Five Before Chaos

Colbert skews one of Glenn Beck’s remaining nutbag sponsors.

Colbert skeews one of Glenn Beck’s remaining nutbag sponsors.

Colbert skeews one of Glenn Beck’s remaining nutbag sponsors.

Been scarce again, I know, I know. Missing all this great political lunacy (Massa, more batshit insane GOP shenanigans, etc.), but I’m balls-deep in working on my master’s thesis, which is not fun. Well, at times it is, as I’m reading a lot of interesting stuff, but I’m a horrible procrastinator and easily distracted, so it makes it a lot harder than it needs to be.

Heading south to see the parents, so don’t expect much in the next week, other than postings about Mexican food, beaches and cheap beer. I will be chiming in on the next day or two about our own Vermont nutters, so stay tuned. In the meantime, go educate yourself at the Museum of Uncut Funk. There will be a test.

I live for this shit. Seriously. I don’ t know how I only managed to find out about this a few days ago, but last year, a blaxploitation spoof came out, Scott Sanders’ Black Dynamite, starring Michael Jai White. If you know and love these films like I do, you have to check this out, as it has just about every convention and cliche from the films, and it’s funnier than hell, too. It’s a lot funnier than that Wayans Brothers spoof, I’m Gonna Git You, Sucka. No review… just see it, already.

Now, tell me this doesn’t look like a parody. It’s not.

A Louisiana sheriff has begun training 200 local volunteers in basic hand-to-hand combat techniques as part of Project Exodus aimed at protecting the northwestern corner of the state from the danger of terrorists, the Shreveport Times reports.

Reporter Drew Pierson writes that Bossier Parish Sheriff Larry Deen’s policing plan involves “a mostly white group of ex-police volunteers and a .50-caliber machine gun” and was inspired in part from the Book of Exodus in the Bible.

It must make the fine citizens of northwestern Louisiana know that when the jihadists all parachute into their corner of the state (undoubtedly a prime target of interest to Al Qaeda), a bunch of old farts with big guns will keep the area safe and free to do something else as equally stupid. It’s like Red Dawn II, except with old people and Arabs instead of teens and Soviets. Wolverines!

I love it when this kind of stuff happens,  it doesn’t happen nearly as much as it should, considering how many of these people are still in the closet:

…a state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk after leaving Faces, a gay nightclub in midtown Sacramento, early Wednesday morning.

A Republican, no surprise there. Of course, what makes it funny, awesome, great, etc.:

Ashburn served six years as a state Assemblyman before being elected to the State Senate. According to Project Vote Smart, Ashburn’s voting record shows he has voted against every gay rights measure in the State Senate since taking office including Recognizing Out-Of-State Same-Sex Marriages”, Harvey Milk Day and Expanding Anti-Discrimination Laws.

The day they get Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham will be a great day, indeed.

Interesting new theory in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly that will make conservative spittle fly:

The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years.”

“Evolutionarily novel” preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess. Some examples:

“General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions,” says Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. “As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles.”

So what does this mean?

In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals…

“Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid,” says Kanazawa. This innate bias toward paranoia served humans well when self-preservation and protection of their families and clans depended on extreme vigilance to all potential dangers. “So, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists.”

Now if someone could just come up with a theory to explain teabaggers and the Vermont secession movement, that’d be real progress.

Actually, no, as they’re just fucking crazy.

UPDATE: PZ sez this guy’s a hack, writes for Psychology Today.

No, not that it’s fun watching the Prez shoot down the usual GOP bullshit – I knew that. It’s that, even in the face of contradiction of the above said b.s. (not talking points, actual demonstrable facts), Republicans simply cannot stop lying, as evidenced by a typical GOP congressdouche Twitter feed:

RepTomPrice: Takeaway from summit so far–Dems push govt takeover of HC! Bureaucrats deciding coverage, everyone forced to buy it, cant keep what you have

See, the prez, to his credit, explained quite clearly why this is anything but true. But facts don’t matter when you’re catering to idiots who walk around with teabags tied to their hats. Good thing the GOP put on those jumbo clown shoes before they showed up.

UPDATE: Rep. Mike Spence is the king of stupid. Twitter is the perfect medium for him:

Boehner brings the Dems’ massive gov’t takeover of #hc to the summit for all Americans to see

I said yesterday that this #summit looked like a
taxpayer funded media event, looks like I was right

Pence doesn’t like the fact that all the typical GOP talking points that work with the teabaggers don’t look so hot when they’re easily smacked down. The GOP doesn’t do too well in a reality-based format.

(Note: I know, I’ve never put a book review up here before, but this book was my introduction to the genre known as Bizarro Fiction, and I suspect at least some of you regular FBC readers are as twisted as I am and might appreciate it. It originally appeared on my spaghetti western website, Fistful of Pasta – enjoy!)

Until I received an e-mail from author Jordan Krall asking if I were interested in reviewing his new bizarro novel that is a tribute to the spaghetti western, I hadn’t even heard of the blossoming genre known as bizarro fiction. What’s bizzaro? According to the things listed in Bizzaro Central’s (the go-to hub on the web for all things bizzaro) What is Bizzaro? page:

1. Bizarro, simply put, is the genre of the weird.
2. Bizarro is literature’s equivalent to the cult section at the video store.
3. Like cult movies, Bizarro is sometimes surreal, sometimes avant-garde, sometimes goofy, sometimes bloody, sometimes borderline pornographic, and almost always completely out there.
4. Bizarro strives not only to be strange, but fascinating, thought-provoking, and, above all, fun to read.
5. Bizarro often contains a certain cartoon logic that, when applied to the real world, creates an unstable universe where the bizarre becomes the norm and absurdities are made flesh.
6. Bizarro was created by a group of small press publishers in response to the increasing demand for (good) weird fiction and the increasing number of authors who specialize in it.

• Bizarro is like:
  • Franz Kafka meets John Waters
  • Dr. Suess of the post-apocalypse
  • Takashi Miike meets William S. Burroughs
  • Alice in Wonderland for adults
  • Japanese animation directed by David Lynch

Got that? Now, take all that, and apply it to your spaghetti western with all of the conventions and archetypes we’re accustomed to in the genre, and that’s Jordan Krall’s Fistful of Feet. Krall had sent me his other works, Piecemeal June and Squid Pulp Blues as well, to give me a familiarization with the genre (a genre that contains titles such as The Haunted Vagina, Ass Goblins of Auschwitz, and Meat Puppet Cabaret) After reading the seriously depraved Piecemeal June, I felt like I needed to take a very long shower, but I found it a rather twisted, entertaining read, as did I with Squid Pulp Blues. After those assaults on my senses and boundaries of taste, I was looking forward to Fistful of Feet, Krall’s first full-length novel.

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