Recently in Amusement Category

by shep

From the Detroit News…

The co-founder and former CEO of the liberal-progressive Democracy Radio and husband of U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow was caught in February by a Troy police sting aimed at catching prostitutes, according to a police report.

Thomas L. Athans was stopped Feb. 26 by undercover officers investigating a possible prostitution ring in a room at the Residence Inn near Big Beaver and Interstate 75.

I sure hope that township was getting a piece of the action.

H/T: TPM

[Cross-posted at Dispassionate Liberal]

by shep

John Rogers:

This is where I'm always amused at libertarians, because they so love markets but never seem to understand how business actually works. If you, my fine libertarian friend, decide to forego the union and negotiate your own contract vis a vis residuals (or pretty much anything else), you will find that unless you are one of the maybe eight out of 12,0000 most famous and profitable writers in Hollywood, you will get exactly the same deal from each studio, or slightly worse. Because what possible motivation would they have to share their profits, relative to each of the other five competitors? That's just common sense.

Rogers is obviously talking about the writers’ strike – cruise the whole blog if you want a great writer’s perspective on the issues.

But he also make a great point about Iibertarian “free-market” types: they have no idea how the marketplace really works, suffering mainly from the delusion that the market is always a force for competition and good (Microsoft, Enron and Halliburton, they never explain). Rogers uses a great Chris Rock joke as a metaphor for the amoral, predatory nature of business:

One of my favorite jokes, just a lovely piece of writing, is Chris Rock's bit about the time one of Siegfried and Roy's tigers mauled Roy.

"Everybody's mad at the tiger. 'That tiger went crazy!' That tiger didn't go crazy ... that tiger went tiger."

This is how I feel about corporations in general, extended to the Studios in particular. There are those who rail at the AMPTP for being profit-maximizing heartless, soul-less bastards as if that were a bad thing. It's not.

A corporation's job is to make money, and if necessary fuck you in the process. Just like a tiger's job is to eat, and if necessary kill you in the process. I'm okay with that. I like capitalism. A lot. I like tigers. A lot. That doesn't mean I trust corporations not to try to screw me and everyone next to me when negotiating. Nor would I trust a tiger not to attack me in the wild. Nor am I personally offended when they try.

Exactly. It’s just business. But that is why you need regulatory government and institutions like unions to make it a fair fight. You alone, against the tiger, will soon be jungle fertilizer, ten times out of ten.

And the problem stretches the tiger analogy when you look at the other worst consequence of unregulated “free-markets”: pretty soon the biggest, baddest, most ruthless tigers start eating their own until there are only a few left that can survive (see Microsoft, Enron and Halliburton). In other words, competition – the supposed source of predictably “good” market outcomes - gets gobbled up by the market itself if left to its own amoral, greed and power-based nature.

You’d think that these facts would be self-evident, looking at what has actually transpired in marketplaces and societies throughout history, relative to the strength of existing trade unions and other worker and consumer-based institutions and (very occasionally) liberal, democratic government. But that’s reality-based thinking and, I’m sure, not nearly as satisfying as a simplistic, comforting worldview about business, government and human nature gleaned from a work of bad fiction.

[Cross-posted at Dispassionate Liberal]

When I was growing up, our family always had at least one dog and at least one cat at all times. Now, I consider myself a cat person, but I do love dogs too. So I was interested to read this from John Kaltz:

Psychologist Brian Hare of Harvard has also studied the human-animal bond and reports that dogs are astonishingly skilled at reading humans' patterns of social behavior, especially behaviors related to food and care. They figure out our moods and what makes us happy, what moves us. Then they act accordingly, and we tell ourselves that they're crazy about us.

"It appears that dogs have evolved specialized skills for reading human social and communicative behavior," Hare concludes...

Note: The dog in the picture showed up to watch the Mystic Krewe of Mutts at the Mardi Gras Dog Parade in Baton Rouge on Sunday.

The 101st Fighting Keyboarders on full alert

103 dead in Iraq this month, 2814 dead in the war,  and they're fighting the Battle of Don't Get The Joke.

Rangel said Cheney may need to go to "rehab" for "whatever personality deficit he may have suffered."

(Click to see a larger image...or better yet, open up Google Earth to the coordinates listed in the title)

(Click to see larger image)

This is a picture taken of camels in the desert. It is considered one of the best pictures of 2005. Look closely, the camels are the little white lines in the picture. The black you see is just the shadows!

Guy Kawasaki has a blog. It's pretty good -- you should read it, especially the posts about what they should (but don't) teach you in college and how (not) to do PowerPoint presentations.

Anyway, his masthead has this wonderful definition for the word "blogger:"

"Someone with nothing to say writing for someone with nothing to do."

Perfect.

by Mark Adams

Breeders