Dear McCain, I’m confused

Gov. Sarah Palin, center, and the MILF Marauders.

Yes, I understand the superficial, just-for-the-election reasons why Sarah Palin was chosen. She is a walk-the-walk pro-lifer, has little political experience that can be dug up and scrutinized, might peel off a few Hillary voters and looks smashing in a skirt and spectacles.

What I don’t understand is how this redneck princess is going to run the country when McCain’s old ass inevitably kicks the bucket. Alaska has a population of about 600,000. That’s 200,000 less than Prince George’s County, MD. This woman is WAY out of her depth. She has not seen ugly politics. Her biggest scandal so far is being accused of trying to force the firing of a state trooper, because the trooper was having domestic issues with his wife, Palin’s sister. This is Hazard County politics, not D.C. She is going to get rolled, especially when Rule 34 rears its ugly head (VPILF.com?).

I cannot imagine this woman, lugging her “first dude” and five little crotch fruit across the globe to face down the Russians and the Chinese in high-stakes negotiations. She once, somewhat disingenuously, claimed to not know what the vice president even does. I give Palin credit for calling Senator “Demigod” Stevens to the carpet for his shenanigans, but a leader has to do more than lob bombs.

Obama may be green, but Palin has barely sprouted.

Lock, stock and two Smilin’ Bobs

Something tickled my funnybone when I read that the founder and president of Berkeley Nutraceuticals - the company promising you a bigger willy if you take their useless Enzyte sugar pills – got 25 years in Federal PMITA Prison today for ripping people off. It wasn’t the fact that this cheeky con got his just desserts that amused me, though. It was the revelation that his company would require customers to provide a notarized statement from their family doctor attesting that the customer did, in fact, have a small penis before giving them a refund.

This scam sounded really familiar to me…and I found the source:

book review: Spook Country by William Gibson

William Gibson, the author who coined the term “cyberspace,” has seen the metaverse, and he is not bloody impressed. So, his latest novel, Spook Country, envisions a near future where the internet “everts” into the real world, where real life objects and locations are tagged and linked and digitally altered, at least for those who have special headsets to see it. If this sounds familiar to you, it’s because Gibson has recycled this idea from an older book – Virtual Light.

This is no great crime, Gibson repeating himself. Gibson writes his novels in general trilogies – the Sprawl Trilogy, the Bridge Trilogy and now the Blue Ant/Bigend trilogy. Each trilogy has moved steadily away from the fantastical comic book world of The Sprawl’s Neuromancer as the accelerating pace of technological change has nearly overtaken the science fiction genre. Spook Country finds Gibson smack in the middle of the overwhelming interconnectivity and growing social paranoia that his first six books foreshadowed, and he’s trying to understand and humanize it.

This is a new place for Gibson, who has been used to getting by on visionary prophecy and aggressive styling. Spook County doesn’t use those crutches and actually has to tell a story … about people … with a narrative arc. I think it has made Gibson a better writer. He is still obsessed with ass-kicking women protagonists and has an unhealthy level of Mac lust, but his characters are finally getting round and believable. This is an encouraging direction.

Bonus book review brief: Rapture Ready by Daniel Radosh
Cheeky bunch, those Jews. Whether they are attempting to live the commandments of the Bible literally to show us just how ridiculous they all are or, as Radosh does, exposing the Christian media industry as just another cynical corporate exploitation of a subculture, they keep the fundies on their toes. If reading the Bible for yourself doesn’t illustrate just how crazy you would have to be to take any of if literally, then reading Radosh should do the trick. This is a much more open-minded and sympathetic take than I would have done.

he’s normal, honest

It’s family night at the Democratic National Convention. Candidates’ wives drink for half price and the relatives all get in free. Thanks to NPR’s slavish coverage, I got to hear all kinds of speeches and focus-tested media packages from the Dems about how normal, God-fearing, mother-loving and not Muslim Barack Obama is … really.

John McCain’s hapless campaign is not wholly to blame for this parade of schlock, but it did egg it on with the infamous Paris Hilton ad. By making this race about Obama’s personal charisma, McCain has invited the Dems to compare Obama’s gorgeous wife, perfect children and adoring siblings to McCain’s facial bulge and pimp momma wife, both of which strike fear into the hearts of small children.

Cindy McCain is tired of your shit.

We all know that the conventions are supposed to be infomercials for the two parties, since any genuine drama would be disasterous to Nancy Pelosi’s declaration that this convention WILL NOMINATE BARACK OBAMA AND JOE BIDEN TO BE THE NEXT PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES PAUSE FOR APPLAUSE. And we know the Dems are running low on cash at the moment. But does the show really have to be this bad?

the pale papists perscribe pandering

The “scrappy kid from Scranton?”

When I left for vacation, the CW was that Obama wasn’t Jewish or Southern enough to pull away from McCain in the polls. The solution? Pick Tim Kaine of Virginia to make that purple state finally turn blue.

Then, while returning home on the cursed Jersey Turnpike, I stopped for lunch and overheard CNN declaring that the choice of Joe Biden for veep candidate was brilliant, because it will help Obama with his new deficiency – white Catholics. So this is the new micro subgroup who is going to deliver his 51% victory? It sure as hell isn’t going to soothe the chapped hides of Hillary supporters.

Yet, I see no reason to abandon my bold prediction that Obama will hammer McCain in November, at least in the popular vote. I remain strongly resolute, because the tracking polls have been so bad this year, and the media has been recently working very hard to turn this back into a ratings-grabbing horse race, rather than a boring over-by-halftime blowout.

Obama’s machine far outclasses McCain’s. It’s general election time, and Obama will “go negative,” blowing two large holes in the kneecaps of McCain’s flimsy rebel image. And McCain will pick a safely centrist running mate (Lieberman?) in search of the ever elusive “independent” voter, further alienating the rabid wing of the GOP base that delivered Bush to office twice.

That, and McCain just looks awful on television.

Update: Richard Cohen, the Post’s resident Bitchy Jew, charges that Biden doesn’t know when to shut up and manages to use the word “gentleman” as an insult. One of his better columns.

Impressions: Stongbad’s Cool Game for Attractive People Ep. 1

Strongbad's Cool Game comes with everyone you see here. Extra storage not included.

If Gamefaqs is correct, I am nearly done with the first episode of Stongbad’s Cool Game for Attractive People. I can’t imagine what kind of geek sat down and beat this game in the last two days and then had time to post a walkthrough to help out impatient people like me. Bless ‘im anyway, the li’l sexless freak.

I have been pleasently surprised by the game’s quality, writing and attention to detail. I was not expecting a $10 WiiWare game to include features like picture messaging, minigames and subquests. Nor did I expect all of the dialogue to be spoken. I really don’t follow the Homestar Runner site much anymore, but I still got most of the game’s jokes. Personalized Teen Girl Squad cartoons? Awesome.

There’s really not much “game” here, but what do you expect from a point-and-click adventure? Telltale knows how to do interactive cartoons, and that’s what this is.

I’m now considering purchasing the whole series, but I might go ahead and do it on PC, instead of the Wii. While using the Wiimote is nice, dealing with the Wii’s resident memory issues is not. Nintendo really needs to fix this problem by the time Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures come out.

A legend in his own mind

Since the New York Times wrote its hacker story, I have been fascinated with this “weev” character for both professional and personal reasons. The story was full of jounalism code like “claimed” and “boasted.” When a journalist, even a feature writer, deviates from the good old “said” or “stated” to use words like that, he is sowing doubt about his subject.

Unlike other feature writers, who have taken punks like this at face value, Mattathias Schwartz used those words to strongly signal that he thinks weev is full of shit. He signaled again when a Rolls Royce appeared in a strip mall parking lot, and weev called it ”my car.” Schwartz wryly wrote, “And it was, for that night and the next, at least.” Schwartz also took pains to mention that he always met weev at the train station and that it took a month before weev found Schwartz’s social security number. I’m thinking weev had to scrape together $50 for a Choicepoint report. Schwartz also theorizes that weev’s digs were actually his girlfriend’s.

This is not the first time weev has been called out for spewing sheer bull. If Google Video is to be believed, “weev” was once Andrew Wbeelsoi (Weevlos?), whose sole claim to fame in the real world was giving a talk at a hacker conference in SanFran two years ago with his inarticulate douche friend Mischa Spiegelmock. Pseudonyms? I hope so. At any rate, the two claimed to have hacked Firefox in 30 ways, only to have their claims debunked. After giving a drug-fueled public speech about using a bot net to create an underground market for assassination, drugs and whatnot, weev got worked over by two FBI agents and scared shitless, as the story goes.

Now weev trolls the web pseudonymously, and, despite his rant about bloggers in the pages of the Times, he little squirt actually runs a precious Live Journal blog in which he recycles Nazi propaganda and Ayn Rand philosophy in a toxic, malliable mix that justifies his parasitic lifestyle. What cracked me up the most about his blog – aside from the messianic complex, false arrogance and fluffy, SoCal take on Social Darwinism – was his absolute failure to recognize (or acknowledge?) that he just got owned by the NYT. His words:

“I while ago I met with Matt Schwartz from the New York Times Magazine, under the explicit condition that I would be covering philosophy and history and not my personal business. I feel I didn’t really get what I want out of this exchange, as the important philosophy I conveyed to him was only conveyed in short bits that I think were taken out of context.”

That, weev, is because Schwartz quickly sized you up as a blowhard freak and decided to get some frequent flier mileage out of you. Over at Something Awful, weev’s claims are being roundly ridiculed in this thread as well. But Corrupt.org, which appears to be the vanity project of one Alex Birch, has given weev a soapbox.

suck it, noobs!

Yeah, we all know about your 100 percent completion on Kill Blood Death 6. What…ever. But this, children, this is the ultimate achievement unlock. Behold, 500 points and a full graph on the Everybody Votes Channel. It takes a real man to read the zeitgeist.

/b/lowout

We just hit critical mass.

An article that will appear on the New York Times Magazine this Sunday hit the web site today, and it’s a 7-page primer for the rest of the Boomer culture vultures on “the 4chan,” sort of. It punches all of the gut buttons – /b/, the “an hero” meme, cyberbullying … Starbucks?

I would just like to state that I was in the shit a whole two months before bored, underemployed interventionists and paranoid parents arrived to demand that “something must be done!” … most likely something expensive that involves onerous legislation and new government jobs.

My favorite part of the article was the interview with the supposedly legendary hacker “weev,” who did his level best to portray himself to the reporter as some kind of shadowy Batman character who can digitally ruin lives and summon Rolls Royces and candlelit dinners at will. I’m all prepared to believe it until the stupid druggy bum starts talking about how religious figures are his favorite trolls, an idea ripped straight from a William Gibson novel…I think. Anyway, I backtracked through the article and realized that most all of the ideas falling out of this guy’s mouth were already chewed through, spit out and formed into easily digestible nuggets for people like him.

Update: And then I found his LiveJournal. Holy batshit. Delusions of grandeur much? Oh, and here is the video of the lecture referenced in the article. Yeah, this guy is your criminal mastermind.