Meet the Cute Catherine Zeta Jones Lookalike in charge of Chile's student protest!!

Meet the Cute Catherine Zeta Jones Lookalike in charge of Chile's student protest!!

In keeping up with my world view on political protest going on, I turn to Buzzfeed, cause they break it down to a level where the common internet moron can understand any complex political situation. Just look at this information coming at you;

The 23-year-old is in charge of spearheading a student revolution in Chile calling for better and cheaper education. The latest series of protests has led to a nationwide shutdown. She also happens to look like a young Catherine-Zeta-Jones-meets-Katie-Holmes with a nose ring. Pics and links below.

Tags: "Cute", "Win"

Then it goes on for a while highlighting how "cute" and "Zeta-Jones-like" this protester is:






If that's not creepy as all hell, I don't know what is. Did we take a while to highlight how rugged and handsome Che was? How about how manly and Humphrey Bogart-like Stalin was. How exactly do women tolerate this sort of thing? If I was a woman I would probably suicide bomb something. So I guess the answer to that question is "Barely"

So what the fuck exactly is "Buzzfeed" anyway? It's like reddit - Strike that, the site somehow manages to be worse than reddit by design. but for a more casual internet audience. It seems like it's your top source for cool star wars pictures that were bouncing around the other shitty content aggregators 6 months ago.



FAIL? Seriously? Do people actually talk like that or use words like this in real life? Or should I say IRL? Then again, it wouldn't surprise me if they did. People seem to use words like FAIL in their everyday lingo and it's pretty damn depressing.

The real issue in all this is how we treat, or at the very least see people of power. If they have breast or a vagina then they're classified by how socially acceptable they look as eye candy first and their message they spread second.

I honestly wonder how the media would react if a beautiful female Hitler was to come to power. "Meet the drop dead stunner in charge of holocausting the inferior races! Bikini spread, pg. 10. Wait, I already know the answer to this bullshit.



Meet the new Libyan beauty who executed 10 Prisoners! Do we actually do this for male political figures? Because it's utterly sad that we really do this for any female. Besides that, haven't the police already started shooting people and shit there for all this? It's the first 48 hour general strike since Pinochet... Check out this broad!

Maybe we should look past the good looks and "hot" factor and look at what is exactly going on there. You know, not burring the fucking lead. It's not like we describe the males like this at all:

Meet the cute Dick Cheney lookalike in charge of cracking down on Chile's student protests!



This 49-year-old is in charge of crushing a student revolution in Chile calling for better and cheaper education. The latest series of protests has led to a nationwide shutdown. He also happens to look like a middle-aged Dick-Cheney-meets-Dwight-D-Eisenhower with a vacant, glossy-eyed stare.

Might I also add that Chilean Spanish is literally unintelligible. I guess that's why it's funny. American tourist who think they have a grasp of Spanish go there and are driven utterly insane when they realize Chilean Spanish is a completely different beast. I mean, it's those little things that matter. You know, like the fact that you have this land where Nazism still exist.

I mean, I'm sure Chile has a healthy military cultu-



Don't quote me on this one, but I'm pretty sure that it's a yearly thing too. Chilean soldiers straight up dress like Nazis. What is the deal with that? Or maybe they're just fans of literal goosestepping... It makes you wonder if Chile started with that after WWII to make all the new German immigrants feel more at home.

Anyhow. I got side tracked from the point I was trying to make.. how about we don't focus on who looks like a celebrity and just try to get on with what their message is. You know, politically and all.

Teachers - What Are You Worth

Teachers - What Are You Worth

It's a fact that any given teacher is almost certainly a better person than you; the person reading this blog entry. But the subject title is indeed an actual question. It's one for all you teachers out there and it's pretty simple..

How much are you worth?

Yeah, that sounds pretty harsh but when you think at how little our society views teachers, it's pretty sad. Just look at these following articles if you don't believe me in order to see what the value of a teacher actually is..

What is value-added assessment?

Value-added assessment is a new way of analyzing test data that can measure teaching and learning. Based on a review of students' test score gains from previous grades, researchers can predict the amount of growth those students are likely to make in a given year. Thus, value-added assessment can show whether particular students - those taking a certain Algebra class, say - have made the expected amount of progress, have made less progress than expected, or have been stretched beyond what they could reasonably be expected to achieve. Using the same methods, one can look back over several years to measure the long-term impact that a particular teacher or school had on student achievement.

How is value-added assessment different from traditional measures of student performance?

Student performance on assessments can be measured in two very different ways, both of which are important. Achievement describes the absolute levels attained by students in their end-of-year tests. Growth, in contrast, describes the progress in test scores made over the school year.

In the past, students and schools have been ranked solely according to achievement. The problem with this method is that achievement is highly linked to the socioeconomic status of a student's family. For example, according to Educational Testing Service, SAT scores rise with every $10,000 of family income. This should not be surprising since all the variables that contribute to high-test scores correlate strongly with family income: good jobs, years of schooling, positive attitudes about education, the capacity to expose one's children to books and travel, and the development of considerable social and intellectual capital that wealthy students bring with them when they enter school.

In contrast, value-added assessment measures growth and answers the question: how much value did the school staff add to the students who live in its community? How, in effect, did they do with the hand society dealt them? If schools are to be judged fairly, it is important to understand this significant difference.

I mean, that's just touching on the subject a little bit. Priming you up to deal with the rest of this shit. Cause really, these articles are pretty sad and scary.

John H. Liechty Middle School opened in 2007 in Los Angeles' impoverished Westlake neighborhood with a seasoned principal, dozens of energetic young teachers and a mission to "reinvent education" in the nation's second-largest school district.

The students had come from some of the lowest-performing schools in the city. But by the end of the first year, their scores on standardized tests showed the most improvement in English among district middle schools and exceptional growth in math, according to a Times analysis.

"It was a dream job," said Monique Gascon, who taught English and history at Liechty during its first two years. "We had a lot of autonomy as teachers, we had a lot of support from administration and the kids were really learning. We could see the progress."

But when budget cuts came in the summer of 2009 — at the end of the school's second year — more than half of the teachers were laid off. Among those dismissed were Gascon and 16 others who ranked in the top fifth of district middle school instructors in boosting test scores, The Times' analysis found. Many were replaced by a parade of less effective teachers, including many short-term substitutes.

Now before you people get mad at me for dissing on teachers, let me make myself clear. I have respect for teachers. Any given teacher is almost certainly a better person than you or I. Unless of course you reading this are actually a teacher yourself. In which case, you do the math.

But getting back to the article.

http://www.monthlyreview.org/101201dimaggio.php

Apparently the bullshit in the second article is because of union seniority rules. Then again seniority rules and the way teachers unions work might not be "ideal", but they're pretty far down the list of problems that need fixing in the American public education system.

We first have to get past the notion that a teacher's value added is negative in America. Don't believe me? Look at this sad shit.

Next to Mulgrew was his press aide, Richard Riley. “Suppose you decide that Riley is lazy or incompetent,” I asked Mulgrew. “Should you be able to fire him?”

“He’s not a teacher,” Mulgrew responded. “And I need to be able to pick my own person for a job like that.” Then he grinned, adding: “I know where you’re going, but you don’t understand. Teachers are just different.”

That is the kind of story that makes Jon Schnur smile. Schnur, who runs a Manhattan-based school-reform group called New Leaders for New Schools, sits informally at the center of a network of self-styled reformers dedicated to overhauling public education in the United States. They have been building in strength and numbers over the last two decades and now seem to be planted everywhere that counts. They are working in key positions in school districts and charter-school networks, legislating in state capitals, staffing city halls and statehouses for reform-minded mayors and governors, writing papers for policy groups and dispensing grants from billion-dollar philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates, along with Education Secretary Arne Duncan; Teach for America’s founder, Wendy Kopp; and the New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein could be considered the patron saints of the network.

It's pretty clear that we can't have people getting educated because then they might start to question why they get such a shitty deal and might be cogent enough to blame minorities like we tell them to.

Teachers are really important to a society based on knowledge like our own and the jobs already entails lots of stupid "assessments" that are only theoretically correct. So it's stupid because it makes an already difficult and undesirable job much harder and less fulfilling to achieve.

It ends up being a job where people who are desperate to have work at all take it. People who will jump through hoops to meet standards that are easy to put a good public face on, and most certainly won't teach something that goes against the powers that be. Then you have this side thought that "you can't fire a good teacher as things are" and that might be true, but that's why you force people to talk about substantive solutions and what privatization would create even if it "fixed" the existing problems.

It seems like a sad fact that teachers in this country are never ever going to make a living and probably gonna die in a gutter covered in quizzes with a copy of Zinn rammed down your throat by the pinkertons hired by whatever private school you're forced to work for



So as you can see, any law or reform that would seek to limit the powers or benefits of teachers unions is just a ploy to take a bigger shit on teachers some more. Which I guess leads me to Waiting For Superman.

I finally got around to seeing Waiting for Superman. What a poorly named film. I mean, who would have thought that had anything to do with the school systems with a title like that? But that's probably for the best. After viewing it I have to say that it's a terrible documentary. There's literally a scene where some hack goes "what you've got to keep in mind are two opposing ideas: Teachers unions bad, teachers good." And then I expected it to be the start of a longer thought showing how that dichotomy was wrong but nope. That was the whole thought.

Teachers unions bad, teachers good.

Talk about fucking stupid liberalism at its worse. In any case, I walked away from it with the knowledge that the film maker sure didn't like unions. But maybe I should have seen the warning signs in advance. A pretty decent way to tell if a movie is okay is if they're paying you to see it and Waiting For Superman paid you to see it. Because really, For-profit education is clearly the only way to save our kids.

And don't think this can be solved by simply tossing in the ancient secret art of Charter schools. The dirty truth about charter schools is that the one that haven't been profiled in national news magazines (most of them) are just as likely to fail to educate students as much as public schools are. Especially when you get into the rural areas.

It may come to a bit of a surprise when I tell you that America's schools are literally more segregated now than they were in the late 1960's.

It's actually pretty funny the loops people go through in order to get into one of them. Why yes, let's make children's lives incredibly unstable by using a lottery to determine which one of the poor's get to be drilled hardcore by some privately funded teacher. Oh, sorry kid you didn't get in this year, back to the regular school for you!

I'm also not sure why people blame unions for all of the school system's problems. Okay, I understand why - because they need someone to blame. But I just don't get the logic.

"Gee, I wonder why schools suck these days. It must be those cunt teacher unions!"
*continues cutting education funding*
*teacher salaries remain pathetic*

They'll blame teachers unions first and not go into talks about the poverty levels or the economics and dynamics of a single family home or other factors. Fuck it! It's the teachers unions fault! Not to mention that with the budget cutbacks and layoffs they'd be stupid not to work in a charter school. They at least know they'll have a job next fall. Unlike the new hires in public schools.

In the documentary Waiting for Superman every family shown had only one parent, lived in the projects and poor neighborhoods and at least half of them were first generation Americans. Gee, I wonder why they're not testing well.

There's a really beautifully done (don't think I'm saying "good") bit in the film where a dis-empowered administrator just can't cut through the red tape because of public high school teacher tenure to fire under-performing teachers and it's played up as this big tragedy.

Now if you knew very little about the public education in the U.S.A you're already laughing, but just to make it clear: the only protection tenure offers in public secondary schools is making your annual review semi-annual, and mandating that cause be state when the teacher is fired.

If the administrator wanted to fire the teacher and they were really that bad, all they had to do was raise their voice. But the entire scene with moody music and sad faces is farce if you come into the film with literally any background info at all. The administrator is comically incompetent, either lying through his teeth or astonishingly bad at his job and scapegoating the faculty unions for it.

But again, this is never explained because Waiting for Superman is not about informing the viewer, it's about providing an emotional impression and then offering a solvency that is immediately do-able. The latter bit is why charters are such a big focus because if you have money then it's a thing you can do right now and if you don't have money you aren't in participant media's demographic and can suck a dick about it.

To sum up, the movie basically was all about sending the message that Unions are bad and we should privatize it all. That there's no other factors that come into play in a student's learning besides "ugh, teachers!"

So teachers, please chime in - What exactly are you worth?

A Laborless Labor Day

A Laborless Labor Day

This labor day it seems that with the amount of unemployment going around you'll be surprised to see anyone still even halfheartedly celebrating labor day. Can you really blame them? Just look at the jobs market report that came out late last week where it stated that there was zero jobs growth in August.

August brought no increase in the number of jobs in the United States, a signal that the economy has stalled and that inaction by policy makers carries substantial risk.

The government report on hiring, released on Friday, prompted another round in a relentless diminution of economic expectations. The unemployment rate, at 9.1 percent, did not change last month, and the White House said it was expected to stay that high through at least 2012.

When you factor in other reports that have actual figures

U.S. job growth ground to a halt in August as government layoffs erased meager gains in the private sector. The Labor Department says American businesses added only 17,000 jobs last month, far short of the 100,000 jobs analysts were expecting. To make matters worse, cuts in state and federal employment offset those gains

Add in that they just shut down the space shuttle, so you can add in a few thousand more highly skilled workers to the surplus labor army.

From all this it's pretty clear that the U.S. Government is obviously very much on the side of the people. The proletariat inside of us all. Otherwise explain tome why they're trying to get citizens so angry that they'll rise up and kill it while it says "Finally, the sweet release of death!"

So... not to mention the huge elephant in the room, but who reading this feels good about Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack H. Obama now? Or should I ask if there's anyone who doesn't think that he's such an empty suit? Take a look at the following poll and the results from each group:

Which do you think should be more important for the Obama administration: reducing the deficit, even if unemployment might remain high or creating more jobs, even if it might mean less deficit reduction?
ALL
Reduce deficit: 30
Create jobs: 68

REPUBLICANS
Reduce deficit: 44
Create jobs: 54

INDEPENDENTS
Reduce deficit: 32
Create jobs: 66

DEMOCRATS
Reduce deficit: 16
Create jobs: 83

You see, Obama has been under a lot of pressure from the left, and he allowed himself to be pushed by it... to the right. It's only logical, right?

It seems that the Obama administration is considering adopting the Georgia Works program. This is a program that the government gives people a two hundred dollar a month stipend to volunteer for an unpaid "trial period" at a private company, and the company can decide whether to let go or hire the intern after two months.

At the end of that time it seems that around 59% of the people participating in the program eventually get hired some where, including those who have to go through multiple trials. So Obama's plan to reduce unemployment is literally to "create/expand programs where companies don't have to pay their employees"

God fuckin' damn. What the hell is wrong with this president?

The White House has indicated it is considering something similar as part of a forthcoming jobs package., which the administration may consider politically palatable because it can be seen as kind to businesses and workers both. President Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack H. Obama recently praised the program: "If they hire you full-time, then the unemployment insurance is used to subsidize you getting trained and getting a job."

But the 60 percent of workers who participated in the Georgia program and supposedly found steady work may not have done so. The statistic means only that at some point within 90 days after a person completed the training, the person's Social Security number popped up in state payroll data. It doesn't mean the trainee had a job at the 90-day mark; it could even mean that a person worked just one day during those three months. In addition, economists have not studied the program and there is little data to recommend it.

There is also concern that even though the program is voluntary, Obama's plan of attaching it to the unemployment insurance system could eventually lead to a worst-case scenario in which jobless workers are forced to work for free as a condition of receiving unemployment benefits. Some sources in the US Labor Department are even worried Obama's proposal may run afoul of federal labor laws

Enrollment in the Georgia Work$ program slowed drastically this year after the state labor department restricted access to only those workers receiving unemployment benefits (it had been opened to nonrecipients in 2010). As of this week the state program boasts just 19 trainees.

So let's do a break down on the numbers here.

-$200/month this is fair to both employers and employees

-40 hours/week @$200/month means an hourly wage of about $1/hour

And if you're wondering, yes. That's $200 a month in addition to unemployment payments. Which I guess you may feel like it's nice, but really this whole act is pretty appalling. How can you seriously suggest someone go to work on a trail basis for $50 dollars a week?

I also think it's fairly appalling when companies give college students unpaid internships where they do real work - especially when it's mandatory for the degree in question and say it's okay because they call it "training" so the government allows it.

But hey, I'm a huge commie socialist so what do you know. It's just sad that unpaid jobs have become literally the new normal. Of all the depressing news stories I've read over the last few years, the one about people my age taking an unpaid internship in hopes of a job have been one of the worse.

I still don't know how the following thoughts could go through anyone's head:

"the problem with communism is that nobody will work without getting wages for it"

"abolish all labor laws, and corporations shouldn't have to pay their workers"

I'm amazed that somehow these two thoughts grow and flourish simultaneously in the same mind. Though it seems that

Then again, the same minds that think those things are the ones who honestly believe that when freed of all regulation, corporations will give workers the saved money out of the goodness of their heaaaahahahahahahahahahahha. Okay, I pray no one actually believes that shit. I just don't know how this will work anyway. How exactly does anyone try to sell this bullshit?

"Conservatives will love it because it undercuts worker's rights, liberals will love it because it's stimulative government spending!"

Meanwhile everyone not criminally insane is just going to be scratching their heads and wondering what the fuck here. Oh Obama is a fucking terrible president.

Or maybe it's just that Barack Obama might not be a bad president. In fact, he may be a great president. Only, the difference is that we should consider presidents to be an otherwise terrible thing.

Take for example the media and their occasional comparison of the pictures of a president getting grayer and more wrinkled throughout his term to try to portray him sympathetically. Oh look how this heavy burden weighs upon the crown. But the grim truth is that they are literally eroded, body and soul, by wielding the powerful dark energies of the presidency, in a manner not unlike that of Palpatine's transformation.

What it actually comes down to is that stress doesn't affect hair color and the supposed toll that the presidency has had on recent president's appearances is primarily due to the fact that the last three presidents have been elected during their forties and fifties, a life stage wherein people almost universally experience changes in their physical appearance.

If anything, the presidency does turn you into Reagan as Obama at the very least is making some people some money - Gun runners.

Newly obtained emails show that the White House was better informed about a failed gun-tracking operation on the border with Mexico than was previously known.

Three White House national security officials were given some details about the operation, dubbed Fast and Furious. The operation allowed firearms to be illegally purchased, with the goal of tracking them to Mexican drug cartels. But the effort went out of control after agents lost track of many of the weapons.
The supervisor of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives operation in Phoenix specifically mentioned Fast and Furious in at least one email to a White House national security official, and two other White House colleagues were briefed on reports from the supervisor, according to White House emails and a senior administration official.

But the senior administration official said the emails, obtained Thursday by The Times, did not prove that anyone in the White House was aware of the covert "investigative tactics" of the operation.

"The emails validate what has been said previously, which is no one at the White House knew about the investigative tactics being used in the operation, let alone any decision to let guns walk," said the official, who was not authorized to speak about it publicly. "To the extent that some [national security staff members] were briefed on the top lines of ongoing federal efforts, so were members of Congress."

HA HA HA HA. Obama is literally becoming Reagan. We thought the cough of ûdùn had killed him but he has returned, changed but quite the same! Gone is Reagan the White, all hail Reagan the Black!

Yeah.. in short Happy American Labor Day. Go out and hug a union member while you can still find one.

Entourage is a Terrible Show - Why Can't I Stop Watching It?

Entourage is a Terrible Show - Why Can't I Stop Watching It?

Entourage is terrible. Simply terrible and it's amazing that in one week's time, it will be done with. Look back at the past few week's episodes you'll be amazed to think that this was a "final" season of anything.



What other show would bother putting Andrew Dice Clay into the show on its final season? I guess I'm just one of those who has stuck around this show because it'll be over soon anyway. I can say that there was a few moments that I did get some enjoyment out of so far this season.

-Sloan telling Eric "FUCK YOU" and then seeing Eric rifling through her panties. Why? Who the fuck knows why.

- Ari going to war with Bobby Flay. I mean, this show is all about star-fucking circle jerking anyway, but seeing Bobby Flay come off as an ass.. well, I guess I'm just used to that from all his Food Network shows.

- Billy moaning about Dice... about Drama.. well, about anything. Billy has been the best thing so far this season.



It's strange though. For writing a show about business, Entourage really has no idea how to write about business. Especially last year with the whole "YOU GOT A BUYER TO PAY MANY MILLIONS FOR MY COMPANY?! TURTLE YOU ASSHOLE!" part.

Currently Turtle went to business school, and then decided to sell his shares early of a god damn Tequila company that Mark Cuban is sticking with so that he can start a new business franchise? Seriously?! SERIOUSLY?! He could have gotten a loan to do it using soon to be public stocks as collateral as means to pay for this new clam company.

Why exactly does Turtle have to do his restaurant right this minute? Couldn't he have waited for Avion to go public and then sell? Turtle is a terrible business man. If he had to open the place right away, he oculd have easily gotten Cuban or Vince to help him initially with it. But wait, he wants to do this all by himself... Even though he has Vince doing promotions for it in magazine interviews.



I'm not even sure why Vince is apart of this anyway. Tough choices. Either stay with Mark Cuban and get rich off Avion stock or go with the guy who started Lim-hos? I'm in, Turtle! Then you have Don Pepe being flown out and being nothing but a star struck tourist couple. Which makes me confused as to why these people would even care about going to a Lakers game.

And Clams? Really? I don't see how anyone can consider him maturing when all his ideas seem to be your basic service need with "hot chicks working there" attached to the end of the sentence. I don't even want to think of what he's going to name the place.

But that's not the biggest problem of the show. I think it's really the issue that there's no grand plan. I just can't believe a show about the height of showbiz fame is going to end on a made-for-tv movie, a clam shack and some monkey cartoon with Dice Clay in the mix.

Entourage, how far have you've fallen? We're one episode away and this is utterly what we get? Hell, how many episodes in a row has it been this season that you haven't seen any nudity? That has to be a record for Entourage. Or maybe they just decided to cancel nudity because they have to think of the syndication aspect of the show going to SpikeTV.



Hey Spike, recovering addicts like to fuck too, you know. Speaking of which, they sure dropped that whole side story about the addiction that they ham-fisted into the story last season as quickly as they introduced it. No mention of Sasha and he's able to drop the addiction with no problem.. yeah, that sounds stupid. You put the character in this shitty situation, the least you could do is just try to write him out of it with something that doesn't sound stupid.

I also don't know what the fuck is going on with Sloan and E. Their breakup was off screen and it had to do with Eric not wanting to sign a pre-nup that was mandated by her father. Which I have to admit is pretty sad that you have far more progress to every story off screen then you do during the majority of episodes DURING the season.

Two or three weeks back they also aired a 20 minute episode. 20 fucking minutes. This season is made up of 8 episodes and its the last season and they couldn't even give us eight 25+ minute episodes? At this point it's pretty clear that they just don't give a shit anymore now that they already got the other network to pay for syndication rights.

My biggest problem with it is the fact that here we are with one episode left and this entire season has been aimless and pretty much pointless. Which in Entourage low bar set of entertainment is saying something really sad about the state of the show. That movie that they're leading up to with the last remaining episode really is just not a "must see" sort of thing. Not when it's this shit over and over again.

Spoiler talk for Episode 7

So even tho this show is total shit and really deserves not only a total lack of respect in terms of spoilers, it would be a disservice to you for me not to spoil it for you and warn you on how awful this shit is.

So here's the warning on what used to be a fun escapism show:

Turtle turns to his investors for more money when his business partners eye an expensive property. They start shooting him down and he comes to realize that Avion went public and he just missed out on making millions of dollars. When breaking this news to Vince, Vince ends up telling him that he never sold his shares and actually bought Turtle's under the advice from Mark Cuban. This move makes Vince 15 million and makes Turtle 4 million.

Which having Vince pull a saving move on himself brings me some hope that even he realized how fucking stupid Turtle's decision to sell the stocks was. Again, let me remind you of the past ideas that Turtle came up with:

"Hey, I like that restaurant in New York. I want to put it in LA."
"A lot of celebrities use limos. How about we make the limo drivers hot girls?"
"I'm gonna spend a shitload of money on some fucking sneakers."
"Time to buy a Sandy Koufax jersey with the money I made managing a rapper who stole cars and left his demo CD in the car stereo."
"There's a huge demand for Avion tequila and the company is about to go public. I better sell my stock ahead of time to avoid making any profit."

Then there's Johnny Drama's problem that get solved rather quickly when Phil is given a shit ton of money for a dog charity So I guess the movie is back on.

Then there's E... what the fuck can be said about E. He continuously act like a dick and this week he gets the surprise news - in the final minute before the end of the second to the last episode of the series, that Sloane is knocked up and he's the father. Not only that but she doesn't even want him near her.

Though I have to say, all of that is much better than the "resolution" to Vince's courtship of Sophia. Because as it seems, that's the plot progressing for Vince in what has to be the most creepiest method ever conceived.

Vince, in a hail Mary approach to trying to date Sophia, he video tapes all of his past relationships talking into the camera about how much of a great guy he is, puts it on a DVD and gets Drama to get it to her. Sounds fucking creepy, right?

Well, this gathering of Vince's ex's in a DVD montage of girls he's been with can only lead to good things, right? Yeah. Sadly they do. Him getting a DVD put together somehow convinces Alie Eve's character on what a sweet guy Vince really is - which may have worked great on paper, but in the theater it just comes off as being extremely creepy. The fact that this approach actually worked on the show really made me want to punch my television screen.

Good god this show is terrible. There is literally no point to anything that happens. "You didn't want to date me because you think I act like I care about women in order to get them to sleep with me, so I'm proving you wrong by having all the women I've done that to tell you that I did it, now will you date me? Oh you will! Entourage!"

I'd hoped, HOPED that by the end of the last episode where Vince talked to that waitress girl and found out that he'd banged her sister soon after her, that he'd realize that the journalist was actually right and change his ways. But that would be too much to ask for.

Over all, episode 7 was so bad it actually made me physically cringe and just not want to finish the episode. It seriously boggles the mind that they could have ran this show into the ground any faster.

If it wasn't for the fact that there's only 1 episode left, I would have dropped the show altogether for being so stupid. But as it is, I'm just watching it next week for fucking closure on this god awful thing already.

Burn Notices Going Out

Burn Notices Going Out

So apparently the U.S. government really likes the USA show Burn Notice. Enough to just allow a ton of them out in to the market and potentially help people in trouble on their spare time between over arching season story lines because it looks like a lot of people just got their own burn notice.

WikiLeaks Springs a Leak: Full Database of Diplomatic Cables Appears Online

For the second time in a year, WikiLeaks has lost control of its full, unredacted cache of a quarter-million U.S. State Department cables — and this time the leaked files are apparently online.

The uncensored cables are contained in a 1.73-GB password-protected file named “cables.csv,” which is reportedly circulating somewhere on the internet, according to Steffen Kraft, editor of the German paper Der Freitag. Kraft announced last week that his paper had found the file, and easily obtained the password to unlock it.

Unlike the cables that WikiLeaks has been publishing piecemeal since last fall, these cables are raw and unredacted, and contain the names of informants and suspected intelligence agents that were blacked out of the official releases. Der Freitag said the documents include the names of suspected agents in Israel, Jordan, Iran and Afghanistan, and noted that interested parties — such as the Iranian government or intelligence agencies — could have already discovered and decrypted the file to uncover the names of informants.

“The story is that a series of lapses, as far as I can see on behalf of WikiLeaks and its affiliates, has led to the possibility a file becoming generally available which it never should have been available,” confirmed former WikiLeaks staffer Herbert Snorrason, of Iceland, who left the organization as part of a staff revolt last year, and is now part of the competing site OpenLeaks.

Information about the exposed file and password was also confirmed by the German newsweekly Der Spiegel. According to that publication, the cables were contained in an encrypted file that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had stored on a subdirectory of the organization’s server last year, which wasn’t searchable from the internet by anyone who didn’t already know its location.

Assange had reportedly given the password for the file to an “external contact” to access the file’s contents. With both the file and the password now online, the leak is complete.

“The issue is double: On one hand there is the availability of the encrypted file, and on the other the release of the password to the encrypted file,” Snorrason told Threat Level on Monday. “And those two publications happened separately.”

The password leak was done “completely inadvertently,” Snorrason added. He declined to identify the leaker, or the circumstances of the leak, but said it was someone who was with neither WikiLeaks nor OpenLeaks.

Last year, former WikiLeaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg and another WikiLeaks staffer led a staff revolt at WikiLeaks following a rift with Assange. They finally left the organization and set up OpenLeaks.org. When they left WikiLeaks, they took the contents of the WikiLeaks server with them, which included the encrypted file. Last December, Domscheit-Berg returned most of what he had taken, including the file containing the cables.

Wikileaks supporters subsequently released an archive of the data that Domscheit-Berg had returned, as a public service to provide readers with access to everything WikiLeaks had previously published. But among the documents was the encrypted file containing the cables. Several months later, the person to whom Assange had provided the password somehow made it public online. Der Spiegel doesn’t elaborate on precisely why or how that person published the password, and Snorrason declined to say more, for fear of guiding people to the password.

“It’s not very obvious how the password was made available, and we’re not keen on making it any more obvious how or why it might have been published,” Snorrason said.

Both the encrypted file and password went unnoticed until recently. Der Spiegel implies that Domscheit-Berg or someone else connected to his rival OpenLeaks organization was responsible for calling Der Freitag’s attention to the file and password to make a point that WikiLeaks is unable to properly secure the data it possesses. Domscheit-Berg did not immediately respond to an e-mail query from Threat Level on Monday.

After nine months of slow, steady publication, WikiLeaks abruptly opened the spigot last week on its cable publications, spewing out over 130,000 by Monday afternoon — more than half the total database.

This is not the first time that WikiLeaks has lost control of its database of cables. Last year, as the organization and its media partners were beginning preparations to publish stories related to the cables, a WikiLeaks member gave the database to a freelance reporter, Heather Brooke.

Brooke was not a member of the approved cabal of media outlets that had been given access to the documents and her possession of them threatened to derail the plans that WikiLeaks and its media partners had hammered out for publication. The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. subsequently secured agreement from Brooke that she wouldn’t herself publish any of the cables or stories related to them.

WikiLeaks responded to the leak on Twitter on Monday by writing: “There has been no ‘leak at WikiLeaks’. The issue relates to a mainstream media partner and a malicious individual.”

This is could be a good indication on how well or bad the Assange rape trail must be going. Things must have taken a turn against him.

But won't someone please think of the U.S. spies that are potentially going to die? Wait no. Good! I hope all the intelligence agents are murdered.

Then again, nothing is going to happen because the State Department is often so out of the loop on CIA black-ops and most of the cables aren't even that sensitive really. Do you remember that during the Afghan diary release Robert "Iran-Contra" Gates accused Wikileaks of having blood on their hands for releasing the files and putting lives in danger? Then later he admitted in a letter to Senator Levin that no Afghan informants or operatives were killed or even threatened.

I guess I just wish there was a cable that said, "Damn... you 'member all that dope we was slingin' in Laos and Thailand? Thems was the days!"

So you're probably wondering why I have no love loss for the potential name dropping of our spies and super soldiers. Hmmm, I wonder why. \

US forces had committed a heinous war crime during a house raid in Iraq in 2006, wherein one man, four women, four children, and one infant were summarily executed, a State Department diplomatic cable released last week by WikiLeaks revealed.

The cable excerpts a letter written by Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, addressed to then Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.

American troops had approached the home of Faiz Harrat Al-Majma’ee, a farmer living in central Iraq, to conduct a house raid in search of insurgents in March 2006.

“It would appear that when the MNF (Multinational Forces) approached the house,” Alston wrote, “shots were fired from it and a confrontation ensued.” Afterwards, “troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them.” Mr. Faiz Hratt Khalaf, (aged 28), his wife Sumay’ya Abdul Razzaq Khuther (aged 24), their three children Hawra’a (aged 5) Aisha ( aged 3) and Husam (5 months old), Faiz’s mother Ms. Turkiya Majeed Ali (aged 74), Faiz’s sister (name unknown), Faiz’s nieces Asma’a Yousif Ma’arouf (aged 5 years), and Usama Yousif Ma’arouf (aged 3 years), and a visiting relative Ms. Iqtisad Hameed Mehdi (age 23) were killed during the raid.

Alston’s letter reveals that a US airstrike was launched on the house presumably to destroy the evidence, but that “autopsies carried out at the Tikrit Hospital’s morgue revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed.”

That's right. Our brave mercenaries handcuffed a 5 month old baby before blowing his brains out and then ordering a bombing on his corpse. You have to remember that it's standard procedure to fire bomb children 5 and under after shooting them in the head. They're just way too resilient.

Then they blamed the acts of their murder victims on the inherent brutality of their savage opponents. Nothing ever changes, I guess. I can just see their mentality in all this.

"islam is evil because it induces its followers to oppress women"

*Lines all women ever up against the wall, shoots them in the head with one hand while giving a thumbs-up and a huge grin to the camera* But I guess you can't be oppressed if you're dead. I thought we hit peak war crimes when those soldiers got drunk and killed a family except the 15 year old daughter, who they later raped and then killed, then mutilated the bodies - but hey, executing a baby?

Fuck this shit! and you wonder why I don't give a shit if these fine warriors are burned and the potential of their deaths comes ever so slightly closer.

Importing Banned Wood

Smuggling Banned Wood.

Trafficking illegally attain wood. Yes, that's what they say when I'm walking through airport security. I kid. I have a license to carry this concealed weapon. Anyway back to the subject of this post. It seems that Gibson Guitar's got raided over this very issue

Federal agents swooped in on Gibson Guitar Wednesday, raiding factories and offices in Memphis and Nashville, seizing several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. The Feds are keeping mum, but in a statement yesterday Gibson's chairman and CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, defended his company's manufacturing policies, accusing the Justice Department of bullying the company. "The wood the government seized Wednesday is from a Forest Stewardship Council certified supplier," he said, suggesting the Feds are using the aggressive enforcement of overly broad laws to make the company cry uncle.

It isn't the first time that agents of the Fish and Wildlife Service have come knocking at the storied maker of such iconic instruments as the Les Paul electric guitar, the J-160E acoustic-electric John Lennon played, and essential jazz-boxes such as Charlie Christian's ES-150. In 2009 the Feds seized several guitars and pallets of wood from a Gibson factory, and both sides have been wrangling over the goods in a case with the delightful name "United States of America v. Ebony Wood in Various Forms."

The question in the first raid seemed to be whether Gibson had been buying illegally harvested hardwoods from protected forests, such as the Madagascar ebony that makes for such lovely fretboards. And if Gibson did knowingly import illegally harvested ebony from Madagascar, that wouldn't be a negligible offense.

Well, I guess that I can take away from all this that things are moving along so well in the economy that the federal government has nothing better to do than to put Gibson's feet to the fire.

First U.S. Attorney General Holder went after online poker and now this with fervor, yet there was nothing that happened to the bankers that ruined the economy with corporate greed. I have to say, this administration really fucking sucks. Then again, maybe we should honor him for thinking of the trees.

The issue that really effects people is that bans are retroactive. So if you have a guitar that has rosewood but was made in 1960, then you can be held accountable for it if you are traveling with it. Which is pretty much a shitty thing considering a musical instrument like that is something that is going to travel a lot.

If you were waiting in excitement for a potential Federal auction in the not so distant future, I would probably not hold your breath. Chances are they'll just destroy the items since they are made with a banned substance.

Another thing to remember is that when Michelle Obama visited her French counterpart Carla Bruni-Sarkozy in Strasbourg in '09, Michelle Obama gave her a Gibson acoustic guitar, with rosewood fretboard. So it seems that our elected leaders are giving out banned items as gifts to foreign dignitaries. What next, O-man. Are you going to be smoking a Cuban cigar?

It's also odd that, well, Gibson's main competitor, Martin uses the same material and is not being raided. What's the difference? Gibson's CEO donates to Republicans; the CEO of Martin donates to Democrats.

Gibson really must have pissed off a career federal officer and is now getting ass raped on just about any mickey mouse infraction they can get fined for. I doubt this is about the political parties that they donate to and more to the point of some sort of personal vendetta.

So I'm on the fence on this one. I really can't agree with what the government is wasting their time on in this situation. This is an example of environmentalists gone crazy and this sort of harassment towards businesses needs to stop. It's not like going after a guitar maker is going to suddenly kick start the jobs market, now is it?

Kevin Smith - An American Filmmaker

Kevin Smith - An American Filmmaker

Kevin Smith is an American film maker who, if you are 14 years of age, know his work very well. He is currently working through the final films he wishes to make before retiring from cranking out films tailor made for 14 year old's. One of his last films is RED STATE. Here's a trailer for it:



If you weren't able to tell from that wicked awesome trailer, here's the plot of the film:

Three teenagers come across an online personal advertisement from an older woman looking for kinky group sex. But what begins as a fantasy takes a dark turn as they come face-to-face with a terrifying fundamentalist force with a fatal agenda.[9] The violent church led by a violent preacher, Abin Cooper (Michael Parks), kidnaps the boys and holds a long-winded and hateful sermon in front of them for his cult members where other kidnapped innocent victims are executed.

Hmm, doesn't this sound like that Rob Zombie film? But hey, you saw it on the screen. This has the seal of approval by Quintin Tarantino saying "I LOVE THIS FUCKING MOVIE" and boy, you will too!



I bet you're wondering why I gotta hate on this? I mean. Clerks, Mallrats, Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob strike back were all good films. Hell, clerks 2 was the definitive film of the 2000's speaking to a generation that it was made for who are currently in dead end jobs

Even if it did have that scene where Rosario Dawson claimed that it's sometimes okay to go ass to mouth. And while there is other better movies along the same lines of narrative out there, it was fun to get high and laugh at these sort of films when I was a teenager. So what's the problem with this film then?

The ironic aspect is that what has in the past been considered Smith's strongest element, his writing, is the weakest part of Red State. The film alternates between being heavy handed and moronic, and it seems to be informed by a 15 year olds' understanding of Waco filtered through the paranoid ramblings of a stoner.



This is an extraordinarily stupid film, a movie that probably sounds profound while baked but is actually a little more than nihilistic posturing. That's probably the most offensive thing about Red State, that it's a film that tackles serious and important issues from the level of a junior high school creative writing assignment.

And I guess that's the biggest problem I have. I grew up. The quality is completely consistent from film to film with Kevin Smith. For those that haven't refused to grow up it appears that his films have gotten progressively worse in reality it is Kevin Smith that has been standing still at the ripe mentality age of 19 this whole time.

It's like every day is 1994 to Kevin Smith. Though I would be stupid to think that he was going to do any better with a film about politics than he did with religion and sexuality. And man is Smith a pro at this sexuality stuff....



Clit/Brown/Taint-area.....Seriously? You know, I'm pretty sure a lot of the prudishness in people comes not from being uncomfortable with sex but from a deathly fear of ever sounding like this guy.

Oh yeah baby, you pwn my clit/brown/taint-area soooooo goood! You may as well kill me if I ever sound as creepy as that. Then again, this is the man who decided to put this in a film where with the team name jokingly being C.L.I.T



I also don't understand one major thing about Kevin Smith. What's with the pants? Is he trying to be a denim samurai or something?





I shouldn't be one to judge someone's fashion sense but are those bespoke jorts? Where does someone even find a pair cut like that? Or are they normal shorts meant for someone like Robert Wadlow? How does one even go through the mindset for all this?

Oh boy, after I made my first million, I knew the first thing I wanted to do. You always have these dreams, in the back of your mind, you know, but you never think, "that's going to happen to me" But here I am
*backs up tractor trailer into Long Jort Warehouse*

Or maybe he's just really self conscious about being really fat and huge Jorts are his way of covering it up. Maybe I shouldn't be making fun so much. Though seriously, why Jorts? I mean, I can get that you would want a sturdy yet soft and pliable material that goes with any top and you want to let your ankles and maybe lower calves catch a little breeze. I mean, look at his rather thin ankles. Obviously he's just showing them off.



Though, if the Jean short comes below the knees does it ceases to be Jorts and is instead Japris? Jeanpris? Jeapris? Or maybe it's Capreans? One thing is for sure, is there any occasion that this man won't wear Jorts to?



Man, I'm just going to get a huge sheet of denim, like a blanket size piece, and just wrap it around me and if I have to be dignified for a job interview or going to the Oscars, maybe I'll tie it closed with a piece of yarn.



The kicker on all this is that Kevin Smith's final film will be a two parter based on the life of a fictitious hockey player. The first part of the film will be his youth and the second part will be his rise to fame and pro life. Man, that's going to be one tough sell. I don't think I know anyone who gives too much of a shit about hockey, let alone would want to see two films on the subject.