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.

It's Getting Hot In Here

You know, I was just about to drop a token yammer about how bloody hot it is this fine weekend (and no, I don't have air conditioning, I have a swamp cooler, which is useless above 100 degrees), when I saw this awful news. Jesus, so sad. Seriously, words fail.

Firefighting is obviously dangerous, often thankless work, and you may have noticed the past few years that wildfire season out west starts earlier and goes longer these days. Last year it was Colorado, because large swaths of forest have been turned into tinder by infestations of pine beetle -- wait for it -- which have proliferated because it no longer gets cold enough long enough during the winter.

Usually it's a safe bet to scoff at arguments which deploy the Children, Who Are Our Future trope, but in the case of laypersons attempting to figure out whether climate change is "real," and/or caused by human activity, one would think that most parents at least would want to err on the side of caution, to ensure that their kids have a reasonably safe planet to inhabit. Maybe not; in most subjects, especially ones requiring the ability to assess empirical evidence, one observes a great deal of providentiary thinking. The problem is recognized but studiously ignored; something will come along because something always does.

At this point, you can't even totally invoke the shibboleth of mindless 'murkin consumerism and waste; while of course there is waste, the more egregious examples of suburban assault vehicles, such as Hummers and Excursions, fell prey to high gas prices. That's the only thing the assholes who "needed" gargantuan grocery schooners understand anyway, is a swift kick to the pocketbook.

No, the blessings of globalization have created a lot of newly-minted middle-class aspirations in grievously overpopulated third world countries. What happens when a quarter-billion Chinese and a quarter-billion Indians are suddenly thrust into the arena with the big boys? We're spoiled, we're accustomed to it, but the scope and scale of economically empowering half a billion people or so, in a relatively short time, is bound to have environmental consequences.

There may not be a direct correlation between, say, the ongoing desertification of China and the proliferation of the lodgepole pine beetle, but one thing students of climate change have duly noted is the interdependence -- hell, the interconnectivity -- of the natural world. That is not a difficult concept to understand.

But it is very easy to ignore.

Believe it or not, I have neither lecture nor lament here. I'm writing this, and you're reading this, so by definition we are using electricity, generated by fossil fuels, for non-essential activity. Nobody is Simon-pure here.

But it doesn't hurt to be at least cognizant of the things we do, and the impacts we inflict, and strive to be just 10% less of an asshole, when it comes to being kind to the environment. The thing is, and this is something many Americans do not consider or even know, is that one in three human beings lives in either China or India. One in two -- that is, half of all humanity -- lives on the Asian continent.

In past times, we could afford to be somewhat smug about our hyperconsumerism and wanton pollution because we are relatively sparsely populated, and no one else had the tech or the stones to be as crudely wasteful. We at least had control, in the sense that we could pull back if we so chose. We chose not to.

The demographics, and the concomitant effects of globalized commerce, have rendered that previous mindset inoperative. We retain some control, but only over ourselves, and perhaps not enough in the aggregate. The U.S. is only 5% of the world population, after all. As China outpaces us in accessing African resources, we may find ourselves not only in a bind as climate change continues apace, but increasingly powerless to do anything about it.

Deep in the Heart of Dipshit

Congrats to Texas State Senator Wendy Davis, for actually getting up there and honest-to-gawd filibustering. It's unfortunate that the odds are stacked way against keeping that stupid law pushed through next week, or the week after, or however many tries Rick Perry wants to give it. But at least she tried, and at least she refuses to take their shit, which could be a model for many other Democrats, some of whom couldn't find their spines if Jamie Dimon held the flashlight for them.

The obsession so many people and politicians in this country have over abortion is scary, quite frankly. It's difficult to think of another issue so grievously underpinned by fanaticism, hypocrisy, chicanery, outright stupidity, and bad faith on the part of anti-abortion activists.

As I've said many times, politicians reflect their constituencies, good, bad, or completely stupid. When you have a bozo like Jodie Laubenberg declaring that rape victims don't need abortions because rape kits clean out the impacted area and prevent pregnancy -- well, you can't just walk into your local corner store and buy that kind of stupid. You have to get on the internets and hunt down the right SKU number for that one. But no matter -- either Laubenberg actually believes that shit, in which case her district is populated by morons who elected a fellow moron, or she knows better, but also knows that her district is borderline retarded.

Either way, Texas State District 89 has some issues with elementary cognition. Ditto Louie Gohmert's district, and so forth. The point is, we hold up elected representatives as these totems of mass disapproval, to beat them with our collective reproach.

But someone put those dunces in office. Someone keeps voting for Jim Inhofe and Tom Coburn. Tennessee's 4th Congressional District thought it'd be a swell idea to re-elect Scott DesJarlais, even after it was proven in the ugliest fashion that his pro-life fambly valyews bullshit was exactly that.

And so on. Wendy Davis and her supporters certainly have their work cut out for them on Monday, and I hope they succeed in their mission, but we all know human nature too well. Because Texas, like many redneck states, is getting younger, poorer, and browner demographically, it will be "bluing" sooner rather than later, but in the meantime, it's this tedious, mindless crusade of cartoon characters picking on women, especially poor women.

Don't they have anything better to do? If they put one-tenth of that energy and vigor into, oh I dunno, subsidized birth control, better education (general and sex), better jobs, etc., that the abortion rate would drop -- even more than it has been for 20 years.

What We've All Learned From Paula Deen

Jayzus. A whole week of navel-gazing, shirt-tearing, tearful nonsense, and ham-fisted apologies. And that was just Matt Lauer. [Hi-yoooo! - Ed.]

Really, did the largely self-imposed travails of 'murka's Buttah Queen evolve into some sort of nuanced, sophisticated observation of the nation's (not just the South, though they're obviously the most grievous, entrenched offender) race issues? Of course not. It turned into the predictable sideshow of Deen wallowing in abject, self-pitying burble. Pro tip:  even nailing oneself to the proverbial cross is easier with a stick of butter, y'all.

No, it just turned into another reminder that in a nation of 320 million people, a good chunk of them can only self-actualize and express themselves via consumerism. So of course as Deen is losing endorsers almost hourly, her cookbooks are flying off Amazon's virtual shelves. This is of a piece with last August, where we saw hordes of sweaty hillbillies racing their Hoverounds down to the nearest Chick-Fil-A to show their solidarity with the gay-bashing CEO. The idea that any of these acts might qualify as expressions of intellectual coherence tells you a lot about the folks indulging in those acts.

So it went as these things typically go, and ended up being almost not at all about Paula Deen, and whatever or how long ago her transgressions were. It's much more about a substantial chunk of like-minded people, who jes' don't see whut awl the fuss is about, where peoples just is whut they is, y'all.

Instead of helping Deen hide behind her lame "I'm just an old lady who was raised that way" defense, her enablers might consider that Deen was nearly 20 years old when the civil rights movement came to fruition, when southerners were forced to confront the moral ramifications of murdering college students, picking on schoolchildren, and siccing dogs and turning firehoses on people who had the nerve to be tired of that shit and said so.

There was a choice to be made then and there, and Deen, while obviously not a cross-burning, hood-wearing knuckle-dragger, chose like most southerners to pretend that offensive symbolism and ofay "humor" were just part of that fabled suthuhn cultcha. The anecdote she told about her great-great-grandfather killing himself after "losing" his "workers" tells you everything you need to know about that Lost Cause mentality, just completely obtuse, the stubborn refusal to see what has been right in front of them all along.

I don't know that Deen needs to have her career ruined over this particular kerfuffle, but I do know that her apologies seem to lazily trace the shopworn "I'm sorry if you were offended" trope of the insincere buffoon who isn't even quite sure what they did wrong. It mostly conveys the possibility that Deen hasn't really thought much about any of this, at least not deeply enough to understand why the descendants of the people her great-great grandfather owned might take umbrage at some of this.

People not from the south wonder what it will take for southerners to unscrew their heads from their asses on this thorny subject, why they can't just admit what everyone knows -- that the Civil War really was about slavery, and that slavery was and is a stain on this nation's soul. The South's greatest writer famously noted that the past is never over, nor even past, and that's part of it.

But it's also the inability of the remaining crackers to just admit these things to themselves, much less to outside observers. This refusal to acknowledge obvious historical facts -- facts corroborated by the papers of the Confederacy itself -- produces a condition where their backs are just instinctively up on this subject. It's not hard to see why -- to acknowledge the atrocity is to admit complicity, in a way, because they've so stridently defended the excesses and symbols all this time.

I don't think there's anything to talk them into or out of, all we can do is make sure to call "bullshit" when it's uttered.

[Update 6/30 1:37 PDT:  Also, too. If even half of what's alleged there is true, Deen and her goon brother deserve exactly what they're getting, and worse.]

Crime and Dumbishment

You know, I was going to sarcastically/rhetorically ask if Aaron Hernandez is, like, borderline retarded or what, having pulled off the easiest-to-solve crime since a herd of goats all suddenly had Louie Gohmert's DNA on them.

But then I recalled, "Oh yeah, Hernandez was a Gator, and a teammate of Tebow's at that!" Which automatically makes him the sort of guy who needs mnemonic devices to get his underwear on in the right direction. Brown in back, yellow in front, and all that.

Seriously though, you read the breakdown of this crime, and the trail of breadcrumbs and derp left for the cops to follow, and you come away wondering if Hernandez, or anyone in his Connecticut onionhead posse, ever even heard of Law & Order, or CSI, or fucking Mannix for chrissake. It's as if these people have never seen a movie or teevee show or read a goddamned crime novel, like ever. No, let's all text each other, and go pick up this poor cuss at 2:30 AM with his sister watching, and take him back to where there's a bunch of fucking surveillance cameras. Because no one tracks phone calls or films shit anymore, amirite?

And this was in Bahhhston, did a terrorist incident happen there just weeks ago that was tracked and solved within hours, or did we all fucking dream it?

Jesus, and people give Tebow a hard time about shit. Tell you this right now, folks -- there's no fucking way Tebow isn't at least 50 IQ points ahead of a drooling moron like Hernandez. Cops live for stupid criminals, because they make the job that much easier. Hernandez just made their year.

And from the football side of things, I've been watching the game pretty regularly for going on 40 years now, and I don't know if I've ever seen such a radical reversal of fortune hit a team so suddenly. This time last year, the Patsies had a dream tandem of tight ends in Hernandez and Rob Gronkowski, had dumped a ton of money on both to compensate them for their all-world stats, and looked set at the position for years to come.

Now Gronkowski is coming off of his fifth surgery in the last eight months, has a steel plate holding his forearm together (that had to have an infection cleared out of it), and now his back's jacked up. And Hernandez' terminal case of the stoopids looks to have him incarcerated for the next 20 to life.

Which leaves the Patsies with a bunch of scrubs and Tebow as their best options at TE. If someone wrote any of this in a movie script, it would be rejected as bullshit.

A Friendly Reminder

"You name me an institution in American society, I'll show you where it basically betrayed the people they're supposed to serve...."

 

Watch this, then watch the other two parts, then watch them all again. Don't say you weren't warned.

Excuses for Psychopaths

Look, let's call a spade an entrenching implement, shall we? The idea of globalization is perfectly fine and makes sense, in practice it's hosed a lot of hard-working families to enrich a few people who already had plenty of money. The 1% have made it perfectly clear that they give less than one-hundredth of a fuck about the peons, and all the contorting to defend their hoarding is just, well, sad.

Worse yet, it's mathematically unsustainable.

Proof of No Karma

As always, we should all fervently hope that these morons get exactly the society they wish for, lose their pensions and learn to live on cat food.

It Gets Butter

There's a little bit of schadenfreude in watching Paula Deen's (literal) gravy train with Krispy Kreme wheels get derailed by her ignorant (again literal) piehole. Offhand, I'd say her greater crime against humanity is finding newer, grosser ways to poison them with a toxic effluence of saturated fats, but that's me.

Anyway, for those of you not porking yourselves into a diabetic coma washing down donut sandwiches with 64-ounce Big Gulps, let's cut the shit. Deen's casual racism is certainly off-putting and revelatory, and will stall her career for a few weeks until Roger Ailes gives her a blank check to clog America's arteries once more from the safe confines of Steve Doocy's assholeFox and Friends.

But there's a difference between a jackass and a scumbag. Deen is a jackass; these people are scumbags. We used to be able to tell ourselves that racism would finally die off when mossbacks like George Wallace finally shuffled off to hell, then it was when the smiling ofay raised-that-way dipshits like Deen were gone. But you can see from the links that the majority of the twittards appear to be in their twenties, maybe thirties. We're stuck with these cocksuckers.

Or not. As America gets younger, poorer, and browner, these bozos are going to have to get with the program; that world will be a lot less forgiving of their overprivileged white asses venting their imaginary grievances. People used to (hell, still try to) defend this stuff with half-assed nonsense like "it's the southuhn cultcha" or "that's the time and place they came from." Give me a fucking break. Paula Deen is sixty-damn-six years old; exactly how old do you need to be to figure out that slavery-themed weddings and "sambo burgers" are fucked up?

It all stems from the inability of (a preponderance of, not all) southerners to let go of their lost cause mythos, and drop their finger-in-the-eye-of-yer-political-cureckniss bullshit. Get over it. You were wrong. You lost. You deserved to fucking lose. Also, too, it was 150 years ago.

As they like to say in the south, you can't fix stupid. All you can do is stand back and watch things fix themselves, and when the oaf inevitably pulls the vending machine on himself, chalk it up to evolution winning out at long last.

James Gandolfini

I happened to catch the awful news about James Gandolfini just minutes after it hit the news outlets, and thought for a split second about jumping on the instant "oh noez!" wagon. But more and more I'm coming to appreciate the value of "slow news", in correlation with "slow food."

Really, as dysfunctional as Americans' relationship with their food is, the news is so much worse, as it is compelled to fill every fucking moment with whatever's there, which usually ain't a whole lot, unless endless iterations of the same goddamned thing punches your ticket. Sometimes, we need to take a few minutes and let news -- good or bad -- sink in.

Anyway, Gandolfini. As a huge fan of The Sopranos, and of Gandolfini (even before Sopranos; his bit part in True Romance stood out in a movie full of wonderful small parts), it's always a horrible thing for someone of such talent to be cut down in their prime. And if half of the "nice guy" encomia are remotely true -- and I'm sure they are --  then it's also the loss of a working-class dog, a regular guy uncomfortable with the irregularity his status granted him. You can never have too many people like that.

It's not an exaggeration to say that the success of The Sopranos changed the face of television. In a pustulent wasteland of "reality" diarrhea gravitating to every low nook and crevice of the people's airwaves, never to be completely rinsed out, there are diamonds to be found, rich story arcs populated by vivid, complex characters and compelling scenarios.

You definitely have no Boardwalk Empire or Mad Men without Sopranos, as they were created by folks who got their pedigree on David Chase's watch. But you probably also don't have the rest of the quality basic cable stable:  Breaking Bad, Justified, Sons of Anarchy, the late great Southland. Hell, anything good that's come on HBO since Sopranos probably owes at least part of its existence to the success of that show; HBO had foundered after Larry Sanders closed shop and needed something to boost its stock. Instead it captured lightning in a bottle, a sprawling, rambunctious mob epic with heart and grit and a stellar ensemble cast.

But every ensemble needs its gravitational force, and that was Gandolfini to a T, at turns charming and menacing, communicating subtleties of character with a cold glint of the eye and a slight Doberman grin. I always felt that Sopranos was the funniest show of its era, still do. It was the darkest of humor, but hilarious all the same, and much of that was due to Gandolfini's tremendous timing and facial cues.

I recall reading once that Chase originally wanted DeNiro for the role of Tony Soprano, and as great as DeNiro is, Gandolfini used is bulk to inhabit the character and make it larger than life. Where DeNiro is almost catlike in his presence, stealthy and clever, but not physically overpowering, Gandolfini made Tony more like a bear, pleasant one moment, imminently dangerous the next. Like Michael Chiklis in The Shield, Gandolfini was a force of nature in his signature role, compelling and unstoppable.

So there ya go. It's not hyperbole -- James Gandolfini really did change teevee in this new millennium, helped create a redoubt for quality, storytelling, and acting as a true craft. That he was apparently a great person as well is icing on the cake. Gone far too soon. Go rent True Romance, which is just a great movie from front to back anyway, and check out Gandolfini's interview with James Lipton.

Into the Void

Whether your a Belieber, or even just a Biebnostic, you have to appreciate the symbolic heft of launching the little turd into outer space. If they can load Kim and Kanye and the rest of the Kardoushian klan on the one-way rocket ship into the sun, it would be a start.

At the very least, Harvey Levin would have to find other, hairier legs to hump.

Oculingus

Not to make too much of a meaningless trend, or to get too misanthropic, but I kinda hope that the fear-mongering over the "trend" in eyeball-licking is real, that it really could cause eye herpes and blindness. The planet is overcrowded enough as it is, and can't start shedding morons too soon. Twenty or thirty years ago, these idiots would have been pulling vending machines on themselves, or riding shopping carts down steep flights of concrete stairs.

Dicko Uncheneyed

I think it's just swell that there might still be someone out there who still gives a shit about Dick Cheney's opinion on anything.

Public Service Announcement; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Debt Bomb

We all know this fact intuitively, but it still bears repeating and reminding ad nauseam -- all debt, whether it's your own personal household debt, or the debt incurred by your municipality, county, state, whatever, is someone else's equity. Just keep that in mind at all times when observing how the Masters of the Universe continue to find creative ways to rejigger the usury on their 30:1 leveraged derivatives on assets that frequently don't exist in the first place.

When they talk about "solvency," what they really mean is making goddamned sure that you and your kids and your grandkids and so on remain on the hook to paying them in perpetuity to the value they removed from your economy to hoard offshore. This is an important point, since the banksters' plaint is that they are worth the pelf they accrue, because of the value they add. But the only value added goes to directly to them, and comes out of everyone else's hide.

This is not politics, especially since they rent both parties. It's just math. It's simple -- if you have debt, the entity whose equity your debt affects has a vested interest in keeping your dumb ass on their balance sheet as long as possible. This is what I mean when I talk about "debt peonage" and "wage slavery," which are mutually reinforcing phrases.

If you make just enough money to get by, but never ahead -- as the majority of Americans do -- then you are on the hook forever, unless you're smart and lucky, and design the next hot app or whatever. Hard work alone will not do it anymore; there are plenty of folks out there busting ass at two or three pud jobs, who will never get off the hamster wheel.

Twitler Youth

Hey, there's a newsflash -- douchebags breed more douchebags. The upside is that there are very few avenues in the real world when your name is "Tanner Flake." No doubt young Flake plans to either inherit daddy's desert throne, or leverage the connections into the usual bullshit sinecure, some rich asshole do-nothing "job" lecturing the poorz on their stoopid laziness, in between golf junkets and circle-jerk "conferences."

If there is any such thing as karma -- and we all know there isn't -- these two closet cases will end up infamous on Ryan Lochte's reality show as slightlyeven dumber wingmen, ending up a long, drunken, futile night of poon-chasing in each other's arms. Either way, these little fucktards are as good an argument for term limits as any.

Rebel Rebel

Just a reminder that, as far as which side to take in the Syrian civil war, that we don't know what we're doing, and aren't going to know. It's assholes versus monsters, and if your only response is "whatever keeps gas prices lower" then you're merely an accomplice.

And of course Syria is not a big oil country, but their major benefactor, Iran, is. They'd love nothing more than to lure us into some bullshit proxy war in the Syrian desert, watch us chase our tails for another decade or so. If we want to do something about this, about petrocratic dictators and theocratic bastards, then support alternative energy. Stop bitching about Solyndra and support ten more Solyndras, and wind farms, and anything else (short of pumping chemicals into aquifers and undermining substrata) that minimizes the guzzling of oil.

The best way to defeat desert despots and Islamist thugs murdering children for no goddamned reason at all is to simply starve them, make it so you no longer need to buy the one thing of value they produce.

Patriot Games

Bill Belichick continues his free-agent dumpster-diving to pick up BSPN totem Tim Tebow, primarily because the Patsies' two stud tight ends got seriously banged up last year (Gronkowski just had his fourth forearm surgery in about seven months, from an injury sustained running up the score on the Colts, so karma), and hybrid TE/H-back is probably where Tebow's real skill set lies.

All that said, the longer Tebow is in uniform, the longer it'll be before some moneybags buys him a congressional seat in the Florida Panhandle.

It Was the Beast of Times, It Was the Wurst of Times

With the "revelations" about the NSA's domestic spying program, helpfully provided by a private contractor because outsourcing rulez, I suppose most of us find ourselves on a particular fence. On the one hand duh, this is a confirmation more than anything else, certainly not informing any sentient being of something they didn't already know or at least presume.

And in a nation of chronic over-sharers, where the Fourth Amendment is just a hazy memory, is this really a massive transgression? Is this going to make Chat Rouletters self-conscious, worried that the gubmint might be looking on them rabidly masturbating with a stranger?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but they can build all the zettabyte storage hives out in the Utah desert that they want, and it's still just a massive garage. There is simply too much data, too many emails, phone calls, what have you, to randomly sift through. It's all search algorithms and tracking (and retroactively tracking) known entities.

You want a career tip, kids? Come up with a slightly better automated regression analysis tool that can work through these ginormous data backloads, and sell massive contracts for the licensing to that software to Big Brutha. You're welcome.

On the other hand....well, where to start? Even his supporters no longer consider Obama any sort of transformative figure, merely a perfidious, mediocre bulwark against much more transgressive opponents. But elected -- even in a bullshit election -- representatives typically reflect their constituencies. So one might safely assume that a bored, intellectually lazy populace that mouths pieties about "privacy" and "rights", but really wants daddy to do "whatever it takes" and not tell them about it, will sooner or later park another venal Dick Cheney type at the levers of power and unaccountability.

All of the things "purist" liberals have castigated Obama over -- drones, IRS searches, now this -- have been underpinned by this very real concern, that a less reliable character gets in, with all these nifty superpowers at his disposal. Obama, as a con-law-prof, knows this better than anyone, that these powers he arrogates unto himself will at some point pass to a psycho or an idiot or an asshole, with no checks or balances to offset clear precedents.

This is part of the current design of the system, though, a center-right party either mewling ineffectively against their far-right opponents, or acting in cahoots with them, and getting away with it because their captive-market supporters are sufficiently cowed by the utter insanity of the far-righters. Yet they are operationally more alike than different; on issues that actually affect your life in a day-to-day respect, they are nearly identical, as a clear majority of 'murkins are never going to marry someone of the same gender or seek an abortion.

It is not a coincidence or a mistake that "both" parties share major donors, some of whom have a vested interest in seeing the impending health care "reform" changes get diluted even more, since having the foxes write henhouse legislation in the first place just wasn't quite enough. Once the talking heads are done huffing and puffing their manufactured outrage, get ready for a fall season of "scandal fatigue" stories, the better to soften up the constituencies for the rentier class to call in their chips on their congresscritters.

Killing In the Name of....

You know, if we're talking about areas where it might just be okey-doke to deploy us some killbots, these assholes might be an excellent place to check out. I mean, fuck them, like right in the neck. Seriously, let's drone us some poachers, shall we? I care less than a goddamn about the impoverishment of their situation; you know, it is actually possible these days to not have kids every time you have teh sexy timez, knaamsayin?

As for the demand side, don't want to be a cultural imperialist, but ah, what the fuckety-fuck is it with the Chinese? Are they just not going to be happy until they exterminate every elephant, tiger, rhino, shark, and whatever else they think will keep their tiny dicks hard? Jesus H. Christ, let's just donate a few pallets of Viagra already.

Certainly Americans have been criminally indifferent in the past to the plight and endangerment of many species, but this is insane. Yes, the idea of "charismatic megafauna" is subjective, but I think we all understand the ramifications of soups made of tiger penises or shark fins, or powdered rhino horns, or ivory trinkets for social-climbing assholes. Perhaps it's an economy of scale rather than culture, in that 1 in 3 humans are in China or India, so even a fraction of a percentage point translates into big kill numbers.

Whatever. Here's your internets curse, assholes -- if you've ever sought potency or luck from the by-product of a species that everyone knows is grievously endangered, may all forms of misfortune befall you, your family, your penis, anything and everything you hold dear. Rot in hell already.

Praise the Lowered

It would be all too easy to characterize this assertion that yoga leads to satanism as exactly the sort of extremist ankle-biting buffoonery that should be ridiculed. And it probably should be ridiculed.

But the thing is, when mainstream American Christianity is considered not as a system of spiritual thought and reflection, but as a uniquely political business model, it makes more sense, and is in fact intellectually consistent from E. W. Jackson's point of view. And why not? The spiritual component of yoga, at least as far as I've read of it, seems to revolve around clearing the mind, eliminating as much clutter as possible, freeing oneself of pre- and misconceptions about anything and everything, observing what (if anything) remains. It is not at all about hewing to a particular doxology, but rather about putting the individual into a spiritually and intellectually clear position to determine their own path. That and some stretching and pose-holding for physical conditioning.

Jackson's disciplined megachurch brand of Christianity, on the other hand, is the diametric opposite -- surrender and obedience are emphasized, not to the Gnostic ideal of finding the spirit within and without, but only to the selectively vengeful sky-daddy the pastors prescribe to their faithful flocks. The idea of opening one's mind in order to experience perception unfiltered and unchanged is heresy to them. To us godless hedonistic sybarites, the whole thing comes across as a big [makes overt "jerkoff" hand motion]. I mean, what is the deal with these goofballs, amirite?

But by the rules and logic they have already put forth in their dogma, they're correct in their assertions. Say what you will about these people, but they don't deal in ambiguities. There's not a lot of room for interpretation. And the most ironclad rule they have is that the deity, infallible in his wisdom, has made himself clear on what his expectations are. Asking questions or clearing one's head with eight-armed eastern claptrap is worse than unnecessary, it's sedition bordering on treason. When one's rules are absolute, extreme logic on contrary opinions and positions is entirely expected.

Arbeit Macht Foxx

Speaking as someone who bought into the false promises of the higher-ed racket hook, line, and sinker, and who basically works a second, unpaid side job trying to get extra money to pay down college loans (since that, uh, supposed MBA salary average ain't happening), I sincerely hope that when the inevitable economic collapse comes a-calling again, Virginia Foxx spends her final years living on cat food. The older I get, the more I work, and the more I read and try to create opportunities for myself. I drive a 20-year-old vehicle and haven't taken a real vacation in years. And I'm sick and goddamned tired of these self-righteous assholes with their assumptions about why some succeed wildly and some don't.

I got news for ya, Grandma -- it ain't always because dumb and lazy. Sometimes life is luck, and sometimes that luck isn't what it "should" be.

Remember that, your poor saps -- pick better parents next time.

[via Decline of the Empire]

Golden Rule, Golden Shower

Shorter Wall Street:  If the eeeevil, sociamalist-run gubmint doesn't continue to subsidize our institutionalized usury / bookmaking operation, we'll just go ahead and fuck up the economy again with a round of corrective profit-taking.

Get bent, America.

Bachmann Quitter Overdrive

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. -- Frank Zappa

Barely six months into her latest term from the state of Gerrymander, teabagger cupcake Mickey Bachmann has decided to shift gears on her career in shit shoveling, just as a cloud of finance investigations regarding her doomed (but hilarious) presidential campaign starts closing in. Would it be irresponsible to speculate? It would be irresponsible not to.

Unfortunately for women-in-prison movie aficionados, Mickey is unlikely to end up the big house. Chances are, she'll do just fine on the wingnut rubber-chicken circuit, peddling tales of woe and persecution. That and lobbying, the pestilential carbuncle on the prolapsed rectum of American politics. Plus her husband can keep grifting the health-care racket for curing gays. You can't parody these people anymore, seriously.

Not that it matters hugely; even if Bachmann is replaced by a librul Democrat, what then? More gutless incrementalism, spineless compromise, punting on first down, yada yada. There's no "mission accomplished" here, just a change in marching orders, at best a slightly less malevolent, cartoonish presence in an endless field of competing fnords.

Battlefield Afterbirth

Not to read much of anything into this, just amusing anecdata passing through, but which is more hilarious:  that the Fresh Prince's cobbled together, Shamalama-dingdong-directed CGI hoke-fest is transparently a $cientology home movie, only slightly less tedious and preposterous than Battlefield Earth; or that huge chunks of the comment thread at The Hollywood Reporter read like a Stormfront recruitment ad?

Well, we can just say that they're both hilarious in their own right, but not so much as what is apparently the central premise of this vanity project cum video game -- that humans abandoned Earth 1,000 years ago, and since that time, predatory species have evolved to kill humans. Yes, ladles and spoons, multiple species evolve specifically to eliminate another species that disappeared. Oh, and it gets deadly cold at night, and the air is only partially breathable by humans, yet mammals and jungle flora proliferate. Science!

Random Appreciation: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Apropos of nothing, this is a wonderful turn of phrase that applies to so much more than just the learning of French:

The Internet is overrun with advertisements meant for those who feel the longing for another language, who hope to attain understanding without the fear, the pain of mocking or rejection. There is a symmetry in language ads that promise fluency in three weeks and weight-loss ads that promise a new body in roughly the same mere days. But the older I get, the more I treasure the sprawling periods of incomprehension, the not knowing, the lands beyond Google, the places in which you must be immersed to comprehend.

As the man famously said, it ain't what we don't know, it's what we know for sure that just ain't so. That and the assumption that we can learn and gain things of lasting value over a weekend.

The Continued Cyberstalking of Fuckface Von Clownstick

Just a little drive-by posting on this fine holiday weekend, in which it is duly noted that golf-course gangsta and meteorology professor Fuckface von Clownstick has some smackdown for the [finger quotes] "scientists"out there:

Aha, I see what he did there, right? Subverting many tricksy cultural tropes by merely flicking the icicles off his combforward. Not only do the "scientists" not know what the hell they're talking about, but they have the power to influence the weather just by changing their minds about the empirical data they're analyzing! Awesome.

Bring It On

You know, as much as I pick at Obama and his many misgivings, I did vote for the guy, if primarily because the alternative really was much worse, at least by sheer degree. So while I'm glad that at least one of this mouthy dunce's listeners had the integrity to call in and repudiate her (supposedly rhetorical) call to violence, there are probably plenty more who agree with her, and maybe even a few of those who might act on her exhortation.

Should someone actually get hurt, Tantaros will no doubt hide behind the same sort of mealy-mouthed crap that Sarah Palin and her ilk did when Jared Loughner emptied the 30-round clip of his Glock into a supermarket parking lot. It's just entertainment, they'll say, or satire, not meant to be taken literally.

But see, morans don't do nuance. They can't spell it or pronounce it, they don't know what it means, they have no use for it, so they don't know or care how to distinguish it. The people who watch this nonsense do so for the same reason they watch reality teevee, whether it's interchangeable "court" shows or swamp-dwelling hillbillies:  to affirm the things they think they know, maybe stoke some imaginary grievances in the process. Really, 90% of the guff most of these halfwits engage in could be communicated in grunts.

I will say this, though -- contrary to the hokey Fixed Noise / Rash Limpballs conventional wisdom about lefty milquetoasts, we're not all Alan Colmes. Some of us actually have been in fights, and don't mind scrapping, and own and use guns.

The idea that this "hey, it's all good fun, go pimp-slap a pussy-ass librul" shit, if acted on, could have any sort of positive outcome for either the tough-guy Obama-hater or the presumed victim of his righteous wrath, is almost literally impossible. Andrea Tantaros told her audience to "punch [Obama voters] in the face." There's only two possible responses -- ignore it, or act upon it. All it takes is one person, that's all it ever takes, and then their chickenshit "we wuz jes' sayin'" Cracker Barrel caveats don't mean a goddamn thing.

The only way the flying monkeys are ever going to shut their gaping, jabbering cakeholes is ironically when someone happens to take them seriously one of these days. Hope they're not too surprised when the target of their bullying actually fights back.

Dog the Scandal Hunter

Once again, it boggles the mind that so many doofi waste so much spittle and pork-rind breath foaming over Benghazi and the IRS, when you have daily routine outrages such as this here, or the constant tax evasion of millionaires and corporations, or Eric Holder dicking around with potheads and hackers while the Masters of the Universe continue to fracture the world.

Then again, as we've noted multiple times, the things they profess to be pissed about have been done before by other administrations. They only started caring about them when the blah guy came to town.

Setting the Record Straight

There seems to be some confusion about something that I happen to think is very simple and obvious. Nonetheless, let's clear it up right now:  there is nothing gratuitous about Alice Eve, i'ight? That's good times right there, and I will gut the fool who says otherwise.

Damon Lindelof, on the other hand....

Godwin's Lawn

Via a commenter at G&T comes this pearl-clutching hilarity:

I'm sure the Jews, among others, will be delighted to hear that it is now "absolutely not illegal" to have government agents targeting a particular minority among the population.

You know how it goes: "first they came for the conservatives, but I was not a conservative...."

Wow, like, fuckin' seriously, Chief? The operative verb 'mongst various scaremongers and effect-chillers is "target" -- as in, the big bad gubmint "targeted" these poor, poor teabaggers.

Naw, son, this is targeting:

See, what the IRS did to the 'baggers was sweat them on their insistence on tax-exempt status. That's all. Really? Yeah, really. No one got dragged to jail, or sent off to a camp, or even lost any actual money. But because a good number of these shitheads were being bankrolled by scumbag millionaires who don't have the balls to let the peons see what they do under cover of darkness, the gubmint decided to do its job, and make sure that the requirements for 501(c)(4) status were actually being met.

Was this high, dastardly crime perpetrated by the eeeeevil islamocommienazimoooslim wizard, presumably while on a break from blowing up Benghazi and causing hurricanes to rise from the ocean? I dunno, was Bush personally behind siccing the IRS on the NAACP and Greenpeace?

It is this, over everything else, that I loathe about the self-satisfied teabaggers and their tedious jabber -- it's all of a convenience. The economy started going in the shitter in 2007; they conveniently waited until March of 2009, when the new guy had barely even gotten the seat warm, to start their righteous jihad. They're up in arms over Benghazi, as if no diplomatic personnel had gotten killed in the previous administration, or that teabagger representatives dumped the State Department's request for more money to beef up security at embassies around the world. They're whining about it like Benghazi is the Biggest Thing Evah, even though almost half of them don't even know what fucking country Benghazi's in. Smooth move, morons.

And now this happy horseshit, a political reversal of similar activities perpetrated by the previous occupants of power, but of course that didn't matter then, because IOKIYAR. Not only do they get to ignore the exact same actions just a few years ago from their own party, but they get to extrapolate the current idiocy into yet another dark, sinister conspiracy, to invoke Hitler. Look, assholes, if this country is turning into a concentration camp, then how is it that you're on the fucking internets all day whinging about it. Jesus, Obama's even worse at this fascism thing than he is at the socialism.

Well, hope they enjoy that while it lasts. They're in for a tough haul, most likely; the only reason the Goopers are able even to cause this much disruption is because of their carefully gerrymandered districts. That might hold the fort for them until the next census, but by then the country will be browner, younger, poorer per capita. Meanwhile, they've overinvested in the freakshow wingnuts who, to say the least, critically undermine their constant plaints about smaller, less intrusive gubmint.

Tumblr in the Hay

You know, I'm not ashamed to admit that I sport some nerd lumber whenever Marissa Mayer is in the news, but uh, whose bright idea was it to dump a bil plus on a micropornblogging venture with no real revenue model? Not that Tumblr can't or won't eventually turn a buck, as it continues to build, but right now, Google seems to be holding most of the cards in the tech biz, what with Dell circling the drain and Microsoft devolving into a shameless licensing racket.

Let's face it -- this weekend's real lottery winner wasn't the lucky bastard hiding out in America's Wang, it's David Karp.

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.

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.

Fight Fire With Fire

If this little stunt doesn't clarify what the NRA is and does at this point, I don't know what will. They subsist on imaginary grievances and fantastic scenarios, from jackbooted thugs coming to forcibly seize their weapons and bullets, to successfully waging an armed insurrection against a corrupt government.

(Not that being able to counter the excesses of corruption isn't a great thing, but they've got urban assault vehicles and drones and chemicals and nukes. You think some next wave David Koresh is going to hold off a siege of RPGs and Abrams tanks and Predators? Come on. First round of Willy Pete over the wall, and it's over. Your collection of Kalashnikovs and Chinese SKSs won't help you.)

Reasonable people (to the extent that there are any left) can agree to disagree over the specifics of where exactly the line is on the Second Amendment, whether it is presumed that people in the 18th century could conceive of semi-automatic handguns with 30-round clips, or that maybe mild background checks to possibly prevent even one of our weekly spree killings won't infringe on anyone. But the NRA exists merely to leverage antagonism and stoke paranoia.

And collect money. Sweet, sweet money.

So if you're sick of their bullshit, maybe it's time we all chipped in five or ten bucks, and got some lobbyists in there to counter said bullshit. Put together a reel of their greatest hits, go around the country, reach out to responsible gun owners with other responsible gun owners and reiterate that no one wants to take anyone's hunting rifles away, unless you're a violent felon or a raving nutbag.

Or you could continue to suffer, in quiet resentment, the seditious nonsense of a lobbying group whose membership numbers a little over one percent of Americans. Talk about a tyranny of the minority. Law, policy, and cultural rhetoric are apparently being determined by people who watched Red Dawn one too many times.

Frankly, the NRA and its members and political supporters need to decide whether they are merely an ankle-biting special interest group, or a wannabe separatist movement.

Conspiracies in Plain Sight

You know I loves me a good conspiracy theory as much as the next prole, but I think brother Orlov might be reaching a bit here (though his deeper insights as to the history of Russian-Chechen enmity is certainly interesting). It's not that it's inconceivable that people in the gubmint could and would conspire to do horrible things -- it is a business that seems to attract casual psychopaths -- it's that they are simply too organizationally inept and individually talkative to pull something like that off. There's always (okay, usually) one sane individual in any given room that says, if only to themselves, "Wait. What the fuckety-fuck!?!"

This is not to say that Orlov's assumption of false-flag absolutely can't be true, just that it's extraordinarily unlikely, that there's zero reliable evidence of such, and that at least one of his corroborating links appear to be babble and bullshit poached from WhirledNutDaily. But hey, it's a free country, it's okay to ask questions, even if they turn out to be the wrong questions. One thing people across the political spectrum can agree on is that historically, the powerful have tended to resort to unsavory means in order to retain or expand their hold on said power.

Now, all of that said, it is not tinfoil-hattery to point out that the incredibly militarized response in Boston should give one pause. In an urban area that has its share of armed assholes shooting one another routinely, the town went into martial-law lockdown with a fucking quickness, to hunt for a kid who might or might not have a gun and/or a jerry-rigged pressure cooker.

This is not to minimize the threat that the Tsarnaev brothers posed at a time of genuine chaos, but rather to suggest that this is a case of the creeping paramilitarization of municipal police forces. You want the good guys to have more and better weapons than the bad guys, but we're looking at zombie-apocalypse measures being utilized on a city of over half a million people, in response to a vicious crime, but one that is routine in many countries, the way gun massacres are routine here.

These extreme measures should be cause for some concern -- what, every time some asshole figures out how to make an IED or a pipe bomb in his basement, the entire city has to squat in their hovels while SWAT teams and private security firms wave their automatic weapons at every window?

And while Orlov's assumptions may appear to be off-base, his rationales have at least some credibility. The implosion of the empire continues apace, Dow 15000 notwithstanding. The oligarchs have made it clear that the planet is their cash cow, and they don't feel like sharing, because fuck you. Notions of pay commensurate with strenuousness and difficulty of work are whimsically archaic; in the Excel paradise, the man with the golden algorithm sets the earning curve.

But imperial maintenance is costly, and as noted, the donor class only shells out money in order to rent pols to do their bidding; maintaining infrastructure and creating jobs is your fucking problem, hoss. Capital mobility is king, and you are but a serf. What happens if gasoline prices hit six, seven bucks a gallon here, and supply chains start getting iffy? You ever take a look at how your food supply chain operates, how heavily it depends on the affordability of petroleum? What is the official response when the plebes start rioting for reals, when the cheez doodles are no longer on the shelves? What happens when the financial racket finally blows out like the bald tire that it really is?

And the debates over whether Boston was false-flag or not can continue as more evidence (or "evidence") comes in, but one fact comes through regardless -- this was a golden opportunity for gubmint to flex nuts and test civil response mechanisms in case of extreme circumstances.

Since there were no reports of anything untoward during the lockdown, one can assume that compliance has been found sufficient. Regular programming can resume.

Consider the Twittard; Or, The Ballad of Fuckface Von Clownstick

Doop-de-doop, let's see what 'murka's favrit toupee farmer is doing with his historically unparalleled success. Oh look, he's pimping his piece of shit teevee show -- that just got beat in the ratings by the entire Fox lineup -- and getting into another butthurt flame war with a comedian:

Those are not copy-and-pasted together, mind you -- they are consecutive posts.

But wait! Donald also has unwanted advice for the flailing newsprint industry:

No, only Trump is smart enough to take a publication struggling to retain some vestige of legitimacy, and turn it into a print version of CNN. Not that Trump vouching for a guy named "Pecker" isn't a thing of ironic beauty. Maybe Pecker can take over Time and give Bat Boy a column.

That's the business savvy you want from someone who claimed and proved that Barack Obama was born in....no, wait, that didn't quite work out. Well, he is the guy who successfully sued that nasty Bill Maher for $5 million and....oh, wait, right.

Hey, how about that Macy's line, amirite?

I hate people who spout this final one like it's some sort of hidden, profound wisdom:

Ahahaha. Right. Are there still people out there who actually believe this, or do they just not understand what the word "never" means, that it is immeasurably different from, say, "sometimes", or "occasionally"? Maybe we can send those folks over to the Congo (borderline NSFW), with Donny and Billy on the first plane, and they can toss that one out to the folks there, see what that gets 'em.

The Big Lie

Just in time for the, ah, "National" Day of Prayer (and hey, I didn't, don't, and won't, and I'm willing to bet that almost no one else did either, whether they profess to believe or not), comes this steaming pile from the folks at Big Babywood, or whatever the despondent followers of L. Ron Breitbart (PBUH) are calling it this week.

So President Barack Obama’s civilian appointees who lead the Pentagon are confirming that the military will make it a crime--possibly resulting in imprisonment--for those in uniform to share their faith. This would include chaplains—military officers who are ordained clergymen of their faith (mostly Christian pastors or priests, or Jewish rabbis)--whose duty since the founding of the U.S. military under George Washington is to teach their faith and minister to the spiritual needs of troops who come to them for counsel, instruction, or comfort.

This regulation would severely limit expressions of faith in the military, even on a one-to-one basis between close friends. It could also effectively abolish the position of chaplain in the military, as it would not allow chaplains (or any service members, for that matter), to say anything about their faith that others say led them to think they were being encouraged to make faith part of their life. It’s difficult to imagine how a member of the clergy could give spiritual counseling without saying anything that might be perceived in that fashion.

And it's been sternly retweeted by #jesuschristnotyouagain, so it must be true!

Oooh, heavy duty! Love that Mama Grizzly thinks she can order the preznit like she's telling one of her kids not to do drugs or have premarital sex. He'd "better clear this up today, right now", or I'll, I'll....go on Greta Van Susterenenen and make seagull noises until someone pays me to stick a cork in it.

Noted call-girl aficionado Charlie Sheen once famously cracked that he didn't pay hookers for the sex, he paid them to go home afterward. There may be a corollary theory in the second half of that equation somewhere with regard to Palin. The voice is screechy, but even her writing instantly makes me think of the "wonk-wonk-wonk" muffled-trumpet sound of Charlie Brown's teacher.

Then again, the last time this broad got a wild hair in her ass, someone got shot. So you might not want to piss her off.

Labor Daze

So, uh, lessee here what people's poet Sarah Palin, aka "The Quitter from Twitter" is down to these days:

Oh no she di'unt! That is some grade-A Fuckface von Clownstick smackdown, yo. I especially like how she says "working our asses" off, like she's just a down sista like you, with a second job cleaning motel rooms just to make ends meet.

And totally not a past-their-sell-by-date ankle-biter cashing checks for ghost-written doorstops that no one in their right mind would read, much less write, so stop it you guys! It's quite a formidable work ethic in that family, truly. But there's only so many Big Gulp "punchlines" you can pull out of your ass before you have to move on to the next schtick.

Now, the WHCD nerdprom is a tiresome, unseemly, self-satisfied party thrown by people who do little but party most of the year. Has been for some time. So I guess she gets credit for concern-trolling that rare acorn, before she goes back to doing whatever it is she does.

Rule of Law

"We must be careful about what we pretend to be." -- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

So let's see if we have this straight:  some two-thirds of the remaining prisoners in Guantanamo -- most of whom have been cleared for release, yet not released all the same -- continue to rot in their subtropical dungeon, without charge nor trial, for over a decade now. The only way for them to get out of their Orwellian sentence is suicide, and some of them have managed to take that path.

Now those who remain get force-fed, nasally. Perhaps this is because it was deemed to be even more painful and humiliating than being force-fed anally. Who knows? Nothing makes sense about this situation anymore. Except that nobody seems to give a shit whether these people will spend the rest of their lives stuck in some legal limbo that no one is in much of a rush to rectify.

Either they are guilty, or they aren't. Either there is evidence against them, or there isn't. Put them on trial and have done with it if they actually did something, or admit a mistake and set them free, and close this place already.

Just as we executed enemies who waterboarded Americans during World War 2, but reserved the right to use the same form of torture when it suited us, so the application of basic jurisprudence appears at this point to be nothing more than a polite affectation. Again, either we -- and our endlessly dithering constitutional law scholar of a president -- believe that it is wrong to imprison a human being without charge, trial, or proof of crime, or we believe it's perfectly fine to do such a thing for no better reason than political convenience and cowardice.

This is yet another in a long (and getting longer all the time) line of issues where Obama continues to whiff. If he wants his legacy to be something other than "Congress wouldn't let me" then he needs to sack up and by god do something about anything.

Seriously, dude, no one's expecting loaves and fishes. Create a few decent jobs; take some steps to alleviate the impending clustersomething that health care deform will perpetuate, since it does nothing at all to address the usurious racket comprising the American health care system; enforce basic party discipline to keep retiring Democrats onboard with simple background-check measures for deadly weapons; maybe pressure Harry Reid to insist on actually having to get your ass up there and spend time filibustering, rather than this lame "threat" dodge the goopers get away with routinely. Take a bold stand that civilized nations don't lock people up without charge and lose them in an offshore gulag for a decade or so.

Put these people on trial; if they're guilty, shoot them as enemy combatants. Whatever. But do something, ferchrissake, something slightly bolder and more principled than strapping a person to a table and jamming tubes up their nose to force-feed them like a foie gras goose. The fact that said person may not only have been supposed to be released, but may very well be innocent in the first place, and spent a decade of their life in hell because of someone else's chickenshittery, is a disgrace.

You can make fun of Dubya's ridonkulous Liberry and its self-serving exhibits, but what's Obama's library going to look like at the rate he's going, a cartoon of Barry O getting pushed around by Mitch McConnell and Jamie Dimon for eight goddamned years?

I know his acolytes console themselves that his feckless 11th-dimensional chess mastery is somehow infinity better than whatever shit sandwich Romney and Ryan were cooking up. But only as a mild, eroding bulwark against the eternal predations of the oligarchy, not that Obama has done thing one about them or even slowed them down. In the meantime, every bloody thing you despised about the Bushies -- imprisonment without trial, drone war without end, the ongoing and deliberate ruination of the financial system, the rich getting richer and the poor no longer even getting by -- continue unabated.

There's not much more time for Obama to decide and act on whether he wants to end on eight years of excuses and ineffectual moderation, or to take a risk and do something, anything, pick a direction and grab a shovel. I have zero faith that he'll do the right thing, and it no longer matters whether he wants to but can't, or if he simply was never the transformative figure he was pretending to be. Just another politician, forever chasing the next election and too timid to do anything that might actually impact someone from the non-donor class.