Beyond The Broken Spectrum

THE OREGON WILDERNESS—Frustrated by the widely held assumption that he unequivocally endorses the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a bald eagle said Monday that his thoughts on the conflicts were far more nuanced than many Americans might expect.

Speaking to reporters from his nest in the upper branches of a 175-foot ponderosa pine tree, the eagle explained that each member of his species was different and none should be taken for granted as a lockstep supporter of American military policy.

“I think World War II was justified, and I got behind the first Gulf War [in 1990],” said the bird, who has served as the national symbol of the United States since 1782. “But the recent war in Iraq, with its shifting rationale and poor planning, was clearly a huge mistake. Personally, I believe that these crucial, life-and-death matters deserve more honest and less politicized discussion than they get.”

“I’m not a hawk or a dove,” he added. “I’m an eagle.”

The majestic bird of prey, who said he is not registered with any political party, admitted to having some ambivalence about the current mission in Afghanistan, lamenting that any argument one could make seemed to prompt an equally valid counterpoint.

Yes, that’s right – The Wal-Mart Story !!!

This story originally appears at www.mentallyincontinent.com

It’s not A Wal-Mart story… it is THE Wal-Mart story. A tale so sordid, so epic, that it is the only thing I can think of to write about tonight.

I was in my first year of college at the time and was working for Roadway Package Systems on the overnight shift. RPS was a cheap knockoff of Federal Express or UPS, only without all the customers and apparently safety regulations, as we had at least 15 employees out on workers’ comp at any given time. What THEY were doing when they got hurt, I’ll never know, because all I ever saw anyone do was basically sit around and move a few boxes here and there to create the illusion that we deserved our $7.00 an hour. My job function consisted mostly of breaking open the occasional Nerf shipment and “playtesting” the toys all night. Sure, that stuff was meant for someone else, but the company’s insurance would cover it. It was free Nerf as far as I was concerned.

I decided to “quit” RPS one night (and by “quit”, I mean to say that I physically demeaned the 5′ 2″ late night security guard by rubbing his head and calling him “cutie”. This was met rather quickly by the blunt end of his Mag-Lite and a veritable honor guard of an escort out of the building), and since I had just lost my scholarship to college due to sleeping in class all day – because of late night work, oddly enough – and still had the futile intention to graduate, I was desperate for a late-night solution to my funds-to-expenditure ratio problem. I had to do SOMETHING for money. I thought about whoring my body out to dirty old men or selling hash made from yard grass and pencil shavings to high school kids, but I felt that as a future writer (haha, right), I needed, for once in my life, to indulge in something TRULY dark and evil… Something from which immeasurable pain and embarrassment would come, so that I could have an experience to draw upon for inspiration in the future. Naturally, Wal-Mart was the first thing that came to mind. (more…)

Below, are examples of sixth grade research projects. Enjoy…

1. Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert. the climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.

2. Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea where they made unleavened bread which is bread made without any ingredients. Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.

3. Solomon had three hundred wives and seven porcupines.

4. The Greeks were a highly sculptured people and without them we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a female moth.

5. Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.

6. In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled biscuits, and threw the java.

7. Julius Caesar extinquished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Dying, he gasped out Tee hee, Brutus.

8. Joan of Arc was burnt to a steak and was canonized by Bernard Shaw.

9. Queen Elizabeth was the Virgin Queen. As a queen she was a success. When she exposed herself before her troops they all shouted hurrah.

10. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented removable type and the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes and started smoking. Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100 foot clipper.

11. The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. He was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday. He never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He wrote tragedies, comedies, and hysterectomies, all in Islamic pentameter. Romeo and Juliet is an example of a heroic couple. Romeo’s last wish was to be laid by Juliet.

12. Writing at the same time as Shakespeare was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.

13. Delegates from the original 13 states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin discovered electricity by rubbing two cats backwards and declared, A horse divided against itself cannot stand. Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.

14. Abraham Lincoln became America’s greatest Precedent. Lincoln’s mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. They believe the assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposingly insane actor. This ruined Booth’s career.

15. Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic. Bach died from 1750 to present. Bach was the most famous composer in the world and so was Handel. Handel was half German, half Italian and half English. He was very large.

16. Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.

17. The nineteenth century was a time of a great many thoughts and inventions. People stopped reproducing by hand and started reproducing by machine. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up. Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper, which did the work of a hundred men. Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis. Charles Darwin was a naturalist who wrote the Organ of the Species. Madman Curie discovered radio. And Karl Marx became one of the Marx Brothers.

The Muppets perform Queen’s legendary song, Bohemian Rhapsody.

Obama’s Home Teleprompter Malfunctions During Family Dinner

Looks like we aren’t smart enough to be trusted to do things on our own so we have to cede our ketchup privileges. Great satire btw, I hope people “get it” but something tells me we’ll have some out there that won’t have a clue what they’re really talking about here.

Article at The Onion

“From now on, those seeking extra ketchup will be required to submit a non-stained written application.”

This post comes from an article at The Onion that I came across today, and felt that it needed to be shared. It is a good satire of people that wish to twist the constitution to make it fit their own agenda, and applies to more than just the group of people mentioned in the article, obviously conservatives.

I take issue with only one part of the article, though I could just be mistaking it for satire, which is possible. I’ll address it anyways though. “Dad’s great, but listening to all that talk radio has put some weird ideas into his head, said daughter Samantha, a freshman at Reed College in Portland, OR. He believes the Constitution allows the government to torture people and ban gay marriage, yet he doesn’t even know that it guarantees universal health care.”

I hope thats a satirical shot at proponents of universal health care, and not a “matter of fact” statement.

An emergency services dispatcher in Tampa Bay, Florida got a surprise phonecall last Wednesday when a man called 911 looking for sex. He made sexual comments towards the operator and even asked to come over to her house. The operator hung up on the man, who ended up calling back four more times after claiming that since his phone was out of minutes, 911 was the only number he could call.

Fifteen minutes later police arrived at twenty-nine year old Joshua Basso’s house. When police arrived, he claimed that he didn’t think that he could get in trouble for calling 911. He is currently being held without bond and has a criminal history of theft and other crimes dating back to 2001.

The issue here was plainly stated by Joshua “he claimed that he didn’t think”, which I’m sure to this day he is still not doing.

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN— According to sources at the Pentagon, American quagmire-building efforts continued apace in Afghanistan this week, as the geographically rugged, politically unstable region remained ungovernable, death tolls continued to rise, and the grim military campaign persisted as hopelessly as ever.

In fact, many government officials now believe that the United States and its allies could be as little as six months away from their ultimate goal: the total quagmirification of Afghanistan.

“We’ve spent a lot of time and money fostering the turmoil and despair necessary to make this a sustaining quagmire, and we’re not going to stop now,” President Barack Obama said in a national address Monday night. “It won’t be easy, but with enough tactical errors on the ground, shortsighted political strategies, and continued ignorance of our vast cultural differences, we could have a horrific, full-fledged quagmire by 2012.”

Added Obama, “Together, we can make Afghanistan into a nightmarish hell-scape Americans will regret for generations to come.”

The U.S. plan to build a lasting quagmire in Afghanistan calls for the loss of at least 5,000 coalition troops, nearly 1,500 of whom have already been killed, and a wasted investment of nearly $1 trillion, a quarter of which has thus far been spent.

Article continued at The Onion

Reality?

Posted by David Boaz

I wrote in Libertarianism: A Primer, “One difference between libertarianism and socialism is that a socialist society can’t tolerate groups of people practicing freedom, but a libertarian society can comfortably allow people to choose voluntary socialism.” (In the final section, “Toward a Framework for Utopia.”)

Now Ira Stoll notes the irony that it was very successful capitalists who put up the money that allowed Michael Moore to make his anti-market screed Capitalism: A Love Story: Story at CATO

Another great blog post from my favorite author, Max Barry

Nine girls were trapped in a big house in Turkey, their every move filmed for the titalation of their captors. Not recently. This was about a month ago. I’m only mentioning it now because a month ago my brain wasn’t working. Back then, I just thought, “That… irony… blog.” That’s as far as I got. But I’m feeling better now, thanks for asking.

So the interesting part is that the girls thought they were on Big Brother. According to reports:

…the women were not abused or harassed sexually, but were told to fight each other, to wear bikinis, and to dance by the villa’s pool.

Upon discovering this was not for a national TV audience but just a couple of horny old men who owned the house (I’m guessing), the girls reacted badly. Apparently they demanded to be released. But they’d signed contracts, promising to stay for at least two months, and the contracts had some pretty serious penalty clauses: tens of thousands of dollars if the girls left early. I guess you call that a pay or play deal.

The girls took the position they’d been duped, so they were essentially being kidnapped. When the police found out, they agreed.

Me, I’m not so sure. It seems the girls’ main objection is that while they were wearing bikinis, dancing by the pool, and talking about their most embarrassing sexual experiences (I’m guessing), not enough people were watching. These degrading, exploitative acts they were pressured to perform, they weren’t broadcast on prime-time. The problem was there was no fame. The mother of one of the girls said:

We were not after the money but we thought our daughter could have the chance of becoming famous if she took part in the contest. But they have duped us all.

Being watched by two sleazy guys wasn’t enough. If it were millions of sleazy guys, that would be okay. But two? That’s sick.

DAYTON, TN—A steady stream of devoted evolutionists continued to gather in this small Tennessee town today to witness what many believe is an image of Charles Darwin—author of The Origin Of Species and founder of the modern evolutionary movement—made manifest on a concrete wall in downtown Dayton.

“I brought my baby to touch the wall, so that the power of Darwin can purify her genetic makeup of undesirable inherited traits,” said Darlene Freiberg, one among a growing crowd assembled here to see the mysterious stain, which appeared last Monday on one side of the Rhea County Courthouse. The building was also the location of the famed “Scopes Monkey Trial” and is widely considered one of Darwinism’s holiest sites. “Forgive me, O Charles, for ever doubting your Divine Evolution. After seeing this miracle of limestone pigmentation with my own eyes, my faith in empirical reasoning will never again be tested.”

Added Freiberg, “Behold the power and glory of the scientific method!”

Continued at The Onion

Two thugs who attacked what they thought were a pair of transvestites picked on the wrong men – when their intended victims turned out to be cage fighters on a night out in fancy dress.

Dean Gardener, 19, and Jason Fender, 22, singled out the two men walking along a street in wigs, short skirts and high heels.

Bare-chested Gardener was caught on CCTV confronting one of the men in a pink wig, black skirt and boob tube – then seen swinging a punch, a court heard.

But the other cage fighter, wearing a sparkling black dress and matching long wig, sprang to his friend’s help, delivering two lightning-quick punches to the two stunned yobs.

The cage fighters were then seen teetering away in their high heels, stopping only to pick up a clutch bag they dropped during the melee.

Gardener and Fender were left dazed and seen staggering to their feet after their failed attack. The Daily Mail

This is the real world folks, lol. A video of a answering machine message for a school in Australia.
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1212601907690

Best tech support call ever!