STRANGE TIMES

A very smart computer hacker with appalling relationship skills pisses off his girl friend so much that she calls  him a low life and leaves. To take revenge and impress his lost love he somehow – despite his appalling social skills – builds an amazingly successful digital social network worth several billion dollars. In the process he pisses off more of his friends and colleagues who then take him to court to extract their share. He ends up rich and famous but still unfulfilled.

The hate speech from Sarah Palin is truly shocking.  Her liberal opponents would never dream of saying anything hateful about her.  She is so outrageous! She just encourages violence!

Likewise for all those Tea Party types.  Why can’t they be nice and invite their liberal neighbors around for a friendly debate?  I am sure they would be delighted to accept.

Addition by keza:

What you need to understand David, is that liberals are smart and sophisticated, they understand metaphor.  Obama can say things like “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” (his words at a Philadelphia fundraiser, 2008) and of course his clever followers understand that he’s not really talking about shooting people.

But Palin’s followers are crude and uneducated – you  know – literal types,  good with their hands, not so much with their brains – so when Sarah says:

Likewise, an image  such as this one which is part of a series called MILP  (Mothers I’d like to punch) involves a humorous juxtoposition of the words “mother’ and ‘punch” and is just an entertaining way of expressing a deep understanding of the stupidity of  those who can’t see the sinister nature of Palin’s views.

And here’s a YouTube mashup of a bit of liberal word play – far too advanced for Palin types to get their heads around, of course.  It just wouldn’t be possible to engage in anything as sophisticated as real debate with them because their grasp of the language, and their conceptual of the world in general is just far too limited.

“I do think that people are a little kneejerk about the whole environment thing. Some people act like the Earth is broken just because it’s so hot. It’d be refreshing to hear one intelligent person, besides myself, suggest the seemingly obvious possibility that the Earth is just fine, thank you, but perhaps there’s something wrong with the Sun! I’m not a scientist but I’m pretty sure that that son-of-a-bitch is where all the heat is coming from.”

– Arj Barker

I attended the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and saw Arj Barker at the Melbourne Town Hall. The times they are (possibly) a-changin’, and his hour long routine included some very well-received send-ups of green ideology and global warming alarmism. I’ve followed the comedy scene for several years now and usually the jokes are about the ‘deniers’. The beauty of Arj’s routine was that it was very, very, funny but also the routine had a positive message; namely, humans are AWESOME!
No sooner had his espoused his ‘Awesome Human Theory’ than a facebook group had been set up using that name! Borrowing one of Arj’s lines, the facebook group introduces itself thus: “Awesome human theory proposes that humans are not bad for the environment. Rather the environment is simply not good enough to handle how awesome humans are”.
Arj Barker packed out the Town Hall most nights of the festival. I reckon the uber-earnestness and quasi-religious fervour of the alarmists is starting to piss people off (at long last). No-one likes to have a big finger waved in their face telling them they’re wrecking everything. You can either bow down to that crap or rise up against it – and satire/ridicule is a very effective weapon.
The more upset the reactionaries get, the more they wag that finger in our faces – thus proving the point.
I couldn’t find Arj’s routine on youtube but he uses a couple of the lines in this radio interview (goes for 90 seconds): http://www.wmgk.com/shows/john-debella/blogentry.aspx?BlogEntryID=10091870

Great to see some stand-up comedy that challenges the mainstream in a progressive way rather than pander to audience assumptions about things.

(15/4/10 … have replaced video with one which works. The previous version stopped working and would only display a notice reading “Taken down due to terms of use violation” ,  hopefully the one below will remain available)

Here is a US Congressman (Hank Johnson) questioning a Navy admiral about putting more military on the island of Guam.   He suggests that the island could become so populated that it could ..ah …. capsize.

I think everyone will enjoy this (especially Arthur!!)

It’s  200 dancers  taking commuters by surprise at the Central Station of Antwerp with a performance of  “Do Re Mi”.  (Apparently they had only rehearsed together twice!)

Here is nine minutes of Barry’s comedy gig at the  2008 Australian Environment Foundation Conference dinner.

Our report of the conference itself can be read here.

Sweeping away the moribund

Tyranny, in addition to suppressing people’s freedoms, also holds back long-term economic growth and development. When tyrants are overthrown and replaced by something better, an opportunity presents itself for the unleashing of people’s creativity and for the rapid development and exploitation of natural resources as a way of improving living conditions and opening up new opportunities. We see this today, most notably, in Iraq and in Nepal.

In Iraq, the former fascistic regime engaged in devastating military adventures and a nepotistic and bureaucratic centralized control over economic life that held back production. During the decades of Ba’ath dictatorship only 17 oil fields were developed out of a potential 80 fields. Oil production, Iraq’s principal source of revenue, reached at its peak only 3.5 million bpd (barrels per day).

In Nepal, the feudal monarchical system did nothing to develop and exploit nature for the benefit of the people, yet Nepal has incredible hydro-power potential. It could provide cheap and reliable energy from this source for its own people as well as earn vast revenue through the export of power. Nepal’s hydropower potential has been estimated at 84,000 megawatts (84,000 million watts), yet only a tiny fraction has been tapped.

The overthrow of tyranny in both countries, and its replacement with constitutional democracy, is an example of how old realities give rise to new ones, when the old becomes unnecessary and irrational. Continue reading ‘Iraq and oil — the good oil’

Just for fun…..