Yet Another Cletus Safari, Alabama Dingbats Edition

These people just never fucking learn:  the day before a hugely contentious Senate election, perhaps simply to prove that it's not just old angry white wimmins who love them some Roah (I say, Roah) Moah, Cosmo decides to give us all some "insight" into what the future iterations (one of them, I shit you not, is a Moah campaign intern) are cogimatatin'. Well, there's five minutes we'll never get back.

I honestly have no idea what purpose these stupid pieces are intended to serve, but let's note for the record that there does not appear to be any Cosmo article presenting an opposing point of view -- say, even one (1) person of any gender explificatin' to those of us dumb enough to waste time on these things, why they cannot vote for Roah Moah, and are in fact voting for Doug Jones.

Seriously, is there anyone out there who actually cares what these dipshits are thinking, why they do what they do, their excuses for the way they vote? It doesn't matter what they say -- their Christianity is the angel topping a Christmas tree, and their self-professed morals and values are merely the tinsel and lights to get you to look. It's a costume, a pose. It is meaningless.

They will say whatever they think is necessary to rationalize what they know inside to be a wretched choice. And their state will pay for it, as aerospace and tech companies will be the first to start divesting. Good.

We need a better media, one that doesn't keep legitimizing these jabbering retards by taking their pulses every few weeks. Listen close, assholes:  the majority of this country voted against Fuckface Von Clownstick, and his works, and people like Roah Moah. Maybe you should consider talking to a few of them once in a great while, if only to provide the veneer of "balance."

Uncle Sam's Cabin

Via Charles Pierce, here's a little tale that oughta make your blood boil. The entire article is excerpt-worthy; suffice to say that there's a modernized version of the old southern work farms going on here, except this one is a food-industry-created temp agency where the "employees" don't get paid at all.

Should anyone be surprised that this particular slave-diversion outlet pretends to be a christian rehab, even though most of the "participants" have committed no drug-related crimes? No more than one would be surprised that the vile cow overseeing this scam is well-paid, runs some of the slaves to work her daughter's egg farm, etc.

Most exposés of the ever-expanding, ever-more-privatized carceral state focus (with good reason) on the disproportionate ratio of minority inmates exploited and abused under the system. But it's really a socioeconomic issue -- the slave drivers are just as happy to exploit poor whites as they are any other poor person. The race of the exploited person doesn't matter nearly as much as the captivity of the victim, the complete inability to fight back or resist against the evil perpetrated on them.

Considering the article mentions plenty of popular food brands that buy product from these slave farms, it would be nice to think some sort of economic pressure could be pushed onto these companies. In the real world, however, this is an unfortunate fart in a now endless hurricane. Beef is relatively easy to buy locally sourced, chicken much less so. But maybe if enough people hear about this atrocity, these monsters can be shut down and shunned.

In the meantime, this serves as an apt metaphor for the way our wonderful world really is:  you're either profiting from the racket, or being victimized by it. That's their ultimate goal.

Just as Every Cop Is a Criminal, and All the Sinners Saints

Look, I think most people across the ideological spectrum will attest that the majority of police officers are decent people doing difficult work the best they can under adverse conditions. This is not really in dispute. The problem is that when there is a turd, they refuse to fucking flush it. You can't make them, la la la they can't hear you, they will insist that not only is there no turd, but not even a bad odor.

It has less to do with whether the individual that gets shot is black -- though that clearly is a statistically significant factor -- and more to do with the victim in question being of the "marginalized" class. This is what those aerosol-cheese-sucking yahoos counter-protesting in Ferguson and elsewhere don't seem to get:  this is a socioeconomic issue, even more than a racial one. If you're a dipshit drug dealer and they decide to cave in your front door without warning, you're fair game. In a southern state, the odds double. And in Florida or Texas, they triple. And they get away with it, every goddamned time.

The Torture Never Stops

There are some pretty simple rules of thumb that can be used to determine whether something is "torture" or not:

1. Would it qualify as torture if someone else did it to American soldiers or civilians?
2. Has the U.S. tried and executed soldiers from other nations for doing it?

If you answered "yes" to either of those questions, it's probably torture. If you answered "yes" to both of them, then it's definitely torture. If you answered "yes" to both questions, but still don't give a shit, then you're a sociopath and a hypocrite at best, a soulless homunculus at worst.

Which brings us to Dick Cheney, show-hopping in the wake of the official announcement of what we all knew. Cheney, to his eternal credit and damnation, does not dodge or deny his involvement and endorsement of waterboarding, rectal rehydration, chaining people up in diapers and forcing them to piss and shit themselves, or just chaining them to a dungeon wall until they freeze to death.

Remember the Nixonian rationale that "it's not illegal if the President does it"? That's pretty much what's going on here -- it's not torture if we do it, or if we farm it out to more brutal practitioners.

These sorts of "revelations" are, of course, nothing new at all to anyone who even casually reads up on deep-state activities, which have been ongoing since the end of the 19th century but became more systematized after World War 2. It's laughable to believe that anything about US policy at large changes because we "reform" CIA policies as to what tactics can be used for interrogation -- we'll just send the next unfortunate victims out for one of our pliant minions to help with the wetwork. We'll still find pretexts to meddle or knock over inconvenient countries who don't understand that when we want them to play ball, we're not asking.

Dick Cheney does not give two shits if one of our official torture or rendition victims is innocent or not. Tough shit for Maher Arar, who was kidnapped from JFK Airport and sent to Syria, where he was beaten with cables and kept in a coffin-size box for ten months before, oopsy, turns out he really hadn't done anything. Tough shit for all of them, innocent or not, charged or not. Let God or Allah or the entropic void sort them out.

I sincerely believe that if you were to poll the vast 'murkin public, in its infinite limbic, lizard-brain wisdom, you'd find an appalling level of agreement with Darth Cheney, a seething, toxic brew of cranky indifference and outright hatred, a base assumption that if you can't tell 'em apart, then you should git 'em all, just to be safe.

There is an outside chance that circumstances could be made to change; after all, even Maher Arar eventually was set free and even sued and won a large settlement and apology. In some of the shitholes we outsource the nastier tasks to, they'd have finished the job and thrown him in a landfill.

(It probably didn't hurt that Arar's Canadian citizenship necessitated the involvement of another party to the disgusting behavior we were conspiring and perpetrating. Canada, our best friend, basically saw our hitchhiker sex dungeon through the basement window, and got us to set the poor bastard free. As long as they don't know about the crawlspace.)

The big lie, one of them anyway, is that torture is a normative method for finding out critical information. It isn't. That's not to say that it can't ever work; a person guilty of a crime or who has knowledge of an impending crime will probably crack at some point if enough pain and pressure are applied. But the thing is that the interrogator has no sure way of knowing. Life does not generally conform to the predictable outlines and neat resolutions of a 24 episode.

In countries that use torture more routinely, there is barely even the pretense of using methods solely to extract usable information. It is primarily a tool of repression, meant to terrorize and dehumanize, intended to send a message to fellow dissidents that they're next, that no one is safe from having their fingernails yanked or being boiled alive.

One of the more fascinating characteristics of humans is how so many of them derive such joy -- and make no mistake, Richard Bruce Cheney and every one of these fuckers that did these things are proud of what they did -- from inventing newer and uglier ways to inflict pain. To be sure the merciless cocksuckers in Al Qaeda, ISIS, whoever, they're no better. But we were supposed to be. Once you start pretending that torture is okay, if done by the "right" people for the "right" reasons, you're just a step away from instituting it on your own dissenters.

Hell, maybe the next police brutality protest, the police infiltrator instigates violence as a pretext to drag in some hippie punk, a jailhouse beatdown by pissed-off cops followed by tossing the DFH into the bubba tank for forcible sodomy. Happens every day in the American gulag, and it will not change one bit just because an ancient senator finally got pissed enough at the internal security state to give them a parting slap.

The question is, when do we become pissed enough at the whole lot of it to actually do something about it, even if it's just collectively refusing to support or participate in this corrupt system anymore?

ISIS Crisis

On the 13th Anniversary of Never Forget Day, we find ourselves ready to head back into Iraq, on a seemingly more justifiable mission than last time, but still a fool's errand with no happy ending. It's not that you can't make a respectable case for military and humanitarian intervention in the region. And if it's remotely true that the group has considerable assets and volunteers from a variety of countries, it is entirely conceivable that a non-Arab cell could sneak, say, a nuclear suitcase into Miami or Baltimore.

What should give pause is what is seemingly not being said, at least as far as I've seen or heard. The fact of the matter is, as Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya and Syria and any number of countries in the region demonstrate, we don't know what we're doing there. We don't know anything about these people, we don't understand why they hate us, we can't figure out the difference between the various groups. We don't know the cultures, the languages, we can't find them on a map.

When you don't know jack shit about a country and people you want to bomb or otherwise commit violence upon, isn't it time you checked your basic premises? Does there have to be a larger casus belli than "I think these guys might be assholes, if these are the guys I'm thinking of."? Weren't some of these ISIS cells rebelling against Bashar al-Assad just a year ago, and weren't we ready to arm them in their fight?

Nowhere in this "spreadin' freedom" effort of the last decade or so, nowhere in the premature triumphalism of the Arab Spring, was the possibility noted that, just because the citizens of these countries had chosen to free themselves from the torturous yokes of (sometimes American-supported) despots and dictators, that they automatically wanted what we had to offer -- an emotionally-retarded culture buttressed by an economy mostly based on rackets and pilferage. Shit, they already have those things.

Look, even if these ISIS assholes aren't a direct threat to American geopolitical interests -- and they almost certainly are, if not a direct threat to the US mainland itself -- it is also difficult to simply stand by while they decapitate foolhardy journalists out in their desert moonscape, while they seize dams and terrorize cities and civilians, while they attempt to exterminate minority religions in the area. But it must also be taken into account that our track record has been one of going in and leaving a bigger mess than when we got there.

Wars and insurgencies, whether they are wrought by religious terrorists or secular governments, are fought for one reason and one reason only -- to establish and legitimize power. Clausewitz's saying about war being politics by other means is as true as ever. It might be helpful if for once, we knew what we were getting into before getting into it.

#notallassholes; Or, Shart Week

Taking into account two fresh new stories that might make one consider the merits of capital punishment:

First is the heartwarming tale of one Douglas McAuthur (sic; Jesus H. Christ, do people not own a fucking history book or a liberry card?) McCain. Now, while Doug is not (as far as we know) related to our good friend Poor Ol' Straight Talk, he did make the fateful decision to leave his decadent, meaningless existence in San Diego, and join up with the world's most notorious terrorist group, to bravely slaughter villages of unarmed unbelievers and behead infidel journalists. You can sort of get why a kid in some horrid Middle Eastern despotism might say "the hell with it" and take up arms against whoever and whatever. What possesses a homegrown dipshit to head to one of these god-forsaken places to murder and pillage, who knows? Sounds like he got what he was looking for.

Second is this charming little story from England, where piece-of-shit "gangs" preyed upon children while the authorities turned a blind eye and scorned the victims, some of them as young as 11. Because nothing says "tough guy" like preying on sixth-graders, amirite? Forget all that claptrap of "the state has no right to take life," every one of these gang assholes needs to be lined up against a wall, and the "authorities" that let it go on need to do some serious time. I would seriously suggest that someone who participates or facilitates the gang-rape of children is not a fucking human being, and therefore you're just ridding the world of a rabid animal.

These are the sorts of things that serve as a reminder that the planet won't miss us when we finally push its climate past the point of no return.

Scott Brown's Legacy

Longtime readers of this here cereal box know that a persistent (if intermittent) theme here, in between all the f-bombs and fat-cat rants, is the idea of possible pasts. Playing the "what if" game is useful as a strategic, speculative pursuit, as it forces us to think about alternative outcomes.

More specifically, it's the notion that fate sometimes turns on a dime, that a seemingly small event can have a catalytic "butterfly" effect on its surroundings. One such example is the death in 2009 of Senator Ted Kennedy, as his passing took place at a critical point in "negotiations" over what would eventually become the Affordable Care Act.

Somehow, the Democrats managed to lose the seat that Kennedy had held for nearly half a century, due to a spectacularly inept and tone-deaf campaign by Martha Coakley. Coakley lost the seat -- and with it, the Democratic supermajority in the Senate to one Scott Brown, a photogenic, amiable doofus that the Republicans seem to grow on trees. Brown proved to be the linchpin in what became the now-standard GOP practice of might be called ABWOW -- Anything But What Obama Wants.

Only in a turgid industry like politics would pure, stupid obstructionism for its own sake be considered a strategy, but that and the constant threat of filibustering is all that has kept the Republicans going since 2009. Brown filled the Senate seat just long enough to force Obama to accept a ham-fisted, loophole-riddled sack of shit whose primary purpose is to hold doors in place on windy days.

Had Kennedy lived even a year longer, chances are that the supermajority could have forced through the public option, the single-payer system that is the standard in every other industrialized nation. Sure, your betters in the corner offices might not get the nine-figure salaries they so richly deserve, but the last five years of impossibly wealthy corporations and owners whinging over every fucking dime would not have happened.

Let's accept as a given that regulatory legislation written primarily by the industry it's designed to regulate is guaranteed to either be useless or more harmful than the situation it's intended to remedy. This was seen as a feature, rather than a flaw, by Brown and his cohort. And now we have what we have, which is another layer of bureaucracy in the IRS, a health-care racket whose pricing structure is exactly as much of a theft mechanism as it ever was, a baroque clusterfuck of industries bloated with lobbyists and marketers, gouging their captive markets and laughing all the way to the bank.

So now this week, we have one of the more bizarre eructations resulting from the ACA. Some dipshit craft store has decided -- based on its own ignorant interpretation of how certain birth-control options actually work -- that it cannot, in good conscience, be party to the IUD holocaust, or whatever it is these overbreeding, Christofascist weirdos call it.

Legalistic and moralistic angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin arguments aside, what sucks about this is that it gives license for any and every business, whether for reasons of mere penny-pinching or for some fanciful interpretation of Bronze Age legends, some bullshit excuse to duck out of something that could and should have been very simple and easy. No, now because someone "believes" something that is empirically not true, they can weasel out of it. Yeah, that's gonna work.

The public option would have worked, and well, because it would have disintermediated all the parasitic middlemen who drive up costs with marketing, admin, and sales. Ask yourself how well your grandmother's cancer was abated by fucking admin.

None of this had to happen. And now Brown is running for Jeanne Shaheen's seat in neighboring New Hampshire, because there is always more damage to do, more precious money to be made. People will die, and other people will go broke, because the health-care system in this country is an abomination, something that should be strapped into an electric chair and fried like an egg.

But as long as Scott Brown and his benefactors continue to make money and make a flawed process even worse, I guess it's okey-doke. I mean, hell, Jeanne Shaheen is just an Obama puppet, and he's evil. Some 80-year-old fart in Nashua said so, so it must be true. Cool, pops, pay for your own fucking bypass, then. Frankly, I have no interest in subsidizing these morons. Talk about doing the impossible for the ungrateful.

Whenever the post-mortem on this country and this species is written, whether it's five or fifty or 500 years from now, the thing our successors will note about us will be exactly what we noted about the previous civilizations we've unearthed, thinking that we've surpassed them with our intellect, might, and technology. That thing is the tendency to be our own worst enemies, to undermine our own rational self-interest for the sake of superficial qualities of glad-handing and smiling contempt. Your mastery of Candy Crush on your smart phone does not make up for not seeing what is right in front of you.

When Mitt Romney smiles, I see nothing but discomfort -- the inner pain of a man who regards the unrich as another species, and does not understand why the customs of this society compel the best and brightest to break bread with such people, to pretend that they like or even comprehend them. For every rich guy with a conscience, there are a hundred Mitt Romneys -- and because they sincerely regard their infestation of the political process as a bulwark against takeover by the rabble, they're the ones that actually run the show.

As always, people who willingly vote for politicians who can barely conceal their contempt get exactly what they deserve.

I Got Your Stimulus Package Right Here

On the fifth anniversary of the "stimulus," it's not unfair to ask what precisely it stimulated. You can see pretty effective breakdowns of ARRA funds here and here, itemized and tabulated six ways from Sunday. There are descriptions of plenty of beneficial projects.

But it's also important to look at results, to ask why, for example, if over $98 billion was spent on transportation and infrastructure, so many of our bridges and highways are on the verge of collapsing. Why, after spending nearly $19 bn on health care, is the health care system still such a monumental clusterfuck, an issue that essentially works out to a 20% productivity tax, where wealth is extracted and siphoned upward for shareholders and exec bonuses.

Speaking of extracting and siphoning, how is it that after putting over $41 bn in stimulus money toward "energy," presumably at least some token efforts toward conservation and efficiency, the best this administration can point to is fracking, and pipelining tar sand bitumen? Does this sound like a tremendous bang for your hard-earned tax dollar?

Surely jobs were created and preserved by these and other efforts, so even as a stopgap there is some efficacy. But I said it at the start, and nothing has happened to change my mind -- at least some of the stimulus should have gone to households, rich and poor alike, some flat amount across the board, say $50,000 per household. You would have seen an aggregation of activities centered around three main goals -- spending, saving, and eliminating debt.

That last one is the killer, as our debt ratio has skyrocketed, with no way to get it back down to where the average person can save, or even have discretionary income to put back into the economy. This is a situation that I strongly and sincerely believe is not accidental or coincidental. It is by design -- the owners continue their accrual without missing a beat, while the rest barely manage to hang on, making them even more desperate to cling to whatever straws are left, to accept the few crumbs that still fall from the table.

It's a patronage system, so the stimulus pelf was going to patrons regardless of which party supported what policy. But imagine for just a second how much more successful it would have been to have at least part of that money go directly to taxpayers and consumers, rather than finance weasels who pulled the money at 0%, hoarded most and lent the rest to the peons at interest -- or just rigging the interest rates in the first place. Nice racket you got there.

{Update 2/21/14 20:00 PST:  Looks like The Krugster had the same bright idea there.]

1 Timothy 6:10

So plutocrat performance artist Tom Perkins, apparently trying to leave no doubt amongst the proles as to whether he really is an asshole, lobs this little polemic:

In order to vote, [Perkins] proposed, everyone should have to have paid at least $1 in taxes.

"And those who have paid a million dollars in taxes," he continued, "should have a million votes."

Perkins demurred afterward, claiming that he had "intended to be outrageous and [he] was," but it was probably the truest expression of his beliefs about society at large -- and by association, the beliefs of many of his pelf-grubbing peers. These beliefs are simple, and pervasive, and borne out by the things they say and the things they do.

They believe firmly that poor people are poor not because of luck or circumstance, but because they're lazy and/or stupid, that they're basically children of a lesser god, and only by the benevolence and forbearance of their betters, and an occasional crumb from the table, can they be truly managed to a level of competence that is tolerable to the elites. They believe that they comprise the sum total of "greatness" this country still has to offer, choosing not to look back and see what really made the US great, a true world leader, for a considerable period of time. They have the luxury of being able to fuck things up, and then to sit back and complain about it.

To be (somewhat) fair, you have to give Perkins this much:  he's not an entitled idiot who walked into Daddy's money and just assumed he hit a triple. He has degrees from MIT and Harvard. (Then again, George W. Bush has a coveted Harvard EmBeeAyyy, doesn't he?) Still, Perkins does at least seem to have (or did at one time in his life) a marketable skill. The problem is that he thinks that skill gives him some sort of helicopter view over the rabble, and the right to exercise it as such.

Coming from a guy who weaseled out of a fatal yachting accident with a measly $10K fine, the whole thing is, pardon the expression, too rich. It's all just so terrible for them, the ingratitude of the peons. Not quite enough to change places, mind you, but terrible nonetheless. They have it all, but it ain't enough. They need us to love them, apparently, or at least admire their swagger and fortitude.

But that would be like a rape victim sympathizing with their attacker; the family of one of Ted Bundy's or Richard Ramirez' victims sympathizing with the animals that slaughtered their loved ones for the thrill of it all. There's Stockholm Syndrome, and there's mental illness catalyzed by extreme trauma.

The one-percenters, in their inexplicable defensiveness, have chosen to fight fire with stupid, to lash out at the least fortunate with the most despicable plaints. The peons need to organize enough to grab Perkins and his scummy ilk by their custom silk lapels and say:  Listen close, motherfucker. You won life's lottery. You and your children and grandchildren will never know for a day what 99% of us know every day of our lives -- that life is struggle; that we're lucky to cadge a paycheck-to-paycheck living doing something we can barely tolerate through the best years of our lives; that we're one bad break, a job shift to China or a health-care scare, from the street.

It barely merits pointing out that, since the political system is already owned lock, stock, and barrel by rich assholes like Perkins, that the "one dollar, one vote" principle he espouses is already in play, has been in play as long as any of us can remember. I don't know what system he's talking about; the system I know is one where rich people (like Perkins, who sits on Faux News' board) pit poor people against each other with imaginary distractions.

These idle rich fuckfaces use the system not just for their own benefit, but for their own amusement -- while you try to figure out how you're going to make it through the next week or month or year, they look for a new toy to play with, something else to keep score. It really is a game to them, and my long-standing contention that "Wall Street hates Main Street" couldn't possibly be clearer now. Although it does overstate the point; to hate something you actually have to care on some level, and they don't care. At all. At all. At all.

One assumes that Perkins' greatest expense, aside from taxes and stepstools to plant his nose up Danielle Steel's ass, is a team of minions to help him get his pants on around his giant fucking balls every morning. It's a toss-up at this point whether a more satisfying fate for him would be for him to be rendered destitute by some random ill fortune, or just to see his head on a pike.

Either way, Perkins is 82, so he'll be dead, sooner rather than later, but not soon enough. And some stray three-legged dog will stroll by, and piss on his headstone and take a massive dump on his grave.

The Evil of Banality

Easily one of the most disturbing docs I've seen in a long time. A brutal reminder of the absurd, mindless cruelty that lives in people. If you can make it through this thing without at least wondering if a massive die-off might be such a terrible thing after all, you're a better person than I am.

Not one of these evil bastards has even a shred of remorse for the massacres they and their death squads committed in Indonesia in 1965-66. The attempts to show Anwar Congo as haunted by his deeds fall short; Congo is clearly just dismayed that he has nightmares and can't rid himself of them. Tough shit, asshole -- if there were any such thing as karma in this universe, Congo and the rest of his cohort would be withering away from a slow, agonizing death from eyeball cancer.

Perhaps the most revealing part of the movie is how, when you get right down to it, the Indonesian death squads were not really political. Sure, they wanted to kill commies. But only because the commies wanted to get rid of the Hollywood gangster flicks these criminals enjoyed. Aside from the death squads and genocidal ambitions, it's really like watching a street crew from a mob movie, shaking down merchants for protection money, running for office so as to legitimize their theft, throwing their weight around, siphoning parasitically from the honest labors of others. The commies would have shut down the protection racket, where Suharto recognized that these paramilitary gangs had a constructive use for his own genocidal ambitions.

Movies like The Act of Killing inadvertently provide an explanation for why mainstream dreck packs houses; by the time you're done with this thing, even Grown Ups 3 or Transformers 6 or Tyler Perry's Tyler Perry Puts on a Dress -- Again would be an acceptable palate cleanser.

Fun for the whole family. See it at your own peril.

Rising Tides, Sinking Boats

It's virtually impossible to imagine anyone being surprised by the report that 85 individuals now possess as much as half of humanity. Now, there are qualifiers of sorts -- if you're even an average schmuck in the US or Europe, chances are that in terms of assets and income, you're ahead of a healthy chunk of folks who live on a dollar or two a day, and don't own a pot to piss in. The average American frequently forgets (or doesn't even know) that 1 in 3 people live in either China or India, and 1 in 2 -- half of all human beings -- live in Asia.

Still, as the Krugster points out in what has become more or less a weekly homily to be ignored by our betters (or bettors), inequality is increasing everywhere, here as much or more than anywhere else. This seems to be mathematically at odds with the supply-side mythos, the Reaganauts who spoke wistfully of "trickling down" and a "rising tide lifting all boats." There is only so much stuff even magnificently wealthy people can buy and own and use, so it gets hoarded or "invested," usually overseas in both cases so's to avoid paying even a percentage point or two on their precious.

I politely suggest that if you find yourself on the short end of the stick, your options are few and far between. You can bend over and take it for the rest of your life; you can talk about how much it sucks, as if Barry O or Elizabeth Warren will actually do anything about it. Sooner or later someone, or some group, will choose the violent insurrection option, but the problem there is that usually an ineffectual or flat-out wrong target is chosen. Political figures operate at the behest of their owners; they have little choice but to dance with them that brung 'em.

Which leaves identifying properly the operators of these collectively ruinous enterprises, the soulless bastards who would rather dump a kajillionty dollars into astroturf teabagger propaganda efforts, than to put the same money -- or even less -- into something that benefits someone other than themselves. The animals Krugman describes, the smug, vile pricks who want to be Leo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, always get away with it, leaving their rented dogsbodies in DC to take the abuse and hyperbole, while they scuttle off to the Hamptons or the Bahamas and hoard their pelf.

Obviously, not every single wealthy person is a shiftless douche who inherited every dime they have. But many of them are, and act like it, or act like they're the only ones who have ever worked for anything, and everyone else is just some worthless combination of dumb and lazy. Worse yet, even among those that earned every cent they got with no help from anyone at any point in their lives, they mostly (Warren Buffett being a notable exception) persist in avoiding any and all taxes if they can help it.

As we always say, this is not politics, it's math. Increasing inequality by definition means reduced opportunities and mobility for everyone else. To the people who refuse to say anything bad about them because they hope to be them someday (just read the LA Times comments, if you can stomach it), all you can tell those folks is, good luck with that. They might as well spend their entire next paycheck on Powerball tickets, for all it'll get them.

So let's get after these assholes, once and for all. Properly identified, one then has the option of bringing out the tumbrels and guillotines, or better yet, developing ways to disintermediate them. Their worst nightmare, the unproductive rich, is for their rackets to no longer work, the idea that they might actually have to work for a living. Refuse to participate in their system. This is why Bitcoin is starting to attract so much scrutiny, as is Silk Road, Kim Dotcom, and other players and aspects of the parallel system. They can't stand the idea that one day, enough of us might come to the realization that we can do just fine without them, that we never really needed them in the first place.

Money and value are, after all, simply tacit agreements on what things are "worth" for trading. What would happen if enough people decided that they no longer agreed with that collective understanding? As the Orlov article points out, even a 10% hit would cripple them. It would cascade downstream -- but it already has been, and will only get worse anyway. Might as well have at least some control over our fates, right?

Dearth of a Nation

Scenes from Weernumberoneistan:

Of the nearly 200 homeowners who lost their properties in recent years, one in three had liens of less than $1,000.

More than half of the foreclosures were in the city’s two poorest wards, 7 and 8, where dozens of owners were forced to leave their homes just months before purchasers sold them. One foreclosed on a brick house near the Maryland border with a $287 lien and sold it less than eight weeks later for $129,000.

More than 40 houses were taken by companies whose representatives were caught breaking laws in other states to win liens.

Instead of stepping in, the D.C. tax office created more problems by selling nearly 1,900 liens by mistake in the past six years — even after owners paid their taxes — forcing unsuspecting families into legal battles that have lasted for years. One 64-year-old woman spent two years fighting to save her home in Northwest after the tax office erroneously charged her $8.61 in interest.

So you have indifferent gubmint bureaucracies and soul-dead paper-holders teaming up to prey on the poor and elderly, coupled with the paramilitarized oops brigade, in the service of a machine that uses human beings up like cord wood. Are we having fun yet?

Rebel Rebel

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

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

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

Please Donate

The good folks over at Balloon Juice have a fund going for this viciously abused dog. Give if you can, it's a damned fine cause.

Too bad they don't know who did it, because it would be worth chipping in another few bucks to eliminate the scum who torture pets for fun. The future gene pool will thank us. May everything they do to animals be revisited a thousand times upon them.

Putting the "Mental" in Fundamentalism

At some point, we'll have to leave the Af-Pak area to these animals.

On Tuesday, masked Taliban gunmen answered Ms. Yousafzai’s courage with bullets, singling out the 14-year-old on a bus filled with terrified schoolchildren, then shooting her in the head and neck. Two other girls were also wounded in the attack. All three survived, but late on Tuesday doctors said that Ms. Yousafzai was in critical condition at a hospital in Peshawar, with a bullet possibly lodged close to her brain.

A Taliban spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, confirmed by phone that Ms. Yousafzai had been the target, calling her crusade for education rights an “obscenity.”

      

“She has become a symbol of Western culture in the area; she was openly propagating it,” Mr. Ehsan said, adding that if she survived, the militants would certainly try to kill her again. “Let this be a lesson.”

Great. Yes, it would be twelve kinds of awesome sauce if someone could round up Ehsan and his buddies, and just end them once and for all. But by now, we should be able to see that it doesn't work that way, it'll never work that way, not with constant drone raids and collateral damage.

Just as there is no liberal counterpart to a twisted freak like Bill Tapley, so too is there no real western counterpart to the Taliban, to this scarily regressive, heavily bastardized perversion of Islam, that hates women and science, murders writers, threatens artists, molests boys, incites riots over comic drawings and fake films, wants nothing more than to bully and subjugate their societies back to the seventh century. Whatever idiots like Tapley, or "Pastor" Terry Jones, or even Fred Phelps are, they're not that, not by a longshot. Phelps is a king-size gaping asshole, but I'm pretty sure he never tried to assassinate an eighth-grade girl on a schoolbus.

But it's impossible at this point to imagine what we can actually do to alleviate the situation. I'm sure tough guy chickenhawk Sir Mitts-A-Lot wants to send other peoples' kids in to kick ass and take names, not only in Af-Pak, but Syria, Libya, and Iran to boot. No problem, right?

Again, let's just send as many planes in as we can to airlift out anyone who wants to leave, especially the women and children, leave the devout perverts to their own devices, see how well that goes for them. Hell, can't be much worse than it is now.

[Update 10/12/12:  Some glimmers of hope in this terrible story -- Malala Yousafzai has a fair chance of surviving the attack (to which, of course, the mighty warriors of the Taliban have vowed to go after her again, as well as her father), and there have been several days of public protests against these fiends. Again, it would be nice to believe that the Pakistani military could just go round these humps up, and plant them in a ditch forthwith. But of course it never works that way. The next best way is for the people themselves to rise up en masse against them, demonstrate that they've had enough of their violent medievalism.]

More an Art than a Science

You have to hand it to the American media -- Japan gets hit with the twin power punches of massive quake and devastating tsunami, and in mere hours a good chunk of them find ways to make it all about us, and our deep-seated fears of everything except what we should actually worry about.

Your average 'murkin is many thousands of times more likely to die of stress, obesity, type 2 diabetes, substance abuse, depression, auto accident, and many other things, than from radiation from Fukushima, or Islamic terrists for that matter. This is not to say that I know that there is absolutely no danger in the US from radiation from Fukushima; I am saying that I don't know, which is what the mediots would say if they had an ounce of honesty in them. I will go out on a limb and say that a panic run on potassium iodide in Texas straddles that fine line between merely stupid and flat-out hysterical (and not funny hysterical, either).
Fortunately for opportunistic scumbag and all-around hump Glenn Beck (and unfortunately for the rest of the planet), the aphasic venom he soaks in is not fatal. Though one can always hope.

It is certainly bad enough when a fat, bloated, ignorant nation becomes entirely oblivious to its own bad karma, not only from initiating pointless, perpetual wars, but from trading its future for toys on credit to utterly shameless thieves and frauds. One has to ask, if one is so masochistically inclined as to engage with a subhuman prick such as Beck, precisely what it was that Japan did recently to earn this sort of divine reckoning. (One could also ask the Tokyo governor the same thing, since he sounds like the same breed of asshole, but maybe he gets voted out or forcibly removed from office.)

Putting natural disasters in moralistic contexts is never not going to be intellectually offensive. Most of us know this by the third grade. But wallowing around in this solipsistic narcissism of wondering how international catastrophes will affect us is very nearly as awful.

I'm embarrassed for them, really. I mean, somebody should be.

Hamsters on a Wheel

Let's cut the proverbial shiznit, a'ight? The "downturn" does not affect everyone, only almost everyone. But not anyone who matters. Have you checked the Dow lately?

The rentiers and grifters and credit default swap scumbags who lawn-darted the economy in the first place are making just as much money as they ever were. And fuckin' A if they don't practically seethe with pure contempt at the peons who dare question their deeds, their judgment, the consequences of their noble actions.

They get all bent about how hard they slave for what they earn, as if 70-hour weeks in an air-conditioned skyscraper with a supply of The Macallan and Ketel One and on-demand blowjobs from the secretary is such a tough ride compared to some unlucky schmuck who has to work three menial, stultifying jobs just to make rent. It does not seem to even occur to them how fucking galling that is to people who are not quite lucky or clever enough to have mastered the black art of corporate bookmaking, and therefore must actually work for a living.

The, ahem, "philanthrocapitalism" is all well and good, but perhaps doing things that actually have impact on this nation's most persistent economic affliction -- its banana republic level of income disparity -- might alleviate the resentment that troubles them so. Failing that, they could always make good on their threats to go Galt on us. Really, I just don't know how the rest of us would manage without being forced to bankroll their collateralized debt obligations.

Bastards of 2010

[With apologies to the late great Beast.]

Update (1/3/11): Thanks to RD in comments. For months every time I'd tried to access The Beast, I would get an Error 404 message. I had heard that the site was going under at one point, so I just assumed that it had. But the real deal is that my sidebar link was just suffering from a severe case of linkrot, which is now fixed. Thanks, RD!

10. Mark Burnett
Largely responsible for "reality" teevee taking over network and cable airwaves during the past decade. Not that teevee was ever a grand cultural medium, nor have humans ever been quite as exalted as they think they are. But thanks in large part to Burnett's schlocky efforts, anonymous nincompoops consider it a star-making turn to be dumped out in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of like-minded assholes, and eat bugs for the amusement of millions of emotionally-stunted couch potatoes.

With his latest entertainment abortion, however, Burnett crosses the line in allowing someone with a lamentable degree of political viability to get paid to pimp themselves -- essentially a two-month campaign commercial in which the candidate gets paid to shill their own happy horseshit.

Sentence: To be dropped on a remote island, forced to eat grubs and deer penises in exchange for life-sustaining basics, only to be shot by Sarah Palin from a helicopter.


9. Fox News
For these guys, the Big Lie is not just dogmatic consistency, it's a proven business model. This year's list alone underscores the fundamental fact that, for a substantial portion of people, "facts" are incidental to the overall narrative they need to remain "vigilant", in the sense that your neighbor is "vigilant" for building a giant cinderblock tower on the side of his house so that he can keep an eye out for unicorns. Has more Republican candidates on its payroll than the RNC, to which it now openly contributes, which at least removes the long-standing pretense of "fair and balanced". Simply calling Fox an irresponsible journalistic enterprise does a disservice to truly irresponsible, yet far less damaging, journalistic enterprises, such as, say, the National Enquirer.

Sentence: To live in the financially, morally, and intellectually bankrupt backwater which it strives to create.

8. The Supreme Court
Ideological handmaidens of corporate rapacity. Purveyors of the periodic charade that Roe v. Wade is the be-all/end-all of jurisprudential knowledge and advancement, whilst bumwipe such as Kelo and Citizens United (not to mention, say, Bush v. Gore) pass through unabated. Possibly an even more sclerotic instituion than Congress, which takes some doing. Home of intellectual reprobates such as Combover Tony Scalia and Long Dong Clarence Thomas, which should be warning enough.

Sentence: Tied to chairs and forced to watch LA Law reruns until they promise to retire.

7. The Democratic Party
The proverbial pawl to the Republican ratchet of awfulness. Considering the supermajority they had after the 2008 elections, pound-for-pound quite possibly the most gutless, ineffectual group of cheesedicks this country has ever seen. Time and again, they found themselves flummoxed by bare minority opposition, undercooked Faux News rhetoric that a sixth-grader could have eviscerated, and a complete lack of internal discipline. It's bad enough when the usual circular firing squad forms, but it seems to be an ineffably Democratic trait to accomplish this feat whilst holding all the cards.

Unless, of course, you happen to be one of the Wall Street rentier scumbags who paid good money to have these chumps look after your bad bets, in which case, they did exactly what they were paid to do.

Sentence: Permanent irrelevance.

6. The Republican Party
From career asshole Mitch McConnell to tanorexic crybaby John Boehner to teabagger godfather Jim DeMint, this is a collection of goofballs and whackjobs right out of a Dick Tracy or Batman lineup. A bunch of moral cretins, acting on borderline treasonous impulses, who would rather stall and further wound an economically reeling nation, just for the opportunity to fuck over Barack Obama. Would probably filibuster a resolution expressing support of Mom and apple pie until they were allowed to attach some district earmarks. Ran two candidates for the US Senate in the last election (Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell) who were so marginal in terms of qualifications and, well, sanity, they made even Sarah Palin look somewhat rational. As difficult as it is to overestimate just what scumbags the leaders of this party really are, it is even more difficult to fathom why supposedly reasonable people would remotely identify with these sociopaths.

Sentence: Unemployment, and benefits have been cancelled.

5. George W. Bush
A solipsistic, birdbrained amateur, who seriously does not appear to understand just how badly he monkeyfucked the country during his reign of error. Still and always a gladhanding butt-boy to the haves and have-mores, if only because he has no concept of anything else. Seriously believes that his biggest failure was his inability to turn Social Security over to ass-raping Wall Street fiends, even after they nuked the economy. A living, breathing, stammering insult to anyone and everyone who has actually busted their ass to earn an honest MBA, or even just worked their way through life. Does not realize or care that most of the shit that's gone down the last several years really is his fucking fault. Still butt-hurt about that Kanye West thing, as if anyone besides Kanye West gives half a goddamn about anything Kanye West has to say about anything. Should stand as a stark warning about putting unqualified morons into higher office, but will probably end up being some sort of totem for the burgeoning know-nothings barnacling their way onto the hull of the ship politic. Brags that he read fourteen biographies about Abraham Lincoln while in office, which may explain why he never got around to learning the nuances of his job.

Sentence: Home mistakenly foreclosed on by predatory slice-and-dice operation that "accidentally" robo-signed his mortgage and tanked his pension on credit default swaps.

4. Barack Obama
In the kingdom of the people without balls, the man with one testicle is king. Constantly treads the fine line between capitulation and collusion. Seems to think punting on first down is a strategy. Not only is unable to garner credit for the few decent things he has accomplished, but has continued many of his predecessor's policies, even after swearing on a stack of Qu'rans that he wouldn't. Has managed to squander a supermajority in less than two years, even with most of the country understanding the enormously bad hand he was dealt. Does not seem to realize just how badly his Wall Street buddies have rolled him, and like Clinton, will ultimately have to hock what remains of his hide to them if he hopes to get what will at any rate be an utterly meaningless second term. May eventually get a clue that the only way to approach a completely thankless job is to say "fuck it" and at least try to take some suckas down with you.

Sentence: Four more years! Four more years!

3. You
You've really let yourself go, yet you don't seem to mind. You've spent most of the last decade watching has-beens and never-weres sort their sock drawers and give each other herpes, and are mightily offended at the notion that someone else might think they're smarter than you. You let smug assholes in DC and New York skull-fuck you at every opportunity, and are enraged that they don't respect you. You think it's always someone else's fault, never your own. If you're a man, you think Sarah Palin wants you to jump her bones; if you're a woman, you think she wants to share her secret moose chili recipe with you. You've convinced yourself that it's your god-given right to have a vehicle roughly the size of a Winnebago to run mundane errands around town. You'll fight to the death to protect your right to guzzle and squander, you might even send a protest letter if Jersey Shore gets cancelled, but not much else seems worth the effort. You know your kids think you're a jerkoff, but you have no idea why.

Sentence: Reap the whirlwind.

2. Sarah Palin
The Oprah dream turned on its head -- a petulant, obnoxious smartass, empowered by pure spite and gall. Let's face it, folks -- a person who knows barely half of what they're talking about, and can't be bothered to learn the other half, is not fit for higher office, as if George W. Bush's rotten tenure weren't proof enough of that. Communicates primarily by crafting catchphrases via incessant twittersniping, then repeating ad nauseam in her fundraising road show, since her audience is generally of the sort that needs shit recited to them over and over and fucking over again. Insists on riding fambly valyews schtick until the wheels fall off, yet has a fairly poor slugging percentage with her older kids, and seems content to use the younger ones as props.

Seems to seriously think that Michelle Obama's initiative to discourage childhood obesity is some sort of conspiracy to forcibly keep Americans from choosing to swim in Cheez Doodles and sodium benzoate (and having the rest of society subsidize their excesses). In a decent society, people like Palin would be relegated to harmless bridge club and quilting activities; here, she's a political rock star for morons. Here is America 2010 in a nutshell -- on a recent episode of Palin's reality show, fellow professional pain-in-the-ass Kate Gosselin made an appearance with her in-vitro brood, and at one point, both women apparently complained about the intrusiveness of the media and the hassle of being famous for being well-known. At no point did it to occur to anyone, including the halfwits who actually sit through this dreck, to turn the cameras (or the teevee) off.

Sentence: After attempting to parlay her heretofore humorous political career into talk-show gravy, Palin is dragooned by her army of gibbering maroons into running for President -- and somehow wins, upon which she instantly nukes Pyongyang (on order from her prayer warriors), and sets off World War III.

1. Glenn Beck
Yet another "only in America" success story -- pudgy alcoholic cokehead finds Mormonism and becomes Fox News' most popular moralizer, surely cable's coals-to-Newcastle moment if ever there were one. Makes a tidy living affirming every John Bircher legend and outright lie to unbelievably credulous audience. Calling Beck a professional calumniator would be like saying Lindsay Lohan might have a little substance abuse problem. As the saying goes, every word is a lie, including "and" and "the". Between the simpering fugues and the messianic delusions, Beck's career arc will make a fascinating case study for some future scholar trying to figure out how millions of idiots bought into Beck's pet notion that Woodrow Wilson turned us all into communists. As with most professional jackasses, Beck's success says more about his followers than about himself. It is actually scary to contemplate so many foaming-at-the-mouth morons willing to pay money for the third-rate product this asshole generates; the only sensible explanation is that they are not working nearly hard enough for their money.

Sentence: Fired, preferably from a cannon.

The Memory Hole

The Great Revision continues apace, enabled not only by the usual complaisant chattering journos, but the éminence grise himself, a man literally without a pulse, but with a passion for gloss and invention that only a self-serving bastard can possess:

Addressing a crowd of 2,500 supporters and Bush administration veterans, Mr. Cheney said the response to Mr. Bush’s book showed that the country had begun to re-evaluate him.

“Two years after you left office, judgments are a little more measured than they were,” Mr. Cheney said. “When times have been tough or the critics have been loud, you’ve always said you had faith in history’s judgment, and history is beginning to come around.”

....

His dry wit seemed intact as he took a poke at Mr. Obama’s recent admission that there were no such things as shovel-ready public works projects. Referring to the groundbreaking, he said, “This may be the only shovel-ready project in America.”

Yes, and we all know what they're shoveling. They never stopped, really, they just took a break for appearance's sake, and now the shoveling recommences.

Cheney may just very well be genetically predisposed, hardwired to the extreme, to act as hatchet man for whatever slimy boss he toadies for. He's been doing it since the Nixon administration, it's second nature, the way he steps in to let Fredo appear to be above the fray, above the mess that Obama may now officially own, but nonetheless did indisputably purchase on consignment from these two bozos, the continued existence and success of whom is proof enough that karma is a polite fiction.

Nation of NAMBLA

Call me a cultural imperialist, but Christ these people are disgusting:

In Kandahar, population about 500,000, and other towns, dance parties are a popular, often weekly, pastime. Young boys dress up as girls, wearing makeup and bells on their feet, and dance for a dozen or more leering middle-aged men who throw money at them and then take them home. A recent State Department report called "dancing boys" a "widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape."

So, why are American and NATO forces fighting and dying to defend tens of thousands of proud pedophiles, certainly more per capita than any other place on Earth? And how did Afghanistan become the pedophilia capital of Asia?

Sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from perverse interpretation of Islamic law. Women are simply unapproachable. Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until after proposing marriage. Before then, they can't even look at a woman, except perhaps her feet. Otherwise she is covered, head to ankle.

"How can you fall in love if you can't see her face," 29-year-old Mohammed Daud told reporters. "We can see the boys, so we can tell which are beautiful."

Even after marriage, many men keep their boys, suggesting a loveless life at home. A favored Afghan expression goes: "Women are for children, boys are for pleasure." Fundamentalist imams, exaggerating a biblical passage on menstruation, teach that women are "unclean" and therefore distasteful. One married man even asked Cardinalli's team "how his wife could become pregnant," her report said. When that was explained, he "reacted with disgust" and asked, "How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean?"

That helps explain why women are hidden away - and stoned to death if they are perceived to have misbehaved. Islamic law also forbids homosexuality. But the pedophiles explain that away. It's not homosexuality, they aver, because they aren't in love with their boys.

Bull. Fucking. Shit. They're gay, and they're child molesters, pure and simple. This seems to be fairly widespread across South Asia, not just among Muslims but Hindus in Bengal as well. But it appears to be cultural more than religious.

Of course, in the West there is a similar culture, and it's called the Catholic Church. And the commonality here is that both cultures despise, fear, and subjugate women (really, all people of both genders, since what they really fear is free expression of thought, but especially women). You can't repress people so forcefully and violently, keep men from meeting or even seeing women, and not expect to get some twisted results. These guys would probably fuck a farm animal or a slab of liver if it came to it.

It's never not a source of constant amazement to see people who commit awful, dreadful shit as a way of life, like it never occurs to them to question their catamite "culture", to stop abusing their children. Not sure what we're trying to "save" here. I find it difficult to believe that the planet would miss these "men", rapists and child molesters is all they are.