Due to its inflammatory nature, I’m guessing, the latest dispatch from conservative columnist John L. Perry seems to have been scrubbed from his employer site, Newsmax. I managed to find it elsewhere on Newsmax (click here for the original), but check out—and gasp at—Perry’s logical leapfrogging:
There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America?
Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Florida) is hero of the day here at Dangerous Minds. Bravo Congressman Grayson! Nice one!
From left to right: Bay Buchanan, Carrie Prejean, Michele Bachmann, SE Cupp, Star Parker, Phyllis Schlafly, Kellyanne Conway, Ann Coulter, Kate Obenshain, Michelle Malkin, Marji Ross
Mmm…make that “Babe” Buchanan!
Via Fox News
Artist Gehard Demetz was born in 1972, in Bolzano, Italy. Currently he lives and works in Val Gardena on these lifelike woodcarvings.
See more amazing images at Beautiful/Decay
(via Beautiful/Decay)
From the annals of artistic justice, a photo of Chinese artist Chen Wenling?
And he’s wants to tell all you motherfuckers who think you know it all, you don’t know shit. And you can go fuck yourself.
Sobering essay from TomDispatch’s Michael Klare on our dependence on fossil fuels and hows it’s going to get worse—for some time—before it gets any better:
The debate rages over whether we have already reached the point of peak world oil output or will not do so until at least the next decade. There can, however, be little doubt of one thing: we are moving from an era in which oil was the world’s principal energy source to one in which petroleum alternatives—especially renewable supplies derived from the sun, wind, and waves—will provide an ever larger share of our total supply. But buckle your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride under Xtreme conditions.
It would, of course, be ideal if the shift from dwindling oil to its climate-friendly successors were to happen smoothly via a mammoth, well-coordinated, interlaced system of wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and other renewable energy installations. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to occur. Instead, we will surely first pass through an era characterized by excessive reliance on oil’s final, least attractive reserves along with coal, heavily polluting “unconventional” hydrocarbons like Canadian oil sands, and other unappealing fuel choices.
There can be no question that Barack Obama and many members of Congress would like to accelerate a shift from oil dependency to non-polluting alternatives. As the president said in January, “We will commit ourselves to steady, focused, pragmatic pursuit of an America that is free from our [oil] dependence and empowered by a new energy economy that puts millions of our citizens to work.” Indeed, the $787 billion economic stimulus package he signed in February provided $11 billion to modernize the nation’s electrical grid, $14 billion in tax incentives to businesses to invest in renewable energy, $6 billion to states for energy efficiency initiatives, and billions more directed to research on renewable sources of energy. More of the same can be expected if a sweeping climate bill is passed by Congress. The version of the bill recently passed by the House of Representatives, for example, mandates that 20% of U.S. electrical production be supplied by renewable energy by 2020.
But here’s the bad news: even if all these initiatives were to pass, and more like them many times over, it would still take decades for this country to substantially reduce its dependence on oil and other non-renewable, polluting fuels. So great is our demand for energy, and so well-entrenched the existing systems for delivering the fuels we consume, that (barring a staggering surprise) we will remain for years to come in a no-man’s-land between the Petroleum Age and an age that will see the great flowering of renewable energy. Think of this interim period as—to give it a label—the Era of Xtreme Energy, and in just about every sense imaginable from pricing to climate change, it is bound to be an ugly time.
READ MORE: The Era of Xtreme Energy: Life After the Age of Oil by Michael Klare
A community of dwarves has set up its own village to escape discrimination from normal sized people.
Everyone in the mountain commune in Kunming, southern China, must be under 4ft 3ins tall and they run their own police force and fire brigade from their 120 residents.
Now the group has turned itself into a tourist attraction by building mushroom houses and living and dressing like fairy tale characters.
“As small people we are used to being pushed around and exploited by big people. But here there aren’t any big people and everything we do is for us,” said spokesman Fu Tien.
Crusader Cat is a Christian furry who “crusades” for abstinence and against homosexuality. Meanwhile, he posts confessionals to the net about his foot fetish and actually having sex with his cat. Apparently the Internet just lost its collective shit about this guy.
WikiFur says this about him:
Crusader Cat (a brown house cat) is a fursuiter, amateur artist, writer (mostly stage and screen plays), aspiring actor, who plays the bagpipes. He is a Christian fur known for his fundamentalism, and love of Garfield. Crusader Cat is a zealous Independent Baptist who will only read the King James version of the Bible, despises C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, and opposes Christian rock. He makes stage and screen plays with Biblical themes, anthropomorphic cartoons, and Jack Chick style tracts featuring anthropomorphic characters; he brought some of these tracts with him to Anthrocon. Crusader Cat was introduced to the furry fandom when he was 17, through yiff art. As a result, he became fiercely anti-furry. A couple of years later, after discovering and contacting Christian furries, he became more tolerant of the fandom. In March 2008, he decided that becoming a furry could help him deal with some of his issues regarding sexuality, and he attended Anthrocon 2008. Although he has changed his views on furry fandom, Crusader Cat is still strongly opposed to yiff. Before he discovered the fandom, he had struggled with foot fetishism and bestiality.
He also has an Encyclopedia Dramatica entry.
Note to human race: Really?
Seriously?
At least once a year, I find myself watching the Peter Cook-Dudley Moore version of Bedazzled, a film I find both uproarious and poignant in equal measures. Peter Cook, playing perhaps the most charming devil figure in cinematic history, strikes a deal with hapless fry cook Dudley Moore: seven wishes for Moore’s soul (seeking reentry into heaven, Cook’s working his way to a hundred billion of ‘em). The humor is dry (Cook walks in during a Moore suicide attempt and says, “I do hope this isn’t an awkward moment.”), the direction comes via Singin’ In The Rain‘s Stanley Donen.
The Cook-Moore comedy partnership started in England in the early ‘60s with Beyond The Fringe, and then went on to reach even greater absurdist heights with Not Only…But Also. Many of those early clips have migrated over to YouTube, but just today I stumbled across a Not Only… clip I’d never seen before (above), one claiming to be part of a “prize-winning documentary made for Idaho television.”
In it, Cook and Moore perform their faux Beatles diddy, “The L.S. Bumble Bee,” a song described by the 365 Days Project thusly:
The story goes that a few DJs played the record, “The L.S. Bumble Bee,” claiming that it was an unreleased Beatles’ track, or else an advance from their forthcoming, highly anticipated masterpiece “Sgt. Pepper’s.” True or not, the song managed to sneak its way on to several Beatles bootlegs throughout the 1970s, convincing many more that it was an authentic outtake.
In a letter from December of 1981, Moore offered a bit of insight: “Peter Cook and I recorded that song about the time when there was so much fuss about L.S.D., and when everybody thought that “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” was a reference to drugs. The exciting alternative offered to the world was L.S.B.!, and I wrote the music to, in some ways, satirize the Beach Boys rather than the Beatles. But I’m grateful if some small part of the world thinks that it may have been them, rather than us!”
But what really sticks with you is how perfectly this song captures the lollygaggery of the wondrous hippie fantasy machine that was the late 1960s. Its sparse instrumentation, with distant shimmering pianos, screaming babies, and jangly, seagull-like guitar effects set it apart from other psychedelic satires, but it goes further still. Its inviting lyric is more genuinely hallucinogenic than much of what has been labeled “psychedelic” throughout the years.
Don’t miss the “surprise” guest that pops up at the end. Below you can watch Peter Cook, whom Stephen Fry called “the funniest man who ever drew breath,” singing the Bedazzled theme song.
Cook-Moore: At The Psychiatrist
Cook-Moore: At The Art Gallery
Cook-Moore: At The Doctors