The Enema Within

So we have our first truly hilarious midterm moment of the season -- future Speaker of the House Eric Cantor gets drummed out in the wild-card round by some Randroid econ tool from a small private college. Worth its weight in comedy gold.

The teabaggers have the establishment dorks on the run, and it is fun to watch. Thad Cochran barely managed to coast on the miniscule goodwill generated by his opponent's shenanigans enough to qualify for a runoff against said opponent. Huckleberry Closetcase beat back his primary opponents, but mostly because there were six of them splintered against him, and Huck has standing invitations to free-advertise on all the Sunday morning circle jerks.

On the one hand, getcha popcorn, and simply bide your time until stupid people live down to their names, and say stupid things, and other stupid people vote for them regardless. On the other hand, if the Democrats want to at least give the impression that they're not just dickless corporate stooges, they are going to have to up their game. How else is La Hillary s'posta get her turn in '16?

Deep Thought

Having Oliver North on your news program to advise on the ethics and practicality of negotiating with terrorists for hostages is pretty much like having John Wayne Gacy show you how to optimize your crawlspace.

Look, I don't know if Bowe Bergdahl is a deserter or not, and neither do you. But I think we all know this -- Obama could have rescued Santa Claus from an al Qaeda torture chamber, power drill embedded in his fibula, and liquidated the bastards, and these fucking people would have found something to complain about.

Takin' Care of Business

Never were we told, we'd be bought and sold, when we were innocent. -- Fuel, Innocent

I missed this missive from Brother Orlov a couple weeks ago, but it is spot-on, as any casual observer should be able to tell. At least at the national level, your vote, even if it's not suppressed, even if it's "for" someone rather than merely "against" an opponent, is a waste, a piss in the wind, something to be ignored en masse.

This should be laid out in simple terms of procession, as often as possible:  The political system is owned and operated by a very small group of very wealthy individuals and corporations. This same oligarchical class also --coincidentally, mind you -- happens to own all of the major canals of disseminating points of information and discussion, not just the networks who provide content, but the physical modes by which said content is transported. To the extent that this class appears to tolerate any meaningful form of dissent or reform, it is almost entirely illusional.

Consider the rise and flail of one Barack Hussein Obama, who was seen at his first investiture in 2008 as a genuinely transformational figure, someone who not only could but desired to engage in systemic reform, and could communicate this on an intellectually honest level. Welp, how has that all turned out? You can -- and should -- defend Obama to a great extent by reiterating the blatant, shameless obstructionism of the teahadis in the House, but you must also accept that Obama has too often been diffident and passive in the face of their idiocy and hostility.

I said it when it happened, and I'll say it again -- there are two things that happened very early on after Obama's first election that he could and should have straightened out. The first incident occurred at the '08 Republican National Convention, where Joe Lieberman ratfucked Obama (and yes, you whinging assholes who are still crying about Ralph Nader, I want you to consider what sort of vice-president this shameless cocksucker would have been). The first thing Obama should have done after winning that election was wall-slam the esteemed senior fuckface from Connecticut and explain to him in no uncertain terms how shit was going to roll from here on out. Instead, he fucking hugged him. Shit, why don't you knit him a fucking sweater while you're at it, wash his car or something? Jesus H. Christ.

The second major opportunity missed was when Obama held a (giggle) health care address in September of 2009, and pigfucker Addison Graves "Call me Joe, because that's a man's name" Wilson decided to impress his colleagues by heckling Obama, shouting "You lie!" not once, but twice during the speech. Now, someone who's serious about not being pushed around by bidness-as-usual assholes would be on the phone to their party chairman the next day, and instruct them to spend $50m in the next election to push that motherless fuck out, if that's what it took. They gave it a token shot in 2010, but didn't even bother to run an opponent against Wilson in 2012. Balls to the wall, amirite?

You might (rightly) say, "Well, jeez, Heywood, what can ya do? We have to reach across the aisle, forge a consensus, politics is the art of the possible, blahbedy-blah-blah." Fair enough, and believe it or not, I agree with the principle of that. But I also recognize when a bully is trying to test defenses and pushbacks, and the only way, unfortunately, to beat such people back is to go full fucking apeshit on them. Before Obama had been in office for a full year, the Republicans understood that he was willing to take shit from them, and that bolstered their resolve to thumb their dicks and obstruct everything he proposed.

So when the honest post-mortem on this administration gets written, if it ever gets written, it will have to state at or near the top that one, Obama failed to accomplish much of what he said he'd do and set out to do; and two, that this was primarily because of an inability to assert himself convincingly with his opponents -- in short, people who laugh at you will never work with you or concede to you. On anything.

These days, I have two recurring dreams, desires, whatever you want to call them. One is some sort of rich-uncle windfall coming in, and I cash out and move to Costa Rica or Croatia or somewhere, and see what life is like outside the toxic circle. The second, more contemporaneous of these idealized visions is a scenario where "we" the "people" are presented by our corporate insect overlords with a "choice" between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. And we say "fuck you very much," and act and react accordingly. We stop pretending, we stop legitimizing this bullshit, we stop hoping that someone, anyone upstairs gives a red-hot monkey-fuck about anyone besides themselves, we stop waiting for crumbs from the table that never seem to come.

I mean, neither of those things will ever happen, but one has to hold out some sense of hope.

Money Grab

I guess the thrill of hosting the Olympics is now officially gone, and good riddance. Notice that not a single one of the venues listed in the Deadspin article is in the US. Not that we're above that, mind you; there's never a shortage of municipalities begging to force its own citizens to build a playground for millionaires playing for teams owned by billionaires.

Watching the Olympics used to be a thrill when I was a kid; I still remember watching the Innsbruck and Montreal Games in 1976. There wasn't a particular favorite sport, but certainly the various "death on ice" events -- your bobsled, your giant slalom, etc., were exciting, the gymnasts were impressive, and the camaraderie and competition between athletes from various nations seemed evident.

But now it's just a big ol' hustle, stuffed with inane "human interest" stories and infinite commercials on an endless loop. I mean, they have to recoup the money somehow, we all get that. But it's about as entertaining and inspiring as watching flies fuck (as my kindly great-grandmother used to say in Sunday school).

Even people who enjoy watching sports -- and I'm definitely one of them; I watch a decent amount of NBA and MLB during playoff seasons, and am pretty much encyclopedic on college and pro football at this point -- have to admit that it's at best a diversion from real, pervasive issues, and at worst a system that grinds up the bodies of young men for the costly amusement of fans, the expense of taxpayers, and the benefit of owners only.

The Olympics have fallen into this trap as well; long ago, they abandoned the pretense of "amateur" -- as in, non-professional -- competitors on the world stage, which makes the whole thing even more of a shameless joke. It's sad, but it's up to people whether they want to keep supporting this racket or not.

Marketing to the Choir

Fundamentalists of any religion are, by definition, obsessed with their own certitude, and the need for everyone else to abide by their divine pipeline. I suppose the primary difference (and perhaps, if you'll pardon the pun, the saving grace) of the Christian fundamentalist, as opposed to the violent psychopathy of the Islamic fundamentalist, is that the Christian is first and foremost American, which means that his primary purpose is sales.

Case in point:  this guy, who has apparently written 25 books (probably all about the same thing, something along the lines of "Jesus really loves you, but God is getting sick of your decadent bullshit and will burn you in the fiery pits of hell for all eternity, so put down the cock!"). While the headline gulls one into believing that the article will describe "America's Greatest Moral Crisis," (which of course is abortion and homosexuality and such like, and totally not, as some hippie dude once put it, the love of money, so stop it you guys!) one is treated to such a cobbled-together pastiche of pull quotes and self-tributes, it becomes almost impossible to tell what parts of this slapdash exercise qualify as new, fresh thought.

I mean, it's still a damn sight better than whipping or executing people for being gay, or committing adultery, or marrying someone of another faith. But even a hard-boiled atheist skeptic wants to see a more challenging, developed level of thought and ideas in their faith-based counterparts, not this stylized ipse dixit jabber. Batman wants to go up against the Joker, not some junkie pickpocket trying to shake down little old ladies with a finger gun pointing through the pocket of his tattered hoodie. This transparent "buy one of my books" schtick, masquerading as a serious thought piece, is just downright embarrassing.

Plumbing the Depths

Folks, d'ya remember a cartoon character from the 2008 preznitential campaignsideshow, bald-headed galoot who went by the name "Joe the Plumber," who reified the teatard teleology of the self-made bootstrapper making his way in this socialist paradise, in spite of libtards' attempts to hold back his greatness? Yeah, that guy.

So apparently "Joe," in between plumbing gigs, has returned to his self-anointed role as vox populi for the low-forehead set, and written an "open letter" to gunsplain to the parents of the victims in the Isla Vista shooting, you know, 72 hours ago. Certainly no one else on the professional or amateur opinion-mongering circuit (uh, including your humble blog proprietor right here) has waited for the bodies to get cold before analyzing the situation.

But Wurzelbacher's trite, paranoid manifesto brings another dimension to the notion of, well, insensitivity. (Not to mention, you know, the ludicrous proposition that there was actually a person out there observing the coverage thus far of this tragedy, and saying to themselves, "You know what? I wonder what that 'Joe the Plumber' dude, the guy whose first name is not Joe and is not really a licensed plumber, thinks about this whole rotten mess.")

"[Y]our dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights"? Seriously, this is the best way to frame a response to a grieving father who just lost his kid hours before, who hasn't even had a chance to bury him? Who does this? Well, we know who does this, but still, as always -- what the hell is wrong with these people?

There's a minimal chance that any meaningful debate about gun control will arise from the Isla Vista tragedy, whether it's initiated by a grief-stricken parent or an opportunistic politician. In fact, no politician who isn't bulletproof in their incumbency will even suggest that any actual measures be taken. You know it, I know it, Richard Martinez knows it, the NRA knows it, and Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher knows it as well.

The public has become inured and desensitized to these events, as they happen with regularity, and the gun culture (there clearly is such a thing; in fact, of all the voices that clamor after these routine tragedies, theirs is always the loudest and most strident) steeps a sufficient amount of people, apparently besotted with action-movie heroism tropes, into sincerely believing that one thing that could have prevented or altered Elliot Rodger's bizarre rampage was a "good guy" with a gun.

And as I mentioned before, it's hard to tell exactly where any real suggestions as to gun control would have prevented this. Rodger purchased his guns legally, months ago, in California, which has rigorous background checks and waiting periods. Now, if Rodger had had to purchase insurance on the firearms he bought, the way he (or someone) had to pay insurance on the BMW and Mercedes daddy bought for him to drive around Santa Barbara, there might have been a different dynamic in play. Perhaps not, but the idea might have merit in discussion.

And this is where the gun activists lose the thread. For them, since the Second Amendment is a constitutional right and is therefore impermeable and unalterable, no discussion is allowed. There is no room for debate, because as far as they're concerned, it would be like debating the merits of breathing air, drinking water, eating food. (Of course, since these folks usually find themselves on the side of unconscionable polluters, those particular issues tend to resolve themselves with some regularity as well, as a cursory glance at red-state life expectancy will demonstrate.)

Of course some of the chatter, on either side, in the wake of tragedies like is going to be cynical, self-serving, opportunistic. But even honest questions and debate get shouted down now; even legitimate protests and disagreements are dealt with by intimidation and harassment. They may revere their immutable interpretation of the Second Amendment, but they clearly have nothing but contempt for the First.

Planet of the Apes

You know, there's rarely an opportunity missed to take cheap shots at 'murkin culcher burble, slack-jawed fish-in-a-barrel watch-the-neighbors-sort-their-sock-drawers crap that we all get saturated in, or the deeper, darker, oppression of minorities, gays, women, etc. Those things are all true.

Yet this sort of thing puts all of the above to shame. Or this. The people, the cultures that perpetrate "honor killing" or execution for "apostasy" are nothing more than a skid mark on humanity's collective underwear. They have nothing to offer, nothing to add to the world. It needs to be said.

Even when they're not murdering their daughters for imaginary transgressions, they oppress them every moment of their lives, covering them in beekeeper suits, marrying them to their own cousins, beating them to keep them cowed. They have a pathological hatred of women, one that makes your garden-variety pro-life goofball in America look like an amateur.

There are knuckle-dragging assholes everywhere, but the ones in the "Islamic republics" seem to be determined to show up everyone else. Folks, it ain't a contest. The rest of the world just looks at your toxic behavior and wonders what the hell is wrong with you.

[Update 5/29/14 19:00 PDT:  It gets better. These people are just all kinds of awesome.]

Ladies' Man

In the wake of the Isla Vista killings a couple days ago, it's certainly not shocking but might still catch some (including yours truly) unawares that there is something called a "pick-up artist [PUA] community." If you have the stomach to wade through such guff, you're a better person than me, but from the Slate article one can still glean the basics -- that these communities are populated by men who hate women (or at least view them as things to be acquired by any means necessary) and probably hate themselves and each other as well.

Certainly there are "alphas" and "betas" in this world, and the trope of the "nice guy" getting "friend-zoned" by his heart's desire is the staple of many a rom-com over the years. This is not in dispute. I suppose my puzzlement with this "community" thing of stratifying and stat-ifying "the game" is that, while it is a game, the rules are simpler than these doofuses seem to understand.

[Edit:  I had a half-dozen or so common-sense "rules" worked up for your entertainment, but decided to punt because it came out sounding uncomfortably close to these bro-douche PUA assholes. The basics of it should be obvious to anyone who isn't emotionally or socially stunted -- go out with your friends once in a while, because that's how you meet new people; don't overthink it or fixate on a person you barely know; be self-aware of things you may need to work on.

Perhaps most importantly, talk to women as if they're human beings, and not "objects" of your "affection." See previous advice about being self-aware. And relax -- you're trying to get laid, not come up with a cure for cancer. Look at some of the other folks getting laid. How hard can it be, really?]

You look at the self-inflicted trauma of someone like Elliot Rodger, and all you can do is wonder. Here's a kid who had money and toys at his disposal, and at least some connections that women would dig. But, uh, I'm gonna go out on a limb and speculate that anyone who barfs up a 140-page manifesto about he's going to torture and slaughter the whores who didn't see what a knight in shining armor he was, there's someone who could have benefited from the above Obvious Rules.

Same with the PUA guys. These poor bastards have channeled their inability to self reflect into this weird obsession with developing a method or process to snagging that smokin' hot babe. This sense of entitlement permeates popular culture; every year, there's a number of popular movies and teevee shows featuring some fat schlub punching way above his weight -- say, Kevin James married to Salma Hayek. Notice that this never happens in the opposite direction; you are never going to see a movie with, say, Melissa McCarthy married to Brad Pitt.

This gets reinforced and conditioned over the years, until you get a particular strain of tool who thinks he's entitled to the hottest chick in the room. These guys (okay, okay, I did check out the PUA site a bit; I had to rubberneck at the 50-car pile-up), once you drill down a bit, really seem to be motivated by the urge to "get back" at the cute chick they obsessed over in high school, but who failed to see their awesomeness and drop to her knees forthwith.

So they buy into this "neuro-linguistic programming" schtick, and think they can basically hypnotize or convince any woman they talk to into jumping their bones. Inevitably they are disappointed when they try out their "game" and it doesn't work. Or it does work, and they get laid, but fireworks and rainbows don't shoot out of her ass, and they feel gypped. After all, they were entitled to having their greatness validated.

Just as rape is not really a crime of sex, so much as a crime of power and assertion, so does this PUA thing come across less as an effort to find love or sex or even an emotional connection with another human being, but an attempt to claim status and peer recognition. Where most Americans have been properly conditioned to self-actualize by acquiring money and toys and jacked-up four-by pick-em-up trucks to compensate for lack of penile girth, these twits have convinced themselves that they need to overthink what, for even average guys, is one of the easier things in life to do -- get laid.

Press the Meat

Driftglass brings up some nice points regarding the esteemed institution of the Sunday morning punditocracy. One would think that the holiday weekend had a substantial role in yesterday's Meet the Press being pre-empted by F1 racing.

The question still remains, though:  who watches this shit, especially on a regular basis. Do you watch any of these idiotic Sunday morning fuckfests, do you know anyone who does? I sure as hell don't on both counts. Most people will say that life is too short, and weekends are spent in infinitely better ways than tuning in to liars being interviewed and analyzed by insular chumps.

These people are talking to each other, not to any of us. Politics, never a respectable pastime in the first place, is now rather transparently just another racket, in a nation run by rackets. It was already a foregone conclusion by the time the two-ply bumwipe known as Citizens United passed through SCOTUS (yet another American institution that has outlived its usefulness) like a pork tamale from a disreputable taco truck.

But the CU (next Tuesday) ruling sealed the deal, legitimized the blatantly transactional nature of the American political system. The total 2012 election spending topped $7 billion. More than $2 bn was spent by the two major candidates for president. The bulk of all that money was raised and/or donated by large contributors. It is not merely naïve to suppose that the large donors, and the corporations who own the networks which broadcast the Sunday morning follies, don't have directly vested interests in the outcomes of these rituals -- it is flat-out stupid to not understand intrinsically the power and purpose of those connections.

Chomsky laid this all out more than 25 years ago in Manufacturing Consent, but the point bears repeating -- there is no hidden, dark conspiracy, no oaths or rituals sworn in smoke-filled backrooms. This is all out in the open. The hyper-concentration of ownership of these resources is self-perpetuating, and anyone wanting to enter the game knows this before they even get into the game. Any and every talking head we gawp at on any given day, or time of day, knows what the rules are, without even having to have those rules explained to them.

For every outlier like, say, Bill Moyers, there are two hundred Erin Burnetts or David Gregorys. Hell, when was the last time you saw Noam Chomsky on your teevee, versus the usual rotation of known liars, calumniators, and just lazy thinkers, giving bad or false analysis of a situation they know jack shit about? These things are not by accident, but by design -- there are large, grotesque amounts of money in play these days, and these fuckers aren't taking any chances.

The buildup to the big Battle of the Dynasties, Hillary versus Jeb, will continue apace, people will show up like they think have a real choice, and then the second after the winner is anointed in 2016, the circle jerk to 2020 begins anew. It is an industry in the truest sense of the word.

The Virgin Suicides

So we kick off our We Honor Our Soldiers With Bullshit Health Care Weekend with a massacre that has some strange locational and motivational parallels. More than anything, it's a deep, disturbing look into the fevered brain of a young man that should have had the world laid out right in front of him, but for some reason couldn't make anything of it. It's brutal to read, but provides a ton of context.

There is the temptation to blame the "gun culture", the NRA, and politicians for this horror. That's understandable; on a planet full of assholes, Wayne LaPierre certainly stands tall in that regard. And you could make a reasonable argument as to the Glock 34's standard 17-round (33 optional!) magazine capacity. But as of now, it appears that Elliot Rodger purchased his guns legally, went through California's waiting period and background checks, the whole nine yards.

If it were an illegally obtained AK-47, it would be a different story. It would be easy money chastising the usual gun nuts over their callous indifference to tragedies such as these. But this is not one of those instances, tragic as it is.

The more you read the excerpts of Rodger's sketchy manifesto, you have to wonder. In a world where most average schmucks seem to have few obstacles to getting laid, how is it that a privileged kid who drives high-end German automobiles, and whose dad just happens to be an assistant director on one of the hotter movie franchises right now, can't get any action? Who knows? The details will come out soon enough, if we allow ourselves to catch our collective breath.

Chances are, even if Rodger's fantasy had come true, it wouldn't have satisfied him, wouldn't have silenced whatever demons were driving him. As we all know (I mean you all have had sex before right?), sex is great, an important part of life, but people who have this vision built up in their heads of sex being the absolute pinnacle of human existence are inevitably doomed to disappointment.

These big, crazy tragedies happen far too often, because we are a big, crazy nation, desensitized to violence, attuned to easy sexual gratification, and affixed to social ranking amongst our peers. There is always the impulse to assume, to presume that Something Must (Or Can, Or Should) Be Done when these things happen. Sometimes we can do something, sometimes we can't. This is an example of the latter.

Given that Elliot Rodger appears to have legally purchased his firearm, as is his right, curtailing the existing rights of gun owners as a response would be as irresponsible and unreasonable as taking people's vehicles away as a response to David Attias mowing down coeds in his Saab thirteen years ago. Of course, the opposite will happen; nothing will be done and the whole terrible event will go down the memory hole with all the others. That's not much better.

Cowards

Over the years I think I've been a pretty consistent supporter of the 2nd Amendment as written, with reasonable constraints. This is based on the notion that, despite the unspeakable tragedies that almost routinely take place with firearms in these here Yewnighted States, it is simply unrealistic to try to engage in any meaningful confiscatory actions, given that there are more guns than people here; and more importantly, it is simply wrong (beyond enforcing and instituting reasonable regulations and restrictions) to punish the majority of responsible gun owners and users for the actions of a demented few.

That said, incidents like these [via Balloon Juice] certainly make a case for just saying fuck it, and taking away some toys from some assholes. I'm pretty sure that the Founding Fathers did not have these thumb-dick losers in mind when they conceived of armed self-defense against the encroachment of tyranny.

Preaching to the Choir in the Briar Patch

Elaborating a little further on "Benghazigategate", which is to Fux News what the missing Malaysian jet is to CNN, a steaming fnord in the punch bowl, meant explicitly to distract folks from anything of actual import. Again, Congressman Car Alarm and his merry band of idiots know full well that there is no there there, that compared to US Embassy deaths in the past, the most damning thing about Benghazi is that it was a PR fuck-up.

I shouldn't have to say this, but I do anyway -- that is not to minimize the tragic, violent death of foreign service personnel, but simply to point out that dozens of people were killed in multiple incidents around the world during Fredo's tenure, and no one said jack shit. In Beirut in the early '80s, between the US Embassy and Marine barracks attacks, over 300 people were lost, and there were glaring security issues in the latter attack that should have gotten someone's ass whipped.

And that's not even to mention the weird fact that some of the most strident criers of this particular "wolf!" are the same folks who voted to defund embassy security. So, you know, fuck you and the horse you rode in on, fellas.

Now, all that said, I think it's a splendid thing for these folks to continue with their obsession, and I think the Democrats should (and probably do, but won't say so) embrace it as well. For one, it is only going to get the base to vote in the midterms, it will not sway or convince a single person truly on the proverbial fence. It is of no strategic use.

Second, and maybe this is just my personal preference, the only possible long-term outcome of obsessing over this nothingburger is that it sticks to Hillary Clinton's "my turn" presidential campaign, and that would be just fine. It is a sad state of affairs when, in a fairly sophisticated nation of 320 million people, and a hyperactive electoral industry with dollars flowing through it like water through Niagara Falls, the best our "two" parties can come up with are Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.

Let me be even more clear:  if the "choice" in 2016 comes down to Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, then we might as well just dispense with the endless campaign, the tedious analysis, the useless debates, and just have a fucking coin toss at the Super Bowl, and not bother to look at the result. It would be as explicit an indicator of the truth about the political system as one could imagine, the open acknowledgement that your vote is worthless, outcomes are inevitable, and the best you can hope for is for some rich tool to toss you a better piece of flotsam on which to weather an endless storm.

Don't get me wrong. If it comes down to Clinton versus whatever clown-shoes psychopath the Republicans roll out, you hold your nose and vote for her, and hope next time there'll be a better choice, just like you've done since day one. This is based on the presumption that at least the Democratic candidate has at least a slight chance of being marginally less catastrophic to the interests of what remains of the American working class.

It's just that it is always going to be this way, and it is not an accident but by design, and the only way to make it stop is to, well, make it stop.

It's Getting Drafty

OK, it's official -- with all the scheduling maneuvers and extensions, the hype and the barrage of ridonkulous mock drafts, the NFL draft has gotten completely out of hand. Already the hype has gotten to where folks are openly speculating if it might be pushed back yet another week, and extended to four days.

All this for something that the most rigorous statistical analysis imaginable can realistically characterize as a crapshoot. It's stunning to consider, even more so when factoring in the NCAA's recent problems with college players suddenly wanting to, you know, get paid for the profit they add to their schools' balance sheets.

These are situations and dynamics which will continue to get more, not less, problematic. The prognostication industry, despite its newer and better econometric regression analysis tools and formulas, is no better at determining how a random human being will work out with a team of random human beings, run by yet another staff of random human beings.

This is relevant because, at its cold heart, the NFL is a corporation, and as such, is a fairly rational indicator of business behavior and expectations. Modes of strategy, tactics, leadership, motivation, and especially public relations are inherent in virtually any NFL activity. So at the very least, it will be interesting to see how the corporation handles its eventual overreach in extending what used to be a fairly routine, mundane annual task.

Without a Prayer

As far as praying in public events goes, I feel about the same as I do about religious artyfacts or farting in public -- as long as everyone gets their shot in, fine. I have a feeling that the good folk of this or that sectarian township will righteously bristle when approached by members of a less popular cause, but c'est la vie, connards.

Cabin Fever

The Benghazi fever can probably be cured with more cowbell, but honestly, why bother or worry? This is one of those pointless things that will convert or motivate absolutely no one; statistically, there is virtually no living human who is going to look at this ongoing handjob and say to themselves, "Self, I was going to vote for the Democratic candidate in these here midterms, but because of the vague, unfounded speculations surrounding the Benghazi attack, I'm going to go right ahead and vote against my rational self-interest, and endorse the red-assed baboon that the Republicans are running. While I'm at it, I'll just hit myself in the head with a hammer or a large rock for a while."

But hey, whatever. Look, instead of griping about the ludicrous idiocy of the House Republicans, maybe start running some viable candidates and putting some real money behind them. I mean, Darrell Issa is not really Jesus H. Christ, he just thinks he is.

Qualifications

Can someone kindly explain why, in a job market where thousands of people holding master's degrees are either looking for work or holding jobs way beneath their skill levels, David Brooks is still employed? Seriously, if one were to sit down and scrutinize each individual player in the professional pundit industry, they'd come away completely perplexed.

Or, you know, with a deeper understanding of why utter morons are entrusted with the important job of manufacturing acceptable opinion and consent. It is neither accident nor mere circumstance that you'll see someone like Bobo on your teevee a hundred times for every occasion that, say, Noam Chomsky is allowed anywhere near a corporate media newsotainment program.

By now, Bobo should have massive arms, from carrying water for his dark overlords lo these many decades. Strangely, he still looks like he's made of pipe cleaners and broken dreams.

Lost Cause

From the "better late than never movie review" files, here's a quick rundown of 12 Years a Slave:  it's a lavishly photographed, brilliantly executed, disgusting, appalling film. It is in fact, I believe, meant to be all of those things, and as such, fits well into my wabi-sabi view of the universe.

And yet, it also transcends that aesthetic, in that when viewing movies such as 12 Years or Django Unchained, I inevitably come away thinking that William Tecumseh Sherman let them off too easy, that if there had been atomic bombs and daisy cutters at the time, the confederacy sorely deserved to have flaming hell visited upon them.

While the national media gets its periodic moral enema on over the Donald Sterling kerfuffle, some things need to be put into perspective:  one, that Sterling is 80 years old, and a billionaire, so banning him from the NBA "for life" means less than folks might like it to; and two, the media abandoned tealoading welfare rancher Cliven Bundy way too quickly, perhaps because Bundy's own people spotted him granting interviews whilst holding a dead calf, and thus realized because of that, that their boy might just be shithouse-rat crayzay.

Bundy's comments ("I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro") deserve more scrutiny in this light. What films like 12 Years (and to a lesser degree, Django) make clear is what more astute observers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates have been elucidating -- that this dynamic is and was systemic, and that, no matter how often these "those darn racist bastards" stories crop up in the media, things don't just magically wash out that cleanly. There are any number of studies showing hard numbers on the discrepancy of education for inner-city schools, or for numbers of black men imprisoned, versus other races.

Because Cliven Bundy was primarily a conservatard cause celebre, once he made his bed, his conserva-buddies were the first to jump ship on his ass. They have a hard enough time as it is convincing non-whites to vote or even listen to them, they don't need this asshole mucking things up for them.

And yet, it is only sensible and just to continue exploring the motifs behind someone like Bundy. Recall that this started with Bundy as a would-be insurrectionist, replete with armed supporters ready to square off with the feds over someone else's right to graze cattle on public lands. The Hannity types were just fine with all that, not just because Black President, but because Democratic President. They will pull this shit and more on the next one, and the one after that. Anything and everything to distract and obstruct.

So we've got the crazy established, but it went up another substantial notch. Again, Bundy's comments re "the Negro" were not so much merely insensitive as thuggishly clueless, the musings of a person who seems genuinely not to understand why they shouldn't bludgeon a beloved pet.

The only thing a thoughtless dickweed like Cliven Bundy will understand, in the wake of his revolting "I wuz jes' wondrin'" comments, is to be forced to pick cotton all day under the hot sun and the lash of the whip, and then to watch 12 Years over and over again until he gets it. Until they all get it, that even if there were "nice" plantation owners and slave masters -- and common sense should tell you that such people were either non-existent, or a less-than-1% minority -- it doesn't matter.

This was a system of owning human beings as property, using any manner of violence -- rape, murder, torture, maiming, breaking up families -- to do so. There is no excuse for continuing to defend what is and always has been completely indefensible.

I don't know why this is so fucking hard for them, but such people deserve no mercy in the court of public opinion.

Outkicking the Coverage

Still trying to process both sides of the meta-issue surrounding gay marriage: on the one hand, people should be able to register their opinions without fear of retribution, and businesses (especially small businesses) as a rule of thumb ought to be able to refuse service to whomever they choose; on the other hand, substitute the word "black" for "gay" in each of these instances, and see how that all resonates.

The acceptability of gay marriage has taken place with such speed and scale and breadth that it is difficult to keep up with it, and therefore difficult to develop sufficient mechanisms for talking about people who, less than a decade ago, were on the side of a clear majority, and now find themselves scrambling to find a viable role as principled dissenters.

There is a very clear distinction between, say, the late and unlamented Fred Phelps' psychotic, traitorous death cult, obsessing to an unholy degree over the very existence of homosexuals, and a small bakery or mom-and-pop photo studio that just isn't comfortable with providing services to something they don't believe in. It doesn't excuse the latter group from growing up on the issue, mind you, but they probably also don't deserve to get dragged into court over it.

Where the linked article makes a categorical error is in lumping every instance of late into a half-baked dish of opinions and outcomes. What happened with Phil Robertson, Brendon Eich, and the state of Arizona, all of them employees or business concerns being pressured by the interests of capitalism and customer pressure, is simply the way things work. Each of those folks said or did something that many gays found insulting, and activist groups, by definition, mobilized and made it clear that, well, gays collectively have enough discretionary income to respond in kind. In other words, they made it clear that they don't have to take shit from people who depend on customers, be they teevee viewers or tourists. Simple as that.

We all see instantly how offensive, in just the last couple of days, the comments from LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling and teahadi ranchtard Cliven Bundy have resonated. There's just nothing debatable or defensible there. Well, Phil Robertson has repeatedly compared gays to criminals, drunkards, bestial enthusiasts. Should gays have to take shit from some pigfucking hillbilly, or do they have the right to tell Robertson's employer that maybe they won't patronize their product anymore?

Arizona was ready to legitimize the "turn away the gay" rights of businesses, and in a state that earns a good chunk of revenue from tourism, and is hosting the next Super Bowl, it became clear pretty quickly that their moralizing was going to cost them. Everything has its price.

Again, when we compare the ledger on each side, I would say that these noble, principled dissenters who suddenly find themselves unjustly persecuted for merely speaking their wittle minds, need to take a look at the big picture. In more than half the US states, people can still be fired just for being gay. No one, to my knowledge, has ever been beaten or killed for voicing their opinion against gay marriage, or homosexuals in general.

I think they're mostly just surprised at how quickly the tide of opinion turned against what they had thought was safe and acceptable. And that's okay, for a while, but it's time to get the memo, and understand that this dialogue -- a dialogue, let's remember, about the lives and rights of a group of consenting, law-abiding, tax-paying adults -- is back-and-forth. Each side has an inalienable right to call bullshit on the other for disingenuousness and intellectual dishonesty, and to vote accordingly with their wallets if necessary. Ain't that America?

Hatesong

Why did I not know about this before? I'm just now discovering Hatesong, and there is something noteworthy about, say, David Lynch despising It's a Small World so much, he won't let the interviewer refer to it by name.

Fortunately, I'm at a point in my life where I simply don't encounter most of these awful songs. I mean, I've never heard Katy Perry's Firework, like not a single note. I've never heard more than a few seconds of My Heart Will Go On. I've never heard a Justin Bieber song, again, not so much as a single note or word or melody. Life is too short.

Still, I think we've all had jobs in the past where workplace radio is plopped onto some lowest-common-denominator shit sandwich, endless streams of commercials sandwiching three-song blocks of heavy-rotation dreck. No wonder the American worker is stressed out to the point of a breakdown.

But most of us are certainly familiar enough with some of these songs, so when you turn a fine, observant mind such as Steve Coogan on the aerosol can of cheese The Lady in Red, hijinks are bound to ensue. Yet there are still people who listen to it on purpose, there are nostalgia radio stations that play this sort dreck deliberately.

This makes me sad, really. It makes me think of a person who has been stuck in a basement or a cornfield in Kansas their entire life, with no radio or TV or internet, and so they think that the entire world is a desolate cornfield, because they've never seen anything else. Not that I expect other people to like exactly what I like; far from it.

But there are songs (and Lady in Red is a prime example) where, as Coogan points out, creativity is absent, nothing but trite greeting-card sentiments are listed. It's the musical equivalent of having sex through a hole in a bed sheet, missionary only. To enjoy -- or even to be not offended by -- inert, lifeless crap just seems to be a symptom of missing out on a whole 'nother universe of great stuff.

Most of this stuff is very fish-in-a-barrel; honestly, do you know anyone who likes a floater like Mambo No. 5? But pairing the right person with the right song is just magic in this context, as the legendary Matt Pike demonstrates in his evisceration of the Aerosmith handjob Dude (Looks Like a Lady). Pike hates not just that song, but the band with a level normally reserved for someone who you just watched run over your dog. On purpose. Fun stuff. Check it out if you haven't already.

[Update:  Also, too. Certainly a valid point here, in that someone's taste -- or lack of -- doesn't pick anyone else's pocket or break their arm, so why sweat these poor folks on their schmuckery?

Two reasons, says I:  one, it's frequently funny (and some of the commenters in the Hatesong pieces are flat-out hilarious); two, beyond the subjectivity of mere pop-culture aesthetics, the fact is that when these objets de merde are popular, however long that toxic half-life may be, it's tough to get out of range of the smell.

I've never seen so much as an episode of Survivor, American Idol, or really any reality teevee, and yet a certain amount of "informational" oxygen and media space gets taken up with coverage of this sock-drawer-sorting nonsense, so I know way more about these things than I would ever have wanted to. You can only change the channel so fast; you have to read the headline before you can choose to skip past it. This stuff becomes very difficult to completely avoid. The same can be said when it comes to music, for those poor folks who are compelled to share communal space with aficionados of said dreck.

It's one thing to posit that someone who lurves them some Mambo #5 is no worse or better than someone who knows every Beethoven string quartet by number and key; it's quite another to have the mambophile blaring their crap over the cubicle wall every day.]

One of the Good Ones

Okay, unbeknownst to y'all, I had made a secret pact with myself to not post anything more about tealoading racist cracker asshole Cliven Bundy, but this was just too good to pass up. If anyone ever does a biographical movie of Alan Keyes, the lead role should be played by Tracy Morgan.

ETA

Yes, if we don't find some way to curb the excesses of the several dozen people who own every goddamned thing of value in this country -- the media, the political system, the modes of production and distribution -- why, we might eventually become an oligarchy. That would be a bad thing, you see.

It doesn't take a history major to see that all countries have always been run in the interests of the majority owners of capital. But it's been a while since there has been such an obscene level of hyper-concentration, of wealth stratification, of the utter lack of upward mobility. What we're experiencing is, in the physics term, called stasis, and is defined in this case by lives of inertia and clutter.

This is an area where hope consistently triumphs over logic; poor and middle-class people are consistently rolled into voting for rich people because they hope to be part of that club, someday, someway. This is a fantasy straight out of a perverted version of Lake Wobegon, where everyone is good-looking and all the children are above-average, where no one ever gets laid off or poisoned by the chemical company up the road, where everyone has the same opportunities, and so forth. It's similar to the fantasy that voting for a fake Republican will produce much better results than voting for a real one.

But let's not shit ourselves, friends 'n' neighbors -- in the sense that all important decisions are made by the same class of people, in the sense that all modes of political discussion and accession are made by the same owners and donors, this is an oligarchy, more so than any time in the last hundred years. It may be slightly more benign than your garden-variety banana republic, or Russia, but only by matters of scale and degree, and where you live, and what socioeconomic or racial background you have. As long as the Albuquerque Police Department doesn't think you might be carrying a joint in your asshole, you should be fine.

Other than that, sure, it's a democracy.

Mommie Dearest

It's easy (and accurate) to pick on the spate of  "celebrity" (or used to be) mothers who write books chock-full o' "parenting" and "lifestyle" advice, usually nonsense about vaccines and toilet training. Mostly these things are just the artifacts of a desiccated cultural landscape, where wealthy, pampered dingbats can preach to the peons about lives of "simplicity" and such.

But what we really should be curious about is, what sort of moron purchases and reads these things? Who are these simpletons out there that think Jenny McCarthy has better ideas about how to raise their children than, hell, just about anyone else on the planet? How does the chick from Clueless show up on the short lists of mothers and mothers-to-be (not to be overly sexist, but I promise you, right here, right now, that no man on the planet is buying any of these books) as a repository of sound advice?

Seriously, now. The problem is not solely that this "advice" comes from people who have, for the most part, lived cosseted lives away from the working-two-jobs-to-survive, one-paycheck-from-the-street reality that most people live. It's that "living well," contra received dingbat wisdom, really does cost more. Good food and good health care, the immediate vitals, cost more. All the ancillary things that add to a quality of life -- roads, schools, jobs, activities, etc. -- those things cost more, because you get what you pay for.

This is what happens when you have a population that is willfully illiterate and innumerate. There are too many people who can no longer parse statistical data, tell it apart from mere anecdata. There are a preponderance of folks out there who cannot critically think, who are simply too lazy to read up on how many different ways the "anti-vax" legends have been debunked.

Worst of all, this is what happens when you have a swath of people out there who can barely find their intemellectual asses in a dark room with both hands and a flashlight, but will hang their hopes and opinions on someone they've heard of, some D-lister who was on that show a million years ago, or who used to be famous for showing her tits. (Five years ago, my response to Surgeon General McCarthy would simply have been, "shut up and take your top off," but she's been so heavily sculpted and botoxed at this point, it would be like looking at a plastic fuck doll.)

Really, much to the chagrin of this bullshit "parenting and lifestyle" industry, you do not need a parenting book at all. Maybe good old Dr. Spock if you really must, but so much of it is just common sense. Apparently Voltaire was an optimist on that count.

Having children is one of the things humans do better and more than just about anything else they do; rearing children is simply a matter of considering their interests at the same or higher level than your own. Looking to some useta-be-famous name for help is just a failure of attention and thought.

On Golden Pawn

Ahahahaha. I bet you're all shocked that tealoading welfare rancher Cliven (not to be confused with Al or Ted) Bundy turns out to be just what you could easily assume -- an old racist cracker. The militia movement is not known, shall we say, for its holistic outlook toward non-whites. This was entirely predictable.

The stupid-ade to made from this particular bushel of stupid is the fun of watching all of Bundy's erstwhile conservalibertarian buddies at Faux News and in Congress running away from him even more quickly than they tried to hitch their rhetorical wagons to his "cause". Even better is Bundy's apparent confusion -- not only has he no clue what he said that might be objectionable, but he doesn't yet understand what his role in this really is.

As barmy and self-serving as I found the video of Bundy ridin' the range wavin' a giant US flag -- again, you know, the banner that represents a gubmint that Bundy has pronounced to every microphone and knothole that he don't believe in, consarn it -- it provides the most important clue to what makes this clown tick.

Bundy seriously believes that he is the hero of his personal saga, his kampf, his jihad (settle down now; both those words mean the same thing: struggle), and so when people like Sean Hannity and Rand Paul flock to his side in a show of support, it validates Bundy's narcissism. It confirms his thesis, that he (Bundy) is an avatar of absolute good and right, while the gubmint and its nefarious agents are soulless minions serving an ineffable evil.

It will sink in through the five gallons of shit in the ten-gallon hat at some point, that Bundy is simply a totem of convenience, a game piece to be used for teevee ratings, to help burnish the libertarian small-gov street cred of a probable presidential contender. It served their respective purposes to attach themselves to Bundy's grievances, for their own perpetually aggrieved audiences.

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro.” Yeah, there's no way for anyone to start an idea with such a sentence, and have it end well. Some people just insist on being damned fools, determined to make asses of themselves at any given opportunity. But Bundy, unfortunately, vocalizes a sentiment and assumption that of course has much traction in certain circles.

For people constantly on the hunt for welfare cheats and grifters, lounging in their skivvies and cranking out litters of dependents, these sorts of passive-aggressive, more-in-sorrow-than-anger claims provide small cover for their incipient racism. Now, to be sure, there certainly do exist some folks who, across multiple generations, indeed have been enabled by Great Society programs into a cycle of dependency. I work in social services, and I've seen such people, talked to them, seen their files. I've seen entire families who have been almost completely on the dole for four generations.

But here's the thing -- in the county where I live and run across these folks, they're mostly white. In fact, on the national level, recipients of services are almost equally split between white, black, and Hispanic. So Bundy's comment and assumption is disgusting not just on the obvious face value, but on multiple levels.

What would Bundy's advice to a white family who lives in the squalorous, idle conditions he decries? He can't "wonder" aloud whether they'd be happier, freer, more productive under a system of legal torture, rape, and murder. Probably tell 'em they just need them more Jee-zus, the sure cure for everything from layoffs, to working three jobs to keep your rat-infested apartment, to the heartbreak of psoriasis.

Hopefully this episode helps take the piss out of these would-be secessionist assholes, as well as the demagogues who try to utilize them for their own opportunistic schemes. You know it won't, it never quite does, but the next one of these jerkoffs that pops up will get more well-deserved scrutiny of their underpinning sentiments. Let's not kid ourselves -- a good chunk of these groups, whether they'll ever admit it or not, really just want to break away into their own all-white enclaves.

[Update 4/24/14 10:45 PDT:  Credit where credit is due. Krauthammer makes it absolutely clear why Cliven Bundy's (repeated) statements are so execrable, front to back. The guy is finally (and rightly) getting hung up on his racist sentiments, but the fact is that his traitorous jabber should been identified as such well before that point, by people who should have known better. In a just world, this would at least put a fat dent in Hannity's ratings and career as well, but you know it won't. He'll just burble some half-assed "I didn't know, and besides, the BLM are still dicks and thugs" non-apology. Anyway, good for Charles K on this one. Hell, even Glenn Beck (no small thing, as Bundy is a fellow Mormon) seems to have gotten out in front of this one.]

Resource Allocation

I know this has been covered elsewhere, and even featured on Homeland, but it is still fascinating. Ordinarily, the hard-wired misanthrope coursing my veins would compel me to shrug and say "fuck 'em," but I'm in awe of the ingenuity and fortitude of these folks. We jabber about wealth inequity and poverty in the US, but it ain't jack shit to what goes on routinely in the rest of the world.

Home On Derange

So professional asshole Sean Hannity and his comically large head have made welfare rancher and incoherent goofball Cliven Bundy into some sort of martyr -- for what, besides not paying his grazing fees for over 20 years, I have no idea.

One can acknowledge possible additional sides to Bundy's story -- such as how much he was recompensed when the BLM took his land in 1993, or if Rory Reid really does have some sort of sweetheart deal in the works to purchase neighboring land for a Chinese-owned solar farm (answer: he doesn't) -- but there's no excusing the crazy that Bundy and his whackjob cohort have escalated this to. There's no excusing would-be militiamen who openly bragged about using their wives and daughters as human shields, if the BLM agents opened fire. There's no rationalizing the desire these goofballs nurse, to have this situation turn into a Ruby Ridge or Waco.

And there's no getting around that fact that Bundy seems to think he's the living reincarnation of John Fucking Wayne, a smirking narcissist who can't get his story straight about whether he obeys a state government (whose state constitution professes that the federal government is the absolute authority), or rides the range hoisting a giant American flag, banner of a government Bundy smugly proclaims that he doesn't acknowledge the existence of.

The feds weren't going to win this one any which way -- if they had pressed beyond tasing Bundy's adult idiot son, they ran the risk of an armed standoff, but almost as bad, they just showed that they will back down when confronted, that a bunch of surly galoots with an imaginary axe to grind can scare them off. Look for more of these to start popping up, at least as long as the black guy is in the White House.

In the meantime, as always, enjoy yet another meaningless spectacle of armed buffoons going apeshit over something that has nothing to do with them. This is the same species of dunce that self-actualized their stance on "free speech" by waddling down to Chick-Fil-A, and joining a Facebook page to "stand with" a fake hillbilly millionaire who sells them overpriced duck calls and cheap branded shit at Walley World.

The Big Bunk Theory

Some say a comet will fall from the sky, followed by meteor showers and tidal waves.
Followed by faultlines that cannot sit still. Followed by millions of dumbfounded dipshits.
-- Tool,Ænema

Articles about poll outcomes, especially ones that have sociocultural elements to them, are always problematic and incomplete. What was the sample size, and the geographic range thereof? What was the phrasing of the question(s)? Margin of error, confidence level?

All that said, no doubt we each know enough bona-fide bozos, proud of their nincompoopery, to at least intuit that even if the numbers might be a bit hinky, there is still a substantial -- and any size is unacceptable, but this is a number probably large enough to sway elections -- swath of folks who fall into this range of shameless intellectual boobism.

Certainly there is a measurable correlation between political "conservatism," or what passes for it these days, and the stubborn refusal to believe the findings of scientific method and empirical observation, or to even understand what those things are, and what they mean. And there is additional correlation between those things, and having a regressive, anachronistic outlook on the world, informed by whatever hodgepodge of religious dogma insinuates itself through their transoms and into their brain stems.

But religion and politics only partially explain this phenomenon; one does not have to look too far back or around to find examples of believers and/or conservatives who still understood the scientific role in explaining the mechanics behind physical and natural conditions. Perhaps the most pernicious part of all this is how the average 'murkin has actively distanced themselves from what used to be conventionally understood and accepted principles of arguing a point, and mustering facts and analysis to support that point.

It scarcely bears mentioning that there is no real forum for "debate" any more -- you either have the staid, canned bullshit of the Sunday morning political follies, hacks trotting out stale arguments that have the veneer of thought, but always end up in support of the insect overlords; or you have the pro-wrasslin' cable bonobos flinging shit at everything within reach of the monkey house. Whoever's loudest, or the biggest asshole, wins.

Most of the time, we prefer scoreboards to tell us who the winner is in a contest. Probably only on matters of scientific consensus are people so willing, so eager, to toss the literally 99% of career scientists who have weighed in with peer-reviewed data and observations on things such as evolution, climate change, the age of the earth, how the universe was formed and expanded. Suddenly a statistically overwhelming proportion, an almost unanimous response of individuals who have spent the majority of their lives studying this stuff, is cynically cast as corrupt, suspect, and therefore meaningless.

That's the downside of the internets, empowering drooling morons with the ability to sharpen their electronic crayons and inflict their ignorance on everyone. It's much easier to spout nonsense and conjecture, raise idle speculation, than to actually read up on the subject one is attempting to dispute. Obviously, it affects our ability to compete in areas such as science and engineering, as well as leaving these sorts of folks vulnerable to the cheapest demagoguery. It explains a great deal, though; if you're still wondering how people can be so easily bamboozled into voting against their own rational self-interest, not just once but every goddamned time, there ya go. They're gullible because they want to be gulled.

As in politics, it is of little use to attempt to convince them, best to ignore them if at all possible. It's a strange irony that the most ignorant tend to be in the most vulnerable areas, and when the deluge comes, whether literal or figurative, suddenly they may decide to learn to swim. See you down in Arizona Bay.

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.

All Poodles Are Dogs, But Not All Dogs Are Poodles

I've seen Ayaan Hirsi Ali in a number of interview and panel segments over the years, and I get where this writer is coming from, in that Hirsi Ali is one of the more caustic critics of Islam in general, and militant Islamists in particular. I suppose having one's clitoris forcibly removed, and having a friend murdered in the street, with a death threat to oneself attached to said murder victim, will sort of do that to a person.

That said, it is a crude comparison at best to categorize the collective lumping of over a billion individuals in with the few thousand most violent practitioners, with anti-Semitic or anti-gay criticisms. It shouldn't even need to be said that, while perhaps Jews and gays no longer face the horrors of genocide or systematic violence, it really hasn't been all that long since they did face those things (and in fact still do in many countries -- how are gays faring these days in, say, Uganda or Iran?).

It is not fair to insinuate that all Muslims are responsible for the actions of a small but virulent percentage of lunatics, but when seemingly nothing at all is said or done in that regard, it doesn't absolve them from any responsibility whatsoever to address the issue. The experiences Hirsi Ali has endured in her life, both from outdated "cultural" traditions and from ideological fanatics, are real, and for many areas in the world, still normative. I mean, ten bucks to the first person who can guess the religion of the folks behind this, or this.

I don't know what to make of people who emigrate to other countries that already have long-established legal systems, and expect those new places to conform to the female-hating third-world holes they left behind. It can be difficult to parse cultural norms from religious precepts in many instances, but uh, I can assure you that as a decadent, hedonistic westerner, I am a great deal more offended by the consistent treatment of women as illiterate chattel, than they are by a satirical drawing of the prophet (PBUH). But since I am a rational person, and not guided and goaded by this or that collection of Levantine folk tales and regressive sky-buddy whispering, I can fight their bad ideas with better ideas, and still express my resentment at my own gubmint thinking that it can and should handle the situation with a fleet of killbots raining hell on villages. Some of these folks seem not to have made that seemingly modest intemellectual leap.

It might be more productive for concerned Muslims to address the fanatics in their attic already, instead of raising false equivalences about what sort of speech is offensive, as if the typical respective reactions to being offended were remotely the same -- someone maybe losing their job for talking shit about Jews or gays, versus riots and violence over comic strips and movies.

Off-topic but still fun, given the post title:  the one and only Ken Ham discourses on poodles.

It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature

The latest and greatest from the most transparent administration evar:

This week, it came to light that a small error in the open-source OpenSSL implementation of the SSL encryption protocol opened a gaping hole in the security of hundreds of thousands websites and networking equipment across the Net—and that hole had been wide open and exploitable for years. Passwords could be easily grabbed. User names matching those passwords could be easily grabbed. Heck, userdata could be easily grabbed. The “Heartbleed” moniker attached to the devastating bug seemed all too apt.

And Friday afternoon, Bloomberg reported that the National Security Agency has been aware of and actively exploiting the Heartbleed bug for at least two full years, citing “two people familiar with the matter.”

....

Leaked NSA documents provided to reporters by Snowden have revealed an agency casting a wide—and often domestic—surveillance dragnet, spying on American emails and web searches, gobbling up metadata from smartphones en masse, and even tapping into the internal communication infrastructures of Internet giants like Yahoo and Google.

A September Snowden-supplied revelation revealed that the NSA can easily defeat many of today’s encryption technologies, and in an aside that now seems precognizant, the SSL protocol was then rumored to be a particular favored target for the Agency.

Keep that in mind next time you're "choosing" between Candidate Coke and Candidate Pepsi.

Offensensitivity

Perhaps because the majority of the country has changed so much and so quickly on the issue, "gay marriage" is developing a set of meta-issues, and rather absurd ones at that. Now the question is longer whether discriminating against gay couples bears the same nasty whiff that discriminating against interracial couples did 40-50 years ago.

The most recent and persistent epiphenomenon is the martyrdom meme, perhaps best characterized in the self-imposed travails of Duck Dynasty honcho Phil Robertson and Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, the latter who was forced to resign for his contribution to California's Proposition 8 campaign back in 2008. So now Conor Friedersdorf's correspondent seems to epitomize the sort of person who feels aggrieved at whatever chilling effect is supposed to have taken place, as far as "allowing" what the aggrieved feel is legitimate difference of opinion.

And so it is, to a certain extent. Ostensibly, one of the great strengths of this country is that everyone has the right to be wrong, and even to be an asshole about it, so long as said opinion picks no pockets and breaks no arms. And that's where the problem arises, since in more than half of US states, you can be fired just for being gay in the first place, forget trying for a supposedly meaningless equal right to get married.

Nothing in life is absolute, and this applies to the Bill of Rights as well; you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater, and you can't bring an assault rifle into a courthouse. There are balances that are struck all along the way in these sorts of debates, and hey guess what -- the First Amendment doesn't apply to companies and places of work. You can be an asshole, and other people can call you such. That's how it works.

That means that you can -- and should -- be fired from your job if you, say, host a website that advocates race war or features the crushing of small animals for the amusement of fucking creeps, even if such things happen not to be against the law (inexplicably, in the latter instance). You can, in fact, be fired from your job just for saying something impolitic, if your boss happens to feel that said speech costs the company sales and revenue. This is not exactly a secret or a surprise, and yet here you have grown-ass adults genuinely shocked that their sincerely, deeply held spiritual beliefs do not automatically grant them immunity from the consequences of discourse.

That's at least part of the reason why so many of us choose to blog in relative anonymity -- not to completely absolve ourselves from any and all consequences of what we might say out here on the internets, but because we are aware that even if we say something that is logical and accurate, we can still be held liable for it, if it has an adverse (or even a potential or perceived) impact on any organization we might be part of.

This particular issue is an opportunity to examine the idea that one's beliefs, no matter how sincere, do not automatically immunize them from participating in the same verbal scrum as the rest of us. I promise you, the small hint of opprobrium, of "hate" and "fear" as the CF correspondent put it, is a drop in the bucket compared to what "outsider" groups have felt even in the last generation or two, from gays to atheists to civil rights and antiwar protesters.

I think those folks and many others would find the idea hilarious, that someone could say something they have a pretty good idea will hit a significant portion of people the wrong way, and still expect to be exempt from even legitimate criticism (as opposed to, you know, the discrimination and violence that many dissenting groups have routinely faced). It may not be 100% "fair" to ostracize or fire someone for voicing the "wrong" opinion, but it is also not the duty of the rest of society to wait around for these people to start unpacking their ideological baggage, and letting it go, once and for all.

Poetry Corner

Apropos of very little, check out the verses of inspiration from one of Edroso's commenters. That's just awesome right there.

Blast from the Past

In combing through nearly a full decade of posts to assemble a decent compilation of the antics that have transpired here, I'm finding a lot of past nuggets that are worth resurrecting. So call it "Throwback Thursday" or whatever, but here is the first what will be a weekly (or so) revisiting of a classic post.


Atlas Smugged

Kiss of Debt

The band Kiss (or, as The Army would have it, KISS) occupy a rather odd place in my musician's psyche. During their prime, I never really understood the appeal, comic-book splashes of fake fire and fake blood over cheesy chord progressions and thinly veiled cock rock.

Then they fell for the disco schtick, and even produced a poorly-received concept album, well after the whole "concept album" idea was dead and buried. Too bad, so sad. The smart kids had moved on to Rush, who somewhat ironically had gotten their big break as the opening act on one of Kiss' tour legs at their commercial height.

But as I got into actually playing in front of crowds, seeing what they wanted and what they tended to be attuned to, the whole cheesy package started to make more sense. Every band sells out to some degree, and even total sellouts such as Kiss still had points where they wanted to flex nuts and show chops and such.

Enter Vinnie Vincent, one of the more contentious, prickly folks to inject himself into what is (you'll be surprised to find) a rather people-oriented business. As a kid in the early '80s with a voracious appetite for any and all types of music, and a fairly photographic memory for notable quotes and quirky tics, to me Vincent stood out as the sort of person who seemed to be on a mission to make the blustery wunderkind Yngwie Malmsteen look quiet and contemplative.

As you can see from the embedded solo video from the RS article, Vincent's playing falls under the classic proto-shred grouping of jizz-lobbing, monkey-spanking speed dabblers, who had never heard of "taste" and barely bothered with tone, thinking that some distortion and a furious flapping of fingers would compensate for a lack of imagination and musicality. It's the sort of stuff that made This is Spinal Tap so true to life. At least Malmsteen actually had considerable tone, taste, and melodic sensibility to back up his arrogant demeanor.

Hair metal actually progressed pretty quickly along that decade, in terms of musicianship -- on the one hand, you had shredders like Paul Gilbert, Nuno Bettencourt, and Vito Bratta throwing down innovative, technically proficient melodies; on the other, you had "feel" players like Slash and Mick Mars, who were really great players in the mold of Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, but overshadowed by the singers they worked with, and the drama of their bands. I can give you a list of great players from that era, makeup and all, but personally, Vincent would not be on that list. He was a dick in interviews, deliberately so, and again his playing was just a random flurry, a buzzing hive of bees.

Still, musical criticism aside, Vincent's story since getting kicked out of Kiss is interesting, weird, sad, almost poignant.

Teaching Americans Geography

From the WaPo Monkey Cage:

On March 28-31, 2014, we asked a national sample of 2,066 Americans (fielded via Survey Sampling International Inc. (SSI), what action they wanted the U.S. to take in Ukraine, but with a twist: In addition to measuring standard demographic characteristics and general foreign policy attitudes, we also asked our survey respondents to locate Ukraine on a map as part of a larger, ongoing project to study foreign policy knowledge. We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign policy views. We found that only one out of six Americans can find Ukraine on a map, and that this lack of knowledge is related to preferences: The farther their guesses were from Ukraine’s actual location, the more they wanted the U.S.  to intervene with military force.

When we talk about things that are literally impossible to parody, and are really just too pathetic to contemplate, this is what we're referring to. But it explains a lot.

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.

#raceforbutthurt

Three things worthy of note this past week, that perhaps aptly characterize the scope and extent of putatively librul activism.

One is the high-tech mau-mauing of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich. One of Eich's misfortunes is that he bears an eerie resemblance to a Despicable Me minion; the other is that he contributed $1000 of his own money to the repulsive (and ultimately repudiated) Proposition 8 referendum in 2008, to ban gay marriage in California.

Second is the #CancelColbert Twitter campaign launched against well-known satirist Stephen Colbert. Colbert's deliberately obnoxious and offensive (and, for that matter, rather outdated) sendup of Asian stereotypes, straight out of Mickey Rooney's Breakfast at Tiffany's praybook, rankled a college student with more time than sense on her hands. Hilarity, as it is wont to do, ensued.

Finally, the recent Supreme Court decision to openly legitimize what any sentient observer already knew -- that there is gambling going on at the casino, and rich assholes own and run the political system for their own benefit -- ruffled the Thanksralphers feathers one more blessed time, like a random breeze blowing up their skirts. Fourteen years later and the wound is no less fresh for them.

One tough guy suggested that said decision be branded into the forehead of everyone who voted for Big Bad Ralph way back when. Because everyfuckingthing that has transpired this benighted new millennium, from 9/11 to the Democrats' spineless acquiescence in the Iraq War to the heartbreak of psoriasis, sprang forth from the font of Nader's malignant narcissism.

To which I say, one, bring it, motherfucker, soon as you get your extra-chinned self away from I Can Haz Cheezburger, but you should probably pack a lunch; two, you have a hell of a lot of branding to do, since (repeat after me ad nauseam) almost thirteen times as many registered Democrats in Florida voted for Bush than for Nader. Logic would stipulate that even if one construed a vote for Nader as an indirect vote for Bush (it wasn't), surely only a burbling halfwit could misunderstand that a vote for Bush was a direct vote for Bush. Funny how they never ever break out the pitchforks for that one. There's a clue in that somewhere.

But more to their feeble point:  It wasn't Nader's fault that Gore was such a shit candidate he couldn't even win his own home state. Nor was it Nader's fault that, when push came to shove and Florida's dangling chads were hotly contested, Gore decided to demand a recount he thought he'd win (rather than one he probably would have won), and then conceded anyway.

And let's not forget what a soulless ratfucker Holy Joe Lieberman turned out to be. Still better than Dick Cheney, but that's like saying that chlamydia is "better" than syphilis. The endless whinging does not change the stone fact that the Democrats' manifest failures cannot all -- or even much -- be laid at the feet of Ralph Nader. True story.

But let's not rehash the epic travails and endless, heroic quests of the N8r b8rz any more than we have to. Let's look at the larger picture here. The outbursts over Eich, Colbert, the McCutcheon decision, what do they all have in common? An utter lack of focus and perspective, for one. Say what you will about the stupid conservatool outbursts over idiotic things such as Chick-Fil-A and Duck Dynasty, the fact is that when they want to, those fuckers mobilize. It's silly shit, but they show up anyway, at least at first, and at least enough to get picked up and noticed in the lamestream media they so roundly despise.

Certainly Brendan Eich stepped on his own dick by failing to explain himself sufficiently when he had the chance, lamely claiming that he didn't want to be pushed by activists into having to delve into his private political sentiments. But by all accounts, Mozilla runs a pretty clean shop, as far as equal treatment for gays is concerned. Also, too, they won, supporters of gay marriage, and rightly so. The country is coming to its senses on this issue, and will be the better for it. It's not as if Eich played the part of Bull Connor or Lester Maddox, handing out ax handles to thump every hommasekshul in sight. It was a thousand bucks, six years ago.

I submit that if one were of liberal sentiment and potent influence on these here internets, and one wanted to get the most bang for their ideological buck, as it were, one might choose different targets. Targets that matter, for starters. Where are the concerted hashtag efforts to push congress-critters into making corporations pay taxes; where are the #CancelAdelson or #CancelKoch campaigns, with nice laundry lists of the things those assholes own and sell (aside from, you know, people and influence) so that like-minded folks can, como se dice, boycott those motherfuckers?

No. Let's go after some techie slapdick, let's go after Stephen Colbert, let's go through yet another round of urban wailing over Ralph Nader's capital transgressions in the previous millennium. Good grief, from climate change to income inequality to poaching to overpopulation to the oppression of women and the trafficking of children to the open theft of this country's political system, there are a multitude of issues over which one can get one's panties into a death-dealing wad. Yet these other non-issues are the things they choose to get jiggy with, and over.

I'm embarrassed for these people, since they don't have the good sense to be ashamed of themselves. All that righteous anger and technical expertise could and should be harnessed to a team of Clydesdales, instead it's tethered to a yappy, ankle-biting Chihuahua.

[Update 4/7/14: Also, too.