Inside Man

I'll throw out the disclaimer that I don't know enough about John Schindler to attest to his reliability, and it does not go unnoticed that his article appears in the newspaper that Clownstick's son-in-law owned up till very recently, but Schindler's Twitter feed looks like he at least knows what he's talking about. The facts are indisputable that Kremlin Mike Flynn has his dick caught in a serious wringer here, and will probably be forced from his job barely a month into it, but knowing these animals, they'll probably replace him with Alex Jones.

It should be clear by now that the real challenge of this administration is figuring out whether they are incompetent or treasonous, whether their intent is to "disrupt" (in the hacky corporate jargon sense, as if causing chaos is a necessary precursor to innovation) or to destabilize.

In the end, it shouldn't matter. These people need to go. All of them. When lifelong professionals across the sixteen intelligence agencies are uniformly convinced that the Kremlin has ears in the fucking White House Situation Room, to the extent that they will no longer speak clearly and completely around the occupant of the highest office in the land and his appointed minions, we have a problem.

Clownstick needs to figure out a way to pay his bratva debts, other than by looting the US treasury and passing intel to Putin. Maybe he can host another pageant and grab some more teenage pussy.

Tons of Anarchy

In following the case against Silk Road, and a quick skim of the purported log of the alleged Keyser Soze Dread Pirate Roberts, my initial kneejerk is to condemn the gubmint for its usual intrusions, this is all about The Man getting his piece of the action and wetting his beak, that they won't be happy until they've corralled all the Kim Dotcom and Dread Pirate Roberts types out there in the cyberworld, lurking in the .onion layer, etc.

But then there's this little gem from way down deep in the log:

Alrighty then. Not sure what's worse, some numbnuts kid trying to push shrooms for cyber-currency and bringing the Hell's Angels in for his wetwork, or him being stupid enough to write it down.

Eat, Spray, Love

So apparently we are running out of ideas for useful, informative articles. Lest someone get the wrong idea, let's make something abundantly clear -- fist-fucking six dozen hot dogs down your gullet in ten minutes does not make you an athlete, it makes you something of an asshole. The fact that professional hockey took some years to get squared as to teams and rules does not equal the hard truth that "competitive eating" is more a joke than a real sport.

It's disgusting to compare the sheer gluttony of butt-chugging hot dogs to what Babe Ruth or Michael Jordan accomplished in their careers, even vicariously. Maybe it's because I was raised in a poor household where food was prepared to last 3-4 days at a time, but I am well conditioned to believe (secularly, anyway) that gluttony and waste are sins.

But as a sports fan as well, it's very difficult to reconcile the idiotic notion that trenchermen are "athletes" in the same sense that genetically blessed, superbly conditioned humans who do things that few other people can do, are athletes. Any asshole can chug water for a few weeks to extend their stomach, and allow themselves to gorge on dozens of hot dogs and tacos or whatever. That is not a skill, and athletics require some sort of skill. I am only mildly comforted by the thought that Joey Chestnut's dumps must be episodes of furious grunting and rectal brutality (much like Gary Busey's sex life).

I suppose complaining about nonsense like this is a lot like complaining about shitty music or hot weather -- like the poor, they will always be with us. But at least no one's trying to claim that Justin Bieber is Mozart, or that a 110° heat wave is actually a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

No, Virginia

It's a shame when they lose their idealism, isn't it?

Let’s assume, for a moment, that a real meritocracy would be an awesome thing to have; that giving every person a chance to run the Race to the Top is a worthy goal of government policy.

Even with those assumptions it’s not so simple. Why should Americans work to ensure that everyone has a fair chance to join the ruling class, if the great principle of that ruling class is unfairness? Why should Americans compete on the level if what we’re trying to win is admission to a fraternity of thieves?

Let me explain. A meritocracy requires more than simply making it possible for people at the bottom to climb the ladder of opportunity. It also involves chutes of accountability for those at the top. These are two sides of the same coin: the skilled must be able to rise, but grandees caught with their snouts in the trough must also come tumbling down. “We cannot have a just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless and the principle of the forgiveness to the powerful,” writes Chris Hayes in his sweeping meditation on meritocracy, “Twilight of the Elites.” And yet: “This is the America in which we currently reside.”

Is it ever. Recall for a moment the situation in which Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009. During the preceding decade, we had endured a tech bubble and a housing bubble; our accounting industry had been suborned in all sorts of ways; our prize stock analysts had been suborned in all sorts of different ways; our leaders and foreign-policy pundits had sold us a war in Iraq using completely bogus reasoning; our investment houses specialized in cooking up poisoned investments; our ratings agencies specialized in hanging blue ribbons on them; and the executives of our financial industry specialized in helping themselves to stupendous bonuses even as they lost billions—even as they blasted holes in the economy of the world.

....

I confess here that believing Obama would act in this way was one of my reasons for supporting him back in 2008—the hope that this thoughtful and talented man would bring a completely new crowd to D.C. and break the grip of the Clinton-era centrists on the Democratic Party.

....

I will also confess that Obama’s subsequent failure to follow these meritocratic rules astonished me in a way that we cynical types don’t like to be astonished.

Yeah, well, join the club, bunky. It's a hard lesson to learn, but like Lucy pulling the football one more blessed time from poor ol' Charlie Brown, it must be learned and internalized all the same. It's nice that the "WTF Haz Obama Done?" crowd can hang their hat on the previously uninsured now getting insured, but they are strangely silent on the fact that, since everything still costs what it always has, and the 1% have refused to pitch in, someone has to pay for all that. This country still has banana-republic levels of income and wealth disparity, something Obama has a popular mandate to remedy, and failed not only to do so, but to even try.

Nothing will happen, because nothing ever does. People will either get out and vote like they think it makes a difference, thinking that holding back whatever ludicrous teabagger poltroon counts as a principled stand, or they won't bother, fulfilling their own assumptions that it doesn't matter.

Well, it doesn't and it does, in that acceptance of the, in the Chomsky parlance, "evil of two lessers" constitutes any sort of real choice. Hopefully by now even the most enthralled Obamanaut from '08 understand now that their man, however well-meaning he may have genuinely been, is simply an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill. So is everyone he's surrounded by, colleagues, counterparts, and political opponents alike.

I think many, if not most, people understand this at least intuitively, that their government no longer has their best interests at heart, that the middle-class expansion of the middle of the last century is well and truly dead and gone, that it's a dog-eat-dog world and we're all wearing bacon pants. What remains to be decided is whether that is acceptable, what is to be done about it, and then to do it.

Whether that means simply disengaging from a parasitic, overweening system of hypocritical technocrats and their corporate PR crews, or taking your chances in the streets against an increasingly paramilitarized and unaccountable security apparatus, is anyone's guess.

They're Coming to Take You Away, Ha Ha

Holy shit. Something to think about next time a, um, gun-rights enthusiast starts in again about the encroaching power of the state. And hell, this ain't even the state, it's the city of Henderson, Nevada.

Seriously, look at the photo in the link, how many stormtroopers do you see on that man's porch? Was this another backyard terrorist? No, this guy refused their "request" to vacate his own home so that they [the cops] could set up shop and use his house to spy on a neighbor who was the subject of a domestic violence report.

So this is a thing in America now, that these pissant, jackbooted Barney Fifes get to push taxpayers around on DV disputes involving their fucking neighbors? Forget drones overflying and checking out your property (though that will be a thing as well), because you can skull-fuck America with your bullshit derivatives, but lord help you if Eric Holder sees that you grow a few plants to supplement your measly "legitimate" income.

I usually don't bother with the Alex Jones "they're coming to get you" sort of guff, but this is really a "what the fuck" sort of moment, that probably happens more often than we realize. Consider the balls it must take for the police force of a Vegas suburb of about a quarter-million people, to demand that a homeowner surrender his home because his next-door neighbor might be a wife-beater.

It is important not only that Anthony Mitchell be duly recompensed in his lawsuit, but that every single law-enforcement "professional" involved in this mess experience an immediate and drastic career change.