Category: News

Woman Driver steps out onto road, casually strolls while still-moving car glides into oncoming traffic

Driving in souther California is annoying because of the traffic, bad drivers, and illegal immigrants populating the roads as it is but it’s an extra annoying day when people just slow down and exit their still running car, leaving it to continue rolling down the road and over the divider and into the oncoming traffic lanes, hitting several cars in the process. What in the actual balls, SoCal?

The only thing better than the fact that this was captured on video by a dashcam is the haunting foreign language serenade underscoring this bizarre event as it unfolds in real time.

Notice that the woman isn’t running in distress or to the side of the road at all… When she exits she casually continues walking the direction her now driverless vehicle is continuing. Betch needs one of those treadmill keys that cuts the power if you fall off or a surfboard tether or SOMEthing.

No information on why the eff she did this.

The driver of the Hyundai was identified as 22-year-old Jasmine Lacey. She was taken to a hospital for “a non injury-related reason,” according to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.

Lacey was never charged with a crime. The drivers of the two SUVs suffered minor injuries.

The only theories I can come up with that make sense to me are 1- the obvious “on drugs, or suffering from other mental incapacitating ailment” (in which case I guess we need to fight the auto-unions with the same diligence as those do when going after the NRA when drugged or mentally sick people gain access to firearms and do horrible things with them) or 2- she was in a captive situation and assigned a task that would put her deeper in the hole of an already shady situation (like a drug run or some other forced errand) and “getting into a car accident” was a non-“calling the police” way to get law enforcement involved in her plight. In that case – she shouldn’t have endangered other peoples lives and made sure the car was pointing toward something stationary without humans around before pulling the stunt.

What’s your theory?…

Tip: Buy Disney

I’ve never written a stock tip post before but I feel like I’m observing what seems to be obvious to me and yet Googling all the main points in the article yielded zero results. So, while I have to warn you that I could not find Forbes, MarketWatch, the Wall Street Journal, the New York times – or anyone else to make these recommendations and then cite them as the source – I will reveal why me as my own source is making these claims…

From September 2015 (the time of this writing) for at least a year, Walt Disney Company stock is going to be a good bet, says I.

1- FRANCHISING BOOM (alternative title: FRANCH & MERCH)

The studio excels at 2 things that they’re doing more and more of: Franchise Building and merchandising. Since the 1950s, Disney has been Boss at extending their intellectual property as far as it will stretch and plastering it all over any physical products that could possibly be conceived of.

Especially recently, the company has been franchising in a way I am seeking to emulate in my own productions. No one does franchising better than Disney. They milk characters and storylines into movie, television, sequel, and product gold on a level akin to printing their own currency. This makes the company a great long term play for its existing properties but a quintuple or more of a good bet for the following reasons –

2- GROWTH:

The previous 5 years especially has shown huge growth and while that doesn’t necessarily mean future growth (as shown above) for most entertainment companies, I will explain why I think Disney is a major exception

 

3- MARVEL:

Disney bought Marvel a few years ago and it has been pumping out movies that have been fan and critic hits with no sign of stopping as they keep increasing their cinematic universe with more films. An excellent example of the Marvel longevity is that this years Ant-Man movie – hardly one that is even on the radar of most movie goers – is set to earn almost half a billion worldwide. Upcoming in the franchise is a super fan-favorite storyline to be covered in “Captain America, Civil War” (the 3rd Cap movie), and a 2-parter Avengers 3 & 4. They will be huge hits at the box office and spawn tons of profitable merchandise and media offshoots.

 

4- STAR WARS:

Disney bought Star Wars several years ago as well for a few billion and they will certainly earn that back probably with just their first movie. There is no possible way that the new Star Wars movie, “The Force Awakens” will not be record-breakingly huge. It has even more curiosity among the hundreds of millions of people familiar with the franchise than the previous set of movies had and far more good will from the fans and is going to make box office billions worldwide. It is released in December but again, it’s all about the franchise: Star Wars merchandise, themepark attractions (With a new “star wars land” being added to Disneyland & Disneyworld Themeparks) and a planned new Star Wars movie to be released almost every year after this one – the franchise is going to rocket beyond it’s already firm position in its field.

If you are skeptical of this, then you need to go back and re-read what I said about Ant-Man… *ANT-MAN* for Christ sake. Star Wars is going to slay. Watch…

 

5- ATTRACTIONS:

The Shanghai Disneyland park opens in 2016 and will include full theme park, hotel and resort attractions that Disney excels at. It will not be a failure.

6-BONUS REASON: NOW IS THE TIME TO BUY!:

DIS stock is down over 16% in the past 2 months evidently because of problems with it’s ESPN property and concern over cord cutters but that nonsense is a short term problem and ESPN is in no long term danger of losing its dominance in the field of live sports or sports television in general. That aspect will soon correct itself and the stock price will at minimum return to highs seen earlier in the year and as I explained above, much more according to my forecasting.

At the time of this writing, I am buying stock in Disney at $100 a share. The companys high-point of this year was $120. So you tell me… Do you think, given the stuff I listed above, that Disney will under any circumstances possibly NOT reach that high point again in the coming year?…

I think it will far surpass it, given the above, so I’m betting big on Disney and urging others to do the same for these reasons.

Finally, someone gets electronics storing travel clothes right

I’ve been underwhelmed with similar “pockets for your electronics” clothes items that think they’re amazingly clever for including basic additions to normal fashion that would have been cool at the turn of the millennium but 10+ years later are yawn-worthy. Like – oh, you have a blazer with an oversized pocket to put an iPad in? okay I guess. A hoodie with a cloth tunnel to feed your earbuds wire through? eh… not really interested.

Finally it appears that someone has assembled all the right nooks and cubbies into normal looking neutrally stylish clothes.

The crowdfunded campaign on Kickstarter sought $20,000 and currently have almost $8 Million in pre-ordered sales so I’m not the only one who thinks they did something right.

From a marketing perspective, the campaign does what I have been saying needs to be done for utility clothing items like this and that is to bill them as utility items with demonstrations. Too often these types of products try to be stylish first and “look how you can fit stuff in it” second. That’s lame. People will buy a hoodie with a million secret compartments for the million-secret-compartments and then it looking and functioning nice will be secondary – not the reverse scenario where a new non-label hoodie is in need and “oh look, it has unconventional pockets…”. Billing itself for travel is key to the success. Travel makes us feel helpless, unprepared, and cumbersome in our availability of stuff we want on our person. I have a somewhat similar product design going through a review process currently making a similar utility appeal. These things have a subconscious super hero feel to them: sit in comfort with your built-in neck pillow reverse airbag, lower your eye-mask like Iron Mans face plate, whip out your drink from your Batman utility pocket, and pop in your ear buds from within your Captain America helmet. The video does a great job of showing off ease and function in an “always be prepared” style of Awesome.

I laughed out loud at that zipper pen stylus scene tho…

“looking for one of these?… *gets laid immediately*”

It also looks like this kind of techno dance music is the go-to score for crowd funded tech. It’s fun and gets you excited by strategically rolling out the features at a linear pace that tells a story and reels you in with the perfect “but wait, theres MORE” info-mercial tactics. The Lily cam I bought (see: pre-ordered) a few months ago hooked me with the same hypnotizing must-havezes.

5 Reasons a Biden vs Romney 2016 Election is the best matchup for both sides

As I’ve said before, I like Joe Biden and would like him to run for President.

But, in the interest of fair disclosure: I also would like Joe to run because I want Mitt Romney to run and a Biden vs Romney election would give me peace about the country since both men pass the authenticity and decency tests I filter political picks through.

Non-dangerous candidates running against each other with mostly the same end-goals who just differ on policies arriving at those goals takes the terror out of the election but I like the matchup as a matter of interest in the news as well since it levels the star-power playing field, forcing a discussion on actual substance.

Substance hasn’t been at issue in national elections for decades. 2008’s McCain vs Obama was all about the star power of Obama and McCains VP pick Sarah Palin for their “first” status and rockstar appeal and Obama vs Romney similarly focused the race the perceived personalities of the two candidates instead of Obamas record and Romneys ideology.

Romney vs Biden is a race between two rich white guys in their 70s.
Biden – a career politician whose first run for the presidency was in the 80s, then again in the 2007 Democrat primary Barack Obama won and current sitting Vice President at the time of the election
vs
Romney – a private sector businessman who has been flirting with politics since the 90s, having unsuccessfully run against Ted Kennedy for senate and later serving 1 term as Governor of Massachusetts, running for president in the 2007 primary and again in 2012, becoming the Presidential nominee but losing to the Obama/Biden ticket.

This match-up creates a dynamic where issues and ideology can take the spotlight in place of the identity-politics of the previous examples. It also raises several interesting points…

 


1-  IT’S THE REMATCH AMERICA DESERVES

Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, and Republican Mitt Romney all ran for president in 2008 and failed to get their parties nomination for the race that elected Barack Obama to the presidency.

A Hillary Clinton vs Mitt Romney race would mean 2 candidates who both ran directly against Barack Obama (Clinton in 08, Romney in ’12) and lost so it’s more of a story about candidates getting another bite at the apple (Hillary to win the nomination and Romney to win the presidency after the nomination). While Hillary served for 1 term in the Obama administration as secretary of state and thus would not only put on electoral trial the administration of her husband but also that of Obama’s, her lack of any actual life accomplishments or significant role in history other than “being around men making history” is a problem.

There is a better matchup…

Joe Biden vs Mitt Romney would be a rematch of the Obama Administration vs a potential Romney administration. This is a much more interesting divide than “Republican ideals of smaller government vs ‘first woman president'”.

Barack Obama was the first president to win reelection with less states and less votes than he was initially elected into office with and he largely won through demonizing his opponent and sliding by unchallenged by a sympathetic media to some majorly false promises, predictions, and attacks. America deserves to revisit these attacks straight against the VP of an administration that scored debate points on things like “the sequester will not happen” (it did, after Obamas reelection), or that Romney’s regard of Russia as a geopolitical foe was ridiculous “cold war (ie: backwards/outdated)” thinking only to then, after safely being re-elected, have to face Russia as – oops – a geopolitical foe in a list of troublesome ways.

Not that anyone besides insiders and nerds like me even remember any of those moments today and are hungry for a straightening of the public record – but rather because everyone following the election remembered them at the time and then forgot them. That’s kindov cheating, don’t you think? When you get positive buzz that translates to more support which translates to more votes that translate to a victory and then later the roots of it all not only turn out to be false but turn out to reveal that your opponent was right… that’s some shady ass sh*t, bruh. A Romney vs Obamas-2nd-in-command race would force some record setting and give the VP an opportunity to defend his boss and party’s terrible judgement and let the people decide.

Advantage: Romney

 

2- IT’S A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD

For the Democrats, a Romney nomination kills the starpower momentum on the Republican side. At the time of this writing, the top Republican primary candidates are Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and Marco Rubio. In the same order: A celebrity billionaire, a black neurosurgeon, a former tech CEO, and a 1 term cuban-American senator from Florida. In any of those matchups except Trump (whom everyone knows will not be the nominee), the Democrats are at a “personal story” disadvantage because all of those top contenders are non-career politicians and have compelling personal stories while the Democrats current top candidates – Hillary Clinton and the as-yet-undeclared Vice President Biden are both life long politicians, gray haired and white as mountain snow.

Hillary faces a disadvantage among all of those candidates because they are all fresh faces with earnestness in their character while Hillary is an old face (politically) with the words “dishonest’ and “liar” most commonly associated with her and her “first woman president” story is undermined by Rubio being Cuban-American, and Carsons “first black president” credential (succeeding the nations first half-black/darker skinned president, Barack Obama).

All that makes Biden a better choice since the choice would be between 2 lifetime politician older white candidates – better to go with the one with actual accomplishments in his record and who has authenticity and honesty attached to his name than an accomplishment-less candidate thought to be serially dishonest.

For the Republicans, however, those names I mentioned win the scorecard on personal story and fresh face charisma, but lose on experience, which can be easily exploited by a Biden campaign. Their solution ought to be to run one of those candidates or one like them as their Vice Presidential nominee and one most-like them but without their baggage in their top slot. The only option that ticks all those boxes is one Mitt Romney. A candidate who has already been vetted, is popular among donors, is not a career politician, and is a good debater.

Advantage: Biden

 

3- BOTH MEN WOULD SURELY PICK NON-WHITE MALE RUNNING MATES

It would be both mens 3rd run at the Presidency and I highly suspect both would choose non-white-male running mates which would be great for political engagement and general dialog.

Advantage: Draw

 

4- IT IS BOTH MENS LAST CHANCE AT THIS WHOLE ‘PRESIDENT’ THING

They are both too old and have gone around the block too many times. 2 runs for president is generally the maximum. Reagan and Nixon are the only ones to successfully run 3 times and only Nixon ran as the losing nominee (to JFK), coming back to run again and win the nomination and the presidency years later. For both Romney and Biden, this is their back to back #3. Biden is still living on the White House grounds, for gosh sake, and Romney was the GOP nominee for the last election that Biden won his VP reelection in. They’re both too old to ever make their 3rd try after 2016. This is it. Both men want the job. Both men have tried for it. Both men have this one and only last chance bid for the position… That’s exciting. That’s a story. That’s some Reality Show level stakes. And frankly, both men deserve to make their case on why they should lead this country before its too late.

Advantage: Draw
5- IT WOULD “END” ARGUMENTS ON BOTH SIDES

End is of course in quotations because obviously no political argument ever truly “ends” regardless of the amount of facts involved. But for all intents and purposes, both sides would be able to make various claims about a victory in this unique matchup alone that don’t work for other match-ups.

Democrats – Think that Romney really is the evil corporate uncaring monster the Obama 2012 campaign claimed? Lets see if America still thinks so…

Republicans – Think the Obama administration really is an America ruining pestilence across the land that the American people were bamboozled into? Lets put its VP up for the job and see if America really thinks so…

The victor of these divides come with more than a victorious election, but with a history proving set of “see I told you so”s under their belt that raises the stakes for both sides.

Advantage: Draw

 

But whatever – that aspect of this isn’t important. The thesis here is that Joe Biden is presidential material, a mountain among midgets, and deserves a national spotlight as a nominee for the nations highest office. Mitt Romney, likewise, was the best nominee either party has seen in decades and got cheated out of a victory he objectively deserved by metrics regarding the ideology of the electorate and the number of key campaign arguments the winning side made that later turned out to be false.

This is the matchup that America may not want or care for, but it’s the race the country needs and deserves.

Why I hope Joe Biden runs for President (and why you should too)

The country and the world would be in such better shape under a Biden, instead of Obama presidency.

Joe Biden ran for president in 2008, but his experience and policies didn’t make for appealing enough figureheads as having that center-left view come from a mouth that was attached to either a woman or a brown skinned guy so Biden was iced out and America missed out.

Any number of VP choices in a Biden administration in 2008 would have worked fine but I actually think a Biden/Obama administration would have done immense good for the country because while the frank speaking non-phony competent negotiator knowledgable elder statesman who actually likes working in politics was in the top position, the political neophyte that doesn’t like actually working in politics

Instead, the appropriate positions are reversed and the country has had 7-ish years of a petulant manchild president who doesn’t negotiate, doesn’t compromise, doesn’t care what his constituents actually want, is easily butthurt, wastes time, wastes money, and a completely wasted Vice President doing little outside of make an occasional gaffe or other screw-up. What a tragic waste of truly great potential.

Now, the country might get a 3rd chance to reject Joe Biden (he ran for president in the 80s as well as 08 and would face an uphill climb promoting what would be perceived to be a 3rd term to an unpopular Obama administration full of unpopular policies, minus the only thing about the administration that *is* consistently popular – Barack Obama).

I hope Biden runs even though I will feel bad for him losing. He’s the only potential 2016 candidate on the Democratic side besides Jim Webb (the fact that you just said “who?” says all it needs to in that regard) who isn’t either a phony (sorry, Hillary fans – Update: sorry x2) or fruitcake (sorry Bernie fans) and would add sanity and honesty to an otherwise circus style primary and general election that no one needs this year in particular.

—

Update: Poll: While Clinton struggles with ‘liar’ tag, voters find Biden ‘honest’

Comedian Barry Crimmins inadvertently got me kicked off AOL in the 90s

A mystery in my life has been solved almost 20 years later and it turns out AOL was an even worse company in the 90s than I thought…

You younglings may not even know this but in the 1990s, before AOL (“America OnLine”) was a low-end video creator and distributor, it was the only way just about anyone could connect to the internet. As the biggest and often only internet service provider for what is now known as “dial up” but then was just known as “the only internet that exists”, AOL had a monopoly on access to the world wide web.

I was kicked off AOL at least 3 times. And by “I” that of course means my family since I was a minor using a screen name under their account. The stories of each kick-off is worth its own post but the summary is that they were forms of “spam” (soliciting invites through instant messages for people to add themselves to my free Jokes and humor email newsletter) and “harassment” (getting baited by someone in a chatroom picking a fight and then responding, only to have them report me while they got away with their more egregious use of bullying profanity). Those cases were ridiculous reasons to cancel my families internet service and force them to use a different name and credit card to re-ignite with new screen names at much inconvenience to everyone – but at least I was actually technically violating their stupid “TOS” (Terms of Service). The last time I got banned, I did nothing wrong. I just recently Sherlock Holmesed the reason why…

Barry Crimmins is a comedian who is the subject of a new documentary by Bobcat Goldthwait titled Call Me Lucky and while plugging it on the Adam Carolla podcast, he told a story covered in the movie that made me realize why I was kicked off AOL and how it is 100% his fault.

If the stupid reasons I was previously banned weren’t hinting enough: AOL was a supremely bad company in the 90s. It’s customer service was bad, its actual-service was bad, it raped you on fees, constantly had virus problems, let spam run nearly unfiltered into your email inbox, spammed your real-life mailbox with trial membership discs, and would ban you from their service if you said a curse word in a chat room or someone on instant message reported you after not liking what you said.

There was one niche they evidently serviced super well though, according to Crimmins: pedophiles.

I would get perverts messaging me all the time wanting to “cyber” which meant “cyber sex” which meant “type out sexual things and I guess masturbate in between typing while imagining what the other person is typing back at you” but Crimmins tells of darker experiences. Evidently AOL was a haven for not just the easy solicitation of sex talk but the actual dissemination of child pornography. The tale of Crimmins battle against the company is worth hearing in interviews and watching in the documentary but the point is that AOL was allegedly turning a blind eye toward child abuse because it made them millions. Pre-teen entrepreneurial douches like me were just causing a ruckus for other paying members so we were easy to kick off the service – but child pornographers were only sharing their filth amongst themselves so there was no disgruntled customer to report to AOL. But even when Crimmins went undercover and DID report the people trying to solicit whom they thought was a child, AOL still did nothing because there was just too much money involved in these people paying for their service to trade their kiddie abuse media.

GROSS: So you wrote repeatedly to AOL and asked them to shutdown these pedophile chat rooms.

CRIMMINS: Right, and they were making a lot of money on it, so they just filed a – because in – back in those days the modems were really slow. And so it took, like, a half-hour to upload a, you know, low-grade picture.

GROSS: We’re talking dial-up era.

CRIMMINS: Right, right, and so it took a long time to upload each photo and all these – and then if you’re on AOL for more than 12 hours or something a month, they started charging you $3 or $4 an hour. So when you find, you know, thousands of people that are, you know, in the same chat rooms all the time or you find that one of the chat rooms that are named thusly – I mean, like anyone else, when I first went in there I just said what – are you people out of your minds? And they started talking to me about the First Amendment and stuff. And as Andrew Vachss said, you know, you can mug somebody and try to call it performance art, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get away with it. And I just realized – you know, I would go in there as an adult, you know, with my own AOL name and people would just start sending me child pornography immediately. Like, no sort of – they just, oh, that’s what you’re here for, here. And they expected you to send child pornography back to them. And so I immediately contacted AOL and they said, oh, thank you very much for being, you know, a bunch of corporate – good citizen of our community, blah, blah, blah. But as time passed and I watched the problem grow exponentially, their answers became, you know, they – the back and forth between us just became more and more ridiculous.

After a public slog against the company involving a testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee., Crimmins evidently finally got AOL to take child rape seriously… and in doing so, he got an innocent mid-90s Richard kicked off the service yet again, much to his continued disgrace.

The last time I was banned from the America Online service it was for going in a chatroom. For years I was baffled at wtf happened and thought it had to have been a coincidence and that the AOL Feds had just caught me for some snarky comment or profane one-liner I had said in a chatroom prior to then. But finally now after hearing Crimmins tell his story and matching the timelines, it makes sense WTF happened to me.

I had heard from the kid sitting in front of me in school make the ludicrous claim that “if you go into private chatroom PICS, your account gets deleted”…

Um…right. This is so wrong it couldn’t be more wrong, I told him. That is dumb upon dumb. I knew first had that AOL had horribly fascistic policies on wantonly killing their customers accounts, but there was no way that entering a chat room would get your account canceled. I had heard of some chat rooms being banned in the sense that if you typed them in then it wouldn’t let you access the room, but there was just no damn way that you would be allowed in a room and then denied service on your whole account just for going to private room “pics”. That’s it. PICS. Not “Pics of government secrets” or “pics of death fantasies involving elected officials” – just pics. As in, short for “pictures”. Or maybe an acronym for something unrelated to photography. Who knows. You could make a private chatroom of any series of letters and numbers.

I couldn’t wait to prove him wrong so that day I got home, logged into AOL and after about 30 minutes of waiting for it to frigging connect, went to “Enter A Private Chat Room” and typed in PICS…

“GOODBYE” said the AOL voice as the software closed all windows and kicked me offline.
No… freakin… way…
Okay, so there was some kind of hack that someone in the PICS room used to kick offline anyone who entered. That had to be it. There was a thing called Punting that used a program that would bomb the instant messengers in AOL and that would disconnect them so I thought for sure it was a version of that.

No, dude. I could not reconnect. The dreaded “Please call this number” cancelled membership message appeared when I tried to connect. I was screwed. and this time I legitimately did nothing wrong!

Now, after hearing Crimmins tell his tale against the company during exactly that time, it seems way more obvious: The chat room was almost surely a meeting place for AOL pedophiles and AOL had just switched from a “90 strikes and maybe we’ll talk about you possibly being out” policy on rapists to more of a “Zero tolerance for anyone who does anything not identified with anything illegal but that a pedophile also previously did” and that chat room must have been infested with pedo-creeps and thus condemned. There is no confirmation that this is the case, but given Crimmins storytelling of the time, it sounds like AOL just started mass-deleting accounts with suspected activity instead of going through the trouble of doing word searches or an actual investigation or something that a company that wasn’t horrible might do.

So thanks for nothing, Barry Crimmins. In saving countless children from having their abuse flaunted on the internet, you ruined several weeks for a young Richard.

Loser Ted Cruz chides Romney for losing.

And dumb Conservatives cheer him on like dummies…

Here’s what happened… President Obama is proposing a uniquely and aggressively horrible deal with Iran that would give it – the most anti-American regime currently in existence – hundreds of billions of dollars, for nothing in return. Nothing. Just says “here you go. you use this responsibly though, okay?”. And just like with the lifting of the blocks between the U.S. and Cuba – Obama’s getting the country he represents nothing in the deal. The argument in favor of this ridiculous Iran deal is that it somehow delays instead of hastens Iran getting a nuclear bomb by 15 years, a concept that is wholly unfounded according to the details of the actual agreement signed by the Government of the United States.

In response to this awfulness, senator Ted Cruz, who is running for the 2016 presidential nomination, noted that this makes the Obama administration a financial facilitator of Islamic terrorism, saying:

“If this deal is consummated, it will make the Obama administration the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism,” Cruz said during a round table Tuesday. “Billions of dollars under control of this administration will flow into the hands of jihadists who will use that money to murder Americans, to murder Israelis, to murder Europeans.”

It’s true that the money Iran will get will likely be used to murder people and it’s true that Iran wouldn’t have this money if not for the Obama administrations agreement and it’s true that this was not a helpful thing for Cruz to say.

Mitt Romney, noted as such.

Which is the most sensible commentary a rational mind can have on the topic. Cruz’s comment isn’t wrong but the way it’s stated is so clunky that it hands Obama supporters a gift to turn a bad Obama policy into an opportunity to make Ted Cruz and Republicans the target of scorn. That is friggin horrible strategy but Cruz is notorious for being non-strategical. Which is cool if you want to drum up angst from your base but super horrible if your intention is to win elections. Romney helped his party by voicing his opposition to the deal while also noting that it most obviously hurts that oppositional cause for people like Cruz to be simplifying the dot-connections the way he did.

Cruz replied to Romneys criticism in typical Cruzian fashion (read: terribly):

Cruz, 2016 presidential candidate, fired back at Romney in a Thursday radio interview with KFYO’s Chad Hasty.

“So Mitt Romney’s tweet today said, ‘Gosh, this rhetoric is not helpful,'” Cruz said. “John Adams famously said, ‘Facts are stubborn things.’ Describing the actual facts is not using rhetoric; it is called speaking the truth.”

The senator recalled what he described as a critical moment during the 2012 presidential race: A back-and-forth over that year’s attack on a diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya.

“Part of the reason that Mitt Romney got clobbered by Barack Obama is because we all remember that third debate where Barack Obama turned to Mitt and said, ‘I said the Benghazi attack was terrorism and no one is more upset by Benghazi than I am.’ And Mitt, I guess listening to his own advice, said, ‘Well gosh, I don’t want to use any rhetoric. So OK, never mind. I’ll just kind of rearrange the pencil on the podium here,'” Cruz said.

He added that the 2016 presidential candidates need to speak up or they will fail like Romney.

I’ll get to why Cruz doesn’t know what he’s talking about here later in this post, but first a factual correction: Cruz’s claim never actually happened. As I’ve shown before, Romney expertly trapped President Obama on the Benghazi issue in the 2nd debate by going 3 rounds on the subject and giving Obama every inch of rope he needed to hang himself on the issue. Romney noted that Obama not only did not treat the terrorist attacks in Benghazi as such, but actually took great lengths to deceive the American people about the nature of the attacks, instead blaming a Youtube video for them. Obama, knowing that he was getting trapped in having to either lie by claiming he did something he did not do or obfuscate the question merely said “check the transcript” of his rose garden speech on the subject, in where he knew he could point to the word “terrorism” being present and then spin that as having taken responsibility for the attacks as being terrorism (successfully avoiding the messy explanation of the ensuing phony claims about a Youtube video instigation). In an unprecedented move, the debate moderator Candy Crowley stepped in and falsely claimed that Obama was correct in his claim about labeling the act terrorism and even though she walked it back later and the truth was verified by fact checkers, the damage had been done on live tv. To blame Romney for not attacking the issue he actually attacked in the most perfect of strategic ways is nonsense.

However – Republicans are just not smart enough to understand this and many agree with Cruz that Romney’s reason-for-loss was that he wasn’t tough enough on the President.

Here is how Rush Limbaugh summarized the positions of both men:

“Both Obama and Romney have called Cruz’s remarks inappropriate.” What has Cruz done? He’s “maintained that [Obama] would become a leading state-sponsor of terror if the agreement it struck with Iran makes it past Congress. He and others have argued that Iran would use a windfall from sanctions relief to finance terror abroad.” He has said on that basis alone this deal ought not get done! And then Romney piped up and said in a tweet (paraphrased): “Gosh, this rhetoric isn’t helpful. Gosh, this rhetoric isn’t helpful!”

Cruz fired back: “You’re telling me what’s not helpful? You got clobbered by Obama for a reason! You got clobbered because you backed off. You got clobbered because you didn’t have the guts to keep going.” So this is… I like this, folks. Whatever Trump’s responsible for it or not.

 

The truth is that both Cruz and Romney lost competitions to Obama but in very different ways…

In 2012 Mitt Romney ran for president against Barack Obama and lost.

In 2013 Ted Cruz led a strategy from the Senate against Barack Obama’s signature legislation “Obamacare” and lost.

Romney’s strategy was verifiably better at every level. Victory was in sight – the numbers just didn’t add up at the end since his side was fractured from a year of in-fighting and bad press while Obama’s side was boosted and mobilized during that time (and as I’ve pointed out before: the key to winning elections is to fracture the OTHER side and unite yours).

Cruz’s strategy in the senate was verifiably guaranteed to fail at every level as there was literally just no path to victory outside of President Obama just deciding to become a Republican overnight one day.

Cruz’s tactic of denying funding to Obamacare that caused a deadlock with the Democrats who refused to negotiate on the matter, resulting in a government shutdown that ultimately got Cruz absolutely nothing but scorn from the media and public at large.

So both men lost in their matches with President Obama, but one fought valiantly and one  fought irresponsibly with literally no strategy to actually win.

Alternate headline: Defeated-by-Democrats-TedCruz lectures Defeated-by-Democrats-MittRomney on why the GOP gets defeated by Democrats.

Doesn’t sound like such bold talk when you put it that way now does it. Yet that’s exactly the case.

The only difference is that Romney actually had a chance of winning.

Reminder: Holocaust victims weren’t killed in ovens…

I hate to go and ruin the fun in historical acts of genocide, but this seemingly minor detail of a myth is one worth straightening out: victims of the Nazi’s weren’t killed in ovens.

This historical correction comes on the heels of a quote getting buzz by critics of Mike Huckabee who, in a condemnation of the Obama administrations nuclear deal with Iran (a nation dedicated to “wiping Israel off the map” in one way or another).

The actual quote isn’t anything remarkable, but got a lot of coverage because of the specific holocaust reference he used.

“This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history. It is so naive that he would trust the Iranians. By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven. This is the most idiotic thing, this Iran deal. It should be rejected by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and by the American people. I read the whole deal. We gave away the whole store. It’s got to be stopped.”

As a political story, this doesn’t interest me because there’s no reason it should. The Left tried to exploit it as a big deal. It was misconstrued as every Nazi-related analogy is. Other 2016 Primary Republicans had to play the “agree or disagree with what the Left says is a big deal” game (Rick Santorum said right-on – Jeb Bush said tone it down). Huckabee doubled down on the sentiment. blah blah blah.

But what no one is mentioning in any of the coverage is the misleading history in the comment. Jews weren’t “marched to the ovens” in the holocaust. Ovens weren’t a method of slaughter.

It’s an easy mix-up to make since the holocaust is known for mass killing and mass body burning, so skipping over the part where the bodies were dead and mashing it with the part where people were murdered in unconventional methods is a common jumble. I used to be one of the mixer-uppers. Around 2008 when I was baking a pizza and I opened the lid, causing the wave of heat to hit me in the face, I had an immediate empathic PTSD-style flashback of how holocaust victims had to have felt dying this way. Everyones worst way to die is burning, and even if you’re not claustrophobic – the addition of being in a casket sized space is a tremendous horror. Everyone who has had a loved one cremated has had their mind go to the morbid “what if” thought of their own death being misdiagnosed somehow and waking up just as they were being put into the crematory oven. *shudder*


Survivors of the Dachau concentration camp demonstrate the operation of the crematorium by preparing a corpse to be placed into one of the ovens. Dachau, Germany, April 29-May 10, 1945. Credit.

But if there’s a bright side to horrific senseless mass murder, there is the comfort that this didn’t happen in the concentration camps of the holocaust. Back when I had my pizza vision, I looked up how many people died this way and could only find one or two instances of a prisoner being put into a crematorium oven alive as a special punishment.

I blame for this myth, the intentionally-offensive joke regarding exactly this connection between the best thing on earth (pizza) and the worst thing on earth (burning alive) that goes “Q: What’s the difference between a Jew and a pizza? A: the pizza doesn’t scream when you put it in the oven.” Womp womp. But you’ll be shocked to find out that the normally reliable factually rigorous nature of anti-semitism has, in this instance, failed on accuracy. Idk about you, but I did Nazi that coming.

But for real, guys: Victims murdered by the Nazi’s were shot or gassed to death en masse. Their bodies were carried to crematoriums afterward. Yet a lot of people, evidently a 2016 Presidential candidate included, seem to think mass oven killing went on in the holocaust.

While Huckabee didn’t explicitly state the historical inaccuracy, it’s implied in the term “marching to the door” and he continued the implication that people were murdered by ovens when commenting on the comment afterward:

“When I talked about the oven door, I have stood at that oven door,” he said. “I know exactly what it looks like, 1.1 million people killed. For 6,000 years, Jews have been chased and hunted and killed all over this Earth, and when someone in a government says we’re going to kill them, I think, by gosh, we better take that seriously.”

It’s the Iranians who used the word Holocaust first, Huckabee said, and refused during the negotiations to recognize Israel’s right to exist.”

“They refused to tone down their rhetoric and said the Holocaust did not exist and that they’re going to wipe Israel off the map,” he said. “When people in a government position continue to say they’re going to kill you, I think somebody ought to wake up and take that seriously.”

Not withstanding dopiness of his Appeal to Authority fallacy in saying he saw the ovens in person (and I saw them on a Bing search alongside disturbing juxtapositions of actual ovens. So what?)…

 

-the rest of what he said is at least accurate. Iran brought up the holocaust first so if someone thinks the Obama deal with Iran empowers the enemy-state (as it does) then it’s not a wildly off base comment – just in-artfully stated (he should have said that it potentially makes such a march, not that it does).

 

This Selfie-Drone will be following me in the air next year

Finally someone started making the “flying camera that follows you” that I invented 10 years ago.

I bought one but it won’t ship until February 2016.

I’ll be interested to see more of the cam in actual action and testing but so far most searches turn up videos of girls name Lily singing songs I never heard of, dogs named Lily with GoPro’s strapped to them, and various less-wholesome cam related activity.

The Tim Burton Superman movie starring Nick Cage that almost was

A $30 million Superman movie that was planned to be made and released in the late 1990’s but never got completed has been the subject of interesting rumor for years and is now the subject of a crowdfunded documentary finally released. I have been following the rumors for years and the making of the documentary since it was announced last year and just finally watched it.

My reaction is that I would have utterly hated Tim Burtons vision of Superman, but I desperately wish he got to make it. I hate all the Superman movies, so that’s no big D. I would have hated this one for the same reasons I think the Christopher Reeve versions are campy garbage and the 2000’s attempts are melodramatic wastes trying too hard to suck the joy out of a fun character and go for a “realistic” emotional disaster drama. Yawn.

The movie would have focused on a version of the Death of Superman story, which in the 90s was a big deal and would have been a big draw on film. In the comics, Superman is confronted by a new character named Doomsday who, like Soops, is similarly indestructible but bent on killing everything. They fight for awhile, weakening each other in a meta-bar room brawl similar to the way Soops vs Zod was depicted in the most recent iteration Man of Steel until finally they punch each other to death in a mutual loss. Superman is buried and then there’s a couple offshoot storylines where a kid, a cyborg, and a couple other pretenders to the throne try to take the mantle until Superman comes back, now with long black hair and a black uniform. Turns out Superman was only dead-in-name-only by being beaten into a recovery hibernation mode and was able to be revived in the Fortress of Solitude and returned at a weaker power mode to save the day like always.

For a good depiction of the story, I recommend the animated 2007 film Superman: Doomsday.

So in 1996 Warner Bros gave Kevin Smith the opportunity to write a screenplay for either a movie version of The Outer Limits (a forgettable Twilightzone ripoff), a Bettlejuice sequel titled “Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian” (finally answering the questions posed in the first Beetlejuice of “but what would he be like in a tropical setting?”) or friggin Superman (an American icon and comic book legend). Smith picked that one and wrote a script where the alien Brainiac invades the Fortress of Solitude (fighting polar bears in the process) and deprives Superman of his powers, allowing the whole come-back thing and so on.

Tim Burton signed on to direct and retooled the vision entirely ditching Smiths script for a more….Burtonesque approach.

The comics at the time had Superman looking like this:

Long haired sortov mullet, buffed out, boxy Termantor style chin and cheek bones.

This is what Tim Burton had in mind:

It sucks that we were so close to getting a Superman Scissorhands movie and it all fell apart with its budget going to the 1999 Will Smith flop, Wild Wild West.

Warner Bros really dropped the ball here by that fact alone. Because even if Burtons Superman movie flopped, 1) it wouldn’t have been as low as Wild Wild West, and 2) it would have had decades long staying power as an item of interest (where as WWW faded to obscurity outside of notation of its financial and critical negative reception). It would have been the utmost of cool to have the 90s Batman movie series directed by Burton cross over with Superman in a combo sequel like Warner is trying to accomplish with Batman vs Superman in 2016.

And to make it even more deliciously bizarre, the Man of Steel was to be played by real-life SuperWeirdo Nicolas Cage, of whom test footage exists to drool over.

All this and more is in the previously mentioned documentary “The Death of ‘Superman Lives’: What Happened” which I just watched. It’s okay. There are animated recreations of storyboards and concepts from the original treatments that I wanted to see much more of, the story isn’t told in an easily discernable beginning-middle-end like I would have appreciated, and the directors distracting head nodding while his interview subjects speak on the topics raised could have been drastically cut for my tastes, but the base material is good and its a good watch for comic, Cage, Smith, or Burton fans.

Here’s the trailer:

https://youtu.be/_5Q1j0XJQPI

If that sort of thing appeals to you, watch the first 10 minutes below and consider buying the full doc itself:

Image credits: the Death of Superman Lives