Five Before Chaos

FINALLY.. there’s some Mandrill vids up on Youtube. They weren’t a household name like P-Funk or Sly and the Family Stone, and didn’t reach quite the audience or popularity that those bands did, mostly because much of their music wasn’t as commercial. They’ve been sampled by quite a few hip-hop artists, as well. Here’s three nuggets for you.

The first is just a vid someone put together with the studio track of “Mango Meat ” in the background. Two live ones below the jump.

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I usually don’t go for those end-of-the-year lists that come out, but the 50 Most Loathsome People of the Year over at the Beast is indeed a good one. No one is spared, Reid, Pelosi, O’Reilly, Coulter, Huckabee and Bush (“Is it a civil rights milestone to have a retarded president? – Only supporters left are the ones who would worship a fucking turnip if it promised to kill foreigners.”). The best one, however, is “you” (well, not FBC readers, of course, except perhaps chanman, if he still comes around here):

Charges: You believe in freedom of speech, until someone says something that offends you. You suddenly give a damn about border integrity, because the automated voice system at your pharmacy asked you to press 9 for Spanish. You cling to every scrap of bullshit you can find to support your ludicrous belief system, and reject all empirical evidence to the contrary. You know the difference between patriotism and nationalism — it’s nationalism when foreigners do it. You hate anyone who seems smarter than you. You care more about zygotes than actual people. You love to blame people for their misfortunes, even if it means screwing yourself over. You still think Republicans favor limited government. Your knowledge of politics and government are dwarfed by your concern for Britney Spears’ children. You think buying Chinese goods stimulates our economy. You think you’re going to get universal health care. You tolerate the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques.” You think the government is actually trying to improve education. You think watching CNN makes you smarter. You think two parties is enough. You can’t spell. You think $9 trillion in debt is manageable. You believe in an afterlife for the sole reason that you don’t want to die. You think lowering taxes raises revenue. You think the economy’s doing well. You’re an idiot.

Exhibit A: You couldn’t get enough Anna Nicole Smith coverage.

Sentence: A gradual decline into abject poverty as you continue to vote against your own self-interest. Death by an easily treated disorder that your health insurance doesn’t cover. You deserve it, chump.

Well, not much, really, because admittedly I don’t follow the minutae of Middle Eastern and central Asian matters nearly as much as I should, so to be honest, I don’t know how this will all play out. What prompted me to post on this, however, was all of the press reports on how this will somehow affect the primaries. It won’t. Most Americans more than likely can’t even point out Pakistan on a map, let alone talk about the internal domestic situation there. It’s not going to matter one whit. It’s just more of the punditry acting like they have a clue, when really, they don’t. And that’s not to diminish the seriousness of the issue, or to imply that the candidates shouldn’t be concerned about Pakistan. I just don’t think it resonates with the electorate as much as the punditry would have you believe. Now, if one of the judges on American Idol were assassinated, you’d have a story as far as mainstream voters were concerned.

It’s so nice to actually win one. There’s a great diary over at Big Evil Orange right now by diarist davidkc, called Flying spaghetti monster defeats anti-evolution FL school board. Apparently, the Polk county school board in Florida had a number of Intelligent Design believers that wanted it taught and reflected in the new science standards (which, by numerous accounts are quite pathetic).

The Ledger followed up with another story a week later where it polled all school board members on the issue and reported that five of seven school board members declared a personal belief in the concept of intelligent design, and four of those five board members said they would like to see intelligent design taught in Polk schools as an alternative to evolution. One of those four board members, Margaret Lofton, made her views on the topic quite clear:

“If it ever comes to the board for a vote, I will vote against the teaching of evolution as part of the science curriculum,” Lofton said. “If (evolution) is taught, I would want to balance it with the fact that we may live in a universe created by a supreme being as well.”

Heh. “Balance it with the fact”. Sharp one. Anyways, the Pastafarians of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monstergot wind of this, and wanted to make sure that in the name of “balance” that the school board also included the Pastafarian creation story. In case you don’t know, the FSM thing was started a few years back when the enlightened folks in Kansas decided to ditch evolution from their educational standards. Long and short of it, it started to get a lot of attention, and made the school board look like the idiots that they were.

And the school board members didn’t hear from just the Pastafarians.  Local residents wrote scathing letters to the Ledger criticizing the school board members’ positions: – “It looks as if Polk County School Board members Fields, Harris, Lofton, Sellers and possibly Cunningham would have us return to those dark days of yesteryear when the old men who wove the creation fairy tale believed Earth was the center of the universe and that it was flat,” wrote one Ledger reader. – “Look out Polk County – as long as our School Board considers flouting science standards, we will remain Hillbilly USA,” wrote another local citizen.

Polk school board members were clearly caught off-guard by the speed and verocity of the response to their public support for ID/creationism in the classroom, and they quickly backed off any efforts to teach intelligent design. “They’ve made us the laughingstock of the world,” board member Lofton told the Tampa Tribune, in reference to the Pastafarians.

See, now this is the stuff that Dawkins and Harris are talking about, that is often accused of being so “harsh”. We need to forcefully confront these ridiculous beliefs and actions with more ridicule. Score one for reason on this one.

Every time I think things are getting better in the world, I pop over to Townhall.com and remind myself that the mouthbreathers are still around. They’re milking this “War an Christmas” bullshit for everything they can, with the usual idiots such as Dinesh D’Souza and Cal Thomas and no less than three or four other columnists jumping on the bandwagon. And they keep doing it because the people that really get riled up so easily about this are most definitely short a few brain cells, as exemplified by commenter”Bigjer”, commenting on Bill Murchison’s braindead War on Christmas screed, Christmas vs. The Rejectionists”:

I am a human being , born in the good ol U.S.A. and when we go to Wendy’s we can choose a whopper, or a spicy chicken sandwich, but to be told we cant eat this or that, or believe in this or that, I have one other suggestion to the atheists of the world, and its another courteous American offering, , THAT YOU may leave the country and try to find a nice atheistic place on a mountain top , or where ever rings your bell, it is as you would leave a Christian church service….please feel free, but DONT TRY AND TELL US THAT YOU DONT LIKE WHAT WE DO, CAUSE ITS REALLY NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS….WE ALSO HAVE RIGHTS IN THIS 210 YEAR OLD CHRISTIAN COUNTRY

SO, ALL ATHETISTS leave this country or shut the hell up….!!!
you had the misfortune ( according to you) to be born in a place where they have these silly rules called “MAJORITY RULES” and “IF YOU DONT LIKE IT ,CHANGE CHANNELS, OR CHANGE LOCATIONS ,LIKE THE SOUTH POLE ,WHERE NO ONE WITH A DIFFERENT IDEA THAN YOURS, WILL NEVER BE HEARD NOR UPSET YOU…..!!!

What, oh what will Bigjer do when he doesn’t have a president like Bush that he can relate to and connect with on such a fundamental level? Shudder to think.

2007 was a sad year for jazz. We lost Michael Brecker, Joe Zawinul, and now Oscar Peterson.

Actually, it was on the 19th that I stumbled home half in the bag after a Christmas party and set up a blogger account, and the rest, as they say, is history. And so this is the anniversary post, the one post per year where I get toot my own horn.

Well, there was a heck of a lot more action at FBC this year than the first one. My traffic essentially tripled, from 5k the first year to 20k by this year’s end. Undoubtedly, the big story for me this year was the one about the VT secessionist Group, Second Vermont Republic, having ties to white supremacist organizations, originally broke by Rowley at VT Secession, catapulted by Odum at GMD, and then instigated and taunted by me (they weren’t threatening my job, so I had lots of fun provoking ‘em). Needless to say, the story did have legs, and SVR is merely a punchline now and essentially a one-man organization consisting of not-a-racist-but-very-comfortable-around-racists Thomas Naylor. FBC got a mention in a Seven Days article about it here.

My storyabout the Peter Welch meeting with some angry and vocal antwar activists seemed to get some attention as well, taking up some space in an article in the Times Argus as well as getting me on the radio with Steve West in Brattleboro. FBC also got another mention recently in 7D with the iBrattleboro blog/libel brouhaha. So, all in all, not a bad year for media attention for some pissy little no-name blog. Ok, end of the horn-tootin’.

Other notables, as far as the most interesting Google hit that brought people here, nothing has even come close to topping last year’s “Asian tradition + marriage + eating poop”. The blog still lives a rather schizophrenic existence, with about 1/4 of the traffic coming from people who come here for spaghetti westerns and more than likely don’t read anything else, a little more than a 1/4 of regular readers, and then everyone else. Lots of people still come here for “Sam Harris quotes”, although I don’t think I quoted him at all this year.

So what’s up for year three of FBC? Well, I mentioned earlier about revamping the site to a magazine style format, but I’ve changed my mind on that. Unless I’m writing five or six posts a day, it would seem rather pointless. If I can get rid of the terminal case of the lazies, I’m still hoping to get “A Fistful of Pasta” up and running, my site devoted exclusively to Spaghetti Westerns. But other than that, it’s just going to be more of the same ol’ same ‘ol, which has more or less worked for me so far.

Anyways, it’s been a real hoot, and will continue to be, undoubtedly. Thank you to all of those who have continued to keep coming back for your regular dose of inane ratings. Oh, as I was looking for a picture of a stupid birthday cake, I came across this picture of a squirrel with big balls, which is much more funny, dontcha think ? Here’s to year three!

I’ve been around computers since the early 80′s, one of those Commodore 64 users. And those of you who remember the early days of personal computing who happened to be gamers, will remember the “Zork” series by a company called Infocom. It was a text-based adventure game, in which you’d read a description such as “You’re in a large room with a doorway to the north. There’s a large table with a chalice on it.” Then you would type in “go north”, or “pick up the chalice”, and so on. Tame by todays standards, no doubt, but back in the day, they were challenging and a lot of fun (especially if you were into the whole ‘swords & sorcery” bit like many of us were).

Anyways, much to my surprise, you can actually download and play on your modern computer, the entire Zork Trilogy, which you can get a hold of here. I started playing it last night and it’s just as difficult as I remember.

It may sound alarmist to some, but there’s been some rather chilling developments in the realm of public surveillance lately that you should know about. I’ve mentioned earlier about the latest from the Department of Homeland Security for a spy satellite program, which they assure us, “won’t be used to spy on Americans”.

Even more chilling, like something out of the sci-fi flick “Minority Report” is the WaPo story that lets us know about a new program that the FBI is up to:

The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world’s largest computer database of peoples’ physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.

More below the jump…

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Bill Simmon over at Candleblog has chimed in on the recent Seven Days piece that featured a few comments from yours truly. He doesn’t agree with the overall tone of the piece, namely its implication that the reason the editorials in the papers came out supportive of the suit is stemmed in “new media/old media” jealousy. Rather:

The real tension, I think, is between bloggers, who get the internet, and newspaper editors, who generally don’t. Every opinion I’ve seen expressed that supports iBrattleboro being named in the libel suit seems to miss the fundamental differences between blog comments and letters to the editor in newspapers. Perhaps more importantly, they miss the fact that this is very covered ground. Blogging is still fairly new to Vermont but online unmoderated forums are not that new to the legal system. That the relevant case law that’s being debated is eleven years old is telling.

 

I’m inclined to agree with him on that.