Andrew Sullivan says he’s going to quit blogging: A Note to My Readers.

I don’t have much to say about this, because to be honest I was not a fan of Mr. Sullivan and I haven’t paid much attention to his writing for years. I didn’t like his apologia for the absolutely horrible Ron and Rand Paul, his defense of the crypto-racist pseudo-scientific “The Bell Curve” and discredited eugenics theories, or his advocacy of conspiracy theories about Sarah Palin’s pregnancy. I could list a lot more reasons, but I think I’ll just leave it there — with the note that I seriously doubt this is really the end of Sullivan’s blogging.

Now get ready for a deluge of mainstream journalism think pieces about THE DEATH OF BLOGGING. As if.

You’ll have to click to see this amazingly crazy email I received tonight from someone in Monterey, because it’s pretty damned disturbing, not to mention racist and antisemitic. Holocaust Remembrance Day always excites the lunatics.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Bring on the crazy.

YouTube

As a kid, the Fantastic Four were my favorite Marvel characters, but the recent films weren’t really that great. So I’m glad to see a reboot in the works, with an apparent emphasis on the science fiction angle that attracted me to the Fantastic Four in the first place — and we can also look forward to a right wing freakout, because in this version the Human Torch is… black.

And speaking of right wing freakouts, first out of the racist gate is our boy the Ginger Avenger.

If there are such great universal stories from diverse cultures why is Hollywood remaking movies & eliminating the men & whites?

— Charles C. Johnson (@ChuckCJohnson) January 27, 2015

Right — because there are so few white men in the movies these days.

The worst person on Twitter took another dive into his own personal misogynistic sewer yesterday, posting a tweet offering a “bounty” for the name of a woman who reported being sexually assaulted at a Duke University frat party.

TRUTH BOUNTY: We are now offering $500 for name of the alleged Duke university hot chocolate rape victim. #jackiecoakley

— Charles C. Johnson (@ChuckCJohnson) January 26, 2015

I think I might need to create a new category for posts about Johnson; maybe “Disgusting” or “Vile.”

I encourage all LGF readers with Twitter accounts to report this tweet; you can now report tweets that are not addressed directly to you, and Twitter has made the process much easier. Just click the timestamp in the tweet to go to the Twitter website, click the “More” link (it looks like ‘…’) and report it for targeted harassment.

I don’t understand why Twitter stands back and allows their service to be used for evil purposes like this; it damages their brand, and sends the message that they welcome misogynist creeps who harass rape victims. This is becoming Twitter’s reputation.

SoundCloud

According to GOP Texas Rep. Louie “Terror Babies” Gohmert, the Christian God is going to punish America because Obama isn’t sucking up to Benjamin Netanyahu.

This is your right wing, America.

YouTube

Media reports on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s “prayer rally” made it seem completely unremarkable. Just some religious folks praying, that’s all. Good clean fun for the whole Christian family!

But Right Wing Watch supplies us with a video clip that shows the true intention of this religious right crowd — they literally want to control every area of American life, including the government.

Gene Mills, president of Louisiana Family Forum (an official state affiliate of the Family Research Council) spent his entire ten-minute speech at Jindal’s prayer rally this weekend openly preaching Seven Mountains Dominionism from the stage.

Christians have been tasked to take control of “the sphere of influence around civil government,” Mills said, because all areas of culture “belong to God.” Jindal’s prayer rally, Mill’s declared, was a key component of their effort “to reclaim territory that rightfully belongs to God” because “these seven spheres of influence are under enemy occupation right now.”

After revealing that last month, he and other prayer rally organizers knelt in prayer with Jindal “asking God to break unholy alliances” over these areas of society, Mills led the gathering in a similar prayer.

“Father, we cry out for the seven mountains of influence today,” Mills said. “We pray that you will give us government, arts and entertainment, education, the church, and the family. That our ambassadors would occupy the high places. That you would bring us into a place of understanding that they need to be occupied by the body of Christ because it’s rightfully His.”

I’m thinking back to all the climate trolls who used to throw this guy in my face when arguing with them…

YouTube

Richard Muller founded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project after declaring himself skeptical about climate change. He was funded in part by the Koch Brothers.
He found out what other scientists have known for decades. The Earth is warming, and we’re doing it.

Rarely will you see the inhuman heartlessness of the conservative viewpoint so well expressed as in this freakishly horrible piece by American Enterprise Institute “scholar” Michael Strain: End Obamacare, and People Could Die. That’s Okay.

It’s difficult to know where to start with a morally perverted piece like this. His point seems to be that we make moral tradeoffs all the time, not exactly an original thought. But Strain gives away his game with this paragraph:

How do policymakers decide such things? In the deepest sense, every human life is inestimably valuable. But in a fallen world where trade-offs are inevitable, public policy can’t treat each life that way.

In his position of great privilege, Strain obviously thinks of himself as a righteous “pro-life” Christian. But he’s quite literally advocating that if they get sick, people less privileged than himself should just … die.

Vimeo

Image via Shutterstock

Every once in a while I come up with a bit of code that might be useful to other programmers, and here’s one of those bits — a regular expression that extracts the ASIN product code from almost any Amazon product URL, including URLs from non-US Amazon stores. (It doesn’t handle pages of search results or other index pages, however.)

I use this at LGF to rewrite links to Amazon and add our affiliate ID to the link, so if someone clicks the link we get a small percentage of the purchase price when they buy something.

This code used to be a series of regular expressions that matched each type of URL, but I was looking at it this week and realized it might be possible to condense the whole process down to just one regex. And after extensive testing, I think I may have gotten pretty close to a universal Amazon ASIN extractor. (I searched Google, and couldn’t find anything this good online.)

In this PHP code, I used the x modifier to let me split the regex across multiple lines with comments and indenting. I also used ~ for the regular expression delimiter so all the forward slashes don’t need to be escaped. These two steps make the code much more readable, but if you use this regex with a language that doesn’t allow you to change the delimiter you’ll need to insert a backslash before each forward slash.

(Notice that I used non-capturing groups for everything except the ASIN product ID.)

<?php
$regex = '~
	(?:www\.)?				# optionally starts with www.
	ama?zo?n\.				# also allow shortened amzn.com URLs
	(?:
		com					# match all Amazon domains
		|
		ca
		|
		co\.uk
		|
		co\.jp
		|
		de
		|
		fr
	)
	/
	(?:						# here comes the stuff before the ASIN
		exec/obidos/ASIN/	# the possible components of a URL
		|
		o/
		|
		gp/product/
		|
		(?:					# the dp/ format may contain a title
			(?:[^"\'/]*)/	# anything but a slash or quote
		)?					# optional
		dp/
		|					# if short format, nothing before ASIN
	)
	(B[A-Z0-9]{9})			# capture group $1 contains the ASIN
	(?:						# everything after the ASIN
		(?:/|\?|\#)			# beginning with /, ? or #
		(?:[^"\'\s]*)		# everything up to quote or white space
	)?						# optional
~isx';
?>

Here’s a bit of code that puts this regex to work and inserts our affiliate ID into the reconstructed link:

<?php
$text = preg_replace($regex, 'www.amazon.com/dp/$1/?tag=littlegreenfo-20', $text);
?>

And here’s what this regular expression looks like when condensed down to one gnarly line:

<?php
$regex = '~(?:www\.)?ama?zo?n\.(?:com|ca|co\.uk|co\.jp|de|fr)/(?:exec/obidos/ASIN/|o/|gp/product/|(?:(?:[^"\'/]*)/)?dp/|)(B[A-Z0-9]{9})(?:(?:/|\?|\#)(?:[^"\'\s]*))?~isx';
?>

If you run this regular expression against the following URL:

http://www.amazon.com/Man-High-Castle/dp/B00RSGFRY8/ref=sr_1_1?s=instant-video&ie=UTF8&qid=1421879835&sr=1-1&keywords=the%20man%20in%20the%20high%20castle

You end up with this:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RSGFRY8/?tag=littlegreenfo-20