April 2nd, 2008 by Manila Ryce
You may already know that Barack Obama is a fundamentalist Muslim terrorist who’s unable to answer a phone call at 3 in the morning because he’s out snorting coke with his racist preacher, but did you also know that he sucks at bowling? It’s true. Barack Obama absolutely sucks at bowling. One of the bad things about relying solely on your image to carry your campaign is that if that facade is damaged, you’ve got nothing else going for you.
March 31st, 2008 by J. Milton
The MPAA, RIAA, and Big 4 (Sony, EMI, Warner, Universal) music cartel have declared open-season on all file-sharing. In a whirlwind of lawsuits, press releases, proposed legislation, and frothing at the mouth demands, the entertainment industry has attacked every single head of the file-sharing hydra. For starters, the Big 4 have just filed a $2.5 million lawsuit against P2P icon, The Pirate Bay. This brings the total pending legal actions against my favorite Swedish pirates to a whopping *four*, all of them multi-million dollar! As usual, The Pirate Bay has flipped everyone the bird and is continuing on with their business as usual. Methinks things will heat up for them in the near future, though.
Next, in the wake of the Comcast ISP Throttle-Gate, the MPAA has come down from the mountain and announced that ISP’s should begin filtering their customers’ internet connections, and looking for copyrighted materials. “Much of the Internet is being clogged up with stolen goods. Basically you have a bunch of free riders who are hogging the bandwidth (and taking) it away from legitimate consumers,” says Jim Williams, the MPAA’s chief technology officer and senior vice president. Riiiight. As a consummate file-sharer (Now, I didn’t tell you *what* I actually share), I can assure you that based on my $165/month cable bill, no one in *this* house is free-riding! Although the big ISP’s (notably Verizon) have generally opposed this measure due to the costs involved, several like Comcast have already begun experimenting with throttling designed to thwart or slow P2P file-sharing. And now, most recently, UK ISP Virgin Media looks set to cave in to the entertainment industry’s demands and actually begin to disconnect file-sharers!
First, let’s deal with a couple of misconceptions. Not all file-sharing involves copyrighted material. In fact, the majority of open source software is distributed via bittorrent, the most popular file-sharing protocol. So in asking ISP’s to inspect their customer’s internet traffic for “unauthorized” media, the entertainment industry has collectively positioned us at the very top of the proverbial slippery slope. Where does the inspection end? Who gets scrutinized? What constitutes unauthorized material? Folks, we are close to a tipping point…
So what’s a netizen who’s concerned about their privacy supposed to do? Well, if you’re a power file-sharer or just a casual web-surfer who doesn’t want someone else reading your email, there are some privacy services that have evolved to address the threat. You simply need to “rent a VPN“. Yes, it’s more money (up to $10 or $20 per month), but your entire internet connection is encrypted and tunneled right past your ISP’s prying eyes. I reviewed a bunch of these services a few months ago, and since then even more have sprung up. Check out Perfect-Privacy, Strong VPN, or VPN boy. Or just google for a VPN-for-hire. Just bear in mind that as our online privacy becomes more restricted, we will need to make a choice or one will be imposed upon us. Protect yourself before you wreck yourself.
March 31st, 2008 by Manila Ryce
President Bush walked into a barrage of boos as he delivered the first pitch at the Nationals Park in Washington, DC last night. Bush plays for the Petro-imperialists, has an average bedtime of 9pm, a death toll of 1.3 million, and closes out his career with 2 stolen elections under his belt. He certainly has secured his place in history.
March 28th, 2008 by evmonk
I wasn’t fully aware of Phil Donahue back in the day when he was dominating daytime talk, but I vividly remember his short-lived show on MSNBC in 2002-03. As a college sophomore watching this country mindlessly head to war, Donahue was literally the only person I remember on mainstream television who consistently challenged the rationale for war. Night after night, he pleaded with Americans to pay attention and debate the disastrous course we were on. Here was a host unafraid to feature topics like the PATRIOT Act, the drug war, and Israel-Palestine, and provide a national platform for guests like Ralph Nader, Barbara Ehrenreich, and mothers of 9/11 victims who opposed war (any war) in their name. He’d run around his studio with a microphone, inviting his audience to engage in the discussion. I even remember at least one show where he was taking live calls in the studio, and I was so excited that someone on cable news was telling the truth that I did something I’d never done before and called (though I didn’t make it on air).
And then on February 25, 2003, less than a month before the Iraq war began, Donahue - then the most watched show on MSNBC - was canceled. An internal memo at NBC spoke of executives’ fears that Phil would be “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” The memo continued, “He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives,” and went on to describe how the Donahue show could become “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”
Everyone knows what’s happened in the world since Phil Donahue was booted out of our living rooms, but what about him? He made a brief cable news cameo in 2005 to belittle and embarrass Bill O’Reilly, and now he’s back with a feature-length documentary on the war that Manila highlighted earlier this week. Good thing there are non-corporate media outlets like The Real News and Democracy Now! who aren’t afraid to put Donahue back on-screen where he belongs.
(See this excerpt from Jeff Cohen’s book for a fascinating behind-the-scenes account of the challenges the Donahue show faced at MSNBC. Cohen was a senior producer of the show, and is the founder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.)
March 25th, 2008 by Manila Ryce
A little Hillary Clinton never hurt anyone, but it sure did scare the hell out of me.
h/t Shoutfile
March 24th, 2008 by Manila Ryce
Following Tina Fey’s shamelessly hollow and, more importantly, unfunny endorsement of Hillary Clinton on Saturday Night Live awhile back, I personally watched the boner stock I had invested in Tina’s geeky hotness take a dive the next morning. After this Reader’s Digest article came out, in which Fey took a shot at Jon Stewart, Daniel O’Brien of Cracked just couldn’t remain silent anymore. The following excerpt accurately portrays the frustration of many a heterosexual man after the devastating boner crash of 2008.
Here’s a tip ladies (that’s not what I meant), if you ever want to get a guy interested, please refrain from mentioning Hillary Clinton… ever. For guys, talking about Hillary with a woman we fancy is like sitting next to grandma at the strip club. Her name is an anti-Viagra neutron bomb destroying the appeal of everything within a hundred block radius.
O’Brien doesn’t have his grievances rooted in Fey’s support of Clinton, but in a few other examples which show Tina’s head is getting a bit too big for her glasses. The only part in which I think O’Brien is alone in his denunciation is that I’m pretty sure every guy who wanted to sleep with Tina Fey before the great Pecker Plague swept America probably still would on account of being guys.
As aggravated as I was to hear Tina disregarding the entire history of male comedy as juvenile, robot-obsessed frat humor, I could forgive her, because she’s a very passionate and outspoken woman, and I think it would be neat to see her naked. But then she went on to commit a most grievous sin. In the interview, Fey very subtly and very briefly calls out one Jon Stewart:
“RD: What pleases you more, applause or laughter?
Fey: Laughter. You can prompt applause with a sign. My friend, SNL writer Seth Meyers, coined the term clapter, which is when you do a political joke and people go, “Woo-hoo.” It means they sort of approve but didn’t really like it that much. You hear a lot of that on [whispers] The Daily Show.”
You thought you could outsmart us by whispering, Tina Fey, but guess what: Reader’s Digest is a magazine. (With words.) Do you have a problem with The Daily Show, Tina Fey? Do you think you’re better than The Daily Show, or that you’re funnier than Jon Stewart? I never thought I’d reach a point in my life where I’d need to choose sides in a Fey-Stewart Feud, (especially one that I’m almost entirely creating), but I can say without a doubt that I choose Stewart. The Daily Show has had some weak spots, but I am fucking thrilled that Stewart is, consciously or not, the unofficial spokesman for my generation. He’s our guy, Tina. First you shit on male comics for not being as attuned to the minutia of human behavior as female comedians (Lisa Lampanelli?), and then you’re dissing The Daily Show? Please pull your head out of your finely-toned ass long enough to hear me tell you how much sex we’re not going to have.
Loads.
Read the entire article here
February 28th, 2008 by Manila Ryce
If there were an award for most self-deprecating host of a late night fake news show, Jon Stewart would be nominated, lose, then berate himself so much for losing that they’d have to give him the award after all. Unfortunately, no one would be watching.
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