Gotta admit, it is tons o' fun watching Tons O' Fun circle the drain, hoist mostly on his own fat petard.
For someone who spent the '90s so obsessed with Clinton's pee-pee, Newt shore don't wanna talk about it now. Just take his word for it, his marital indiscretions were totally different from Clinton's. Even his own kool-aid chuggers can't be thumbing their tiny dicks to that tune; in a base best characterized by ridiculousness at every angle, that one's too preposterous even for them.
Although the lunar colony shit is pretty fuckin' hilarious as well. Tell ya what, Fatboy, we'll start building it tomorrow if you'll serve as its governor for life.
"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
Friday, January 27, 2012
Strange Brew
There is apparently no small amount of hoo-ha over Arizona "governor" Jan Brewer's finger-wagging guff in Obama's face, like he was the butler who dropped her favorite purse dog.
Let me suggest that, aside from the fact that teabagger politicians have long felt empowered to act like assholes to this president, to jam their finger in his face or heckle him at the State of the Union speech, there is no controversy, especially considering the source.
Jan Brewer is a clown, a schmuck, a puller of stunts, a shameless fabulist who squats out lies about her own father's history, who concocts lurid fables about deranged Meskins loppin' off heads in the Sonoran desert, leaving them for innocent Yuma children to stumble across on their way to Sunday school, no doubt. Anything and everything she says about any subject whatsoever should be viewed through the prism that she will say pretty much whatever is most expedient for her at the given moment.
Arizona has very deep-seated streak of stone yahooism in its politics, one that well predates our current conservatard lunacies. They've been barking at the moon since Evan Mecham was a pup. Brewer is exactly the sort of ass-grabbing fool Arizona wants -- and more importantly, deserves.
Maybe Brewer will use this as a stepping-stone to a run for Jon Kyl's Senate seat. One can only hope; with the demise of other clown-car devotees such as Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell, the GOP needs to upgrade its batshit quotient.
Let me suggest that, aside from the fact that teabagger politicians have long felt empowered to act like assholes to this president, to jam their finger in his face or heckle him at the State of the Union speech, there is no controversy, especially considering the source.
Jan Brewer is a clown, a schmuck, a puller of stunts, a shameless fabulist who squats out lies about her own father's history, who concocts lurid fables about deranged Meskins loppin' off heads in the Sonoran desert, leaving them for innocent Yuma children to stumble across on their way to Sunday school, no doubt. Anything and everything she says about any subject whatsoever should be viewed through the prism that she will say pretty much whatever is most expedient for her at the given moment.
Arizona has very deep-seated streak of stone yahooism in its politics, one that well predates our current conservatard lunacies. They've been barking at the moon since Evan Mecham was a pup. Brewer is exactly the sort of ass-grabbing fool Arizona wants -- and more importantly, deserves.
Maybe Brewer will use this as a stepping-stone to a run for Jon Kyl's Senate seat. One can only hope; with the demise of other clown-car devotees such as Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell, the GOP needs to upgrade its batshit quotient.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Dixie Key Party
So Fatboy and his big ideas, tiny cock, and swingin' heart won the day down in the original Treason in Defense of Slavery state. Awesome. That weird sound you just heard was every comedian, and every member of Obama's campaign team, simultaneously creaming their jeans. America's Wang should be even more hilarious; maybe they'll go for Santorumentum, or perhaps a stray dog wearing a sandwich board (or one of Rick's cool sweater vests).
No one in the corporate media has the balls to say it on the record, since this perpetual reality teevee show is their bread and butter in a dying market, but the Goopers' primary has long since degenerated into an ass-kicking contest consisting entirely of one-legged people. Only more hilarious. It's only a matter of time before they start using Yakety Sax for theme music at the remaining debates.
No one in the corporate media has the balls to say it on the record, since this perpetual reality teevee show is their bread and butter in a dying market, but the Goopers' primary has long since degenerated into an ass-kicking contest consisting entirely of one-legged people. Only more hilarious. It's only a matter of time before they start using Yakety Sax for theme music at the remaining debates.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Priorities
Cases of this sort are fascinating, primarily for the unusual gymnastics of reasoning undertaken in resolving them.
Whenever someone proposes to sterilize someone else, for whatever reason, obviously there should be some voice of skepticism raised, just to make sure the idea is being thought through, and either accepted or rejected for rational, hopefully at least somewhat utilitarian reasons. This does not seem to be the case here, the ruling does not appear to have a practical basis.
Consider the discordant rationales being deployed here. You have a 32-year-old woman whose mental illness is severe enough that her parents have to care for her. She is legally incompetent to take care of herself, to support herself, to make rational decisions for herself. This is not in dispute by any of the litigating parties, nor by the appellate court which overturned the first ruling.
So ostensibly this woman -- who, again, cannot care for herself, and therefore cannot support herself -- would suffer a tremendous civil wrong were she compelled to either abort the fetus she is currently carrying, or even to be temporarily or permanently sterilized afterward. Fair enough. This is not an unreasonable argument on its face.
But one still has to wonder at what expense comes avoiding this great wrong. Maybe the 'rents are independently wealthy, so they can just kick down for an daughter who can't take care of herself or any number of children she "chooses" -- to the extent that a person declared legally incompetent can be said to have made a rational choice in the first place.
But what if they aren't wealthy? What about the kid she already has, that the parents are taking care of? Or the fetus, that may be damaged from the drugs she has to take, or damaged by her if she has to go off those drugs during the pregnancy? Do any of the other people in this scenario have any rights, including the right not to be saddled with the poor decision-making capacity of a legally incompetent, mentally ill person? It's like their concerns don't matter at all, they are just there to accept responsibility.
I don't necessarily assume offhand that there is a political agenda underpinning any of this, though I do recall a privately-funded movement in Southern California in the '90s that set out to essentially pay crackheads with at least four kids to get their tubes tied. The movement got shouted down by self-styled women's rights groups, who bizarrely (imho) felt that a crackhead's "right" to reproduce infinitely trumped, say, the right of her children to not enter teh world addicted to hard drugs, or the right of society to not be compelled to infinitely underwrite this foolishness.
I suggest that this is one of those issues, like abortion, where the biological function of reproduction has been granted some mystical, exalted, practically untouchable status. It is a polite fiction people seem to have tacitly agreed on, this one inviolability of the right to irresponsibly reproduce with impunity.
Of course there are any number of reprehensible historical examples. Fortunately we live in a society whose very modernity enables judges to establish proper mechanisms to prevent such instances. We're not talking about sterilizing every retard and criminal here. (Although really, people, aren't there enough Juggalos in the world already, must we clutter up a dying planet with more, to accelerate the impending doom?)
You can propose legislation that allows for wiretapping, pulling suspects off the street and throwing them into Gitmo for torture, or just lobbing a missile at them halfway around the world, without trial or even charge, and no one will bat an eyelash. But Flying Spaghetti Monster forfend that anyone intervene in a legally incompetent person's "right" to compel everyone else in their life to bear the consequences of their decisions. It seems like the parents and the children should have some rights as well.
Whenever someone proposes to sterilize someone else, for whatever reason, obviously there should be some voice of skepticism raised, just to make sure the idea is being thought through, and either accepted or rejected for rational, hopefully at least somewhat utilitarian reasons. This does not seem to be the case here, the ruling does not appear to have a practical basis.
Consider the discordant rationales being deployed here. You have a 32-year-old woman whose mental illness is severe enough that her parents have to care for her. She is legally incompetent to take care of herself, to support herself, to make rational decisions for herself. This is not in dispute by any of the litigating parties, nor by the appellate court which overturned the first ruling.
So ostensibly this woman -- who, again, cannot care for herself, and therefore cannot support herself -- would suffer a tremendous civil wrong were she compelled to either abort the fetus she is currently carrying, or even to be temporarily or permanently sterilized afterward. Fair enough. This is not an unreasonable argument on its face.
But one still has to wonder at what expense comes avoiding this great wrong. Maybe the 'rents are independently wealthy, so they can just kick down for an daughter who can't take care of herself or any number of children she "chooses" -- to the extent that a person declared legally incompetent can be said to have made a rational choice in the first place.
But what if they aren't wealthy? What about the kid she already has, that the parents are taking care of? Or the fetus, that may be damaged from the drugs she has to take, or damaged by her if she has to go off those drugs during the pregnancy? Do any of the other people in this scenario have any rights, including the right not to be saddled with the poor decision-making capacity of a legally incompetent, mentally ill person? It's like their concerns don't matter at all, they are just there to accept responsibility.
I don't necessarily assume offhand that there is a political agenda underpinning any of this, though I do recall a privately-funded movement in Southern California in the '90s that set out to essentially pay crackheads with at least four kids to get their tubes tied. The movement got shouted down by self-styled women's rights groups, who bizarrely (imho) felt that a crackhead's "right" to reproduce infinitely trumped, say, the right of her children to not enter teh world addicted to hard drugs, or the right of society to not be compelled to infinitely underwrite this foolishness.
I suggest that this is one of those issues, like abortion, where the biological function of reproduction has been granted some mystical, exalted, practically untouchable status. It is a polite fiction people seem to have tacitly agreed on, this one inviolability of the right to irresponsibly reproduce with impunity.
Of course there are any number of reprehensible historical examples. Fortunately we live in a society whose very modernity enables judges to establish proper mechanisms to prevent such instances. We're not talking about sterilizing every retard and criminal here. (Although really, people, aren't there enough Juggalos in the world already, must we clutter up a dying planet with more, to accelerate the impending doom?)
You can propose legislation that allows for wiretapping, pulling suspects off the street and throwing them into Gitmo for torture, or just lobbing a missile at them halfway around the world, without trial or even charge, and no one will bat an eyelash. But Flying Spaghetti Monster forfend that anyone intervene in a legally incompetent person's "right" to compel everyone else in their life to bear the consequences of their decisions. It seems like the parents and the children should have some rights as well.
Still Alive
I've probably mentioned this before, but I had sort of an assumption that finishing up grad school would somehow grant me more leisure time. And at least initially, I felt like I had my nights and weekends "back".
But it didn't take long at all to realize that not only was there not going to suddenly be this abundance of screw-off time, but that I didn't even want there to be. I'll watch the teevee, but I can't just sit and watch; I have to either have a book or a guitar or the laptop going as well. And the late nights continue apace, as the projects grow and expand far beyond their initial parameters.
The past six months or so have also seen me ingesting huge amounts of music, a little bit of everything -- thrash/power/prog metal, some pop, and even some classical (torrented all 104 Haydn symphonies, and while I'm familiar with the last 20 or so, it's been interesting getting acquainted with the earlier ones a few at time). After turning 40 a few years back, I was initially perplexed that my musical tastes seemed to be getting heavier in general, but as my daughter starts figuring out what she likes, I quit wondering about it and just going for whatever's there.
And there's a lot, and a lot of really cool stuff, in quite a few genres (more in an upcoming post). Anyone who whines about how today's music sucks just needs to turn the radio off, leave it off, and go on walkabout in the internets. There's tons of places to find great music that will never get on the radio. I hear people complain about radio pap, and I don't know what to tell them. There is no excuse for being stuck with mainstream crap, unless you're a 15-year-old mallrat and just don't know any better.
Some of these projects I'm working on will be put on the internets at some point, hopefully to turn at least a modest buck, but at least to get some decent chops at building a real thing, not just the creation of a product but building the requisite 21st-century marketing presence around it. Naturally, I will keep you all apprised as things develop. Right now we're balls-deep in a pure content-building phase, probably into March or April.
In the meantime, the blog, such as it is these days, tends to suffer quantitatively, and I suppose I'm becoming more okay with that. Seven years has kind of snuck up on me in some ways. Obviously the first five years were fairly prolific, and once school cut into that, I found myself missing the catharsis of these little 'sodes less and less.
Actually, the writing is still a great deal of fun, it is the subjects that are less so. How many ways can you call Mitt Romney an empty suit, Obama a feckless dupe who has betrayed his putative constituency and abdicated what at least plausibly appeared to be his deeper convictons? How many times can the industries underpinning our economic systems be portrayed as the money-grubbing rackets they most certainly are, and still sound relatively fresh? How many different ways are there to point out what a useless toad, what self-aggrandizing, leg-humping sack of shit Newt Gingrich really is, not to mention the hypocritical dipshits he represents?
And on and on. The names change here and there, but the bullshit remains mostly the same. They keep lying, too many of us keep buying. So it goes.
But politics and power are the things that capture my interest, and I suppose we'll have some things to mull and discuss this fine campaign season. So for now I certainly plan to keep the Hammer banging at least through the end of this year, while I continue working on the projects, get the products finalized and formatted and ready to roll, and get a website (possibly two or even three) up and running.
Like I said, I still enjoy writing, and while the hit counter doesn't trsvel fast here and there aren't many comments, I do strongly feel -- and there are practically infinite corroborating examples anywhere you look -- that the folks that do check in here are thoughtful and reasoned in the commentary they share. I'd much rather have five or six literate, intelligent comments than the six million lumps of monkey shit you see in, say, just about any YouTube comment section for starters, not to mention any given corporate media site, who really should be able to attract a better class of riff-raff.
It is a weird phenomenon that I'm still digesting much of the time, this compulsion to be constantly working on something. I've always liked to work, to learn, to keep busy, but we're talking about staying up to 3:00 or 4:00 AM three or four nights a week working on a project, or reading about ideas to make the project just a little bit better. And then going to work at 7:30. If I didn't enjoy it so much, I'd be burnt by now.
So thanks for checking in, thanks for still reading, please continue to do so (and leave some comments!), and we'll try to get the posts at least a little more regular, see how this year shakes out.
Only one thing is certain -- Newt will still suck. Just a beastly little man, on so many levels. In a truly civilized country, this is someone who would have been tarred and feathered already, not treated like a serious person.
But it didn't take long at all to realize that not only was there not going to suddenly be this abundance of screw-off time, but that I didn't even want there to be. I'll watch the teevee, but I can't just sit and watch; I have to either have a book or a guitar or the laptop going as well. And the late nights continue apace, as the projects grow and expand far beyond their initial parameters.
The past six months or so have also seen me ingesting huge amounts of music, a little bit of everything -- thrash/power/prog metal, some pop, and even some classical (torrented all 104 Haydn symphonies, and while I'm familiar with the last 20 or so, it's been interesting getting acquainted with the earlier ones a few at time). After turning 40 a few years back, I was initially perplexed that my musical tastes seemed to be getting heavier in general, but as my daughter starts figuring out what she likes, I quit wondering about it and just going for whatever's there.
And there's a lot, and a lot of really cool stuff, in quite a few genres (more in an upcoming post). Anyone who whines about how today's music sucks just needs to turn the radio off, leave it off, and go on walkabout in the internets. There's tons of places to find great music that will never get on the radio. I hear people complain about radio pap, and I don't know what to tell them. There is no excuse for being stuck with mainstream crap, unless you're a 15-year-old mallrat and just don't know any better.
Some of these projects I'm working on will be put on the internets at some point, hopefully to turn at least a modest buck, but at least to get some decent chops at building a real thing, not just the creation of a product but building the requisite 21st-century marketing presence around it. Naturally, I will keep you all apprised as things develop. Right now we're balls-deep in a pure content-building phase, probably into March or April.
In the meantime, the blog, such as it is these days, tends to suffer quantitatively, and I suppose I'm becoming more okay with that. Seven years has kind of snuck up on me in some ways. Obviously the first five years were fairly prolific, and once school cut into that, I found myself missing the catharsis of these little 'sodes less and less.
Actually, the writing is still a great deal of fun, it is the subjects that are less so. How many ways can you call Mitt Romney an empty suit, Obama a feckless dupe who has betrayed his putative constituency and abdicated what at least plausibly appeared to be his deeper convictons? How many times can the industries underpinning our economic systems be portrayed as the money-grubbing rackets they most certainly are, and still sound relatively fresh? How many different ways are there to point out what a useless toad, what self-aggrandizing, leg-humping sack of shit Newt Gingrich really is, not to mention the hypocritical dipshits he represents?
And on and on. The names change here and there, but the bullshit remains mostly the same. They keep lying, too many of us keep buying. So it goes.
But politics and power are the things that capture my interest, and I suppose we'll have some things to mull and discuss this fine campaign season. So for now I certainly plan to keep the Hammer banging at least through the end of this year, while I continue working on the projects, get the products finalized and formatted and ready to roll, and get a website (possibly two or even three) up and running.
Like I said, I still enjoy writing, and while the hit counter doesn't trsvel fast here and there aren't many comments, I do strongly feel -- and there are practically infinite corroborating examples anywhere you look -- that the folks that do check in here are thoughtful and reasoned in the commentary they share. I'd much rather have five or six literate, intelligent comments than the six million lumps of monkey shit you see in, say, just about any YouTube comment section for starters, not to mention any given corporate media site, who really should be able to attract a better class of riff-raff.
It is a weird phenomenon that I'm still digesting much of the time, this compulsion to be constantly working on something. I've always liked to work, to learn, to keep busy, but we're talking about staying up to 3:00 or 4:00 AM three or four nights a week working on a project, or reading about ideas to make the project just a little bit better. And then going to work at 7:30. If I didn't enjoy it so much, I'd be burnt by now.
So thanks for checking in, thanks for still reading, please continue to do so (and leave some comments!), and we'll try to get the posts at least a little more regular, see how this year shakes out.
Only one thing is certain -- Newt will still suck. Just a beastly little man, on so many levels. In a truly civilized country, this is someone who would have been tarred and feathered already, not treated like a serious person.