… here’s Tim Hicks singing “Stronger Beer”:
H/T to Dave Slater for the link.
July 4, 2013
In honour of our American cousins’ Fourth of July…
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July 2, 2013
Reason.tv – Up in My Grill: 4th of July Rap (featuring Remy)
Ain’t no party like a nanny state party.
Song written and performed by Remy. Video produced by Meredith Bragg. About 1:20 minutes.
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June 29, 2013
Chris Kluwe on how to be a manly nerd
Former Vikings punter Chris Kluwe has a must-read piece in Esquire about how to be both nerdy and manly:
For example, every morning, I wake up from my nesting pile of bearskin pelts and immediately plunge into an ice-cold spring-water bath in order to facilitate maximal hair follicle growth on my face, chest, back, and pendulous member. After the brisk cleanse, I dry off by shaking my rippling muscles in a vigorous twitching pattern, much like that of a dire wolf shedding rain. I then run down a nearby small game animal, spit and roast it over a hand-built fire, and toss the bones to my pet crocodile, Frederick.
When it comes to playing video games, I’m just as manly. My Xbox 360 controller is hand-carved from a single block of mahogany, and it features an inbuilt testosterone sensor that lets me know if my massive thews involuntarily clench too hard in between rounds of Call of Duty and Battlefield 3. Obviously, the only reason I would start crushing exotic hardwood between my calloused hands is due to sheer excitement at my five-to-one kill/death ratio, and not at all because of an overwhelming abundance of pulsating sexuality coursing through my chiseled body, attracting all the poser girl gamers.
Sometimes, when one of the lesser females manages to somehow defeat me (obviously by cheating), I’ll let loose a primal bellow of animalistic rage in order to send her weak and delicate frame scurrying back into the bedroom where she belongs. Once she’s safely returned to her proper place, I make tender, ravishing love thrusts into her always-willing ladyparts, which I know she enjoys immensely. As a manly gamer, it is both my duty and my privilege to remind the fairer sex of the proper hierarchy in the electronic jungle, and I take my duties seriously. We manly gamers need to constantly reassert our alpha-ness upon the inferior girl gamer wannabees so they don’t get any stupid ideas that they’re as good as us.
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June 24, 2013
Don’t judge a book – especially a science fiction book – by its cover
H/T to Lois McMaster Bujold, who sent this link to her mailing list.
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June 21, 2013
Duffelblog will probably get a lot of the “Onion article mistaken for real news” action today
It’s guaranteed to get on a lot of thin-skinned people’s radar:
Amidst cries of outrage and controversy, Activision unveiled the latest addition to the Call of Duty franchise at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) last week, entitled Call of Jihad: Scourge of the Infidels. The first-person shooter, developed in conjunction with some of al-Qaeda’s top field experts, will be launched for both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 for release on September 11, 2013.
Like previous titles in the series, Call of Jihad will feature campaign, online multiplayer and a “Suicide” mode — reminiscent of “Survival” in Modern Warfare 3 — with the objective being to slaughter as many innocents as possible before a quick-reaction force arrives.
The campaign takes place in an alternate reality where infamous al-Qaeda operatives like Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are still alive and Khalid Sheik Mohammed is a free man. The opening mission of the campaign, displayed as part of a teaser trailer at E3, takes place in the Pakistani compound raided by SEAL Team Six. The player must single-handedly dispatch the American commandos as Bin Laden escapes on a camel before time elapses.
Game developers also confirmed the martyrdom perk would always be turned on.
“It’s fucking sick!” squealed die-hard gamer Bryan Campbell, 17, of Manhattan, New York. “I give it two severed heads up!”
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June 19, 2013
Nostalgia for an imaginary better past
I love this:
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June 16, 2013
Not from the Scottish Tourist Board
For more great reasons to love Scotland, click here.
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June 14, 2013
June 11, 2013
New privacy options on Facebook
H/T to KA-CHING! for the image.
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Remember the Canadian political scandals?
Andrew Coyne got the secret decoder ring from one of his readers:
A reader writes: “Is it not possible McGuinty went to Ford & asked him to pose for that videoto divert attention from the gas-plants?…1/3
— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) June 11, 2013
… Then Ford realised the heat was on him so he gave Nigel $90,000 with which to repay Duffy…. 2/3
— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) June 11, 2013
… Don’t try to tell me that having three inane scandals like this, all at the same time, is a coincidence.” I, uh, THINK he was kidding. 3/3
— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) June 11, 2013
June 8, 2013
The Moral High Ground has finally been mapped
NewsBiscuit provides the details on the latest Ordnance Survey discovery:
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June 3, 2013
“Checking your privilege”
Sean Thomas outlines the notion of “checking your privilege” before discovering that he is the most underprivileged person in Britain:
The idea of Checking Your Privilege is that the opinions of “underprivileged” people, in any political debate, are deemed to be intrinsically more important and valuable than the beliefs of those who are luckier in life.
This is especially true if the debate relates to an area in which The Underprivileged Person is adjudged to be deprived. Extreme versions of Privilege Theory assert that, in especially sensitive arguments, the more privileged person should say nothing at all. e.g. white people are not allowed to express an opinion on racism.
[. . .]
It’s an impressive list of deprivations. Sometimes, when I look at my life, I wonder if I am [a] talented black saxophone player in the 1950s, or at least a meth dealer in central Baltimore – rather than a writer in north London. Certainly, I am THE most underprivileged person in the UK. And this means that my opinion is the most worthy and important of all, and everyone else must shut up, while I opine.
And my opinion is this: Privilege Checking is stupid. It is vacuous and diseased. It is a duet of moral vanity and bourgeois guilt which symptomizes the decadence and redundancy of what passes, today, for lefty “thinking”. Karl Marx (middle-class, well-travelled, disapproved of Engels’s plebby girlfriend) must be spinning on his Highgate pedestal when he sees what his great discourse has turned into.
I hope that clears things up. Now we can move on; IMHO, of course.
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June 1, 2013
QotD: Internet espionage
A new report says that the Chinese are hacking American computer networks at an alarming rate. This is hardly news. I’ve been including the phrase “早安，我抱歉有沒有在這封電子郵件中的商業秘密或加拿大色情。請停止殺害酷動物啄木鳥醫學。剛剛買了一些偉哥了” at the bottom of every e-mail for months (I put it just above where it says “Hello Mr. Holder!”). It means, according to Google translate: “Good Morning, I’m sorry there’s no trade secrets or Canadian porn in this e-mail. Please stop killing cool animals for pecker medicine. Just buy some Viagra already.”
What is new is the scope of the problem the report lays out. This is a thorny issue and I think the U.S. needs to be much, much more aggressive in combating it. Why it’s not a bigger issue for the WTO, for instance, is baffling to me. They are stealing our stuff, which strikes me as a bigger deal than taxing it at the border.
Explaining to the Chinese leadership that they shouldn’t be doing this because it’s wrong is like explaining to a dog licking its nethers that what he’s doing is bad manners: To the extent they understand at all, they couldn’t care less. They respect power. They understand when you put a price on bad behavior. So we need to put a price on Chinese hacking. It’s really that simple. The hard thing to figure out is how.
Jonah Goldberg, “Chiiiiiicoms in (Cyber) Spaaaaaaaaaaaace!”, The Goldberg File, 2013-05-31
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May 27, 2013
Kim Il Sung’s 1974 higher education management text is “a perfect book for our times”
Alex Usher can’t stop recommending On Improving Higher Education, by Kim Il Sung, going so far as to call it “a perfect book for our times”:
Pay raises, for instance are Right Out. “As long as you make an issue out of remuneration, you cannot be a revolutionary,” says Kim, righteously noting that nobody paid Marx to write Das Kapital (the fact that Marx died before completing it might have had something to do with that, but no matter). North Korean intellectuals had the privilege of giving lectures and writing books, “and yet they insist on receiving money for this wonderful task,” Kim splutters.
Work rules, too, come under serious scrutiny. Responding to complaints that “university and college professors lecture a thousand hours a year”, which some consider to be too much, Kim is clear: “You are wrong! Fundamentally speaking, calculating lecture hours is not the attitude of a revolutionary. If you are true revolutionaries who serve the people, you would never calculate the hours; you try hard by all means to work as much as you can”.
(I make the following offer to university administrations across Canada: if any of you decide to try to outflank your faculty union to the left by telling them their views are evidence of captiveness to bourgeois ideology, I’m buying the first round.)
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