This ad proves what I’ve suspected all along: I am as good a director as Oliver Stone. That’s the best Oliver Stone comes up with? It’s not even 30 seconds and I’m bored half way through. I’m sure Army Sgt. Bruhns’ message is important, but Stone totally loses my attention after about 10 seconds.

I can see his attempt to convey a simple yet powerful message through an equally simple and powerful visual, but I have to give him an E for effort. I wouldn’t expect him to get all flashy and “NBK” on us, use multiple stocks and lots of impressionist imagery, but c’mon…do something more than any other numbskull on youtube could have done.

Now, I may be wrong, this may not be the official Oliver Stone ad, it may just be a “hey, this is the guy who’s gonna be in the Oliver Stone ad – can you bear to wait for it?” promo. A trailer for the upcoming epic ad, which will expand upon the 29 second promo with 8,790 additional seconds of paranoid delusion. But if this is really the ad…? Yikes, Ollie’s losing his touch.

Update: And here is the extended directors cut with an alternate ending, further embracing the now cliche “youtube style”.

Update II: Stone, take notes. This is how you make a simple yet powerful 29.5 second spot. Like yours, it’s nothing flashy to get in the way of the message, but it’s shot and edited to compliment the story, grab the viewer’s attention and move forward with energy. And unlike your extended director’s cut (see above update), it doesn’t bore the viewer with cliche, amateur video/faux-youtube stylings that are just stale and done (seriously, someone get the word to Madison Avenue)

“I promise you the disaffected will watch him the way they watched ‘Natural Born Killers.’ I know. I examine these people,” he said. “I’ve examined mass shooters who have told me they’ve watched it 20 times. You cannot saturate the American public with this kind of message.”

Welner maintained, however, that he was not blaming the media for airing the footage.

“It’s not an issue of blame. It’s an appeal. Please stop now. That’s all,” he said. “If you can take [talk show host Don] Imus off the air, you can certainly keep [Cho] from having his own morning show.”

“They turn themselves into icons. They get articles written about themselves in The New York Times. This is perversion. We have to send a message to alienated people, you know what? You hate everybody around you? You’re paranoid. You’re sad. You’re depressed. But these people are perverts,” Welner said.

“They’re … not powerful. He’s a weak link. He needs to create and produce his own picture in order to give himself a sense of power. Nobody saw him that way. He didn’t see himself that way and that’s why he set this up and he did this to achieve immortality. We have to stop giving him that and we can do it now.”

Amen.

If you’ve been reading the papers and you have spotty knowledge of history, you might be forgiven for thinking that the shootings this week were the “worst mass murder in U.S. history.” If you’re a journalist with a lot on your plate, you may have forgotten the mass murder of September 11, 2001, which left over 3,000 dead. Then again, that was nearly six years ago & all.

[.....]

Truth is, the Virginia Tech shooting rampage, while tragic, was not “the worst mass murder in U.S. history.” It wasn’t the “second worst mass murder in U.S. history,” or even the third, or the fourth.

The 9/11 attacks (2,998 deaths), the Oklahoma City bombing (168 deaths), the HappyLand arson (87 deaths) and the Bath, Michigan bombing (45 deaths) all claimed more victims than the Virginia Tech shootings (32 deaths).

The Jawa Report also picks up on this post at the Plains Feeder asking the question, worst school killing?

The media is noting that the Virginia Tech massacre on Monday is the very worst school killing ever in America since Charles Whitman went nuts on the Texas Tower. The media bias against the Second Amendment shows clearly in this assertion. The fact is, the 1927 Bath, Michigan school killings had a death toll of 45 with 58 injured. So why doesn’t Andrew Kehoe, the Bath killer, get any mention? Kehoe didn’t use a firearm! He blew up the school with a bomb. No gun control mileage here. Into the wastebasket of history goes the Bath School tragedy. No useful purpose.

Hattip: Michelle Malkin

MIAMI (Reuters) – Global warming could increase a climate phenomenon known as wind shear that inhibits Atlantic hurricanes, a potentially positive result of climate change, according to new research released on Tuesday.

The study, to be published on Wednesday in Geophysical Research Letters, found that climate model simulations show a “robust increase” in wind shear in the tropical Atlantic during the 21st century from global warming.

Wind shear, a difference in wind speed or direction at different altitudes, tends to tear apart tropical cyclones, preventing nascent ones from growing and already-formed hurricanes from becoming the monster storms that cause the most damage.

You see… it’s perfect. If we have an active 2007 season it’s because of global warming. If we have another dud… That’s right; more proof of global warming. You really can have it both ways.

Sounds to me like the Earth is in perfect balance.

In recent years some scientists have suggested that human-induced greenhouse warming may be increasing the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes by heating up the sea water from which they draw their energy.

In February a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said it was “more likely than not” that humans contribute to a trend of increasingly intense hurricanes.

But researchers in the new study said increased wind shear could counter the effect of warming waters in the Atlantic.

“The environmental changes found in the study do not suggest a big increase in tropical Atlantic hurricane activity during the 21st century,” said Brian Soden, a co-author of the report.

Update: According to an interview with ABC, as detailed in Brian Ross’ “The Blotter”, the mass murderer role player isn’t role playing at all, it’s in fact an overblown case of mistaken identity.

Kudos to Brian Ross for helping this kid clear his name, and rasberries to the very same Brian Ross who earlier on Monday took the opportunity to exploit this tragedy to push his own personal agenda for more gun control by randomly bringing up the unrenewed federal ban on assault weapons:

High capacity ammo clips became widely available for sale when Congress failed to renew a law that banned assault weapons.

[.....]

Virginia law enforcement officials have not identified the weapon used in the shootings today at Virginia Tech, but gun experts say the number of shots fired indicate, at the very least, that the gunman had large quantities of ammunition.

The comments to this particular post are worth a read as one reader after another deftly points out just how much of a tool Ross is.

From The Examiner:

[T]he military flew at least 13 congressional delegations to various destinations during the Easter recess — at an estimated rate of $10,000 or more per flying hour.

The congressional delegation trips, known as CODELs, are paid for by taxpayers. They are supposed to be directly related to members’ official duties, and House guidelines also stipulate that delegations include members of both parties to qualify for military planes — a requirement that Speaker Nancy Pelosi waived for Engel’s group and two other delegations.

“There was a good faith effort made to include Republican members,” a Pelosi spokesman said. “For one reason or another, that did not work.”

I’m sure all the Republicans Pelosi asked were too busy plotting further corruption.

[Rep. Bennie ] Thompson’s office said he toured the Caribbean because he now chairs the Homeland Security Committee and wanted to see vacation hot spots to “examine border security and port security.” Three other members of the delegation also brought along their spouses.

“They are going from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. everyday,” a committee spokeswoman told The Examiner. “They do not have down time.”

I’ll bet! The best snorkling is in the morning. And all that rum tasting can keep you up til all hours. But rest assured, the massage cabanas were determined by the spouses to be low, very low value terrorist targets.

At the Caneel Bay resort, where room rates reach $1,100 per night, the spokeswoman said Thompson and his wife paid the “government rate.” But, according to the reservations department, Caneel Bay doesn’t “offer any government rates.”

“ohhhhh, the government rate, right. Sorry, didn’t hear you the first time. Yes, the government rate is $1,100 per night, slippers and fluffy white robe included.”

The Caribbean trip led by [Rep. Eliot] Engel, who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, explored the “best practices for emergency disaster relief” and energy policy, according to his office.

Traveling with Engel and his wife were Reps. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Tex., and Barbara Lee, D-Calif. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., who went to Belgium in a delegation led by Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., earlier in the week, also joined Engel’s Caribbean trip. She brought her husband with her.

No comment.

Rep. Jim Oberstar, D-Minn., also led a trip to Belgium over the two-week Easter recess. In February, Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, took a delegation there.

“We’re at war with Iraq and Afghanistan, but apparently our members see Belgium as our most urgent international destination,” scoffed one Republican member of Congress.

The driver of the other vehicle, Hector Velazquez-Nava, 24, of Los Angeles was arrested and booked for investigation of driving under the influence of alcohol and gross vehicular manslaughter. He was being held on $100,000 bail.

Only thing is, Velazquez-Nava is not “of Los Angeles”. He’s “of Mexico”, in the USA by way of the hole in the fence. He’s what you might call an undocumented non-American. An Unassimilated. An Immigrant. Or more politely, an Illegal Alien. Actually, they say “Illegal Immigrant” – I guess that’s the accepted PC term now. Whatever you want to call him, nowhere in the WaPo story do they mention that. Even the LA Times mentions it in their gruesome depiction of the murder.

The high-speed collision left the mangled vehicles about 100 feet apart amid a long trail of debris, including parts of wheels, undercarriages and axles.
…..
The passenger sides of both vehicles sustained the heaviest damage, indicating that Velazquez-Nava may have swerved toward the ocean and Clark the opposite way as they collided at high speed.
…..
Police haven’t finished their investigation, Fischer said, but it appears the Yukon entered the southbound lane and Clark, 67, swerved left in an attempt to avoid the collision. The first of several calls to 911 came at 2:24 a.m., Fischer said. Paramedics arrived shortly after. The Clarks, who were pinned in the wreckage, were pronounced dead at 2:34 a.m. Fischer said he didn’t know whether the Clarks were wearing seat belts or whether their vehicle air bags had deployed.
…..
Velazquez-Nava, who was wearing a seat belt, got out of the SUV and was walking around after the collision, Fischer said. His passenger, Lydia Mora, 29, of Azusa, was treated for minor injuries and released. Velazquez-Nava had a blood alcohol level of 0.24 percent, three times the 0.08 legal limit for driving.

Velazquez-Nava shouldn’t have been in this country, not only because he was here illegally, but because he had already been arrested and sentenced in a prostitution ring two years back and should have been deported then.  If we were a little more vigilant about our immigration laws and a little less worried about offending the criminals in our midst, Bob and Ariel Clark would be alive today.

In 1999, smelly hippies and communists from all across the country converged on Seattle in the name of the poor and destitute of the world, to save and protect them from the evil corporations that rule the planet. What better way to help the poor than to kick in store windows, throw firebombs and generally stink up the place?

This week’s issue of Forbes carries an article outlining the benefits the poor countries of the world have realized thanks to the very globalization that was supposed to “crush”, “oppress”, and “impoverish” them, according to groups like Public Citizen.

The business-bashing group Public Citizen argued as much in a proclamation signed by almost 1,500 organizations in 89 countries in 1999. Whereupon hundreds of protesters rioted outside a conference of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, shattering windows, blocking traffic and confronting cops armed with tear gas and pepper spray. Six hundred people were arrested.
…..
Cut to 2007, and the numbers are in: The protesters and do-gooders are just plain wrong. It turns out globalization is good–and not just for the rich, but especially for the poor. The booming economies of India and China–the Elephant and the Dragon–have lifted 200 million people out of abject poverty in the 1990s as globalization took off, the International Monetary Fund says. Tens of millions more have catapulted themselves far ahead into the middle class.

Someone once said, “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for life.” Kenyan economist James Shikwati said, “For God’s sake, please just stop [the aid].”

Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.
…..
Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

Which brings us back to the Forbes article and the ever fulfilling promise of globalization:

It’s remarkable what a few container ships can do to make poor people better off. Certainly more than $2 trillion of foreign aid, which is roughly the amount (with an inflation adjustment) that the U.S. and Europe have poured into Africa and Asia over the past half-century.

Globalization is helping the poor of the world a lot more than anything these useless hoodlums are doing.

Feinstein was chairperson and ranking member of MILCON for six years, during which time she had a conflict of interest due to her husband Richard C. Blum’s ownership of two major defense contractors, who were awarded billions of dollars for military construction projects approved by Feinstein.

Here’s the hard hitting national media coverage

No, wait, I’m sorry. HERE’s the hard hitting national media coverage.

Hmm, that doesn’t seem to be it either. Okay, I found it, Senator Feinstein talking about resignation.

Oh well, it’s not important anyway, is it?

“Did I ever want to acquire the Sixties? No. But I own the Sixties I’ll give ‘em to you if you want ‘em. You can have ‘em.” – Bob Dylan, in a recent Rolling Stone interview.

John over at Last Train Out of Hell directed me to this interetsing article about Bob Dylan entitled “What Dylan Is Not: Poet Laureate of the Left, for one” at the Weekly Standard.

[T]he Vietnam war is the seemingly unbreakable link that ties Dylan to the left in the popular consciousness. Consider: Dylan wrote no songs about the Vietnam war during the 1960s. Zero. The songs Dylan wrote that antiwar protesters later seized upon (from Blowin’ in the Wind on down) were written when the Vietnam war was little more than a twinkle in John F. Kennedy’s eye. A close study of those songs would also reveal, as Dylan himself has stated in so many words, that they are not “antiwar” songs, as such. Just as with all his best work, they are based upon an almost unerring sense of human nature and a remarkable ability to ask questions that provoke revealing answers in the listener.

Dylan took a lot of flack for not being outspoken about the Vietnam war. He even had protesters outside his house who “were unhappy with the records their ‘leader’ was making” (a country album in 1969? How dare he.) It makes me think of the lesbian backlash against Ani Difranco when she revealed she was dating (gasp!) a man (emphasis added). How dare she go against the lifestyle of her self appointed followers?

Despite the heat he took, he backed down not one bit. In an interview in Sing Out! magazine in 1968, Dylan was pressed on how any artist could be silent in the face of the war. Dylan talked about a painter friend of his who was in favor of the war, and said that he “could comprehend him.” Pressed further on how he could possibly share any values with such a person, Dylan responded: “I’ve known him a long time, he’s a gentleman and I admire him . . . Anyway, how do you know that I’m not, as you say, for the war?”

Granted, the writer is not making the point that Dylan is a “conservative” (perish the thought), but that he is potentially at the very least not a leftist/liberal/progressive/whatever they’re branding themselves these days, as has been assumed all these years.  Have a read.

Now, I’m no scholar, but I’m pretty certain that Nixon did not start the Vietnam war.

That got me wondering: Nixon ended the war, but he’s blamed for starting it. And that is the  “history” accepted by the Air America audience. So, question, when Hillary is president and if she should be lucky enough to end the war in Iraq, will those same people blame her for starting it?

(“You’re Fired-Gate™” is a registered trademark of Donald J. Trump and The Trump Organization. )

They’re a useless nuisance. I’ll never understand why people think they’re more convenient. It takes a dozen of those little crap wrappers to carry what you can fit in one paper bag.

And they hurt your hands when you carry them. Cause what’s the point of carrying just one or two of them? Then you’ll have to make 10 trips to and from your car to carry the groceries inside when you could just make one trip if you had a paper bag. So what do you do? You carry a dozen of those little plastic bitches, tucking one under a finger, hanging another over your wrist and looping more over your thumb, and you end up cutting off all circulation to your hand. Then you get them all home and add them to the collection of 100 other white, plastic bags with which you know not what to do.

I wonder sometimes how many of those little bags have been made, distributed and thrown away. There must be hundreds of millions of them floating around garbage dumps not to mention city streets.

And contrary to anything you may have learned from “American Beauty”, there is no beauty in a white, plastic bag floating in the wind in an urban landscape. It’s trash from its inception and litter the moment you accept at the supermarket. yo yo yo, check it out:

I long ago stopped accepting them. I started to ask for paper bags and as few as possible. Then they’d say, “paper and plastic?” And I say, “are you a fucking moron? Did I say paper and plastic? No, I said paper, please.”

Grocery bagging is a lost art. There was a time when there was actually skill involved. But thanks to the white, plastic bag, now all the baggers ever do is toss a couple random items in a bag together and toss it in your cart. No organization. No cans on the bottom, eggs in the middle and bread on the top. Just a mess of plastic chaos.

If they didn’t have paper bags (“umm, sorry we’re all out”), then I would reluctantly accept plastic bags. And I’d have to watch them because otherwise, they’ll double bag them and then I’ve got twice the eco-disaster squeezing the life out of my fingers.

Now I bring my own canvas bags. They’re easiest bags to carry of the triumvirate, I don’t have bags at home that I am bringing in the door only to throw away seconds later, and the joy that comes from confusing the check out clerk and their bagging buddy when I whip out my canvas cannot be quantified.

I urge all of you to go canvas yourselves. And if the stores know what’s good for them, they’ll drop the plastic bags or run the risk of further lawsuits.

According to a two-count civil lawsuit filed Wednesday in Westmoreland County, Brenda and Ronald Sager contend a plastic bag they brought home from the East Huntingdon Township store last month was deficient and overstuffed.
 
The bag, which contained a 32-ounce jar of Miracle Whip, a 46-ounce bottle of ketchup, three 15-ounce cans of fruit, an 18-ounce bottle of ranch dressing and a 12-ounce bottle of mustard, broke open when the Sagers returned home and started to put away their groceries.
 
That’s when the handle tore and the bottom of the bag broke, the Sagers claim.
 
“… all of the contents of said small plastic bag immediately fell onto and struck the right ankle, foot and toes of the plaintiff, Brenda Sager,” the lawsuit said.

Idiots.

Arguing for the motion were Michael Crichton, Richard Lindzen and Philip Stott, while arguing against the motion were Brenda Ekwurzel, Gavin Schmidt and Richard Somerville. The outcome was decided by audience polling:

In a vote before the debate, about 30 percent of the audience agreed with the motion, while 57 percent were against and 13 percent undecided. The debate seemed to affect a number of people: Afterward, about 46 percent agreed with the motion, roughly 42 percent were opposed and about 12 percent were undecided.

It’s a fascinating debate with excellent points made by both sides. If you don’t want to listen to it or want to read the full transcript, check it out at Crichton’s site and while you’re there, check out his appearance on Charlie Rose, in which the many fallacies of his critics of his position on Global Warming are revealed as well as interesting info on some of his other recent books.

Getting back to the debate, Crichton, in his closing argument, puts forth a simple, inexpensive and immediate solution to the Global Warming “crisis” – and it’s the best solution I’ve heard yet:

There was a time when I worked in a clinic and, uh, one day a young woman came in, she was in her early twenties for a routine checkup and, I said what’s going on with you and she said I’ve just become blind. And, I said, oh my gosh, really, when did it happen, she said, well just, uh, coming into the clinic, walking up the steps of the clinic I became blind. And I said, oh, and I’m by now I’m looking through the chart and I said, well, has this happened before, she said yes, it’s happened before. I’ve become blind in the past, and, what she had of course was hysterical blindness. And the characteristic of that, is that, the severity of the symptom is not matched by the emotional response that’s, that’s being presented. Most people would be screaming about that but she was very calm, oh yes, I’m blind again. And I’m reminded of that whenever I hear, that we’re facing, whether we wanna call it a crisis or not, a significant global event, of, of importance where we’re gonna have species lost and so on and so forth, that we can really address this by changing our light bulbs. Or that we can really make an impact by unplugging our appliances when we’re not using them. It’s very much out of whack. And so if we’re only gonna do symbolic actions, I would like to suggest a few symbolic actions that might really mean something. One of them, which is very simple, 99% of the American population doesn’t care, is ban private jets. Nobody needs to fly in them, ban them now. And, and in addition, [APPLAUSE] let’s have the NRDC, the, the Sierra Club and Greenpeace make it a rule that all of their, all of their members, cannot fly on private jets, they must get their houses off the grid, they must live in the way that they’re telling everyone else to live. And if they won’t do that, why should we.  And why should we take them seriously. [APPLAUSE]

It reminds me of a joke I heard on evil, arch conservative, ultra right-wing conspiracy talk radio: All the potential “first ever minority” presidential Democrat candidates are only half minorities – Richardson is only half Hispanic, Obama is only half African-American, and Hillary…

In case it’s changed overnight, here’s a screengrab:

(click to enlarge). (pun intended)

Update: