Wiley - Cash in my Pocket

understatement of the year: 2009

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debating healthcare: Brooklyn style

LOL, this is absolute brilliance. Political theatre it may be to some extent, but, even so, certainly of the highest rhetorical order!

"Would you like to revise your remarks?"

"Yes, I would. Earlier, when I said 'fuck you', what I really meant to say was, 'fuck each and every one of you, individually and collectively, and your mothers and spouses for good measure too. thank you.'"

Jon Stewart: prophet

The man is just at the top of his game. Shame the Dems are not:

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newsflash: Angelina Jolie isn't blonde!

I have to hand it to the advertising execs - they really work hard to set new standards for superficiality:

"St. John chief executive Glenn McMahon told Women's Wear Daily she "overshadowed the brand. We wanted to make a clean break from actresses and steer away from blondes and cleanse the palette."

Yes, when I think of "luxury knitwear", it's really only the blondes that wear them that interest me.

Not to mention, Angelina Jolie ISN'T BLONDE!!

The Men Who Stare at Cellphones

I love copyediting typos! Who needs expensive research and drugs? To prevent Alzheimer's, apparently all one needs to do is stare at cellphones*! To wit:

""Quite to the contrary, those mice were protected if the cell phone exposure was stared in early adulthood..."

Also, while one's waking hours should be spent staring at cellphones, one should also try not to remain awake for too long, as sleep-deprivation could be another cause of Alzheimer's! However, you enter into another Catch-22, as studies have shown that people with strong social networks fare better in old age in avoiding diseases such as Alzheimer's ... then again, with approximately 35,000,000 sufferers worldwide, you're sure to make meet new friends (and since you can't remember meeting them, they'll be 'new' people to befriend every day!)


* You also don't have to worry that the cellphone may give you cancer, because apparently having cancer can also prevent Alzheimer's (and vice-versa). It's a win-win!

pretension comes to those who wait

I read this with growing incredulity. Really, art criticism is just a made-up, hyperbolized world of idiocy. I mean, look at this shit:

“Those of us with a passion for either geometric art or Latin American Modernist painting now realize what a pivotal role” Ms. Herrera has played in “the development of geometric abstraction in the Americas,” Mr. Sullivan said.

You fucking moron, a reclusive artist who doesn't display her work cannot, by definition, influence other artists. Without influence, you cannot "play a pivotal role" in the development of anything! What a crock of shit. And to call her paintings "iconic" - you have to display your work for it to become iconic! The Unabomber wasn't an icon of the loner, Luddite crowd until he started blowing things up (i.e., impacting on larger society).

No offense whatsoever to the artist, but shame on you art critic community! First for trying to make up for overlooking her art all this time, and second the vacuous manner in which you're going about it!

"Those who can't create, teach. Those who have not even the skill to teach, criticize."

Danger! Danger! Sidekick 'dogfooding' at MS!

Nothing is ever 100% reliable. Nothing. That is why back-ups and redundancies are an integral part in good, robust design. And that is why Microsoft is becoming a victim of its own making:

"On the iPhone, you sync your data with your PC/Mac via iTunes, and MobileMe in parallel syncs both the iPhone and the PC/Mac with 'the cloud" [at MobileMe]. If the cloud were to go down and everything lost (like I said, an almost completely inconceivable occurrence except by deliberate sabotage), your data would still be preserved on both your iPhone and your PC/Mac," a source explained.

"Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way on the Sidekick. The Sidekick was designed under the assumption that the cloud would always be available, and that your data would be safe there, so the device doesn't try very hard to preserve your data if you were to yank the battery or in the rare event of a phone OS crash/reboot. Instead, under these circumstances the device starts from an empty database and then reloads all of your data from the service when it comes back up.

"That's why T-Mobile has been telling everyone not to pull the batteries on their Sidekicks or let them run down. It is safe to turn the device off and on with the power button, and it should also shut down cleanly if the battery runs down, but once again, if it fails to shut down cleanly, it starts over from an empty database on the next reboot.

Shouting: the new spanking?

At what point does the inverse become true: instead of coddling these future adults who "suffered trauma" because "mommy yelled at me when I dropped a plate once. I was 8 and never got over it." and making them feel their neuroses are justified (by a BS psycho-therapy industry that cares more about self-propagation than mental health), we start telling these thin-skinned nit-wits that THEY, not their yelling parents, are the problem. In fact, why not yell? Those sound waves might even get through their thick skulls!

say it ain't so, Bill!

Oh how I love the sound of that fat, wet, c0ck slap on Microsoft. Such a huge c0ck it was that it slapped right across Gates's and Balls-mer's faces in one fell swoop. And the peasants rejoiced!

one of capitalism's hallmarks

Did Texas execute an innocent man? Not knowing for certain, I will say that there is no such thing as a human system which is without error, and that includes systems (mechanical, electrical) devised by humans. So they most likely did. I found the following statement interesting: "Each official had a separate role in the process, so that no one person felt responsible for taking a life."

Yup, that's a hallmark of the capitalist system, especially with respect to industrialization. Sounds like something out of 1984, and it illustrates how dehumanizing the parceling out of personal responsibility can be. It can make people so desensitized as to partake in murder. Remember that in Ye Olden Dayz, the accomplices also used to hang (now they just get life). And yet we ascribe to such a system that can so dehumanize us most of the plaudits for creating enormous wealth and well-being for so many. Interesting, is it not, to consider that such divisions of labor also lead corporations unable to name individuals responsible for things like "rogue" trading (no mention of the system that exists behind the trader, or the conspiracy required to hide the misdeeds) and the recent (fawesome) legal debacle over the Merrill Lynch / Citigroup merger and bonus scheme.

My favorite quotations have to be:

• “The S.E.C. gets to claim that it is exposing wrongdoing on the part of the Bank of America in a high-profile merger,” he wrote, and “the Bank’s management gets to claim that they have been coerced into an onerous settlement by overzealous regulators.”

• “It is quite something else for the very management that is accused of having lied to its shareholders to determine how much of those victims’ money should be used to make the case against the management go away,” Judge Rakoff wrote.

• “You filed a rather uninformative, bare-bones complaint,” Mr. Rakoff told SEC lead lawyer David Rosenfeld, who reportedly replied meekly that the commission hadn't made any allegations against specific individuals.

The response didn't satisfy Mr. Rakoff.

“I would be less than candid if I didn't express my continued misgivings about this settlement at this stage,” he told the lawyers for both sides. “When this settlement first came to me, it seemed to be lacking, for lack of a better word, transparency.”

People already have enough of a hard time taking proper responsibility for their actions without Adam Smith getting in the way! lol

ADHD queue-jumpers create debate

But only amongst those already mentally retarded.

This article includes a fucking moronic argument in favor of special treatment for ADHD brats:

"'These are children with a disability who cannot wait. You cannot teach someone who is crippled to walk, someone who is deaf to hear,'" says Andrea Bilbow. 'They have a 30% maturity lag, and are emotionally younger than their peers.'"

Bilbow, your analogy is bullshit. They have a 'maturity lag' of 30%? That's not being crippled, it's a mild limp or partial deafness in one ear. You can teach someone with a limp to walk better or a person with less-than-perfect hearing how to compensate. Exacerbating the initial conditions with further learned behavior (no waiting) only makes such children even more susceptible to any waiting in the future. It's a fucking retarded approach.

They're emotionally younger than their peers? As if children all develop at the same rate. Show me the statistical deviation that illustrates how you came to determine they were more than 1 std dev less mature than their peers. If ADHD is just about maturity, then let's teach them maturity. You think children develop in a vacuum? These kids are not *that* disabled that they can't learn! We shouldn't be striving to make them more impatient. Do we try and make someone with a limp cripple or someone with partial hearing loss fully deaf?

on this day

which already lives in infamy, I decree that the BBC shall be Blitzed by the grammar Nazi for this gaffe regarding changes to the Oscar voting system for Best Picture:

"However, this is the first time it has been introduced for best picture voting since 1945." ....

USED, you twats! The word is "used" or "re-introduced." You can only "introduce" something once. After a thing's introduction, further instances of its use are no longer introductions!

murderous english rednecks

O rly? I never relaized rednecks like this existed outside the American South!

sci-fi fans everywhere rejoice (quietly)

Geo-engineering deemed feasible, but flawed, approach to climate change management.

eye haz internets

butt eye still date the Hutch

swearing may mitigate pain

but it does nothing to cover up the stupid! lmfao:

"Some experimental evidence to suggest that swearing makes pain less traumatic, though the mechanism by which is does this shit is unclear."

lmRFIDao!

This has to be one of the funniest things I've read in a long while. "Passports: now with added security!" Shutup. The best security in a high-tech world is often the low-tech solution. Don't want your home alarm system infiltrated by hackers, or your Internet-enabled house? Buy a bigger/better lock! Don't Internet-enable your kitchen! I don't give a shit if my oven timer can check the local weather forecasts live - such 'features' are fucking useless!

Motion to Object:

The prosecutor is absolutely correct that the fact that the defendant was drunk and under-aged is 'irrelevant given the other issues at stake'.

Rightly put, the first and foremost such issue being why/how the fuck does one get drunk to Dave Matthews? I mean, really! That much sappy semi-depression, combined with alcohol - I bet he was trying to kill himself with carbon monoxide!

i'm lovin' it!

Sarko is just a barrel of laughs. Look at Obama having to restrain the poor guy ... and his wife is smoking hot! What is his problem? G'damn Hungarian blood - it just increases his natural French womanizing traits!