Feel like shitting yourself?

via the NYT's Green blog, The National Center for Atmospheric Research has a predictive model for where all that oil is going to go. Hint: the Atlantic seaboard.

Now they coach their model with "it's not peer reviewed" and "it's merely a projection", but I'd like to commence pants shitting and proclamations about the ruination of all sea life and beach going on the eastern coast of America. Not to get reactionary or anything.

Commence happy smile time:

Things you don't want to hear the smartest man in the world say

We all have dreams about aliens and space travel. Most of them involve aliens landing, telling you you're the ultimate special human, and then whisking you far away to fight in an intergalactic battle where you're the key to defeating evil, and your reward will be all the space bucks and alien princess 'tang you can carry. Or it involves aliens invading Earth and you coming up with the key to defeat them that was so simple that the aliens, with their superior intelligence and weaponry, really should have had a contingency plan for it, but OH THEIR ALIEN HUBRIS AND ARROGANCE, YOU CANNOT DEFEAT THE HUMAN SPIRIT!

Or maybe you just want to be Han Solo or fuck around and have a family type adventure with a stranded, but friendly, alien. Whatever. The point is, you don't think of the aliens coming down, fucking our shit up royally, and then exterminating or enslaving us for all eternity. Well, Stephen Hawking really wants you to start considering that notion. Like, right now.

“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”
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Hawking uses them to lead on to a serious point: that a few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity.

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

Bleak enough for you? That's just the beginning stages of the Discovery Channel's new series Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking. Hell, part four is called "Aliens: Did I mention the part where they rape you and eat you at the same time? No? Trust me, it'll be awful."

But, the smartest man on earth isn't just trying to scare you about aliens and sell a spec script to Steven Spielberg where a man in a wheelchair beats back the evil Columbus aliens with knowledge, quantum theory, and a chair mounted Gatling gun, no, he's trying to educate about other things as well.

Aside from aliens, Hawking's program discusses the nature of life, space travel, time travel, black holes, and the wonders of the cosmos in an attempt to entertain and teach. Largely about how we're all doomed, but also about things that we won't be able to see or fully comprehend... because hostile forces from other planets will have wiped our civilization out before we become smart enough. The four part miniseries already aired its first two parts on the 25th, with the second two to come in subsequent weeks. Watch, learn, and be afraid.

Picture of the day

Via the Big Picture Blog comes more of the Eyjafjallajokull eruption. Look, I don't want to jump to any premature conclusions yet, but I think it's time to declare Europe a dead, ash strewn wasteland and move on with our lives in this post-Euro world. They had their run and God destroyed them because we passed health care reform. We mustn't be consumed with the past, consumed with the Europe that was. We must look to the future. We'll just wait for them to slowly die from the lack on sunlight and heat, then we'll send in looting teams to pick up ashy Mona Lisa's, statues, and the like. Win win.

Clicks embiggen. You know this.

Picture of the day w/ bonus animation

The Icelandic death cloud that is devouring Europe/ushering in a new sunblocked ice age/inconveniencing air travelers.

SEEDS~!

SEEDS! THE GLOBAL ELITE! SECRET STORAGE VAULTS! THE ARCTIC CIRCLE! MORE VALUABLE THAN GOLD!

People did you know that society is collapsing and civilization is crumbling?OF course you do, we mention it every day. But did you know what the currency is going to be when the dark times come? If you said "the warmest hole on my body" you're only partially right. It's seeds! What will feed you when there are no more Wal-Marts? Seeds! What will get you the company of two comely young blonde lasses at the grog shack? Seeds! What will be there to comfort you after you've had to kill a man to survive and the last vestiges of your humanity slip away as the world you once knew fades into your memory and the bloodlust takes over? Seeds!

Fuck gold. Seeds. This is what you and all other fringe survivalist fruitcakes need to be stockpiling for the upcoming economic collapse... excuse me, further economic collapse. That... and guns. Guns, knives, pointed sticks, fire making implements, quasi futuristic armor, and something you can convert into a mobile kill center/tank. Seeds though, remember to get the seeds. Hell, I'm going to the store to buy a bag on sunflower seeds as we speak.

Your Christmas miracle

If you were hoping that in the next few days that a lonely rich miser would learn the value of humanity, sharing, and good will to all, that some workaholic father would learn the value of time spent with family appreciating the little things, or that a precocious mutt from the pound would reunite an estranged couple and teach the neighborhood the meaning of Christmas, well, you're out of luck. All the Christmas miracle sauce got used up this weekend by the Democrats to get 60 votes for the health care bill and what little was left over got used by the Steelers last night to beat the Packers.

Would we all have liked something a better Christmas miracle than Ben Nelson being sufficiently bought off by the Democratic leadership to pass a compromise of a compromised compromise health care bill? Yeah. But time are tough for everyone, even Santa, and all he could give us was a discount Christmas miracle. The first votes have been finished and things look to be on track for Senate passage of the bill by Christmas day. What did they have to compromise to get this passed?

Under the deal, states could choose to prohibit abortion coverage in plans offered through insurance exchanges that the bill would set up for people who lack coverage through their jobs. The compromise is less restrictive than the abortion language contained in the House bill.

Nelson also secured full and permanent federal funding for his state to extend Medicaid eligibility to everyone below 133 percent of the federal poverty level. The bill would require all states to do so, but Nebraska alone would not be required to pay a portion of the additional cost after 2016. And he won concessions for some nonprofit insurers and for providers of supplemental Medicare coverage from a new insurance tax, and he was able to roll back cuts to health savings accounts.

So under the abortion compromise, which may be unconstitutional, you essentially are at the whims of the states to decide if it's allowed and you have to pay for the transaction with two checks.Nice to see that as part of his principled objection to women paying for things with one check, he also had a principled debate over whether or not his state should get extra Medicare goodies that no other state got. He won that argument of course, but Harry Reid was able to keep out an amendment that declared Nebraska the "most ball out fuckin' radical state ever created." The Senate does have some principles.

If you want to read what's in the actual bill, go here. If you want to read someone lamenting the state of the bill, but saying the bill should still be passed, pick anyone but Howard Dean and Kieth Olbermann. But here are some good ones: Jacob Hacker "The Godfather of the public option", the Washington Post's Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman, and.. well fuck it, you have Google. Just type in "smiling while eating a shit sandwich" and it ought to take you to the most relevant articles. I swear on Sean's life that you won't find anything other than health care analysis if you Google that phrase.

Merry Christmas, you got health care, of a sort, to be put fully in place in 2014. Maybe some of this country will even be back to work by then. Enjoy.

Gold, women, sheep

Stephen Colbert looks at the linkup between conservative commentators and precious metals and Mad Men's John Slattery tries to prepare us for the post-apocalyptic nightmare future that we all know is coming.

What the hell is happening?

I don't want to alarm you, but the natural order of things has been uprooted. In a realization that people like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman are rotten fuckers who should be left on a hill to be tormented by vultures, Harry Reid has been negotiating with the last two moderately sane Republicans, the ones from Maine, in order to get them on board for health care. I know you just grimaced right now, thinking about what further concessions will be made. But that's where it gets weird. Not only is Susan Collins offering up proposed changes to the bill in order to get her support, most of the changes....make the bill better. You're fucking with the natural order of things, Collins!

Collins met Monday with White House health reform director Nancy-Ann DeParle and Health and Human Services health reform director Jeanne Lambrew. The senator said she put several amendment requests on the table: raising the penalty on hospitals with high rates of hospital-acquired infections, changing the small business tax credit to prevent it from discouraging hiring and increasing wages and boosting the affordability of insurance.

My God, all of these things are largely good ideas on the merits that would expand the reach of reform. Does she not understand how "getting support" works? It's by making the bill worse. Hello? Plus, both Collins and Snowe are quite the pro-choice advocates and Ben Nelson's recent pledge to out-Stupak the House bill might further bring them aboard in a bid to, you know, protect things they actually believe in.

My world is spinning and I feel dizzy. I have to go sit down. It's just....using swing vote power to improve health care access for Americans and protect women's rights? In the Senate? I think the sun is going to explode any second now.

The beginning of the end

Rest easy America, the Senate Finance Committee has finally gotten through the business every other Senate and House committee got through months ago with the Baucus bill passing by a margin of 14-9. Olympia Snowe was the only GOP'er to vote for it. And so we move on inexorably towards health care reform, but not before another hundred infuriating things happen, dozens of politicians are wished dead, and the whole miserable process drags on so feebly that when it is passed we're all angry, thoroughly disheartened, and completely disillusioned even though the biggest reform of health care since Medicare just passed.

Many commentators have gone out of their way that politicians have been promising to get comprehensive health coverage since Teddy Roosevelt without success, so I'll just point out that literally any of those proposals, from Roosevelt's to Nixon's to Bush I's to Clinton's would have been much more preferable to what we got. But there we are.

If you're interested in such things the Times live blogged the whole Finance Committee failfest. Go through it and see if you can pick out what angers you the most. Whether it's Orrin Hatch bitching that the bill wasn't bipartisan just because his party spent all its time pissing and moaning about grandma murdering, smart people like Wyden and Rockefeller not having their smart ideas listened to, John Ensign complaining about the lack of tax breaks for senators who have healthy, in shape mistresses, Bill Nelson supporting the bill becuase Olympia Snowe supporting the bill made it bipartisan, I'm sure you'll find something to hate about the Senate. Then there was Press Secretary Gibbs prattling on about how today's vote was bipartisan. Who gives a shit? As if one Republican vote makes things bipartisan. As if people care more that the bill is bipartisan than it being a good bill.

Bleh. So we move on tow.....what's that, Joe Liberman? You want to butt in and say something? You want people to hate you with the fire of ten thousand suns?

LIEBERMAN: I’ve been saying for a couple of months now that I’m concerned, that I’m concerned that there’s a danger that we’re trying to do too much here and the president is trying to do two good things. But doing them at once in the middle of a recession may be hard to pull off.
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IMUS: Do you support the Baucus bill?

LIEBERMAN: Not, not, no. I mean, not the way it is now.

Diediediediediediediediedie. Can't even celebrate this mediocre achievement for a day before you interject your sackless warbling, can we? I blame you, Connecticut, you're on fucking notice. I swear if Sean and I ever have robot armies that Minnesota District 6, the headquarters of every cable TV news outlet, Wall Street, and you are going to be taken out in the first wave.

Chart of the day

From Mint.com comes this handy chart showing how the American newspaper is more or less screwed, a shambling zombie, staggering down the street waiting for that sweet sweet bullet to the head. Come now, don't gawk and the deceased, it's impolite.

On the bright side, Glenn Beck built a lovely ski chalet at the top of the Scripps stock plunge. Though due to the steepness of the drop it is rated a black diamond course. Less brave souls might want to try the bunny hills on Gannett, McClatchey, and the Times more gently downward angled slopes. Still, lovely scenery from up that high and the snowboarding is excellent.

Perhaps I was too hasty

Maybe I jumped the gun. My declaration that American culture was killed by Spencer and Heidi praying with Mrs. Blagojevich for the exoneration of Pay-Rod was too definitive.

Surely the fact that US Weekly has had Jon and Kate (+8!!) on their cover six weeks in a row (along with every other magazine) and their BS family drama spilling over into nightly news coverage surely played some role in that gruesome death.

Who knew that having twins followed by sextuplets and documenting every step of your attempt to raise them on TV was bad for a marriage?

Just so you know

The exact moment where American culture died a violent and painful death was last night when Spencer and Heidi from the Hills prayed with Patti Blagojevich for the exoneration of Pay-Rod, while on a TV show called "I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here." Rod himself had been scheduled to be on the show, but a judge prevented him from leaving the state.

Sadly Stephen Baldwin was not involved, even though he is a reformed preacher and on the show.

Is this good?

Despite all of the predictably sad, sadly predictable, and mildly racist conservative opposition to President Obama's nomination of Second Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, one voice of... um... reason has emerged:

I have no questions in my mind about her qualifications in terms of education, experience. A president is not required to nominate the most qualified person to the court. I think he’s obliged to nominate someone who is well-qualified, and I think by any measures, she is well-qualified.

To whom can this measured, level-headed assessment be attributed? None other than former criminal mastermind Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales. I suggest we all forget about the perjury, the abject politicization of the Justice Department, the narrow pursuit of anti-American ideals, and just focus on backhanded semi-endorsement of an Ivy League-educated judicial scholar that the crazy right has sought to vilify and demean for, oh, the last 13 hours or so...

Dogs and cats, living together. Mass hysteria...

A compendium of childish reactions to the new liberal devil

Mike Huckabee hears "Latino" and "woman" and doesn't bother learning Judge Sotomayor's first name before he fires off a complaint about "feelings" and "the far left." He just assumes she's named Maria and may or may not be in the middle of a doomed romance/pitched dance off between the Jets and Sharks.

The Judicial Confirmation Network's Wendy Long dropped in the phrase "liberal judicial activist", accused her judicial style of dishonoring police and firefighters who died on 9/11, "reads racial preferences and quotas into the Constitution", and said she was more liberal activisty than the current liberal activist Supreme Court which is full of liberal activists. Judicalpocalypse in other words.

Rod Dreher calls her a mediocre Quota Queen, the left's Harriet Miers, and is relieved that Obama picked a dumb liberal woman instead of someone who can match wits with Scalia.

Charles Krauthammer decided she cares more about minorities and affirmative action than justice and that conservatives essentially need to oppose her to show that white people will not let this stand, man.

Red State: Intellectually shallow. To be clear: they were describing Sotomayer and not the entirety of their website.

Powerline wonders if she's "Che Guevara in robes". I guess we won't know until she's dead in Bolivia after failing to foment a revolution there.

The New Republic is perplexed as to why its dirty, anonymously sourced hit piece on Sotomayor is being used by conservatives to attack her. Gee, I wonder why.

National Review's Mark Hemingway: ‘Dumb,’ ‘Bully,’ ‘Doesn’t Play Well With Others,’ ‘Obnoxious’

ThinkProgress has video from Karl Rove to various Fox Newsies giving different variations of "not smart" and "intellectual lightweight".

There are also reports of a Virgin Mary statue bleeding from the eyes and the birth of a white two headed calf that the media ignored in favor of the birth of a tan two headed calf. We aren't even 12 hours into the nomination yet.

Good morning, we're all going to die

Here we were thinking this financial/economic crisis was going to bring the world to it's swift end. Nope. Should have seen the classic the Stand superflu angle coming down the pike. Who's to blame? Mexico, Mexican pigs, and Mexicans who kiss sick pigs on the mouth. Swine flu. It sounds funny and it'll kill us all.

Governments are racing to find and contain pockets of swine flu around the globe, seeking to stem both the threat of a pandemic and public panic.

"We're preparing in an environment where we really don't know ultimately what the size or seriousness of this outbreak is going to be," U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Sunday.

In Mexico, the outbreak's epicenter, soldiers handed out 6 million face masks to help stop the spread of the novel virus that is suspected in up to 103 deaths.
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There is not a global pandemic yet, but waiting until scientists know if the new virus is going to spread rapidly and easily would be too late.

It's not a pandemic....yet. Everyone says not to panic.....yet. But the signs are there. We've declared a public health emergency, the WHO is talking about "pandemic potential", and Europeans are being urged to avoid North America lest they get caught up in an EU backed mission to wall up the continent and burn everything inside. It's already spread to NYC, Texas, Canada, and California, and by the end of summer the remnants of society will be collecting in Boulder or Las Vegas to wage apocalyptic battle against one another.

If there's one silver lining it's that the flupocalypse has distracted is from financial Ragnarok. In fact, we can even blame plunging markets on flu fears. This should even provide a boost to our flagging newspaper and fear mongering industries. I can already smell the thousands of "How to Save Your Loved Ones From the Pig Virus", the "PANIC!!!!!", and "Don't Panic!!!!!!" articles churning up. The other silver lining? I made money on a bet that our flu based end would be mammal related, not avian. So, you know, I'll be pretty well of as I try to rebuild society early next year. Which is nice.

America's latest cry for help

Why yes, this is what the face of Jesus looks like.

What is this, you might ask. The greatest thing ever or merely the greatest culinary achievement in American history? It is a McChicken sandwich in between a double cheeseburger. And it can be yours for $2.16, provided you can stand eating it over the blaring sound of the Star Spangled Banner that a chorus of bald eagles will start singing the minute you order it.

They call it the McGangbang and if you want one you'll probably just have to order the two components separately, because repeatedly asking loudly for a McGangbang in a crowded McDonald's will probably get you arrested/scar children eating their Finding Nemo Happy Meals.

America has reached its creative and culinary pinnacle, there is nowhere to go but down. Which, by sheer coincidence, is what's already happening due to the horrific financial apocalypse. In fact I think the McGangbang is foretold in Revelations as a herald of doom. Pre-Seven Seals and Horsemen, but around the same time as Fast&Furious opening #1 and the world economy going in the shitter. The mark of the beast is quadruple bypass scars. Chow down.

Skynet goes active tomorrow

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Broken News: Experts agree: "America had to end sometime. Why not now?"

NEW YORK—Today the UN Commission on Depressing Conclusions, a panel of scholars and experts from all relevant fields assembled to analyze the effects of the economic crisis on America, released the results of their study, It Had to Happen Sometime: Coming to Grips With the End of America.

The analysis, compiled over five months and featuring the combined analytical weight of over 40 top scientists, engineers, economists, retired officials, and celebrities who pretend to care about issues, argues that America was always going to come to some grim end and that this relatively slow-moving financial crisis gives us all a chance to walk away from our country with the least potential collateral damage to human society.

Excerpt from the study's conclusion reveal a sobering, yet somehow lighthearted and encouraging assessment:

In respect to the alarming figures shown in section 47-11a and the projections in section 7B-1137, it is the considered opinion of this commission that the citizens of the United States should recognize that the weakened state of their economy and moral/ethical standing in the world has provided them with the ideal opportunity to disband.

The US was always going to collapse under its own weight and we feel that by deciding to disband voluntarily instead of being torn apart by economics, racial strife, government conspiracy, Mexican invasion, or any number of scenarios involving genetically modified dinosaurs, robots, aliens, or clone armies resulting in complete economical and societal collapse will not only benefit the well being, health, and survival rates of the citizens of the United States, but will also negate any danger of said conflicts and collapse affecting the surrounding globe.

The report ended with a cryptic and ghoulish, “You’re going to fail and take us all with you. Get out now before you devour us all.”

While no concrete plan was given for the dispersal of the world’s only superpower into the wind, several suggestions have been floated. One proposal called for America to be broken up into anywhere from 7 to 243 separate countries, grand duchies, fiefdoms, and anarcho-syndicalist communes with a promise never to reform. While others suggested America’s land be divided between Canada and Mexico while citizens were given a choice to join any other country in the world where they would be given new identities and new regionally appropriate surnames.

“Look, we’re just looking out for the planet as a whole,” remarked Dr. John LaFleur, statistician and Chief Overlord of Harsh Numbers and Unflinching Realities on the commission, at a press conference following the release of the report. “If the United States as a whole is dragged down by this economic mess, or really by the hundreds of other potential messes they will inevitably create, it will bring down the UK, Germany, China, Russia, and spread to the rest of the world. At the very least the US needs to be broken into more manageable pieces.”

“Look at Iceland,” he continued, motioning his hand with the derogatory ‘wank-off’ gesture. “They’re using seashells and old Viking tales as currency now and that’s just from the beginnings of this economic crisis. God help the rest of us if this gets worse."

"Now what would happen if, say, the new, smaller economy of the Islamic Republic of Montana went in the toilet, or the Commonwealth of Pennsyltucky was hit by a meteor, or people stopped believing in Narniabama? Less global calamity. Smaller stakes, smaller consequences. It wouldn't fuck with my shit over in Switzerland, that’s for sure.”

He ended screaming “We don’t all have to be taken down with you!!!!!”

Other committee members present were quick to voice their support, noting that if America was to take this opportunity to sacrifice their nationhood now that it would dramatically reduce the number to die of starvation, radiation, exposure, civil war, fascist rule or whatever things would almost certainly occur if America chose to let the passage of time decide its fate.

“Just think, there’d be no awkward situation where you had to face down your brother on a battlefield because you took opposing sides in the civil war,” observed Tomas von Gelt, a committee member and Oxford professor specializing in grimly ironic, personally emotional wartime conflicts. “Plus you would also reduce the number of children whose deaths you had to avenge against the multitude of different splinter groups that caused them. Time-wise it makes sense. Just think about it.”

The commission hopes that America will look at the report, listen to their considered words, digest its limited options, decide to listen to reason and do the responsible thing. The UN has dangled the possibility of a swank farewell party for the country if America decides to end itself on its own terms and provided the country survives until the date of the party.

Ragnarok

Space rock gives Earth a close shave

An asteroid of a similar size to a rock that exploded above Siberia in 1908 with the force of a thousand atomic bombs whizzed close past Earth on Monday, astronomers said on Tuesday.

2009 DD45, estimated to be between 21 and 47 meters (68 and 152 feet) across, raced by at 1344 GMT on Monday, the Planetary Society and astronomers' blogs reported.

The gap was just 72,000 kilometers (44,750 miles), or a fifth of the distance between Earth and the Moon and only twice the height of satellites in geosynchronous orbit, the website space.com said.

The estimated size is similar to that of an asteroid or comet that exploded above Tunguska, Siberia, on June 30 1908, flattening 80 million trees in a swathe of more than 2,000 square kilometres (800 square miles).

Actual apocalypse: averted. Financial apocalypse: still on schedule.

Still lets hear it for deep space monitoring. What's that? They only knew it was coming three days before? Phenomenal. Well, at least we now know that a scenario where a giant rock bears down on us and we have weeks to do what we always wanted to do, tell people we love them, and generally make our peace with our impending death will never happen. We'll look up one day and see a giant flaming rock hurtling down from space, we'll all receive a text message from NASA saying "WoRLd asplode s00n. LULZ! 0ur bad", and we'll all die on fire.

More important than this horrible revelation is our worst fears being realized right after we elected a black guy. Barry takes the oath and God starts lobbing giant rocks high and tight, just like Deep Impact and Dave Chappelle predicted.

Chappelle's Show

Real Movies - Deep Impact

Charlie Murphy Videos
Buy Chappelle's Show DVDs

Black Comedy
True Hollywood Story

When the clock chimes the end is nigh

KILL IT WITH FIRE!!

This is the Corpus Clock at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. It was invented by John C. Taylor, cost $1 million dollars, involved six new patents, was one of TIME's best inventions of 2008, should be able to run accurately for over 200 years, and is creepy as all unholy fuck. Also: CONSPIRACY!!!!!!!!

John C. Taylor said that the clock “is terrifying. It is meant to be... I view time as not on your side. He’ll eat up every minute of your life...”. He refers to the “Chronophage”, the locust at the top of the clock as “demonic”, and states “Time is gone. He’s eaten it.”

The inscription at the base of this mysterious clock, which incorporates six undisclosed patented inventions, and which had components constructed at a secret military research facility in Holland, is from the Vulgate translation of John 2:17: “Mundus transit et concupiscentia eius”... “The world passeth away, and the lust thereof.”
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We, a group of concerned individuals, have since the unveiling of the Corpus Clock been conducting heavy research concerning the creators of this clock, and the strange occult symbolism embedded within it’s design.

We are working to make our research public, in order to inform the public and allow people to draw their own conclusions about this mysterious device and its origins and purpose.

All I'm saying is that when the world ends, and that will probably be soon, this clock will tell us and/or trigger the end times. I just wanted you all to be aware of that and know the horrid face of the creature that devours all time. Wired had a nice video describing how exactly it chews and eats seconds and terrifies children: