American Power And Anti-Semitic Hominids

So my conservative counterpart Donald Douglas of American Power was in New York City over the weekend for the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. His main post on the events has a lot of pictures taken from around the city and while it's a little heavy on religion and rantings about "the left's Media-Industrial-Islamist-Complex" it's still rather interesting to check out but it's his follow-up post about "the America-bashing, anti-Israel left" amongst the sign-carrying protesters of the various ideologies present that day that I found particularly entertaining. Amidst his claims about supposedly out-debating some anti-war "leftists" on the street I found this gem of an accusation:

Then turning around, I saw this kid yacking it up for the crowd, obviously having a blast with this ugly Jew-hating sign. And what does that mean, "SASQUATCH ISRAEL"? This is a play on the "legitimacy myth" of Israel's existence. As there's of course a "Sasquatch myth," it's worth noting the implied comparison: that Israel is also an ape-like beast existing only in historical folklore. Absent legitimacy, Israel has "no right to exist." This kid's sign is but one more example of eliminationist anti-Semitism. And look at how overjoyed he is in boasting this hatred. Creepy.

I'm sure you're all just as familiar as I am with this oh-so-common yet extraordinarily awkwardly worded insult comparing the country of Israel to the cryptozoological creature known as Sasquatch in order to advance the agenda of anti-Semitic eliminationism, right? You know, all those political cartoons you've seen in which Israel is portrayed as a large hulking fictional beast crashing through the dense underbrush of the Middle East with the words "SASQUATCH ISRAEL" written across its chest? Wait, you're not? Yeah, neither am I and it's because Don's claim qualifies as the very definition of the phrase "desperately grasping at straws". Here's a picture of said kid:
Now tell me, if you had to make a guess would you say that his sign reads "SASQUATCH ISRAEL" or does it perhaps read "SASQUATCH IS REAL"? One might even guess that there's a very good reason that this kid is seemingly "overjoyed" and "having a blast" whilst holding up his sign:
So he's either just some kid having a laugh (or being somewhat serious, who knows?) about the disputed existence of Sasquatch or else he's an unabashed anti-Semite openly boasting of his ugly Jew-hating agenda, thus confirming Don's paranoid fears about the "nihilist left" (oh, and he can't spell very well either). This is what happens when the modern Republican persecution complex goes looking for anti-Semitism around every corner: it inevitably finds it, even in the face of incredulity at the obviously nonsensical nature of it. And on a personal anthropological note, I haven't seen a case of Sasquatch FAIL this bad since the fake freezer Bigfoot from a few years back. I've always suspected that the Sasquatch had a liberal bias...

Picture Of The Day

How cool is this?

This isn't our Sun. This other sun is 470 light-years away from our home. Its name is 1RXS J160929.1-210524, and the orange sphere near it has been confirmed today as an orbiting planet. The first photo of an extra-solar planet.

The photo was originally taken in 2008 by David Lafreniere and collaborators working at the Gemini Observatory. Scientists weren't sure about it being an orbiting planet until now, however. New observations have shown that the planet follows an orbit around the star 300 times larger than Earth's orbit.

The planet has eight times the mass of Jupiter, and has a much higher temperature: 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit as opposed to the minus 166 degrees of the biggest planet in our solar system. Scientists believe this temperature is a product of the age of this star system, much younger than ours.

Far from throwing any light in planetary theories, this discovery challenges the current model. Lafreniere and his colleagues think the orbit is too large for the planet to form by core accretion. If that was the case, then the star system could be much older than is actual age.

The only thing that worries me about this: what if the inhabitants of that planet saw the flash from our camera? Now I'm not saying that we're due for an alien invasion or anything like that but we do have a black president: isn't that always when shit goes down?

(via)

Schwarzenegger Reviews The Predators Trailer

I've posted the Predators trailer here and the 160 greatest Arnold Schwarzenegger quotes here so it was only a matter of time before I found this clip combining them (and yes, I know it isn't really him but it's still damn funny):


(via)

A New Hope: Parody vs. Reality

I was watching the original Star Wars last night when I came to this disturbing conclusion: I can't watch the original Episode IV anymore without imagining and subsequently obsessively repeating every one of the lines from the Family Guy double parody episode Blue Harvest. One of my happiest memories of childhood has been subsequently replaced by one of the most entertaining videos of my adult lifefime and I barely batted an eyelash. I'm either becoming very old or else reality seems a bit too false for me at this point.

Predators Trailer

OK, I loved Predator, Predator II was pretty damn good (Busey scared me more than the predators, but what else is new?), Alien vs. Predator was fairly interesting yet also fairly boring and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem literally put me to sleep so I'm giving this franchise just one more sequel before I finally give up on the off-world dreadlocks (and leave the acidic aliens out this time, please):

(via)

Rarely Seen Predator 2 Shuffle

Yes, it's going to be a video kind of day so just strap in and enjoy, ya'll. As I first started watching this one I thought, "My God, that really looks like the set from Predator 2!" until I saw the outfits, and then I realized that there's no way that anyone went to the trouble of recreating them just for this little dance video. A two decades old blast from the past with a Glover cherry on top. Slightly surreal, to say the least:


(via)

Picture Of The Day

"Sexual Predator" by Marco Mazzoni. The caption totally makes this one, and I've always thought that their mouths looked like some kind of crazy, toothed alien vagina.

(via)

70 Minute Review: The Phantom Menace

I know this movie is almost ten years old but I just watched the first part of this and I found it equal parts entertaining and informing:

If you’d stopped by the Heeb office recently, you would know how obsessed I’ve been with this 70-minute review of Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace. I was so obsessed that I reached out to the critic himself, Milwaukee-native Mike Stoklasa. His justifiable character assassination of the worst Jedi ever (Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon Jin) and his overall slamming of the CGI clusterfuck that helped spawn a generation of overvisualized, underdeveloped and downright boring blockbusters is especially relevant today with everyone spewing blue goo over James Cameron’s self-important Smurfs project.

Here's part 1 of 7:


He makes a lot of sense, no? You can watch the other six parts by clicking on the options in the YouTube window (just in case you've for some reason never used YouTube before).

[Update: On the topic of plot and character development being sacrificed for a focus on special effects and technology, I did in fact see Avatar a few weeks back. Meh... Now, the look of the movie was absolutely incredible. Cameron created an entire other world out of digital pixie dust and it was seamlessly beautiful (which is why I recommend seeing it on the big screen while you can) but the rest of his effort can unfortunately be summed up by the following script comparison to Disney's Pocahontas:
Having never seen this cartoon I went with Dances With Wolves myself, although pretty much any flick with Native Americans as the main characters is a valid comparison I think.]

Patrick Bateman Was Tom Cruise

Regular readers may remember this video for Miles Fisher's Talking Heads cover in which he expertly apes Christian Bale's unhinged performance in American Psycho, as well as this video of Fisher doing an uncanny impression of Tom Cruise from Superhero Movie courtesy of reader one L bil bill. Now comes this revelation from director Mary Harron:

How did you and Christian Bale develop his character in American Psycho?
It was definitely a process. We talked a lot, but he was in L.A. and I was in New York. We didn’t actually meet in person a lot, just talked on the phone. We talked about how Martian-like Patrick Bateman was, how he was looking at the world like somebody from another planet, watching what people did and trying to work out the right way to behave. And then one day he called me and he had been watching Tom Cruise on David Letterman, and he just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy.

Telling, no? I like a lot of Cruise's movies but he's obviously a certified nutcase, although I'm sure some of that perception comes from the baffling American mindset that belief in aliens is crazy while belief in talking snakes and walking on water is completely plausible. It's all improbable magic to me, of course.

(via)

Russians Catch Squeaking Alien And Eat It

I personally like my alien deep-fried but that's just me:

Village residents from the Rostov region of Russia caught a weird creature two weeks ago after a strong storm in the Sea of Azov. The shark-looking creature was producing strange squeaky sounds. The fishermen originally believed that they had caught an alien and decided to film the monster with the help of a cell phone camera. The footage clearly shows the creatures’ head, body and long tail. The bizarre catch was weighing almost 100 kilograms, the Komsomolskaya Pravda reports.

However, ufologists and scientists were greatly disappointed when they found out that the fishermen had eaten the monster. They said that they were not scared of the creature so they decided to use it as food. One of the men said that it was the most delicious dish he had ever eaten.

Here's the video of the creature:


It would have been a lot cooler of they'd filmed it while it was still alive and squeaking. I've eaten a lot of different animals in my lifetime and I'd totally try alien if I got the chance but it's a shame they consumed this thing instead of getting it to a trained ichthyologist for study. I'm curious as to what it actually was.

(via)

Han Solo, P. I.

Continuing with the pop culture movie theme (and two of my favorite childhood memories), it appears that Solo and Magnum are indeed long lost brothers. Of course, it would have made flying through space a lot tougher if they had to keep the Millenium Falcon's top down to accommodate Chewbacca's furry melon. Did you ever notice that Magnum never drives the Ferrari with the top closed? Selleck's a tall guy:


(via)

Picture Of The Day

Is it true what they say about Klingons? Yes , they have massive photon torpedoes. Oh, and their cocks are huge too. Those brow ridges can still be a bit off putting though, huh?

Magneto vs. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Per a comment by the now apparent ex-Deranged Leftwing Baker is this highly debatable point as to whether KSM could escape a SuperMax prison based on the wholly fictional escape committed by Magneto in the first X-Men film:

A while ago, in response to conservative fearmongering over holding Guantanamo inmates on American soil, Atrios pointed out that terrorists aren't "actual supervillains with special powers." The fact is that Congress has a Constitutionally mandated responsibility to consider the possibility that terrorists are supervillains with actual powers. Today, Glenn Greenwald makes a completely incorrect assertion:

Take note, Chris Cillizza and friends: while it's true that "not a single prisoner has escaped from Gitmo since it was created," it's also true that no Muslim Terrorists have escaped from American prisons and our SuperMax prison "has had no escapes or serious attempts to escape." Actually, the only person to even make an escape attempt from a SuperMax is Green Arrow, who hasn't succeeded despite the help of Joker and Lex Luthor.

Greenwald clearly doesn't remember the Magneto incident of 2003, in which the mutant supervillain escaped from his glass prison facility after Mystique increased the iron content in his guard's blood, which Magneto extracted using his ferrokinetic powers and then used to destroy his cell. Obviously, we need to discover if Gitmo inmates do have mutant abilities, which will undoubtedly require more waterboarding, and this has to be done before the administration gets a dime to close Guantanamo. In fact, I'm pretty sure Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the subject in 2002.

Now we can ignore the fact that the Magneto escape happened in the films and not within the actual comic canon but even then, comparing Magneto's escape to Green Arrow's failed attempt is like comparing Marvel apples to DC oranges. While I truly love Green Arrow he's obviously no Batman, who has infiltrated and also escaped from Gotham's Blackgate prison a number of times, not to mention the time Superman did the same from Metropolis' own SuperMax facility in the guise of Clark Kent whilest interviewing Lex Luthor.

When you add these previous successful attempts to Magneto's own documented cinematic yet dramatic escape one can only draw the obvious conclusion that absent superhuman abilities or a lifetime of training and knowledge in the escaping arts terror suspects like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would be utterly powerless to liberate themselves or any others from America's most inescapable facilities. And as I've said more than once, these guys aren't Houdini-esque escape artists or even highly trained super soldiers, they're a bunch of thugs and religious nuts...a well trained American marine could beat the shit out of a couple of these guys at once.

A criminal the likes of Magneto would rightly scare me, as would that the likes of Superman, Batman and even Green Arrow. Those are the types of individuals, if realistic, actual, and evil, we should fear as a people and a society. The two hundred and forty or so potential douchebags we have imprisoned in Gitmo, I take a bit more lightly. When one of them starts to manifest ferrokinetic abilities, you go ahead and let me know. Until then, they're pretty much just a bunch of assholes who've trained on a jungle gym in the middle of the Afghani desert for pr films. You'll excuse me if I don't, as opposed to the current leaders of the Republican party, shit my pants in fear at the prospect of their incarceration on American soil.

I Totally Missed Star Wars Day!

Damnit! You can read about the ostensible Star Wars holiday here. Enjoy your Cinco de Mayo, bitches.

(via)

HALO Physics Experiment: Warthog Jump

If you've never played HALO, it's set on a fictional ringworld where you can demonstrate any number of dumb ass scenarios according to regular world physics to achieve fairly cool outcomes:

The Dark Knight Meets Superman, Part II

Yes, part II for Batman. You knew it was coming:

The Dark Knight Meets Superman

This is a little old but it makes me laugh (and I'm a huge Batman fan) so I'm posting it now:

Picture Of The Day

Alien vs. Predator. This is gonna get messy...

Stalin vs. Martians

Apparently this is an actual video game. It's also 100%, good old fashioned, pure nihilistic entertainment:

Picture Of The Day

That super bastard.