At least it’s still better than Go On.

Last spring, a large section of the internet had a collective seizure when it was announced the NBC sitcom Community would be going forward without Dan Harmon, the super-duper-mega-genius who created it all. It seemed like sacrilege, since the show was Harmon’s baby from the beginning, and he had put so much of his blood, sweat, and tears into the project.

When it was announced that he would be replaced by David Guarascio and Moses Port, best known for their work on Happy Endings and Just Shoot Me (the latter is a fairly underrated show, for the record), all the diehard fans were all to eager to write the postmortem for Community without even seeing any of the new episodes. Well, after watching the first three episodes of the post-Harmon era, it’s my sad duty to report that those devoted ultra-fans actually had a point.

The show just isn’t the same.

Continue Reading

After 8 years on the job, Pope Benedict And The Jets XVI decided to call it quits this week, presumably because covering up child molestation is grueling, tiresome work. This, of course, means there is a vacancy at the Pope position, and since I’m three months away from graduating from college, and I could really use a job, I thought I’d throw my hat into the ring.

What’s that you say? Pope is too tough of a job for a 22-year-old, perpetually drunk college student? I beg to differ. This seems like the easiest job on the planet. All I have to do is not cover up thousands of pederasts and I’ll be better than either of the last two guys to do it. Piece of cake!

Continue Reading

NOW WITH 90% MORE COPY-EDITING!

50) Aaron Sorkin
Charges: Won’t stop writing like Aaron Sorkin. More Sorkin with each Sorkin. Like that scene in Being John Malkovich, every Sorkin character is a Sorkin-headed Sorkin shrieking, “Sorkin!” in coked-up, Asperger-esque Sorkinese–speed-walking through saccharine, ahistoric morality plays in which triangulation evokes lofty scores, social change is effected solely by limousine liberals, and hackneyed drama is typically measured in rainfall.
Smoking Gun: “The Newsroom.”
Sentence: His fresh cup of Chris Matthews’s spittle secretly replaced with Folgers crystals. Will he Sorkin the Sorkin?!

49) Jim Lehrer
Charges: The PBS Punching Bag, the Denver Dodderer, the Moderating Mute came out of semi-retirement only to spare Obama the title of “most incompetent performance in a debate,” and play Rihanna to Romney’s Chris Brown. The king of NewsHour’s horrendous phony balance coverage, it’s no surprise that his toughest question was meant to determine if the candidates were, in fact, two different people.
Smoking Gun: “…”
Sentence: An eternity of brunches with Charlie Rose.

48) Chris Brown
Charges: Aggravated assault. The Todd Akin of pop stars. Twitter, Halloween, Frank Ocean, something, something. I just can’t bring myself to care about this half-talented jerk.
Smoking Gun: Battered woman neck tattoo.
Sentence: A fatal case of Bieber Fever.

47) Rihanna
Charges: Guuuuuuuuuurl?! Worst role model for girls since Batter-Me-Barbie. Not technically American.
Smoking Gun: See above.
Sentence: Stockholm Syndrome, apparently.

46) Peggy Noonan
Charges: As the Journal‘s postmenopausal Carrie Bradshaw, the full depth of her political analysis is that “America doesn’t date losers.” Tied to Romney big-money advisor Paul Singer (who pushed Ryan onto the ticket) through the Manhattan Institute, her call for a campaign “intervention” was but a brief, self-serving departure from being wrong about everything, always. Terrible writer. Unbearably pretentious.
Smoking Gun: “The GOP still practices primogeniture, but much else has changed in politics.”
Sentence: Chief speechwriter for Clint Eastwood’s Barcalounger.

Continue Reading

Dear BEAST Readers,
Over the past few months, you’ve likely noticed an unexplained dearth of the BEAST content you crave. My absence is inexcusable. But I do have a pretty good excuse.

Continue Reading

Who took my false teeth?

In case you haven’t heard, in a recent episode of The 700 Club noted corpse Pat Robertson reluctantly admitted maybe that whole thing about the earth being only 6,000 years old is just kind of, y’know, maybe a complete load of shit.

Obviously, this was a bit of a shocker. Robertson has been the captain of the delusional nutjob team for decades now. Why the sudden change of heart? Is he so old that he’s just entered “who gives a fuck” mode? Whatever the case, it certainly threw a lot of people for a loop, but the question is: does this actually matter? Let’s take a look at the details and see if we can’t reach conclusion on this.

Continue Reading

Two Recent Hacktivist Trials Have Dangerous Implications For A Free Internet

Twice last week, the justice system heard cases related to hacking, and in both instances, information sharing and cyberlaw were dealt a seriously heavy-handed blow. The government was the bully here, and the dorky little hacker had his glasses knocked square off his face.

It reminds us that the Internet is serious business, but also that a man’s gaping butthole can cause a lot of damage — but more on that later.

On November 20, alleged Wikileaks source Jeremy Hammond was denied bail in a New York City courtroom, and told he’s more dangerous than a sex offender because he compromised the computers of a private intelligence firm. In New Jersey, just hours later, a jury of his peers quickly convicted Andrew Auernheimer on charges of accessing a protected computer, and disclosing an AT&T security flaw while working with a group called Goatse Security. Hammond could get life in jail for his crime, and Auernheimer is likely to do a few years on a trumped-up charge for involving himself with a collective named after an Internet-famous image of a man’s wide-open rectum. Really. Look it up.

But it’s more than just a matter of sharing information, vile viral photographs, and making the world a wee-bit smarter. These rulings offer an eye-opening example of how far the government is willing to go to deter future hacktivism, even if it sets a deleterious legal precedent that could affect us all.

Continue Reading

Beyond godlessness, the fight for social justice

The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly  intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature. 
~ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I

In early October, I received an email from author Richard Carrier. He heard that I was writing an article—this one, as it turns out—lamenting the general neglect of class issues among atheist writers. Among other things, Carrier wanted me to know about the new movement—which, actually, I had been watching since its inception—called “Atheism Plus” (a.k.a. “Atheism +” or “A+”). It is, he wrote, an entire movement “dedicated to including … problems of poverty, income inequality … and other issues of social justice.” (Note: there is no breach of confidence here—on his blog Carrier has promoted A+ and elaborated at considerable length on what he takes to be the core concerns of the movement.) At about the same time, Adam Lee, writing in Salon on 06 October, averred that one of the aims of A+ is to “call for equality of opportunity and economic fairness.”

Continue Reading

Harlem Hurricane Hunt results in disappointing lack of unimaginable carnage

Looks pretty damn “real” to me, the dead, and all the people still without power and water.
But what the hell do I know? I’m just the guy who captions the photos.

In Which I Decide to Fight a Hurricane

In the days leading up to her arrival, Hurricane Sandy had been hyped by meteorologists in windbreakers, 24-hour newscasters, and your friends on Facebook as some sort of “Megastorm.” It was like that movie, The Perfect Storm, except that instead of being a movie you caught on cable/a flight, it was a real thing in real life that you could participate in. By texting or tweeting jokes. Or by asking your buddies, Google and Siri, about it. Or by getting bored and accidentally passing through CNN2 Territory. But what ended up going down, when Sandy finally hit the East Coast, was an unprecedented clusterfuck of publicly-conducted reports, experiences, and perceptions, and a bunch of wind and rain and snow and floods. Having thrown myself needlessly into the mess through a convoluted concatenation of events, I am still reeling in confusion. What really happened?

Continue Reading

This shit is almost over with.

Obama and Romney hug it out, bitch.

Holy fuck shit am I sick of this election.

All of it, just all of it. The pointless debates, the endless pontificating by overpaid TV blowhards, the fact that Romney and Ryan can lie their fucking asses off, and no one in the media will call them on it, and if they do, they’ll write it off as no big deal, because apparently asking our politicians for accountability is like, sooooooo 1974….

Continue Reading

Reddit, perverts, free speech, privacy, toughtcrime, misogytrolling™, and my own personal ignorance all wrapped up in an article that’s way too long for anyone to read…which is probably for the best

Let’s start with one of my favorite tunes. “Smut” by Tom Lehrer:

Okay then. Time to make myself a moral pariah. Again.

Interesting exposé by Gawker’s Adrian Chen is interesting. Since you’re on Internet, I presume you’ve read it. But, anyway, it’s about one Michael Brutsch. He lives in Texas. Has Had some shitty job. Just a normal guy who likes to anonymously propagate jack-off pics — up-skirts, ripped Facebook bikini shots, etc. — of unwitting underage girls on the Reddit. He’s also into “Niggerjailbait” and “rapebait” stuff. He’s the Internet’s most prolific peddler of taboo. Well, he used to be, before Chen outed him.

Now we’re left with a truly interesting debate on exploitation, smut, free speech, sexuality, anonymity…heavy ethical shit.

Continue Reading