“There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets, and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”

-- Katherine Graham, former head of the Washington Post, speaking to a class of CIA recruits.

More fascinating info about the way the elite Washington press corps sees America here.

Mmmm donuts.

Watch and marvel, as Dr Frankenstein Lyle Rossiter, Jr, MD, an actual doctor (or so he claims), fashions, with his own hands and sizzling imagination, a horrible and terrifying creature:

Like all other human beings, the modern liberal reveals his true character, including his madness, in what he values and devalues, in what he articulates with passion. Of special interest, however, are the many values about which the modern liberal mind is not passionate: his agenda does not insist that the individual is the ultimate economic, social and political unit; it does not idealize individual liberty and the structure of law and order essential to it; it does not defend the basic rights of property and contract; it does not aspire to ideals of authentic autonomy and mutuality; it does not preach an ethic of self-reliance and self-determination; it does not praise courage, forbearance or resilience; it does not celebrate the ethics of consent or the blessings of voluntary cooperation. It does not advocate moral rectitude or understand the critical role of morality in human relating. The liberal agenda does not comprehend an identity of competence, appreciate its importance, or analyze the developmental conditions and social institutions that promote its achievement. The liberal agenda does not understand or recognize personal sovereignty or impose strict limits on coercion by the state. It does not celebrate the genuine altruism of private charity. It does not learn history's lessons on the evils of collectivism.

This creature must be made of pure evil! Do you dare read on? Are you brave enough to learn more about this abomination, this so-called "liberal" ?

The liberal cure for this endless malaise is a very large authoritarian government that regulates and manages society through a cradle to grave agenda of redistributive caretaking. It is a government everywhere doing everything for everyone. The liberal motto is “In Government We Trust.” To rescue the people from their troubled lives, the agenda recommends denial of personal responsibility, encourages self-pity and other-pity, fosters government dependency, promotes sexual indulgence, rationalizes violence, excuses financial obligation, justifies theft, ignores rudeness, prescribes complaining and blaming, denigrates marriage and the family, legalizes all abortion, defies religious and social tradition, declares inequality unjust, and rebels against the duties of citizenship.

The StrawLiberal! It's allliiiiivvvve!

Horrible!!! And it gets worse! This hideous monster has made demands of its creator, the amazing Dr. Rossiter! A part of which I shall excerpt here:

I intended to reason. This passion is detrimental to me, for you do not reflect that you are the cause of its excess. If any being felt emotions of benevolence towards me, I should return them a hundred and a hundredfold; for that one creature's sake I would make peace with the whole kind! But I now indulge in dreams of bliss that cannot be realized. What I ask of you is reasonable and moderate; I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself; the gratification is small, but it is all that I can receive, and it shall content me. It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another. Our lives will not be happy, but they will be harmless and free from the misery I now feel. Oh! My creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit! Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing; do not deny me my request!

Sure, cut off from the world - I can get behind that. But, it wants... to... mate?

If you consent, neither you nor any other human being shall ever see us again: I will go to the vast wilds of South America. My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment. My companion will be of the same nature as myself, and will be content with the same fare. We shall make our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as on man, and will ripen our food. The picture I present to you is peaceful and human, and you must feel that you could deny it only in the wantonness of power and cruelty. Pitiless as you have been towards me, I now see compassion in your eyes; me seize the favourable moment, and persuade you to promise what. I so ardently desire.

Dirty fucking pacifist vegan hippy liberal monsters.

You know, when I started this post, I was going to cleverly put links to counter-examples on each of his assertions. But then I realized that I'd have to put links on every single word larger than five letters, and I just ain't got that much jam. So, I'll just go for a TBogg™-style funny-picture post.

P.S., Hopefully this clown's a better psychiatrist than he is an analyst of human motivations.

And...

1. Sea And Cake - There You Are
2. Slint - for dinner... . like half this song is silence...
3. John Coltrane - Hot House
4. Tortoise - Glass Museum
5. Pixies - Monkey Gone To Heaven
6. Rolling Stones - Start Me Up (live)
7. The Pretenders - Louie Louie
8. Audioslave - Drown Me Slowly. Chris Cornell and Rage Against The Machine should be much more interesting.
9. Pink Floyd - Us And Them. Skip!
10. Sunny Day Real Estate - How It Feels To Be Something On. SDRE was the rock.

alas... it's Monday.

TBogg has a clip of an amazing guitar player, Erik Mongrain. Wow. Just wow. He does this two handed tapping thing, where he lays the guitar on his lap and plays it almost like a piano - not like Randy Rhodes or Eddie Van Halen. Be sure to click through to the guitarist's site and check out some of his other video clips.

Music doesn't make people violent. Bad music makes people violent. For example: listening to Nickelback makes me want to kill Nickelback.
-- Brian Posehn

Woman faces fines for wreath peace sign. God throws his hands up in despair and deems humanity "Too stupid to bother with any more." Santa crosses everyone off his List, says "No, even though this woman eventually won, it's too late; you people just aren't worth the trouble. Make your own fucking toys."

Burt Prelutsky is troubled:

Recently, two events took place that bode ill for the future of America. The first of these was the election, which saw such buffoons as Nancy Pelosi, Charles Rangel and Harry Reid, assume power and influence they are no better equipped to handle than Daffy Duck or Elmer Fudd.

Fudd was the old round-faced man who was always shooting people in the face while hunting, right ? Yeah, I think we've got more than enough of those guys.

The second event was the release of the movie, “Borat.” Of the two, “Borat” is probably the more troubling. After all, thinking adults can entertain opposing points of view when it comes to such things as Iraq, the economy and even affirmative action, but I'm afraid that the astonishing box office success of this movie heralds the end of western civilization as we have known it.

Uh oh. There's a bad moon on the rise and the end times draw near ! Some old guy thinks the world is going to hell in a handbasket because people these days are just too dumb!

A few of my friends, knowing what a low tolerance I have for dumb movies, were surprised that I went to see it. Well, naturally I knew that the movie was in bad taste, but I thought that just meant that it trampled all over the tender sensibilities of those who adhere to the strictest tenets of political correctness. I thought that it merely made fun of feminists, minorities and other sacred cows. Instead, I found it was filled with bathroom humor of the first grade level. I would have thought its natural audience would be six-year-olds.

Six year olds ? I think you'd have to be at least ten to truly appreciate the humor in watching a bunch of bigoted misogynistic rednecks letting their inner hate run free on camera. And I'm not sure even a ten year old would understand what's funny about a stadium full of people cheering when Borat says he wants Bush to drink the blood of all the Iraqis.

To my mind at least, it's no coincidence that the name Borat has the same root as such words as bore, boor, bozo and brat.

Right. Now that's the kind of stuff a six-year-old would find amusing.

Many years ago, when fractals were new and exotic, I spent a lot of time creating fractal images. Here is a gallery of images that I use as a demonstration for our ThumbNailer application.

Here's one of my favorites:

I wrote my own app to create them, of course. And spent weeks optimizing the inner loops to run as fast as possible (integer-based math, in assembly. duh). I even went so far as to write my own window-based user interface for the app, so it would be easy for me to use. Note that I didn't write "Windows-based" - No, I actually created my own windowing interface, in a hi-res DOS graphics mode and drew all the stuff myself. This was back in the day before Windows 3.1, and I was trying to copy X-Windows and Solaris, not Windows. It was event-driven, had overlapping windows, sliders, buttons, text boxes and screen savers! Quite slick. I also used the windowing system for a primitive coin cataloging application (during a brief interest in coin collecting).

I can still run the fractal app, but because I can't recompile it (I can't find the VESA graphics libs it needs), I can't change the type of fractals it makes. And I just don't have the energy to rewrite it for Windows. So, it's stuck with basic Mandelbrot calcs forever. So sad.

I finally went ahead and got him... my pet dromaeosaurus.

This is the original image, which used to live here (but has now vanished, in Yahoo's site update).

And this is how it turned out on me.

She (Christy) did a great job, IMO.

And this is what the first bandage looked like after i took it off...

Roaaaarrrrr!