Good morning. Twitter-addicted readers should know the guestbloggers' twitter handles (at least the ones I know):

@moelane
@bdomenech
@ComradeArthur
@verumserum
@cuffymeh
@JammieWF
@johnekdahl

All are worth following.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:45 AM | Comments (193)
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Cow Nipple Fashion is a funny business. (via LauraW)

Not nearly as funny, but interesting in a dull way, washed up actress Roseanne Barr is perfectly willing to kill people who don't conform to her concept of spreading the wealth, and thinks we oughta go Al-Q on wealthy people who won't give away money (no way to tell if she, a wealthy person, is giving away hers). Also this is worth a repeat and also I suck at this ONT thing.

Big Dick Cheney: Obama owes Bush a Thank You

A man would say so. Obama isn't a man, so he won't.

Wow, we sucked today. Amazin meltdowns deserve amazing remembrances.

So here.

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Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:29 PM | Comments (417)
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Blogger: Andy Rooney is saying his farewells tonight.

Morons: Wait, effing Andy Rooney is still alive??

Blogger: I know, I know. But it's true. And tonight is his last night on 60 Minutes.

And now for something completely unrelated: more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 03:43 PM | Comments (239)
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Bless their little non-biased hearts over at AP. They do try so hard to turn failure into success for their little empty-headed ideological sisters and brothers.

Case in point, Colleen Long has written this little bit of fluff wherein she clearly points out how easy it is to find a silver lining in every dark cloud if you just look hard enough.

Of course, first you need to define the dark cloud:

It all has the feel of a classic street protest with one exception: It's unclear exactly what the demonstrators want.

"When all the bailout money was spent on bonuses and stuff everyone was outraged, but no one did anything because no one feels like they can," protester Jesse Wilson, 22, said this week when asked to take articulate the cause. "It's time for us to come together to realize we are the masses, and we can make things happen."

But he couldn't say what, exactly, he wanted to happen. Handmade signs carried by some of the demonstrators — "Less is More" and "Capitalism is evil" — hardly make it clearer.

I wonder how Jesse and his SEIU enablers feel about state employees getting their retention "bonuses" for doing nothing more than showing up for work every day? (well, most days, anyway. Don't want to stress the poor dears...)

Of course, the really funny part about the "Capitalism is Evil" mantra is found in the paragraph that precedes the one above:

They sleep on air mattresses, use Mac laptops and play drums. They go to the bathroom at the local McDonald's.

I'm sure those air mattresses were hand-made by Quadriplegic Native American Lesbians with sustainable growth hemp products. As well as the Macs. As for using McDonalds bathrooms, McDonald's being one of the biggest corporations on the planet, hey, dude, they have awesome fries!
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Posted by: Guest Blogger at 11:52 AM | Comments (172)
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Before we regale you with 13 minutes of of pious, sanctimonious drivel from Boston, we first must offer up what has to be the best of all protest signs we've seen from the filthy hippies in Manhattan. It's almost too clever that I'm thinking this guy is an AoS moron who's gone undercover.

Now Ace has kindly asked we refrain from excessive use colorful language, so let it be known I'm just quoting this guy:

SHIT IS FUCKED UP AND BULLSHIT

The Gothamist has a pictorial spread called "The Faces of Occupy Wall Street" so go there to check out more, including this endearing young lad who smugly declares "I'm here to foil the 1%, to ruin their plans." Judging by the kid's writing skills. the only plan I see being foiled is graduating from grammar school.

Always a nice touch seeing these lefty kooks using kids. They use kids for the children, I suppose.

As for those gathered in Boston, in one respect they at least speak using coherent English and are relatively articulate. They just have no idea what they're talking about. Then again it's Boston, so I guess that makes sense.

Video after the jump.

You can follow me on Twitter or check in at my place. more...

Posted by: Guest Blogger at 11:05 AM | Comments (99)
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Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, thinks we're headed for a billionaire exodus. While this might be welcome news for the thousands of innocent straw men that have been needlessly slaughtered in teleprompter speechifying over the past few years, the good folks over at the IRS probably aren't thrilled.

So, where will they be going? Belize? Switzerland? Nope.

In the old days, every member of the middle class thought he or she had a chance of becoming rich. In that sort of optimistic environment, you don't want to urinate in the pool that you hope to someday swim in. But lately there's more fatalism in the air, thanks to our crushing debt and the hobo militias that I assume are forming all over the country. The middle class will soon trade their unrealistic dreams of wealth for the opportunity to transfer money from total strangers to themselves—a process often referred to as fairness. That's when the rich will get serious about an escape plan, just like the brave little sea creatures billions of years ago.

But where can the rich go? Their choices include nations that have swarms of malaria-infested mosquitoes, bad TV, deadly climates, decapitation issues, French people, bland food and other signs of inhospitableness. When you consider these factors plus wars, pollution, terrorism, floods, droughts, earthquakes and tornadoes, I think you'll agree that most of the surveyed land on Earth is unfit for fancy people.

This is where technology trends come in. We've already entered the era of megaships, including plans for island-size vessels with permanent homes and businesses. We'll soon see rapid advances in high-speed Internet for seafaring vessels, floating fisheries, hydroponic gardens, energy generated from waves, and desalination. The only other element needed to trigger mass migration of the wealthy to the oceans is a financial motive. If a billionaire can escape taxation by leaving his dirt-based country behind, he'll save more than enough money to pay for his floating fortress of awesomeness.

Okay, but what about the rest of us? What if I want to aimlessly drift along the North Atlantic Current until global warming shuts it all down? Well, there's always Seasteading if you can handle being trapped on a floating libertarian utopia with a bunch of yammering Paulbots. Otherwise, it looks like we'll have to go with makeshift rafts. I'm told Glenn Beck's non-hybrid survival seeds will grow in the open ocean, though. So that's a plus.
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Posted by: Guest Blogger at 09:46 AM | Comments (90)
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Or baseball, if you prefer.

Really, whatever you want.

Incidentally that pic is from LauraW (she sent me the link to a whole bunch of em). She likes you too.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 08:28 AM | Comments (382)
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The past week saw a lot of developments on the e-reader front.

Amazon, as expected, introduced the Kindle Fire, a 7" color touchscreen device. This was a widely anticipated move, but most observers were expecting Amazon to bring out the device at the $250 price-point to compete with Barnes & Noble's Nook. Amazon surprised everyone by pricing the new gadget at $199, and by so doing threw the whole tablet market into disarray -- RIM, Samsung, and HTC were all forced to make huge price-cuts in their own offerings to stay competitive. B&N is widely expected to drop the price on the Nook as well.

The Fire is touted as a competitor to Apple's iPad, but it really isn't. Whereas the iPad is more of a general-purpose tablet computing device, Amazon is clearly intending the Fire to be a customized "front end" to Amazon's digital media offerings (music, books, and video) and maybe some games. The Fire is not aimed at hackers, modders, or technology geeks; it's aimed at the direct center of the Amazon consumer market, people who already have a relationship with Amazon and who want to have another way to consume their digital goods. By all accounts, the strategy is working: Amazon reports that they sold 95,000 Kindle Fires the first day. (Delivery isn't until November 17, alas.)

But the Fire was only part of the story -- Amazon also released several new versions of the classic "e-ink" readers. The low-end model comes in at only $79! That's getting into impulse-buy territory even for people with tight budgets; that's about what you'd pay on date-night for dinner and a movie afterwards. ArthurK wonders how long it will be before Amazon just starts giving them away as premiums for other services. It depends on how low they can get their manufacturing costs -- if they can make these units for less than $50 apiece, they might figure that a Kindle owner will buy more than $100 worth of digital content over the life of the unit, so giving them away would make sense. But Amazon is probably going to sell a lot of these things at this low price, so they don't need to give them away yet.

Barnes and Noble are in a tough bind with their Nook product. It's competitive with the Fire based on pure specs, but B&N doesn't have the breadth of offerings that Amazon can offer. B&N has books and magazines; Amazon has books, movies, music, magazines, newspapers, and blogs. If B&N wants to compete, they're going to have to partner with someone (Netflix?) to offer similar services at a similar price-point. And the other tablet makers are probably doomed unless they can figure out some way to undercut Amazon's per-unit price (or go upmarket and directly challenge Apple in the iPad space, which is probably a suicide mission).

I've pre-ordered a Kindle Fire, so when I get it I'll post a review.

So much for the book stuff. I wanted to mention a music CD I bought recently because it is one of those rare purchases that at once surprise me, gratify me, and remind me once again that good music is still being made even in these debased times. The CD is Beth Hart and Joe Bonamassa's first duet project, "Don't Explain".

It's an album of soul and r&b covers, which normally puts me off (nothing beats the old stuff), but in this case I couldn't wait to listen to the CD: Bonamassa is probably the best electric blues guitar player now living, and Beth Hart has a voice that harks back to the glory days of Etta James, Aretha Franklin, and Billie Holiday. Together they turn these soul standards into something fresh and dazzling; they take the songs and make them their own.

I've linked two YouTube performances from this CD: a cover of Etta James' famous "I'd Rather Go Blind", and the old soul standard "I Will Take Care of You". If you're a fan of blues, soul, or r&b, don't hesitate to pick this one up. This CD is fantastic.
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Posted by: Monty at 06:41 AM | Comments (119)
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Good morning! I'm one of the folks that got tapped to do some guest-blogging for Ace as he does... whatever it is that Ace is going to do this week. Personally, I recommend drunken depravity, if only because I stopped getting to do that once I had kids. I'd tell you what I have scheduled for my time here, except that I don't have the slightest idea what it's going to be!

Hey, that's why they call it an adventure.

Moving along, via Jim over at Gateway Pundit comes a cheerful video to watch over your flapjacks: Charlie Rangel getting screamed at and rushed by a Occupy Wall Street goofball. more...

Posted by: Guest Blogger at 06:20 AM | Comments (55)
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The Department of Energy slipped in five billion more in loan guarantees on Friday before the midnight deadline. But unlike Solyndra, I'm sure these investments aren't sloppy. After all, Nobel Prize winner Stephen Chu is in charge.

The embattled department announced approvals for a total of more than $4.7 billion in guarantees Friday — acting hours before the program's congressional authorization was set to expire, and seeming not at all like an agency cowed by the furor over its troubled $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra.

. . .

As of 6 p.m., DOE had yet to announce whether it was approving or rejecting two more conditional loan guarantees on which it must act before midnight.

. . .

Friday's total is in addition to more than $1.2 billion in guarantees that the department issued earlier in the week.

I wonder if there are a lot of Obama donors and bundlers in those organizations. Surely not. Chu issued this statement:

“To win the clean energy race we must invest in projects like this that fund jobs and increase the generation of clean, renewable power in the U.S.,” Chu said in a statement. “Deployment of utility-scale solar power will help bring down the cost of solar and strengthen our position as a global clean energy leader.”

So there's a clean energy race. Just like the space race. And we have to win it. Because it's important to be the global clean energy leader and not let Russia or China beat us. That way we'll have all the braggin' rights. More at the Washington Post.

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Posted by: rdbrewer at 06:18 AM | Comments (25)
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