Palin Porn

All of the photo ops of Sarah Palin remind me of shock sites like stileproject.com, which were very popular in the early 2000’s (and may still be now, I dunno). Those sites interspersed very hot clips of porn and NSFW pictures of sexy women, along with truly disgusting and disturbing violent  and macabre imagery.

All the photos and videos of Palin have the same effect (on me, at least): arousing and repulsive in just about equal measures at the same time.

I can’t wait until January 21st, when Obama becomes president, Palin returns to Alaska to get indicted and convicted of corruption (like her pal Ted Stevens just did), and McCain returns to the Senate to babble on about “subcommittee chairs”, and to retire soon after a long career, at last “turning the page” on this sorry and embarassing chapter in American history.

Randroid admits flaw in fairy-tale ideology

Ayn Rand’s long-time freind and hard-core disciple Alan Greenspan, finally admits a “flaw” in Rand’s ivory-tower ideology.

There’s something in Ayn Rand’s works that appeals to everyone at some point in their lives. Everyone wants to identify with the specialness of Dagny Taggart or Howard Roark or John Galt. Everyone feels, at some point in their lives, as if they are the true hub of the universe.

Then rational people grow the hell up and get over it. There’s no more substance to Rand’s objectivist view than there is in a child fantasizing about being a fairy princess, and even less to admire.

John Galt is dead. We can only hope he stays buried.

A-fucking-men.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

OK, whatever…

No, it's not a Photoshop

Old code never dies

I dug up some old code I wrote over 7 years ago, a pthreads-capable circular buffer library I wrote as an exercise to learn pthreads, and it actually compiled and ran.

I suppose that shouldn’t be surprising. Neither POSIX nor Pthreads have changed all that much over that time (and not all that much in probably 20 years, actually).

But it surprised and pleased me that some old shitty code I wrote so long ago, actually works and might even be useful in the current task I’m setting myself to.

Bush melting down?

Great rant from Tim Krieder:

I now believe that there is no one in this country who more eagerly awaits the day George Bush leaves office—not me or Tom Tomorrow or Janeane Garofolo or Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn or those guys with the giant puppets and drum circles you see at protests–than George Bush.

Yeah, it’s possible. When it comes to war and giving rich fuckers and corporations tax cuts, Bush is on firm and familiar ground. But this? Totally out of his league, and– finally– knows it, I’ll bet.

And now, the adults get to take over

Obama appears to be the only adult in the room:

I take away … the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.

There it is. This is a generational election. After the trainwreck of being ruled by baby boomers, the grownups are finally taking over… and they’re 47 years old.

I don’t mean to make such harsh judgement of the baby boomers– they did give us the civil rights movement and women’s liberation and the environmental movement the and human potential movement and rock and roll– but the right-wing idealism of that same generation– neoconservatism and wacko Christian dispensationalism– also gave us the Iraq War, “faith-based” initiatives, the Laffer Curve and “trickle-down” economics and its idiotic Ayn Rand-ian “free market” utopianism, and a host of other cases of “naive idealism” gone horribly wrong.

Obama’s assessment is right on. Now’s not the time for idealism, or for the cynicical apathy for which my (and his) generation is more well known. Now we need to patiently do the difficult things, consistently, for a long time, without necessarily seeing results or getting any reward for it. That’s what adults do.

So here we are, it’s 2008, at the end of a long orgy of fake money and fake wealth and easy credit and digital bread-and-circuses spectacles and cheap plastic crap from China. There is a huge mess to clean up. And who’s stuck with that task? Us.

Obama’s staying positive, and that’s good. I think we’ll all pull together and do our homework and we’ll get through this. But I do resent, and am outraged by, having been left with this clusterfuck to deal with.

Here’s Kevin Gilbert, who would be 42 now if he were still alive, speaking for my generation– which is Obama’s generation too– and how it feels to inherit this clusterfuck from Bush, Cheney, McSame, Delay, Rove, and those clowns:

Goodness gracious, at the mercy of the crooks
We’re broken, stroking vegetables and there’s way too many cooks
In every pot a pink slip, in every mouth a hook
…
The babyboomers had it all and wasted everything
Now recess is almost over and they won’t get off the swing
…
Goodness gracious, we came in at the end
No sex that isn’t dangerous, no money left to spend
We’re the cleanup crew for parties we were too young to attend
Goodness gracious me

Propaganda balls

What sets propagandists apart is that we have balls. Contradict me if you dare.

Beautiful.