Author: Aaron Weber

A boat in a harbor is safe, but that is not what boats are for.

The American gulag differs from the Soviet system in two ways: we don’t use forced labor and have fewer prisoners. But it’s still an unaccountable system of political imprisonment. Add in the overcrowded criminal justice system – one percent of the US population, if I’m not mistaken, many of them nonviolent drug offenders – and we’ve got something history will regard as monstrous. See also: 5 Things You Should Know About Crack.

Dr. King was a radical. Everyone should read The Vietnam Speech. Also worth reading: The National Review’s 1959 coverage of King’s speeches. It’s amazing that a magazine that vile still exists today. But then, I guess that as late as 1983, John McCain voted against MLK day as a national holiday (see Jack And Jill Politics for details on McCain’s civil rights idiocy) and he’s still employed, too.

Print Liberation is selling Barack Obama shirts that don’t actually send any money to Barack Obama. Is this helpful? It feels sleazy to me. They are pretty shirts though.

Conspiracy theorists are going to love the alternate economic data from Shadow Stats. It’s got things like more sophisticated inflation metrics and unemployment figures that include discouraged workers. And yes, all their figures are more pessimistic than the official figures.

I made a joke about it over at MeeVee but I’m beginning to think that the latest anti-drug ads from The Meth Project are really a sign that we need a new movement in horror film, back to the sixties and seventies drug-exploitation movies, only with all the cinematic sophistication that we’ve developed over the years. The torture-porn thing is gross, misogynistic, and no longer shocking. Just watch the first anti-meth ad, the one with the shower scene (at right). Yes, it’s got the traditional horror plot of a sweet defenseless girl doing something bad and getting into trouble, but more importantly it brings in what I hope will be this decade’s horror theme: She is her own monster.

Look at “I Am Legend” – or, at least, look at “I Am Legend” as it was written, without the tacked-on happy ending: The zombie vampire monsters are human and have their own society, and don’t understand why Will Smith is hunting them and capturing them and killing them. He’s the monster. We’re the monsters and we’ve created ourselves as such. That’s what I want to see from horror movies. Instead we get “Saw III.” Blech.

Here’s my plot: Nice kids fall in with a bad crowd, take lots of drugs and gradually become psychotic. Insert any kind of terrifying hallucination you like; the protagonists won’t know which ones are real. Definitely have a scene in which someone is actually covered in bugs because they live in filth, but refuses to brush them off because they think they’re just hallucinating. As in “Requiem For A Dream,” everyone else should have a parallel drug problem, but one which allows them to function in society. Functional alcoholics, wake-and-bake burnouts, whatever, so long as they manage to hold down jobs and preserve a semblance of normality, while the tweakers get into identity theft and then forget which stolen persona they’ve adopted is actually theirs. Basically the drug is a metaphor for the horrible scabrous monster that lives inside all of us. When you apply for ONDCP grant money to defray production costs, tell them that the horrible scabrous monster that lives inside all of us is a metaphor for drug abuse.

The LAT steps up to the plate to ask “Seriously, why do you keep making jokes about prison rape?“

This weekend’s MotoGP in Jerez was the source of one of the most incredible near-misses I’ve ever seen on video. The second or third replay in this clip is from the bike’s onboard camera, and you can see it go completely horizontal. The rider’s elbow has got to be totally destroyed. (Via The Biker Gene.)

“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots…“

Prayer instead of insulin: Child, 11, dies after at least 30 days of ketoacidosis.

There was a brief period in the UK at the beginning of the sixties when mods (scooters, pills, fancy clothes, The Who) fought violently with rockers (motorcycles, beer, leather, Elvis). These days in Mexico, it’s emo versus all the other subcultures. When I first saw the headlines on BoingBoing I figured it was some kind of prank, but no, it’s serious:

These days, motorcycle and scooter enthusiasts get together and have mods-and-rockers parties together. There is no rioting; it’s more of a get-together with talk about restoring old machines. Hell, there’s a clothing line named after the US equivalent, the Hollister riots. I wonder whether the emo vs. everyone else riots will have a similar nostalgia in 2038.

A Bentley parked illegally in a handicapped spot.
A car-wash sign saying WHEN MY CAR LOOKS GOOD I FEEL

I wonder if they are somehow related: The Bentley owner’s only opportunity to feel anything is to have a shining symbol of their financial status.

Ride 2 Die, a motorcycle site aimed to promote safety by posting horrible accident photos (and horrible graphic design – man, they could use a blog format on that thing) has been circulating around the various motorcycle sites I read. And let me tell you, if those road rash pictures don’t sell armored riding pants, nothing will.

Anyway, after rubbernecking through all their gory crash pictures, I switched to YouTube for more motorcycle crash videos on YouTube. My favorite so far illustrates the hazards of putting a raw novice onto a 140-horsepower supersport motorcycle… and yes, that’s Masshole motorcycling at its finest:

When Slate.com calls BoingBoing a national treasure, you can be pretty sure it’s all downhill from there. It’s like a glowing profile of your innovative energy-trading outfit in a national business magazine– you can be sure there’s a corruption scandal or bankruptcy soon to follow, or at least a major slide in stock prices. Yes, they’re all debating the nature of truthiness in the internet age, but I’ve grown tired of that debate. My more revealing insight: Everybody sucks.

Here is a film clip for your edification, illustrating my point: