Cheap. But he deserves it.

I was hoping Twitchy would compile this but I didn't think they would.

The key to this joke is something a commenter here said: One of y'alls said the guy who said that Dana Loesch needed a ckoc up her ssa was a little on the heavy side.

Well, that's all I needed.

That's the easiest joke in the world to make.

I like it because it's so cheap.

Whoops: I didn't think they'd compile my series of cheap fat jokes and it turns out they didn't. So I'm compiling them below.

Twitchy linked something else I did, about what people's Twitter bio brags really mean.

Here now the fat jokes.
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Posted by: Ace at 11:39 AM | Comments (202)
Post contains 302 words, total size 5 kb.

It's pretty simple and obvious, really: It's a cliche.

When a metaphor is first introduced, it has the power to make someone consider the ways in which two things are similar. Or it conjures an image in the mind.

A metaphor, used once, or even a couple of hundred times, adds something. It adds meaning. It adds imagery.

But used a thousand times, it no longer conjures any image at all, because We've already seen that.

Let's look at one like "Run like Hell." What does this mean, nowadays? It means nothing at all. It means "run fast," and that's it.

But let's look at the etymology of the phrase. (Caveat: I have not actually looked at the etymology of the phrase.) Originally the expression "run like Hell" was "run like Hell itself is at your back." (Maybe it was, who knows. I'm making this up.) This conjured a potent image of screaming devils chasing a man down when it was spoken. (If it was spoken at all. Which it probably wasn't.) And for the first several hundred times "Run like Hell itself is at your back" was spoken, it was an interesting turn of phrase that actually added to the communicative power of an otherwise-mundane sentence. (More likely, it was spoken zero times and added nothing at all.)

Flash forward to the thousandth time it's said, and "Run like Hell itself is at your back" has now been condensed to "Run like Hell," and it no longer conjures the image of a pack of ravenous demons. (If it ever did, which, let's face it, it didn't.) Now it just means nothing. It means "hey, run faster than normal."

The brain can only be tricked into producing an image so many times. And this doesn't just apply to metaphors of several words, but to individual words.

Did you know that if you say "two" a hundred times quickly your brain will stop associating the word "two" with the concept of the number 2 that the word is intended to conjure? So that "two" stops meaning 2, and starts just being weird squiggles in your head?

It's a phenomenon called Semantic Satiation.

The idea is that the word "two" conjures the idea of the number two by creating a synaptic, physical link between the neurons which store the word "two" and the neurons which store the concept 2. If you force that chemical bridge to be made too many times in too short a period of time, you will burn that chemical bridge out, and, for a time at least, your brain will be unable to link the two concepts, or at least will not be able to link "two" and 2 in time enough to understand.

This may be why writers hate using the same word multiple times in the same sentence, as I just artfully used "time" and "two" two times too many the last time I wrote a sentence.

Say the words often enough, as they say, and the words lose all meaning. Literally true, it turns out.

So that's the problem with "like crack," which frankly I don't even know why we're talking about it because everyone already knows it's a terrible cliche that no longer has any meaning besides "yummy." When the metaphor was first introduced, it was a sort of a cute thing, suggesting that food created a euphoria and capacity for addiction like the most powerfully-addictive drug known to exist.

Several thousand uses of this once-cute metaphor and it means nothing at all.

Now, LV Anderson could have written this, and even could have added -- and she'd need to add this, because leftists don't bother writing at all unless they're scolding society for All The Ways In Which It Has Disappointed Them -- that it's also an insensitive term, as a brief aside.

But then that wouldn't make for a good #SlatePitch, now would it? The problem with everything I've just written is that it's all true (except for the parts I made up, and the dubious science* I've claimed to be iron-clad fact), and things which are true are not interesting to people who live their lives in fantasy, and things which are true are not linkbait.

Thus, LV Anderson reached for a silly joke of a premise which was funny and cute... when it appeared on The Office like five years ago.

In other words, not only is "like crack" now a cliche, but to even note that "like crack" is a cliche is itself a cliche.

Up next for LV Anderson:

Stop Saying "Get Jiggy With it!"

It's Racist and a bit of Verbal Minstrelsy for White People Who Want to Add "Street Cred" With a Four-Word Commitment.

Yeah LV we're not saying that and in fact have not said it since it was fun for six months in 1999.

And that's how you write a toss-off article about cliches without embarrassing your family.

* Although I think it's real. Sometimes I will see a word and it will suddenly appear strange to me. Because all of a sudden I am seeing the word itself and not just the concept I've trained my brain to associate it with.

I mean, like look at these squiggles which I'm about to write. Don't think of the concept; just look at the squiggles themselves:

word

All of a sudden it looks weird, doesn't it? And you start going "wooorrrrdd, that's so weird, man!"

Pot smokers do this a lot, and I think what must be going on is that the THC is interfering with their neuron links so that they're suddenly realizing that the signifier ("word") is not the signifier (the concept of word), and it's just weird.

We go through most of our lives automatically liking "word" with a cloud of mental associations. When the curtain is suddenly pulled back, and we see that the word "word" has nothing inherently to do with the concept of "word" at all (except for, you know, being one), it's a... well, it's a trip, as the kids say.

Posted by: Ace at 10:46 AM | Comments (391)
Post contains 1039 words, total size 6 kb.

I'm writing a piece on Slate's descent into madness dumb and so I'm just throwing this one up to fill the time as I finish that.

This is a good story. I just have nothing to add.

Booker’s tales of his trials and travails on the streets of Newark, the city that twice elected him mayor, are familiar, and they have helped to breed an almost mythological aura around the Stanford, Oxford, and Yale graduate.... But sources tell National Review Online that the central character in one of Booker’s oft-repeated stories — T-Bone, the drug pusher who the mayor has said threatened his life at one turn and sobbed on his shoulder the next — is a figment of his imagination, even though Booker has talked about him in highly emotional terms and in great detail.

The tale is one Booker admits he’s told “a million” times, according to the Newark Star Ledger. Ronald Rice Jr., a Newark city councilman and Booker ally who has known the mayor since 1998, says the T-Bone story was “a fixture” of Booker’s unsuccessful 2002 mayoral bid against corrupt Newark political boss Sharpe James, perhaps for its symbolic value. In Booker’s mind, according to the city councilman, “It’s not so much the details of the story” that matter, but the principle that “these things happen, they happen to real people, they happen in the city of Newark.” Rice, a Newark native, says he doesn’t know whether T-Bone exists. But, he explains, “if Cory had to tell a story or two and mix details up for Newark to get the funding for it, I see that as something that’s taking tragedy and doing something productive for it.”

The T-Bone tale never sat right with Rutgers University history professor Clement Price, a Booker supporter who tells National Review Online he found the mayor’s story offensive because it “pandered to a stereotype of inner-city black men.” T-Bone, Price says, “is a southern-inflected name. You would expect to run into something or somebody named T-Bone in Memphis, not Newark.”

Price considers himself a mentor and friend to Booker and says Booker conceded to him in 2008 that T-Bone was a “composite” of several people he’d met while living in Newark. The professor describes a “tough conversation” in which he told Booker “that I disapproved of his inventing such a person.” “If you’re going to create a composite of a man along High Street,” he says he asked Booker, “why don’t you make it W. E. B. DuBois?” From Booker, he says, “There was no pushback. He agreed that was a mistake.” Since then, references to T-Bone have been conspicuously absent from Booker’s speeches.

...

I don't know. I think T-Bone is real.

Certainly, the dialogue Booker attributes to "T-Bone" sounds realistic and highly accurate, and at all like something he Just Made Up By Remembering Bits of Movies and Old Damon Wayans Routines:

The mayor has gone into painstaking detail about his experiences with the elusive T-Bone. “I still remember my first month on the street,” he told Stanford’s alumni magazine in 2001 about moving into a crime-ridden area of Newark in 1995. “I walked up to this charismatic black guy my age called T-Bone, who was one of the drug lords,” Booker recounted. “I just said, ‘Yo, man, wha’s up.’ And he leaped in front of me, looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Who the blank do you think you are? If you ever so much as look at me again, I’m going to put a cap in your ass.’”

You know what this country really needs? Another black Politician/Savior with a sort of ambiguous sexuality and a fictitious backstory.

That's what we need.

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Posted by: Ace at 09:22 AM | Comments (211)
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Well, it looks like the Washington Post was just so many chains holding back the Mighty Joe Young that is Slate. Because they're now parading their naked id in public, in all its stupid, ridiculous, laughable, sub-retarded inglory.

We have been speculating that Slate is pursuing a deliberate strategy of posting risible blogposts in order to get linked by the right (and also generate tons of traffic from reader comments -- as even their liberal readers are a bit scandalized at the stupidity flowing forth from David Plotz' amateur webzine now).

Today, this theory is all but confirmed. Today is a Banner Day for Slate, and that banner reads, "A somewhat dumber version of Salon." There are at least three blogposts (I will not say "articles") of such profound stupidity as to announce themselves as Desperate Cries for Help.

Here now a recap of the first scandalously dumb output pumped out by the Slate Brain Trust today.

Provocative Title:

"No, Your Favorite Food Is Not Like Crack

So stop saying that."

Great title. It starts us off on that hectoring, judgy tone that liberals so love.

Writer: L.V. Anderson, last seen arguing that an AP story about a woman who fell to her death while smoking a cigarette on a date was slut-shaming the victim.

Thesis: To say food is "like crack" is "callously classist," which is what people say when they want to say "racist" but suddenly realize that attributing crack addiction to minority races is itself racist. So they change it to "classist," but you know what the first draft said. Wink.

In addition, to speak of food as "like crack" demonstrates a profound indifference to the plight of crackheads. No really. But we'll get to that.

Crescendo of Stupid: The following passages seem primarily designed to induce people to say, "Why that's so obnoxiously stupid I have to link this!"

Saying that a food is “like crack”—or doing away with the “like” and using “crack” as an awkward adjective—is intended to be an edgy way of emphasizing how instantly gratifying it is, and how difficult it is to stop eating it once it’s in front of you. Unfortunately, all it really does is demonstrate how out of touch and callously classist foodie culture has become.

Is a steak sandwich bad for your health? Absolutely. Does caramel ice cream taste so good that it induces cravings in some people? You bet. Do sweet, fatty foods like Crack Pie light up the same pleasure centers of the brain that are activated by addictive drugs? Sure—in rats, at least. And yet food is not like crack in several significant ways.

lolwut?

None of the foods touted on menus as being like crack is illegal. None of them produces an intense, euphoric, consciousness-altering high when you eat it. None of them induces paranoia, psychosis, erratic behavior, or seizures when you consume too much of it over the course of a few days. None of them scars your lungs, making it difficult to breathe, if you make a habit of eating them over the long term. And none of these foods is so physically addictive that it has the potential to ruin your health, finances, and relationships.

Mm, that's interesting.

No, I mean it's interesting, the things you find interesting. It's like thinking about what your dog thinks about. Is it all just like Tennis Ball, Food, Keys, Leash, and Groin?

Yes, I understand that comparing food to crack is supposed to be hyperbolically absurd

Do you? Do you really understand that?

Because it sounds like you grasp the dictionary meaning of the individual words, but fail to understand the actual import of that the assembled words are intended to conjure in your mind.

...

The problem with the joke is that crack addiction isn’t funny. The rise of crack cocaine’s availability—and the brutal, racist war on drugs that ensued—tore inner-city communities apart in the 1980s and 1990s. And although sales of the drug aren’t what they once were, gang violence associated with crack trafficking continues to make some urban neighborhoods nightmarishly unlivable. There is no quicker way to display your ignorance of and indifference to the misery of poverty in America than to say that your favorite dessert is “like crack.”

We're still talking about saying "this key lime pie is like crack," right? Because for like five minutes there all of a sudden we were in New Jack City with Mario Van Peebles and Judd Nelson.

...

These foodies never consider the fact that crack abuse is a devastating problem for some people, because they never have to.

"These Foodies."

That's virtually racist itself.

Winking Self-Awareness? Is Slate just writing these stupid articles to get Outrage-Clicks? And are they so ashamed at what they're doing that they have to broadcast that's what they're doing, the way directors insert camp into films they believe are beneath them in order to signal "I don't like this movie either"?

I detect in this particular article a sly wink to the reader, a signal that the writer does not believe this stupid shit she's writing.

Here is the passage that actually sort of says "This is a joke and I know it."

How many people who smirk when they order a piece of Crack Pie have ever met anyone who smokes crack, let alone smoked it themselves?

Why do I say that's a Sly Wink? Because... That right there is a joke from The Office, and one of the only truly great jokes from the last several (very mediocre years) of the show.

Watch:
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Posted by: Ace at 09:52 AM | Comments (358)
Post contains 969 words, total size 6 kb.

Well! We've come quite a long ways since the New York Times' fulminations against presidential warmongering and foolish Wars of Choice, eh?

Just to be clear (why won't anyone ever let anyone be clear?): This isn't the editorial board talking, this is an op-ed submitted by some outside party (but which the New York Times chose to publish). And they probably made up that headline.

But it's still pretty extraordinary to see the New York Times' conception of the power granted by the Constitution to the President expand and contract according to the "D" or "R" after his name.

THE latest atrocities in the Syrian civil war, which has killed more than 100,000 people, demand an urgent response to deter further massacres and to punish President Bashar al-Assad. But there is widespread confusion over the legal basis for the use of force in these terrible circumstances. As a legal matter, the Syrian governmentÂ’s use of chemical weapons does not automatically justify armed intervention by the United States.

There are moral reasons for disregarding the law, and I believe the Obama administration should intervene in Syria. But it should not pretend that there is a legal justification in existing law. Secretary of State John Kerry seemed to do just that on Monday, when he said of the use of chemical weapons, “This international norm cannot be violated without consequences.” His use of the word “norm,” instead of “law,” is telling.

I continue to be baffled by liberal interventionists' lunatic belief that there exists an "international law" on war, apart from treaties. (And even treaties are routinely ignored or repudiated -- especially when countries want to go to war with each other.)

Liberals have this unshakable faith in bureaucracies, institutions, councils, and so forth. Even in a situation in which institutions which exist, supposedly, to stop or at least regulate war, have plainly failed, and international law (which does not exist) has gone quite out the window, they still want to talk in these terms.

Even when a guy, like this writer, has come to the conclusion "Oh the hell with international law" -- which should not have been the conclusion, but the starting premise -- he still feels the need to babble on about how his plan to disregard international law, which doesn't really exist, somehow vindicates international law, which still doesn't exist, even after the vindication.

This just shows how hollow this entire premise is. Everyone ignores it, including the liberal interventionists who are the only sops who kind of halfway believe in it.

Incidentally, the Constitution provides for an example of a mechanism for limiting the number of wars countries might fight: a democratic process for voting the country into war.

But that's so old-fashioned. Now we have a UN that can, in liberal interventionists' theory, vote us into war even if the people of the country (and their representatives in Congress) refuse to do so.

And even if the UN doesn't give us the green light for war, we can still go to war if one country, France, says it's okay. (And by the way, most of the UMP (the DeGaullist center-"right" block, opposes the war.)

But anyway. There's your New York Times, Wagin' Peace, now expressly advocating Illegal Wars of Choice because Obama is Lord and King and we must follow him into his every divine folly.

Thanks to @benk84.

Posted by: Ace at 08:16 AM | Comments (350)
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I mentioned the other day that the American Legion and other veterans organizations are concerned about IRS targeting. Kansas Sen. Moran got the ball rolling on this issue and now the American Legion convention has approved resolutions to respond.

It's like this. As a tax-exempt veterans patriotic organization, the American Legion has to demonstrate to IRS upon request that its membership complies with statutory limits. For example, at least 75% of members have to be past or present members of the Armed Forces with the rest being "cadets or. . . spouses, widows, widowers, ancestors, or lineal descendants." That last part is from statute.

According to the IRS manual that Lois Lerner's Office of Tax Exempt Organizations uses, this "other members" group that includes lineal descendants is limited to two degrees of consanguinity. IOW, IRS says only sons and grandsons count and that Legion posts can be fined if, for example, their membership includes great-grandsons, stepsons, and adopted sons. The Legion wants IRS to abide by statute, and one of the resolutions that passed yesterday was to seek congressional action on that point.

To give you another example, IRS is using a different set of dates to determine whether an individual is a wartime veteran than have been approved by Congress for the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Because of this manipulation, Legion posts that have been audited have faced the threat of fines from IRS officials who say the posts aren't complying with the IRS manual.

It should go without saying that to the extent the IRS manual deviates from statute no Legion post (or any other veterans patriotic organization) should have to comply. The Legion is working to get IRS to correct its manual or, failing that, asking Congress to step in.

Disclaimer: the American Legion arranged airfare and my hotel, as well as a per diem, so that I could attend their national convention. The American Legion had no editorial oversight of this post or any of my other coverage here or on Twitter.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 07:10 AM | Comments (197)
Post contains 356 words, total size 2 kb.

• New York Times Calls For Illegal War In Syria
  
• VDH: The Israeli Spring
  
• Obama Offers New gun Control Steps
  
• Pride Of Ignorance On Firearms
  
• Syria And The Oil Markets
  
• Chicago Celebrates MLK By Killing People
  
• Fort Hood Shooter Sentenced To Death
  
• UK's Cameron Backs Down On Urgent Syria Strikes
  
• Kim Jon Un Kills Ex-Lover And A Dozen Well Know North Korean Performers, Possibly For Twerking*
  
• The Rise Of Rafael Cruz
  
• Some Scientists Say Life On Earth Started Out On Mars
  
• Detroit Having Trouble Issuing Death And Birth Certificates
  
• Obama's Affordable Care Act Looking A Bit Unaffordable
  
• Ukraine's New Relationship With The EU
  
• Obamacare Is Turning Us Into A Part-Time Nation
  
• France Takes Half-Step Towards Pension Reform
  
• "Why Should The Appointed Senator Have Been Invited To MLK Day?"
  
• Snowden Impersonated NSA Officials
  
• Will Iran Retaliate If The US Strikes Syria
  
• Taranto: The Harms Race
  

*Probably not.

Check out my Myspace page.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:12 AM | Comments (290)
Post contains 158 words, total size 3 kb.

Here's a good piece from David Freddoso, who'll be our podcast guest this week, on congressional authority over declarations of war.

This quote from Madison seems particularly relevant:

In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture to heterogeneous powers, the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one manÂ…

... particularly for as small a man as the current occupant of the White House.

Posted by: andy at 02:38 AM | Comments (203)
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The Most Important Life Lesson Older People Want Younger Ones to Know

Do not spend your life in a job you hate.

You know those nightmares where you are shouting a warning but no sound comes out? Well, that's the intensity with which the experts wanted to tell younger people that spending years in a job you dislike is a recipe for regret and a tragic mistake. There was no issue about which the experts were more adamant and forceful. Over and over they prefaced their comments with, "If there's one thing I want your readers to know it's . . ." From the vantage point of looking back over long experience, wasting around two thousand hours of irretrievable lifetime each year is pure idiocy.

Fringe Politics Isn't Really About Politics

Even if the people on the fringe obsess on politics and politicians.

Because their motives were basically psychological rather than political, the anti-Bush moonbats have kept up their radical craziness long after the original grievance has passed. The U.S. has pulled out of Iraq and is withdrawing from Afghanistan, but the radicals have not been placated by the policy changes they demanded, because policy changes are not really what radicals seek. Rather, the radical desires to destroy the society from which he is alienated.

...Why have fringe kooks like this - who raged against Bush when all the cool kids were doing it - not been placated by Obama's policies? For the same reason that Oswald, who embraced Marxism during the Eisenhower era, was not placated by John F. Kennedy's liberalism: It's not really about politics for these kooks.

It is wrong to dismiss these kooks as irrelevant to mainstream politics, because the mainstream influences the kooks even while the kooks influence the mainstream.

Unfortunately just because they're acting mostly out of their own internal psych issues rather than policy or ideology doesn't mean that they still don't have a powerful political influence. Like the strength of the retard the power of the kook shouldn't be underestimated.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:39 PM | Comments (538)
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Not sure what this means, but I'm sure it's nothing serious. more...

Posted by: Russ from Winterset at 05:48 PM | Comments (300)
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