“Jim Carrey is a talking ass,” sings a bloke on Reason TV, below. Very funny. True too. But let’s get serious. Carrey is a bad actor in more than one way. His venomous contempt for my right to defend myself aside; Carry is without talent. His slapstick schtick is pathetic, repulsive. So tell me this: Who made him the celebrity he is, and who’ll continue to patronize his rotten films? YOU! And you won’t change a bit, despite the man’s manifest contempt for your right to life*, will you?
*Inherent in the right to life is the right of self defense, as a right that cannot be defended is a right in name only.
Lyrics:
It takes a talking ass
to oppose a vaccination
when your Ph.D. is in
making funny faces
It takes a talking ass
to tell people they can’t arm when
you don’t walk around
without an armed bodyguard
It takes a talking ass
to call fans dumb and demented
when you are the one
who wants something uninvented
It takes a talking ass
to be out there passing blame
when you’ve shot someone
on every TV ever made
Lyrics:
Sometimes dudes’ minds are skewed
and they choose to go a-killin’
’cause they saw a Batman villain
killing, well … ring a bell?
Sometimes stars get armed guards
when they make a million buck-ers
then call you heartless motherfuckers
to want the same … is it the fame?
Polio and smallpox they no longer kill en masse
because of vaccinations they are a thing of the past
but you tell parents to skip them and the science you contrast
because just like in your movies … you’re talking our your ass
UPDATED I: “Idiocracy” pegged the Jim-Carrey humor brilliantly in the segment, “Ow my B-lls!”
UPDATE II (3/29): Chime in on Facebook. From the thread:
I’m proud to say I have never watched anything by Carrey the cretin. I know his “worth” from flicking through channels. I might have paused b/c of a Kim Basinger scene (she is utterly gorgeous). Did she do one with him? Maybe not.
Birds in flight are the very symbol of liberty. Yet what do people do to the most sentient, socially and intellectually evolved among them? We cage them and maim them by clipping their wing feathers.
He has dedicate himself to reversing the destruction humans have wrought on the Cape Parrot. What a heroic commitment he and his team (including Cape communicator Rodnick Biljon, who captures the Cape Parrot on film) have pledged to rescuing the Cape Parrot from extinction, brought about by the decimation of the Yellowood forests of the Eastern Cape. (Your host hails from Cape Town.)
The Cape Parrot Project is one of my favored charities. Owned as I am by an Un-Cape Parrot (a genetic relative to the wild Cape Parrot), I’ve had the privilege of experiencing first-hand the intense brilliance of these precious Pois (mine is Poicephalus fuscicollis; the Cape Parrot is Poicephalus robustus). We rescued Oscar-Wood from a cage in a store, where he had languished for 4 years, plucking his feathers down to the pink skin beneath. This, after having been sold into the trade by a well-known breeder in Hawaii.
LOOK at him then (2009):
Another heartbreaking image (2009):
Here Oscar-Wood is today (2012), fully flighted, nesting in a bag of tortillas. This state of relative well-being has come about only because I work from home and am able to give him the attention and freedom he requires to thrive. And still he plucks; once acquired, this neurotic habit is hard to eliminate.
Oscar-Wood has a facility with … wood (all parrots require wood, preferably from a tree, in the wild):
WARNING. Do not try the above at home. By all means, rescue an abandoned and abused parrot, but do not fuel the wicked pet parrot trade, which everywhere and always involves breeding mills, inhumane by definition. As to wild-life traffickingg … words fail.
Those who’ve bothered to get to know a parrot in flight, if hobbled horribly by the walls of a house (the Cape, for example, can fly hundreds of kilometers in a day), know this: Out of a cage, free to be adorable and impossible as only hookbills are—parrots are so much smarter than any of the domesticated animals (and than some of your neighbors).
Even showmen such as parrot whisperer Clint Carvalho attests that the larger parrots are “twenty times smarter than dogs.” I’m not sure how Carvalho quantifies his findings, but these sound about right.
Know a politician with this magic macaw’s problem-solving skills? Tan’s Japanese admirers are enthralled. As well they should be. Watch Tan solve an impossible magic-cube like puzzle:
What’s positive about Carvalho is that, unlike your average avian dabbler, he has realized that parrots acquire rudimentary language (often greater than those acquired by the bumper crops of illiterates US public schools produce) through conditioning and cognition, just as kids do.
The cognitive capacities of the parrot, however, match his emotional needs.
Unlike dogs and cats, birds are wild animals, ill-suited to captivity. Moreover, they’re flock animals who wither without the physical proximity of a feathered family with which they fly, forage, communicate and mate, often for life.
The trade is fueled by consumer demand.
Being slaves to authority and convention, the mass of humanity doesn’t much like or appreciate the independent-minded individuals among them. Imagine the fate of a creature as smart, as independent-minded and as individualistic as the parrot?
Consider the attendant cruelty of excluding parrots from assorted public-awareness campaigns. Funds are invariably solicited for and awareness raised over the airwaves about abused and needy dogs and cats. Not so for parrots. Despite their popularity as pets and their prevalence in American homes, natural disasters come and go without any mention of the plight of the Psittacine victims.
Most people know about the popular African Grey parrots of central and western Africa, but very few people know about Africa’s most endangered parrot, South Africa’s Cape parrot. Today, there could be as few as 800 Cape parrots remaining in the wild and they are considered Critically Endangered due to continued habitat loss, poor nesting success due to lack of nest cavities, a severe Psittacine Beak and Feather Disease epidemic, historical persecution as a crop pest, and illegal capture for the wild-caught bird trade. If Africa was to lose this “green and gold” ambassador of some of our last-remaining Afromontane forest patches, it would be a sign of very bad times to come… We would have lost one of the last Afromontane endemics clinging onto these forests through their own ingenuity and collective intelligence. Intensive logging in their forest habitat, persecution (e.g. being shot or caught in nets and clubbed to death), nest poaching and mist-netting adults for the wild-caught bird trade, and very little or no conservation intervention, has left the Cape Parrot in ruins with an aging populations in declining physical condition. We need to intervene now and stimulate positive change for Cape parrots in the wild
JP: Point taken, but parrot are picky about friends and partners. The chances of a friendship being struck up are greater when the other parrot is of the same species. Personally, I recommend against taking on two parrots. That’s much like planning for one toddler and learning that you’ll be giving birth to twins. It’s never easier. Better that you be a good parront to one parrot than shortchange both and yourself. Of course, if you do not work, or your work is not too demanding (because parrots are), have a large enough house and homestead (maybe even place for an outdoor aviary)—by all means. Caring for parrots under the right conditions is rewarding. There is nothing like the love of a parrot, once earned.
Baby is currently doing lapse from his cage to kitchen cupboard (or what’s left of it; our kitchen has not been renovated and we’re delaying that job until we can think of how to parrot proof Sean’s planned maple-wood cabinetry).
Oscar-Wood is also talking up an storm. Singing his musical repertoire; knocking, and then demanding, “Hello, hello”; asking if I’m going, “Bye-bye-bye?” and if he’s been a “bad bird?” He’s also doing his raspy chest cough, because he knows that sound worries me. Should I dare to attempt to bathe him (parrots bath themselves pretty thoroughly), it’s an indignant, “Hey, hey!” Tell me that’s not a very decent attempt to communicate.
He sculpted a career out of killing for Uncle Sam. A former Navy SEAL, Chris Kyle’s claim to fame, by the news media’s telling: He “held the record for number of kills by an American sniper. The Pentagon has confirmed more than 150 of his kills. The previous record was 109.”
Nobody is prepared to say that it is NO astounding accomplishment to have killed so many individuals, in the service of the US state. So consider it said.
Kyle (and his kill-for-Uncle Sam supporters) reminds me of a real-life Jack Bauer “Federal Zombie”: “the unstoppable, undead agent who has actually been killed and brought back to life, in service—and in thrall—to the state…”
To be a man is to defend your family and community. Not the empire and its “goals.” Men like Joe Horn are American heroes.
Chris Kyle’s death seems to confirm that “he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.” Treating PTSD at a firing range doesn’t make sense.
America’s chosen heroes are either killing someone in far away lands, or crying on TV, here at home. Crying—and coming out about private, personal matters—this imbues someone with goodness, even conferring him with the status of a hero.
And always: Be they your grief, your struggles, or your Iraqi culling expeditions—the key to everlasting honor is to be public about it.
I hope you realize that these deformed values are exactly inverted.
Piers Morgan, who is warring against a quintessential and meaningful American tradition—self-defense—has declared his affinity for another: the Superbowl.
MORGAN: “Listen, I know what this game means to America. It’s going to be a hell of a day on Sunday. I shall be glued to it, as always. I love the whole entertainment. I love the commercials. I love the football. I love the fact that it’s such a huge part of American culture. And may the best team win.”
The truth is that we foreigners do not get it—and will never get it. Also true: One can never really be an American unless one talks the talk about the game and the scene.
Oh well. Not belonging to the cool kids’ fraternity has never bothered me terribly. And at least one great American agrees about the obscenity of the whole scene.
“I don’t pay much attention to it, replied Ron Paul to a Piers Morgan question, in February of last year, during the 2012 campaign.
… the American football scene is obscene, starting with its incestuous fraternities, the rock-star status surrounding handlers and players, their pompom-waving, knickers-baring groupies, and the tantrum-prone fans who experience bare-fanged fury when their heroes let them down.
The ads are always a big point of contention. Thus, in 2012 too, Freedom Watch’s “J-Nap” (a coinage by Jack Kerwick for Judge Andrew Napolitano) struck a blow for “liberty” by calling on a middle-aged Madonna to challenge The Censor and repeat the feat of another peer, Janet Jackson. (Yes, “Libertarianism Lite” carries the day.)
The apparition the Judge wished upon us was described, in 2004 (“JANET’S SACK OF SILICONE & OTHER SYMBOLISM”), as a “sack of silicone-filled skin, awkwardly positioned on Janet Jackson’s chest. Few will forget how pop singer Justin Timberlake released The Thing from Jackson’s bustier during the Super Bowl halftime show.”
Add the effects of age and gravity to a surgically over-stuffed breast, and you end up with a veiny mass, mounted inorganically on the breastbone. Take my word: This is not something you’d want to wave about. It looks like a stretched-to-the-limits Bota Bag (also known as a wine skin), only not nearly as inviting. The photograph also captures the gaze on Justin Tinkerbelle’s girlie features. The reviewers, mostly groovy hip-hop heads, described the sequence as “a sex-charged duet.” Justin, Jackson’s partner in the “stunt,” looks as turned on as a surgeon removing a suture. The “sensuality” was, er, a bust.
Contra “J-Nap,” I was comforted to learn that a quaint Old-World, quintessentially American gentleman like Ron Paul was baffled by America’s annual football frenzy. (And is guaranteed to find the commercialsas off-putting as the frenzy.)
UPDATE: I’m one of you. Hear me talk Ravens And 49ers.
The two coaches are brothers. One quarterback has been a starter for barely half a season. The sport itself is under a microscope for its violence, and the setting, New Orleans, is where the home team found itself recently caught up in a so-called bounty scandal — bounty — excuse me — scandal.
The spectacle and the game, Super Bowl XLVII, between the Ravens and 49ers, it’s all set for Sunday, with an expected worldwide audience of more than 160 million.
MORE at PBS.org. I won’t be reading this. It’s for you.
Below is an excerpt from the current weekly column,Pimping The Culture,now on WND.
“The marketplace doesn’t adjudicate the quality of art or pop culture—it does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the trillions of subjective preferences acted upon by consumers. That snapshot, in 2013, tells us that when it comes to “Bread and Circuses,” Rome and its provinces wallow in the same lowbrow popular culture.
Incidentally, to judge the quality of a cultural product is not to begrudge the preferences of the people who purchase it. It is simply to apply timeless, objective standards in assessing these products. …
… By and large, when it comes to entertainment, the people and the elites are on the same empty page—most of the musicians whose products they patronize, or with whom they fraternize, can’t read music, much less play it.
‘Grammy and Academy Award winner’ Jennifer Hudson, to whose primal screams the president and first lady attempted to dance, doesn’t sing; she screams. Voice coaches once considered the Hudson brand of ‘vocal wobble’ a deficiency in technique and talent. But then, ‘Why be a musician, when you can be a success?’ Such cacophony currently plays to full houses. It is to their credit that the First Couple smoothed the noise over with some smooth moves. …
… More sounds that curdled the air were those of Alicia Keys pounding on the piano keys. …
… I’d rather listen to the dodecaphony of twelve-tone music than sit through the guttural battle cries emitted by today’s entertainers. …”
If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.
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Rosen said he had heard the staccato sound of gunfire about 15 minutes earlier but dismissed it as an obnoxious hunter in the nearby woods.
“I had no idea what had happened,” Rosen said. “I couldn’t take that in.”
He walked the children past his small goldfish pond with its running waterfall, and the garden he made with his two grandchildren, into the small yellow house he shares with his wife.
He ran upstairs and grabbed an armful of stuffed animals. He gave those to the children, along with some fruit juice, and sat with them as the two boys described seeing their teacher being shot.
But this good Samaritan’s offering did not quite meet the standards of one of his small guests. The boy responded with a comment Rosen thought so adorable, he “wanted to tell him, `I love you. I love you.’”
“This little boy turns around, and composes himself, and he looks at me like he had just removed himself from the carnage and he says, `Just saying, your house is very small.’”
Is that not a rude and unkind quip?
Just saying.
UPDATE (1/11): Everyone on Facebook ducked the issue of how badly behaved kids have become. Myron Pauli at least responded by changing the subject. But pretending the problem doesn’t exist is becoming harder. Fox and experts are catching up with a topic I’ve been covering since the early 2000s and before. “We are raising a generation of deluded narcissists.”
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