Now it all makes sense.

Rebecca Black wakes somewhat too perfectly in the early scenes of her viral video, “Friday.” Her eyes open exactly as the clock beside her bed flashes seven. She wears full make-up. Rare for a teen, she isn’t tired, longs not for any receding dreams.

Her cultural debt is less to Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles than Vicki the robot girl from Small Wonder, we realize, as in a voice controlled by Auto-Tune she enumerates the banalities of an anti-existence: “Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs, gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal… gotta get down to the bus stop.”

Read the rest, Arms So Freezy: Rebecca Black’s “Friday” As Radical Text. (Via Reddit Anarchism)

If you don’t know what this is spoofing, you really need to watch They Live.

So I give you this.

Charles Johnson gave a superb talk at Liberty Forum. Thanks to Bile’s video, I got to see the 2 minutes I missed, and people who weren’t there get to see everything.

Charles lays it down:

Freedom is not a conservative idea. It is not a prop for corporate power and the political-economic statist quo. Libertarianism is, in fact, a revolutionary doctrine, which would undermine and overthrow every form of state coercion and authoritarian control. If we want liberty in our lifetimes, the realities of our politics need to live up to the promise our principles — we should be radicals, not reformists; anarchists, not smaller-governmentalists; defenders of real freed markets and private property, not apologists for corporate capitalism, halfway privatization or existing concentrations of wealth. Libertarianism should be a people’s movement and a liberation movement, and we should take our cues not from what’s politically polite, but from what works for a revolutionary people-power movement.

Check it out at Rad Geek People’s Daily.

And Rad Geek is a really cool person to hang out with too.

An inventor gives you a gift. It is an ingenious device which incorporates a multitude of previous innovations. By using this machine, you will understand how it works and be able to refine future generations of the device to operate more efficiently, accommodate new demands, and break new ground in human understanding.

Instead, you put the machine on a pedestal and insist on making copies of it as close to the original as possible.