Rocket Highway

As I said in a post last week, I got a smartphone. It’s been a fun little toy, and one of its more hilarious features has been its dubious capability to record voice and render it into a text message. It often fails at anything more complex than “Help I’m in my Suburban Pakistani manse and the NAVY Seals are in here,” (actually, it would screw that up)so Molly and I thought it would be fun to read a paragraph from a Serious Book.

The Serious Book chosen was The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, which I also mentioned in a previous post. If you don’t remember, it’s basically an account of Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri’s arduous journeys from “brave freedom fighters” in Afghanistan to terrorist masterminds of Al Qaeda. So, without further ado, here is the original quotation from the book.

In 1986, Bin Laden brought his wives and children to Peshawar, where they joined the small but growing community of arabs responding to Sheikh Abdullah Azzam’s fatwa. it was clear by then that the Afghans were winning the war. admitting that Afghanistan was “a bleeding wound,” Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, offered a timetable for the complete withdrawal of Soviet troops. that was also the year that the American-made Stinger, the hand-fired missile that proved so deadly for Russian aircraft, was introduced, decidedly tipping the balance in favor of the Mujahideen.

Here’s what voice-to-text turned it into!

In 1986 been lot in brought his wives and children to pass to war for the joined the small but growing community of parents responding to sheikh’s up the laws on xfactor. It was clear by the end of the Afghan for winning the war admitting the Afghanistan was a tweeting world me Kyle Korver Charles the general secretary of the coming this party of the Soviet union offer the time table for the complete withdrawal Soviet rooms that was also the year that the American made stinger the and fart missile the proves so deadly for russian aircraft was and reduce the size with tipping the balance in favor of the mood job. Talk to you loads?

Could Muslin Terror Mosks produce this highlight of Western Culture? No, I think not. America.

I know we think that EVERYBODY who is ugly and boring who played a high school teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is probably a Secret Genius based on American movies. However, in the case of Ben Stein, idiot creationist conservative extroardinaire, you’d be wrong.

His column from yesterday is about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the shady French chair of the also shady International Monetary Fund who is accused of raping a hotel maid. It’s basically an apologia and a bunch of bleating about being skeptical of the charges(YOU KNOW THEM DAGGUM WOMEN CAN JUST SAY THEY WAS RAPED AND RUIN A MAN’S LIFE. US MEN GOT IT SO HARRRRD. WAAAHHHH) and ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ Whatever. But his second point is…well, I’ll just let it speak for itself.

2.) In life, events tend to follow patterns. People who commit crimes tend to be criminals, for example. Can anyone tell me any economists who have been convicted of violent sex crimes? Can anyone tell me of any heads of nonprofit international economic entities who have ever been charged and convicted of violent sexual crimes? Is it likely that just by chance this hotel maid found the only one in this category? Maybe Mr. Strauss-Kahn is guilty but if so, he is one of a kind, and criminals are not usually one of a kind.

Right. People who commit crimes tend to be criminals. Therefore, white collar crime doesn’t exist? I guess kings never did anything wrong because they weren’t made to answer for things? I guess torture isn’t illegal because noone will ever answer for it? Ben Stein: pretend economist, proud defender of the rich and rapeloving.

Trey is hustling FOR REAL AND FOR KEEPS. Check out this sweet bike. I can just see Trey cruising around on it while dramatically flipping his sunglasses off and back on again. He is repping his blog hard now. How can we compete?

INTERCEPTOR

So, I finally succumbed and got a smartphone (Samsung Atrix 4G, it’s an Android phone) and “downloaded” an “app” or whatever you whippersnappers are calling it these days called “This Day in History” that works through wikipedia. Seeing that today is Friday the 13th, I figured I’d share something pretty terrifying that happened as recently as 1985! It was something I hadn’t heard about, so I used wikipedia to engage in a little background research.

MOVE is a black liberation group from Philly(formed in 1972) that honestly had some pretty goofy ideas. They differed themselves from the other black liberation groups in their desire to ‘get back to nature.’ By which I mean return society to a hunter-gatherer state. In my view, a hunter-gatherer society probably wouldn’t be too bad, but it’s pretty unrealistic to have as a legitimate and central goal in one’s political agenda. They also opposed science and medicine in general. They lived communal lifestyles in Philly buildings while piling up heaps of garbage and human waste in their yards(this attracted vermin but they believed it morally wrong to kill vermin with pesticides) while shouting about zoos into megaphones at their neighbors. As you can imagine, this didn’t endear them to anybody, and definitely not the police. A 1978 shootout which resulted in the death of a police officer didn’t help their case. The nine MOVE members who were tried were all found guilty of murder, and are still in jail. If this were a bad crime drama, they would have gone free based on evil stuff like “due procedure of the law” and it would have made the terrifying actions of 1985 a stupidly sypathetic or understandable climax of the movie. But they were all put away, and on May 13th, 1985, we were all reminded that if we step far enough out of line, American citizenship is no guarantee that you won’t be murdered by “authorities” without trial. To wit:

In 1981, MOVE relocated to a row house at 6221 Osage Avenue in the Cobbs Creek area of West Philadelphia. On May 13, 1985, allegedly responding to months of complaints by neighbors that MOVE members broadcast political messages by bullhorn at all hours and also about the health hazards posed by the piles of compost, the police department claimed that they attempted to clear the building. The police lobbed tear gas canisters at the building and the fire department battered the roof of the house with two water cannons. The police fired 10,000 rounds at the house in two hours. A police helicopter then dropped a four-pound bomb made of C-4 plastic explosive and Tovex, a dynamite substitute, onto the roof of the house without any prior warning.

The resulting explosion caused the house to catch fire, igniting a massive blaze which eventually destroyed 65 houses. Eleven people, including John Africa, five other adults and five children, died in the resulting fire. The firefighters were stopped from putting out the fire based on allegations that firefighters were being shot at, a claim that was contested by the lone adult survivor Ramona Africa, who says that the firefighters had earlier battered the house with two deluge pumps when there was no fire. Ramona Africa and one child, Birdie Africa, were the only survivors.

Yeah, Philadelphia Police literally bombed a house in the city of Philadelphia. There is no reason not to use a SWAT team in that situation, I don’t care if mean under-equipped black nationalists are in there. Do your fucking job WITHOUT bombing your own citizens.* Except if you’re not a white protestant, you’ll never be a REAL American. This attitude and spirit still lives on today in the bloated might-as-well-be-a-corpse-for-how-fat-and-immobile-it-is horrible so called ‘Tea Party.’

*-Not to say that bombing random brown people is any more excusable. This act is just more shocking based on the general political narrative of America. Happy Friday the 13th!

Wow, Trey’s really pushing his SpackleCube page hard these days. I should have expected it from a hustler such as himself.

Pink Rims are cool, presumably

Pink stickers on the back too. Wow.

Good evening. Or afternoon, or morning or whatever if you’re Cyrus or David living out in the lawless American West. Today I’d like to share with you the joy of Amazon customer reviews! Most of you have no doubt already had a run in with these funny, weird things, but I want to devote a little bit of time out of my day to discussing these.

I was browsing Amazon for some books and I came across the page for The Looming Tower by journalist Lawrence Wright. I’ve read the book, and I super-recommend it to anybody and everybody who wants to know anything about Al-Qaeda and 9/11 and all that fun stuff. It’s a compelling, well written and well sourced narrative following Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri(Al Qaeda’s Numero Dos) in their quest to destroy McDonalds and freedom or whatever. It also won a Pulitzer Prize and is pretty much universally praised for being an even-handed account of the events that led up to 9/11 that goes deep into the backstories of key players such as Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri. But wait, what’s this?

(more…)

Since I don’t want people getting the idea that this is just going to be a depressing political blog, I decided it was time to write about something I love way more than politics and world events.

Baseball is often criticized by dumb sports fans who are only interested if there are well-buried but ever-present homoerotic undertones(see: american football, which I also love, but let’s be serious) for things ranging from its slow pace to its mammoth season, and it’s even criticized by the exceptionally dumb for the fact that they don’t play in the rain.

The long season allows for lots of weird things to happen. You could call them flukes, but that doesn’t really take away from the fact that they’re really cool. Last night provided just one little example of why baseball really is the greatest game.

Francisco Liriano, a starting pitcher for the Minnesota Twins, was supposed to have a good year, but he went into last night’s game with a 9.13 ERA. That kind of exemplifies the troubles of the 10-18 Twins, who were all supposed to have a pretty good year too. There’s still plenty of time to see that turned around, but for now, they’re playing pretty bad baseball. So what happened last night? Liriano threw a no-hitter, which also happened to be the first complete game of his career. (He hasn’t pitched more than 6.1 innings in a game so far this season) It wasn’t pretty. He walked six, struck out two(the lowest total in a no-hitter ever), and got the benefit of 3 double plays. He only had a 54% strike rate. No-hitters are kind of a statistical anomaly, and they always require at least a little bit of luck to occur in the first place. Liriano’s shaky effort, though, will have to go down as one of the luckiest pitching performances of all time. Not to take anything away from it, because it was one night where everything actually went right for Liriano and his Twins. It’s kind of what makes it awesome.

Some of the greatest pitchers of all time never pitched even one no-hitter, while a bunch of nobodies’ names are remembered only because they happened to have that one game where everything went right for them. But the sheer number of games, at-bats, appearances, etc. contribute to these sorts of things popping up more often, and we truly appreciate their rarity because we know damn well how rare they are even WITH all the games that are played. That pretty much captures the essence of why I love baseball. Idiots accuse those of us who approach the game with objective, statistical mindset of treating players and the game itself as nothing more than collection of absurd number robots, churning away towards predetermined outcomes. This is of course ridiculous to anyone with a first grade education. If anything, the statistical approach heightens our appreciation of these moments. We love when the human beings playing the game buck the undeniable trends and tendencies, even if just for one game. We know the probabilities. If you’ll pardon the cliche, it’s why they play the games in the first place.

…that the GOP literally doesn’t give anything even closely resembling a fuck about deficits, here is yet another hilarious reminder. (Hint: the Texas House, mired in their own little budget crisis, are giving tax breaks to people buying yachts. Could they get any more cartoonish?)

For further evidence, see here.