Mojang's Notch is a smart guy, not only in game design terms but also when it comes to managing his company's 20 million or so Minecraft players. The designer has posted a poll on his personal blog to discover whether his cuboid constituents would feel comfortable with the company collecting various types of anonymous data from its players.

Currently, Mojang only tracks when a player logs into the game. Notch's proposal is to also track "non-private data" like gameplay-session length, your PC's OS type, whether you're playing in single or multiplayer mode and whether you're playing via the client or the web applet. The collected information would then be shared with the community, "as usual."

"Naturally, the data sent will be fully anonymous," said Notch. "So it wouldn't contain any session information or your user name, and it wouldn't send any sensitive information that you might not want to share." To be perfectly honest, we're fairly surprised this kind of data wasn't already being collected. If you're part of the Minecraft nation, you can let your voice be heard by voting for or against anonymous data collection here.

Notch asks community for permission to track player data in Minecraft originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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North Carolina activist Patrick Wooden has become a favorite of groups like the National Organization for Marriage, the Family Research Council and the American Family Association, and most recently joined Peter LaBarbera of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality at a rally denouncing the Southern Poverty Law Center. On a recent appearance on LaBarberas radio show, Wooden called homosexuality a wicked, deviant, immoral, self-destructive, anti-human sexual behavior and should make people literally gag. Wooden added that gay men have to wear a diaper or a butt plug just to be able to contain their bowels by their 40s or 50s as a result of what happens to the male anus.

Today, Wooden appeared on LaBarberas show and stood by his claims, going as far as to say that gay men regularly shove objects such as cellphones, baseball bats and animals up their anuses and that he personally knows a gay person who literally died in diapers because he literally lost control of himself.

Listen:

Wooden: I do not back off or back down from my statements at all. I was giving anecdotal examples that I am personally aware of that have happened as a result of men who have given themselves over to this lifestyle. One man past away, a friend of mine shared this information with me, that where what used to be his anus had become a gaping hole and he literally died in diapers, he literally lost control of himself. There are examples of men who have stretched their anuses, their sphincter muscles so that they could fit objects into themselves that once the sphincter muscle is stretched too much it will not contract. Because the truth is, despite the anger of the homosexual community, the anus is not a vagina. A vagina, a woman can give birth, God so designed it, the hips release can give birth to babies and things return back to normal. The anus doesnt work that way; this is one of the reasons why many male homosexuals place larger and larger objects in their rectums.

I know of a case where in a hospital a homosexual male had a cellphone lodged in his anus and as they were operating on him the phone went off, the phone started ringing! Thereve been instances where men have put bats, baseball bats, in their rectums!

Even the homosexual lobby knows, those who are pro-homosexual, they know that they cannot win the argument describing what it is that these people actually do to each other, the objects, the animals in certain cases, the little gerbils; thank God Im a human being! Because if you talk about what it is that these people actually do, they cant win the argument.

Germany isn’t all that keen on movies that could possible promote Nazi sensibility. While the tongue-in-cheek sci-fi war movie Iron Sky, in which Nazis attack Earth from a secret base housed on the dark side of the moon, can’t possibly be construed as a pro-Nazi  movie, it is still a bit remarkable that the film will premiere next month at the Berlin Film Festival.

Iron Sky is a partially crowd-funded indie that has been really big on web-based PR over the past couple years. But the film is finished, and the teaser trailers that have been released over the last year or so are now complimented by a full trailer, which also trumpets the Berlin premiere. Check it out below.

Towards the end of World War II the Nazi scientists made a significant breakthrough in anti-gravity. From a secret base built in the Antarctic, the first Nazi spaceships were launched in late ‘45 to found the military base Schwarze Sonne (Black Sun) on the dark side of the Moon. This base was to build a powerful invasion fleet and return to take over the Earth once the time was right.

Now it’s 2018, and it’s the time for the first American Moon landing since the 70?s. Meanwhile the Nazi invasion, that has been over 70 years in the making, is on its way, and the world is goose-stepping towards its doom. The three main characters of the story are Renate Richter (Julia Dietze), Klaus Adler (Götz Otto), and James Washington (Christopher Kirby).

• New Iron Sky Teaser Trailer

Brad Pitt starred as a pious Christian man in the Oscar nominated-epic "The Tree of Life," but off-screen, a childhood spent in church pews have rendered him far from a regular congregant.

"I grew up very religious, and I don't have a great relationship with religion," Pitt tells The Hollywood Reporter in their new cover story. "I oscillate between agnosticism and atheism."

Pitt was open about his religious childhood while promoting the film last summer, telling Extra that he "got brought up being told things were God's way, and when things didn't work out it was called God's plan."

In 2009, the star discussed his unease with God, saying that he was "probably 20 percent atheist and 80 percent agnostic. I don't think anyone really knows. You'll either find out or not when you get there, until then there's no point thinking about it."

That, of course, doesn't mean Pitt doesn't have a higher purpose. As he tells THR, "I got really sick of myself at the end of the 1990s: I was hiding out from the celebrity thing; I was smoking way too much dope; I was sitting on the couch and just turning into a doughnut."

That changed when he took a trip to Morocco in the late-90s, where he saw "poverty to an extreme I had never witnessed before, and we talked about inequality and health care, and I saw just what I felt was so unnecessary."

It made him an activist, something he shares in common with his partner, Angelina Jolie. For more on the Oscar nominee's relationship with Jolie, his activism, his movies and more, click over to The Hollywood Reporter.

Not one of the people who made Bridesmaids a success last year supported a sequel to the comedy hit, the only saving grace for the idea being the return of every single person from the original. Well, the woman responsible for the movie existing in the first place, Golden Globe nominee Kristen Wiig, has put the nail in the coffin, saying there will not be another matrimonial outing. So, let’s please stop throwing around the idea that this will happen, with or without her. Okay? Okay.

Universal has seemed dead set on trying to repeat the success of Bridesmaids, and naturally, the idea of a sequel was brought up. Repeatedly. But Melissa McCarthy said it would be a “terrible idea,” and while director Paul Feig and co-star Wendi McLendon-Covey seemed to suggest that there was no telling what could happen, Wiig has maintained since earlier this month that she has no interest in being part of another Bridesmaids movie. Her exact words: “We aren’t working on that. [Co-writer] Annie [Mumolo] and I aren’t planning a sequel. We are writing something else.”

And she iterated that when she was asked the same question at the Golden Globes this past weekend:

“We’re not planning on doing [a sequel],” she said. “We had a special time making the first one, but we’re really excited to try something else.”

Before the Globes, Universal said that they might move forward with a sequel regardless of Wiig’s commitment to the project, maybe hoping for a less costly production that will bring in the audience who discovered the movie after it was out of theaters. (Even though the person who entertained them so much the first time won’t be there the second time.) Though it would be unlikely that the original producer, Judd Apatow, would even want to do a movie with the Bridesmaids name that didn’t include Wiig or Mumulo. But would Universal be smart to gamble on this? Would we really want to see Bridesmaids without Kristen Wiig in it, without her writing and Annie Mumolo’s writing?

The answer is NO. NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. It will be the next Evan Almighty, so NO.

(Vulture via /Film)

Previously in Bridesmaids

• Don’t Hold Your Breath For a Bridesmaids Sequel
• Bridesmaids Expected to Surpass All the Rest of Judd Apatow’s Films at Box Office
• Bridesmaids Stars Get Asked Weird Questions, Make Up Story About Homeless Fart

A few weeks ago, we posted a video of Bryan Fischer denying that HIV causes AIDS and claiming it is all a scheme concocted by scientists in order to get research grants.

Since then, Fischer has continued to promote this position and earlier this week, Warren Throckmorton got Rick Warren to issue a statement decrying people like Fischer (and the "expert" he cites, Peter Duesberg) for promoting "quack science."

Fischer, of course, is standing by his claims, asserting that "it is the folks who have been propagating this scam for almost three decades who are the ones in fact putting millions of additional lives at risk" and saying that the solution to the AIDS crisis is simple:

If you’re a man, stop using poppers, stop having sex with other men, and don’t shoot up. The beauty of that solution is that it doesn’t require billions and billions of dollars.

He also discussed the issue on his radio program today, where he said we need to stop spending so much money on AIDS research and instead focus it on how to rehabilitate the human immune system because, as Fischer sees it, if gay men will just stop having sex, God will heal them:

Is it Halloween already? Today’s TV Bits is dark and spooky, as it deals with vampires, zombies, murderers, and other scary creatures. (Insert your own joke about some of Star Wars‘ CGI characters being their own brand of horrifying here.) After the jump:

• Rick McCallum talks about the Star Wars TV show (again)
• ABC releases a trailer for Oren Peli’s The River
• NBC picks up Dracula from Black List writer Cole Haddon
• Golden Globe winner Jessica Lange ponders a return to FX’s American Horror Story
• AMC announces the Season 2 premiere of The Killing and orders an extra dose of The Walking Dead

No, we’re not any closer to a live-action Star Wars TV series than we were a week ago, but fans continue to ask and producer Rick McCallum continues to answer. In a recent interview with Collider, he reiterated much of what we’ve already heard about the budget problems, etc., but then offered some interesting insights about the show’s tone:

It’s much darker [than the movies]. It’s a much more adult series. I think, thematically, in terms of characters and what they go through, it will be… if we can ever get it together and George really wants to pursue it, it’ll be the most awesome part of the whole franchise, personally…. It’s Empire Strikes Back on steroids.

McCallum revealed that the original idea had been “Deadwood in space,” and he’s compared it to The Godfather in the past as well, but even with the mature it shouldn’t surprise anyone that they’ll be toning things down a bit for the series. “Obviously, we changed it for where we couldn’t go in terms of language,” he said. “It was to be serious performances, very complicated relationships, unbelievable issues of power and corruption, greed, vanity, pride, ego manifesting itself at levels that only equal the world that we live in now, but, as I said, on steroids.”

For more on the Star Wars television series, head over to Collider.

After the release of three very successful Paranormal Activity movies, director Oren Peli is about to make his first foray into television with next month’s The River. Executive produced by Steven Spielberg (though it kind of feels like everything is these days), the “found footage”-style series centers around the search for nature TV host Emmet Cole (Bruce Greenwood), who’s gone missing in the Amazon. The first episode was directed by Orphan helmer Jaume Collet-Serra, and also stars Joe Anderson, Leslie Hope, Paul Blackthorne, Eloise Mumford, Daniel Zacapa, and Thomas Kretschmann. Watch the trailer below:

The River debuts Tuesday, February 7 on ABC. [Shock Till You Drop]

I suppose it’s pretty fitting that the vampire trend just won’t die, isn’t it? NBC is now about to take its own stab (ha ha) at the subgenre with Dracula, an 1890s-set drama described as “Dangerous Liaisons meets The Tudors” with an international setting and a young, sexy appeal. Tony Krantz (24, Felicity) and Colin Callender (Tsunami: The Aftermath) will executive produce, while Cole Haddon is set to write. The network has given Dracula a “script-to-series” commitment, which means it’ll skip the pilot stage and go stright to series if NBC approves of the script.

Haddon is relatively new at screenwriting, but could already be carving out a niche for himself reinterpreting dark characters of classic literature; his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-inspired script Hyde earned a Black List spot back in 2010. [Deadline]

As the wild first season of American Horror Story drew to a close, co-creator Ryan Murphy revealed that the show would go in an entirely different direction in its second season, moving to a new haunted locale and incorporating a mostly new cast. Though the Season 2 lineup remains mostly undecided at this point, Golden Globe winner Jessica Lange has revealed that she, for one, is considering a return. “Yes, we are considering a second season,” Lange told TV Line. “Nothing is definite yet.” If Lange does come back, however, she won’t be reprising the character that won her the prize. “I know that everybody that is returning will be playing a different character,” she said.

Murphy has previously confirmed that stars Connie Britton and Dylan McDermott would not be coming back, though he’s said that other unnamed Season 1 stars could return in different roles. [via Hollywood.com]

While we prepare for the March return of Mad Men, AMC has announced release dates for one of its other hit dramas, The Killing. The second season of the crime drama will kick off with a two-hour premiere on Sunday, April 1 at 8 PM, against HBO’s Game of Thrones Season 2 premiere at 9 PM. Upon its return, The Killing will pick up where it left off with the Rosie Larsen murder, which won’t be solved until the Season 2 finale, and will also introduce a new mystery.

Meanwhile, there’s good news for fans of The Walking Dead as AMC announces that the upcoming third season will consist of 16 episodes, rather than the current season’s 13. The second season, which has been on hiatus since late November, is gearing up to return on Sunday, February 12. [TV Line]

• TV Bits: New Shows for Mike O’Malley, Marlon Wayans, Bunim/Murray, ‘Big Love’ Creators; See ‘Grimm’ Early; ‘Sons of Anarchy’ Renewed; Marvel Publishing ‘Dexter’ Comics
• TV Trailer: ‘The River,’ From ‘Paranormal Activity’ Creator Oren Peli
• TV Bits: ‘Mad Men’ Sets Return Date, Plus: ‘Community’, ‘Glee’, ‘Fringe’, ‘Allen Gregory’, ‘Californication’, and More
• What’s The Working Title Of The Live Action ‘Star Wars’ TV Show?
• TV Bits: Josh Lucas and Tricia Helfer in ‘The Firm’ Trailers; Premiere Dates for ‘Eastbound & Down’, ‘Life’s Too Short’, and ‘Luck’; ‘Pan Am’ Not Cancelled
• TV Bits: Man Claims Old Episode of ‘Fraggle Rock’ Contains Racial Slur, Plus: ‘The Munsters’, ‘South Park’, ‘Alcatraz’, ‘How I Met Your Mother’, ‘Happy Endings’

Filed under: Video, Culture

Three new videos have emerged for Nickelodeon's upcoming The Last Airbender: Legend of Korra, the sequel to the much-beloved Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon. Set 70 years in the future after Avatar, the upcoming animated series follows a ... Read more

 

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Dear Madge:

Over the years, I was "crazy for you" just as much as the next gay, but lately I am worried. You had a solid handle on the pulse of pop culture once. Now you seem out-of-step. What happened?

Case in point: the Golden Globes. Ricky Gervais, when introducing you, rolled his eyes as he said you were "like a virgin." You are a 53-year-old woman with several children who published an erotic book titled Sex. You are obviously not a virgin. Ricky's joke was a poor attempt at humor. But what did you do in response to this "insult"? Tit for tat, you said, "If I'm still just like a virgin, Ricky, then why don't you come over here and do something about it? I haven't kissed a girl in a few years on TV."

That's the best you could come up with? Your rejoinder is calling him a girl? Is there something wrong with being a girl?

Oh, Madonna, I am so disappointed in you.

I know, I know, at the Golden Globes, Ricky pretends to be offensive and awful, and the Hollywood elite acts all scandalized and attempts some good zingers to one-up him. You always wanted to be part of that Hollywood A-list crowd -- you were an "actor" once and now you fancy yourself a "filmmaker" -- so it makes sense that you would join this game of outrage. But a comedian you are not. If you wanted a solid one-liner, you should have consulted Joan Rivers or Kathy Griffin.

I always thought you were a champion of female empowerment. Calling Ricky a "girl" seems beneath you. You, of all people, should know what it feels like for a girl in this world. Women like you are symbols of strength and confidence, helping to erode pervasive gender stereotypes. Have you seen those ridiculous new Legos for girls, for instance? Talk about reductive.

Yes, I said reductive. I can use that word, too. I looked it up. You used it to describe Lady Gaga's music. Must you really get in a public feud with Lady Gaga, another symbol of tenacity and might for today's girls? Madonna don't preach. You should be honored that Gaga is taking a page from your playbook. After all, didn't you do a little "borrowing" yourself back in the day? Remember when you stole Marilyn Monroe's looks and moves? I thought you were trying to ally yourself with another woman who used her sexuality and smarts to succeed, but now I am not so sure.

Pop culture is full of disgraceful stereotypes right now, so why are you feeding into it yourself? Did you see that awful Work It sitcom? That show teaches little girls that appearing as a woman makes you an object of ridicule and hilarity. There was a time, in your videos and stage shows, when you dressed men in female attire -- thigh-highs, high-heels, bras. You weren't ridiculing them, were you? I always thought you were allowing them to explore their hidden feminine side for empowerment. Maybe I was giving you too much credit. Were you just out to grab attention?

When I was a boy, the worst, most scathing taunt on the playground was to be called a girl. Once, a librarian mistook me for a girl, and I ran quickly out of the building before anyone heard her. I was young at the time, maybe 5 or 6, but I knew intuitively that it was shameful. It took me many years to understand that being feminine or effeminate was not a bad thing. As an adult, blurring genders is not a problem for me. But I believe it is still a problem for our kids. Look at that transgender child, assigned to be a boy at birth, who wants to join the Girl Scouts. I am sure that kid is not having an easy time of it. She is brave, yes, but we still live in a world where expressing yourself is not always welcome.

Oh, Madonna, don't reduce yourself to being catty, bitter, and pretentious. Who's that girl? I am desperately seeking the Madonna of yesteryear: daring, a ray of light, in a league of her own. That girl is still inside you somewhere, I bet. Please bring her back. Open you heart, express yourself like you used to do, so that I can justify my love for you again.

The world of video games is full of mighty people—people whose mere whims control what video games we play, what we play games on, how we buy them or even what games are like. More »

I love iTunes. As Apple’s native music player and iOS powerhouse command station, it is unlikely that anything will ever wholly replace iTunes for me. It’s an integrated hub for surfing the iTunes music store, buying iOS apps, making playlists, the Ping network (even though it’s somewhat barren), managing the media and content on my iPhone and iPad, and more. But in spite of my love for iTunes, I will be the first to admit that with a music library the size of mine, it can be a bit slow, unwieldy, and bloated when all I want to do is play some tunes.

When I began reading up on Sonora, a beta-phase app coded by Indragie Karunaratne and designed by Tyler Murphy, I was impressed with the obvious target niche that Sonora was appealing to. At the risk of sounding “scoff-y”, independently developed music players rarely appeal to me because they so often claim to be an iTunes replacement–which, for the reasons listed in the above paragraph, is unlikely for me. Sonora, on the other hand, markets itself as a companion player, humbly leaving the heavy lifting of music purchases and iOS management to iTunes and providing a lightweight player for the express purpose of playing music. Hit the jump to read more about Sonora.

Prepare Ship for Ludicrous Speed!

Oh god, the speed. It would be unjust of me to begin this review by talking about anything other than Sonora’s lightning fast speed. The biggest problem with using iTunes when all I want to do is play music is the sluggishness (even on my relatively new MacBook Pro), so let it be known that Sonora does not have this problem. Even after importing my entire iTunes library (which it will do on startup, and rather quickly, I might add) opening and closing the app happens almost instantaneously.

I know this is a bit out of order, and I’ll fix that momentarily, but one final note about speed: searching the app is as snappy as everything else. Simply begin typing anywhere in the app, and a search bar shows up mid-screen with instant search results.

The Anatomy Of Sonora

Okay, we got a bit ahead of ourselves there, didn’t we? Let’s back up, and I’ll explain how Sonora works.

Sonora works on the premise that “music is flexible” and continually plays tracks from a versatile queue, which can be found across the top of the window. Tracks can be added, removed, or rearranged on this queue, allowing you a custom, and constantly changing, playlist based entirely on your mood. While a track is playing, a subtle progress bar creeps along the gap between the queue bar and your library near the top of the window.

If you feel like creating a mix that you can save and listen to later, tracks can be added to the column on the right side of the window, which can be accessed by clicking the + icon in the bottom right. When you’ve constructed a mix you like, click done and it will be saved to the “Mix” tab on the bottom of the window.

Sonora posits that your music library shouldn’t look like a spreadsheet, and offers an elegant remedy. Each album is displayed beautifully in a grid, pending available artwork. Hovering over an album cover displays a Play button in the corner, which will replace the queue with that album. Additionally, a good old-fashioned double click will reveal the albums track list in a gorgeous pop-out pane, and songs can be added individually to the end of the queue with the + icon, or dragged to a specific spot in the queue for on-the-fly playlist editing.

Finally, your standard player controls are fashionably implemented in the upper corners, including play, next track, and previous track on the left, and clear queue, repeat, and shuffle on the left.

To maintain it’s simplicity, Sonora focuses on only providing what’s absolutely necessary for an enjoyable music experience. Limited metadata, stylish tracklists, and a customizable music queue make Sonora great for listening, even when iTunes might be a bit more powerful for cataloguing purposes.

Flexibility And Integration

Part of what makes Sonora such a great iTunes companion is that it willingly syncs libraries each time it’s opened, so anything you import to iTunes will automatically be added to your Sonora library, and any playlists will show up in “Mixes.”

According to one of tenets outlined on their webpage, Sonora suggests that music should be social. It certainly follows through with full Last.fm scrobbling integration, without the need to be running the standalone Last.fm app in the background.

Lastly, and probably most excitingly, Sonora has support for the rare and high-quality audio file formats that even iTunes doesn’t. Listen to your lossless .flac files or your .ogg’s in style.

Final Thoughts

Sonora isn’t just a barebones music player. It’s thoughtful, elegant, and minimalistic. The only issues I came across were things like brief hangups or very minor visual glitches–nothing even close to unacceptable in a beta-phase app. Indragie is doing it right with Sonora, and I’m excited to continue following it’s development.

I’m thrilled to put Sonora in it’s rightful place in my dock… next to iTunes, of course.

Joe Scarborough did his best to attempt to rewrite the failings of conservative governance we've suffered over the last few decades along with some of his own history, surprise, surprise with a big assist by some of his fellow panel members, Jon Meacham, Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist.

While discussing some of the right's disdain for the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, Scarborough throws out the first whopper during the segment, that George W. Bush was not really a conservative. The New Yorker's David Remnick notes that the Republican Party doesn't seem to be the “party of ideas” any more and here's how Scarborough responds.

SCARBOROUGH: Two things have happened over the last decade. One, the election of George W. Bush... a man who claimed to be a conservative, but The New Republic had it right in 2000. Bush was for big government and he was for big business. The New Republic predicted it. I remember the cover of it.

And yet conservatives went along for the ride for the better part of eight years, they let him double the national debt without complaining. They let him engage in a Wilsonian foreign policy where he spent his second inauguration talking about ending tyranny on the four corners of the globe. They remained silent. They betrayed their values. They forgot everything they said in the 1990's and they sold their soul to have power in the White House. And then Barack Obama got elected. And then they lost their mind.

These Democrats have had the Bush derangement syndrome and they did. But then what did they get? Obama derangement syndrome. So it because less about ideas and it became more about destroying Obama and Jon Meacham, that's why they stopped focusing on balancing the budget, on having restraint.

Scarborough seems to have a pretty short memory because by his own definition here, he's part of that problem he's complaining about, and he apparently doesn't remember that he claimed that we won the Iraq War back in 2003 while berating anyone who dared to speak out against it. For a reminder of Scarborough's previous statements, go read Extreme Liberal's Blog here -- Joe Scarborough – A Look Back At His Previous Statements About War! Here are a couple of the quotes from Scarborough among many that they dug up in that post:

“Maybe disgraced commentators and politicians alike, like Daschle, Jimmy Carter, Dennis Kucinich, and all those others, will step forward tonight and show the content of their character by simply admitting what we know already: that their wartime predictions were arrogant, they were misguided and they were dead wrong. Maybe, just maybe, these self-anointed critics will learn from their mistakes. But I doubt it. After all, we don’t call them ‘elitists’ for nothing.”
(MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, 4/10/03)

“Sean Penn is at it again. The Hollywood star takes out a full-page ad out in the New York Times bashing George Bush. Apparently he still hasn’t figured out we won the war.”
(MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, 5/30/03)

And as they noted, he contradicted himself on that in 2007:

Isn’t that funny? We won the Iraq War in 2003 and I MISSED IT! So someone tell me why I should be listening to Joe Scarborough blather on, pretending like he’s a dove. So I looked a little further and found this from Mr. Scarborough in February of 2007…

Even if you agree with me that this war was worth fighting as long as we believed Saddam Hussein had WMD’s aimed at America, at some point you have to face the facts: the Bush administration was wrong about those weapons, wrong about the nuclear program, wrong about their refusal to quell rioting early, wrong about Bremer’s gutting of the Iraqi army and police force, wrong about refusing to kill or capture al Sadr in 2003, wrong to tell the generals not speak of the coming insurgency, wrong to stubbornly refuse to give generals the troops they needed to win this war, wrong to make the “Mission Accomplished” declaration, wrong for the VP to claim that the insurgency was in its death throes and wrong to push a surge plan that the president’s top generals opposed.

Joe Scarborough will say whatever the hell he wants as long as it suits his current situation. His photo should appear next to the definition of hypocrite in the dictionary. He seems to get away with it most of the time, though.

And here's more on Scarborough's previous flip flopping on Iraq from North Coast Blog -- Joe Scarborough and the Iraq War:

Joe Scarborough just wrote a column for Politico in which he discusses the Iraq War. As he acknowledges in the article, he was a supporter. [...]

I guess it’s nice to hear Scarborough acknowledge that he supported this fiasco, but this statement is somewhat misleading. Notice how he mentions that 75% of Americans supported the war. If you didn’t know Scarborough’s past, you might assume he was just one of many Americans who went along with the President. But he was much more than that, as he had his own cable show on MSNBC at the time, Scarborough Country, and he used that platform to become one of the loudest cheerleaders for the war. And, he enthusiastically mocked people who were against it. Joe Scarborough contributed to a climate that made it more difficult for rational voices who opposed the war and questioned the Bush/Cheney/Rove propaganda machine on WMD. He didn’t just go along; he helped lead the parade.

And here's Joe Conason from 2009 rebutting Scarborough's claims that it was the current health care bill that ballooned the deficit -- Conason Reminds Scarborough That The Iraq War and Tax Cuts Ballooned the Deficit.

And if Scarborough wants to talk about "Obama derangement syndrome", here he is comparing President Obama to Kim Jong Il.

This also seems to be a habit of Scarborough's with trying to pretend that conservative "principles" aren't bankrupt. They're just not being followed well enough by our politicians. Bob Cesca caught this bit from back in 2009:

With a straight face, Joe Scarborough was just telling Katrina vanden Heuvel that “Reaganism” isn’t bankrupt — it “just wasn’t followed.”

Yeah, okay, Joe. Massive defense spending, corporate deregulation, conservative social policy and tax cuts for the super wealthy “weren’t followed.”

Reaganism was followed quite faithfully and it’s been a colossal failure.

You can go watch that entire exchange on MSNBC's site here if you've got the stomach for it.

Okay, moving on and back to the segment. Next up, we get the "America is a center-right country lie which I'm not going to rehash again since it was already debunked in this post where Mrs. Greenspan was trying to redefine what a "centrist" is -- Andrea Mitchell Cites Recent Gallup Poll to Paint Romney as Centrist and Obama as Liberal where I linked the lengthy Media Matters report you can read here -- The Progressive Majority: Why a Conservative America is a Myth. Here's Scarborough and Meacham from the clip:

MEACHAM: I think personally what you're seeing is that conservatives have won the essential argument, I believe.

SCARBOROUGH: They have. We live in a conservative nation now and there is... that's just the reality. We are a center-right nation.

Uh... no we're not Joe. They got some push back from The New Yorker's David Remnick, but par for the course it fell on deaf ears with Scarborough.

REMNICK: I really disagree on a lot of issues. This is the year of gay marriage being normalized throughout the country. This is an administration that got health care through no matter what you may think of it. I think there are a lot of issues where this is not a center-right... on social issues there's still Rick Santorum waving the flag. There are other candidates waving the flag, but generally...

SCARBOROUGH: If you're talking about gay marriage, that is a Libertarian strain. That is Americans saying get out of our wallets and get out of our bedrooms.

REMNICK: But it was a movement not initiated by Ron Paul.

SCARBOROUGH: Well, it is a movement, let's face it though (crosstalk). It is a movement that 80 percent of Americans don't really care about, don't want to talk about and when George Stephanopolous and other people...

REMNICK: Which you could have said about civil rights...

SCARBOROUGH: Well, I wouldn't compare it to civil rights. I would not compare gay marriage to people getting beaten and killed and lynched in the South...

More revisionist history from Scarborough. Gay marriage and LGBT rights are a civil rights issue and if he doesn't think there's any violence against those communities, maybe he can spend a whole two minutes using the search engines and bother to read a couple of articles on the topic like this one -- Crimes against LGBT community are up, despite social gains and this one -- Violence Against Gays and Lesbians .

And Scarborough wasn't done with the hackery yet there. It continued with him trying to paint President Bush and President Obama as equally responsible for our debt and deficit. As we've noted here over and over again, our current deficit is primarily due to George W. Bush and not the Obama administration.

I don't remember Scarborough ever carping about Bush's record on anything until it was very obvious that he'd trashed our economy and the invasion of Iraq was a debacle, and even now, he continues to play the all sides are equal game with President Obama.

He wrapped things up with one of the most ridiculous statements of the entire segment which is that if President Obama just says he'll sign that god awful failed Simpson-Bowles plan that couldn't even make it out of the committee assigned to put it together, it will assure his reelection, with Brzezinski nodding in agreement.

The only reason Americans are “tuned into” the issue of the debt and the deficit is because of fear mongering that we see from the likes of Scarborough and his pals in our corporate media on their television sets everyday.

I think they may have set a record with this one with just how many B.S. talking points you can cram in between one set of commercial breaks and I didn't even include some of the beginning where they were making excuses for why no one likes the current crop of GOP presidential candidates. Quite a feat, even for this bunch.

Want to know how much R2-D2's slapstick antics cost in 1970s ducats? David Pirie's 1981 book Anatomy of the Movies dissected the film's then-lavish $11-million budget, but sadly did not delve into the film's blue milk budget. Also, check out the amount of bank Sir Alec Guinness would eventually roll in. That crazy hermit was loaded. More »

What do Cleveland, a negotiating room, a desperate librarian and underage sexual assault have in common? This video. And also the one time that desperate librarian committed underage sexual assault in a negotiating room, of course, but we don’t talk about that.

Thanks to Buzzfeed.

The Katamari series is known for being esoteric, having excellent music and, at times, being eccentric to such a degree that "absurd" can't even begin to cover it. It's relieving to see that Touch My Katamari will not only continue these proud traditions, but take them to new heights.

Touch My Katamari's prologue is just the best thing originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember that movie that came out around the same time as The Matrix and it was like The Matrix only not really, because The Matrix had cool guns and shit? Yeah. That movie was Dark City. Now you remember it. Granted, there are a lot of us who love Dark City, its story and ideas and the brilliant execution in how the city looks and feels. But, even those of us who love this movie didn’t see it the way director Alex Proyas intended it. That’s why, for this week’s Commentary Commentary, we’re looking at the track Proyas laid down over his director’s cut of Dark City. Chances are there will be more talk about why the film was changed before it was released to theaters than anecdotes about shooting and the underlying subtext. This DVD includes two other commentary tracks, one from writers Lem Dobbs and David Goyer and one from film critic Roger Ebert. Yes, that one has always intrigued, and it will surely be featured in this column somewhere down the line. However, this week we’re listening to the director and all he had to say about this director’s cut of his film, Dark City. There are no machine guns, no Oracle, but it’s still damn cool. Dark City (1998) Commentators: Alex Proyas (director, writer, story by), test audiences, feedback, and added CGI. Also a very thick, Australian accent. The differences in the theatrical and director’s cut start right off with the opening shot. The theatrical version of [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Seriously, Facebook addicts have trigger fingers that could beat Meta Knight on expert mode 10 times out of 10. – Matty Malaprop