Category — the at-risk youth

Typical: old dogs, new tricks.

Consider this post the rolled up newspaper that’s used to swat a dog across its snout after the pooch takes a shit in the middle of the kitchen floor. This time the kitchen floor is the interweb. And the steaming, coiled, noxious piece of shit is the first ever Presidential Twitter debate — which features no presidential candidates.

Nope. Just some Obama and McCain staffers armed with Treos (couldn’t even get iPhones –not even the old ones!) are participating in a four-day online debate. Moderated by some professor of tech and culture and O.G. Wonkette/new editor at Radar Ana Marie Cox.

As you all know, Tweets can only be 140 characters long. Here’s a sample response to John McCain’s intern about his fiscal plan:

Priorities:1) $ for R&D>>tax breaks for hedge fund managers;2) S&T ed. programs>>tax breaks for oil companies

Do you hear that? That’s the sound of my soul screaming. I know folks are trying in earnest to get some cutting edge fusion going with the presidential election and social media but this type of trash misses the point entirely. Much like the youtube debates, having staff serve as gatekeepers to mediate content subverts the entire point of social media. It’s about being instant, spontaneous, and accessible.

Nothing about filming a talking snowman or having some intern text message you about universal health care enriches the political process. It’s just a ham handed exercise in repackaging. The word wide web really does provide a grassroots challenge to both establishment politics and mainstream media — but not when it’s so cheaply used. The smartest baby boomer I know said this about the rise of New Media in politics

Authentic Web-driven power surfaces most dramatically when online communities exercise collective accountability over institutions and individuals that were once invulnerable to instantaneous public reaction and feedback.

Put another way — in a 140 characters or less:

“If you claim to be a social media expert and you only use social media to talk about social media… you’re no expert.” Tim Siedell via Twitter.

related: FAILURE.

A piece in the Boston Phoenix describes the tension between old-line sportswriters (that’s them!) and bloggers (that’s us!). I’m not sure how the photographer was able to catch such a wildly spontaneous moment on film, but kudos! This exactly what I’m doing right now – eXxXxxXtremme BLOGGING!!!11 Its so *~KrZy!!!*~

Wicked Visual Metaphor Broseph!!

Stimulus Package: Money, Cash, Hos

Lately I’ve been wondering what an Obama White House might mean for the future of bling. For the fate of heavy gold, medallions, below-the-butt denim, the whole hip-hop gangsta fashion habit. What if January 20, 2009 turned out to be.. a watershed fashion moment for teenaged boys?

Ugh. “Gangsta?” This is like when my pudgy sweat-slathered boss says desperately ironic things like “That’s how I roll!”

She goes on to reference: Ed Sullivan. The Beatles. And a winsome 67 year old corrections officer. This is EXACTLY why assisted living facilities should NOT have internet access.

Moving on. Let me holla at this ho: DO NOT confuse bling with jeans that sag from gats, crack pipes, and all the dreadful woes of a Baltimore housing project.

1. Bling is boss. Its not just a red-carpet fashion statement. It’s a deeper set of values: Playing hard, looking good and lapping up the finest. The Bentley, the four finger ring, chilled the Dom Perignon, and the hot jacuzzi. Its about hittin switches in a drop top.

2. Whether its based in crass materialism or in giant meta quotation marks, bling is about being gaudy, sassy, and bold. Right or wrong bling is empowering. Its irreverent, audacious and HONEST. Damon Dash Emporer of Bling says: “I’ve always been addicted to money. I like to have diamonds, jewelery; I like my private jets, my cooks, the fact I stay in a presidential [suite] wherever I go.” Totes. I say, why the fuck not? Brush yo shoulders off and hop on that jet if you got it.

3. Speaking of which, let us not forget Bama’s dog whistle when he brushed his shoulders off at a rally. It was a gloriously authentic moment. A moment that we gleefully understood that the confused boomers missed. Like the fist bump, like Bama saying “Ya, I did a little blow“, its all about the open self-revelatory style. The way Dash unabashedly declares his love for them big bodied Benzes to Bama snorting yeah-yo: its open, its out there, unapologetically. This is something neither the focus grouped Clinton or the Liver Spotted McCain could do.

When Bama becomes president the flossin, the rims, and the bling will not go away . Hopefully, the craggy Boomers who write this moth-eaten drivel will.

It’s gay pride week in DC. Let’s see what the self proclaimed king of hip hop has to say about it: “I ain’t into faggots,” 50 Cent told Playboy. “I don’t like gay people around me, because I’m not comfortable with what their thoughts are.”

In response openly gay rapper Deadlee stated:

“Fuck him. I don’t like ignorant bitches around me, so he can suck my gun”

AH! YES!!Wanna know whose more homophobic Rappers or Pastors — take the Radar Quiz.

Ya’ll ask me what I’m doing tonight. Ok, I’m going to see my long lost sister/ project runway winner Christian Siriano sashay across some in district dive (Town on U-street). Hyped.

“Don’t these bitches know that I’m.. way better than them?” - Christian

Hey kids, did you know the anti-sex, Bible-bashing kooks at the Abstinence Clearinghouse are now keeping a blog? That is, if “blog” can be defined as “a bunch of two-sentence rambling crap entries with no links to back up their insane blathering and the kind of puncuation one usually comes across in serial killer missives”.

Here’s a typical entry, ominously titled “The Left” and penned by HotMama247 (no, really), who is clearly the Dostoevsky of this little group of wingnuts:

The left is telling the many young people who are committed to purity and character that they want to cure them.  I didn’t know there was anything wrong with them!!!

How can we possibly argue with that scintillating logic? We’re off to convert to The First Church of Obnoxious Proselytism and swear off sex until marriage, and off birth control altogether! Better stock up on saltpeter to keep down the urges and install a zipper on our uterus!!

Sadly, the blog has been closed to commenting, after an inundation of comments by the non-addle-brained left them clutching their pearls and unable to deal with the resulting cognitive dissonance.

The Catholic Church is desperately attempting to prove they’re “hip” and “down with the young people” in time for their World Youth Day, to be held in Sydney, Australia in July. They took some ads out in the Australian version of Marie Claire that somehow prove Jesus is responsible for all of pop culture ever, amen, including the following:

Does this mean that Jesus also begat smoking the chronic?

Click here for larger size.

You hear that, kids? Today’s Catholic Church isn’t just a bunch of crusty old white men creepily obsessed with your sexuality! It’s also a pimp thug who’s obsessed with dank!

(Do the kids still say “dank”?)

Hat tip to copyranter.

Dude, you got dooced

The Millenial Generation is painted here as self-involved, shallow, coddled consumerist whiners who think “think updating a spreadsheet while simultaneously posting to a Twitter account about the latest gossip on perezhilton.com is an essential corporate skill”.

Part of me remembers the accusations of “slacker” and “cynical” that were flung at us by the Baby Boomers and can’t help but think that this feels like another spoke in the endlessly turning wheel of “This generation that came immediately after us is nowhere near as awesome as we are, and will bring about the fall of civilization!”

On the other hand, fuck the Millenials. We gave the world anticommercialism, Google, and Johnny Depp. What the hell is going to be The Millenials’ legacy to the world, motherfucking MySpace? The claim that anal isn’t “real” sex?

This army of Guy Fawkes clones was breastfed

Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, advised against breastfeeding, saying that most modern women didn’t have a good enough diet to form nutritious breastmilk. Instead he advised his adherents to feed their infants a noxious sludge–which he claimed to have gotten the recipe for in Ancient Rome–of barley water, milk, and honey. Honey is, as any first-year medical student or someone who’s watched a couple of seasons of ER can tell you, not recommended for children under two, as it’s an excellent way to kill your baby with infant botulism. Some modern practitioners have replaced the honey with corn syrup, leading to rotted baby teeth and scurvy. Scurvy. A disease that illiterate, cannibal sailors don’t even get any more.

What makes this speculation all the more amusing is a recently-released survey which found that children who were breastfed have, on average, IQs 5% higher than children who weren’t. (Thanks, Mom!) So maybe Hubbard was crazy like a fox?

1. Instruct your followers to raise their children to be too dimwitted to realize they belong to a cult that exists soley to siphon their money away.
2. Make sure they grow up dumb enough to think statements like “Mental illnesses are caused by the ‘essences’ of followers of a galactic dictator who were brought to Earth billions of years ago and blown up with hydrogen bombs!” make perfect sense.
3. Sit back and watch generations of progressively obtuse morons bulk up church membership.
4. PROFIT.

P.S. If you’d like to contribute to the legal defense fund that will no doubt be needed when we’re sued by the Church of Scientology, please email the author at sarah@heybeus.com.

Bonus: Ripped from the headlines! Check out this clip from a recent episode of Law & Order: Original Flava in which a Totally Not Scientology cult called “Systemotics” kills its members babies with steam baths and wheatgrass juice and throws its critics off of rooftops.

My new favorite music video. Catchy as hell, and you know, pro-HOPE. Note the Shepard Fairy cameo.  Hyphy or G Funk? Hmmm..

Do you see the type of glorious street art Obama inspires? What does Hillary inspire? Psychotic tree gnomes who are strangely effeminate to mobilize and gyrate. UNACCEPTABLE.

Hey Florida, I got your nose!

Just when you think Floridians have exhausted their monopoly on Dark Ages-level intellect in America, they manage to lower the bar a little more: A Florida substitute teacher has been suspended for accusations of “wizardry” after he performed a magic trick in class.

Wait, so that time my father seemed to make his thumb detach from his hand, it wasn’t just a clever illusion, but Dark Magic? BURN HIM!!!

Later this week the Land O’ Lakes school board will have an emergency meeting to discuss whether or not they should implicate a stoning policy for teachers who teach heliocentrism.

An NYU student bit into a muffin filled with razor blades — a “prop” left behind in a classroom from a discussion of absurdist philosophy.

We really can’t think of better reason to NEVER date some one who majored in ‘art’, ‘philosophy’, ‘women’s studies’ or any of the humanities. Stick with the sexually repressed math/science kids who spent most of high school being ostracized and only came into their own in college, not only are they easier emotionally manipulate but they’re far more adjusted. Otherwise you’re going to have to put up with this shit. Honestly, do you want to be the girl that mops up after your boyfriend “Skiegh” jerks off into hamburger bun to protest the meat industry?

What the fuck point were you trying to prove by stuffing a muffin full of razor blades that couldn’t have been done with a diagram on a blackboard? This ranks right up there with the Yale hiptard who claimed she used blood from self-induced miscarriages over a 9 month period (heh). Or that other the Costa Rican Mike Vick (hell yeah summer 2007 reference!) who tortured a dog to death. . .in gallery space!

So remember ladies, if the kid doesn’t know what F.O.I.L. stands for stay the fuck away from him.

Disney spokeswoman Patti McTeague told the New York Times that the Vanity Fair shoot featuring a tussled and tarted up Miley Cyrus “was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines.”

Shame Shame Vanity Fair.

You should have tried to replicate the demure age-appropriate classiness that Disney displays in their pre-teen underwear ads that plaster billboards in China.

A pasty, pig-tailed, pre-menstrual tween, reclining in snug fitting white panties and what appears to be an underwire bra. Notice just the slightest hint of cleavage? I’m not sure what’s creepier: her tiny fists hidden behind the maniacal smile of the Disney mouse puppets? Or her dead eyes that look to a future of a first round dismal on VH1 CelebReality dating show?

Before Disney continues to trot out their little teen star to apologize some more, maybe they should get in their own house in order? But then again, maybe we should all just relax Disney, you see, knows a lot about good role models.

via Slate