New Edition to the Blog Roll

David Weigel has a newish blog up at the Washington Post called Right Now.

Its main focus is on the movement conservatives out there, the Republican party and the right-wing of the conservative movement. Covering it and trying to explain its orthodoxies to us naive liberals. It is interesting and thought provoking take on a differing ideology. Well worth the time to read.


-Cheers

Last Son of Krypt.....err...Bollywood

Here is something a little different for you all. It kind of has to be seen to be believed.



I will give it this. It is more original then Superman Returns.

-Cheers

Dangerous Curves and Roosters.....ahead (NSFW)

Normally I don't post NSFW stuff on the blog (it's a family friendly blog after all!), but I thought this was interesting.

Some colleges are just more fun/interesting/risqué then others, but my hats off to the industrious students at Bard College as Huffington Post and Jezebel report:

Jezebel: Why did you start Boobs@Bard? Is it just for fun? is there a political message behind what you are doing?

Boobs@Bard: [It] was initially conceived as an alternative to Bard's "nudity and body politics" magazine The Moderator. The nude student models in The Moderator always seem uncomfortable, weirdly bent over tree stumps, posing in recognizable campus locations. Additionally, the political nature of The Moderator was a bit of a turn off; I wanted to see my naked peers unabashed, not participating in hurried photo shoots to fit articles and deadlines. I wanted people to feel comfortable viewing these images in a variety of ways, from an appreciation of the female form to masturbatory purposes. Anonymity is the most important factor in my creation of the site, and I attribute much of the success of the site to this feature. The anonymity requirement has allowed numerous ladies the chance to exert their sexuality/femininity/womanhood/silliness in a creative way where other outlets have failed them.

Personally, the more public nudity we have the sooner it will lose its stigma. In this country we have so many social taboos on nudity and sexuality; the more desensitized that we become to nudity, the healthier our discourse on the subjects of sexuality and sexual health will be.

It's not like it will cause a major earthquake or anything!

So check it out here. And not to leave the ladies out in the cold so to speak.

-Cheers

The Double Down has nothing on this.....

My arteries hurt just from this (h/t Balloon Juice):

• 1 1/2 pounds ground beef
• 3 tablespoons freshly chopped parsley leaves
• 2 tablespoons grated onion
• House Seasoning, recipe follows
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 3 eggs
• 6 slices bacon, cooked
• 3 hamburger buns
• 3 English muffins
• 6 glazed donuts

Seriously, someone came up with this and thought, "You know what, we need more butter!".

-Cheers

Oh...but you knew that already...

There is a lot of talk on the interwebs about conservative epistemic closure (see here, here, here , here, here and here), some riveting stuff and interesting to watch the debate.

Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic encapsulated some of the things I have been thinking about over the last couple of years about the conservative/republican movement.

Can anyone deny that the most trenchant and effective criticism of President Obama today comes not from the right but from the left? Rachel Maddow's grilling of administration economic officials. Keith Olbermann's hectoring of Democratic leaders on the public option. Glenn Greenwald's criticisms of Elena Kagan. Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn's keepin'-them-honest perspectives on health care. The civil libertarian left on detainees and Gitmo. The Huffington Post on derivatives.

I want to find Republicans to take seriously, but it is hard. Not because they don't exist -- serious Republicans -- but because, as Sanchez and others seem to recognize, they are marginalized, even self-marginalizing, and the base itself seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking.

It is absolutely a condition of the age of the triumph of conservative personality politics, where entertainers shouting slogans are taken seriously as political actors, and where the incentive structures exist to stomp on dissent and nuance, causing experimental voices to retrench and allowing a lot of people to pretend that the world around them is not changing. The obsession with ACORN, Climategate, death panels, the militarization of rhetoric, Saul Alinsky, Chicago-style politics, that TAXPAYERS will fund the bailout of banks -- these aren't meaningful or interesting or even relevant things to focus on. (The banks will fund their own bailouts.)

The elevation of bromides and slogans over actual policy is the most disappointing aspect. I have said it before, and I will say it again, I want there to be a sane conservative party. I think it is necessary to avoid this sort of insular group think that we are seeing the Right exhibit.

So I am even more dismayed when I see stuff like this:

In a study evaluating the program's effectiveness, Opower researchers compared power use before and after the HER reports began arriving, and further compared this change with a group of control households that never received the reports. On average, the HER households reduced their consumption in the months that followed by a little less than 2 percent. Not bad, but probably not enough to save the planet.

Working with the same utility as Opower, Costa and Kahn matched up information on the households in the pilot study to data on political affiliations and a database of past charitable giving to environmental organizations. The economists found that the 2 percent average decline in energy use obscured significant differences in the responsiveness of different types of households to the conservation message. Registered Democrats who give to environmental organizations and live near other liberals reduced their consumption by 3 percent. For liberals who started out as heavier-than-average consumers, the reduction was almost 6 percent. Republicans who live in conservative neighborhoods (and hence had no neighborly pressure to conserve) and had no record of giving to environmental organizations actually increased their consumption by 1 percent.

Why would some energy-conscious Republicans all of a sudden become power hogs? One explanation is that many conservatives don't believe that burning energy harms the planet, so when they learn that they're better than average, they become less vigilant about turning the lights off. That is, they're simply moving closer to what they now know is the norm (what psychologists call the boomerang effect). Costa and Kahn also look for guidance from the patron saint of right-wing fundamentalists, Rush Limbaugh, who encouraged his listeners to turn on all their lights during Earth Hour. Costa and Kahn suggest that ardently right-wing electricity customers might respond to paternalistic nudges by burning more energy, just to thumb their noses at Big Brother.

So if you wonder why it is I get angry watching the news, this would be why. When I see Republicans espouse blatant falsehoods and anchors let that pass I get more and more infuriated.

-Cheers

With great awesome, comes even greater awesome....

I know I am an evil person, but these made me laugh......

-Cheers

Too True...Too True...

Some things need no explanation (h/t The Daily Dish).

-Cheers