the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world

Yes, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world

Out of the mouths of babes ...

A parable on the climate change debate

Background here.

The perfect gift for that nerdy hard-to-shop-for person

The joystick from the Apollo 15 lunar module.

Bidding opens at $10,000.

Recording your sexcapades is seemingly easy

This is not my usual cup of tea, but it seems so, so easy:

"If it's possible to have sex in a feminist way, it's possible to record it in a feminist way," says Pandora Blake, a 29-year-old London-based sex worker, pornographer and porn performer.

Wait, what?  This is the taxpayer supported BBC?

Well, yes.  And so to my (younger) gentleman readers, you can get all the (BBC-approved) female attention you need if you just give up your manhood and support the "feminist way".  Because chicks are said to dig that (well, the BBC says that, and they're about as, err, feminist* as they come).  Besides, it seems easy to record your, err, workout.

No doubt that my (unmarried) lady readers will await this new crop of feminized men with baited breath.  Because men who want "feminist sex" are manly men.**

* Ahem. I was going to use a different word but Brendan Eich told me to shut my pie hole.  I'm sure glad we've evolved to the stage where people aren't burnt at the stake because of their ideology.

** So much for any career advancement hopes I had ...

Spyro Gyra - Havana Moonlight

I must admit that I have a soft spot in my heart for Spyro Gyra, even though it's perilously close to being elevator music.

Someone needs to be fired

Maybe prosecuted.

If you laugh at this, you're really a nerd

I laughed and laughed.



And then laughed some more.  The only thing that would have been better would have been if Kirk had replied "Yer leg's off!"

Unemployment rate drops to zero

Last unemployed American stops looking for work:

President Obama today became the first to achieve a milestone coveted by enlightened central planners everywhere, as the Bureau of Laborious Statistics announced the much-followed meaningless headline: "U3 unemployment rate for last month was ZERO PERCENT," which clearly implies that the glorious economic recovery he engineered after the disastrous Bush years has now resulted in full employment.

...

Naysayers were quick to note that the labor force participation rate had also dropped to zero percent, which, according to them, was not a good thing as it meant no one was employed. Rep. Nancy Pelosi brilliantly countered their racist, straw-man argument by observing that it also meant no comrade was any longer "job-locked" and each was free to be an artist, writer, or hooker, pursuing their passion.

The People's Cube serves up top shelf snark.

Escalation

There's no doubt that the Obama Administration is the most lawless of my lifetime.  They embody what Christopher Hitchens aptly called the "pornography of power":

We're in power because we like it.  We're in power because we enjoy punishing people.  We're in power because we enjoy owning people.  We enjoy telling them what they can do.

And so there's a little frisson of schadenfreude in seeing the escalation:

The House on Wednesday voted to hold a former Internal Revenue Service official in contempt for her refusal to answers questions about the agency's conservative-targeting scandal.

Lois Lerner headed the agency's Exempt Organizations division when it controversially targeted conservative nonprofit groups applying for tax-exempt status. But she has repeatedly refused to answer questions when called before Republican-led House committees investigating the scandal, citing her Fifth Amendment right to remain silent and avoid self-incrimination.

She likely deserves to end up behind bars.  But.

I do not like seeing her rights get trampled in an attempt to get justice for trampling other's rights.  Congress cannot repeal the fifth amendment, any more than the IRS can issue regulations nullifying the first amendment.

I'm not sure what the path forward is here, except that it is a political, not a legal path.  But I do not trust the Republican Party to stand up for the fifth amendment any more than I trust the Democratic Party to stand up for the first.  Not in an election year.  And so the assault on the Bill of Rights escalates.



This business will get out of control.  Because someone won't let this crisis go to waste.

Time and tide wait for no man

It's been a long time since 1960:

Check out these photos from the Montgomery Ward 1960 Fall and Winter catalog. Here are some things that I found interesting:

• nothing could be more wholesome for a mass market retailer than a father and son going out to kill birds with a pair of shotguns (there was no suggestion of mom and sister joining!)
• …
• a subset of the functions of a modern mobile phone could be obtained at the following costs:
  • Rolleiflex still camera (uses “popular 127 film“): $68.50
  • Movie camera: $100
  • Movie projector: $100
  • Smith-Corona portable typewriter (only 21 lbs!): $119.50
  • Audio recorder (open-reel): $280
  • Portable television (“so light” at only 33 lbs.): $158

(total: $826 or $6594 in 2014 dollars)

Hey, remember nostalgia?

Slow to field, expensive, and feature-poor

Other than that, it's a great weapons system:

The Army’s Comanche helicopter (22 years + $7 billion = zero helicopters) and the Joint Tactical Radio System (15 years and $6 billion before it was cancelled) are just two recent examples. But as the Government Accountability Office helpfully notes, these huge projects overall tend to “cost more, take longer to field, and often encounter performance problems” — not unlike the Empire’s moon-sized battle station. This means there are economic as well as operational reasons not to build them, which perhaps explains why I get a very bad feeling whenever I’m around one.

Real-life performance data shows that the most important and high-impact technologies are not the gold-plated, over-engineered wonder weapons that turn majors into colonels, colonels into generals, and young Jedi apprentices into Sith Lords. Instead, data suggest the real winners are humble, simple, low-cost products made by small, rapid innovation teams — the type of projects that don’t attract much attention from the press or from the brass because all they do is get the mission done without any fuss.

Defense analyst Pierre Sprey has written extensively about these “cheap winners” and “expensive losers,” a pattern which also showed up in my career. As I look back on 20 years in uniform, my most important contributions to national defense came when I worked on small droidish projects where I had no time, no money, and only a few teammates. My biggest frustrations and failures happened when I was in a cast of thousands, spending buckets of money and working towards a distant deadline.

This is a picture perfect example of the Iron Law of Bureaucracy in action in the military.  Crappy weapons systems consume huge piles of funding and may never see action, but someone got his Star.

You might think so. I couldn't possibly comment.

Nice 'stache, bro.  Chick.  Magnet.

Shamelessly stolen from Joel.  You do read him every day, right?

The question was rhetorical

Quote of the Day: Political Correctness edition

Word:

Political correctness is about blackmail. It is used to control insiders and aspiring insiders by creating an inevitable tension between private behavior — which soon enough becomes secret behavior — and an unreachable and sanctimonious standard.   PC creates an institutional hypocrisy through which the nomenklatura can be policed. The price of being an “insider” is consenting to have the Sword of Damocles dangle over your head.

Do you wonder why the elite stick together? They have to.

This is just a snippet from a very insightful article by Richard "Belmont Club" Fernandez.  Worth your time.

Antivirus: not quite useless

But almost:

Symantec, a company that has made huge amounts of cash as the largest antivirus software vendor for the last quarter of a century, looks to be getting out of that business and into fixing hacking problems rather than stopping them.

"We don't think of antivirus as a moneymaker in any way," Brian Dye, Symantec's senior vice president for information security, told The Wall Street Journal, adding that antivirus was "dead."

Dye said that modern antivirus software only stops around 45 per cent of attack on computer systems and lets the rest through. That's a bit embarrassing for the firm's Norton team, who are still advertising the software as "secure and reliable," rather than "works less than half the time."

This is no surprise, actually: the effectiveness of antivirus software has been falling for more than a decade.

The end of a melody is not its goal

The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

 This would likely have pissed off Nietzsche.  Not sure that this was a bad thing.  The melody's end is a reflection on who we are, and where we've been, and where we are going.

But what about those inner thoughts, those you don't tell anyone? Think to someone you once loved, or perhaps do now. If you had known then, what you know now, about your desire and theirs, would you have run away from the intensity of their gaze, those eyes possessing a wisdom all their own. Or would you, knowing what you know now, run to them with an ease and a comfort that no random coming together of two people could ever have produced.
Or would you have simply run away? 

- Brigid

Worthy questions.  And the Worthy Questions have no answers.