Back before I went into the 6-month blog void of personal fucked-upness, I used to do a Weird News Wednesday just to give my blog some sort of structure.  I’ve decided to bring it back but with super lax rules.  Every Wednesday I will post weird news, a webcomic, or, if I get really lazy, simply a picture that elicits “What the fuck?”

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I have a trifecta of weird news articles today.

1.

Miami face-eater is identified; cause of attack is a mystery

Witnesses and police have said Eugene was naked Saturday when he attacked another naked man on the MacArthur Causeway next to the Miami Herald building, chewing up to 80% of the victim’s face off. A police officer commanded him to stop, and when Eugene didn’t, the officer shot him as many as six times.

2.

Police: Hackensack man stabbed himself and threw intestines at officers

Carter was in the corner of the room with a knife in his hand, and he stood up, he yelled at police while stabbing himself all over his body. Officers noticed that his intestines were protruding from a wound in his abdomen, Heinemann said. Carter allegedly threw some of his skin and intestines at officers as they tried to enter the room, Heinemann said.

3.

Man hits car driven by nun, has iPhone stolen

Police said the nun was taken to hospital as a precaution and suffered minor injuries. After the collision, the male driver attempted to call 911 on his iPhone.

However, the male driver was shaken up after the crash and had trouble operating the phone. A passerby offered to help him with the phone, but then ran off with the device when the driver handed it to him.

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The news is all about mentally ill people and assholes these days.

If you go into “The Dictator” with “Borat” expectations, you will most certainly be disappointed. But if you go in with “Ali G Indahouse” expectations, they will most certainly be exceeded.

Complete with a small role from The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi, “The Dictator” is the perfect combination of really smart and really stupid humor that will probably alienate anyone whose humor levels are in between. I thought it was funny, and I love me a good dick joke.

“The Dictator” is a tale of love and betrayal, riddled with genocide, racism, and dick jokes. When Admiral General Hafez Aladeen (Sacha Baron Cohen) is betrayed by his uncle, Tamir (Ben Kingsley-otherwise known as that bald, secondary character associated with movies in the desert), he will end up in the strange unknown country of America.

By a series of forced plot devices, Aladeen will meet his love interest Zoey (Anna Farris), a corporate-hating, vegan-loving Brooklynite. Complete with a gender-neutral haircut and love for protesting, it’s a caricature that manages to be more accurate than offensive. (I’ve been to Williamsburg. Don’t deny it, hipsters.) Because nothing says true love like a feminist urban homesteader + brutal dictator wanted for war crimes.

Cultural confusion and dicks ensue.

If you are expecting a mockumentary, then you didn’t pay attention to the marketing of the movie. “The Dictator” is more like “The Hangover 2″ if you replaced Zach Galifianakis with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It’s an Adam Sandler movie, if you replaced Adam Sandler with someone with talent and added relevant political satire.

If anything, the film proves that Sacha Baron Cohen is an extremely versatile actor. And from the 0.5 seconds of it, has a pretty impressive flaccid cock.

President Barack Obama meeting with Rep. Barney Frank, Sen. Dick Durbin, and Sen. Chris Dodd

Political polemic wonderboy, Matt Taibbi, wrote another great article in this May’s RollingStone on how exactly Dodd-Frank has been undermined by Wall Street and the Republican Congress that caters to it.  Yanno, that law Obama said two years ago would end taxpayer bailouts for good. Dodd-Frank is one of those things a lot of people who care about the world mean to read, but never do because financial legislation is fucking boring. So thanks, Taibbi, for reading it for us and laying out the implications of its slow repeal. “How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform” gave me some terms I didn’t know and expanded with useful information on others.

Commodities Futures Trading Commission:  The independent agency (required by Congressional statute, but outside the Executive dept. purview) that is tasked with regulating certain derivatives markets.

-Last year, Republicans tried to cut the agency’s budget by more than a third even though the financial market they were overseeing soared from $40 trillion to $340 trillion.

-Corporations love to sue to the CFTC (as well as the Securities Exchange Commission) for being “unreasonable.”

Son of Supreme ConvservaJudge Antonin Scalia, Eugene Scalia led the Chamber of Commerce’s legal team to sue on the proxy access rule

Proxy Access Rule:   A rule that would allow shareholders of a company to remove directors from the board via a proxy ballot, which would increase democratic power among stakeholders.

-Wall Street then employed lobbyists from The Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable to sue the SEC, claiming they had not done a proper cost-benefit analysis.

-They would use this lawsuit strategy again and again to rip apart the rest of Dodd-Frank rule by rule.

Orderly Liquidation Authority (OLA):  Title II of Dodd-Frank.  It was supposed to create an FDIC-style fund in the event of a catastrophic liquidation, so that taxpayers would never again foot the bill (at least $19 billion) for a bailout.

-Ted Kennedy died mid-2009, Republican Scott Brown took his seat, and then the watering down of the bill began.

-The $19 billion required corporate pay-in to the fund disappeared.

Positions Limits:  The maximum number of contracts an investor is allowed to hold on one underlying security.

-Dodd-Frank regulation designed to prevent one speculator from controlling over 25% of a commodities market at any one given time. This is done to prevent crazy speculation, like what was seen in 2008 when average gas prices jumped over $4 a gallon.

-The CFTC was supposed to enforce the rule for energy and some other contracts starting January 17, 2011. But the machine-work of bureaucracy turned, it never happened, and if lawsuits go the way they’ve been going, it never will.

Volcker Rule:  Proposed by former United States Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, this rule would restrict United States banks from making certain kinds of speculative investments that don’t benefit customers.

-I.e., it would restrict banks from making risky gambles with taxpayer-insured money.

-Dodd-Frank mandated the Vlocker Rule be implemented July 21, 2012. But after 17,000 comment letters representing Wall Street interests, the Federal Reserve announced in April that it actually won’t go into affect until 2014. Two more years time for potential lawsuits.
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Read Taibbi’s article online to learn the five steps that corporations use to kill any legislation. There is plenty of ammo in there for debating libertarians, including how this tedious, technical legislation affects us all.

Arcade Fire on SNL last week wearing red student solidarity patches.

Here’s some Orwellian bullshit from our northern neighbors.

 The NYT reports:

On May 18, Quebec’s legislative assembly, under the authority of the provincial premier, Jean Charest, passed a draconian law in a move to break the 15-week-long student strike.Bill 78, adopted last week, is an attack on Quebecers’ freedom of speech, association and assembly. Mr. Charest has refused to use the traditional means of mediation in a representative democracy, leading to even more polarization. His administration, one of the most right-wing governments Quebec has had in 40 years, now wants to shut down opposition.

The bill threatens to impose steep fines of 25,000 to 125,000 Canadian dollars against student associations and unions — which derive their financing from tuition fees — in a direct move to break the movement. For example, student associations will be found guilty if they do not stop their members from protesting within university and college grounds.

The bill is deliberately vaguely-worded and the article reports that use of force among the police has increased since its passage.  The recent protests in Canada fall in line with the trend of indicators of a global problem in education and tuition inflation.

Hat-tip for the link goes to a Canadian Clantily Scad reader.

All physicists have to look nerdy. It’s part of the job description.

Science is not about the data. The empirical content of scientific theory is not what is relevant. The data serves to suggest the theory, to confirm the theory, to disconfirm the theory, to prove the theory wrong. But these are the tools that we use. What interests us is the content of the theory. What interests us is what the theory says about the world. General relativity says space-time is curved. The data of general relativity are that Mercury perihelion moves 43 degrees per century, with respect to that computed with Newtonian mechanics.

Who cares? Who cares about these details? If that was the content of general relativity, general relativity would be boring. General relativity is interesting not because of its data, but because it tells us that as far as we know today, the best way of conceptualizing space-time is as a curved object. It gives us a better way of grasping reality than Newtonian mechanics, because it tells us that there can be black holes, because it tells us there’s a Big Bang. This is the content of the scientific theory.

I just discovered Edge.  They have some good shit melding philosophical questions with scientific inquiry.  The kind of stuff I want to write if I ever make it through my formal education.  Totes subscribing.

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[edit]

I have to add commentary on this particular post. I can see what Rovelli is getting at, but I don’t like the rhetoric. It’s too dismissive of the importance of data, of the relationship between reason and theory. The arrogance in the rhetorical question, “Who cares about these details?” is particularly grating.

Physicists often try to play with “deep” writing and often fail. (Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman is the other example that immediately comes to mind.) The nature of their occupation involves describing reality, and reality is undoubtably complex. But if you’re a scientist that wants to do metaphysics, you had better choose your language very carefully or risk sounding like a tool.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/05/jennifer-egan-black-box.html#ixzz1vueU8F3k

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The latest evolutionary mutation of literary mediums is here–short stories on Twitter.

I’ve never been impressed with Twitter, except for its ability to propel the hashtag from IRC networks to colloquial diction. I follow two comedians regularly and the rest of the people get spot-glances from my homepage whenever I log in, which is about once every 3 days. Nothing says, “I was the attention-starved middle child,” like regularly using Twitter.

Twitter is annoying. It’s a way to blog that’s as random and incoherent as writing on a bathroom wall. To use it to present staggered fictional prose, one 140-character-or-less sentence at a time, makes it more annoying. Serialized fiction deadens the reading experience and is done mostly for the profit of the publisher.

Sorry, Jennifer Egan. Tweeting your work is like painting in period blood. The final product still matters more than the unique means of production.  (Also, in my elitist opinion, this “story” is too meh for The New Yorker. Try turning it into a T.S. Eliot poem.)

Fail Whale.

I walked right up to it and it didn’t stir an inch, not even blink.

Probably less than 2 weeks old, its presence confused me:  Should I try to cover it from the rain? Shoo it back into the woods? Call animal control? Funny, how human babies are such hideous creatures, but fluffy critters (It had spots! On its nose!) can elicit something of a maternal instinct. Where did evolution go wrong there.

Google revealed that mother deer just do that–leave their babies alone to curl up all comatose-like while they forage for food. Considering its placement, deer obviously still do not understand suburbia.

[EDIT:  A reader writes me, "You shouldn't ever go up to a deer like that. Or else the mom will show up and KICK THE SHIT OUT OF YOU."]

It disappeared, presumably with its mom, an hour later.

Maybe we’ll meet again one day, baby deer. But if we do, it’ll probably be a meeting of your lack of understanding about civilization and my car.  Rats with hooves.

Reblogged from Molly In Seville:

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Poor little guy can't get a student loan...

Today there were students running around the US campus with megaphones shouting “estudiantes, despiertan!” (“students, wake up!”) trying to grab some support for their protest tomorrow. They’re concerned about tuition increases and “recortes” (cuts) in education.

Wellsians – sounds familiar, right?

But here’s the plot twist:

Spanish students at US pay between 69-102 Euros for every six credits each semester…

Read more… 253 more words

Teachers and students have been striking across Spain this week, in response to the government's spending cuts. It reminds me of a post my friend (American) made while studying abroad in Seville last fall and witnessing some of the outrage.

ZeFrank fell off the face of the planet for the last couple years, doing projects like Star.me which weren’t bad ideas, but not good enough to reclaim former glory. (Watching Internet celebrities try to make a comeback and fail fills me with existential dread.)

So when he announced that he was coming back with A Show, similar to The Show, I was super excited.  Alas, his attitude was old and tired. Nearly 20 videos later, I’m still not fully engaged.

But finally, he came out with one that got my attention.  Here Ze uses his nueroscience degree from Brown University* and talks some intellectual mind-fuckery about the nature of being and consciousness.

The red book on the shelf behind him is “Free Will” by Sam Harris. <3 <3 <3 <3!

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_{*Brown is doing a lot of cool stuff in the areas of brain research and nuerotechnology.  Here’s a video of a paralyzed woman moving a robotic hand with her thoughts.}

Glenn Greenwald ‏@ggreenwald:  That Cory Booker recantation completely has the feel of a hostage video.

I went back to the transcript. No one on the panel mentions Booker’s comments. But they quickly became a firestorm. It’s a reminder how different speeches and interviews and comments can look when viewed in context, as opposed to after they’ve been ripped from wherever they originated, spun into a separate narrative, and made into their own story.