Europe Under Seige

What we believe. [Link]

We in the West believe that blasphemy is a right and not a crime. And we in the West believe that Jews (and everyone else, for that matter) should be allowed to remain alive and have museums. (I would note, for those who believe that recent anti-Semitic attacks in Europe were caused by specific actions of the Israeli government, that a) anti-Semites cause anti-Semitism, not Israel; and, b) the Brussels attack occurred in May, well before the summer war in Gaza.)

The Charlie Hebdo massacre seems to be the most direct attack on Western ideals by jihadists yet. I’ve seen arguments advancing the idea that 9/11 represents the purest expression of Islamist rage at a specific Western idea— capitalism, in that case—but satire and the right to blaspheme are directly responsible for modernity. In the words of Simon Schama, “Irreverence is the lifeblood of freedom.”

The French president, Francois Hollande, said earlier today that, “No barbaric act will ever extinguish freedom of the press.” This statement is, as Claire Berlinski has pointed out, self-falsifying. This barbaric act, she notes, literally extinguished the press. The most recent iteration of the Islamist terror campaign in Europe has focused on Jews and cartoonists, but it will not end with Jews and cartoonists, unless it is comprehensively defeated.

The day coffee stopped working

Satire? [Link]

The Secretary of State thought for a moment.

“Well, Mr. President,” he began, “I can’t see any way around this problem. Except, that is, to seize all the coffee within our borders and transport it to a secure location immediately. After that, we can dissolve the Union and split the country into new territories, one for each of us. We go our separate ways with an equal share of the coffee. We’ll have enough for ourselves and our families, and we can dole out the remainder to the citizens of our regions as we see fit.”

The room was silent. Everyone looked around at each other. They had to admit, it was a sensible idea.

“Can we name our territories whatever we want?” asked the Secretary of Energy.

“Yes.”

“Even a swear?”

“I wouldn’t recommend it, but sure.”

“I call the military,” said the Secretary of Defense.

“No, we have to split that up, too,” said the Secretary of State.

The President had been sitting in silence, but now he spoke out, loud and clear.

“Mr. Secretary, we cannot consider that option.”

Everyone in the room glared at the President, pissed. But then, sort of low, the President said, “…just yet.”

Everyone in the room breathed a sigh of relief, and took their hands off their swords. All the cabinet members had these awesome mini-swords now. The President had given them as presents, for team building.

Who wins a Presidential free-for-all knife fight to the death?

Asking the important questions. [Link]

One of my most-visited sites on the web isReddit.com, and one of my favourite subreddits isHistoricalWhatIf, an online community that debates historical hypotheticals. Earlier today someone asked the question, In a mass knife fight to the death between every American President, who would win and why?Someone beat me to the obvious answer that a final showdown would see Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt doing a dagger-wielding version of a Mexican standoff, so I took it too far and walked through how I thought every president would turn out. An hour later the result greatly exceeded the maximum 10,000 character limit for a post, so I’ve decided to blog about it instead.

To begin, here were the original conditions of the hypothetical, as suggested by the redditor Xineph:

• Every president is in the best physical and mental condition they were ever in throughout the course of their presidency. Fatal maladies have been cured, but any lifelong conditions or chronic illnesses (e.g. FDR’s polio) remain.
• The presidents are fighting in an ovular arena 287 feet long and 180 feet wide (the dimensions of the [1] Roman Colosseum). The floor is concrete. Assume that weather is not a factor.
• Each president has been given one standard-issue [2] Gerber LHR Combat Knife , the knife [3] presented to each graduate of the United States Army Special Forces Qualification Course. Assume the presidents have no training outside any combat experiences they may have had in their own lives.
• There is no penalty for avoiding combat for an extended period of time. Hiding and/or playing dead could be valid strategies, but there can be only one winner. The melee will go on as long as it needs to.
• FDR has been outfitted with a [4] Bound Plus H-Frame Power Wheelchair, and can travel at a maximum speed of around 11.5 MPH. The wheelchair has been customized so that he is holding his knife with his dominant hand. This is to compensate for his almost certain and immediate defeat in the face of an overwhelming disadvantage.
• Each president will be deposited in the arena regardless of their own will to fight, however, personal ethics, leadership ability, tactical expertise etc., should all be taken into account. Alliances are allowed.

With the scenario set, here’s my take on it:

I agree with his final three left standing: Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. As to who would win, it could go either way.

I hate the Other Side

They must lose and My Side must win. [Link]

The past several weeks have made one thing crystal-clear: Our country faces unmitigated disaster if the Other Side wins.

No reasonably intelligent person can deny this. All you have to do is look at the way the Other Side has been running its campaign. Instead of focusing on the big issues that are important to the American People, it has fired a relentlessly negative barrage of distortions, misrepresentations, and flat-out lies.

Just look at the Other Side’s latest commercial, which take a perfectly reasonable statement by the candidate for My Side completely out of context to make it seem as if he is saying something nefarious. This just shows you how desperate the Other Side is and how willing it is to mislead the American People.

The Other Side also has been hammering away at My Side to release certain documents that have nothing to do with anything, and making all sorts of outrageous accusations about what might be in them. Meanwhile, the Other Side has stonewalled perfectly reasonable requests to release its own documents that would expose some very embarrassing details if anybody ever found out what was in them. This just shows you what a bunch of hypocrites they are.

Naturally, the media won’t report any of this. Major newspapers and cable networks jump all over anything they think will make My Side look bad. Yet they completely ignore critically important and incredibly relevant information that would be devastating to the Other Side if it could ever be verified.

I will admit the candidates for My Side do make occasional blunders. These usually happen at the end of exhausting 19-hour days and are perfectly understandable. Our leaders are only human, after all. Nevertheless, the Other Side inevitably makes a big fat deal out of these trivial gaffes, while completely ignoring its own candidates’ incredibly thoughtless and stupid remarks – remarks that reveal the Other Side’s true nature, which is genuinely frightening.

My Side has produced a visionary program that will get the economy moving, put the American People back to work, strengthen national security, return fiscal integrity to Washington, and restore our standing in the international community. What does the Other Side have to offer? Nothing but the same old disproven, discredited policies that got us into our current mess in the first place.

Like the Onion, but Military.

The Duffel Blog. And like the Onion, occasionally satire is not noticed and gets posted as real news.
This one is a particularly believable.

Atwoodian tautology considered harmful

Approving meta statement. [Link]

Considered Harmful

Declarative statement opening blog statement. Back away from declarative statement slightly, pivot then double down with even more controversial declarative statement. Insult beloved programming language and assert newer language's idiomatic aesthetic as superior. Including backing statistics with missing Y-axis labels to prop up weak link-bait including declarative statement. Reference Linus, invoke Dijkstra. Oh, everything looks bad if you remember it.

Biased Benchmarks

Supporting albeit equivocating statement. Weak marginally equivocating statement because I want to be on TechCrunch. Farmville.

The phrase 'Atwoodian tautology' cracks me up.

Why we must lose the darn 1 percent

Funny. [Link]

The Occupy Wall Street crowd has correctly identified two distinct groups in this country: the wealthiest 1 percent and the other 99 percent, who suffer from the 1 percent’s vast wealth: The wealthiest 1 percent not only have more money than us, they have much, much more money. That’s just wrong. 

It’s easy to see how the wealthiest 1 percent are devastating our country. Let’s say you took part in a raffle and won a prize of $500. Happy at your good fortune, you’d start thinking of all the neat things you could buy with $500. 

But say the person next to you won $1 million. Then, suddenly, your $500 would seem like nothing in comparison, and all your ideas of what to do with that $500 would seem pathetic compared to what you could do if only you had the other person’s $1 million. 

One truth would ring constantly in your mind: “That’s not fair!” 

That’s what the wealthiest 1 percent do to us a nation: It’s just impossible to appreciate our affluence while other people are allowed to have so much more than us. 

Sure, we could instead compare ourselves to the poor in other nations who live on a dollar a day or the poor throughout history who lacked all the freedoms, opportunity and technology we have -- but it’s too depressing to think about those people. Instead, we just need to do something about the wealthiest 1 percent. 

Some might say one person’s income doesn’t affect another’s, and people should only worry about improving their own finances, but this is ignorant of how math works: None of us can get ahead while the 1 percent are around. 

Let’s say you had two apples and another person -- let’s call him “Rich” -- also had two apples. If you then got one more apple and Rich got 80 more apples, would you now have more apples? No, you’d have fewer apples -- fewer than that other guy who has an unfair number of apples! 

See, the wealthiest 1 percent prevent us from getting ahead because any time we improve our incomes, we spend more on businesses and services, and guess who that helps? The 1 percent. Getting ahead just isn’t worth the knowledge that the rich are getting richer. 

There’s no point in working hard to try to become one of the 1 percent ourselves, because what’s the chance of that happening? One in 100? Who would play a lottery with odds that bad? 

No, instead of working hard, the 99 percent can only sit and protest on Wall Street until the wealthiest 1 percent are torn down. 

Here’s the thing: They’re the 1 percent, but we’re the 99 percent. Their wealth may be much more than ours, but 99 is a much bigger number than one. So we should just gang up and take their money. 

When one person takes the property of another, that’s tyranny, but when lots of people get together and do it, that’s democracy. So we should legislate that the 1 percent no longer get to keep that vast wealth and must instead distribute it among the rest of us. (I should get the largest portion because it was my idea.) 

After we’ve taken care of their wealth, to keep the nation happy and prosperous we should pass a law making it illegal for there to be a wealthiest 1 percent -- this country should just be the normal 99 percent. 

Sure, that isn’t mathematically possible, but government shouldn’t be about what’s possible; it should be about what’s fair.

He actually earned this one

Nobel War Prize. [Link]

Among Obama’s list of war accomplishments, the committee highlighted Obama’s decision to double the number of troops and expand the number of private contractors in Afghanistan, as well as his dramatic escalation of drone strikes and targeted assassinations in Yemen and Pakistan. According to one committee member, “Two years ago, we worried that President Obama would rollback Bush administration policies and pursue a peace agenda, but in fact he’s expanded the militaristic Bush approach to counterterrorism. He’s managed to get the U.S. involved in three wars in the Middle East, keep Guantanamo open, and dramatically expand the use of covert CIA capture/kill operations across the globe. We could not think of a more worthy candidate for this award.”

News this week that the CIA is building a secret military base in the Middle East had the committee buzzing with excitement. One judge noted, “We applaud Obama for presiding over 865 military bases abroad at a cost of over $102 billion annually. At a time when the country is faltering from the economic crisis, Obama’s decision to approve the construction of more bases deserves praise.”

Obama’s speechwriters are hard at work preparing the his acceptance remarks, and PolicyMic managed to obtain a preview of the speech from a source inside the White House. The president will begin by thanking congressional Democrats “for campaigning in 2006 on the antiwar agenda, and then turning around once in office and funding the war they claimed to oppose.” He will also thank Congress for “stepping aside and allowing me to go to war in Libya without Congressional approval and once again approving the Patriot Act despite years of supposed opposition.”

Helping Move

This is why you hire movers. [Link]

You're like a Spanish conquistador but instead of bringing smallpox you bring Scandanavian furniture, property damage, cast urine, and irresponsibility. 

Biggest news of the day

New voice for AFLAC duck chosen. [Link]

Daniel McKeague, 36, a father of three from Hugo, Minn., beat out 12,500 other contestants to replace actorGilbert Gottfried and become the voice of the reinsurance company's duck mascot.
Gottfried voiced Aflac's duck for U.S. audiences for 11 years but was ousted in March after making insensitive remarks on Twitter about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which produces about 75% of Aflac's revenue. Aflac soon announced a contest for Gottfried's replacement, but the company kept a different actor who has long offered a gentler interpretation of the duck for Japanese audiences.
McKeague recorded a 30-second clip at KQRS in Minneapolis, where he works, uploaded it to Aflac's website and later did a more formal video audition.

No pulling a "Gottfireid" from him:

"I understand what's at stake, it is not just getting behind a microphone and screaming 'Aflac.' If you're a spokesperson you have responsibilities."

How to Behave During an Islamic Massacre

Andrew Klavan cuts to the heart of the matter once again. Why are some people held to a different standard?

The Onion Should Develop the Next Version of Microsoft Word

A feature that starts in satire and continues right on through to believability. [Link]

"Microsoft Word Now Includes Squiggly Blue Line To Alert Writer When Word Is Too Advanced For Mainstream Audience."

In Soviet Russia, Bad Movie Makes Fun of You

Russian MST3K ripoff. [Link]

Just how much does the Russian TV show Project Popcorn ape Mystery Science Theater 3000? Check out the theme song. Something tells me nobody from the original MST3K was consulted on this.

Even the plot appears to be ruthlessly cribbed from MST3K. In short, Stephen the protagonist needs money, so he signs up for an experiment run by the nefarious Professor Zamishlavkin. The Professor imprisons Stephen and forces his captive to watch bad films to study the effect on his psyche.

Steampunk Palin

This is not a political post. It's a comics one. [Link]

Picture in your mind the most insane possible story that could be contained in a book named Steampunk Palin. Go ahead, take ten seconds or so to imagine it perfectly in your mind's eye. Use this cover image for help.

They Hate Our Guts

Satire with a lot of truth behind it by P.J. O'Rourke on the Democratic Party Leadership. [Link]

Using the metaphor of Michael Vick for the Democratic party leadership implies they are people with a capacity for moral redemption who want to call good plays on the legislative gridiron. They aren’t. They don’t. The reason is simple. They hate our guts.

They don’t just hate our Republican, conservative, libertarian, strict constructionist, family values guts. They hate everybody’s guts. And they hate everybody who has any. Democrats hate men, women, blacks, whites, Hispanics, gays, straights, the rich, the poor, and the middle class.

Democrats hate Democrats most of all. Witness the policies that Democrats have inflicted on their core constituencies, resulting in vile schools, lawless slums, economic stagnation, and social immobility. Democrats will do anything to make sure that Democratic voters stay helpless and hopeless enough to vote for Democrats.

Beltway Adventure

Turn Left. [Link]

WELCOME TO ADVENTURE! WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS?

>YES

YOU ARE SOMEWHERE IN BELTWAY FOREST, WHERE SOME HAVE FOUND TREASURES OF GOLD ALTHOUGH SOME HAVE ENTERED AND NEVER BEEN SEEN AGAIN. MAGIC IS SAID TO WORK IN THE FOREST. I WILL BE YOUR EYES AND HANDS. DIRECT ME WITH SIMPLE COMMANDS.

YOU ARE IN AN OVAL OFFICE. THERE IS SNOW OUTSIDE. YOU ARE BEHIND A DESK. ON DESK THERE IS A BUST OF CHURCHILL.

YOU HAVE A CONGRESS.

YOU HAVE A SENATE.

YOU HAVE A MEDIA.

YOU HAVE A TELEPROMPTER.

YOU HAVE A MILITARY.

YOU HAVE A BIG JET.

YOU HAVE $3 TRILLION OF GOLD.

YOU HAVE 82% APPROVAL HEALTH.

THERE IS 7.2% UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE FOREST.

YOU HAVE A RACE CARD.

YOU HAVE INAUGURAL PARTY LEFTOVERS.

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO?

He is the Taxman

Be happy he doesn't tax it all.

This would explain a lot

Presidency as Punk'd. [Link]

Sacha Baron Cohen became famous for his rendition of the character "Borat", filming a fake documentary on "behalf" of the government of Kazakhstan. During the creation of the film, Cohen fooled many, including former Congressman Bob Barr and a local news crew.

But his latest stunt goes well beyond that.

"Basically, what I wanted to do was create a practical joke so large and so profound that it wouldn't even seem funny." Cohen told us from his London loft, "It was around 2004 and I remember that lots of American folks were rambling on about that year's Presidential election, so I figured that I could create just a romping good laugh by faking my own election.

"So I went down to the studio and began to draw up a general idea of how we could create a 'fake' President of the United States. We picked an actor named James Stephenson and sent him over to the States to act in a role as 'Barack Obama.'

Obama and Jintao press conference on SNL

Funny. From here.

This seems really true to life

See the cartoon. [Link]

YOU KNOW ONE OF THE NICE THINGS ABOUT BEING FRIENDS WITH A CARTOONIST?

You can tell him an idea you think is pretty good, and the next day he sends you something that's better than you could have imagined:

Normal people aren't interesting enough for the media. They want train wrecks, or clowns.