Nom de plume: Rivrdog

What makes YOU mash the TV "off" button?

Meme time. You're sitting through the Evening News, and your facelifted news babe or nuze hunk introduces a story. You gag, then mash either the "mute" button or the "off" button.

What caused this visceral reaction? Put your TeeVee turn-offs in comments if you don't see 'em here, or "+" mine if you want.

In no particular order:

• Obama doing any Agenda item with the Victim Group which he thinks illustrates it.
• Over-coached kids doing "anti-bullying" PSAs
• "Doug", the Mesothelioma Victim.
• Any Victim who has done more than one "grief on my sleeve" gig.
• The "latest" Big Pharma sales ad you've already seen 39 times.
• Bill O'Reilly with guests screaming at each other.

Other than Evening News:

• Sportz channel show with screaming-at-each-other sportz wallahs
• Any people screaming at each other unless Alfred Hitchcock wrote the script
• Anything with a zombie lurching, EVEN campy old movies.
• Anything with a zombie in it that tries to convince me that zombies are real.
• Anything, particularly zombies, that takes a load of 00 Buck to center of mass and keeps coming.

I would have included "teased news" stories, but if I mashed the button every time one of those came on, I'd never watch any news at all. I'm old enough to remember when news stories were NEVER "teased", the newscasters just read the news and showed the video or still photos which illustrated the stories. Only the production staff knew which order the stories were going to be in.

In the Auld Days, the Beeb (BBC) used to have the best format: they headlined the stories and put them in an on-screen list with the exact time they were to be broadcast. That way you could go to the potty or pour another drink to get you through the dismal parts (and back to the potty), or you could even turn off the TV if you saw nothing on the list which didn't interest you.

Fire up the comments. TeeVee is dismal, and this is your chance to show the world just how dismal that swamp IS.

Need more proof?

That the Obumble Admin doesn't get it about security?

Pipe this.

Now, for some enterprising outfit like Breitbart, you can have a starting point to look at phone logs. Start with the ICE station in LAX International Terminal and follow the chain of phone calls about letting these people in despite rules keeping them out. Might be a bigger deal than "Benghazi-gate". Big in size, anyway, since it involves the gasbag Michael Moore.

Fisking Hollywood hypocrisy, Hollywood Style

...with a video.

The rotary-wing contingent over at the League of Extrordinarily Grumpy Majors (I am ronin from that group) has found a video that Hollywood tried to whip Lefty sentiment up with to "make a plan" {to (evidently) seize guns}, all, that is, except the ones in their hyper-violent movies.

You have to stay to the end. It's only 3:25.

The end expresses the point from rage, but if the refusal of the Left to consider changing one of the main causes of gun violence doesn't make you mad, well, Pilgrim, you are taking far too much anti-depressant.

After this fisking video, the naked hypocrisy of Hollywood and the game people gets off the Free Ride Bus.

On this solemn occasion...

...as I sit here at 0800 on my 69th birthday, contemplating my navel/ my station in life/ the sorry state of world affairs/ the decline and prospective fall of Western Civilization, I was pouring myself a celebratory Mimosa wine cooler, and the gudwife had the morning digi-blatt (TV) open (too lazy to get up and read the real newspaper), and a commercial break ensues on Fox News.

At the break, the current ad for Old Dominion Freight Lines comes on. It's a feel-good ad, designed to show how much trucking impacts our daily lives (so true!) and how much you REALLY want to ship on the sparkling new Old Dominion truck fleet (hmmm. Are they competitive?).

The last three seconds of the ad is intriguing. It shows three operators getting out of their cabs at the truck terminal, having just backed their rigs in. There are two men drivers and one woman driver. The men shake hands, and the woman doesn't.

Get it?

Think about it for a minute.

Get it yet?

OK, I'll 'splain it. This ad is a microcosm of our culture. In the beginning, the ad shows all sort of people in all sorts of occupational costumes, including the woman, driving their Old Dominion trucks (in her case, she's driving in a wedding dress). This is supposed to show that all sorts of people contribute to our grand American life. I get that.

At the end, a drum major in his fancy suit is helping dock one of the big rigs. I get that.

What I didn't get is the fact that while the ad shows the three impeccably-uniformed drivers exiting their rigs at the end of shift and walking towards the terminal, it shows them un-equal. The woman doesn't shake hands.

That bears repeating.

The woman doesn't shake hands. She didn't participate in the friendly, end-of-shift ritual of her co-drivers by shaking hands.

Okay, it's time for YOU, Dear Readers, to expound. Some questions to ponder:

• Since the ad was meant to portray what's right with America (and trucking and especially the Company), does this little slight the woman driver showed take away from that image?
• Since the beginning of the ad showed all sorts of males in working costume, but the one female in a dress which is meant to illustrate traditional subservience in marriage, is THAT appropriate to the ad's message?
• Why was the woman set apart by the two allegorical mechanisms (the wedding dress and the failure to shake hands), when the point of having her in the commercial in the first place was likely done as a PeeCee offering to the Goddess of Equality of the Sexes?

Just sayin'. When the best minds in the ad biz get together and put on a perfectly-filmed ad with this much meaning, and they can't stick to their PeeCee message, do we cheer for the frailty of the whole PeeCee thing, or do we cry for our lost America? 

No big deal, the film sucked

I watched the part of the (horrors!) anti-Islamic film when it was available on You Tube. It might be charitably re-titled "Harold and Kumar become Hadeed and Omar", with apologies to the stoners in that film trilogy. It is low comedy at it's worst, and takes several opportunities to show the Prophet Mohammed as a dorky opportunist, and his acolytes, the Harold and Kumar characters, as frat-boy dorks of even lower caliber. The film-maker completely failed to properly use the satire he was obviously trying for, and the ultra-low budget location work, out in the dunes somewhere in SoCal or AZ, didn't even bother to use a leaf blower to erase the ATV tracks in the sand dunes. Losers.

If I'm a muzzie, my reaction is to ask why Westerners are such crappy film-makers, but if Hassan Nasrallah, Mullah of Hizbullah, actually appears in public to denounce it, I guess anyone can be a film critic these days.

The film-maker is not a threat to anyone or anything, but I will award him Maroon of the Month, anyway.

The "Apology Tour" continues apace...

Okay then, it's Day Three of the Disgruntled Muslim riots in the Middle East. So far, it hasn't resulted in any nations attacking each other, but all those Islamic Republics (to pervert the word, "Republic") evidently find it useful to continue to bite the hand that feeds them (that being the overly-generous US' hand).

Associated with all this feeder-hand-biting is the Apology Tour, which gave birth to the "Arab Spring". Do YOU think the Apology Tour is over? If you do, you'd be 180-out, as we navigators used to say before GPS made us redundant and we lost our authority to tell important people (pilots) where to go.

In the current unrest, the now-continued Apology Tour re-started in full form when our Ambassador to Egypt officially apologized for the film's publication on the Internet*. That apology was immediately attacked by Mitt Romney, and the apologists then turned on Romney to hide the fact that they had shamelessly continued the contemptible practice of the USA apologizing for non-Islamic behaviors. At that point, the Secretary of Shamelessness State, Hillary Clintoon, had to "officially" retract the Ambassador's apology, and even President Obama had to acknowledge that we have real freedom of speech in this country.

Except that Obama just reneged on that erstwhile support of the First Amendment.

Guess who is now "officially" involved in yet another incident of un-Constitutional shamelessness?

If you said Eric Holder, you would be correctimundo, and you get the prize.

Holder's DOJ just announced that they are using the Federal Probation and Parole system to "investigate" one Nakoula Besseley Nakoula (he's not from here, but might be Naturalized, and he's no choirboy, either), a Federal Convicted Person (charge of Wire Fraud), who is alleged to have put together the film, "The Innocence of Muslims" which the Islamists are supposedly all butt-hurt about. Yep, after supposedly defending this person's right to make films, the Official USA position on the filmaker is to try to toss him in the clink, somehow suggesting his exercise of the First Amendment is now illegal because he was previouosly convicted of Wire Fraud and is prohibited from using electronic media as a condition of parole for his Wire Fraud charge. Look, I was an Officer of the Court for 25 years, and I know of no case where First Amendment rights were diminished by conditions of Parole.

Way to go, Holder. You have just proven once again that you never met ANY part of the Bill of Rights that you didn't feel could be negated for political purpose.

Way to go, Obama. You have had the opportunity to dump your bully-boy-in-Chief for some months now, since it is obvious he lied to Congress while under oath, but you, Mister President, have stuck with him. Now he has just trashed the First Amendment, and probably the Fourth as well. Was this un-Constitutional activity done on YOUR order, Mister President? If so, YOU have displayed such a denial of the basic freedoms guaranteed by our Bill of Rights that YOU need to step down.

Resign now, Mister President. The farce you have made of your Oath of Office has no precedent, except maybe by Richard Nixon, who at least went to the trouble to hide his predation on the Constitution. You are so steeped in the belief that you are Dictator for Life here that you don't even try to hide it anymore when you and your minions trash our enumerated and guaranteed freedoms.

Barack Hussein Obama, you are a traitor to the Office you were elected to hold, and hold by UP-holding our Constitution. You not only haven't up-held that important document as you swore to, you have repeatedly attempted to negate it with official conduct from your office.

Resign, sir.

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*"The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others." Source here, the Government has scrubbed the official report on this. NBC's link for the document containing the Ambassador's two apologizing statements, url of http://egypt.usembassy.gov/pr091112.html comes back "file not found".

Movie script alert

Read this article and tell me it will never cross a Hollywood producer's desk as a movie script...

B.O.H.I.C.A.*, New Global Warming alarmism.

EhBeeCee News this time, and it was the lead story tonight.  "Major Alert" intones Diane Sawyer as the phrase "Tipping Point" gets casually tossed around. "State of the Climate (Fearmongering) Report just isued", the story blathers on. Cue the picture of the polar bear standing forlornly on the melting iceberg. More alarms: "The odds of a tipping point keep growing."

The story opened with "Weather equals climate?" as an affirmative question, then sort of said it wasn't, but if the writers know that weather NEVER equals climate**, why did they put that in? More fearmongering.

Remember the famously discredited "hockey stick" chart which propelled Al Gore to fame, then shame as a GlowBULL warNing" expert? Look at it this way, the "hockey stick" is back, except that it's now called a "tipping point". The fearmongers knew better than to mention ALGore's name during the story, but it wouldn't surprise me if commentary puts him back into the conversation.

Why now? With the election and the economy and Radical Islam still nipping at our heels, you'd think that the climate alarmists, having been roundly discredited in several major revealing incidents, would be a little less forthcoming this time.

It's "double-down" time! This is a characteristic trick of pathological liars in general, and liberal liars in particular: deny, deny, deny, counter-accuse. The corollary to that is, when caught in the first lie, make up a bigger one to cover the first one. That's what we're seeing now, the Next Big Lie.

BTW, liberloons, the "tipping point" idea was fine as an attention-getter in the climatescare movies, but it has never been proven to actually happen in real life. The climate is fairly well mapped out in the micro-paleontology of the ice caps, and there is no record of a "tipping point" there.

Here's the curmudgeon's last word. Now that the Cloward-Piven strategy is revealed, an early sort of "October surprise", the object/event to be overwhelmed this time is the election and it's previously-driving event horizon, the US economy. The (D)onks know that they will get beaten down by the sluggish-to-declining economy, so they are going to dance out of it with global warming alarmism. "How can we just sit there and let this happen. Quick, before the tipping point gets here, let's DO SOMETHING"

Mark my words, the "DO SOMETHNG' will include re-electing Barack Obama, despite his dismal record on anything related to climate change.

What can WE do?. Start looking for the emails and the evidence that this was set up. They've got to be out there, and if history is any guide, the alarmists aren't capable of any effective cover-up. After we find evidence of these connivances, let's make a supreme effort to tie it to the world liberloon conspiracy.

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* B.O.H.I.C.A. (Bend Over, Here It Comes Again)

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** I took Weather and Climate in college as part of the Geophysical Science triad. On the first day, the Professor advised us that mixing up the two sciences, Weather and Climate, would result in grade failure, because if there was one sure thing on this earth, it was that there is ZERO mathematical relationship between weather and climate. Yeah, that was almost 50 years ago, but I have heard nothing in the intervening half-century to contradict that Professor. BTW, I got an "A" in the course, despite not having the math skill to do any of the really scary calculations to study past the introductory course.

Tax rebates are good, right?

Let's look at the idea of Government reducing the tax burden for targeted industries.

I'm a conservative, and even a bit libertarian, although I don't go full-Wookie with their grand plan to hide the nation internationally and zone everyone out on dope. I generally support most libertarian ideas on economics, though, so I look favorably on reducing the tax burden wherever it may be reduced.

The key here is "wherever it may be reduced". Government, in recent decades, "Big Government", has made a habit of never seeing money that didn't need spending, so the expenses of Government are many and growing, and in fact, Federal Government is guaranteed by law to grow at 7% per year (built-in budget increases for all Federal Departments, there's no such thing as Zero-based Budgeting at the Federal level).

So, if the Government has income that can be reduced, we would generally say "reduce it", because we believe, against all reality, that this results in less Government.

When Big Government reduces it's tax demands, there is always a reason. Recently, the State of WA re-instituted some tax breaks for the film industry. Movie producers and their investor-financiers are always looking for ways to cut the cost of producing their films, so, other things being equal, the least-cost location for out-of-studio work always gets their attention. Since film-making is a high-dollar enterprise, big money gets spent "on location". Makes sense that States would want to attract this business, doesn't it?

Nazzofast. It is NOT so simple as just relieving the film-makers of paying most or all of their business income tax in return for them doing their expensive work in the State. Key personnel are sometimes given tax breaks on income taxes (WA doesn't have those), and other incentives that cut into State revenue are generated. In Oregon, a largish office working directly under the Governor, at last report with 30 State-paid staff and/or consultants, exists just for the purpose of attracting film-makers to work in Oregon (where there is a HUGE State income tax).

OK, now armed with how it's done, and the supposed why it's done, we nod our heads and say, "do it".

I don't agree, for two reasons. The first reason is the effect the final product, likely a fiction-based film, has on the society: this type of entertainment dumbs us all down, for the most part. We tend to better accept fiction as life when we get our heads into film. Accepting fiction is the stuff of politician's dreams, because, as you well know if you've read the 3,500 or so posts on these pages, Government and it's leaders operate by baffling us with bullshit, mainly because they couldn't sell us the reality of what they do on their very best day.

The second reason is that these tax-break perks are a form of political corruption. There is almost a market for them, with brokers, and all. A big producer with a $200 million movie to make might well send an emmisary to several states and dicker over the size of the tax breaks to be issued to his firm. The government weenies he dickers with now all get various bennies, better known as corruption. The sleazy relationship thus produced reinforces the film industry's political influence and the politicians' influence over the film industry, neither of which is helpful for the society.

So, all these arrangements need to be conducted out in the open, subject to public scrutiny, but they never are. Instead, we cheer whenever we hear that another film will be created in our State.

If we knew the half of it, we wouldn't be cheering, we'd be crying.

"Battleship", the failed movie concept

A thought: why did the concept fail? An almost identical concept, "Space Battleship Yamato", has been going strong in both the sci-fi and anime genres for 38 years in Japan.

Could it be...

...that old, rehashed concepts don't fool the fans?