Anyone still wondering why some people are still freaked the fuck out that a crazy, narcissistic asshole has control of the free world and the nuclear football, wake the fuck up. This doddering asshole is going to get everyone killed.
Wednesday, May 31, 2017
On the Other Hand
....if you happen to be a branded corporate entity, especially one of the main faces of a corporation (such as NBC, or the NFL) that regularly engages in jingoistic, insufferable displays of unquestioning nationalism, don't be too surprised if your tacit support of the most obnoxious, divisive, flat-out stupid political candidate of the last half-century affects your pocketbook. Not to mention they stole a Supreme Court seat. Republicans and conservatives sure as hell wouldn't let something like that go, so why should anyone else?
Tuesday, May 30, 2017
Safe Spaces
Usually picking on Rod Flanders Dreher is Edroso's schtick, so I leave it be, since I know my limitations. But here I find myself actually agreeing with Dreher. This is nonsense all the way down; if I had a kid in college pulling this shit, I'd be heading up there to put them up against a wall and ask politely what the fuck I was paying for.
Look, the civil rights struggles that ruptured this country meant something profound, and still resonate to this day. We see it in (to cite just one example) Mitch Landrieu's efforts to remove confederate monuments and relegate them to the museums where they belong. Slavery was and is a stain on this nation's soul, and some people amazingly remain unwilling to help cleanse that stain, or even to simply acknowledge that it's still there.
But this SJW trigger-warning intersectional bullshit simply debases the genuinely righteous causes people actually fought and were murdered for. I hate trolls as much as the next person, though probably not as much as the trolls hate themselves. But it's this niche nonsense and histrionic, overt sensitivity to mild-to-moderate slights that has automatically set a broad spectrum of people resolutely against them.
It is more than merely political; it is the sense that these hysterical cunts couldn't possibly be relied upon to even maintain the practical, logistical system we will leave to them at some future point. I wouldn't want to drive a car manufactured by one of these assholes, much less on a road made by one of them. They'd have to make sure the asphalt wasn't cis-gendered. It is very difficult to believe that one of these snowflakes could become competent in a practical skill needed by another human being. I can muddle my own artisanal mojitos, thank you very little.
I have no idea why these individuals chose to go to college, either for the greater employability granted by credentialism, or the broadening of the proverbial horizons of knowledge and experience. Used to be you could just tell objectionable people to go fuck themselves, and go on about your business, maybe expect to encounter them here and there and deal accordingly. Mostly this is just sad; these douchebags are in for a rude awakening when they find out that no real-world business will hire them for anything, because they can't do anything.
Look, the civil rights struggles that ruptured this country meant something profound, and still resonate to this day. We see it in (to cite just one example) Mitch Landrieu's efforts to remove confederate monuments and relegate them to the museums where they belong. Slavery was and is a stain on this nation's soul, and some people amazingly remain unwilling to help cleanse that stain, or even to simply acknowledge that it's still there.
But this SJW trigger-warning intersectional bullshit simply debases the genuinely righteous causes people actually fought and were murdered for. I hate trolls as much as the next person, though probably not as much as the trolls hate themselves. But it's this niche nonsense and histrionic, overt sensitivity to mild-to-moderate slights that has automatically set a broad spectrum of people resolutely against them.
It is more than merely political; it is the sense that these hysterical cunts couldn't possibly be relied upon to even maintain the practical, logistical system we will leave to them at some future point. I wouldn't want to drive a car manufactured by one of these assholes, much less on a road made by one of them. They'd have to make sure the asphalt wasn't cis-gendered. It is very difficult to believe that one of these snowflakes could become competent in a practical skill needed by another human being. I can muddle my own artisanal mojitos, thank you very little.
I have no idea why these individuals chose to go to college, either for the greater employability granted by credentialism, or the broadening of the proverbial horizons of knowledge and experience. Used to be you could just tell objectionable people to go fuck themselves, and go on about your business, maybe expect to encounter them here and there and deal accordingly. Mostly this is just sad; these douchebags are in for a rude awakening when they find out that no real-world business will hire them for anything, because they can't do anything.
It Came from the '90s
When it comes to music, it will probably not surprise you to know that:
Sometimes these things happen serendipitously, weirdly, for no reason or event at all. They simply occur. But (and again, many years ago; it is an old song by now) after some number of half-listens some years ago, I finally listened more closely to the lyrics. And I watched the video. And it all still holds up quite well.
He's enticing some chick away from a party so he can kill her. He's a fucking serial killer.
I don't know. Maybe that's what the lyrics really mean, maybe not. They're purposely vague, like most good lyrics. But the video certainly reinforces that impression.
But that's not what's cool about the video. It's the little things: the snare drum wobbling between the legs of the drummer, the duct tape on the horn of the "lead" guitarist's black Strat. The weird green mic the singer uses. That frayed orange light bulb from the '50s swaying back and forth to the beat.
Mostly, it's just a great fucking groove. The bass player and the drummer are locked in, and it's a great ride. This is what they're talking about when they talk about the backbone.
Most people who have heard of Chico probably don't know that, during the Cold War, it was designated as an "alternative" state capital in the event that the Soviets nuked Sacramento. So with Beale AFB about an hour south, several Titan I missile silos were installed north of town, and basically shut down and abandoned, all during the Sixties.
By the time me and my degenerate friends came along in the Eighties, the silos were basically the Forbidden Party Spot -- geographically distant enough to where the cops were not a problem, but you needed to be sure that you had all your alcohol on hand for the evening, because a trip back in to town would just be a huge pain in the ass.
We only went there a few times, because even as drunken teenage assholes, we understood that this was a dangerous place. There were hazards all around, and no one nearby to help if you got hurt. This was a period of time where I regularly rode dirt bikes and went cliff-diving in Feather River Canyon, and yet it was in the silos where I felt legitimately concerned for my physical safety.
All I recall, thirty years later, is tunnels and catwalks, and a darkness you could practically touch. We all had decent Maglites, and still you could barely see more than a few feet in front of you at a time. Someone accidentally dropped something (flashlight maybe) over the catwalk railing, and a couple seconds later we heard a splash that was distant enough to be worrisome. We came out a tunnel at one point and looked down at about a forty-foot drop to a concrete ramp below, not much in between, bearing in mind that we were a bunch of eighteen-year-old punks trying to impress our girls on a dark Friday night, in a place we knew nothing about.
But the tunnels, because of the extreme darkness, the odd echoes, mostly of our shoes on the metal catwalks, gave a sense of claustrophobia, and I am not particularly claustrophobic. Strange, oddly exhilarating, and a bit unnerving.
Which brings me to some of those long camera shots in the Possum Kingdom video, that room they're all in, packed like sardines, the band on a postage stamp, the crowd asshole-to-elbow jumping in near unison to that frog's-ass-tight groove. I don't know why, perhaps because the silos are the closest I've ever been to being in a cave, but that particular shot in that particular video takes me right back to that particular place. Every time, if only for an instant.
Which -- even and perhaps especially if it's all bullshit -- is kinda the point.
Honorable mention: Spacehog, In the Meantime. Yes, the video is weird and has all manner of odd ducks. But once again, we have an immutable groove, a masterful bass line, and the song itself evokes the Seventies glory of Bowie.
- On the rare occasions I listen to radio, I am seriously bad about pushing buttons, like in the first three notes. I do not fuck around. I can smell Red Hot Chili Peppers a split-second after they start, like a sonic fart from the worst taco truck in town.
- I don't care much for '90s rock.
Sometimes these things happen serendipitously, weirdly, for no reason or event at all. They simply occur. But (and again, many years ago; it is an old song by now) after some number of half-listens some years ago, I finally listened more closely to the lyrics. And I watched the video. And it all still holds up quite well.
He's enticing some chick away from a party so he can kill her. He's a fucking serial killer.
I don't know. Maybe that's what the lyrics really mean, maybe not. They're purposely vague, like most good lyrics. But the video certainly reinforces that impression.
But that's not what's cool about the video. It's the little things: the snare drum wobbling between the legs of the drummer, the duct tape on the horn of the "lead" guitarist's black Strat. The weird green mic the singer uses. That frayed orange light bulb from the '50s swaying back and forth to the beat.
Mostly, it's just a great fucking groove. The bass player and the drummer are locked in, and it's a great ride. This is what they're talking about when they talk about the backbone.
Most people who have heard of Chico probably don't know that, during the Cold War, it was designated as an "alternative" state capital in the event that the Soviets nuked Sacramento. So with Beale AFB about an hour south, several Titan I missile silos were installed north of town, and basically shut down and abandoned, all during the Sixties.
By the time me and my degenerate friends came along in the Eighties, the silos were basically the Forbidden Party Spot -- geographically distant enough to where the cops were not a problem, but you needed to be sure that you had all your alcohol on hand for the evening, because a trip back in to town would just be a huge pain in the ass.
We only went there a few times, because even as drunken teenage assholes, we understood that this was a dangerous place. There were hazards all around, and no one nearby to help if you got hurt. This was a period of time where I regularly rode dirt bikes and went cliff-diving in Feather River Canyon, and yet it was in the silos where I felt legitimately concerned for my physical safety.
All I recall, thirty years later, is tunnels and catwalks, and a darkness you could practically touch. We all had decent Maglites, and still you could barely see more than a few feet in front of you at a time. Someone accidentally dropped something (flashlight maybe) over the catwalk railing, and a couple seconds later we heard a splash that was distant enough to be worrisome. We came out a tunnel at one point and looked down at about a forty-foot drop to a concrete ramp below, not much in between, bearing in mind that we were a bunch of eighteen-year-old punks trying to impress our girls on a dark Friday night, in a place we knew nothing about.
But the tunnels, because of the extreme darkness, the odd echoes, mostly of our shoes on the metal catwalks, gave a sense of claustrophobia, and I am not particularly claustrophobic. Strange, oddly exhilarating, and a bit unnerving.
Which brings me to some of those long camera shots in the Possum Kingdom video, that room they're all in, packed like sardines, the band on a postage stamp, the crowd asshole-to-elbow jumping in near unison to that frog's-ass-tight groove. I don't know why, perhaps because the silos are the closest I've ever been to being in a cave, but that particular shot in that particular video takes me right back to that particular place. Every time, if only for an instant.
Which -- even and perhaps especially if it's all bullshit -- is kinda the point.
Honorable mention: Spacehog, In the Meantime. Yes, the video is weird and has all manner of odd ducks. But once again, we have an immutable groove, a masterful bass line, and the song itself evokes the Seventies glory of Bowie.
Thug Life
Several times over the years in here I have mentioned my previously ardent support for the death penalty, and how while I still strongly support it in principle, the mechanics have simply become far too flawed. Since capital punishment has (except in a few southern states desperate to show how kill-crazy they still are) fallen out of favor, prison rights advocates tend to focus now on the cruelty of solitary confinement, of keeping someone caged by themselves for twenty-three hours a day, let out only for a brief walk in a fenced enclosure, showers two or three times a week, etc.
This article is a good example of why I don't really care about solitary confinement. These bastards are dangerous, and they have reach to the outside world, and can hurt or kill innocent people. They can shove these fuckers in a shoebox for all I care. They're a waste of oxygen and can't die quickly enough.
In fact, there's no way someone like Pedro Gutierrez would have reached the ripe old age of forty-four without being incarcerated for the last twenty years, where he no doubt victimized countless other inmates and guards, having nothing to lose. I mean, what are they going to do? He's serving 26-to-life already.
Then there's Jamell "Murda Mel" Cureton, who reached out from the Mecklenburg County Jail to have two witnesses gunned down in their own home. That'll teach them to testify against Mel's cohorts robbing their business. Did I mention that the first murder Cureton was sentenced for was committed back in 2013, and Cureton is only now twenty-four years old?
This bit from the second linked article (bearing in mind that Malcolm Hartley was the UBN killer dispatched to the London household for those killings) is just priceless:
Just something to think about. It's not nearly as cut-and-dried as being "civilized" enough not to kill these useless assholes.
This article is a good example of why I don't really care about solitary confinement. These bastards are dangerous, and they have reach to the outside world, and can hurt or kill innocent people. They can shove these fuckers in a shoebox for all I care. They're a waste of oxygen and can't die quickly enough.
In fact, there's no way someone like Pedro Gutierrez would have reached the ripe old age of forty-four without being incarcerated for the last twenty years, where he no doubt victimized countless other inmates and guards, having nothing to lose. I mean, what are they going to do? He's serving 26-to-life already.
Then there's Jamell "Murda Mel" Cureton, who reached out from the Mecklenburg County Jail to have two witnesses gunned down in their own home. That'll teach them to testify against Mel's cohorts robbing their business. Did I mention that the first murder Cureton was sentenced for was committed back in 2013, and Cureton is only now twenty-four years old?
This bit from the second linked article (bearing in mind that Malcolm Hartley was the UBN killer dispatched to the London household for those killings) is just priceless:
On Tuesday, Hartley’s mother is expected to speak at the sentencing and tell U.S. District Judge Max Cogburn that the killings were out of character for her son.Fucking bitch. Look, lady, your little boy went to someone's house and murdered them in cold blood, at the behest of the boss of his organized crime enterprise. You raised an indecent human being. Own it. No one expects you to testify against him, but at least have enough class to not try to get his sentence mitigated.
Just something to think about. It's not nearly as cut-and-dried as being "civilized" enough not to kill these useless assholes.
One Weird Trick
Forget six reasons why the "reset" won't work, they all boil down to one reason, based on two factors: Princess Snowflake is a moron and an asshole, and unlike in the private sector, you simply cannot get away for too long with being both to such extreme degrees.
Sure, it would "make sense" to "pivot" his "strategy" and "work with" Democrats, but by definition none of those terms can be comprehended by a narcissistic halfwit whose only desire is to have his ego stroked. Obviously, there's no strategy to pivot.
It's hilarious to watch all these "leaks" emanating from the White House, and Snowflake whinging that they must be fake. This is what always gets me with these "loyalty" assholes -- the word only goes in one direction for them. They verbally abuse and shit on their subordinates, but expect those same subordinates to take a bullet for the glory of serving an egocentric dickhead. As such, the minions deserve every bit of maltreatment they receive, as long as they are willing to put up with it.
In the meantime, it is only getting more and more entertaining watching this leaky craft taking on sewage, starting to sink under the weight of its own shit. This is a thoroughly dishonorable person without any value whatsoever; only people cut from a similar nasty cloth would continue to serve under such a creature. The sooner they realize this, the better off their souls can once again draw a relatively clean breath. Till then, they are simply enabling a skeevy traitor in the ongoing effort to sell out his own country for a few rubles.
Sure, it would "make sense" to "pivot" his "strategy" and "work with" Democrats, but by definition none of those terms can be comprehended by a narcissistic halfwit whose only desire is to have his ego stroked. Obviously, there's no strategy to pivot.
It's hilarious to watch all these "leaks" emanating from the White House, and Snowflake whinging that they must be fake. This is what always gets me with these "loyalty" assholes -- the word only goes in one direction for them. They verbally abuse and shit on their subordinates, but expect those same subordinates to take a bullet for the glory of serving an egocentric dickhead. As such, the minions deserve every bit of maltreatment they receive, as long as they are willing to put up with it.
In the meantime, it is only getting more and more entertaining watching this leaky craft taking on sewage, starting to sink under the weight of its own shit. This is a thoroughly dishonorable person without any value whatsoever; only people cut from a similar nasty cloth would continue to serve under such a creature. The sooner they realize this, the better off their souls can once again draw a relatively clean breath. Till then, they are simply enabling a skeevy traitor in the ongoing effort to sell out his own country for a few rubles.
It's a Bot Time
Strange days have found us. Strange days have tracked us down. -- Jim Morrison
Starting here over at Jester's, some janky shit is going on in the Twitworld -- namely, that Princess Snowflake has a botnet reeling in actual users as followers, as well as muddying the waters with the usual agitprop.
This is where the "legit" corporate media are especially inept. They certainly don't have the resources to track it all, much less boil it down to a nine-second "if it bleeds, it leads" handjob. But this is where these assholes win, by making things up and propagating it through the miracle of automation. Stay frosty, folks.
Starting here over at Jester's, some janky shit is going on in the Twitworld -- namely, that Princess Snowflake has a botnet reeling in actual users as followers, as well as muddying the waters with the usual agitprop.
This is where the "legit" corporate media are especially inept. They certainly don't have the resources to track it all, much less boil it down to a nine-second "if it bleeds, it leads" handjob. But this is where these assholes win, by making things up and propagating it through the miracle of automation. Stay frosty, folks.
Monday, May 29, 2017
Qu'ils Mangent de la Merde
It's bad enough that these people don't know what Memorial Day is for, because none of them have ever sacrificed anything for anyone. But good grief, they just never stop selling branding monetizing more more more.
I suppose it's a reasonable enough simulacrum of what passes for a life these days, and considering the man from whose poisoned sperm she was spawned seriously talked about his supposed sexual conquests as his own "personal Vietnam," it all makes sense. They think working long hours and schmoozing the mediocracy counts as sacrifice. They think that treating the help as if they were human counts for something.
One gets the impression that there might occasionally be something behind the endless kayfabe with the old man. He knows but doesn't care, but at least he knows, on some elemental level, that he's a pustulent dirtbag. That doesn't make him one bit less of a piece of shit, but at least there's a slice of contextual awareness. Maybe. Probably not, but the possibility exists, however remote.
It's not at all clear if Joanie Clownstick, spoiled and privileged from the day she entered this rotten vale of sorrows, actually knows better. It seems like she doesn't really have any clue as to how awful and soulless and off-putting she really is. She gets a lot of attention for being conventionally attractive, but she has the charisma of a Japanese rubber sex doll. This is the sort of person that would put out a promo tweet about taking a dump, if only to push the toilet and paper used. "Great meal @Nobu, letting it go in @AmericanStandard, cleaning up with some@Cottonelle. #satisfied"
She seems to think she has something to say to and about "working" women, even though the whole world knows that her empty bromides resonate only with people like herself, people whose vacant aspirations are actualized in branding and acquisitions and self-serving lies and renting other humans to do their scut work. Twitter Nixon nailed her plastic ass to the wall last week -- when Joanie's trust-fund douchebag traitor slumlord husband gets his ass carted off to Club Fed for selling out his country to Vladimir Putin, she'll write a "single mother" book.
And a certain type of spoiled asshole will buy it.
I suppose it's a reasonable enough simulacrum of what passes for a life these days, and considering the man from whose poisoned sperm she was spawned seriously talked about his supposed sexual conquests as his own "personal Vietnam," it all makes sense. They think working long hours and schmoozing the mediocracy counts as sacrifice. They think that treating the help as if they were human counts for something.
One gets the impression that there might occasionally be something behind the endless kayfabe with the old man. He knows but doesn't care, but at least he knows, on some elemental level, that he's a pustulent dirtbag. That doesn't make him one bit less of a piece of shit, but at least there's a slice of contextual awareness. Maybe. Probably not, but the possibility exists, however remote.
It's not at all clear if Joanie Clownstick, spoiled and privileged from the day she entered this rotten vale of sorrows, actually knows better. It seems like she doesn't really have any clue as to how awful and soulless and off-putting she really is. She gets a lot of attention for being conventionally attractive, but she has the charisma of a Japanese rubber sex doll. This is the sort of person that would put out a promo tweet about taking a dump, if only to push the toilet and paper used. "Great meal @Nobu, letting it go in @AmericanStandard, cleaning up with some
She seems to think she has something to say to and about "working" women, even though the whole world knows that her empty bromides resonate only with people like herself, people whose vacant aspirations are actualized in branding and acquisitions and self-serving lies and renting other humans to do their scut work. Twitter Nixon nailed her plastic ass to the wall last week -- when Joanie's trust-fund douchebag traitor slumlord husband gets his ass carted off to Club Fed for selling out his country to Vladimir Putin, she'll write a "single mother" book.
And a certain type of spoiled asshole will buy it.
Monday, May 22, 2017
Finally Some Good News
Every big game hunter taken down by his prey is a good start. Every one of them should be reincarnated as one of the animals they killed, not for sustenance, but just for the sheer joy of killing. I sincerely hope Theunis Botha gets reincarnated as a leopard or lion, run to exhaustion by a pack of snarling dogs, to either be ripped apart by the dogs or shot by some rich, bored asshole taking a break from molesting children or whatever the fuck these scumbags do with the rest of their awful lives.
Getting crushed by an elephant sounds painful, and I sincerely hope it was. Fuck every last person involved in these things. Go watch one of their videos, read their forums, see their sites, including Botha's where he and his customers pose with all the wondrous creatures they've killed, like it's something to be proud of. They can try to bullshit themselves and each other that they're "helping" with wildlife conservation by culling animals, but to the extent that it ever occurs to be true, it's only because there are too many humans, encroaching everywhere and anywhere, like marauding, insatiable hordes of army ants, devouring all.
Getting crushed by an elephant sounds painful, and I sincerely hope it was. Fuck every last person involved in these things. Go watch one of their videos, read their forums, see their sites, including Botha's where he and his customers pose with all the wondrous creatures they've killed, like it's something to be proud of. They can try to bullshit themselves and each other that they're "helping" with wildlife conservation by culling animals, but to the extent that it ever occurs to be true, it's only because there are too many humans, encroaching everywhere and anywhere, like marauding, insatiable hordes of army ants, devouring all.
Sunday, May 21, 2017
The Secret Shame of Scrooge McCuck
Steve has a hilarious rundown of a few of the Snowflake cultists who are just appalled that Their Hero sold their vaunted principles down the wadi for a few dinars. It just never fails to make me wonder how these maroons suddenly figured out what was obvious to me back when I first encountered Princess Snowflake, about thirty years ago when I was barely out of high school -- he's a liar and a bully, nothing but a cheap, transparent bullshitter.
Those guys are always the biggest fucking pussies, and the first to fold their tent the second someone stands up to them. The guy has never been anything but talk. Ever. I just assumed it was so obvious and easy to check out, I almost feel sorry for someone who's too fucking dumb to realize it. Drinking the kool-aid is one thing, using it as amniotic fluid is quite another.
As always, Snowflake cultists, if you're that impressionable, feel free to drop a few bucks in the PayPal link on the right sidebar, and I'll be happy to give you further tips to deprogram yourselves from your zero's oh-so-compelling bluster. Just take the money you've been saving to attend Chump University, and send it my way. I'll send you a totally real and redeemable certificate of achievement if it'll help. Sheesh.
Those guys are always the biggest fucking pussies, and the first to fold their tent the second someone stands up to them. The guy has never been anything but talk. Ever. I just assumed it was so obvious and easy to check out, I almost feel sorry for someone who's too fucking dumb to realize it. Drinking the kool-aid is one thing, using it as amniotic fluid is quite another.
As always, Snowflake cultists, if you're that impressionable, feel free to drop a few bucks in the PayPal link on the right sidebar, and I'll be happy to give you further tips to deprogram yourselves from your zero's oh-so-compelling bluster. Just take the money you've been saving to attend Chump University, and send it my way. I'll send you a totally real and redeemable certificate of achievement if it'll help. Sheesh.
Media Enablers
Since Bob Schieffer is supposedly semi-retired as some journamalist emeritus, he doesn't have the usual excuses of callow careerism that most of them have when they reflexively parrot the status quo. I mean, if I wanted to hear mindless bullshit from a useless asshole, I'd watch Princess Snowflake read off a teleprompter.
It remains to be seen whether Fareed Zakaria and Brian Williams have learned anything from their idiotic "this is when he became preznit" mooning, but again, Schieffer should know better. He should be ashamed of himself for this.
But here's the deal, old man: if you actually give two shits about your country and your vaunted profession, you'll kindly fuck off before dropping another turd like this into the world's punchbowl. Go fucking work for Fixed Noise, if this is all you're bringing to the table.
[via LGM]
It remains to be seen whether Fareed Zakaria and Brian Williams have learned anything from their idiotic "this is when he became preznit" mooning, but again, Schieffer should know better. He should be ashamed of himself for this.
But here's the deal, old man: if you actually give two shits about your country and your vaunted profession, you'll kindly fuck off before dropping another turd like this into the world's punchbowl. Go fucking work for Fixed Noise, if this is all you're bringing to the table.
[via LGM]
Useful Idiots
Fortunately for the world, Princess Snowflake's hypocrisy junket to the Magic Kingdom is nothing but a meeting wrapped around an arms deal. Snowflake reads a good game on combating terrorism, but nobody who knows anything about radical Islamic terrorism and its origins takes this guff seriously, not when the speech is coming from the blackened, beating heart of -- wait for it -- radical Islamic terrorism.
Hey, I'm fine with the aggro "drive 'em out of this earth" rhetoric of the speech. In fact, I don't have any real problem with the content of the speech itself -- except it denies most of the reality of where radicalized Islamic terrorists come from, who bankrolls them, and it seems to take sides in a 1,300-year conflict between Sunni and Shi'a, a fight in which we really have no dog to speak of.
And the practical reality is that our coddling of the Saudis takes actual sides in the wholesale carnage of SA's barbaric war in Yemen. Snowflake is too dumb to know that putting his comically small thumb on the scale will have unintended consequences. You'd think that since he has interests in a hotel in Baku that's financed in part by the Revolutionary Guard, he'd be more careful about that sort of thing, but maybe someone needs to slap his name on a place in Tehran for him to get the picture.
AmCon's Daniel Larison has written knowledgably and passionately on this subject, and places Snowflake's empty words and promises in their proper context. This is nothing new; every American administration since FDR has been guilty of this nasty open hypocrisy. This is the unfortunate price we have collectively chosen to pay for our shameless oil addiction.
The difference here is that past administrations have not (at least as far as we know) pocketed money for themselves for such deals. As Larison point out, the idea that Saudi Arabia -- where, as Snowflake's christofascist goon followers never tire of pointing out, it is illegal to possess a Christian bible -- belongs to a group of "nations of conscience" is hilarious at best, but mostly just disturbing.
Of course, as with everything else he does, it is all too easy to find any number of tweets from a couple years ago featuring Snowflake's trolling of Obama doing exactly what Snowflake and his entourage are doing right now. It was some sort of high crime that Michelle Obama refused to wear a headscarf, but totally fine for Melanoma and Joanie to do the same thing. Toby Keith playing a concert that only men are allowed to attend (little known fact: Toby Keith is in Saudi Arabia what David Hasselhoff is in Germany. Go figure.). As the first commenter in the Balloon Juice link notes, it's all worth it to see Steve Bannon surrounded by towelheads, with no booze in sight.
In the end, this is just the first stop on a trip that goes next to Jerusalem, where the Israelis are already pissed at Snowflake burning an intel asset whilst showing off to his Russian masters, and then to the Vatican to visit a pontiff that he, Snowflake, has repeatedly insulted. Good luck, fatboy.
So nothing new to see here, but this is less about the administration in particular than the US' ongoing geopolitical strategy in general. A practical strategy balances potential regional hegemons against each other, if neither one is favorable to the superpower's strategic interests in that region. And in this case, since our operational strategy in terms of money and foreign policy effort expended, is Israel, which both Saudi Arabia and Iran propagandize against routinely.
Beyond the ME prism of Israel's interests, there is of course the strategic interest of preserving our access to oil, and now in containing the burgeoning displacement and refugee crisis, which again has been exacerbated greatly by the meddling of Saudi Arabia and Turkey at least much as by Iran.
The corporate media don't even bother reporting on these issues anymore, since for one, they are owned and operated by conglomerates which have vested interests in these imperial adventures, and for another, most 'murkins couldn't find these countries on a map, much less keep them straight in a discussion of geopolitical strategies of past, present, and future.
Perhaps if someone could spell it out for them how much a gallon of gasoline really costs once all the externalities are factored in, they might pay more attention, but probably not. All they care about is the imagined optics of this thing, but the reality is that Princess Snowflake was every bit as empty and obsequious as Chocolate Hussein Thunder, or any other figurehead who goes to pay tribute to the keepers of the holy spigot. Snowflake's speech might meet the lowered expectations that he seems entitled to on every goddamned thing, but that's about it.
Hey, I'm fine with the aggro "drive 'em out of this earth" rhetoric of the speech. In fact, I don't have any real problem with the content of the speech itself -- except it denies most of the reality of where radicalized Islamic terrorists come from, who bankrolls them, and it seems to take sides in a 1,300-year conflict between Sunni and Shi'a, a fight in which we really have no dog to speak of.
And the practical reality is that our coddling of the Saudis takes actual sides in the wholesale carnage of SA's barbaric war in Yemen. Snowflake is too dumb to know that putting his comically small thumb on the scale will have unintended consequences. You'd think that since he has interests in a hotel in Baku that's financed in part by the Revolutionary Guard, he'd be more careful about that sort of thing, but maybe someone needs to slap his name on a place in Tehran for him to get the picture.
AmCon's Daniel Larison has written knowledgably and passionately on this subject, and places Snowflake's empty words and promises in their proper context. This is nothing new; every American administration since FDR has been guilty of this nasty open hypocrisy. This is the unfortunate price we have collectively chosen to pay for our shameless oil addiction.
The difference here is that past administrations have not (at least as far as we know) pocketed money for themselves for such deals. As Larison point out, the idea that Saudi Arabia -- where, as Snowflake's christofascist goon followers never tire of pointing out, it is illegal to possess a Christian bible -- belongs to a group of "nations of conscience" is hilarious at best, but mostly just disturbing.
Of course, as with everything else he does, it is all too easy to find any number of tweets from a couple years ago featuring Snowflake's trolling of Obama doing exactly what Snowflake and his entourage are doing right now. It was some sort of high crime that Michelle Obama refused to wear a headscarf, but totally fine for Melanoma and Joanie to do the same thing. Toby Keith playing a concert that only men are allowed to attend (little known fact: Toby Keith is in Saudi Arabia what David Hasselhoff is in Germany. Go figure.). As the first commenter in the Balloon Juice link notes, it's all worth it to see Steve Bannon surrounded by towelheads, with no booze in sight.
In the end, this is just the first stop on a trip that goes next to Jerusalem, where the Israelis are already pissed at Snowflake burning an intel asset whilst showing off to his Russian masters, and then to the Vatican to visit a pontiff that he, Snowflake, has repeatedly insulted. Good luck, fatboy.
So nothing new to see here, but this is less about the administration in particular than the US' ongoing geopolitical strategy in general. A practical strategy balances potential regional hegemons against each other, if neither one is favorable to the superpower's strategic interests in that region. And in this case, since our operational strategy in terms of money and foreign policy effort expended, is Israel, which both Saudi Arabia and Iran propagandize against routinely.
Beyond the ME prism of Israel's interests, there is of course the strategic interest of preserving our access to oil, and now in containing the burgeoning displacement and refugee crisis, which again has been exacerbated greatly by the meddling of Saudi Arabia and Turkey at least much as by Iran.
The corporate media don't even bother reporting on these issues anymore, since for one, they are owned and operated by conglomerates which have vested interests in these imperial adventures, and for another, most 'murkins couldn't find these countries on a map, much less keep them straight in a discussion of geopolitical strategies of past, present, and future.
Perhaps if someone could spell it out for them how much a gallon of gasoline really costs once all the externalities are factored in, they might pay more attention, but probably not. All they care about is the imagined optics of this thing, but the reality is that Princess Snowflake was every bit as empty and obsequious as Chocolate Hussein Thunder, or any other figurehead who goes to pay tribute to the keepers of the holy spigot. Snowflake's speech might meet the lowered expectations that he seems entitled to on every goddamned thing, but that's about it.
Saturday, May 20, 2017
Seven Days in May, Part 2: Symptom of the Universe
"And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything." -- some asshole
Picking up where we left off the other day, I want to explore the notion of what happens after enough of us decide that the king is a fink (or maybe a wild animal), that it's high time to send Princess Snowflake back to Butthurt Tower once and for all, for the good of the country. The momentum builds, drip by drop by plop, a tantric level of mendacity and dumbfuckery. This is a man who shoots himself in the foot practically by the hour, and reflexively blames the manufacturers of the gun and bullets.
Obviously, this sort of nonsense is unsustainable. Things cannot continue on like this. Perhaps the big overseas trip will serve as the "narrative reset" the bastards think it will. Certainly the corporate media are instinctively positioned to accept it as such; if not for the continued events unfolding and Snowflake's unerring knack for fucking up the simplest of things, the mediots would go back to default as quickly as possible. Keep that in mind as we go along here.
It's a parlor game -- and a fun one at that -- trying to predict how much longer it can go on. Here's exactly how long it will go on: until enough of the treasonous cocksuckers in his own party decide he's bad for business. Even then it'll be an uphill struggle; even then it'll be close. There are Republicans and conservatives who are already bemoaning the GOP's imminent collapse for the next generation or so. They seem to have forgotten that Saint Reagan stormed the breaches just six years after Nixon resigned in disgrace, that Gerald Ford came shamefully close to winning in 1976. People are stupid and their memories are short. Shocking, I know.
So let's say that everything "works out" in the best possible liberal-progressive shorthand scenario: Princess Snowflake is either impeached or resigns one step ahead, Mike Pence is an ineffective placeholder, Democrats come back bigly in 2018 and 2020. The terminal assholes who thought it'd be a grand idea to advance their careers in the service of a pro-wrestling cartoon have trouble finding gainful employment, and have to result to their natural skill, blowing crab-ridden hobos in a urine-soaked alley. Karma comes through for once. What then?
Recall that Princess Snowflake is not the disease but the symptom, the tangible result of the malaise that has plagued our political superstructure longer than any of us has been alive. Snowflake is the natural consequence of a cancerous system. So what actually changes once the tumor is excised, but the cancer remains? Which policies and large-scale trends get addressed and corrected by the "good" guys?
This is not the usual "evil of two lessers" complaint and false comparison, this is a challenge. To take perhaps the foremost current example: the health care system cannot be improved until someone seriously addresses why things cost what they cost, why captive customers must be forced to subsidize the eight-figure salaries of insurance and pharma CEOs. As long as lobbyists from these entities continue to bankroll politicians from both parties, nothing will change there, it just becomes another can to be endlessly kicked.
Insurance in general is a net societal benefit; we could not afford to drive cars and own homes without comprehensive risk pooling. But health-care insurance specifically is essentially the one industry where the actual business model is literally predicated on not providing the customer with the service for which they have been paying for, and continue to do so.
This is just one of many issues that have not been addressed with any real impact by either party. I do believe that the ACA has been a net benefit, and would become very much like Social Security (i.e., politically popular and therefore untouchable) with enough time and tweaking. But it still does not address the usurious business practices of the health-care racket and its nefarious components (insurance, pharma, HMOs).
Another issue is energy independence. Fuck the fucking Saudis already, amirite? The bowing is merely a symbolic representation of what we actually do for these fuckers, who are nothing but trouble. They snap up our expensive real estate as investments, while they drive Yemen into misery and keep the Syrian civil war going. They bankroll at least as much terrorist activity as the Iranians. The American policy of propping up these disgusting pricks with our petrodollars needs to cease, like now. It starts with making it clear that unless you actually need to drive a truck, you're going to start paying for all the externalities borne by driving your Excursion to the post office. And make it a national Great Works project, similar to landing on the moon, to achieve true energy independence. Start with rehiring the coal miners to make solar panels and wind turbines.
There are actually a few things that Snowflake and his snowflake rally goons were right about, the main one being the disappearance of their jobs, and nothing to pick up the slack. While I do believe that these real 'murkins, rugged individualists to the very last, need to suck it up and retrain or relocate, the fact is that there is also a role for the gubmint to help them to do so. It was promised to them as far back as NAFTA, and never really took place to any meaningful extent. So after Snowflake goes, what is the presumed Democratic savior's plan to set this situation right? A bunch of mealy-mouthed jabber about deferring usurious student loans for a couple years is not going to cut it.
Look. While the case presented by Snowflake and his cult followers is hysterical and overwrought, it is not imaginary. The wur muh country gawn "cultural" whinge is stupid, but there is a great deal of truth to the economic component of their argument. It's just that Snowflake, between his borderline retardation and his complete inability to empathize with other sentient beings, was never going to be the one to handle it.
It will only get worse. Climate change will continue to affect most harshly the countries who are already in a whole, overpopulated and impoverished and desperate. They will continue to flee to the havens of the industrialized nations, who are undergoing their own societal convulsions, and are simply no longer prepared to take all comers. Put more abruptly, Germany is essentially paying Turkey protection money to warehouse refugees from Syria and other countries. The Turks have the EU countries over a major barrel, and both sides know it. And the Turks control all the levers that affect the Syrian conflict, especially water.
All of these issues -- overpopulation, resource depletion, extreme poverty, terrorism -- are not just going to continue, they are going to accelerate. That's not politics, it's math. The numbers don't lie. Hell, they can't even keep the lights on in a lot of these countries.
The people who really run the country and the world, the media and the political system, have invested heavily in keeping us pitted against each other, for sensible reasons and stupid reasons, for economic verities and tribal emotions. They are certainly getting their money's worth, and there is no reason to assume that pushing Princess Snowflake off the Iron Throne would change that larger dynamic.
Meanwhile, the prion disease that affects the 27-percenters that make up the permanent doofus base only gets worse. They are in their cocoon, and they aren't coming out. As Steve notes, they can bullshit all they want about how they love them some 'murka, but they don't. They hate this country, what they think it has become, the road they think it's headed down, and the people -- which are, you know, the numerical majority -- who drive those demographic changes, or who accept those changes for what they are. They care more about monuments to traitors and slavers than they do about their own role in the here and now. It's unclear whether even helping them achieve better economic security would cure their epistemic closure, considering that that is entirely voluntary on their part.
Some of the Snowflake suckers are in counties that voted for Obama twice, but that doesn't mean that those individuals voted for him. Some of them can be won over or won back, and some simply cannot be reached. It is important to determine that distinction, and proceed accordingly. The Democratic party suffers from its own prion disease, that of fucking over its own base to curry favor with people who will never vote for them.
So rather than fixate on the exact moment of Snowflake's impending exile to his Manhattan Elba, it would behoove the liberals and progressives and party-liners to look beyond the schadenfreude of a lifelong schmuck meeting his entirely foreseeable political fate, and develop a grand strategy for breaching the very real political impasse. Not just to return to power, but to at least make a competent effort at walking their talk, at being an organization that is actually responsive and attentive to their constituents, and not just their donors.
Because the alternative is this: there will be another Republican candidate to come, who will embody all the loathsome Snowflake traits, but will be smoother, slicker, less abrasive, more intelligent and well-spoken. A clumsy fascist is relatively easy to parry, especially one so anxious to step on his own dick voluntarily. A fascist with even a modicum of self-control will find an electorate ready and willing to actualize their daddy issues at the ballot box again, and a media environment willing to sell its soul down the river one more time for buckets of clickbait.
Picking up where we left off the other day, I want to explore the notion of what happens after enough of us decide that the king is a fink (or maybe a wild animal), that it's high time to send Princess Snowflake back to Butthurt Tower once and for all, for the good of the country. The momentum builds, drip by drop by plop, a tantric level of mendacity and dumbfuckery. This is a man who shoots himself in the foot practically by the hour, and reflexively blames the manufacturers of the gun and bullets.
Obviously, this sort of nonsense is unsustainable. Things cannot continue on like this. Perhaps the big overseas trip will serve as the "narrative reset" the bastards think it will. Certainly the corporate media are instinctively positioned to accept it as such; if not for the continued events unfolding and Snowflake's unerring knack for fucking up the simplest of things, the mediots would go back to default as quickly as possible. Keep that in mind as we go along here.
It's a parlor game -- and a fun one at that -- trying to predict how much longer it can go on. Here's exactly how long it will go on: until enough of the treasonous cocksuckers in his own party decide he's bad for business. Even then it'll be an uphill struggle; even then it'll be close. There are Republicans and conservatives who are already bemoaning the GOP's imminent collapse for the next generation or so. They seem to have forgotten that Saint Reagan stormed the breaches just six years after Nixon resigned in disgrace, that Gerald Ford came shamefully close to winning in 1976. People are stupid and their memories are short. Shocking, I know.
So let's say that everything "works out" in the best possible liberal-progressive shorthand scenario: Princess Snowflake is either impeached or resigns one step ahead, Mike Pence is an ineffective placeholder, Democrats come back bigly in 2018 and 2020. The terminal assholes who thought it'd be a grand idea to advance their careers in the service of a pro-wrestling cartoon have trouble finding gainful employment, and have to result to their natural skill, blowing crab-ridden hobos in a urine-soaked alley. Karma comes through for once. What then?
Recall that Princess Snowflake is not the disease but the symptom, the tangible result of the malaise that has plagued our political superstructure longer than any of us has been alive. Snowflake is the natural consequence of a cancerous system. So what actually changes once the tumor is excised, but the cancer remains? Which policies and large-scale trends get addressed and corrected by the "good" guys?
This is not the usual "evil of two lessers" complaint and false comparison, this is a challenge. To take perhaps the foremost current example: the health care system cannot be improved until someone seriously addresses why things cost what they cost, why captive customers must be forced to subsidize the eight-figure salaries of insurance and pharma CEOs. As long as lobbyists from these entities continue to bankroll politicians from both parties, nothing will change there, it just becomes another can to be endlessly kicked.
Insurance in general is a net societal benefit; we could not afford to drive cars and own homes without comprehensive risk pooling. But health-care insurance specifically is essentially the one industry where the actual business model is literally predicated on not providing the customer with the service for which they have been paying for, and continue to do so.
This is just one of many issues that have not been addressed with any real impact by either party. I do believe that the ACA has been a net benefit, and would become very much like Social Security (i.e., politically popular and therefore untouchable) with enough time and tweaking. But it still does not address the usurious business practices of the health-care racket and its nefarious components (insurance, pharma, HMOs).
Another issue is energy independence. Fuck the fucking Saudis already, amirite? The bowing is merely a symbolic representation of what we actually do for these fuckers, who are nothing but trouble. They snap up our expensive real estate as investments, while they drive Yemen into misery and keep the Syrian civil war going. They bankroll at least as much terrorist activity as the Iranians. The American policy of propping up these disgusting pricks with our petrodollars needs to cease, like now. It starts with making it clear that unless you actually need to drive a truck, you're going to start paying for all the externalities borne by driving your Excursion to the post office. And make it a national Great Works project, similar to landing on the moon, to achieve true energy independence. Start with rehiring the coal miners to make solar panels and wind turbines.
There are actually a few things that Snowflake and his snowflake rally goons were right about, the main one being the disappearance of their jobs, and nothing to pick up the slack. While I do believe that these real 'murkins, rugged individualists to the very last, need to suck it up and retrain or relocate, the fact is that there is also a role for the gubmint to help them to do so. It was promised to them as far back as NAFTA, and never really took place to any meaningful extent. So after Snowflake goes, what is the presumed Democratic savior's plan to set this situation right? A bunch of mealy-mouthed jabber about deferring usurious student loans for a couple years is not going to cut it.
Look. While the case presented by Snowflake and his cult followers is hysterical and overwrought, it is not imaginary. The wur muh country gawn "cultural" whinge is stupid, but there is a great deal of truth to the economic component of their argument. It's just that Snowflake, between his borderline retardation and his complete inability to empathize with other sentient beings, was never going to be the one to handle it.
It will only get worse. Climate change will continue to affect most harshly the countries who are already in a whole, overpopulated and impoverished and desperate. They will continue to flee to the havens of the industrialized nations, who are undergoing their own societal convulsions, and are simply no longer prepared to take all comers. Put more abruptly, Germany is essentially paying Turkey protection money to warehouse refugees from Syria and other countries. The Turks have the EU countries over a major barrel, and both sides know it. And the Turks control all the levers that affect the Syrian conflict, especially water.
All of these issues -- overpopulation, resource depletion, extreme poverty, terrorism -- are not just going to continue, they are going to accelerate. That's not politics, it's math. The numbers don't lie. Hell, they can't even keep the lights on in a lot of these countries.
The people who really run the country and the world, the media and the political system, have invested heavily in keeping us pitted against each other, for sensible reasons and stupid reasons, for economic verities and tribal emotions. They are certainly getting their money's worth, and there is no reason to assume that pushing Princess Snowflake off the Iron Throne would change that larger dynamic.
Meanwhile, the prion disease that affects the 27-percenters that make up the permanent doofus base only gets worse. They are in their cocoon, and they aren't coming out. As Steve notes, they can bullshit all they want about how they love them some 'murka, but they don't. They hate this country, what they think it has become, the road they think it's headed down, and the people -- which are, you know, the numerical majority -- who drive those demographic changes, or who accept those changes for what they are. They care more about monuments to traitors and slavers than they do about their own role in the here and now. It's unclear whether even helping them achieve better economic security would cure their epistemic closure, considering that that is entirely voluntary on their part.
Some of the Snowflake suckers are in counties that voted for Obama twice, but that doesn't mean that those individuals voted for him. Some of them can be won over or won back, and some simply cannot be reached. It is important to determine that distinction, and proceed accordingly. The Democratic party suffers from its own prion disease, that of fucking over its own base to curry favor with people who will never vote for them.
So rather than fixate on the exact moment of Snowflake's impending exile to his Manhattan Elba, it would behoove the liberals and progressives and party-liners to look beyond the schadenfreude of a lifelong schmuck meeting his entirely foreseeable political fate, and develop a grand strategy for breaching the very real political impasse. Not just to return to power, but to at least make a competent effort at walking their talk, at being an organization that is actually responsive and attentive to their constituents, and not just their donors.
Because the alternative is this: there will be another Republican candidate to come, who will embody all the loathsome Snowflake traits, but will be smoother, slicker, less abrasive, more intelligent and well-spoken. A clumsy fascist is relatively easy to parry, especially one so anxious to step on his own dick voluntarily. A fascist with even a modicum of self-control will find an electorate ready and willing to actualize their daddy issues at the ballot box again, and a media environment willing to sell its soul down the river one more time for buckets of clickbait.
Thursday, May 18, 2017
Study in Contrasts
Strange, terrible news awaited us all as we awoke this morning to find that Soundgarden's Chris Cornell had passed. Later in the morning, it was disclosed that Cornell had hanged himself in his hotel room after a performance in Detroit.
I never have much of anything to offer when things like this happen. I have had several friends and relatives, nearly a dozen in all, kill themselves over the years, and so I have seen far too many times up close the frustration and despair left in the wake of such tragedies. The families look for someone or something to blame.
It is very difficult for people to admit, at least to themselves, that sometimes there isn't any clear reason or answer for why someone does this. We need to believe in answers and reasons for everything, and they aren't always knowable or apparent. Sometimes people have an inner pain or torment that they carry with them always, never confiding it. They have their reasons for making an ultimate decision to set down that burden, and frequently they don't share those reasons. It is a mistake to judge them.
Of the four main bands from the Seattle "grunge scene" (Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains -- and yes, I am well aware of Mudhoney and Tad and Screaming Trees and the like, but those first four were by far the most successful) it is at least interesting to observe that only Pearl Jam made it this far without tragedy befalling them. I don't know what to make of that. It probably is simply a tragic coincidence, although it is certainly tempting to note the constant bad weather of the region, as well as the lyrical desolation of most songs of the genre. But that's a parlor game at best.
Of those four bands and their iconic front men, Cornell was the most charismatic and conventionally "rock star" in appearance and the way he carried himself, and he was by far the best pure singer out of those bands, and probably in many listeners' top ten or even top five all-time singers. He was really that good, and by all accounts, a very sweet and generous human being. Go back and listen to the hits, as well as the deep cuts. It's what he would want.
By way of bizarre counterpoint, Fixed Noise troglodyte Roger Ailes died within a few hours of Cornell's tragic demise. Apparently Ailes' death was the result of a fall he had taken, unfortunately not into a wood chipper.
Remember Hunter Thompson's classic, scathing obituary for Richard Nixon? HST would have had a field day with a stinking turd like Ailes. Nixon, for all his faults, actually had a decent side and tried to do some decent things in office -- started the EPA, tried to work on the health-care system, was by all accounts a devoted family man, etc.
Perhaps Roger Ailes loved his family, after a fashion; if so, it would be the only positive thing one could conjure up about the man. Other than that purely speculative observation, the world is literally worse off for Ailes' having inhabited it for a time. A master propagandist who seems to have inherited Goebbels' soul, Ailes used his television skills from the old Mike Douglas show (where Nixon found him) and his political skills from working for Tricky Dick, and refined Fixed Noise into the agitprop shop we all know and loathe today.
It is no exaggeration to say that the channel has poisoned the minds of significant chunks of paranoid retirees, while somehow grooming a new generation of gullible youngtards. It will take some doing to weed these termites out of the national framework, if indeed it is possible at all.
But more than merely a dark PR lord, Ailes distinguished his full measure as a serial sexual harasser and blackmailer. The allegations are well-known by now, and Ailes of course was able to he-said-she-said most of them away. But the one that stuck should be the one that proves them all: Gretchen Carlson had the foresight to take her phone into one of her predatory one-on-ones with Ailes, and turned on the voice recorder app. Once confronted with irrefutable proof of Ailes' aggressive solicitations, Fox gave him a $40m golden parachute and $20m more to Carlson to keep quiet. Sixty million dollars total to keep this thing tamped down. Yeah, no fire to go with that smoke, right?
Dozens of women came forward on Ailes, many (as with Bill Cosby) from beyond the statute of limitations. But as with Cosby, there was a startling consistency with the accusations. Cosby's thing was to drug 'em and rape 'em while they were knocked out. Ailes' kink was to flat-out coerce women into sucking his dick in exchange for whatever work-related perk they were seeking, and then blackmail more blowjobs out of them with his secret taping of the initial act. Classy with a capital K, our Roger. If his widow and son have even a modicum of honor and/or dignity, they'll donate at least part of the scumbag's ill-gotten pelf to something that helps women. If not, well, shame on them.
And it is not a small detail that HRH Emperor Princess Snowflake Fuckface von Clownstick defended his friend right up to the very end. Because that's the kind of man he is. Birds of a feather and all. It's a goddamned shame that heaven and hell are merely wishes for celestial karma we shout into the void from the prime material plane, because there are people who do deserve eternal torment. If you factor in the wars and brutal policies enacted because of Ailes' agitprop, you can be sure that his body count is far higher than every serial killer combined. He should be cremated in a rendering plant, and have his ashes flushed down a portajohn at a Charlie Daniels Band concert.
I never have much of anything to offer when things like this happen. I have had several friends and relatives, nearly a dozen in all, kill themselves over the years, and so I have seen far too many times up close the frustration and despair left in the wake of such tragedies. The families look for someone or something to blame.
It is very difficult for people to admit, at least to themselves, that sometimes there isn't any clear reason or answer for why someone does this. We need to believe in answers and reasons for everything, and they aren't always knowable or apparent. Sometimes people have an inner pain or torment that they carry with them always, never confiding it. They have their reasons for making an ultimate decision to set down that burden, and frequently they don't share those reasons. It is a mistake to judge them.
Of the four main bands from the Seattle "grunge scene" (Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains -- and yes, I am well aware of Mudhoney and Tad and Screaming Trees and the like, but those first four were by far the most successful) it is at least interesting to observe that only Pearl Jam made it this far without tragedy befalling them. I don't know what to make of that. It probably is simply a tragic coincidence, although it is certainly tempting to note the constant bad weather of the region, as well as the lyrical desolation of most songs of the genre. But that's a parlor game at best.
Of those four bands and their iconic front men, Cornell was the most charismatic and conventionally "rock star" in appearance and the way he carried himself, and he was by far the best pure singer out of those bands, and probably in many listeners' top ten or even top five all-time singers. He was really that good, and by all accounts, a very sweet and generous human being. Go back and listen to the hits, as well as the deep cuts. It's what he would want.
By way of bizarre counterpoint, Fixed Noise troglodyte Roger Ailes died within a few hours of Cornell's tragic demise. Apparently Ailes' death was the result of a fall he had taken, unfortunately not into a wood chipper.
Remember Hunter Thompson's classic, scathing obituary for Richard Nixon? HST would have had a field day with a stinking turd like Ailes. Nixon, for all his faults, actually had a decent side and tried to do some decent things in office -- started the EPA, tried to work on the health-care system, was by all accounts a devoted family man, etc.
Perhaps Roger Ailes loved his family, after a fashion; if so, it would be the only positive thing one could conjure up about the man. Other than that purely speculative observation, the world is literally worse off for Ailes' having inhabited it for a time. A master propagandist who seems to have inherited Goebbels' soul, Ailes used his television skills from the old Mike Douglas show (where Nixon found him) and his political skills from working for Tricky Dick, and refined Fixed Noise into the agitprop shop we all know and loathe today.
It is no exaggeration to say that the channel has poisoned the minds of significant chunks of paranoid retirees, while somehow grooming a new generation of gullible youngtards. It will take some doing to weed these termites out of the national framework, if indeed it is possible at all.
But more than merely a dark PR lord, Ailes distinguished his full measure as a serial sexual harasser and blackmailer. The allegations are well-known by now, and Ailes of course was able to he-said-she-said most of them away. But the one that stuck should be the one that proves them all: Gretchen Carlson had the foresight to take her phone into one of her predatory one-on-ones with Ailes, and turned on the voice recorder app. Once confronted with irrefutable proof of Ailes' aggressive solicitations, Fox gave him a $40m golden parachute and $20m more to Carlson to keep quiet. Sixty million dollars total to keep this thing tamped down. Yeah, no fire to go with that smoke, right?
Dozens of women came forward on Ailes, many (as with Bill Cosby) from beyond the statute of limitations. But as with Cosby, there was a startling consistency with the accusations. Cosby's thing was to drug 'em and rape 'em while they were knocked out. Ailes' kink was to flat-out coerce women into sucking his dick in exchange for whatever work-related perk they were seeking, and then blackmail more blowjobs out of them with his secret taping of the initial act. Classy with a capital K, our Roger. If his widow and son have even a modicum of honor and/or dignity, they'll donate at least part of the scumbag's ill-gotten pelf to something that helps women. If not, well, shame on them.
And it is not a small detail that HRH Emperor Princess Snowflake Fuckface von Clownstick defended his friend right up to the very end. Because that's the kind of man he is. Birds of a feather and all. It's a goddamned shame that heaven and hell are merely wishes for celestial karma we shout into the void from the prime material plane, because there are people who do deserve eternal torment. If you factor in the wars and brutal policies enacted because of Ailes' agitprop, you can be sure that his body count is far higher than every serial killer combined. He should be cremated in a rendering plant, and have his ashes flushed down a portajohn at a Charlie Daniels Band concert.
Wednesday, May 17, 2017
Seven Days in May
Never a dull moment, eh? Let's recap just the major events of the past week:
One cool phenomenon has taken place for me, and I suspect at least a few other people. The anger and frustration I have felt for so many months about this situation has almost completely dissipated. I'm not kidding when I say that, as dumb and arrogant as I thought this asshole was after watching him hump 'murka's leg since the Eighties, it's no small surprise that he's found a way to turn out be dumber, meaner, more inept, more corrupt, than I could have imagined. Not just barely, but by a fucking country mile. This is a deeply stupid man who genuinely seems unaware just how coddled and insulated from reality his status in life has kept him.
Questions about whether he lies with intent, or whether he simply lives in some sort of (as Jacob Bacharach put it a while back) "collapsed distinction" between truth and falsehood, are moot. A person who continues to spin falsehoods for self-serving reasons, utterly indifferent to accuracy or probity, is just as bad as someone who is actively trying to put one over on you. The effect is certainly the same, anyway.
This goes for the Clownstick cultists as well. Shame on all the commentators and journamalists who insist on giving them a pass, or smugly lecture everyone else about how "this is why he won". He won because enough people didn't care what was true or not anymore, and wanted to throw a temper tantrum -- so what, are the rest of the country's citizens -- the majority, it must be pointed out -- supposed to give them a there, there, it'll be all right hug and validate their fucking feewings?
Why? Why is that the only answer; why are they never implored to grow the fuck up, read a book once in a while, maybe come around to the understanding that the rest of the world doesn't owe you a coal mining or auto manufacturing job? You are going to have to retrain, maybe get some more education, maybe even relocate. One candidate was prepared to help you do those things, the other one lied in your faces and dared you to not believe your own lyin' eyes.
Well, you fucked up -- you trusted the wrong guy, backed the wrong horse. So why are all the people who saw the dipshit con man for exactly what he was supposed to reach out and salve your butt-hurt? What the fuck ever happened to at least meeting each other halfway?
Whatever; we've gone over those questions ad nauseam since the election and before, and are no closer to an answer. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe it comes down to a couple of the core principles I've espoused consistently in here for well over a decade now:
So. Where do we go from here? Well, as I mentioned above, I have very little of the earlier anger and frustration I felt for so long, watching impotently as so many of my fellow countrymen willingly signed on to this inept asshole. And now it's starting to unravel, bigly. I will turn fifty years old ten days from now, and I would be lying if I said I didn't regard the imminent disintegration of this profoundly vile enterprise to be something of a rather timely present for a milestone birthday.
The cultists are already gnashing their teeth and rending their garments, aghast at the treacherous leakers and the infernal fake newsers who report their perfidy. They ignore what is right in front of them, that their hero is a fucking moron, that his only skill is reliving them of their wallets, of misusing and abusing their loyalty to him. They are still convinced that he is some sort of brilliant bidness mind, that his magnificence and unparalleled expertise will save us all.
Friends 'n' neighbors, let me add one more rule of thumb to the mix here: Emperor Princess Snowflake Fuckface von Clownstick is to running a successful business what Michael Jackson was to child care, what Jim Jones was to making a tasty beverage, what Jeffrey Dahmer was to veganism. Look, it should be a clue to even the dimmest of bulbs that, even in the ultra-elite billionaires' club, none of the other members (giggity) of that club would be caught dead in the same photo frame as Snowflake Clownstick. I wonder if the real tycoons all know something that the angry crackers in the meeting room of the Pigs Knuckle, Arkansas Waffle House don't.
(See? See? That's why he got elected! Oh, go fuck yourself.)
As for the now-simmering debate over whether to impeach or to invoke the competency clause of the 25th Amendment, I would counsel patience for the time being. This is counter-intuitive, but true all the same. Bear in mind the two main core principles listed above, both of which apply directly to Clownstick's remaining supporters -- which, it should be noted, seem to still comprise a rather large percentage of his voters.
Again, it hasn't even been 120 days, even if it seems much longer (giggity). We saw all the stories, read all the interviews, saw all the profiles of these dumbasses. It's going to take time and an undeniable preponderance of evidence to get them to budge. They have to realize that the cost of sticking with a cynical grifter who is just using them is much greater than admitting (if only to themselves) that they fucked up, and need to drop him like the case of political gonorrhea that he really is.
What will make them come to that realization is the slow, patient, non-dramatic process of building a case, plank by plank, making sure that allegations and evidence are solid and irrefutable. This is exactly what is about to take place, and we have to let it happen. It may take months, or a full year, or even longer. Everything from delay tactics to seasonal recesses will bog down the process, make it take forever and a day. Keep in mind what's happened so far, and the delta -- the rate of acceleration -- that has been building the entire time.
Some are worried about a civil war, of butt-hurt rubes getting butt-hurt and taking to the streets. There will probably be a few isolated instances here and there, but a close reading of the Clownsticker profiles should alleviate most concerns. The most unhinged acolytes are, it turns out, the worst purveyors of the usual empty jabber. They are welcome to grab their AR-15s and mount their trusty Rascals, take to the streets, and see what that gets them. The vast majority of them are precisely what you think they are -- bitter cranks clogging their Facebook feeds with nonsense and lies.
In the meantime, I think Robert Mueller is a solid choice for special counsel. I think these guys are up to their asses in alligators, and they are starting to realize it. I think Page and Manafort, for starters, are people who realize that their literal asses will be traded for smokes and candy bars in the joint, and they will become very invested in avoiding that fate. I think that from here forward, even if the investigation falters and these fuckers get away with it all, every day spent holding their dicks to the grill is another day they can't implement their vicious agenda.
And in the end, perhaps Mencken was right, and nature really does abhor a moron, and that, combined with the other immutable physical laws of the universe, makes all the difference here. I hope so. I want to see every person involved with this clusterfuck rendered destitute, unemployable. They have betrayed their country for long enough already.
- Clownstick fires the FBI director.
- Clownstick meets with the top two Russian diplomats in the Oval Office, deliberately excluding American media but including Russian state media. It's as if all sixteen American intelligence agencies hadn't, less than six months ago, agreed unanimously that Russia did something adverse to affect our electoral process. What could possibly go wrong with having a closed-door meeting with their top spies?
- Clownstick initially claims Comey was fired for not handling But Her Emails' case properly, perhaps inadvertently proving the point of every "guilt-based confession" story (Tell-Tale Heart, Crime and Punishment, etc.).
- Clownstick subsequently undermines his own rationales, as well as those of his staff. Comedy ensues as the gang tries in vain to get their stories straight.
- Clownstick openly threatens Comey on Twitter. Every time Grampa Walnuts makes a boom-boom, a White House staff member clutches the ragged ulcer where their stomach used to be.
- Remember that closed-door meeting with the Russians? Genius decides to show off to his new buddies and lets slip a piece of intel that is considered "code word classified"; that is, very tightly restricted and not to be shared with the fucking Russians. But (again) Her Emails, amirite?
- It gets even better -- White House staff had to leak the piece about the intel leak just to get out in front of the Russians, so that they couldn't blackmail the Retard-in-Thief, or drop a nuclear news item in the next edition of Pravda. This is the kind of damage control last seen in Dr. Strangelove.
- Turns out Comey takes notes of his more, shall we say, contentious meetings and conversations. More comic flailing.
- Turns out Russian asset "General" Mike Flynn was known to be under investigation when the Clownstick transition team were vetting him. Plus Flynn blatantly lied on his background questionnaire. Plus Flynn, as a paid (and unlicensed) agent of the Turkish government, tried to put his thumb on the scale for them as well. No wonder the Drumpfkins liked him so much; mercenaries are alike in their ultimate loyalty. The rumor was that Flynn, seeing the writing on the wall, offered last month to turn state's evidence in exchange for full immunity, and was declined. It might be because they have enough to nail his treasonous balls to the wall, and so any horse trading is simply going to be a reduction, rather than an elimination, of the years Flynn will spend at Club Fed.
- After unironically whining about armchair critics at a commencement address at Jerry Falwell Cracker College over the weekend, Princess Snowflake cranked up the waterworks for the US Coast Guard Academy, whinging as only he can about how the media are so meeeaaannn to him for reporting the things he says and does. Presumably 911 was called and they got him his binky until the waaahmbulance got there. Fucking pussy.
One cool phenomenon has taken place for me, and I suspect at least a few other people. The anger and frustration I have felt for so many months about this situation has almost completely dissipated. I'm not kidding when I say that, as dumb and arrogant as I thought this asshole was after watching him hump 'murka's leg since the Eighties, it's no small surprise that he's found a way to turn out be dumber, meaner, more inept, more corrupt, than I could have imagined. Not just barely, but by a fucking country mile. This is a deeply stupid man who genuinely seems unaware just how coddled and insulated from reality his status in life has kept him.
Questions about whether he lies with intent, or whether he simply lives in some sort of (as Jacob Bacharach put it a while back) "collapsed distinction" between truth and falsehood, are moot. A person who continues to spin falsehoods for self-serving reasons, utterly indifferent to accuracy or probity, is just as bad as someone who is actively trying to put one over on you. The effect is certainly the same, anyway.
This goes for the Clownstick cultists as well. Shame on all the commentators and journamalists who insist on giving them a pass, or smugly lecture everyone else about how "this is why he won". He won because enough people didn't care what was true or not anymore, and wanted to throw a temper tantrum -- so what, are the rest of the country's citizens -- the majority, it must be pointed out -- supposed to give them a there, there, it'll be all right hug and validate their fucking feewings?
Why? Why is that the only answer; why are they never implored to grow the fuck up, read a book once in a while, maybe come around to the understanding that the rest of the world doesn't owe you a coal mining or auto manufacturing job? You are going to have to retrain, maybe get some more education, maybe even relocate. One candidate was prepared to help you do those things, the other one lied in your faces and dared you to not believe your own lyin' eyes.
Well, you fucked up -- you trusted the wrong guy, backed the wrong horse. So why are all the people who saw the dipshit con man for exactly what he was supposed to reach out and salve your butt-hurt? What the fuck ever happened to at least meeting each other halfway?
Whatever; we've gone over those questions ad nauseam since the election and before, and are no closer to an answer. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe it comes down to a couple of the core principles I've espoused consistently in here for well over a decade now:
- It is impossible to use logic and reason effectively with irrational people.
- People do not change until they understand that the cost of not changing is greater than the cost of changing.
So. Where do we go from here? Well, as I mentioned above, I have very little of the earlier anger and frustration I felt for so long, watching impotently as so many of my fellow countrymen willingly signed on to this inept asshole. And now it's starting to unravel, bigly. I will turn fifty years old ten days from now, and I would be lying if I said I didn't regard the imminent disintegration of this profoundly vile enterprise to be something of a rather timely present for a milestone birthday.
The cultists are already gnashing their teeth and rending their garments, aghast at the treacherous leakers and the infernal fake newsers who report their perfidy. They ignore what is right in front of them, that their hero is a fucking moron, that his only skill is reliving them of their wallets, of misusing and abusing their loyalty to him. They are still convinced that he is some sort of brilliant bidness mind, that his magnificence and unparalleled expertise will save us all.
Friends 'n' neighbors, let me add one more rule of thumb to the mix here: Emperor Princess Snowflake Fuckface von Clownstick is to running a successful business what Michael Jackson was to child care, what Jim Jones was to making a tasty beverage, what Jeffrey Dahmer was to veganism. Look, it should be a clue to even the dimmest of bulbs that, even in the ultra-elite billionaires' club, none of the other members (giggity) of that club would be caught dead in the same photo frame as Snowflake Clownstick. I wonder if the real tycoons all know something that the angry crackers in the meeting room of the Pigs Knuckle, Arkansas Waffle House don't.
(See? See? That's why he got elected! Oh, go fuck yourself.)
As for the now-simmering debate over whether to impeach or to invoke the competency clause of the 25th Amendment, I would counsel patience for the time being. This is counter-intuitive, but true all the same. Bear in mind the two main core principles listed above, both of which apply directly to Clownstick's remaining supporters -- which, it should be noted, seem to still comprise a rather large percentage of his voters.
Again, it hasn't even been 120 days, even if it seems much longer (giggity). We saw all the stories, read all the interviews, saw all the profiles of these dumbasses. It's going to take time and an undeniable preponderance of evidence to get them to budge. They have to realize that the cost of sticking with a cynical grifter who is just using them is much greater than admitting (if only to themselves) that they fucked up, and need to drop him like the case of political gonorrhea that he really is.
What will make them come to that realization is the slow, patient, non-dramatic process of building a case, plank by plank, making sure that allegations and evidence are solid and irrefutable. This is exactly what is about to take place, and we have to let it happen. It may take months, or a full year, or even longer. Everything from delay tactics to seasonal recesses will bog down the process, make it take forever and a day. Keep in mind what's happened so far, and the delta -- the rate of acceleration -- that has been building the entire time.
Some are worried about a civil war, of butt-hurt rubes getting butt-hurt and taking to the streets. There will probably be a few isolated instances here and there, but a close reading of the Clownsticker profiles should alleviate most concerns. The most unhinged acolytes are, it turns out, the worst purveyors of the usual empty jabber. They are welcome to grab their AR-15s and mount their trusty Rascals, take to the streets, and see what that gets them. The vast majority of them are precisely what you think they are -- bitter cranks clogging their Facebook feeds with nonsense and lies.
In the meantime, I think Robert Mueller is a solid choice for special counsel. I think these guys are up to their asses in alligators, and they are starting to realize it. I think Page and Manafort, for starters, are people who realize that their literal asses will be traded for smokes and candy bars in the joint, and they will become very invested in avoiding that fate. I think that from here forward, even if the investigation falters and these fuckers get away with it all, every day spent holding their dicks to the grill is another day they can't implement their vicious agenda.
And in the end, perhaps Mencken was right, and nature really does abhor a moron, and that, combined with the other immutable physical laws of the universe, makes all the difference here. I hope so. I want to see every person involved with this clusterfuck rendered destitute, unemployable. They have betrayed their country for long enough already.
Sunday, May 14, 2017
Traitors
It is no exaggeration to stipulate that the world would be an objectively better place if it were without these fucking dipshits. They cannot die off quickly enough. Let's cut the "part of our history" shit. I have never been to the south, and don't plan to go. But these delusional motherfuckers aren't fooling anyone but themselves, and it seems like they could find something better to do than getting weird over people who took up arms against their country in order to preserve their ability to own and murder human beings, and plunder their labor. That's all the confederacy was, and the world was a better place the day it was ended. Fuck them, fuck their memories, fuck their empty rationales, their flag, their sanctimonious bullshit. And fuck their trolling "Russia is our friend" chant too. I'm sure there were Germans in the Waffen SS who fought valiantly for their cause. But it was a dismal cause that deserved to be eradicated as well, and present-day Germans thankfully seem to have enough sense to not engage in these petulant exercises. These crybabies need a better hobby.
Bunker Mentality
I get where Steve is coming from with the "recluse movie" bit, but he gives Clownstick way too much credit. If there's a movie that befits his reclusive, insular, impulsive approach to what used to be considered governance, but has now devolved to constant trolling, this is the movie:
I went to a friend's birthday party yesterday, and there were quite a few older conservative folks there, and they do indeed seem to be just fine with Princess Snowflake, for now. Nothing's going to change their minds, not yet anyway. As Ed rightly points out, we're barely a hundred days into this clusterfuck. He struck a chord with these knuckle-dragging apes, and they will need a bit more skull-fuckery and ineptitude to back away from him. Is there any doubt that he'll give it to them in spades?
But it's not going to get any better for him or for them. Snowflake has made it clear that he has no other gear; despite his claims during the campaign that he could be less of an asshole once in office, he is incapable of such a thing. He acts on impulse, thinks he knows everything and actually knows nothing. This is a combination of traits that has only one outcome -- failure.
This asshole is as stupid and corrupt as the day is long, and he may be getting away with some of it for now, but only because the Republicans in Congress will let him do literally anything, as long as they get their fucking tax cuts for their owners. But Snowflake is down to 36% approval (who are these fucking people, anyway?), and again he is incapable of reversing that trend, or of reaching out to his opponents. Once the Goopers understand that he's going to take them down with him, they'll turn on him so fast, it'll knock that fucking thing off his head.
Ordinarily you'd worry about a Reichstag fire, but these assholes wouldn't be able to pull that one off. The old saying about people who could fuck up a two-car funeral is true with these morons.
I went to a friend's birthday party yesterday, and there were quite a few older conservative folks there, and they do indeed seem to be just fine with Princess Snowflake, for now. Nothing's going to change their minds, not yet anyway. As Ed rightly points out, we're barely a hundred days into this clusterfuck. He struck a chord with these knuckle-dragging apes, and they will need a bit more skull-fuckery and ineptitude to back away from him. Is there any doubt that he'll give it to them in spades?
But it's not going to get any better for him or for them. Snowflake has made it clear that he has no other gear; despite his claims during the campaign that he could be less of an asshole once in office, he is incapable of such a thing. He acts on impulse, thinks he knows everything and actually knows nothing. This is a combination of traits that has only one outcome -- failure.
This asshole is as stupid and corrupt as the day is long, and he may be getting away with some of it for now, but only because the Republicans in Congress will let him do literally anything, as long as they get their fucking tax cuts for their owners. But Snowflake is down to 36% approval (who are these fucking people, anyway?), and again he is incapable of reversing that trend, or of reaching out to his opponents. Once the Goopers understand that he's going to take them down with him, they'll turn on him so fast, it'll knock that fucking thing off his head.
Ordinarily you'd worry about a Reichstag fire, but these assholes wouldn't be able to pull that one off. The old saying about people who could fuck up a two-car funeral is true with these morons.
Friday, May 12, 2017
Among Bushes
You're cruising down the highway and you see what appears to be a massive, bloody, fiery wreck. Authorities have arrived at the scene, but have not had a chance to close the site and detour traffic. The crash site appears to be little more than a cluster of crumpled metal and bloody pavement.
You slow down to an appropriate speed, and make a silent resolution not to look, but you see a rolling head out of the corner of your eye, hear the keening wail of a trapped child, something to require your glance. You slow down even more than you need to, without realizing it.
There are two ways this administration can go now -- chastened impotence or flat-out tyranny. There is no longer a middle ground, nor any "debate" among honest brokers about whether these people respect not just hoary norms of decorum, but the basic rule of law and the importance of long-standing institutions. (Hint: they don't.)
You slow down to an appropriate speed, and make a silent resolution not to look, but you see a rolling head out of the corner of your eye, hear the keening wail of a trapped child, something to require your glance. You slow down even more than you need to, without realizing it.
There are two ways this administration can go now -- chastened impotence or flat-out tyranny. There is no longer a middle ground, nor any "debate" among honest brokers about whether these people respect not just hoary norms of decorum, but the basic rule of law and the importance of long-standing institutions. (Hint: they don't.)
Saturday, May 06, 2017
Better Dead Than Read
I don't know if you've heard, but dead-eyed-daughter-of-famous-retard Joanie Clownstick has a "book" out. Proving that she has learned at the feet (or, well, the lap) of Dear Old Dud, Joanie has cobbled together a pastiche of poached, decontextualized sentiments from other people, poured a corn syrup of tone-deaf self-help bromides all over it, baked for a lifetime of privileged cluelessness, and served as her own dish.
I'm not sure what's worse, the soulless branding machine that churns out this sort of page poop, or the brainless asshole who actually shells out money for it, who see Joanie as something other than what she really is, like they somehow see her old man as something other than what he really is. It's not like this family of boutique grifters has ever been shy about humping 'murka's collective leg like a horny shar-pei violating a hapless couch pillow. Whatever. You can see from the Amazon page that while the "book" has a majority of poor reviews, it is still moving quite well. There will always be someone stupid enough to spend good money on the borrowed musings of a spoiled dunce, if only out of sheer spite.
Just for the fun of it, enjoy the hate reviews from Slate and Atlantic, and remember -- this overrated organism has more money and power than you will ever see in your lifetime, and accumulates more of it every second. She's one of those people who never has to acknowledge how fucking awful they really are, and has the goddamned nerve on top of it all to cloak it in this insufferable pose of "helping" other women. You have to credit these people -- the grift just never slows down.
I'm not sure what's worse, the soulless branding machine that churns out this sort of page poop, or the brainless asshole who actually shells out money for it, who see Joanie as something other than what she really is, like they somehow see her old man as something other than what he really is. It's not like this family of boutique grifters has ever been shy about humping 'murka's collective leg like a horny shar-pei violating a hapless couch pillow. Whatever. You can see from the Amazon page that while the "book" has a majority of poor reviews, it is still moving quite well. There will always be someone stupid enough to spend good money on the borrowed musings of a spoiled dunce, if only out of sheer spite.
Just for the fun of it, enjoy the hate reviews from Slate and Atlantic, and remember -- this overrated organism has more money and power than you will ever see in your lifetime, and accumulates more of it every second. She's one of those people who never has to acknowledge how fucking awful they really are, and has the goddamned nerve on top of it all to cloak it in this insufferable pose of "helping" other women. You have to credit these people -- the grift just never slows down.