I’m normally not too tough on Libertarians, some of them are pretty well meaning. Unfortunately it seems that Libertarian in the last few years has become codeword for Republican. You’ll talk to someone, they’ll have a bunch of Republican positions, and then they’ll look at you outraged if you ask if they are a Republican. It doesn’t help at all that the Libertarian movement was also highjacked by the Koch brothers who proceeded to astroturf it into the Tea Party Movement. But this latest scheme, whether it’s a true Libertarian idea or not, is hilarious.
They want to build Oil Platforms out in international waters in order to be able to implement Libertarian ideas. Now before I go any further, let me give you a quote:
Details says the experiment would be “a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.”
Yes, Looser building codes WHILE YOU ARE BUILDING ON TOP OF AN OIL PLATFORM IN THE MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN! BRILLIANT!
I’m an anarchist, and I can see the many, many ways this wouldn’t end well. Hell, if I was a bunch of Somali pirates, I’d find a way to raid or even take the thing over. It doesn’t even have to be Somali Pirates, most major drug cartels in South and Central America have a strong military presence. It would be a great place to take over and use to co-ordinate drug activities considering it would probably be built near the American shoreline. Then of course our military is probably going to have to get involved and fix their mess.
There are reasons you have some of these laws. Now I do believe in some of the things the government does to insure people’s rights. The mix here sounds like a dangerous one, a bunch of stubborn people who are so unwilling to negotiate they proceeded to BUILD THEIR OWN ISLAND! They are also going to have limited restrictions on weapons, which goes well with people unwilling to compromise. No minimum wage will work well too. Some of these restrictions exist in order to keep people from doing extremely stupid things that will hurt large numbers of people. Considering they are outside the reach of the government, I also wonder what currency they plan to use?
I believe it is possible for people to have a Utopia, but not like this. It’s going to end up being either everyone for themselves, or a huge mess. Mostly I see an invasion by a Drug Cartel causing the end. The weird thing is that if you really wanted to do this and people volunteered to join you you could just buy many acres of land in the middle of nowhere. When people tried to create little Utopias in the past that’s what they did. But hey, if these people want to throw away their money and possibly their life, they can feel free to!
My inability to sleep all night is your gain. As this was on Comedy Central during an episode of South Park, I figured it was a parody. But it wasn’t, and I was shocked. Who out there is fretting over 2 inches of height? I mean what happens if you get this woman, and then she finds out later after you take your shoes off that your shorter. Do you really want to be the person whose height is so important that they need lifts? Of all the things that could possibly be wrong about people, height is really the last thing anyone should care about.
I really can’t believe someone pitched this as an idea, and someone else thought it was a good idea to put their money behind it. At this point they might as well just be burning their money. At 3 in the morning, the last thing people are worried about is their height. Give me some good old hair in a can, or Extenze with the backing of Jimmy Johnson. But two inches of height? Not really a problem unless I’m high as a kite. I’m sort of surprised that they don’t have these for socks so that you can take off your shoes and lose height.
So would anyone out there really buy this? Is there anyone that worried about their height? What would you do when you have to take off your shoes? Am I insane for watching these shows at 4 AM and being amazed by them? Why the fuck can I not just fall asleep?
So with all the recent zombie stuff everywhere, I was reading about World War Z. It’s basically about a world wide zombie breakout and humanity fighting back. Now it’s relatively believable until you get to the part in which the United States falls. And no, this isn’t going to be a rah-rah United States type of rebuttal. The argument laid out by Z is that after NYC falls, the army decides to make a chokehold in Yonkers and wipe out all the zombies in one large battle.
The problem? The infantry is told to dig Foxholes, while the artillery is given a limited supply of Anti-Personnel shells. Yes, with almost all of NYC zombies, they limit the amount of Anti-Personnel shells given to the Artillery and Tanks. The decision to dig out foxholes and use sandbags for barriers make the infantry easy targets. The excuse given is that the generals are leftovers from the cold war and don’t realize how to handle a human wave attack that has no fear of dieing. Of course that ignores a few points:
These are concrete barriers. You see them EVERYWHERE. They are nearly omnipresent. That makes it far easier to round up a bunch of them. If you stack them two high (and you can stack them easily) it’s about the same height as a person. You can also move them around and get together a large stock of them in a relatively short time. If you’ve ever seen the movie Volcano with Tommy Lee Jones, you know what I’m talking about.
This idea also fails because both the Soviets and the Chinese would make use out of Human Wave Tactics. The idea that these generals wouldn’t know how to react to human wave tactics is almost as silly as the idea of digging foxholes and making sandbag barriers. Instead you would most likely put up a barricade and then dig pits in front of those barricades. This isn’t a new tactic actually, it’s been used for thousands of years. Just think of a moat around a castle. Caesar and the Romans infamously did this a lot of time, even using camouflaged spikes in the pits in front of the barricades.
With construction tools and barricades, you could fairly easily make a large pit with a barricade on one side. Then it would just be a matter of setting up machine guns on heights and killing wave after wave after wave. Why you would ever limit the amount of anti-personnel shells when fighting ZOMBIES is just silly. The zombies aren’t going to suddenly start rolling up with tanks and airplanes.
Look, there’s a lot of ways for the United States to fall to a zombie apocalypse. Generals deciding to ignore tactics which are thousands of years old and would still work isn’t one of them. Hell, if you had enough archers you could probably use modern machinery to setup the defenses and still stop the zombies. Almost any armchair tactician could come up with a better plan then that which was used in the Battle Of Yonkers. That’s where the book losses me. It also doesn’t help that for some reason people didn’t try to make a stand at the Mississippi River and ran all the way back to the Rocky Mountains.
Look, it’s not exactly easy to cross the Mississippi, even more when you consider how far it’s major tributaries reach. In one of my favorite comics Evil Ernie, the Mississippi Wall holds out the hordes for years and reaches all the way up to Thunder Bay. The Mississippi would be one of the first major obstacles to someone invading from the east. That the zombies seem to spread past it without much trouble is odd. Did no one think to destroy the bridges over the rivers? You could still use barges to get people over the river. Or when the Horde is within site you could blow the bridges. Either way it’s a large plothole you could drive a truck through.
I swear, the dumbest idea on the internet lately is universal log-ins. Being able to sign into 50 different sites once you signed into one site is NOT a good idea. It’s even worse when stuff like YouTube FORCES you to get a google account. I tried to sign into one of my multiple accounts only to get stopped and informed that I had to either connect the account to my google account or create a new google account. The whole reason that I had multiple email addresses is so my main google account wouldn’t get spammed.
But let’s not dwell on the idea of forcing you to log into services. One of the main reasons that a universal login is bad is that your not protected once someone hacks your account. For example I use multiple yahoo and google email accounts for differing things depending on the level of security I need. My email that gets a ton of spam is not going to be the same email I use to access paypal. Back in the day this was recommended, especially since if you were silly enough to link everything to one email account, someone could reset all your passwords. IE: There is no protection using multiple emails if they are all tied into the same account via password reset.
Making life easier for people is only setting them up for a bigger fall when their accounts get hacked. Now thankfully yahoo has finally taken some steps forward in actually protecting your passwords, but it seems like they’ve taken a giant leap backwards in allowing you to use yahoo accounts to log in to multiple sites. It’s not just them of course. It’s rather insane seeing the number of sites that you can log into using your facebook or something else. It’s sort of disconcerting when you visit a site every once in a blue moon and you see your facebook info on their toolbar.
Idiots are just asking to have their whole online existence wiped with a single button stroke. At some point there is going to be a huge mistake that compromises a whole bunch of accounts across multiple platforms and then maybe we can stop this stupidity. In the long run while having one sign in for multiple places makes life easy, it also makes you just that much more susceptible to being hacked.
It sort of amazes me that people don’t realize what they are doing. I mean people are shocked when you find their stuff on other websites because they use the same nickname everywhere. They are almost acting as though google somehow doesn’t exist. To make matters worse, even if you can’t access someones account on another site once your in their email, it is possible they used the same password for everything. All you need is one site that they are signed up to to email you their password without changing it and you can most likely access everything else.
It seems like people are just never going to learn until they get burnt.
I rant and rave about how bad TV has gotten, how all the channels are all the same and so on. But tonight took the cake for it. I can’t believe people even pay for Cable anymore, just buy/rent/download shows on DVD. The stupidity just ceases to amaze. Why oh why are some of these programs/shows/movies not just on TV, but on the networks they are on. Tonight it was just mind numbingly insane. I wanted to take my TV and throw it out the window.
First stop: History Channel. I should have known it was going to be a bad night. Larry the Cable Guy (yes, Larry The Cable Guy was on History Channel) talking with Rodeo clowns about how valuable Bull Riders are to Cowboys and American History. I already wanted to throw the TV out the window but I decided to keep surfing and somehow it didn’t get better.
Second Stop: ABC Family, Not nearly as bad but Meet The Parents? I mean I’m not expecting it to be sugarpuff shows or whatever but Meet The Parents should have been R Rated. It just doesn’t strike me as much of a family movie. I could think of hundreds of movies with a better family theme. Hell I’d take the Amazing Tennenbaums to be more of a family movie then Meet the Parents.
Third Stop: American Movie Classics: Now it’s come to my attention that much like MTV is no longer Music Television, American Movie Classics is just AMC. Even so, maybe they can do some quality control and stick to the newer classics. A few weeks ago I saw Wild Wild West, but tonight it was Pearl Harbor. One of the biggest recent busts in memory and an affront to actual history. Oh and it had almost nothing to do with Pearl Harbor. There was so much wrong with this movie I don’t feel like covering it all. Needless to say you might loosely make a debate for Wild Wild West (it made a profit) as a “New Classic” but Pearl Harbor?
Fourth Stop: Comedy Central, no idea what the name of the movie actually was, but it starred Dane Cooke trying to be funny in a movie. He was taking a girl on a date. For the date he took her to a religious themed pizzeria. I’m not offended because it was religious themed (including cross pizzas) but instead it was so dumb that it just made a bad movie worse. I didn’t make it much more then 10 minutes into the film, but let’s be serious. It’s a Dane Cooke movie on Comedy Central when everyone with half a brain knows Dane Cook isn’t funny.
If it wasn’t for the fact that I don’t pay for my cable, I would have gotten rid of it as a complete waste of money. The only channel I really need is VS for the NHL Playoffs. Beyond that every single channel is a complete ripoff. The sad thing is that people get convinced to buy more and more channels hoping for better, but this is as good as its going to get. The basic channels are pretty much the bread and butter. Not only that, but I found an interesting reason that all these channels are looking the same. Advertisers are unwilling to buy ads unless it will be seen by specific age groups. So now advertisers are driving content on TV. For joy!
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