Such is what has become of our world.
"Reason laid waste".
Feel free to comment.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
President Obama signs "stimulus" into law
The $787 BILLION package is now enacted legislation, as President Barack Obama signed the bill at a ceremony in Denver.
There might be another "stimulus" coming soon, believe it or not.
And on the day of this esteemed occasion, the Dow dropped 297.81 points, -3.79%, to close at 7,552.60.
And on a somewhat related note, I've been hearing some curious rumblings about stuff going down in the Eastern Europe markets, that might bear watching for the time being.
Travis the Chimp, on Xanax, goes bananas and mauls woman before being shot dead by Connecticut cops
So help me, my eyes are tearing up with laughter after reading that headline, even though this really is a horrible story...Travis, a 200 pound, 15-year old chimpanzee who had appeared in TV commercials and "was toilet trained, dressed himself, took his own bath, ate at the table and drank wine from a glass", went berzerk last night in a Stamford, Connecticut neighborhood after breaking loose from his owners' custody, and then severely mauled Charla Nash with "life-changing, if not life-threatening injuries" to her face and hands. Travis' owner Sandra Herold had to beat the ape off her friend with a butcher knife and a shovel.
Travis had earlier been given tea laced with the anti-depressant Xanax. He proceeded to terrorize the streets before being shot dead by Stamford cops, after Travis opened the door of a police cruiser and attempted to enter the vehicle. According to one report, Travis may have intended to drive away from the scene.
Feel free to post the obligatory Planet of the Apes comments as you see fit...
Ramos and Compean finally free (they never should have been in prison to begin with!)
This morning, former Border Patrol agents Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos were freed from the federal prisons they had been in, and rejoined their families.
About time. But then, their imprisonment was a travesty of justice from the beginning. Regardless of their sentences being commuted, a whole lot of people in this country will never forgive George W. Bush and his lackey Johnny Sutton for taking sides with a known drug smuggler against two men who were trying to protect their country's safety and sovereignty.
No, I won't be one to forgive Bush for that, either.
That said: it's good that Ramos and Compean are back home.
Trailer for TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN
Giant transforming sentient robotic organisms and lots of Michael Bay-hem signature carnage and 'splosions (with a soundtrack by Steve Jablonsky). What more could you ask for?!
Trailer for INGLORIOUS BASTERDS
I must regretfully confess that I have never seen a Quentin Tarantino movie during a first run in the theaters...
...but I am already sold on Inglorious Basterds, due for release this summer.
"Each man under my command owes me one hundred Nazi scalps. And I want my scalps."
See Brad Pitt pour out unbridled Jewish rage on Fortress Europe below...
PRIDE AND PREDATOR?! Are you kidding me?!?
Elton John's Rocket Pictures has begun production on Pride and Predator: a cinematic adaptation of a Jane Austen novel that deviates wildly "from the traditional period costume drama when an alien crash lands and begins to butcher the mannered protags, who suddenly have more than marriage and inheritance to worry about."This is, apparently, not a joke.
One of the producers has also said that "It felt like a fresh and funny way to blow apart the done-to-death Jane Austen genre by literally dropping this alien into the middle of a costume drama, where he stalks and slashes to horrific effect."
Jane Austen books must be a hot sci-fi genre these days. Cinema Blend is also reporting that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is in the works, with involvement from Natalie Portman.
Words fail...
Monday, February 16, 2009
Kansas and California have run out of money
The state government of Kansas is no longer issuing tax refunds and may be unable to pay its employees.
Meanwhile, California is $40 billion in the red and may have to lay off thousands of workers soon.
Dare I mention that "Hell Époque" thing that I first wrote about last year?
BIOSHOCK bringing moral chaos to mobile phones
BioShock, 2K Games' smash hit first-person shooter that tries your personal ethics as much as it tests your aim, is now coming to mobile phones courtesy of Indiagames. The reveal came at the 2009 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Indiagames is working on two versions of BioShock for mobile devices: a straightforward 3-D port of the original game, and... a 2-D rendition, believe it or not.(Can't help but wonder if the 2-D version will resemble this NES-style "demake" or perhaps this Game Boy mock-up.)
I'm of the opinion that BioShock is a game that needs to be played at night, or at least a way darkened room with all the lights out, on a fairly large screen and the sound turned way up. The ruined underwater city of Rapture with all its 1950s trappings is easily the most sinister setting of a video game that I've ever encountered. Putting it on a tiny device to play anywhere... sounds like it's gonna take away from that kind of atmosphere. But hey, the more BioShock the better, right? :-)
Here's some footage of the 3-D version, including the deranged Splicers and of course a Big Daddy in action...
Banker gives $60 million of own money to his employees
Lately it seems like the "feel good" stories have become even more few and far between. So when one is found, I feel more than a little compelled to give it a shout-out.
Take, f'rinstance, what Leonard Abess Jr. did. Back in November he sold a majority share of his holdings in Miami-based City National Bancshares.
And then, Abess gave away $60 million of the profits to EVERYONE that was on his bank's payroll. He even went so far as to find 72 former employees so that he could give them a share of the money, too. More than 400 people got the "bonuses", and depending on how long they had been employed some got more than $100,000
This is an awesome story of capitalism and corporate responsibility, folks. And when I say "responsibility", what I mean by that is a company or business owner going above and beyond in rewarding its employees - who have already shown loyalty to the company - without it being mandated by some decree of government. Nobody made Abess give up his own money. In my opinion, Leonard Abess Jr. made a smart investment in his own company. And I'd be willing to wager an RC Cola and a Moon Pie that City National Bancshares might be among the better managed banks in this day and age.
Abess didn't publicize his good deed, but it was inevitable that news of it would get out. When asked about his motivation...
Abess said he had long dreamed of a way to reward employees. He had been thinking of creating an employee stock option plan before he decided to sell the bank.Leonard Abess Jr., you're a good man. And you deserve a tip o' the hat for your good deed :-)"Those people who joined me and stayed with me at the bank with no promise of equity -- I always thought some day I'm going to surprise them," he said. "I sure as heck don't need [the money]."
Creepy and kooky: 5 months in jail for man who whistled THE ADDAMS FAMILY theme
Leopold Wrobel of Wingerforth, England has been remanded to gaol by the constabulary for a period of twenty weeks after being found guilty of harassment and violating an "antisocial behavior order" that was sought against him by his neighbors.
Apparently, what Michael and Kathleen Sharpe found so offensive is that Wrobel would constantly whistle the theme music from The Addams Family whenever he saw them.
In his defense, Wrobel claimed that he was only whistling at his dog. But "closed-circuit TV footage shown to the court depicted him repeatedly whistling when the couple left their house or arrived home."
I don't know what's more disturbing: this guy's whistling fetish, or the fact that England now has so many surveillance cameras that one was looking out for Wrobel's performance.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Apollo astronaut Schmitt sez: Humans not causing global warming
Harrison Schmitt - geologist, former senator from New Mexico and one of the last men to walk on Moon during the Apollo 17 mission - has voiced his strong belief that global warming is not happening... or at least that it is not being caused by human activity.
And what's more, Schmitt also states that "global warming" is being used as a political tool to increase the presence of government in people's lives...
Schmitt contends that scientists "are being intimidated" if they disagree with the idea that burning fossil fuels has increased carbon dioxide levels, temperatures and sea levels.Schmitt is a real scientist, and a former elected official. I'm far more inclined to trust his take on the "global warming" situation than many of the more current crop of either researchers or politicians. Sad to say: over the past few decades the trend has been that the science has increasingly become driven more by policy than it has been by empirical evidence. And in that regard, we simply do not have enough long-range climate data to satisfactorily proclaim that global warming is or isn't happening."They've seen too many of their colleagues lose grant funding when they haven’t gone along with the so-called political consensus that we’re in a human-caused global warming," Schmitt said.
Dan Williams, publisher with the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which is hosting the climate change conference, said he invited Schmitt after reading about his resignation from The Planetary Society, a nonprofit dedicated to space exploration.
Schmitt resigned after the group blamed global warming on human activity. In his resignation letter, the 74-year-old geologist argued that the "global warming scare is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making."
Chris sings the praises of HandBrake 0.9.3!
A little over a year ago I posted the how-to tutorial on putting video content from a DVD onto an iPod. The workhorse program that I found perfect for my needs was HandBrake. When it came time to convert Lost Season 4 for my iPod classic ('cuz I like having all the Lost episodes hanging on my belt... along with my own movies, the Star Wars saga, etc.) I found that HandBrake had upgraded to version 0.9.3.So if you haven't checked it out yet, I heartily recommend giving HandBrake a looksee, because it has become significantly more powerful since the last time I used it en masse. HandBrake 0.9.3 introduces universal video input: it can now convert practically any format of video into MPEG-4, including DivX AVI files (very nice for putting those bootlegged Doctor Who episodes on an iPod or iPhone or any other portable video device). The video quality has been greatly improved, with many more presets and options available. Syncing of video and audio is said to be fixed, but I never saw any problems with that to begin with. I have however found that HandBrake 0.9.3 is far more stable in Windows Vista: previously, I had to re-install the program every time I wanted to convert a new DVD. Version 0.9.3 has fixed that bug: I've "fired it at the walls" (my own terminology for probing software for its limits) quite a bit over the past several days, and it keeps coming back and asking for more.
If you are using a Windows machine, you will likely have to purchase and install SlySoft AnyDVD, which does the actual work of decryption of a DVD. But HandBrake itself is free and open-source, and is available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.
Federal government's fiscal obligations calculated to be more than WORLD's gross product
Jerome Corsi has published a wallopin' eye-opener of an essay. According to his figures, the United States federal government's runaway spending (like the "stimulus") combined with its already existing financial obligations, is more than the gross domestic product of the entire world.
There is no way we are going to be able to pay for all of this in our lifetime, the lifetime of our children, and quite possibly the lifetime of their grandchildren. Not if our politicians keep adhering to this insanity.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
"We're fine. We're all here, fine. How are you?"
Something screwy is amiss with this blog on the technical backside of things. It looked fine yesterday (so far as I can tell) but in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, stuff is missing.
If this place looks more whacked than usual, it's prolly just me monkeying around behind the scenes trying to get it all fixed :-)
Immigrants can now fast-track to citizenship through U.S. military (and what this REALLY means about America...)
According to a story at The New York Times, the United States military is about to offer American citizenship to legal immigrants if they enlist in the armed forces. Some might be eligible for citizenship in as little as six months.
The reason for this, is that the American military is admittedly "stretched thin" in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So let's go review what happened a little over a millenia and a half ago, when the cost of maintaining its vast empire utterly taxed Rome's martial capability. With not nearly enough proper imperial denizens to draw upon, the Roman government eventually acquiesced to enlisting barbarians from Germania and Gaul to bolster its forces. In many cases, the foreign soldiers were offered Roman citizenship as part of a package of incentives (which could also include some lucrative latifundia).
Fifteen hundred years later, and another great world-spanning power... is now doing much the same.
Don't anybody give me any harsh looks now. I'm just the historian here.
It's the trailer for WATCHMEN's TALES OF THE BLACK FREIGHTER with the voice of Gerard Butler!
If you've never read Watchmen (what's the matter with you? Go read it now!) then this requires some 'splainin'. In the graphic novel there's this kid who's reading a pirate comic book at a newsstand. The comic book, Tales of the Black Freighter, is shown to us the readers as a "story within a story" and it parallels a lot of what's going on in the greater scheme of Watchmen. Zack Snyder didn't have enough time to include it in the feature film adaptation of Watchmen, but it's important enough that it's coming to us next month as an animated feature on DVD and Blu-ray! And the word is that months afterward when Watchmen itself is released for home consumption, that an "ultimate edition" will be coming out that splices together the live-action movie and the animated Tales of the Black Freighter.
So with that said, here's the trailer for Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter, featuring the voice of Gerard Butler (Leonidas in 300) as the marooned mariner...
Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter will also include Hollis Mason's autobiography Under the Hood.
Thanks to Phillip Arthur for the heads-up!
