Everybody Complains About the Weather, But Nobody Does Anything About It

Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog has a nice rundown of the antics of one David Bossie, a lifelong conservatard ball-gargler whose current preoccupation is sucking on the preznitential cheeto, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

Now, a reasonable person might look at Steve's meticulously itemized list of Bossie's nefarious, ugly antics in the service of pure evil and say, This asshole's been doing what he does for twenty-five years now. That's terrible.

Not being a reasonable person, I look at that list and think, Why has that motherless fuck been allowed to get away with this bullshit for twenty-five fucking years? Is there no one in the Democratic Party that has the guts to cut this asshole's Achilles tendon, politically speaking?

Seriously. It just reminds me of all the stupid lurid "Klintoon Body Count" lists that circulated among the then-nascent freeper conspiratard crowd. You had to wonder, If the Clintons are such Mafia-style badass killers, why haven't they at least professionally ruined certifiable morons like Newt Gingrich or Ken Starr, or the rest of them? They don't seem very badass to me.

And it's the same with David Bossie or Dinesh D'Souza or any number of these dipshit rabble-rousers who, however intellectually inept and bankrupt they are as human beings, still serve as ideological rallying points and rainmakers for the Koch and Mercer types who really own this country. Why isn't there a party mechanism to go after these guys, so that every time they come out of the woodwork, there's someone right behind them to remind everyone that they're intellectual goat-fuckers?

These animals have done incalculable damage to the fabric of this nation over the last quarter-century, at the very least by giving voice to the choir of wingnut-welfare insanity that bought out the working rubes for a few shekels, and sold them down the river on a raft of cheap "culture warrior" bullshit and "fambly valyews" claptrap.

Maybe if the Tom Steyer types, who think their bien pensant drives to impeach the emperor have value, instead put some of their pelf into supporting some countervailing "think tanks" and other such generators of ideological propaganda, we might not find ourselves here wondering why card-carrying mouth-breathers like Bossie and D'Souza are still in business after all these years.

Our Liberal Media

While it is a problem that NBC free-agent pickup Megyn Kelly is giving completely unnecessary face time to conspiracy-peddling jagoff Alex Jones, a bigger problem is that she's probably not going away -- in fact, this clusterfuck of an "interview" will probably end up being a stepping stone to Kelly getting that sweet Baba Wawa gig she wanted in the first place. NBC paid a lot of money for her, and they won't want to admit they fucked up.

I mean, Jones is who he is, but at least WYSWIG, right? If you want a fucking crackpot who believes that Sandy Hook was a staged hoax -- why is anyone's guess, since not a goddamned thing was done about guns as a result -- and takes his shirt off to eat barbecued spare ribs, then he's your guy. Jones mines that same ugly spectrum between entertaining and appalling -- let's coin the word appallitainment -- that other talk-radio shitheads like Rush Limbaugh have held court in for decades.

In fact, Jones and Limbaugh and the rest of these dirtbags simply underscore the point I and so many others have been making for quite some time, that Emperor Snowflake is not the disease, but a symptom. The hate-talk assholes are also symptoms, albeit  much more pronounced ones, since they were there when Snowflake came on the scene, and they'll be around after he's gone.

Nope, America is the disease, and we're metastasizing like stage-four brain cancer. Now, you and I might like to look at ourselves and the people we care about as individuals of good nature and good will, and that may very well be true, as far as it goes. But in a nation of 320 million people and counting, the law of averages says that some indeterminate number of that aggregate total must be assholes. That's just science.

So it behooves us to get some sort of idea as to roughly how many assholes there are, how many are actively spreading the monkey-brain-eating prion disease that has taken over the American political body and the media that cover it. Alex Jones peddles hateful lies and conspiracy theories to addled retards, who then turn around and threaten and harass the parents of murdered first-graders because of some "hoax" that no rational mind can possibly explain.

There are conspiracies in this big, beautiful, awful world of ours, and every single one of them starts with one question:  Cui bono? Who benefits from this plot, to what end is it constructed and executed? And can it be carried out as described?

And as much time and effort as Jones and his dipshit listeners have spent mooning over this loco jabber, none of them have yet presented a plausible theory of execution or rationale. This is where the 9/11 truthers fell short as well -- it's not that the gubmint is above doing something awful, but the logistics of it being carried off without a loose thread talking are roughly zero.

And in the case of Sandy Hook, even the "gubmint doing something awful" part doesn't make any sense. There are tens of thousands of violent gun deaths in this country every fucking year. Most of them could easily be leaned on in graphic, heart-tugging detail to push gun-control proposals. The idea that anyone would sit around and go, "You know what would really work with getting some gun control passed? Let's fake the slaughter of a classroom of first-graders? Can't fail!" Right.

Seriously, how fucking dumb does someone have to be to buy into something like that?

I like a good conspiracy theory or alternative history as the next person, but it has to make sense, and there has to be some sort of corroborating evidence. Here's a more harmless example:  Cleveland Cavaliers player Kyrie Irving supposedly believes with some level of sincerity that the earth is flat. I have a feeling that Irving is probably just screwing with people, but let's say he's serious. One would reasonably assume in that event that Irving has thought out some sort of scenario or (from the fiction-writing arena) "world rules" that comprise a somewhat coherent thesis?

For example, does "flat earth" mean that the planet is a disc? Okay then, what is at the center of the disc? What is on the bottom face of the disc? Is the Northern Hemisphere on the top face, and the Southern Hemisphere on the bottom? (But wait, it's no longer a "sphere," is it?) And so on. Tectonic geology, climatology, orbital physics -- there are countless empirically proven facts such a "theory" would butt up against.

Anyway. It's not a problem that Alex Jones and his toxic crap is getting exposure -- in fact, it might be a good thing that folks who somehow have still not been aware of this weirdo get a load of what he's been selling. The problem is that because Megyn Kelly is not actually a journalist but a media personality, her instinct is to sell Jones and "humanize" him, in the name of "both sides" or something. She could have simply researched the things Jones is on record as having said, and perhaps asked him directly about some of the more contentious pieces, of which there are many.

It sucks that "we" are all in this together in some respect. The idea that someone who listens to Infowars and harasses Sandy Hook parents also votes, breeds, drives a car, and maybe owns a gun is disgusting and horrifying. That is the sort of person who is ruining this country and the world, and it's a goddamned shame they don't have the guts to do the right thing and end themselves, to prevent further polluting the gene pool.

In the meantime, the very least we can do is boycott Megyn Kelly, and maybe make NBC think twice about giving any sort of platform to a hateful liar. (And no, this time I don't mean Newt Gingrich.)

Highest Bidder

Watching internet shouty-face cupcake Tomi Lahren on Bill Maher's show last night provided a nutshell take on every one of these interchangeable fuck-dolls, incoherently spouting quarter-truths, flat-out lies, and scummy innuendo for FSM knows what unholy purpose.

Lahren is, one supposes, conventionally attractive, although one thing these women seem not to realize is that that quotient is devalued in direct proportion to the bullshit that spews forth from their carefully lacquered mouths. In other words, it doesn't matter how cute you are, nothing's uglier than a shameless, lying hack who knows they're full of shit and keeps going anyway.

Then again, no doubt the inverse is true the further along the left-right political spectrum that their intended audience lies. But hey, if they're comfortable knowing that Fixed Noise viewers old enough to be their great-grandfathers are out there sputtering puffs of powdered man-chowder into their shag rugs, whatever pays the rent.

It seems that Lahren has, it turns out, a comparatively liberal recent past (then again, when you're 24 years old, your entire past is pretty recent), and that too should be no surprise, and should even be instructive, a confirmation of what we already know -- that while politics is marketed as a "values-based" product, it is in fact strictly business.

Job Qualification

It's interesting to see just how indignant some media folks are over Matt Lauer's passive, enabling "candidate forum" the other night. It's as if they expected some other -- any other -- outcome from having a morning-show hack from a key corporate media monopoly "interview" a reality-teevee actor from one of that same network's shows from the past decade. Did anyone expect anything other than inept softballs?

I mean, yes, Lauer is certainly welcome to fuck off and die; that shitshow the other night was just a ramped-up continuation of what Lauer has done his entire career, which is to hurt America. And now that hurt is on the verge of becoming quite literal. Not that it hurts Lauer, of course; he makes more money in a year than you and I will see in our entire lives. The only thing that would hurt him is if he lost his elite status.

People who fancy themselves as media-watchers, implying that they are savvy to what the corporate media minions are really all about, miss the point by a mile when they start trying to suss out the political preferences of this or that reporter. I have no idea whether Lauer considers himself liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat. Probably votes Democrat more often than not, maybe even fancies himself a good and generous citizen by contributing to the Clinton Foundation, if properly invited to the appropriate appletini soiree in the Hamptons. Whatever. Such considerations are irrelevant.

Contempt

Apparently a couple of the National Review thinkerati have gone full retard and decided that the best thing to do is describe exactly why their base are complete morons who just don't get it. Kevin D. Williamson takes a baseball bat to it:

Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

He's not entirely wrong, mind you, but what Williamson seems to gloss over in his rather poetic rant is just how roundly screwed-over these folks were, by politicians of both parties. You can't just yank them along with false promises their entire adult lives, and then abruptly say, "Ah well, fuck you." But that's exactly what happened.

It's gotta be frustrating for movementarians and orthodox conservatards and such like to agonize over the belated discovery that their salt-of-the-earth base, who are defecting to Drumpf -- who is neither truly Republican nor conservative, mind you -- have no regard whatsoever for the "conservative" principles, as codified by Williamson and other keepers of the flame at the think-tank net-rags. Most of this simply boils down to the old trope that conservatism cannot fail, but only be failed. Therefore, these losers are losing because they did not heed the ministrations about bootstrapping and constancy, sweet constancy.

This would probably be more catastrophic if any of Drumpf's flock actually read National Review, but I'll bet you my next paycheck that less than half of them could even tell you what it is. They're missing out; Williamson deserves credit for merely saying what the owners and donors have been thinking and saying among themselves all along. Hell it's what Drumpf is thinking of them when he's not shilling his infomercial to them. He's going to use them and toss them, and they'll love him for it. Which is why, at the end of it all, they really are getting exactly what they deserve.

Autocannibalism

Although I suppose I read a lot more non-fiction than most people do, my usual intake is about 50-50 between fiction and non-fiction. And I don't really make distinctions between "popular" or "unknown" writers as a barometer of what's "good" or not; if it's good it's good. So I've been a huge fan of Stephen King's writing for most of my life, since probably about seventh grade, 1980 or so.

One of my favorite short stories of King's is Survivor Type, a perverse little number about a drug-smuggling surgeon who survives a plane crash and finds himself marooned on a remote Pacific atoll with nothing more than his wits, his surgical tools, and some heroin. Because it is Stephen King, you expect the natural goo and gore of a man slowly devouring himself, piece by piece, going mad the entire time.

What might be less expected, but is barely subtextualized, is how the demented drug-smuggling doctor tries to convince himself throughout, first as he amputates and eats a foot, then the other foot, working his way up each leg until he's eaten everything below the waist, that he will pull through this, that he can survive, that as bad as it gets, it is still worth surviving, that if a ship somehow came out of the horizon and pulled this raving half-man aboard, he could still rehabilitate himself and move on with the rest of his life.

Which brings us to the much-publicized anti-Trump manifesto released by National Review the other day. It's almost too sad and pathetic to watch, this marooned half-man thinking that there is some deus ex machina out there providentially about to restore his loss.

Takin' It to the Streets

Let's reiterate, for the kids in the cheap seats:  it doesn't matter if you throw Molotov cocktails in the streets, or lay down in Grand Central Station -- it won't do any good, because they don't care. You think a federal investigation or a body camera will prevent the next cop from perforating an unarmed civilian? The ends of Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, and plenty of others are on video. We can all see what happened. Nothing will be done about any of them, because what the fuck are you gonna do about it, block traffic? Go ahead. Vote? Please. Jesus H. Christ.

Back in the day, the noted optimist Jim Morrison said "they got the guns, but we got the numbers". In a modern, militarized surveillance/security state, it's really the other way around -- mere numbers become irrelevant when the minority has all the weapons, the money, and the power, overt and coercive. Power gives you options:  to beat, to imprison, to ignore, to propagandize, to wait you out, to fuck up your future job prospects, any number of things. Mainly to refuse to respond to your plaints and your protests and your duly registered disgust at their conduct.

They don't give a shit because they don't need to give a shit because they don't want to give you the satisfaction and risk legitimizing your grievances because fuck you, cowboy. Whose country do you think this is, anyway? Get back in line or the hired dogs will just put on the riot gear and roll out the up-armored assault vehicles.

Of course these are lessons learned from the '60s, that hippies and idealists need to be beaten down, bought off, or spied on and blackmailed. Nowadays, they hardly even need to do that -- the flying monkeys at Faux News and their scumbag commentators will happily ridicule any non-teabagger grievance. Rudy Giuliani and his Nosferatu shadow have opportunistically slithered out of the coffin to piss on the graves of Eric Garner and Michael Brown and anyone else who fucks with Our Boys In Blue, the same type of hyper-paranoid mutt that perforated Amadou Diallo for the high crime of reaching for his wallet.

I respect the idealism of protestors, the sincere conviction that it will do jack shit to change anything. Occupy Wall Street changed nothing, the massive Iraq War protests around the world in 2003 changed nothing. People reserve high praise for the non-violent (well, on the part of the protestors, anyway) resistance tactics of Gandhi and MLK. And those did change some things, but at what a price, a lot of people getting the shit beaten out of them or murdered for saying no, and a couple of martyred heroes.

But the most modern manifestation of the tactics you see when you see protests is the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. A grim combination of pushing people around, presenting the tactics of looters and vandals as the norm, and dismissing and delegitimizing valid grievances, Seattle became the template for defusing the causes of disruptive groups of citizens.

(Some of the comments in the Atlantic article are just as appalling. Look, most reasonable people will acknowledge that pulling hundreds of millions of people out of grinding poverty in China and India is a net positive from a humanitarian perspective. But, uh, it wasn't the average 'murkin manufacturing worker's fault that those countries are hopelessly overpopulated; it wasn't just a couple thousand greedy union tools that lost their jobs, it was millions of working-class people who were promised retraining and opportunities; the usual suspects made all the money from gutting their countrymen's jobs and communities. Whatever potential globalization legitimately had, what it was was just another round of American corporations fucking over American workers, and pocketing the profits.)

About the only protests you don't see getting smacked down are old white guy protests, your Cliven Bundy types, your teabagger rallies, your gun-nut slobs sporting stretched-out beach shorts and assault rifles at the Chipotle ostensibly because Second Amendment, but really because most guys who can no longer see their dicks have trouble convincing women to suck them off.

The reason those protests don't get shut down is because they're useful to the powers that really be. They're a handy distraction, a way to further propagandize and polarize a dwindling but effective slice of the electorate. They've had their lives upended so that greedheads could profit massively from exploiting the competitive advantage of places with a massive surplus of labor, and look for easy answers to pin the blame on.

Body cameras on cops won't hurt, but also won't change much when grand juries literally refuse to indict despite actual video evidence of police over-reaction and misconduct. Those punk-ass cops gang-mauled Eric Garner for selling individual cigarettes; the man lost his life for selling loosies. It's all on video, crystal clear, and still they refuse to do a goddamned thing about it. Video doesn't matter, in a climate where citizens will not just eat the shit sandwich, but run down to the store and buy the bread.

Here's the only video that matters, if we want to understand what's going on here:
Robin Harris in House Party

Dingbat Logic

NewsCorpse has a nice rundown on Palin's latest delusional stab. Whether or not it's a good idea for Obama to personally back-channel communications with the Iranian mullahs, even a mouth-breathing dimwit like Palin should know by know that the ISIS thugs and the Iranians are deadly, bitter enemies -- in fact, the whole reason ISIS gained traction in Iraq is because the government, led by the Shiite (and thus an Iranian stooge for all intents and purposes) politically marginalized the Sunnis who comprise the ISIS movement.

And of course, to invoke Saint Reagan -- you know the guy who traded arms for hostages with those same Iranian mullahs -- should drive home the cold, hard fact that Palin is even dumber than you thought. She should stick to what she's good at, which seems to be crashing parties and pissing off her neighbors with her drunk, obnoxious brood.

Karma may be coming in the form of Palin's web channel (started by a lamestream media weasel, doncha know) derping along at low traffic levels, perhaps because her low-info demo actually has at least a couple of IQ points to rub together.

This Must Be the Transparency They Spoke Of

No administration ever turns out to be as responsive and transparent as they promise to be. It's practically impossible, especially for a commander-in-chief with zero military knowledge or experience. It makes sense that Obama will always defer to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on these matters.

There is almost no chance that the ISAF (and jeebus knows my dick gets granite-hard at the limitless ocean of sometimes recursive acronyms that the modern military is truly all about) will be more than minimally "successful," by whatever no-doubt-shifting criteria they choose to measure that. There's probably a variety of reasons, some of them measurable within the overall expenditure in question.

Maybe some of the Afghan Forces trainees are Taliban saboteurs. Maybe some of the money gets siphoned off here and there to grease the palms of local warlords, or Karzai and his family. Maybe all of the above. One thing Afghanistan -- like any other collection of human beings, but two generations of war has amplified it there -- has no shortage of is pelf and power and venomous shitheads who would fuck their own country over for a fistful of dollars.

So let's say that you, Tonstant Weader, are the preznit of these here Yewnighted States, and have a fine degree from Harvard Law but zero military experience. And Stan McChrystal or Peaches Petraeus tells you that the most efficient way to kill American enemies without endangering American soldiers is to deploy a fleet of killbots high above the Hindu Kush, controlled by some guy with a joystick in a trailer in Tampa.

Sure, there's always the chance that the hellfire you rain will kill some people who already want to kill you. But you won't have to send in more troops. That's the choice being presented to you, the president, by people who have a lifetime of experience with this shit. You can't tell them no without a better plan, one that you can take to the press and try to convince millions of people who hate you on a deeply personal level.

Or they tell you that these special military programs operating halfway around the world in an extraordinarily problematic part of the world, likely run by their handpicked protégés, need to remain classified because too much information would undo all the good work they've done, and intend to do. Knowledge is power, and in this case would empower the bad guys.

So what are you gonna do, smart guy? Tick-tock, you have to make a call, and soon, because as the song says, choosing not to decide still counts as a choice.

I'm not in any respect sticking up for Obama or his chickenshit acquiescence to many of these policies, which have only increased in scale and degree, and will only continue to do so. We'll know we're at the saturation point when drones are used to attack (don't worry, it'll be spun in the media as "defending" against thuggery) the next Ferguson riot. But in the meantime, it's not that difficult to see how these wrong-headed decisions get made.

Snowblind

I don't suppose you've heard that there's an election in the next couple weeks. "Both" "sides" proclaim it as the most important evah, just like all the other ones which Changed Everything. If 'murka has a more enduring, precious fiction than the one that claims that the one-percenters who own and run this popsicle stand are suddenly going to cede control because The Peepul Has Spoken, I have yet to hear it.

The fact of the matter is that, unless there is a supermajority in the Senate -- and maybe not even then -- nothing at all will change. It does not matter whether there are 55 Republican Senators or 59 Democratic Senators. It should be clear at this point that the defining characteristic of this particular gubmental body is stasis and gridlock.

From the perspective of the peons, and the media monkeys who pretend to be On Their Side, that is a flaw; from the perspective of the Owners, once again, it is a feature. But up to that supermajority point, both parties have dedicated themselves to the notion of using the mighty threat of a filibuster to cow the other side.

(Of course, the Republicans probably can and will take the simple majority in the Senate, so pay close attention to whether minority Dems employ the same tactics that the Goopers have used for six years straight, or if they fold back into their usual "go along to get along" master strategy of capitulation. That will remove all doubt as to who's "on your side," Monsieur et Madame Six-Pack.)

Enter performance artist and connoisseur of Peruvian flake Larry Kudlow, whose screeds only seem to get screedier.

The Republicans are going to recapture the Senate, picking up more seats than most any forecaster expects. And the House GOP is going to add to its majority. But then comes the big story: The beginning of a new conservative revolution.

....

Obama's head will spin with all the new paperwork on his desk. He may even have to cut back on his golf game. 

Of course, because of his left-wing ideology, Obama may veto everything. But if he does, he's setting up a new Republican agenda for the 2016 presidential race. Either Hillary Clinton completely jumps the Obama ship, or she's pulled way left by the Democratic party's Bill de Blasio/Elizabeth Warren/Sandinista wing. Either way, she's in trouble.
 
And maybe some Senate Democrats vote to override Obama's vetoes, with some even converting to Republicanism. An Angus King or a Joe Manchin may cross the aisle after the likely midterm GOP landslide.

[emphasis mine]

Only a complete moron would still call Barack Obama, with his killbots and surveillance and coddling of Wall Street predators "left-wing." In an era when Richard Nixon and probably Saint Reagan would run as Democrats, Obama is a reliably center-to-center-right hack. Whatever Obama's lofty rhetoric has been on this or that issue, his actions have been predictably centrist, dickless and conciliatory.

Not knowing or caring the difference between confidence and chutzpah, Kudlow blindly trucks on through with his bold assertions and predictions, never minding that the general, reasonably non-partisan consensus predicts about a 52-48 R-D split. Which again, should clarify whether or not there actually is a dime's worth of difference between these assholes and those assholes.

If "taker" states want to proclaim their rugged individualism by continuing to vote against their rational self-interest by voting in the usual Republican clock-cleaning grifters, then fuck 'em. They get exactly what they deserve. You think I feel a bit of sympathy for Kansas? Fuck no. Let 'em choke on it, if that's what they want. They'll figure out the hard way when they've had enough voodoo econ, and then they can fucking well bootstrap themselves out of it. Anything else would be sociamalism.

Every one of those teabagger rubes falls for this "I'mma cut me some pork!" horseshit -- except, of course, the "pork" that turns out to be jobs and aid and gubmint subsidies for their district. Then all that principled rugged individualism shit goes straight out the window. Just try touching fucking ethanol subsidies in Iowa, guaranteed you'll draw back a bloody stump. So, you know, Iowa deserves a burbling fool like Joni Ernst. Maybe Steve Braley should fuck a pig at the county fair, just to convince the locals he's the man for the job.

Back to Kudlow. The balls on people like this clown, privileged shitheads who've never had to answer for anything, who were allowed to fail upward where others would find themselves destitute; who were allowed to go to rehab when others went to prison. Kudlow is the standard-issue limo-lib who converted from SDS to supply-side evangelist when he saw where the money was going.

These people have no principles -- and more importantly, no empathy. They couldn't give less of a shit about the very real consequences of the globalization of capital and labor, of the decimation of the American manufacturing base, of the rampant wealth inequality that continues to undermine what could and should be a very smooth running economy that really would lift all the boats, instead of just the yachts.

But they don't want that, they want it all, every last scrap. The metaphor of the one guy taking 11 of the 12 donuts, leaving everyone else in the office to divvy up the last donut in the dozen, only goes so far. What we forget is that, rather than simply skulking off with their ill-gotten gain and being grateful that the rest of the office doesn't beat the shit out of him, the greedy bastard spends all his time trying to figure out how to get the last donut as well.

And he uses guys like Larry Kudlow to make his arguments for him, because Kudlow has literally no idea what a working-class American does or deals with on a daily basis -- and more importantly, like his owners, Kudlow doesn't care. At all.

This country is finished, and the idea that its agonizing downhill trajectory will alter appreciably if, say, Alison Grimes displaces Mitch McConnell, or Mark Begich keeps his seat, is as fine an example of magical thinking as you might find in the viewers and donors of any given glossolalic teevee evange-huckster.

Keeping Score

What Driftglass said. Only the political punditocracy has such non-existent accountability measures. The blogosphere is infinitely more self-regulating; chumps like Bobo Brooks and Billy Kristol would be run out of town on a virtual hot rail for their infuriating consistency at being wrong. But there they are, everywhere you turn, cluttering up various media portals, in print or in person.

It's bad enough that such people continue to cash fat checks in spite of their reliable wrongness. More pernicious is how it leads to institutional forgetfulness, the slate wiped clean with each appearance, so long as no one says anything politically incorrect.

Which, as it turns out, is entirely the point and purpose of that industry -- to legitimize what is profoundly illegitimate, to lend unearned credence and gravitas to analysis and opinions that, if they didn't affect so many lives in so many deep and painful ways, would be comical in their level of error and shoddy craftsmanship. They want to take your money and freedom, sure, but they need for you to grant them your permission, to thank them for it afterward.

Protest and Survive

Great interview in one of the local free sheets, with a gentleman who did a couple years for the high crime of crashing a land auction. What's particularly galling about this case is that not only did the judge rig the jury selection process by stocking it with people who pledged their allegiance to his decree rather than their consciences, but that it wasn't even allowed to be discussed at the trial that the auction in question had been ruled illegal.

There are other worthy tidbits throughout, not the least of which involves a cop who, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, realized his basement was being shoveled out by on of the Occupy kids he had been told to truncheon in Zuccotti Park.

I differ from Mr. DeChristopher in his hope or belief that the cop might have been transformed even a little bit by such an encounter. Oh, it might have made him think a bit, but probably not enough to question seriously why he mindlessly did what he had "been told" to that kid and others like him, not enough to change the trajectory of his ways or beliefs.

DeChristopher's dismay (I was hoping for more palpable contempt, but the guy is simply too nice) for the chickenshit bien pensant liberal baby boomers is also choice -- and also not enough to get them to change their ways. They are clearly content to believe that shopping organic and voting Democratic is sufficient, that climate change is a problem for the next generations to figure out. They hung on, made their money, and they're going to by-god take as much of it -- as well as the health care and Social Security funding of the next generations -- with them as possible.

The problem is, since they have most of the money, they have most of the political power, and so pay for a system that keeps inert just long enough for them to finish their days in comfort, and then everyone who's left can start sacrificing.

I don't think Americans of any generation will start to take climate change seriously until there's a truly catastrophic -- and I mean like mid-five figures of casualties -- event, something like twenty Katrinas or Sandys all at once, on an "important" US city like Los Angeles or New York. Somebody famous will have to perish.

And even then, because the system more than anything counts on inertia, counts on people's willingness to be distracted from their fate for just one more day, there's always the chance that it'll go away. Think of the huge events of this new century already, man-made or natural -- 9/11, Fukushima, Katrina, the extended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. After all the news coverage and the hand-wringing in the aftermath, what actually changed in the wake of any of these things?

Did 9/11 change our approach to dealing with the Muslim world? No, we still prop up corrupt petrocrats, sell them weapons, let them oppress their people into a senseless rage, and then wonder what the fuck is wrong with "those people". Did we take any measures that showed that we take seriously the clear ramifications of global warming and carbon concentration in the atmosphere after Katrina or Sandy or the 2004 tsunami? You tell me.

Consider -- in the space of a few minutes, nearly a quarter-million lives in fourteen countries were ended, and hundreds of thousands more transformed, by the tsunami. Yes, it was caused by an earthquake, and no, there wasn't anything man-made about an undersea subduction. But it should have been a potent reminder of the power of nature, and the powerlessness of humans to stop it.

It's not just Americans, though we certainly set the stage for all this. The Chinese and Indians, after all, are just following our model, empowered by the blessings of globalization and the credo of The Chicago Group. It's difficult to blame them for wanting to catch up with us in standard of living.

Yet that bears consequences, when 1 in every 3 humans lives in China or India, and 1 in every 2 -- think about that, especially if you're in America, which has comparatively sparse population density overall, every second human being -- lives in Asia. And most people live in cities, and most cities are near oceans, and the levels are rising, and will take as long or longer to reverse than they did to set in motion.

We don't all have to go full eco-activist and go to prison, in a system that's rigged to begin with. But if enough people, just in the US, looked at the three primary factors -- what/how we drive; what/how we eat; what/how we consume in general -- all of which are within lost people's control, a real dent can be made in this very real and growing problem.

This Week In Stupid

There are a multitude of legitimate arguments to made against the idea of Hillary Rodham Clinton becoming preznit of these here Untied States [sic]. Not one of them is that she will be a grandmother this time next year.

I know we're supposed to agree -- and I think we all really do agree -- that this sort of Entertainment Tonight type of newz burbling should be instantly marginalized. It's completely unacceptable outside the Hoda 'n' Kathie Lee gettin'-yer-swerve-on housewife porn that afflicts the teevee Morning Zoo shows.

While this gentle bloggery will most likely not be in operation come the benighted Year of Our Bored 2016, you can see some of the reasons why right here and now. For one, I despise, right down to the cellular level, the prospect of Hillary! versus Jeb! being presented as some sort of legitimate choice, that that is the best this nation can do. And that probably north of two billion dollars will be expended in the investiture of one of these toadying dynastic creatures, that there is an entire industry set up to legitimize the installation of whoever manages to give Shelly Adelson the best head as someone who will do a fucking thing for anyone besides themselves, their donors, and their ideological dependents.

But more, much more than all that mere fluff and folderol, I fucking hate with a white-hot passion anyone who thinks they can and should turn an honest buck by "raising" such idiotic "questions" about Hillary Clinton's impending grandmother-dom in the guise of honest gumshoe journamalism. Such people should be ignored immediately and permanently, until they land in the l'enfer c'est les autres cauldron of shit that is E! News.

Shorter Charles Koch

Who you gonna believe -- me, or that fucking commie your hippie neighbor voted for? I'll buy your soul and feed it to you, drop by drop, and you'll thank me for it.

Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right

You know, I get what Steve is saying here, and to some extent I actually agree. But goddamn, at some point the truly librul animals have to by god rear up on their hind legs and demand a genuinely transformative figure, rather than one that merely put on a good show of it on the campaign trail (such as Obama), not to mention a neocon warmonger whose only redeeming trait is that she's not quite part of whatever wretched clown car the Adelson wing of the Privilege party will put together in about 18 months.

In other words, if you want something better, you are going to have to insist on it and fight for it. The self-congratulatory rear-guard rhetorical volleys against the (barely existent) micro-claque of bien pensant pwoggies and Naderista holdouts will do fuck-all in the creeping face of corporate fascism. Citizens United opened the floodgates, and McCutcheon will prop them open -- by 2020, probably well before then, "Democrats" and "Republicans" will be replaced in all but name with more accurate Game of Thrones-sounding terms such as "Sorosians" and "Adelsonians."

This is not schtick, folks, this is fact. Winter has been coming for quite some time, and now it is here with a vengeance. The notion that Obama might give more of a shit than John Boehner or Ted Cruz is useless if nothing gets done in that regard, beyond the usual hand-wringing and cheap DFH-punching.

I mean, what does Hillary being "our best shot" entail, really, a face that's slightly less red in tooth and maw for the remainder of the working class? "Our best shot" at what, and who is the implied we in the word our, anyway? Only the very rich and the very poor have any real representation at this point; everyone else is simply a milch cow for the partaking thereof. People vote Democrat at this point because they think the ongoing predation will be held in at least slight abeyance. The chickens are still voting for Colonel Sanders, mind you; they're just getting a day or so reprieve from their inevitable fate.

These fuckers want your soul, and it's really up to you whether you deed it over to them or not. At least in the past, politics was somewhat transactional; you give me your loyalty and I'll make sure your job stays intact. Now it's more along the line of "give me your first-born and maybe I won't donkey-punch what's left of your job, your town, and your pension fund, because the other guy is even more of a sociopath." So what do we (to the extent that there is a "we" anymore, kemosabe) proles propose to do about any (much less all) of this?

Pissing away precious time and energy rallying against this or that random idiot who says something impolitic about gay people seems a poor substitute for taking back what's left of one's country. On the other hand, as I've been saying, Costa Rica seems quite nice.

Cargo Cult

So the annual clown car nonsense at the Gaylord nears its blessed end, and Real 'murka's favorite prop comic / concern troll blasts through some "new" and "borrowed" material for the trained seals in the audience:

“No you can’t log onto the website,” she said. “No you can’t keep your health care. No you can’t make a phone call without Michelle Obama knowing this is the third time this week you’ve dialed Pizza Hut delivery.”

Palin singled out Cruz for his marathon speech on the Senate floor last year during his push to defund Obamacare, when the freshman senator read Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” to his young daughters watching at home.

Palin brought her own version of the rhyme, crediting a couple lines of it to the Internet.

“I do not like this Uncle Sam,” it began. “I do not like this health care scam. I do not like these dirty crooks or how they lie and cook the books.”

The crowd devoured it.

Well, of course they did. These are the same classy folks who are snapping up bumper stickers saying "The Good, The Bad, The Ugly" featuring a Republican elephant, Democratic donkey, and Hillary Clinton, respectively. They're always on the lookout for the next hypocritical stunt candidate, another inert douchebag to serve simply as an obstacle, an obstruction to doing anything that might actually benefit the unrich.

As always, jerkoff politicians are a reflection of jerkoff constituencies.

Diet of Worms

They flutter behind you, your possible pasts, right? Case in point:  one Dennis "The Worm" Rodman. He could have gone into coaching or front-office after finishing his playing career, and carved out a perfectly respectable name for himself, coasting on his NBA Hall of Fame pedigree and a hard-earned reputation as a fearless rebounder.

Instead he decided to embrace his inner weird, go on a bender with the likes of Madonna, and now he's a 52-year-old pineapple-headed buffoon, thinking he can undo generations of psychotic cultural programming in the world's most isolated nation with a basketball game. It's a noble thought, I guess, but so utterly negligent of the surrounding circumstances and context as to negate any good faith Rodman might have intended.

Because this is North Korea we're talking about, and no one really knows for sure the whole picture, there's also a reasonable argument to be made that the Switzerland-educated Kim Jong Un is, by NK standards, more "liberal" or at least comparatively more moderate than his father's and grandfather's henchmen, who make up the inner circle. At the very least this makes for a wide variety of analyses of the public purging and execution of Kim's uncle, Jang Song Thaek.

The thing is, serious analysis is irrelevant to Rodman being sponsored to coach a game in an indisputable dictatorship, a place of almost absurd levels of cruelty, poverty, famine, oppression. It doesn't put Rodman on a par with having lunch with Hitler, not quite, but it's pretty damned ugly, as ugly as Rodman playing Marilyn Monroe to Kim's JFK. This is how he'll be remembered, as a useful idiot to a powerful, murderous man-child. Just embarrassing.

The Confessions of Commander Ga

Unsolicited book plug:  if you have not yet read The Orphan Master's Son, you really should. That's all there is to it. It's as close as you could find to a detailed look inside the cruel absurdity that underpins and overlays and permeates every atom of the Hermit Kingdom. (Another, lesser-known but just as informative work, academic in nature, is The Cleanest Race.)

So it is that Dennis Rodman's most notorious BFF, needing to prove himself against his inner circle, continues his purge by having his previous closest aide (and uncle) executed. No doubt Kim Jong Un found out the hard way that, by letting his higher-ups conduct negotiations with other, more developed and civilized nations (which, uh, is most of them), by definition they were getting a first-hand look at life outside the walls of the compound.

And that (despite the inexplicable lunacy of this jagoff; what free westerner in their right mind supports this wretched regime?) is really all the hilariously named "Democratic" "People's" "Republic" of Korea is -- a giant cult in a giant compound, ruthlessly herded and abused by a small cadre of people who know the truth, but profit from and insist on the lie.

Lots of Famous Songs Created in DPRK in 2013

Pyongyang, December 10 (KCNA) -- Lots of songs in praise of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) and the socialist motherland have been created in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea at a time when confidence in the WPK is growing deeper than ever before among the local people.

Among them is the song "Always under Party Flag", a paean for the WPK and one of the masterpieces in the era of supreme leader Kim Jong Un.

For its high ideological and artistic value, the song evokes strong emotions for the party flag among the people, leading them to harden their will to remain loyal to the WPK.

A song titled "The Leader and the General Are Always Together" was created on the occasion of the birth anniversary of President Kim Il Sung, the Day of the Sun (April 15). For its ideological, emotional and philosophical profundity, the song well represents the honor of the Korean people advancing toward a rosy future under the blessing of Generalissimos Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, eternal leaders of the DPRK.

"Ode to the Motherland" is also one of the masterpieces created in the era of Songun. The song arouses feelings of ardent love for the socialist motherland, making one recall with deep emotion the great feats Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il performed on behalf of the country and the people. With fresh and passionate rhythms, it reflects the strong will of the Korean army and people to glorify their homeland.

All people in the DPRK say that the song is as valuable as National Anthem.

And you can really twerk to it.

Shit Happens

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

American Grandstand

It's never been news that there is a practically infinite supply of people who are not only willing to cut their own throats, but to vote for other, far wealthier people to do it to them. So it's no surprise that, while a polled majority seems to understand that the shutdown sideshow was entirely engineered by the short-bus teabilly contingent in the Outhouse of Representatives, a substantial (and of course disproportionately vocal) minority blames Obama 100% for this mess.

Certainly Obama deserves some blame -- for persisting in the delusion that these maroons could be dealt with as if they were normal human beings, and not delusional would-be revolutionaries. There is no negotiating with fanatics, and that is all these people are. They are not seeking any sort of "grand bargain," they are seeking only capitulation. There is no compromising with them.

Obama has failed to understand this, over and over again. If he is not urging the DCCC and DNC and anyone else who will listen to pour as much filthy money into unseating these psychopaths, then he is just continuing to fail, simple as that.

At the very least, this should be one of those episodes that highlights the remaining actual differences between the parties, that while -- since they both represent the "donor" class -- both are red in tooth and claw, the Democrats at least usually make a token effort to clean up some of the blood, pick out some of the chewed meat, before uttering whatever feckless burble they think the proles need to hear this week, before muttering "whatever" and turning on the teevee to watch nincompoops sort their sock drawers.

So when you have apologists for bullshit and psychobabble gleefully willing to wreck the world economy just to stand on their imaginary principles, you then have to focus on the fools who keep supporting them -- even though statistically, it's those very same fools who will bear the brunt of the proposals and policies of their fearless leaders.

The only reason we don't let them get exactly what they think they want, and good and hard, is that they'll drag most of the rest of us down with them. At this rate, they might anyway.