Respect Authority

Here in Americker, it’s easy to find yourself disillusioned with the political process. Really, what could be more intellectually stimulating than watching talking heads bicker over whether or not Rush Limbaugh really is the voice of the GOP or if he’s only kind of the voice of the GOP? And personally, I can’t tell you a project I’m more excited about than keeping a strict tally of every single campaign promise Obama inevitably breaks. Man, I can’t wait until we send him back to Mexico with all the rest of his evil Muslim friends.

Now, lest any frustrated citizens in other countries feel left out from the high-school-league He Said, She Said America’s beautiful democracy depends on, fortunately, policy-makers the world over are just as retarded as the Nascar-loving, creationism-touting greed factories we have running the good ol’ US of A. Here are some obscure laws from around the world that will fill your heart with warmth and keep you from ever mistaking that we live in times even resembling “progressive.” Read More ›

I did a lot of things that were mostly right. 

And with that, now-former-governor Rod Blagojevich lost his job. What’s more, the Illinois legislature barred him from ever serving in public office again. Concluding months of media coverage on the second-slowest political train wreck of the century (the first being the entire Bush Administration).

But the real wreck wasn’t so much the taped conversations or the melodramatic U.S. attorney press conference, it was his refusal to resign while going on a quoting tour of British writers and appointing crazy blacks to the Senate instead… which sort of worked on me.  

Crackheadish rambling aside, he did have a point: he didn’t actually do anything, or rather he didn’t actually do anything yet — a technicality he maintained right up to the incredibly bitter, 45-minute end. Blagojevich’s final desperate “defense” amounted to begging legislators to put themselves in his shoes and spare him the embarrassment of having to tell his daughters that his gubernatorial career made Sarah Palin look competent… which, again, is bizarrely reasonable.

[nytimes.com]

Last Winter shit shit
My bank collapsed, vote for change
This Winter fuck fuck

And for good measure…

Oh yes on Prop 8
My gays, haven’t you heard that
opposites attract?

"Behold! The future... where women have been rid of opinions and blacks have penises of a length and girth more appropriate to their social position."

The Large Hadron Collider’s world swallowing first particle smash has been “delayed” again to sometime in 2010, marking the umpteenth setback after a magnet quench lead to a debilitating nitrogen leak in early September.

CERN, in complete denial of the forces at work behind their technical difficulties, has vowed to get its machine working.

While I completely understand lots of money and reputations have been put on the line in the pursuit of this endeavor, I think its time these European geeks admit that they’ve been the victims of temporal sabotage.

All signs point to time travelin’ tomfoolery: an anomalous mechanical failure that cascades into a systemic crash which perpetually retards any effort to recover… barring a complete redesign of the entire system hinting at an omniscient understanding of the schematics that would have taken years to develop, and nerds.

Now, I’ve tried to imagine how we could recover from a scenario in which the LHC was turned on, the Earth destroyed by a Switzerland sided black hole, with all (if not most) of Earth’s population annihilated. In said situation, who would be our time traveling saviors? The crew of ISS Expedition 17 that’s who. They were in space when it happened, used their rocket boosters to fly into a solar flare and/or orbit the Earth backwards at an incredible rate, traveled back in time then snuck their way back onto terra firma embarking on a Ocean’s 13 style mission of scientific sabotage/Nazi art scalping.

You can forward your thank you notes to Astronauts Sergey Volkov (not American), Oleg Kononenko (not American), Garrett Reisman (American), and Gregory Chamitoff (also American).

[CNet News]

Lisa: "I'm afraid my space boyfriend is cheating on me with his wife, I'm thinking about kidnapping her." Virtual Therapist 5000: "SOLVE YOUR MALFUNCTION... COMPLETE MISSION."

Low Earth oribit, the perennial frontier. These are the voyages of the Soyuz space closet Soyuz II. Its continuing mission, to maintain orbit, stare at known worlds and exercise. To boldly go… not insane. Baaa da da dum ba ba ba.

Funny? Well not for the poor crazy astronaut muttering to himself several miles above you. That’s why Harvard researcher Dr. James Cartreine is building a virtual therapist for all those kooky astronauts trying to keep their heads in their space helmets.

Cartreine and his team have created a sophisticated automated flow chart that astronauts can use to engage in a popular therapy method called “problem solving treatment”. One problem though, according to Dr. Mark Hagel, “problem” is a word that’s apparently incompatible with the treatment of intense, motivated and problem free astronauts.

Hagal, the virtual therapist himself, spent hours shooting retakes of his advice snippets in order to avoid addressing an astronaut’s mental problem as a “problem” but rather as a “malfunction” or “challenge” — words that astronauts responded to more viscerally.

No word yet on how exactly a AIM chatbot is supposed to help astronauts suffering from long term isolation and debilitating feelings of dehumanization.

[AP]

I can’t pretend to know how counter-terrorism on a municipal level works. I imagine that it has something to do with randomly checking bags in random stations and treating city employees like dirty airline flyers. So I assume that when the MTA and NYPD thank paranoid riders, they have 1,944 foiled terror plots to thank them for. Or several hundred conspiracy arrests. Maybe at least a couple terror-related conspiracy charges. Actually I can’t find any arrests that have anything to do with a suspicious Arab guy, or backpack, in the subway.

You’re doing it wrong, NYPD. Remember —

Crime Fighting:

Not Crime Fighting: