Foster Friess on Contraception

Rick Santorum’s billionaire “sugar daddy” stuns MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell with his retrograde “joke” on the subject of contraception:

Hard though it is to believe that U.S. politics of late has shifted into the bizarre realm of ridiculous “culture war” issues like contraception, it’s absolutely no surprise whatsoever that the key backer of the current GOP frontrunner would reveal himself to be an anachronistic old codger who’s flippant notion of birth control is that “gals” should just stop spreading their legs.

Charlie Brooker’s 2011 Wipe

To end the year on a fittingly sardonic note, here’s Charlie Brooker’s brilliant take on the past twelve months as darkly viewed through the pop culture lens of a jaded media critic:

If nothing else, you can just skip about half way through the video to enjoy a short documentary gem by Adam Curtis about “how Rupert Murdoch took over the old newspapers of Fleet Street and used them to wage a cultural revolution against the snobbish elites that dominated Britain…”

This short film not only provides a succinctly plausible explanation of the “weird logic” behind the rise of Murdoch’s media empire, but suggests that the same populism once driving the success of its luridly intrusive tabloids has now digitally metastasized itself in the form of… Google.

No More Mr. Nice Guy

Bill Moyers’ thoughts on President Obama and his plan for health reform.

“No one’s ever conquered Washington politics by constantly saying ‘pretty please’ to the guys trying to cut your throat.”

By the way, the excellent essay (“Living in a Culture of Cruelty: Democracy as Spectacle”) by Henry Giroux that Moyers references is a must read.

No (Live) Nudity at the Met

How ironic.

It constantly amazes me that in such a pervasively pornified culture (where “conservatives” are the biggest consumers, by the way), there’s such a hypocritical degree of prudishness about nudity.

Bad Actors Against Gay Marriage

Awkward…

Funny thing. The Smoking Cocktail had the first part of the audition tape posted, but it’s been removed due to “a copyright claim by National Organization for Marriage.” What a bunch of gutless dooches.

Update: The original ad wasn’t scary enough, so Sadly No! fixed it. (h/t: CC).

Update2: “It most certainly is not my intention to blame the epidemic of mass murders on the gay rights movement!” said Morality in Media President Bob Peters, while suggesting there was a connection between the two things.

Why Do People Hate NYC?

Oh, I just cannot possibly imagine why…

Maybe it’s just me, but all of the videos the oh-so-precious dilettantes and marvelous fashionistas at New York magazine egregiously poot out of their collective backside onto the Internet make me think of Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time, a book set in an era “where entropy is king and the universe has begun collapsing upon itself.”

Dumbest Post, Ever

Okay, I’ll confess that’s pure hyperbole… intrepid geeks can most certainly Google vastly more deeply idiotic posts than the idle prattling that Wendy Sullivan dashed off as she rushed to deal with the “huge pile of work” on her probably fictional desk Nonetheless, submitted for your approval (as Rod Serling used to lovingly say) behold the following crystalline idiocy:

When you look at the amount of unnecessary bureaucratic and paper-pushing jobs that have been created by/for women, you must give pause. I’ve been working since I was 15, and very few of those jobs were what I would call necessary to any company I worked for. In many cases, if they had eliminated some of their own internal red tape, those jobs wouldn’t have ever existed.

Where to even begin with such howling nonsense? Wendy… poor dear, you seem to be falling into the all-too-common trap of confusing freakishly anecdotal experience with statistical norms.

Conservatives Biggest Porn Consumers

Here’s something that will totally not surprise you. According to a recent study by the Journal of Economic Perspectives, “conservative” or so-called “red” states spend most on pornography.

Eight of the top ten porn-consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest ten favoured Barack Obama. Furthermore, residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage.

Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code’s religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, the study found.

The Douchebaggery of Zygotes

I don’t often delve into the raging culture wars about abortion/reproductive rights that are enthusiastically engaged in by numerous other blogs, but I did find this post highly amusing:

The votes are in, and 9 out of 10 fetuses prefer defrocked Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich to President Barack Obama, according to RenewAmerica. In his weekly column, Reverend Michael Bresciani, who speaks fluent blastocyte, randomly samples a series of wombs, and reports that while Obama remains popular among America’s post-born youth, he enjoys far less support from members of the intrauterine electorate.

If nothing else, it’s worthwhile for coining the expressions “fluent blastocyte” and “intrauterine electorate.”