American Standard

Jacob Bacharach has an interesting mini-thread here declaiming Obama as anything special as far as critical or "adventurous" thinking. It's worth thinking about because, as with the buffoons that preceded and succeeded him, as with every imperial custodian since the founding of the republic, Obama is simply a reflection of the people who put him there.

I can easily think of a dozen or more things right off the top of my head, in foreign and domestic policy areas, that Obama could have handled better. But he's still the "best" President of my lifetime, by a considerable margin, objectively on his job performance and certainly as a person. That he generally seemed intimidated or reluctant to confront the vituperation directed against him may be less of an observation on his character, and more a realization that as a black man, he always had to watch himself and his responses, check his anger.

That's on all of us, on our shithead corporate mediot gatekeepers and the people who keep them employed.

Even as it was, obviously one of the more frequent criticisms of Obama was that he was too cool or professorial, which translates from dipshit as high-handed -- or worse, smug. You can't win for losing with this fucking country. Obama visited all ninety-nine counties in Iowa, eating their corn dogs and kissing their pigs and all that horseshit that reveals nothing about a person's competence, only what they're willing to put up with. But he did it, and then as soon as he got in, an entire industry geared up to play to the rubes' generational strain of rabid anti-intellectualism coursing through their veins.

More to the point of the tweet that originally sparked the mini-thread, Obama certainly does seem much more self-reflective or even self-critical than most other presidents of recent years, excluding perhaps Carter and Nixon. Whatever flaws I might have found with what Obama said or did in certain areas, one thing I appreciated about him was that he clearly had what is actually the most vital characteristic that a chief executive must possess to be effective -- he knew his weaknesses, shored those areas up with people who knew more, and he listened to them. Seems simple, until again, you compare him with Bush and Trump, two spoiled brats who never heard the word no, and made the world pay for it.

So no, Obama wasn't really the once-in-a-generation world-class thinker his fans praise him as. Compared to the current turd, he's Einstein. But even if he had been this super-genius, he would have had to hide it. They went after him for wearing a tan suit, for putting Dijon mustard on a sandwich.

It's not exactly a secret that a significant part of the electorate -- certainly all of Trump's base -- boils down to you think yer better'n me? They want to spend the rest of their lives drinking shitty beer and watching hillbillies drive billboards in circles at 180 mph. They want to watch nobodies air their sex lives on teevee, because they don't have the guts to watch porn or Faces of Death. They want a life that demands as little of them as possible.

Obama's primary flaw, like that of all true idealists, was this teleological belief that all people are inherently "good" and want to do the "right" thing. But when they encounter people whose concepts of good and right don't jibe with their own, they have no answer. When confronted with moral monsters like Rupert Murdoch, who would literally rather watch the world melt and its people murder each other than pay one percent more in taxes, they don't know what to do. It doesn't occur to idealists that some people, as the prophet John Cougar Mellencamp once sagely observed, ain't no damn good, you can't trust 'em, can't love 'em, no good deed goes unpunished.

In the end, that'll be Obama's legacy -- having to watch a cloven-hoofed oaf tear apart everything he spent eight years building, for no other reason than to show that he could, while Obama watches coolly from the sidelines, staying out of the fray because we are the change we're looking for or whatever.

Well, no, we're not. Most people are overworked and underpaid and struggling in this magnificent gig economy the billionaires have bestowed on the peons. Nearly forty percent of American households can't handle an emergency expense over four hundred dollars. So when they vote for someone to get in there and handle the problem, they don't expect to then be asked to pitch in somehow and help out. No, that's why we voted you into office, pal.

But the deeper, darker truth is that too many people are leery and distrustful of someone who appears too smart. It's the root of every ill and every demagogue we ever have or will see.

Blast from the Past

I posted this barely fictional short story a year ago yesterday. It may be even more relevant now than it was at the time.

Don't Do Something, Just Stand There!

The good folks at LGM have been all over what would be a Big Story, if we had a remotely competent corporate media. But since they're too busy transcribing Judy Ghouliani's "truth isn't truth" lies and stroking their chins about the meaning of it all, it mostly goes unnoticed.

Two Republican Secretaries of State, Kris K. (for Kansas) Kobach of Kansas, and Brian C. (for Cheater) Kemp of Georgia, are running for governor of their respective states. Kobach is perhaps most notorious for chairing the rigger voter fraud commission that FAILED in its mission to manufacture evidence of widespread (or even narrowly spread) fraudulent voting. Kemp's profile is a bit lower, but he deserves credit for stealing the GA-06 seat for Karen Handel (who also has a history of voter suppression when she was Georgia's Secretary of State) last year.

It's not an unfair question to pose to these scumbags:  why bother holding elections at all? Seriously, if they're not even bothering to conceal their cheating and rigging of the electoral system, why even bother? Let's just go full fashy and y'all can tell the peons who they voted for.

But this takes agency away from said peons. Kansans need to step up and take responsibility for their decisions, and start atoning for voting for a clown like Sam Brownback over and over again. The state is absolutely gutted, and they're lining up to have a two-by-four snapped off in their asses by Kobach. At some point people have to start paying attention and showing up, and not getting gulled over and over again by the last flag-humping teevee commercial they see before they go to cast their lot.

Georgia's predicament is a bit more transparent -- a white power minority (only slightly different from a white-power minority) preserving power over a black majority with several methods -- closing most of the polling places, throwing voters off of registration rolls, etc. They know they can't win fair and square, so they cheat and cheat and cheat some more. And no one does a goddamned thing about it.

Maybe disenfranchised voters should organize via this "social media" thing we keep hearing about, and organize a collective strike for a day or several. Maybe they should identify all of Kemp's corporate campaign sponsors and organize a boycott.

And maybe some politicians from the so-called Democratic Party could step up and make some noise too. I don't just mean the Chuck and Nancy show. How about former Georgia governor and noted fan of electoral integrity Jimmy Carter? How about recent president Barack Obama, if he's not too busy parasailing at Richard Branson's private Bahamian island? Former attorney general Eric Holder, mighty crusader against guitar companies and potheads? All of those people could at least raise a ruckus about this situation. But they don't even try. They never do. They'll mumble some bullshit platitudes about not wanting to corrupt the process, never mind that Kemp and Kobach and their ilk couldn't give half a fuck about corrupting the process.

Think about it -- Kemp and Kobach are openly rigging their own elections for themselves, right out in the open, and no one with any power is doing or saying a goddamned thing about it. And they're gonna get away with it.

Citizens do need to step up and exercise their franchise, as it were. But regular folks only have so much time to do such things, after commuting and working and finding some precious time in what little is left of the day to live their lives, knowing every moment of their debt-slave existence is befouled by the banana republic bullshit being rubbed in their faces every fucking day.

The future is going to be a lot uglier; it is absolutely going to get worse before it gets better, if indeed it ever really does. And this is how it starts, with the "small" stuff, stealing an election here and there, working the refs, knowing that the media exists to stenograph lies and truth side-by-side, naively thinking an addled populace will magically be able to suss the truth.

But in a world where lies are truth and truth is irrelevant, all that matters is the art of the steal. It would be a lot less disgusting and demoralizing to watch if some of the folks who seem to have a bottomless pocket of empty bromides for every occasion helped out a bit and gave the good guys a fighting chance once in a while. Instead they'll show up a week after the election somewhere on the rubber chicken circuit for $50k, to offer some cheap observations about our better angels or some such nonsense.

Allow me to be the first to pre-emptively say to them fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

Rising Son

Another "fiction" piece, a bit longer than the last. As before, there may be some upcoming edits. Please leave feedback in the comments, good or bad.

The Marshal waited until his private jet had left the Malaysian air space to order his meal. It was not the Ilyushin he was accustomed to flying in, on the rare occasions he did fly, but a Boeing 747 -- albeit an older unit -- that the Chinese had lent him, one that they had used to ferry their own leaders in. It was one of those little things that made the Marshal smile to himself, and quite a few of those little things had occurred over the last twenty-four hours in Singapore.

He appreciated that this Boeing had a small kitchen near the front, and requested his personal chef to prepare him a prime rib, medium rare, with sides of potatoes and vegetables, and a bottle of blended Australian cab. There would be much to discuss with the generals once they arrived back in Pyongyang, but for now, he needed to think to himself, have a nice meal and a drink, perhaps watch a movie. There was a small library of Chinese, American, and European DVDs onboard, and a decent-sized screen. His advisers were seated further back, to give him time to reflect. Much had happened quickly, and things were in motion.

The Government We Deserve

Because this is the country that made useless doorstops like the Kardashian sisters wealthy and famous, it is a virtual certainty that there's somebody out there -- hell, probably several million somebodies -- taking the idea of an Oprah Winfrey political candidacy seriously. It makes sense that the media dogs would chase their tails on this for a couple days, because as always, they have airspace to fill.

But the idea that a significant number of people would take such a thing seriously, or welcome it, is nothing more not less than a sign that those folks have given up -- on what a sane idea of a political system is and should encompass, on whether managing the world's largest economy and most powerful military force is a serious undertaking. Then again, letting Fuckface Von Clownstick run, much less win, is surely a sign of those things, but encouraging a billowy dilettante is just doubling down on all that.

That's not to say I wouldn't vote for her, if that was the choice. I would go out in my back field and dig up a river rock, and vote for that rock before I'd vote for Clownstick for any office. He'd fuck up dog-catcher. That should be abundantly clear by now.

I suppose there are many fine things about Oprah -- from all indications, she is generous and kind, and no doubt her charitable contributions and foundations hold up much better than Clownstick's little tax-evasion scams that barely make the effort of concealing their self-dealing and money-grubbing. And she is truly self-made. I find her incessant branding overweening and annoying, but there's no doubt that she came from poverty and bootstrapped herself into a position of real wealth and power, something Clownstick can claim but no one will ever believe (like every other claim he makes).

But Oprah is also responsible for inflicting on us Doctors Phil, Oz, and Jenny McCarthy. Someone who falls for this level of ongoing quackery has some issues. However, unlike Clownstick, she (and most normal human beings) at least understands what she is good at and not good at, and can delegate and let other people manage and have input over that latter category.

She's not going to run anyway, so no one out there should get too worried or get their hopes up too much. It's not going to happen. What almost certainly will happen is that Oprah will have a role in publicly vetting whatever roster of candidates eventually comes out of the Democrats' little shop of errors, and will pick on to put some money behind. Unlike these dopey vanity projects like Tom Steyer is running, Oprah understands that the money is better spent on candidates than petitions.

So if Kirsten Gillibrand is smart (and she is), she's already reaching out behind the scenes to Oprah, and getting on that train. Because the one thing Oprah has more of than money is cultural influence, one that transcends to some extent the weird class-race divide that's been stoked the last few years.

Endless Cycle

For as long as I can recall, the cycle plays out and repeats:  A Democratic president is elected. He is smart, earnest, wants to (at least appears to want to) help the little guy. He cleans up the mess left by his Republican predecessor, balances the budget, embraces the future, works collaboratively with the rest of the world.

Then a sufficient number of paint-chip-eating goobers augment their diet with daily inhalations of rubber cement, and vote for the most preposterous, transparent Republican dipshit they can find. Someone who exaggerates their worst impulses, who vocalizes their limbic tribal fears.

Frankly, I've spent the last few months learning to enjoy the ongoing clusterfuck. I want to see the goobers get everything they voted for, good and hard, even as I sincerely wish that the people who didn't vote for this bullshit had other options. But if the tax cut goes through, then everyone has a choice whether to observe the effects of it honestly, and a choice of whether to learn from it.

And as always, by "learn from it" I mean taking specific actions to counter those efforts and results. Protests and marches and phone calls are nice, but they only get you so far. Everyone is Washington is owned by some rich asshole or corporation, and if you hit them where it hurts, they'll listen. Protests don't cost 'em a dime, but boycotts hit them where they live.

Bob Corker just voted for a tax break for himself, after his usual tiresome mime show about what a "deficit hawk" he is. Let's call him for what he is:  a goddamned liar, and a particularly shameless one at that. But it's important to note where he will make that money, on his real estate investments. So, what are those real estate holdings, and can they be protested or boycotted? Hit that weaselly motherfucker square in his thieving gut. You might as well; you're paying for it regardless.

And the actual vote itself, the action you take at the ballot box. Show up. Take five minutes on election day and be there -- or better yet, take fifteen minutes and register to vote by mail, and bypass the lines and ID checks altogether. Trust me, it'll be the best move you ever made.

Just an example:  we heard for weeks non-stop about the apocalyptic consequences of the Alabama special election last week, yet at the end of the day, about 40% of eligible voters actually showed up. Turnout was down last year as well, when the choices could not have been any more stark. You know why angry old racist crackers keep winning and putting their retard candidates in office? Because they fucking well show up.

There's no shortcut or off switch on this thing, folks. Elections are not Super Bowls, where everyone takes some time off to relax after the time expires on the game. The game never ends, because the wealthy and the powerful never stop looking for ways to steal more money from poor people. Does that sound like work? Good, because it is work.

But it's also work to live a financial life of being permanently forced to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place, especially when it turns out, over and over again, that it's all so a bunch of spoiled white assholes can push a law (which none of them bothered to read) through that will give them all tax breaks, as well as allow hard-working aristobrats like Paris Hilton and the Walton heirs to keep more of the money they never lifted a finger to earn.

Never kid yourself about the cold, hard truth -- these pelf-grubbing assholes don't care about you, whether you live or die, succeed or fail, thrive or wither away. Your life, your family, your community are nothing to them. You are another species, you're livestock. It would be easy to say they hate you, but the fact is that hate would take some effort, and they don't want to expend any effort on the peons, beyond the absolute bare minimum.

What's always amazing is just how many members of the livestock class are more than happy -- eager -- to vote for the slaughterhouse and the butcher, every goddamned time. It's really something to watch. They even buy into the idea that a massive tax giveaway will actually result in lots of good jobs, as opposed to what tax giveaways always result in -- corporate bonuses and shareholder profits. We always joke about how Democrats are like Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football, but the Dems got nothing on these fucking rubes, seeing everything through their fentanyl 'n' jebus goggles.

Whether that's the kind of country we want or not, it's the one we have now, and the symptoms and excesses continue to accelerate and accumulate. The falcon stopped listening to the falconer a long time ago. The flood is coming. Get a boat, grab onto something, learn to swim, or be swept away.

Tweet Hole Alabama

The weather forecast for Tuesday's Senate election looks favorable for Roy Moore -- it's supposed to dip into the teens. -- joke on the internets

Despite the supposed plaints from random Alabamans whining about "outsiders" tellin' 'em how ta vote, the hard fact is that this is all up to them -- every last bit of it. Electing a piece of shit like Roy Moore will have consequences, and not just because he's the sort of creep that got banned from a mall because he was cruising high-schoolers.

Moore was an incompetent jurist who was removed from his bench twice, for being a Christian Sharia whackjob. He's a fanatical anti-Muslim bigot and homophobe, and recently told a black questioner at a rally that slavery warn't all bad, 'cause there was more fambly valyews then.

(Except for, you know, the slave families that were broken up all the time -- parents watching their children be sold away and vice versa, husbands and wives sold separately, etc.)

So let's be honest about exactly what you're supporting here, Alabama. You can couch it in terms of wanting to support the agenda of another incompetent serial sexual harasser, or getting another SCOTUS justice, or "preserving" "tradition" and "values" -- though, look at the means you're pursuing to justify those ends.

Look, it's pretty simple. If you're tired of blue-state elitists perceiving you as cousin-fucking hillbillies, which choice makes more sense:  defiantly voting for a caricature of a cracker bigot and affirming those perceptions, or sensibly voting for a moderate, pro-gun prosecutor who put child-murdering Klansmen in prison?

Grow the fuck up. Do the right thing. Stop voting by temper tantrum, and start reading and thinking for yourselves, instead of what your orange grifter king and his flying Fixed Noise monkeys bullshit you with.

Because frankly, it wouldn't take a whole lot to make it hurt. Enough letters to Mercedes-Benz and they move their plant to a state that wants to live in this century; enough threats of a boycott to CBS and they stop broadcasting Crimson Tide games. You want to return to the 1950s and tell the rest of the nation to go fuck ourselves, we can certainly return that favor. And as much as you may resent the supposed smug elitism of your detractors, electing a crank like Moore will only confirm those assertions.

I would like to be proven wrong. I would love nothing more than to wake up Wednesday morning, and see that Doug Jones has squeaked into the US Senate. It would be worth it to apologize for making unkind assumptions. But again, the choice is up to you, Alabama, not the rest of us. Vote for something besides he hates the same people I hate, for once in your miserable lives.

Or don't. Keep riding the Chump Train and see what that gets you -- higher taxes and no health care, so that your cult leader and his billionaire butt-buddies can keep living high on the hog at your expense. Because the fact is that, despite that stupid county map the dotard keeps waving about (probably sleeps with it, and has a small hole cut into it so he can fuck it once in a while), the most productive parts of this country by far voted for her.

So you can grow up and join the 21st century, or you can flip off us elitist book-readers and stick with the fentanyl 'n' jebus strategy that's been working out so well. Either way, good luck.

Tea for the Tillerson

Everyone's aflutter about how Secretary of Oil State Tex Drillerson accurately described the emperor as a fucking moron. But as this extensive profile shows, while Drillerson himself isn't a moron, he's not exactly a genius either. Consider this episode from just a few weeks ago, at the JCPOA (Iran nuclear deal) meeting of the signatory nations:

Tillerson took the microphone and began again, his voice unwavering. The real problem, he said, was that Iran had been attacking Americans since 1979, when Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held fifty-two diplomats for more than a year. “The modern-day U.S.-Iran relationship is now almost forty years old,” he went on, still looking at Zarif. “It was born out of a revolution, with our Embassy under siege—and we were very badly treated.” He enumerated Iranian-sponsored attacks in Lebanon in the nineteen-eighties and in Iraq more recently, which together killed hundreds of American citizens. “The relationship has been defined by violence—against us,” he said.

Tillerson wondered aloud whether the entire effort to improve relations with Iran wasn’t doomed by history. “We have more pounds, and our hair is gray,” he said. “Maybe we don’t have it in our capacity to change the nature of this relationship, because we are bound by it—maybe we leave it to the next generation to try.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t know. I’m not a diplomat.”

As Lavrov, muttering loudly in Russian, stood and led his assistants out of the room, the meeting broke up, with the officials talking in hushed tones about what had happened. For proponents of the nuclear deal, it was an unacceptably risky bit of brinkmanship. For the [Snowflake] Administration, it was an ideal expression of a bellicose new foreign policy, based on the campaign promise of America First. An aide to Tillerson later told me, “It was one of the finest moments in American diplomacy in the last fifty years.”

[emphasis mine]

Consider that for a second:  the top American diplomat conducts a sensitive negotiation that directly affects the national security strategy by asserting that he is not a diplomat.

Even if you give Drillerson some benefit of the doubt and assume that the comment was his way of framing the supposed intractability of the US-Iran impasse, this is an amazingly stupid and unproductive strategy, assuming your goal is to avoid a completely unnecessary war. Maybe we shouldn't assume that.

The larger strategic implications are even more counterproductive. We've clearly signaled the Iranians that there is no upside to making any concessions to enter into a non-proliferation treaty with us, since we've done everything possible to undermine it. The signal is equally clear to North Koreans that they shouldn't even bother to negotiate with us, since our word is no good.

Perhaps most dangerous of all is the signal being sent to our most important allies and friends (and, you know, Russia). This is yet another instance in which they have to decide whether to go on without us, since we have shown the world that no one else matters, and that we are more than willing to shoot ourselves in the foot if it gives us an excuse to tell everyone else to go fuck themselves.

This is poker of the highest stakes, being played by middling checkers players who don't really care about the outcome. It's a dangerous game, and we're all going to get burned. But hey, Big Daddy Cheeto gets to pretend to be a tough guy again, right? The scariest part is imagining who this toxic dipshit will select to replace Drillerson in the coming days when he decides he's had enough.

Twilight of Hot Take Nation

I don't have any pithy thoughts on What Happened In Las Vegas. It's tragic, but not unexpected; as mentioned here countless times, we have become inured to the mayhem, accustomed to thinking of these events as the cost of doing business. So this is the cost, an annual blood sacrifice of several dozen innocent lives, so that the oppressive state doesn't impose too harshly on the rights of lawful gun users.

It would be no surprise at all to find that Stephen Paddock had no political agenda whatsoever, that he was neither a Clownstick hater nor supporter, just a lone nut with lots of legally obtained firearms. This is the inadvertently nasty trick the founding fathers played on later generations, the blank insistence that any citizen has an absolute right to any sort of weapon they desire, no test for qualification or competence.

There are, I believe some exculpatory perspectives on the absolutism of the Second Amendment. The main one is that, in societies with real gun control, there is an overt emphasis on the "monopoly of force" that is to be the prerogative of the state. Technically, if the state apparatus is popularly elected and supported, then said force should represent a willful and lawful majority of the citizens, versus the accumulated stockpiles of regional warlords and assorted cranks. Still, the view is at odds with the actual history and culture of the United States.

Second to that is the hoary but still true analogy that we don't take everyone's cars away when some dipshit careens through a farmers' market and takes out a dozen pedestrians. (Of course, we do test for driver competence, but go out on any given road for, say, fifteen minutes, and try to keep count of how many morons you encounter.)

People can and do go back and forth on all the facets of this issue, with the usual results. Whatever else you may hear over the coming week, however cynical or political or naively idealistic, the bottom line is this:  the cost of not changing is not yet greater than the cost of changing. This is the operative axiom for any major (or even moderate) societal change, period. It is as universal a law as gravity.

Tragically, in a geographically secure nation of 320 million people, you probably never reach that point of equilibrium where gun control laws would be implemented across the nation. There is too much invested in the rhetoric of "states' rights" and "tradition" and that sort of thing. Even standardizing basic background checks and waiting periods would be impossible.

If the Sandy Hook massacre -- a crazy asshole using his mommy's Bushmaster rifle to murder a classroom full of first-graders -- didn't change anything, you unfortunately have to start considering the moral calculus at work here. It's a ghoulish exercise in reverse engineering:  what would it take to get meaningful gun control laws across the country, 100, 200, 500 people? What is the benchmark, the casualty count at which enough people say, "Okay. Fuck this."? Seriously, try to conjure up a suitable number and setting for yourself.

The really strange thing about all this is that Americans are notoriously willing -- eager, in fact -- to embrace any manner of intrusions for the illusion of security. We'll stand in line for hours on end to be randomly searched and probed by TSA schmucks so's we can fly to Hawaii; we've passively accepted the mass surveillance of our emails and online communiques; we routinely let overzealous Barney Fife types push us around at traffic stops. Considering the statistical facts that fewer individuals own more guns, it's weird that the majority of 'murkins seem to be fine with this absolutism when it comes to gun rights.

So this is all old, well-trod ground. We've been hashing this bullshit out for as long as I care to remember, while the NRA continued -- and still does -- to build political influence on the bodies of the slain, fear-mongering to the fearful and paranoid.

What's more interesting (to me, anyway) is the meta aspect of it all -- the collective commentary on the event, then the secondary commentary on the initial commentary, etc. Something like this:  The Gateway Pundit retard posts a bullshit item about the shooting, it gets carried on Facebook because Zuckerberg gives less than a quarter of a fuck about anything besides raking in dough, and lowly bloggerses futilely attempt to clear up the facts as they are known. And nothing results from any of it, ever.

This dynamic has become at best a collective catharsis, a tacit acknowledgement that we are well and truly screwed, and can't do jack shit about it but complain and hope that the benevolent aliens hear us. And then we're all right back at square one for the next one, like it'll turn out any different. This is a classic death spiral; if you had a cousin like this, you'd get together with family and hold an intervention, if only to register your concerns before it was "too late."

I think it's too late, in many respects. When it comes to the daily concern of how to manage the mad emperor, I have a reasonable level of competence that Bob Mueller has unearthed at least enough evidence to shame and disempower him, if not remove him from power outright.

But that does fuck-all about the disease of which Snowflake is but a nasty symptom -- it brings no jobs back, it doesn't lessen the causes or effects of ongoing climate change, it doesn't get opposing cadres of 'murkins out of each others' collective asses, stoked by the ministrations of the orange insect overlord.

The commentariat --- and hell, I'll even throw myself in as a barnacle on the hull of internets discussion -- is as bad as the "conventional" mediots at this point. We can all poke fun at the media monkeys dancing to the corporate tune, penned in at a rally, having to contend with barely ambulatory morons screaming at them and flipping them off, and dutifully transcribing the proceedings like a bunch of assholes. But we bloggerses are much the same, meta-commenting and snarking and such like, but not really affecting anything meaningful. Yes, so-and-so is a certifiable, provable asshole, but the proof means nothing when said asshole just got elected, because enough of your fellow countrymen are toxic douchebags.

Maybe this is what a dying post-industrial empire looks like:  everyone endlessly commenting on everyone else and nobody listening, just shoveling shit into an entropic void.

Rock the Vote

Looks like Jester's got the answer:

It might get in the way of Supergeeeenyus Snowflake Von Clownstick's tireless efforts to write off the three million more people who legitimately voted for his opponent, but them's the breaks.

Consider:  since the founding of the republic, between stuffing and/or tossing ballot boxes, voter intimidation, literacy tests, poll taxes, crooked or "broken" machines, deliberately shorting busy districts in order to create three-hour lines to frustrate voters, and on and on, this nation has almost certainly never had a one-hundred-percent free and fair election in every part of the country. Some ward heeler or local factotum always has their thumb on the scale in some location(s).

That's a different matter than saying that the will of the people has always been thwarted, but obviously it would be very difficult to forensically go back and re-litigate all those past exercises in civic futility. All of which is to say that it would simply be interesting, to say the least, to get a truly untainted picture of What The People Really Want, to the extent that they actually know.

Choose Life

This. So much this.

 

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.

Nihilism

Britain's vote to leave the EU has everyone in a panic, and it seems almost certain to cost them (as it has already, between stock losses and the pound dropping like a stone). Larger questions like whether Scotland will re-vote for independence (probably) or other countries may start opting to the leave the EU (probably not) are open to speculation for now. In the meantime, the country already seems like the proverbial dog that finally caught the car it was chasing, only to realize that it has no idea what to do with it.

What's perhaps more interesting is the apparent parallels in voting "philosophy" between "Leave" voters and American Drumpf voters. The socioeconomic contexts appear to be very similar, in that the people likely to be hurt the most economically by those respective policies are the most enthusiastic for them.

While it may be one thing for an investment banker to understand that they ‘benefit from the EU’ in regulatory terms, it is quite another to encourage poor and culturally marginalised people to feel grateful towards the elites that sustain them through handouts, month by month. Resentment develops not in spite of this generosity, but arguably because of it. This isn’t to discredit what the EU does in terms of redistribution, but pointing to handouts is a psychologically and politically naïve basis on which to justify remaining in the EU.

There have been any number of similar assertions from Drumpfsters interviewed over the past year, many of them bizarrely attesting that Drumpf is "one of us". Presumably "one of us" in this context can basically be taken to mean, much like "speaks his mind", something along the lines of "not afraid to be a toxic asshole".

Doubling Down

Beyond all the bluster and bullshit, the lies and the cheap spray-tan, enraged cheeto John Miller's main characteristic is his willingness -- no, his enjoyment -- of gambling. Not in the specific "bet the house on 33 black at the roulette wheel" sense, but in the more generic "fortune favors the bold" sense. Sometimes that works out for him, sometimes not.

The problem in never changing that tack is that now there are bigger things at stake if he gambles wrong, than simply stiffing his partners on another shitty casino-hotel. This sense of his trickles down to even his tweets; as the article shows, this is a calculated risk predicated on the dopey sensibilities of heedless cult following. If EgyptAir 840 turns out to be a mechanical failure, no problem; Miller's retard fanbase remains immune to his hysterical nonsense. On the other hand, if it was a terrorist incident, it becomes a prescient center-piece of Miller's jabber for the entire summer, even though Miller had no way of knowing either way when he wrote the tweet.

So as unlikely and risible as it may seem that the Screeching She-Beast of the Tundra might be on Miller's veep short-list, one has to look at the pattern and ask, why not? Seen from the perspective of two of the most sociopathic personality types -- gamblers and narcissists, of which Miller is both -- it makes a perverted sort of sense.

Conservatard critics of Obama, imbued with their own special smugness even as they continue to deride that supposed quality in their opponents, typically tag Obama with the "messiah" epithet, some sort of variation on that. The idea is to impute that Obama came into office riding atop a white horse, determined to save us from the gubmint, from each other, from ourselves, that he and only he would be capable of any of those things.

Sound like anyone we know?

Cotton Pickin'

Tom Cotton fits in perfectly with the current iteration of the Republican party, in that the more you get to know him, his stances on various issues, and the idjits he rolls with, the less you like about him. Like good ol' Fredo Arbusto, Cotton seems to be determined to undermine whatever credibility remains in a Hahvahd pedigree.

I mean, when you consider the standard media propaganda model, it makes a twisted sort of sense that Bill Kristol gets so much air time. Like the political class he clucks about, Kristol is a pedigreed, sinecured schmuck with the track record of a county fair chicken crapping on a bingo sheet. He's perfect for helping his insect corporate overlords sell pharmaceuticals, outsized trucks, and hemorrhoid crèmes. (And perpetual war for perpetual peace. With other people's kids, of course.)

But the idea of someone who actually affects policy and decisions taking Kristol's advice, not just with a block of salt but at all, such a person has instantly disqualified themselves from serious consideration. I have a ton of misgivings about Obama's foreign policy acumen; he seems to think it's chess when it's really poker. But Kristol isn't even playing Stratego, more like fifty-two pickup.

Anatomy Lesson

Here's Idaho's tax dollars at, uh, "work":

On Monday, Idaho's House State Affairs Committee debated a bill that would prevent doctors from prescribing abortion pills unless they had met the patient in person. The bill passed through committee, but only after one member asked "if a woman can swallow a small camera for doctors to conduct a remote gynecological exam."

No, the esteemed maroon in question is not in sixth grade, but is in fact 63 years of age, according to his Wikipedia page. That there's a special breed of stupid, folks. It's like he has a bet with Louie Gohmert and Steve Doocy to see who can get away with being the biggest dipshit. At any rate, nicely done, Idaho. Does this guy write his bill proposals in crayon?

Matthew 16:26 / Mark 8:36

If 85 individuals holding more wealth than 3.5 billion wasn't enough last year, then why would the top 1% having half of everything be any different?

What's pathetic is when your ordinary average maroon steps in to concern troll the numbers, something along the lines of "it's not a zero-sum game, someone else's success doesn't affect my ability to succeed." The thing is, that simple statement should be true, but it no longer is.

The mantra some of us have been preaching -- and it continues apace, and in fact is accelerating -- is that we have more people than we have things for them to do at which they can earn a decent living, much less get ahead. How much of the current economy is predicated on the app lottery system, waiting for some zit-faced, wet-behind-the-ears kid to crank out some bullshit app to help you find the nearest local rub-and-tug or whatever, and then someone else way overpaying for it?

One of the things to consider in this vaunted "post-scarcity society" of ours is the sorts of skills which have been devalued, or are in the process of being automated, and what skills are going to be needed moving forward. Vocational trades such as contracting (including construction, plumbing, electrical, etc.), automotive engine repair, farming, and cooking cannot be automated as simply as so many of the other occupations that have been replaced by robots over the past few decades. Used to be that creative pursuits couldn't be automated, but a trip to your local cineplex should set you straight on how much longer that's going to be true.

Not yet, anyway, but Flying Spaghetti Monster knows they're trying their damndest to automate every possible thing. I don't know who they expect to buy their products, or how, once half the people are out of work and the other half are slaving for peanuts, but in an extreme skew, they can hoard what they have or just trade with each other I guess. Like Jay Gould said a hundred years ago, they're just paying half the working class to kill the other half.

I've given up on the notion of the average 'murkin deciding to do anything about it; as noted above the usual rubes are always too willing to cut their own throats. And there's never going to come a time when these awful people who inherited more money than they could hope to spend in ten lifetimes willingly pay even a cent more in tax. They'd much rather live in their gated communities and mega-yachts than spend one goddamned dime on improving their communities at all.

What are the options, if you're not lucky enough to be hatched into the Wal-Mart Billionaire Club? Well, if we're not going to break out the tumbrels and guillotines, then maybe a strategy of disengaging (from their system) and diversifying (your skill set and income portfolio) is the way to do it. I don't know what the next generations should expect, though -- knowing these greedy assholes, probably ensuring compliance as a condition of being allowed access to resources.

The Paranoid Style, Part 2: State of Siege

It continues to be the one of the most fascinating dynamics in this -- or indeed any -- year:  the way political demographics who have distinctly characterized themselves by an intense, almost instinctive mistrust of the flex and impact of the gubmint jackboot, rush quickly and readily to defense of militarized, trigger-happy cops and their self-serving bullshit excuses for why they had to perforate that kid brandishing a BB gun in a playground in just two seconds flat. Well, as my dear memaw useta tell her Sunday school kids, fuck that noise.

It should be abundantly clear by now (and if it isn't, watch the video in the Reason link) that that whole "protect and serve" thing is done; it is simply your duty to comply, to shut the fuck up and do what you're fucking told. That might earn you the right to survive and get back to your meaningless hamster-wheel existence, but we're not making any promises, pally.

What's so weird and amazing is how thin-skinned they are, how any and all criticism, no matter how well reasoned and explained, is so frantically dismissed. Tamir Rice and John Crawford, both black males brandishing BB guns in an open-carry state (Ohio), get put down like dogs, without even being given a chance to comply. This is not in dispute, both murders are easily viewable on the YouTube.

As with Rodney King and Oscar Grant, who knows what lies these assholes would have told and gotten away with, but for the irrefutable video evidence? They shot someone because they failed to comply, to obey, because they could, because no one will call them on their bullshit. Because at heart, America is neither "liberal" nor "conservative," but merely authoritarian.

And a cheap, lame type of pseudo-authoritarian at that, pretending to chafe under the yoke of largely deferential federal and state authorities, while local and urban police forces run wild with no accountability whatsoever -- and indeed, the sincere support and appreciation of these erstwhile Red Dawn fantasists, the last civilized bulwark against those people.

This is of a piece with the collective 'murkin shrug over the "revelations" of torture, of which neither the torture allegations themselves nor the public coverage of same surprised any sentient being, domestic or foreign, friend or foe. These are the maroons who whinge about the consequences of terrorists finding out what they already knew, who in the next breath denounce the idea of rapprochement with a regime that tortures its political opponents. Oh, the humanity!

If irony and hypocrisy were Ebola, this country would be bleeding profusely from every single orifice. Our currency is now a hopeless mix of manufactured outrage and handwringing inaction, as if the perfidy of a few protesters posed a greater threat to the republic than, say, criminal financiers robbing you blind every goddamned day, the ongoing transformation of the economy into a series of rentier rackets, the impending commodification (and thus bankruptcy and peonage, due to the massive labor surplus it will cause) of the American workforce.

Everyone knows the old saw about politics basically being two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. There is a great deal of truth to that, especially the higher you go in policy-making levels. A corollary to this premise is that "success" is largely contingent on the wolves' ability to gull the sheep into at least going long with the game. It's worked well for a couple hundred years so far.

What's changed in the last thirty years or so is how eagerly the sheep actively support the wolves now, if for no other reason than to not be identified as a fuckin' sheep. They bleat incessantly about the virtue of dying on their feet rather than living on their knees, which is admirable enough. Yet they can't wait to put the kneepads on at every opportunity; hell, they'll do it without asking at this point. Jamie Dimon could fuck their wives and rifle their underwear drawers right in front of them, they'd still man the Facebook barricades to post another stupid meme about how the asshole cop who blew away a twelve-year-old in a playground had no choice.

This is the sort of shit that makes me want to sell everything, like tomorrow, fucking high-tail it to Costa Rica, spend the rest of my life teaching tourist milfs how to surf and play guitar. I may yet do it; there is less and less reason not to. When the alternative is slaving away to pay down college debt, for the privilege of listening to seething mouthbreathers dog-whistle to each other, maybe it's time.

Race to the Bottom

It's in the nature of partisan commentators, in the wake of an electoral blowout, to spend time attributing the loss of clearly better ideas and candidates to the calumnious nature of the opponent, the shameless excess of their bankrollers, and of course, racism. That's the job. And certainly there's an element of all those things in last week's smackdown of the Democrats.

It's not a coincidence that just about the only demographics Obama didn't win in his 2008 beatdown of Poor Ol' Straight Talk were men, old people, and southerners (and he barely won the white vote, 49-48). So guess who showed up to vote last Tuesday?

So rather than whinging yet again about the pernicious (and yes, all too real) influence of the vile Koch brothers, Democrats have to be honest with themselves about why they really lost:

1. Barely a third of eligible voters showed up.
2. The ones that did show up were the usual fucking maroons that can't wait to cut their own throats electorally.
3. Every one of the Democratic candidates spent most of their time showing how Republican they secretly were. Way to mobilize your base, assholes.

Thomas Frank does have a valid point about how the Democratic party has, in general, become the voice of a technocratic, professional-managerial class. They apparently bought into the Clinton-era NAFTA-GATT-globalization gospel, the one that insisted that the Chinese and Indians would make our crap for five cents a week while we all sold each other ten-dollar coffees and optimized spreadsheets and such like.

It's like it never occurred to them that gutting American companies and outsourcing American jobs would actually result in a tiny, insatiable claque of pelf-grubbing weasels, with a slightly larger class of upwardly ambitious (if not actually mobile) supervisors, with the other 90% or so stuck at the bottom. Did these people not attend high school? Or did they know what would happen, and just didn't give a shit? It doesn't matter -- it boils down to incompetence or indifference (at best), and neither one helps.

If Sarah Palin has ever been accurate about anything she's said, it's about the whole hopey-changey thing working out. Yes, there are mitigating factors. Obama could not get the Republicans to work with him -- but part of that was because he didn't make them respect him. The stock market continues to chug along at record levels, but only about half of American households own stock at all (mostly 401(k) plans and pension funds), and the top 10% own 80% of the wealth. And the median wage is still where it was back in 1974.

Greed has ruined this country, and attempted to placate the masses by alternately telling them that poor people are poor because they're dumb and/or lazy, and that they (the peons) can join the rich man's club someday, if they just keep their noses to the grindstone and don't ask too many questions. But the 10%-owning-80% should be the clue, if Americans weren't so bad at math.

If you work in an office with nine other people, and someone brings in a dozen donuts, and one person takes ten of those donuts, leaving everyone else to portion out the other two donuts, what should the rest of the office think about that one asshole? Even if he's the one that bought and brought in the donuts, it's a fucking dick move, period.

That's what the economy is anymore, and neither Obama nor the next occupant can or will do anything about it. It's a waste of time to worry and wonder, as Frank does, about why Georgia, the state with the highest unemployment rates, just elected as governor a man who is proud of his career as an outsourcer. Sometimes people don't understand the obvious until they get one broken off in their ass. So Georgia, and Kansas, and Iowa, and the rest of them are about to find out what that's like.

Maybe the young Democratic voters get off their dead asses and vote next time; maybe the Democrats find better and bolder candidates next time. Maybe the peons, liberal and conservative, old and young, brown and white, get tired of this shell game being perpetrated on their lives, and the lives of their children and communities, and do something that actually makes a difference.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any honorable Gentleman will question it. -- John Stuart Mill

Hope this is what you wanted,
hope this is what you had in mind,
'cause this is what you're getting.
I hope you choke on it. -- Tool, Ticks and Leeches

For all you election junkies, this article is as exhaustive a breakdown of your proverbial "swing" states as one could hope to find. Ultimately, though, it is also as disheartening a read as one might suppose. Putatively Democratic candidates who can't run fast enough from -- or hell, directly against -- their duly elected president, because they're deathly afraid of pissing off their rube constituency.

Of course, it doesn't help to have the usual compliant and complaisant corporate media, who in the course of chasing their precious narrative would much rather talk about how Bruce Braley and his wife are kinda jerky about their neighbor's chickens, rather than how Joni Ernst is just another clown-car teahadi in a folksy drawl and a Tupperware saleswoman smile.

The real narrative to be understood here is how the teabaggers overstepped in 2010 and especially 2012, and that they're learned their lesson this time around. There are no clear loons like Todd Akin or Richard Mourdock, just pleasant jest-lahk-us types like Joni Ernst and Cory Gardner. The goofballs have cleaned up their act, while the supposed adult political party stands around holding their collective dicks and running from their erstwhile principles (which most of them would sell down the road in a heartbeat anyway).

It's long been a cliché that the massive sums of money dumped into the political process has been a corrosive influence on the process. But it's also altered the types of people who are willing to run for office, not only to subject themselves to cartoonish levels of scrutiny, but to sell themselves constantly to anyone and anything, because of the sheer amount of money it takes just to stay in office, even for an incumbent. An average of thousands of dollars per day need to be raised to retain a US Senate seat, and most House seats aren't cheap either.

An estimated $4 billion total was spent in the 2012 election. When we start thinking more closely about which industry specifically received most of that money, and proceed and engage accordingly, we might finally start getting better candidates, instead of the candidates we deserve.