Barnyard - The Original party Animals (Widescreen Edition) Moo-ve over, all you pretenders … here are the original party animals - the critters of Barnyard! This laugh-filled, tuneful animated adventure stars Otis (voiced by Kevin James), a carefree party cow. To the consternation of his respected father Ben (voiced by Sam Elliott), Otis is happy to spend his days singing, dancing and playing tricks on humans. But all good things must come to an end, and when Otis is suddenly forced into his father’s position of responsibility, the animal antics multiply as he struggles to find the courage and talent to be a true leader. Wild, wacky and “udderly” hilarious, here’s a herd of animated pranksters that’ll keep you laughing out loud!
Customer Review: party Animals Fall Flat
Though heavy on star power
This one runs out of steam
In many parts it just rips off
“The Lion King” in theme

Respected father rules the roost
Unworthy son’s buck wild
This is another one where fate
Must tame a problem child

Animals walk upright
When humans aren’t in sight
They love a swingin’ hoedown
And can party through the night

Coyotes in the hen house
Steers start riding Hogs
Other than a few sight gags
This one goes to the dogs

It should’ve been “Made for TV”
A plot without a rudder
Just seeing all those “teated” steers
Induced a spinal shudder

The soundtrack is the only thing
That keeps this movie going
Change the channel right away
If you see this one showing

Amanda Richards, December 25, 2006

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by Jacob G. Hornberger To belabor the obvious, murderers do not obey restrictions on gun possession, contrary to the long-repeated suggestion of the gun-control crowd - that if we simply enact such restrictions into law, murderers will comply with them. As we once again see in the context of the Virginia Tech massacre, a person who intends to break a law against murder isn’t going to stop and say to himself, “Oh my, I can’t use a gun to commit these murders because the school’s regulations prevent me from carrying a gun onto campus.” Virginia Tech, a state school, prohibits its students from carrying guns onto campus. When someone recently introduced a bill in the Virginia legislature to permit students with state-issued concealed-carry permits to carry guns onto campus, the bill was allowed to die in committee. So there you have it, once again: Virginia Tech’s gun-control regulation disarmed Virginia Tech’s students from defending themselves against a mass murderer who, having ignored the regulation, could be virtually certain that all Virginia Tech students would be disarmed. Why, just one or two armed students could have taken the murderer out. Virginia Tech officials steadfastly maintain that their “gun-free zone” makes their campus safer. Yeah, safer for mass murderers who know that they won’t have to worry about students with the capacity to fire back.

InsideOutside
InsideOutside is a piece of (under-)clothing that heats up or cools down uncomfortably when the wearer gets near spaces where others feel discomfort. These areas can include but are […]

Speaking of Iran
by Harry Browne George Bush likes to remind us over and over that an Iranian nuclear bomb would be a violation of the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran signed that treaty and agreed not to develop nuclear weapons. However, the treaty also calls for the five countries who had nuclear weapons in 1970 - the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, and China - to begin reducing their stockpiles and eventually eliminate them entirely. To the best of my knowledge, not one of the five countries has intentionally destroyed a single nuclear weapon. So are we going to have to attack Britain, France, Russia, China, and the United States as well? Neither Pakistan, India, nor Israel signed the pact, and each of them developed nuclear weapons. But the U.S. government is only harassing Iran who, by the terms of the treaty, has allowed international inspectors into its country to see what it’s doing. And so far, the inspectors have found nothing. Since the United States is not only dishonoring the treaty by not reducing its weapons, but in fact has been developing new nuclear weapons, non-nuclear nations are condemning the U.S. for violating the treaty while trying to impose it upon other nations.

The State or the People
by Paul Craig Roberts What use is the political left? This is a serious question, not a rant. The same question can be asked about the political right. The question does not imply derogatory implications about individuals on the political left or the political right. Rather, the question concerns the basket of emotions, issues, and knee-jerk responses associated with the political left and the political right. Traditionally, the political left has had a Benthamite view of government, seeing government power as the tool for improving society whether through revolution or reform. Paradoxically, the political left has believed in Big Government despite the political left’s emphasis on civil liberty. The political left sees government power not as a threat to civil liberty but as a tool for enforcing civil liberty; for example, through Brown vs. Board of Education and coerced integration in the southern states. Traditionally, the political right has had a Blackstonian view of government, distrusting government power as a threat to individual liberty. Paradoxically, conservatives value individual liberty while tending to view civil liberties as protective devices for criminals and, currently, terrorists. The political left tends to blame problems on existing societal institutions, especially on capitalism, which is believed to foster greed and private power that is not accountable to the people. The political right blames problems on human fallibility and on laws and regulations that create the wrong incentives and that replace private action with government action. The Founding Fathers, being mild revolutionaries, set up a Blackstonian Constitution in which law is a shield of the people and not a weapon in the hands of government. The Founders balanced this restraint on government with reformist democracy that works against status quo hierarchies. Another essential difference between the left and the right is “compassion.” The left tends to regard criminals, the poor, misfits and failures as victims of society and reacts with excuses and social safety nets. The political right emphasizes individual accountability. In a world of pragmatists, differences in emphasis would be compromised. But ideologies are different. Ideologies run to extremes. They are fighting creeds that demonize opponents. Whether one stands with the left or the right, it is apparent that both political factions are failing the country. The right responded to 9/11 by asserting American hegemony over international law and by permitting the executive branch to waive civil liberties. The political left went along with these developments, perhaps thinking to use the enhanced power of government for its own purposes later. Hoping to restrain the executive’s assaults on the Middle East and civil liberties, the electorate gave control over Congress to the Democrats last November. However, the Democrats have not ended the war or overturned the encroachments upon civil liberties.

National ID Card Threatens Security
by Brian Trent There’s a lesson in the Aesopian tale of the man who wanted to cook a frog. When he tossed the amphibian into a pot of boiling water, it leapt out to safety. The thwarted cook then changed tactics. He placed the frog in cold water… and slowly brought up the heat. In much the same way, American freedom is slowly being cooked away. When I was growing up, “Papers, please!” was once the bark of Communist soldiers patrolling state lines. It’s set now to become an American staple. Slipped insidiously into an $81 billion bill for “supporting troops” and “tsunami relief” was a tiny law - The Real ID Act of 2005 - which creates a de facto National ID card for Americans and requires it to be in place by 2008. Every driver’s license will be required to include “physical security features” and “a common machine readable technology.” The cultists who support this National ID card say that it’s all voluntary. And it is. You can refuse to comply, in which case you won’t be able to open a bank account, enter a federal building, ride a plane or train, etc. Yes, quite voluntary. A nice card, containing all sorts of sensitive information about you, which can be scanned everywhere you go. “This is almost a frontal assault on the freedoms of America when they require us to carry a national ID to monitor where we are,” railed Missouri state Representative James Guest, a Republican. “This does nothing to stop terrorism.” One of only eight Republicans to oppose the measure, Representative Ron Paul of Texas added, “Supporters claim it is not a national ID because it is voluntary. However, any state that opts out will automatically make nonpersons out of its citizens.” Today we face a thriving identity-theft market. National ID will be like adding chum to a sea of sharks; a veritable African diamond war for the digital age. Everyone’s value will be melted down to cold equations which will be stolen, which will be seen by people who have no business seeing it, and which will make it very hard to get your life back when this happens to you. Let’s forget the cost to the states, which has been estimated at more than $14 billion. The ID card will, making use of RFID technology already discussed in another essay of mine, be able to show where you are at all times. Information ranging from mailing address to DNA can be encoded into this little spy.

Our Kind of Central Planning
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. This talk was given at the Houston Mises Circle on April 14, 2007. During the 1990s, many of us complained bitterly about rule by the left. We were outraged at how the Clinton administration had so much faith in government’s ability to bring about universal fairness and equality. Government, we were told, would make right all relations between groups, equalize access to health care, curb every corporate abuse, and stop all forms of exploitation of man against man, and man against nature. Except that behind every regulation, every bill, and every central plan, no matter how humane it appeared on the outside, an informed person could discern the iron fist of the state, which the Clinton administration freely used against its enemies. Clinton himself was perhaps never as convinced of the cure of power as the worst Clintonites, but it remained and remains his default worldview. What was wrong with the leftists’ worldview in the 1990s and today? Essentially it is this: they see society as unworkable by itself. They believe it has fundamental flaws and deep-rooted conflicts that keep it in some sort of structural imbalance. All these conflicts and disequilibria cry out for government fixes, for leftists are certain that there is no social problem that a good dose of power can’t solve. If the conflicts they want are not there, they make them up. They look at what appears to be a happy suburban subdivision and see pathology. They see an apparently happy marriage and imagine that it is a mask for abuse. They see a thriving church and think the people inside are being manipulated by a cynical and corrupt pastor. Their view of the economic system is the same. They figure that prices don’t reflect reality but instead are set by large players. There is a power imbalance at the heart of every exchange. The labor contract is a mere veneer that covers exploitation. To the brooding leftist, it is inconceivable that people can work out their own problems, that trade can be to people’s mutual advantage, that society can be essentially self-managing, or that attempts to use government power to reshape and manage people might backfire. Their faith in government knows few limits; their faith in people is thin or nonexistent. This is why they are a danger to liberty. We knew this in the 1990s, and we know this today. The remarkable fact about the conflict theory of society held by the left is that it ends up creating more of the very pathology that they believe has been there from the beginning. The surest way to drive a wedge between labor and capital is to regulate the labor markets to the point that people cannot make voluntary trades. Both sides begin to fear each other. It is the same with relations between races, sexes, the abled and disabled, and any other groups you can name. The best path to creating conflict where none need exist is to put a government bureaucracy in charge. And yet, the left is hardly alone in holding this essential assumption about the way the world works. We have lived through six years of a Republican president. The regime is dominated by a different philosophical orientation. And we have thereby been reminded that there are many flavors of tyranny. Bush’s spending record is far worse than Clinton’s. After promising a humble foreign policy, war and war spending define our era. We’re told that every problem with war can be solved through more force, there is nothing necessarily wrong with imprisoning people without cause and without legal representation, that torture can be a legitimate wartime tactic, that some countries have to be destroyed in order to be made free, and that we can have all the warfare and welfare we desire at virtually no cost, thanks to the miracle of debt-driven economic growth. Traveling on airplanes reminds us how much freedom we’ve lost and how we have become accustomed to it. Government bureaucrats presume the right to search us and all our property. We are interrogated at every step. The slightest bit of resistance could lead to arrest. We mill around airports while the loudspeakers demand that we report all suspicious behavior. Sometimes it seems like we are living in a dystopian novel. Some people say that the real problem with the Bush administration is that it is too far left, and that a genuine right-wing government would be better. I’m disinclined to believe that, for I detect in the Bush administration a particular philosophy of governance that departs from that of the Clinton regime in many ways, except in its unlimited faith in government, that is, force and the threat of force. I would go so far as to say that the most imminent threat that we face is not from the left but from the conservative right. I would like to defend the idea that rule by the right is as dangerous as rule by the left. Elsewhere, I’ve referred to members of political groups that support the conservative right as “red-state fascists,” and I don’t use that phrase merely for rhetorical purposes. There was and is such a thing as fascism, a non-leftist form of social theory that puts unlimited faith in the state to correct the flaws in society.

Auto-snug clothing
Philips hopes that fitting-room fiascos will become a thing of the past if it ever forays into the world of fashion. The consumer electronics giant has come up with a way to change the size, shape and style of clothes by weaving “muscle wires” into the fabric. The wires are made of shape-memory alloys that […]

Invincibly Incompetent Idiots
by Alvin Plummer In his article “Mind Makes Right: Brain damage, evolution, and the future of morality,” William Saletan outlines why, in the latest attempt of the Brave New World, we can soon expect to have our brains reprogrammed by Responsible Authorities - licensed by the State, of course - to uphold whatever moral code they dreamt up last night. After all, direct reprogramming insures tighter control than gulags, torture chambers, ThoughtCrime laws, and media manipulation could ever do - therefore, it’s obviously the way of the future. This new tool to crush all opposition - the ability to subvert the independent judgment of (increasingly less) Free Men - is supposed to be a Revolution in Morality. You know, in the same way a loaded pistol to the head can also causes a Revolution in Morality. By the very title of his article, the author shows his perfect understanding of the issues involved here. But this time, the power to forcibly rewire Wrong Thought is itself the New God, and must replace both Christianity (aka “religion”) and atheistic naturalism (aka “philosophy”) with a new atheistic naturalism (aka “utilitarianism”) that will insure The Greatest Good For the Greatest Number. If you can tell me how turning ordinary men into psychopaths - the only personality type allowed in the New Dispensation - by forcibly inflicting brain damage is supposed to lead us into the Visionary World of the Future, I would love to hear it. Well, OK, I don’t want to hear it - I have to deal with enough delusions, lies, and propaganda in my daily life. I have no need for yet another plate of fecal matter served up with a sprinkling of sugar on top. The intellectuals’ worship of Power per se has long been nauseating - if completely unsurprising for anyone who has studied the March of Reason since Voltaire, Rousseau, Hobbes, and Hume. Now, it is not only evil and diseased, but increasingly delusional and pathetic. Just consider what is being discussed, from the “pragmatic” - that is, the power-hungry, viciously cruel, and ridiculously short-sighted - point of view: I am amazed with the trust our idealistic, oh-so-superior elites place in bureaucrats. I shouldn’t be by now - the Mental Masters have consistently rewarded bureaucratic failure & incompetence, everywhere in the world, at all times - but I really am. Who knows: maybe one day I’ll learn what a “Ph.D” really stands for. I wonder what happened to all the Great New Moralities that were supposed to replace Christianity. Nazism anyone? Communism? Racialism? The Civilizing Mission? Free Love? The Rule of Reason? The need to Suppress All Dissent only blinds Dear Leader & his Step’n'Fetch It Court Intellectuals to reality1. The ability to insure that no one ever contradicts Official Truth - not even in the privacy of their own heads - means that the very possibility to get of the railway track no longer exists: not for Dear Leader, and not for the reprogrammed organic androids underneath him. I am amused with the idea of just how Our Masters plan to reprogram the masses. Using what funds? The money wasted in various warfare/welfare programs? The cash lost in various corporate corruption - pardon me, “corporate welfare” - initiatives? And who will administer the program? Seventy-year-old baby boomers? Muslim or Mexican immigrants? Public school graduates? The ghosts of 50 million aborted children - the dead future of the elites? The sheer pathetic level of current elite discourse can be presented in a single quote: “Some of those fights are about morality. Maybe abortion grosses you out, but you’d rather keep it safe and legal.” Obviously, the word “murder” isn’t part of the New Morality (version 8… or is it 80? I’m losing track now.) The essential ideal of this article can be reduced to two quotes: “According to the neuroscientists, philosophers on both sides are wrong, because morality doesn’t come from God or transcendent reason. It comes from the brain.” “Right now, we’re discovering the seat of morality,” warns NIO President Zack Lynch. “In 10 to 15 years, we’ll have the technologies to manipulate it.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 29th, 2007 at 4:05 am and is filed under Party Reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.