Foodie Friday (apologies to the late IOZ)

Since by the end of the month I will be closer to the age of fifty than to forty, and because, as an empirical mammal, I understand that my regular intake of dark rum, tacos, and Peruvian flake is not indefinitely sustainable, I recently tried what is euphemistically known as a "kale chip." I did not know what to expect, but the morning shows tell me it is a "superfood," and who am I to disagree that I deserve a cape?

So, uh, how do I put this delicately. Sweet Jebus, it didn't even meet the low expectations I had for, well, a baked weed. Friends, have you ever had occasion to suck a fart out of the asshole of a dying water buffalo? That's the aftertaste, and it took an hour and about a quart of water to make it go away. Of course, then the water makes you belch a little bit, so the taste comes back.

I dunno, unless and until I start looking like Artie Lange or something, I'll just stick with moderation and some exercise when possible. I grew up watching Jack LaLanne juicing everything and doing triceps dips on kitchen chairs every spare moment, and even as a kid knew that was a fucked way to go through life. I'd much rather live to be 70 and eat steak and peach pie and drink good beer and have sex, than live to be 100 on nuts and twigs and constantly lifting household objects.

Anyhoo, kale chips. Serves 5, if they dare. Bon appetit!

Hurl Your Enthusiasm

It's insufferable and sexist enough, but this is the first thing I've ever read from Kevin Williamson that I had no problem with, not even a little bit. The guy's a dick with ears, and I seriously doubt he would have the stones to do that if it had been a man (or at least a bigger man), but I'm glad he did it all the same. (Then again, it could just as easily be some Walter Mitty bullshit pulled squarely out of Williamson's ass. Who knows?)

I admit being somewhat to the right of Larry David when it comes to other people's inconsideration. But there are two types of people who need to have every ounce of fuck soundly truncheoned out of them -- red-light runners, and assholes who talk or text or mess around on their phones during a movie or play or public performance where they ask you to be quiet and turn off your phones before it begins.

Because fuck those people. Because the rest of us are trying to have a goddamned civilization out here. If it makes that inconsiderate dunce think twice before ZOMGing her galpals over some bullshit, at an event other people paid money to attend and watch, then it was a worthwhile endeavor. Save your incessant tweeting for when you're blocking the aisle in front of me at Costco, fool.

Beats Workin'

You have to hand it to the Goopers -- between this nonsense and the Benghazi guff, they've managed to spend a month or so without having to do a single thing to help you, Joe Sucka, make more money or save more money or get a better job or spend less of your money on ever-rising gas and food, etc. And in a couple weeks, they'll take off on summer recess.

But hey, at least they forced Obammy to fire a Bush-appointed bureaucrat who had been with the IRS for 25 years (thus four administrations of both parties), for the high crime of triple-checking the astroturf squids gumming up the public park with their three-cornered hats and their Hoverounds. Folks, the various teabagger/pretend patriot groups did for political activism what herpes did for the dating scene, alright? Let's not beat around the bush here.

The goal of the Republican party, explicitly stated lest you need reminding, is not to develop and implement sensible, utilitarian policies that will benefit the majority of Americans -- it is simply to stymie and obstruct this administration at any and every possible turn. Whether that is accomplished by refusing to work with them or meet them halfway on any proposed legislation or policy, or by making mountains of endless series of molehills, is of no concern. As long as they screw him over, and make it look and sound as if everything is his fault, mission accomplished.

And hey, to a certain extent, it is Obama's fault. At least the Republicans understand what game they're playing. It remains to be seen if the Democrats ever will.

Phantom Scandal

So despite getting their asses handed to them last year, the Goopers have decided to gear up for next year and '16 not by figuring out how to reach out beyond their base. Hell, that would mean trying to engage the very same people they're used to trying to disenfranchise. So we have the continued drumbeat for Benghazi.

This is rich, truly -- I mean, when Oliver Fucking North is whinging about a cover-up, you can be sure that irony is either dead and buried or in the witness protection program. Give it up for the colonel here -- he must need the jaws of life to get his pants on in the morning, just to get around his fucking balls.

Matching North testicle for testicle is Congressman Car Alarm, who not only knows there's no there there, but (among others) actually contributed to the problem by voting down money to enhance embassy security.

Like most things Republican, the feigned outrage over Benghazi is aimed primarily at their inbred Duck Dynasty core audience, people who are incensed over an imaginary, contradictory narrative that didn't occur at a place they can neither pronounce nor find on a map. But to them, it's proof that Obama's a terrorist-hugging pussy, just like his imaginary measures to kick down everyone's front door and confiscate their AR-15s. Yes, and noted Chomskyites such as David Petraeus (who, let's recall, was considered a possible GOP presidential candidate through most of 2011) and Robert "Team B" Gates have nothing better to do than perjure themselves for the commiemoooslin, right?

Just for shits and giggles, if you get the itch to respond to your jackass relative who keeps forwarding you bullshit emails or spamming your Facebook page with this ham-fisted nonsense, remind him that there were far more attacks on and deaths of diplomatic personnel under the Bush administration -- and they never said a goddamned word about it. Nor will they, because the facts don't fit with their preconceived narrative.

Look. You're dealing with information and assumptions of a chaotic situation halfway around the world being presented to the White House by two competing organizations under the same umbrella. Occasionally, these two teams may find themselves with orthogonal or parochial interests. So what they give to the White House to communicate ASAP to the public -- because god forbid you the 'murkin news consumer might have to wait 12 hours for people to get facts straight -- might be inaccurate, or conflicting, or even self-serving.

And even if everyone involved did everything as efficiently and honestly as they humanly could, again, it was a huge riot that sprung up hours after another huge riot in a neighboring country that happens to be the most populous in the region. Shit was flying pretty deep, yo. The first casualty of war is truth, but that does not automatically translate into some calculated bout of misinformation, strategically timed for our quadrennial electoral pageant.

At this point, they're barely even trying to fake sincerity. This is so transparently just another lame exercise in gumming up the works, of hamstringing a second-term president, throwing anything and everything again the wall until something sticks or slides, that it should be obvious to all but the dumbest and most casual, most fact-free political observers.

Which is why Fixed Noise has done so well  in perpetuating this nonsense.

Tell Me Why I Don't Like Mondays

We all know how I loves me some Kanye, so I just wanted to shout out that, while I think paprazzi are detestable and should get real jobs and some goddamned self-respect, this really did make my day. As gaping assholes go, this seemed rather karmic. Maybe his Auto-Tune will make the boo-boo go down faster.

More Adventures In Self-Publishing

I'd like to give a shout-out to all the folks who have been kind enough to lend their support, both financial and moral, to whatever the hell it is I do here. Part of that support has been expressed by the millionshundreds of folks who have downloaded Mockalypse and 12 in '12. I don't mention it often enough because I don't want to be a leg-humping jackass about the whole thing, but the support is very much appreciated.

This whole process has been a learning experience for me, and a very positive one at that. It ain't gonna make me a millionaire, but I knew that going into this. You have to pick very clear sides to be profitable in political writing, because politics is not just show business for ugly people, it's sports for people who are too fat and old to play sports. You pick a side and root, hog, or die.

So "pox on both their houses" efforts don't typically sell a kajillion copies, even by established, professional authors, much less anonymous bloggerses. But again, this has been more about learning the process than turning a fat buck.

Now, as I mentioned recently, I have another site, which has been building an audience slowly but steadily. I would like for this site to both provide a ton of free material for guitarists of all styles and skill levels to use, while also producing a number of reasonably-priced publications that might at least generate enough income so that I can, I dunno, get the student-loan racket out of my lower cloaca before I hit the age of 65.

Ahem. Anyway, two guitar books are up as of today, and you can see that the icons for them have replaced the Mockalypse ad at top right. I get that most of you are probably not guitarists, and even those of you who are may not be interested in the material presented in these two books.

Nonetheless, what I ask is the same thing as I asked for the two political books:  by Monday both guitar books will be set up for a free promo week. I will be posting reminders every day or so during that 5-day promo, for you to grab a free download of each, to push up the rankings, and to leave a review if you have a minute to spare.

More to come. As always, thank you for your support.

Straw Blogs

Say there, fellow internets heathen! Tired of seeing intellectual coherence and logical reasoning everywhere you look? Looking for evidence that maybe Darwin was wrong? Have you become mistakenly convinced that people who make any sort of living writing actually have to know what the fuck they're talking about before they sharpen their electronic crayon and put it to virtual paper?

Friends, look no further. ClownHall's John Hawkins takes a break from his site, where he apparently encourages unibrow morans to use Family Guy characters to ventriloquize their bumptious nonsense (seriously, The Looking Spoon? seems like I Kin Haz Reetard would have been more appropriate), to generate a laundry list of librul strawmen.

(Further evidence of Hawkins' babbling idiocy can be found here, in which he exhorts his readership to boycott liberal celebrities. Because yeah, otherwise they might keep buying Madonna albums and watching Janeane Garofalo movies. Is this guy fuckin' drunk or what?)

This is the usual ipse dixit, tautological conservatard guff we've become long accustomed to, but what's striking is how the commenters take to this cheap, fact-free chum as if it were brought down by Moses from Mount Sinai. One of these bozos defiantly instructs doubters to "prove" Hawkins "wrong," as if it were possible to muster factual information to counter a group of tedious assertions that had to left some scar tissue when Hawkins pulled them out of his doughy ass.

Ed at G&T would FJM this six ways from Sunday. I'll just leave you with the thought that in the past, you would have had to trudge down to the park and find a homeless heroin addict to hear the sorts of mutterings Hawkins (and his idiot readers) trumpet as some sort of received wisdom. This is beyond the usual intellectual pant-shitting that, say, Jonah Goldberg indulges in. This is more like someone shitting their pants, then smearing it all over the wall.

Or in this case, the internets.

Careful With That Microphone

You know, if Michelle Bachmann didn't exist, you'd have to invent her. I just assumed that God's punishment on us was allowing her to stay in office.

Shadow (1995-2013)

Anyone who has a pet knows that there is an unpleasant bargain built into the arrangement. Unless you have a long-lived exotic pet like an African grey parrot or a Galapagos tortoise, you're going to outlive your animal companions.

And when you end up having an animal for well over half of your own adult life, and said pet's suffering has to be ended, it's not just like losing a family member, it's like having to kill that family member. But again, we all know the deal when we enter into it, we just convince ourselves over the years that the sad day will come tomorrow and tomorrow.

Shadow was one of the true characters that have passed through our menagerie over the years, more dog-like in temperament than cat-like, affectionate to the point of being needy. The photo here was taken probably around 2003-4, when she was fat, happy, affectionate. Over the last year, her senses and mind had deteriorated, and some sort of hyperthyroidism had set in, making her thin, irritable, mostly blind and deaf, wandering around yowling for hours on end sometimes.

And yet she still ate well and never had an accident; in fact, I believe that at least some of the distressed wandering was an indication that, while just senile enough to temporarily forget where the litter box was, she wasn't so senile that she'd drop a deuce on the living room rug.

Euthanizing a beloved pet is one of those terrible tasks, where you know it's the right thing to do, but that knowledge doesn't make the task any easier. But eighteen years is a pretty good run for a cat, especially when it's with good food and lots of love. Make sure to give your pet friends an extra pat or kind word. Rest in peace, old friend.

[Update 5/11/13 1:23 PDT:  Thanks to everyone, here and at Balloon Juice and Eschaton, for the kind words and condolences. It really does mean a lot.]

Another Day, Another Lie

So here's yet another in a long line of "the Moooslim Brotherhood in the White House" sacks of crap circulating the agnotosphere, even though the "event" actually occurred nearly a full year ago:

A course for U.S. military officers has been teaching that America's enemy is Islam in general, not just terrorists, and suggesting that the country might ultimately have to obliterate the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina without regard for civilian deaths, following World War II precedents of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima or the allied firebombing of Dresden.

The Pentagon suspended the course in late April when a student objected to the material. The FBI also changed some agent training last year after discovering that it, too, was critical of Islam.

The teaching in the military course was counter to repeated assertions by U.S. officials over the last decade that the U.S. is at war against Islamic extremists — not the religion.

"They hate everything you stand for and will never coexist with you, unless you submit," the instructor, Army. Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley, said in a presentation last July for the course at Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Va. The college, for professional military members, teaches midlevel officers and government civilians on subjects related to planning and executing war.

Dooley also presumed, for the purposes of his theoretical war plan, that the Geneva Conventions that set standards of armed conflict, are "no longer relevant."

Since then, Lt. Col. Dooley has been fired, in no small part thanks to letters of protest from dozens of organizations representing various cultural and ethnic organizations, who all have Islam in common. So naturally, the folks who see an exploding turban under every bed and/or the creeping threat of sharia law being mandated in the heartland have taken all this to mean complaisance or outright complicity on the part of Obama and his eeeevil minions, whose poorly-hidden mission it is to convert, whether by legalistic trickery, the sword, or some sort of jabbery hocus-pocus. Booga-booga!

Folks, there's no denying that political Islamism is no friend of western democratic principles. It is openly and overtly hostile, not only to the past century of Anglo-American meddling in the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia, but even to relatively benign cultural mores, such as women being allowed to drive, vote, and not be forced by threat of violence to wear sweltering tents whenever in public. Extreme Islamists flip out over the mildest of slights, from cartoons to books. You could not write, produce, and perform a Book of Islam musical, without riots and murders. There's no getting around it, they're dicks and goons. They need to go.

But to insist that a religion with over a billion adherents in dozens of countries is (to indulge in legalistic jargon) jointly and severally responsible for the vile actions of a statistical sliver, is just nuts. And if the excerpts that have been shared from Lt. Col. Dooley's seminar are accurate, then in fact he is striking a needlessly provocative, antagonistic stance, one that will only serve to further polarize the massive impasse between the two cultures.