Monkey Majik - Change

Bumped into this. Hadn't heard shamisen in a rock context before and I was intrigued by the masks. A nod to Anonymous?

Say, is that guy at 3:50 walking "three feet behind the head" of the protagonist? And are those Sumo guys doing "Tunak Tunak Tun"?

VOTE, FAGGOTS!

Srsly, the Republican party has been taken over by loonies.  Don't feel guilty for being lazy and not reading up on all the candidates.  Just vote for anyone who isn't a Republican.  DOO EEEET NAOOO!!!



Then there is Sharron Angle, the closet Scientologist.  "I'll answer those questions when I'm the senator."  Smells like "the Secret," amirite?  Say it aloud and the universe will make it so.

Journalists represent us, the people.  They're our eyes and ears.  They ask questions we might ask.  But curiously over the past couple of decades, politicians have discovered that they can dismiss journalists without shame, without paying any political price.  They need only imply via a smirk or a wink that that the questioner is biased.  That needs to change ASAP.

Grass Mud Horse

An old story, but it cheers me up so I'mma remember it here.



The Chinese government has the most sophisticated software "Net Nanny" on the planet, yet this video and other stories of the "grass mud horse" get by.  In Mandarin the written characters for "grass mud horse" when spoken aloud, "cao ni ma," can be heard as, "fuck your mother."

The spoken phrase for the written characters "river crabs" sounds very much like "harmony," a euphemism for censorship in China. President Hu Jintaos regularly encourages Chinese citizens to create a "harmonious society."  Bloggers who've had to re-write a post say they've been "harmonized." 

The friendly grass-mud horse has become an icon of resistance to censorship among Chinese netziens.

Argument heirarchy

Adventures of the S.V. Pestilence

Hold Fast from Moxie Marlinspike on Vimeo.

"Hold Fast: Stories of maniac sailors, anarchist castaways, and the voyage of the S/V Pestilence..."

MAVERICKS at the Huffington Post, LOL!

Someone at the HuffPo has a sense of humor. Below is a screen capture showing the graphic associated with their article on repealing "Don't ask; don't tell."

Didn't take long for Tom Cruise's people to have the pic removed.

Hehehe.

Klaus Nomi - After the Fall

I'm telling you hold on, hold on!
Tomorrow will be there


Joel Burns, you're a good egg.

Organic Liaison vs Kirstie Alley's fat ass

Some months ago Kirstie Alley started a diet business called, "Organic Liaison."  "Hey everybody, watch while I slowly morph from morbidly obese to totally hot!  You will be amazed and will buy my expensive dietary supplement products!"

I was like, "Uh, maybe you should lose the weight THEN pimp the program?" But silly me.  I'd failed to appreciate how Organic Liaison rested upon L Ron Hubbard's notions of health and therefore couldn't possibly fail.

Time passed without much news from Kirstie until just last week when she twittered a surprising pic of herself, described as, "me and my Italian men friends" (click for bigger):

Wow, she looks better, eh?  But hey, my shoop detector seems to be picking up something...

And not just mine.  This vanishing point analysis proves that the carpet, table, and room were never in the same place at the same time:

Lulz ensued:

Then Kirstie tweeted:

And whyweprotest.net was leik:

And the paparazzi were leik:

The inning concluded: Fat Ass: 1; Organic Liaison: 0.

LULZ! MOXON MAD AT BADGERS

Thread here.

Scientology legal strategy: MOXON MOXON MOXON

Good luck, (SP)arrow!

AnonSparrow aka Brian Mandigo has been protesting the Washington DC Church of Scientology since 2008. YouTube has countless hours of him yelling provocative one or two-liners toward the org and adjacent traffic intersection, punctuated by occasional conversations with passers by or OSA handlers. Sparrow once was on staff at the DC org and sometimes says, "Hi so-and-so," to people he knows as he stands on the sidewalk with his sign, camera, and Guy Fawkes mask.

In August of this year the DC org's Executive Director, Kim Belotte, requested and was granted a temporary restraining order against Sparrow. Later, the DC district attorney charged him with "attempted stalking," whatever that is. Scientology's infamous in-house attorney and Operation Snow White unindicted co-conspirator, Kendrick Moxon, is representing Ms. Belotte.

Listen to Sparrow's innocence (as in "n00b") as he asks the officers in the video below, "She's gonna go try to get this order that you're talking about, but do I have a say in this? She can't just go, 'Get me this order,' and it gets issued. They have to hear my side, right? They can't just take her word for it."

The officers try to explain how restraining orders work. I'm not sure Sparrow understands. Fighting a restraining order isn't the same as fighting a criminal charge. The presumption of innocence isn't as important, and the subjective sense of fear articulated by the alleged stalking victim counts for a lot.

If Sparrow understood what the officers were saying, I don't think he would have responded with a comment like, "I'm not gonna stop (protesting)."

Notice how the police refer to "she" and "her complaint," while Sparrow refers to "they," saying things like, "they can bring it," when the officers mention "the possibility of an arrest warrant" about five minutes into the video. Sparrow is clearly stuck in the protester's mind set, imagining himself struggling against impersonal, corporate Scientology when in fact his immediate opponent is a particular woman who has reported to police that she is frightened.

My heart goes out to Sparrow as he faces a legal mess for months and perhaps years to come.

Hubbard's advice to use the legal system as a means of bullying perceived enemies has become something of a sacred ritual within Scientology. The practice highlights a particular weakness of our system of justice: the mere process of going to court is injurious to the parties involved in terms of time, money, anxiety, and lost opportunities to do other things. Ergo, a corporation with a deep legal war chest can win, even when it can't win, simply by outlasting the financial and emotional reserves of the opposing party.

Imma cross my fingers for the poor endearing, idealistic, and somewhat nerdy Sparrow, and for great justice.