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.

No Bubble! No Bubble! You're the Bubble!

I've enjoyed (most of) Michael Moore's schtick and work for decades, starting with Roger and Me, and undeniably powerful evisceration of corporate greed and lies. But his inane critiques at supposed "bubble" liberals have taken on the catechistic sheen of a mindless dogma, untroubled by critical thought or intellectual honesty.

There's no second-guessing Moore's unfortunate accuracy as a political prognosticator; he predicted Clownstick winning six months before it happened, when catfished pollsters and punch-drunk journamalists were veering between snickering at the folly and regaling the slow-motion collapse of his futile campaign. So much for the smart set, right?

But Moore has said his share of stupid, unhelpful shit as well. In Moore's view, liberals are in the bubble, as are New York and Hollywood. It's never the hallowed opioid havens of his sacred rust belt ghost towns that might need to listen to other people once in a while, or maybe get at least some of their "facts" from somewhere other than Fixed Noise and reality teevee.

No, it's always, always Moore's supposed ideological compadres that need to listen to....well, to be honest, I have no idea what precisely we're supposed to be hearing. Because countless journos have spelunked up 'murka's gaping asshole, vainly trying to get the perfect post-mortem from Real 'murkins. I've read far too many of them, and most of them make no sense at all (I just trust him), or rely on things we know to be flat-out lies (he's a great businessman with a history of turning things around).

Just as stupid is Moore's vapid assertion that liberals should watch Celebrity Apprentice and American Idol and The Bachelorette (as if, you know, none of them ever do). Leaving aside the momentary surprise that he left out Duck Dynasty and the various Real Housewives franchises, again I would ask Moore if he's ever suggested to "them" that they watch something that "we" supposedly all watch. I've never seen any of those shows, and I never will, though I am aware of them thanks to endless commercials and The Soup. Life's too short to actually sit through that mess.

If other people want to rot their brains on that shit, more power to them. But it adds nothing to the discussion, although it does explain the bizarre epistemology in play with that generalized demographic. They probably throw money they don't have at millionaire megachurches and televangelists, and trust the astrology section of their newspapers. Should we faithless heathens entreaty those ethereal demons as well?

Think about it, in the context of the five aforementioned shows, and how what those shows really entail dovetails with the electoral reasoning Moore implores us smug smarties to plug into, for some insane reason. Let's take those shows (are they still even on?) one at a time:

• Celebrity Apprentice:  Slightly well-known people, fallen on hard times, compete to start a fake business that they will never run, and are judged by a fake billionaire who pretends to fire them, one by one. Proceeds go to the Human Fund!
• American Idol:  Do they still do that thing in the first few weeks where they humiliate really untalented wannabes on-camera? Boy, that whole William Hung thing was just awesome, wasn't it? Good times. Aside from Carrie Underwood, have any of the finalists or winners really "made it", whatever "it" is these days?
• The Bachelorette:  I think I made the analogy at some point during the campaign that maintaining the belief that Clownstick is a good or even competent businessman is roughly equal to believing that the "winners" in these stupid hookup shows actually get married or even engaged. If I want to watch people fuck in a hot tub, I'll just go to XHamster or something. But Moore's ZOMG! She chose Thorn instead of Brick! fangirl gushing as a serious example of the sort of Real 'murkin decision-makin' that smug bubble-libruls must embrace is just embarrassing to read. Seriously, dude, take some testosterone supplements and eat a steak, before you find yourself on the same menstrual cycle as these suckers.
• Duck Dynasty:  Fake hillbillies who spout real jingoism. Their main selling point seems to be that they actually like each other and pray before dinner. [mimes jerkoff motion] Oh, and the patriarch has a side hustle going around to mega-churches and political campaigns spouting off about how fags are like dog-fuckers. He was at the Roy Moore rally the other night, so there's that.
• Real Housewives:  A bunch of botoxed, fake-tit cunts trying to out-cunt each other. Bitch I'll pull yo weave!

I've said it since the first season of Survivor, and my opinion has not changed one iota:  reality teevee is the most noxious, toxic spew to permeate the boob tube. It's ruined this country to an incalculable degree. It's certainly made some people visibly dumber, less lucid, less cognizant of the real world around them. It's (literally) mindless escapism, and nothing more. Your brain would be less polluted by watching keyboard-cat and log-fireplace videos all day.

What reality teevee does -- and again, though I really have never directly watched any of it, I've read reviews and critiques here and there over the years, been inundated with commercials and promos and news items about the various "winners" and "contestants", and hate-watched The Soup during the Joel McHale years, so I have a pretty good idea -- is culturally unhealthy and corrosive in the aggregate. It wallows primarily in these main traits:

• Cutthroat behavior and backstabbing.
• Public humiliation.
• Toxic behavior.

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect is the rather obvious issue that it's not any more real than professional wrestling. Everything is in fact scripted and scrupulously edited toward a pre-planned outcome. The whole thing is meticulously staged, if at times to conform to flash polls and the like. Many of the reality teevee fans I know personally seem to watch at least several of them, all the time. The "seasons" are scheduled so as to be constant; there is no "off-season" anymore for this sort of hastily-crafted discount programming.

Imagine letting this crap through your eyes and ears to steadily erode your cerebellum for going on two decades now. What do you think that does to your perception of "reality"? Throw in the more recent epistemological conveniences of social media, and you have a sizable contingent of addled people who are being poked with a culture-war stick. They can pick which "facts" and "reality" suit them best, and since they have eroded their capacity to discern or care what is empirically "true," they simply act on pure id and volition.

In fact, this is an ideal situation for them. As mentioned in a recent post, this is also a contingent that routinely fetishizes the symbols and ceremonies of "democracy" as they perceive it, but they are actively hostile toward the actual principles of democracy, especially free speech that they disagree with, especially when it comes from uppity black folks.

So it's dismaying to see Moore throw in with the tedious rube-whisperer lectures of the likes of Mudcat Saunders and Chris Arnade and such. It's a sucker's bet; either you take seriously the reasons and principles why you believe in and agree with conventionally "liberal" ideals, and you try to find ways to bring other reasonable people into the fold, or you don't.

Someone who addles their brain with reality teevee, watched Fixed Noise for their "information," and hasn't read a book in years, is not a serious person. At all. That doesn't mean you write them off completely, but it does mean you don't waste the effort of crafting a significant part of your party strategy around catering to their dipshit notions.

In 2008, Barack Obama won by the largest margin -- by far -- since Reagan in 1984. The Democrats took a supermajority in the Senate, and a considerable majority in the House. Did you see any "important" or "influential" conservative "thinkers" imploring the rubes to maybe take a look across the aisle and see why Obama won? Did any of them crank out any sort of Listen, Conservative jabber?

Even the current "heterodox" conservative writers who do lambaste the base, such as Kevin Williamson and J.D. Vance, are not encouraging those folks to listen to ideas from the "other side" in order to synthesize some sort of magical winning coalition that can actually get shit done. They're simply telling the goobers on their side to get their shit together and start taking responsibility for themselves. They sure as hell aren't telling them to watch The Wire and listen to Beyoncé.

Look. None of this is to say that all pop culture is shit, and all the people who enjoy it are stupid. The problem is Moore's thesis that centers the most vapid pop culture artifacts as some sort of barometer for understanding the mindset of the average American. And the sad fact is that if Moore is correct in that estimation, then we are waaayyyyy more fucked than we can possibly imagine.

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

So there's a lot of cautiously optimistic crowing about the near-miss by the Democratic candidate in the KS-04 House special election to replace new CIA director Mike Pompeo. And there's definitely some good to be observed from this -- where Pompeo retained the seat by a 2:1 margin just six months ago, GOP turd-burglar Ron Estes comparatively squeaked by, 52.5-45.7%. A seven-percent margin, just six months after a thirty-point margin, is certainly noteworthy, especially for a district along the Kansas-Oklahoma border, where the spread at the top of the ticket was roughly the same. And the Goopers pushed hard on this one in the homestretch, with robocalls from Clownstick and his beady-eyed sidekick.

And yet, it must also be mentioned that in the end totals, this was eminently winnable. In the 2016 election, Democratic challenger Daniel Giroux racked up 81,495 votes against Pompeo, while in Tuesday's special election, James Thompson got only 55,310, and Estes received 63,505 votes. We all get that "off-year" and "special" elections get lower attendance, but I guess my question is -- especially given the current circumstances -- why?

Presumably every one of the 81,495 people who voted for Daniel Giroux also voted for Hillary Clinton, and therefore were dismayed by the unlikely ascension of Grampa Walnuts and his ever-changing daily word salad. If only 80% of those people could have mustered themselves to show up to something that takes just a few minutes, it would have been a yuge finger in the eye of this dumpster fire of an administration.

What does it take to motivate people to fucking show up? Do they need a pat on the back, a fucking parade for doing the least bit of engagement to be imposed on a (hopefully) informed citizenry? Seriously, this is the same reason Obama's terms ended up being largely ineffective and ultimately derailed -- because a significant chunk of these lazy fucks don't show up for the midterms. They take it all for granted that Somebody Else Will Do It For Them, and then they're just shocked that Sam Brownback gets re-elected to gut state services some more, that the most inept con-man grifter in recent memory gets the top spot to loot and pillage to his shriveled heart's content.

I'm glad Thompson gave Estes a run for his money and made it close, and I hope he builds on that momentum by throwing in for the regular election in eighteen months, and spends that entire time becoming Estes' worst ankle-biter, tethering him to an increasingly unpopular chief executive and his nepotistic clusterfuck of an administration. And Tom Perez better stake him with plenty of money and support. That's the only way to root out the entrenched scumbags, and put an end to their hypocritical holy war.

But none of it matters if these lazy fucktards don't fucking show up. Ignorance is neither an excuse nor an option. Every single one of these dumbasses can conjure up maps and restaurant reviews and whatever the hell else they want in seconds on their phone. They can sure as fuck take a minute once in a while and check in on the world of people who run their world.

Or not, and then they can get more of the same, while it all swirls down the drain. If Tom Perez wants to send me some cash, I will be more than happy to head out to twine country and smack them upside the head. Here is the day of the election, do you have fifteen minutes to spare that day and do one thing for your country, maybe take a break from uploading pictures of your malformed genitals to Tinder?

I think we all have a touch of nihilism, and mostly I've engaged in the usual sarcastic variety, but the last 12-18 months has stripped away much of the sarcasm, and left a core of really wanting the fucking meteor to hit. And it's stupid shit like this that explains why -- because it doesn't have to be that way, because the little things do affect the larger things, because the people most likely to be adversely affected also seem to be the most indifferent and apathetic. And I'll be goddamned if I can figure out why that is.

War-ons and Wargasms

So Clownstick spends $90M last night lobbing five dozen Tomahawks into a pre-cleared Syrian airfield with no follow-up plan or policy, literally the lamest and most obvious sort of fo-po theater, and the dipshits at CNN fall for it right away. Someone should tell Chris Cillizza and Fareed Zakaria that the wingers who want to hear empty, mewling genuflections are already watching Fixed Noise for that shit.

No, Clownstick did not "become president" last night, anymore than he did a month ago when he used a KIA Navy SEAL as a prop in a (gasp!) teleprompter speech. He will never become president, not in any meaningful way, because it's never going to be in his skill set. He's going to fuck something up in the next three or four days, because he can't help himself, and this dopey, useless distraction will be forgotten.

When news broke of the sarin attack the other day, two questions immediately popped to mind, neither of which has been adequately answered, near as I can tell:

1. Wasn't the key to Obama supposedly abrogating his "red line" stance on Syria the promise from Putin that Syria's chemical weapons would essentially be taken away from them -- in which case, how did they get them back?
2. What strategic purpose for Assad would be served by using chemical weapons? After all, he's been dropping barrel bombs -- which cause plenty of damage and carnage -- for years, and no one's said shit. He could wipe out a hundred people easy with one or two of those. So what's in it for him to use the chemical weapons that were supposedly taken from him in the first place?

Assad's an amoral monster just like his old man, but he's neither insane nor stupid. The dynamics of the Syrian civil war are beyond the grasp of most Americans because the corporate media sucks balls and is comprised of a bunch of armchair Hemingway types whose dicks get as hard as a full-blown jingo's at the sight of a few lobbed missiles.

But the nutshell version is this:  the Assad family and their regime are mostly Alawites (Shi'a), ruling an overwhelmingly Sunni populace with generations of brutality and coercion. Push comes to shove and the regime topples, Assad and his family might get out, hand over a suitcase of cash to Putin and spend the rest of their days at a dacha outside Sochi. But the sultan's dogs would meet a fate not unlike that of many in neighboring Iraq after we kicked over their applecart, revanchist death squads roaming Baghdad with cordless power drills to run through the faces of their victims.

Of course, the missile strikes don't affect the equation or outcome in the slightest, because there will be no follow-through, because Clownstick is a dipshit and an oaf, and thinks strategically like old people fuck. He has no second move. He seriously thinks that the missile launch serves multiple purposes, and will signal the Chinese and North Koreans (and who knows, probably the Iranians while we're at it) that He Means Business. I'm sure Xi Jinping is trembling in his boots.

Xi is headed to a state dinner at the fucking Maga-Lardo country club, with its iceberg wedges and lobster mac-and-cheese and rich-asshole lemon parties, for one thing only -- a price. Xi will tell Clownstick what his foreign policy expectations are from us, and will make Clownstick an offer, and they'll haggle over the final amount, and Clownstick's little crime family will line their pockets once more (just like they are by holding official events at his business). That's all that is; Xi couldn't care less about the "show of strength" in impotently throwing money into a military runway that's already been repaired and is operational again, less than thirty-six hours later.

Xi is not going to get rolled or bullied on North Korea. Even a retard fake negotiator like Clownstick has to realize that the Chinese are in a position of strength here and we are not. There are no manufacturing jobs being repatriated from China, nor is there going to be a tariff slapped on Chinese imports. Everyone seems to get this but the master negotiator. There is no way to do those things without damaging the American economy, bigly. That's not politics, that's math.

Clownstick is such a joker and a loser that even his closet-case alt-right cargo cult is all butt-hurt on this one, insisting that the "globalists" headed by Clownstick's J-O-O son-in-law and daughter pushed him into this move on (heh-indeedy) humanitarian grounds. Setting aside Clownstick's Being There garden jabber about the "beautiful babies" being killed by the chemical weapons, it again occurs to one that more of those babies will be killed by the next round of barrel bombs, and again no one will say or do jack shit.

Observers are overthinking this whole thing. The alt-right cuck-tards are postulating a neolibcon takeover of their movement, pushing out Foster Brooks Steve Bannon in the purge. Even more stupidly, the putatively librul corporate mediots are proposing an even more ridonkulous theory -- that the missile strike is the opening gambit of some sort of grand strategy or (for fuck's sake) doctrine.

You wanna know what the fucking Clownstick Doctrine is? Here it is -- and listen close, 'cause it's a wild one:  make money bigly. I mean, there's some of the usual narcissistic self-aggrandizement baked into everything he does or attempts to do, because that sort of shit is to him what breathing and taking a dump is to us mere mortals. When he talks about being the smartest and bestest at every damned thing, remember that he's talking to himself, not to us.

But it shouldn't even need to be said that there's nothing at all beyond that, certainly not a strategy. Good grief, when it comes to strategery, compared to Clownstick, even Fredo W. Arbusto is fucking Garry Kasparov. Clownstick doesn't do strategy; he'd probably lose two out of three to a tic-tac-toe-playing chicken at the county fair. It's all id and impulse, there's no other gear with this guy. There is no strategic interest for the United States in Syria right now, other than containing ISIS and al Qaeda and the rest of that lot. But the continuation of those groups has as much to do with the Gulf states paying them protection money, and Turkey controlling all the water for the region, as it does with the atrocities of the Assad regime.

On the other hand, I tend to believe Clownstick also had sincere motives in lobbing the missiles for those beautiful babies. That is clearly how his mind works -- he's an addled, sundowning old man who gets every drop of his "information" and "knowledge" from the teevee. So he saw that shit on the teevee and had to Do Something. Coupled with his idée fixe that nothing says "diplomacy" like a big swinging dick (even when all can see that it's just a shriveled orange worm), he timed it against the Chinese state visit for maximum effect. But there's no doubt he seriously thinks that his show of force got ol' Assad all a-skeert and what-not. Sure. Problem solved. No more bombed babies.

Imagine your foreign policy and geopolitical strategy run by Mark Burnett. That's what you've got here, with less polish and suspense. He's gonna fuck this up just like he's fucked up everything else he's touched in his too-long life. It is the universe's weird, ironic sense of humor that his skeevy avarice and utter incompetence at the simplest of things will end up being the main things that keep us out of a nuclear war or an even greater depression than Shrub got us into a decade ago. Maybe.

Strategery

Let's think about just a few of the high spots in diplomacy and foreign policy that Wile E. Coyote Fuckface Von Clownstick, Supergenius, is responsible for in just eight weeks:

• Conducted sensitive national security discussions regarding North Korea missile launches in the dining area of his country club, allowing members to take photos and listen in;
• Scolded the Australian Prime Minister;
• Threatened Mexico with a military invasion to take care of the "bad hombres";
• Accused the British of bugging his Manhattan lair;
• Made implicit threats to China over territorial waters, as well as their handling of the NK situation.

And now, in keeping with this supergenius thing, we apparently think it would be a good idea to encourage the Germans to ramp up their military budget.

Fail to the Chimp

Even Fredo Arbusto, bless his simian muzzle, wasn't this fucking stupid:

[Drumpf] had an opportunity at the start of his presidency to begin with a more or less clean slate with China, and he has now very likely frittered that away for nothing. At best, [Drumpf] has pointlessly antagonized Beijing in a way that will have lingering effects on his dealings with them for months and possibly years to come. At the very worst, his careless freelancing could produce a real crisis between China and Taiwan that could end up dragging in the U.S.

It's hard to conceive of any "stupider like a fox" reason to do something like this. Why would a brilliant bidnessman needlessly jeopardize his yuuuge bidness interests in another country, a vital trading partner? There is no percentage whatsoever -- strategically, geopolitically, financially -- in doing something like this.

This is not to say that there aren't issues that need to be worked out with the Chinese. They are building a deep-water fleet to secure their place as regional hegemon, the ultimate goal of which would probably be to control the Strait of Malacca (through which most of the world's oil travels). Additionally, they are building artificial islands near the Senkaku (aka Diaoyu) Islands, under and around which lie large deposits of oil and natural gas, in conflict with Japan. The violent thug that has taken over the Philippines is sucking up to the Chinese, which runs counter to our purported strategic interests.

Hell, it may be time to back away and concentrate on tilling our own field anyway. This century is likely going to gravitate toward the Indian Ocean nations anyway, based on demographics and yet another book our non-reader-in-thief will never read and wouldn't understand anyway.

The last time a preznit fucked the dog unnecessarily with China, a few months later 9/11 happened. Those two events are not directly connected, but if this regime got too much attention for the sheer incompetence and belligerence of its dopey figurehead, you wouldn't put it past them to cook up some false-flag event as a distraction. And it would work.

Say the Magic Words

The right-wing obsession with politicians -- particularly, of course, Democratic politicians, who are always and forever having to prove their loyalty to this country, never to any avail -- using the phrase "radical Islam" to describe incidents of domestic terrorism, is nothing short of pathological. It is the lapel flag pin of this decade. They are as pathetic as Stallone saying "cup my balls, say my name" to an extra giving him a blowjob in his trailer. (Best hot mike incident ever? Yes. Best. Ever.)

Any attempt to tease out the practical ramifications of the obsession with this magic phrase is almost certainly wasted motion, yet reveals much about the people who insist on it. Obama, of course, has wisely resisted their imprecations, for the same reason that we don't (officially, at least) negotiate with terrorists. (HFC, on the other hand, had no problem with rightly throwing the phrase right back in their faces.) You delegitimize yourself when you give idiots equal standing, or validate their moronic arguments.

Have It Your Way, Part 2: The Trumpening

(A real thing, by the way. Ain't 'murka grate?)

The nineteenth season of South Park just ended, and the final trilogy of episodes contained an intriguing premise -- the idea that advertisements (especially internet ads), through quickly accelerating iterations of evolution, are gaining sentience. Between the ubiquitous pop-ups, embeds, "sponsored content" posing as news, and the cookie-reading that enables the sites you visit to know what you looking at on Amazon, the show raises two essential points:

• Already it is difficult for many, if not most, people to differentiate between an advertisement and an actual news item.
• It's only a matter of time before we won't know the difference between a sentient, three-dimensional ad and a living, breathing human being.

The second point is for now the stuff of Dickian sci-fi, but given that author's track record so far, that future is probably much nearer than it seems. Maybe it'll come from the military engineering and tweaking robot warriors, or it could be open-sourced from the bottom. Whether it's Big Brother or Little Brother or both, the tech is improving, probably more rapidly than we know. We are used to hearing about the more sinister Terminator-style possibilities of weaponized mayhem, or aggregated domestic spying. But it's equally likely that it would be used by advertising weasels to continue their never-ending quest to monetize literally everything you see, hear, read, talk to, fuck, or otherwise experience or interact with.

Watchmen

Because this nation never runs out of maroons, since last week's massacre at a Chattanooga recruiting station, self-styled "protectors" across the country have taken it upon themselves to sit outside military recruiting sites (which, you know, are generally located at shopping malls) in folding chairs, armed and ready to take all comers.

There's the Knight Templar with his bow and quiver of arrows (since he's not allowed to have a gun, even though he's a military veteran), the guy who accidentally discharged his assault rifle into the mall parking lot (for the second time), the three cosplayers (two of whom are supposedly disabled, one of those a former Marine, and the third (non-disabled but still goofy) one also a former Marine. The Pentagon has had to tell them to stop, because by definition, maroons don't already know they shouldn't be doing this in the first place.

To a certain extent, I actually feel bad for some of these folks; clearly, the VA is not keeping up with its end of the deal in providing decent mental health care and counseling. When a disabled vet is sitting in his Rascal in US flag onesie pajamas (swear to jebus, I didn't know such a thing existed, but of course it does) with a presumably loaded assault rifle, some things have gone wrong.

Definitely read the comments in the Wonkette article; a person claiming to be the female cosplayer (with the rather telling middle name in her handle of "WhiteKnight") tries to troll the snark, and rightly gets her ass handed to her. If the two men with her are in fact veterans, we thank them for their service, now please go home.

There are a couple of big issues here:  one obviously being that we cannot have random costumed weirdos brandishing weapons at mall patrons, regardless of their intent. But secondly, seriously? Is the Knight Templar and his armor and bow supposed to stop a whackjob with a semi-automatic? Are the reflexes on Onesie Marine -- you know, the disabled guy in the Rascal -- going to be superior to some dedicated madman on a rampage?

A central assumption in the gun culture is that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. And one supposes that in the right circumstances and the right conditions, it's better than nothing. But that's really all it is. Shall these goofballs set up posts at movie theaters to prevent deranged racists from shooting up the next showing of Trainwreck? Or do we look at the statistics and numbers, and understand that that would by definition be a more dangerous proposition than having nothing at all?

These would-be militia mutants don't seem to get that an untrained fool with a gun is actually statistically worse than nothing at all. And by "training" I don't just mean weapons training, though that doesn't hurt, as far as knowing how to handle your weapon and use it properly. But the difference between a self-styled militia schmuck is that if he "trained" at all, he did so by shooting targets and maybe running an obstacle course set up in the grand wizard's backyard, maybe some calisthenics here and there.

But any good beat cop or even mall cop will tell you that the most effective, meaningful training is learning how to deal with the public, how to defuse situations before they even start, how to steer people into doing what you need them to do to maintain order, without them even thinking about it. Response is nice, but prevention is much more important -- and these people don't even mention or think about that. It interferes with their dream of some Osama type walking up, threatening the good citizens of Gotham, and getting dispatched righteously, with no collateral damage. That's how it works in the movies, anyway.

As with the bozo in Ohio accidentally firing his rifle into the asphalt, he's just goddamned lucky -- again, for the second time in a couple years -- that no one got hit or hurt. Pure luck, nothing else. A slightly different angle, a couple radians off on the ricochet, and you have a tragic event. Someone needs to pull these apparently jobless dopes aside and break it to them gently:  Look, you're in the minority, you're just louder. But here's the deal -- we don't want you "guarding" our schools, our malls, our military recruitment offices. We want you to take your fucking penis extension and go home, settle down, pull up whatever excites you on the internets, knock out a few generations of knuckle-children, and sleep it off.

We'll get by somehow, understanding that life has randomness built into it, and that in a nation of 320 million people, some of them are insane, incompetent, malicious, whatever. That car you just passed on the highway could easily have had a split-second distraction, swerved into your lane. A crazy asshole could take advantage of lax gun laws, get his weapon of choice, pack up his shit and crank out an incoherent manifesto in a hotel room, and walk into a movie theater and start sweeping.

This is not to say that because shit happens, no precautions should be put anywhere. That's ridiculous. But what is just as ridiculous is this notion that every man is a potential John Wayne, just needing the right place and opportunity to prove his heroism. I would rather take my statistically infinitesimal chances with the random psychopaths, than deal with the would-be do-gooders who are off their meds.

Lazy Train

When Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush are the voices of reason on your side, maybe it's time to reconsider your basic premises. This is about to be the next entrant in the Tedious Summer Fake Debate sweepstakes, now that the required shark attacks and Trump announcements are already out of the way. At least one half-assed "tradition" will be "scrutinized" and Both Sides Will Be Heard.

The tradition of flying a flag that celebrates systemic racism and plunder will be said to come down to the noble voters of South Carolina, who will get their backs up in righteous indignation, drawl some obvious untruths, and tell everyone to go fuck themselves. Short of a tourism boycott, you're not going to talk these rubes out of their stupid tree. They're fine with lying to themselves and everyone else about the nature of that hateful rag and what it represents.

Ordinarily you'd just say, well, let morons be morons and leave it at that. And perhaps that's where we'll end up. But nine people got slaughtered in a church a few days ago because some deranged dipshit decided that he'd had enough of something. The same mindset that defends that damned flag is precisely the same mindset that composed said dipshit's actions.

Another tradition is that of giving South Carolina -- a state notable for exactly two things:  being the first state to attempt to secede, and having about 1.5% of the US population -- a prominent role in selecting the next president. To the extent that the electoral process for picking imperial custodian even matters, with its perpetual campaign machine and roster of mostly worthless choices, the insistence on giving tiny states where no one lives first choice on legitimizing candidates undermines the validity of that process. Larger, more populous states such as California and New York -- and yes, Texas and Florida as well -- don't have a voice until Iowa and South Carolina and New Hampshire have had their say.

It's bad enough that a depopulated ghost state like Wyoming has exactly the same number of US Senators as California, a state with about 66 times as many people, and at least four cities each with more people than all of Wyoming. It's ridiculous that preliminary choices are entirely ceded to small states that are not representative of anything but themselves.

I've felt increasingly that the post-Westphalian nation-state paradigm is increasingly outmoded, that what worked to preserve order in 1648 has perhaps run its course nearly four centuries later. Maybe the fifty states would work better as a loose confederation of regional entities that regulate trade, and leave each other to their picayune bullshit.

Maybe the taker states, adding nothing of value in the first place and no longer having their nonsense supported by the maker states, would be forced to get honest with themselves, and join the 21st century. Or not. With that sort of setup, what goes on in the backwaters would have as much relevance as news from Pakistan or Gambia.

Mutiny on the Clownty; Or, None Dare Call It Reason

Because we now live in an era where a thumb-dicked, draft-dodging cousin-fucker like Rudy Giuliani can still get his corrupt ass on the teevee as a serious common-tater, political discourse has taken a more-tacky-than-usual swerve toward proving Who Loves Them Some 'murka More, I Mean Like With Tongues And Throbbing Cock And Shit.

So, since the new crop of conservatard dickheads naturally takes their cue from 'murka's Mayor (PBUH), leave it to freshman cracker Tom, I say Tom, Cotton (R-Cletusippi) to spearhead yet another misguided opportunity to make Black Satan look bad. Like he don't love him enough 'murka. Not like us, baby; he cain't loves ya likes I loves ya.

This is less about who might be borderline traitorous in their sentiments and activities, and more about a party -- an entire political party here, not just one or two key players moseying off the reservation -- to risk buggering a critical piece of foreign policy, just to make Obama look bad. That's the key here, that everyone other than they're own constituencies seem to understand -- these guys are more than happy to fuck the country sideways, if it makes Obama's job just a little bit more difficult.

(And it's no coincidence that Cotton got the nod for this nonsense, since he's brand-new and not running for higher office -- yet. If it blows up in their faces, the party elders can point to the kid having a rookie mistake; if it works out, it's a feather in his cap down the road.)

Whether that means tweaking the administration by hosting Netanyahu's campaign speech, or writing the mullahs a letter that does nothing but empower Iranian hard-liners, they have shown that they are plenty willing to go the extra mile to mess with The Man. It is central to the evangelical core ethos that most of these knuckle-draggers spout that Israel gets into an all-out Armageddon with the Arabs (never mind that Persians aren't Arabs, they're still Mooooooooslim). That is where their actions trump mere partisan hackery -- it is the future narrative of their belief system.

Jeffrey Goldberg has written some fine pieces for The Atlantic on this subject, trying to finesse the balance between dealing with Iranian leaders who do say vile, aggressive things about Israel, and understanding that the way to bring them around to a compromise is not to engage in useless brinksmanship. That sort of nuanced thinking does not come easily (or, perhaps, at all) to people who attained power precisely by eschewing all appearances of nuance.

The mullahs' statements are for internal consumption, of course, but that doesn't mean that Israel and the US should laugh them off. Many things are simultaneously true, and two of the most important ones in that region are:  one, that Israel needs to attend to its miserable treatment of its Palestinian population, sooner rather than later; and two, that Israel really is surrounded by unstable, despotic regimes who stay in power by stoking the grievances of their seething, resentful populations.

However, it is also important to note that Iran is bordered by countries who possess nuclear weapons, namely Russia, India, and Pakistan. Not to mention Israel itself, not to mention that Saudi Arabia and Egypt are no doubt doing everything they can to acquire the technology as well. American lawmakers, just like American citizens, seem completely ignorant of the idea that other countries might have interests of their own, and that those interests might run contrary to our expectations of them, or of the countries in our "sphere of influence," as the saying goes.

But this particular episode goes beyond the usual bumpkin parochialism, this is simply interference for its own sake, a petulant child throwing a tantrum in the supermarket for no better reason than to embarrass his mommy in front of all the other shoppers. Cue the canned Sunday follies with Johnny Walnuts and Huckleberry Closetcase tag-teaming the hapless hosts over whatever bullshit they decide to spread this week.

I'm With Stupid

Forgive me if I'm enjoying the gradually-then-suddenly decline and fall of Meth Valley Barbie a little too much, but this broad's glass-breaking jabber has simply gone on so far past its sell-by date, so we're not just gonna let it go. It needs to be hammered into 'murka's seeping lizard brain just how corrosive her nonsense has been to what's left of a national political body, to allow this person to hang around as long as she has.

Especially when people pull out these ham-fisted "I'm not defending her, but...." pieces that are really just intended to highlight the lamestream media's manifold hypocrisies and inconsistencies.

I'll grant him one point, at least:

And as for all of the attention paid to Palin's supposed white trash brood, remember that Joe Biden's son Hunter was given a special waiver to join the Navy at age 43 only to be kicked out for doing cocaine at age 44. This is the same son who had rather questionable ties to a Ukrainian gas company.

Absolutely. Hunter Biden's appointment to the board (as legal advisor) of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma does and should raise eyebrows and questions, especially since it just came months after Putin's annexation of the Crimean peninsula, and our subsequent saber-rattling.

I mean, it's not quite as questionable as, say, Dick Cheney making a metric fuckton of money from a war that he pushed like Ron Jeremy for, but sure, at the very least, Hunter Biden's journey over the last twelve months should remove all doubt that there are at minimum two Americas.

But impressively, the author manages to undermine his own point in the very next sentences:

Despite being far more consequential problems than whether or not Palin's kids got in a scrape at a snowmobile kegger, these scandals barely registered and media sure as hell hasn't pointed many fingers at the Vice President for the decisions of his kids. With all the tabloid coverage of Palin and her family since 2008 her critics certainly act like they're vindicated, but it's telling they don't even try to make the argument that Joe Biden was a superior man for the job.

A few things here. One is the obvious, that Palin has spent the last few years repositioning herself in the eyes of the American public. No, I don't mean "she was asking for it", but she has become an entertainment figure at least as much as a political figure. She was smart enough to realize that there's far more money and less actual work being the former than the latter. But she forgot that the reward for being a celebrity is that journos rummage through your trash and hang on every stupid thing you say. And when your reputation is for saying stupid shit, well, don't be too surprised when they look at you like a dog looks at a T-bone.

Secondly, Palin has made a bad habit of padding her ascent to reality teevee queen with plenty of social conservative red meat, such as advocating abstinence -- for your kids anyway, not hers. This is not a reflection of Palin as a parent; teenage girls get knocked up, although that number is indeed declining, except of course in abstinence-only states. But even if you're an ordinary mom in the supermarket, if you have a teenage daughter who got knocked up, you kinda have a moral obligation to STFU about the choices of other females. If you hold or have held or are pretending to try to attain in the future some sort of political office where your words might have actual influence over those choices, you definitely have a moral obligation to stay out of it, or at least not insist on the opposite of what your own children did. It's worse than hypocritical, it just makes you look like a buffoon whose words mean nothing at all.

And finally, while Diamond Joe Biden has certainly had his share of WTF moments before and since becoming vice-president, the fact of the matter is that Biden has spoken eloquently and extemporaneously on a variety of subjects, especially foreign policy, has written about those subjects, and has never given a speech like these drunken word-salad moments that have long been routine with Palin. Even if you leave out last fall's drunken snowbillies crashing someone's party and starting a brawl, and just pit Palin against Biden, qual for qual, brain cell for brain cell, quote for quote, there's just no contest.

You know and I know and Mark Hemingway certainly knows that if we all got in a room with Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, and talked about serious issues of foreign and domestic policy -- not some bullshit formatted show-pony debate, but a deep-level detailed multi-point discussion on issues, causes, and possible solutions -- Biden would mop the floor with Palin. Hell, you or I or Hemingway could do that.

It's too bad, because there was a time when Palin could have been seen as someone who understood the travails of the working class, how the elites really have screwed them over, and used that as a basis for proposed policy changes. Instead she chose to turn that opportunity into random sequences of memorized catch-phrases, props, and insults.

In other words, just another blogger.

Endless Kabuki

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. -- Frank Zappa
Hollywood is like high school, but with money. -- Martin Mull

Traditionally the "silly season" for "news" has been in the summer, since people (somebody, anyway) are on vacation and paying even less attention than usual. But it seems like this week -- heading straight into what is an unseasonably nice weekend here in the NorCal (I'm barbecuing steaks in about an hour, fool, so suck on it, snow country! Global warming, amirite?) -- has had more than its rightful share of sheer nonsense.

Starting with the State of the Union, a completely useless pseudo-political appendage, nothing more than an extended plug for the now-perpetual campaign that undergirds this nation's version of political engagement. Yes, Obama managed a few bons mots at the stone-faced dipshits on the other side of the proverbial aisle. He's always talked a good game, that's how he got in. Walking said talk has always been another matter, the tedious, mindless intransigence of the opposition notwithstanding.

Somewhere along the line, the SOTU has morphed from a routine of the president giving the speech, and an individual from the opposition party being appointed to giving a single rebuttal, to multiple responses in the same key, all of them stupid. It would be one thing if the respondents each had a fresh take or perspective on what, let's face it, is simply a barrage of self-serving hortatory rhetorical boilerplate. But they don't; instead of orchestrating their views, the teatards all play a triangle, and ting it at random intervals, or perhaps to some indiscernible inner rhythm.

I think we all had the most fun with soup-brained cornhole Senator Bread Bags, who apparently grew up in Dust Bowl Oklahoma in the mid 1930s. Listen close, you dingbat -- I grew up poor, with farmers and dairymen in my family (though we didn't get the gubmint subsidies Senator Hawg Ballz' kinfolk got, apparently not enough to buy her actual shoes). I know what it's like to wear the same clothes and shoes two years at a time, to stretch the same dinner three or four nights.

But I never wore bread bags over my shoes, not the least reason for which is that bread bags are not particularly known for their exceptional durability; they are, after all, made specifically to encase a food item which typically lasts less than a week. I mean, we all know these "stories" are 100% grade-A bullshit, but usually there's at least some believability to some of them. Hawg Ballz didn't even bother to brush the peanuts off this one when she pulled it directly out of her ass.

Hey, whatever. If you're the sort that takes some sort of weird "pride" in stuffing plastic bags and cardboard into shoes that really should be replaced, more power to you. Hell, you might be up for the one-two jib-jab of the King and Queen of Holy Derp pretending one more blessed time to throw their pointy hats in the ring. Will anyone fall for it this time?

Do we really need to ask? No matter what the question is, regardless of the ninth-circle example of sheer stupidity, whenever you read it and ask if anyone is really that fucking dumb, invariably someone shuffles forward, finger jammed into nostril up to the third knuckle, as if to say, "Uh, yup."

Trump and Palin are just two of the speakers -- and you know I use the term loosely -- gathered at something called the Iowa Freedom Summit (because "Fuckfest 2016" would have been too obvious). A larger collection of card-carrying shitbirds you will not find outside of a state penitentiary. These are people who literally cannot wait to destroy what's left of their country, spread the profits among themselves, and then find newer and better ways to export said destruction as far and wide as possible.

The icing on this shit sandwich of a news week is the manufactured outrage over Michael Moore and Seth Rogen tweeting smartass remarks of mild dissent regarding Duh Most Patriotic Movie Evar. You see, when it's some frog rag getting lit up over its disparaging remarks about Islam, every conservadouche is suddenly a fucking free-speech champeen, never mind that Charlie Hebdo had said nasty things about the Catholic Church as well. But it's all good because booga-booga-moooslim.

But a couple people say that the movie felt a little propagandistic (gee, ya think?) and even Dean Fucking Cain (hey, I kinda remember him, I think) comes unglued. You would think that Moore had directly referred to Chris Kyle (PBUH) as a "coward," rather than mentioning that because Moore's uncle was killed by a sniper in WW2, Moore's family had routinely referred to that mode of killing as cowardly in general. (For the record, I happen to disagree; for the most part, killing is killing. I'd say a drone bombing of a wedding party is pretty fucking cowardly, though.)

And you'd think that Rogen had called Kyle a Nazi or something, instead of merely alluding to the reputedly (I haven't seen it yet, not in any rush, will probably Netflix it eventually) propagandistic nature of the film. And so now Dean Cain and, um, Kid Rock want to kick Rogen's ass or something.

There's a thread in the tenor of these hirsute defenders of Chris Kyle's sacred honor, as if they themselves had a vested interest. More to the point, the "he did this in order to give you your rights" tack is just nuts. I don't have an issue with Kyle's feelings about the people he shot, or Iraqis and Muslims in general. No doubt most of the individuals Kyle encountered or dispatched were, in fact, what most of us would regard as "savages"; I sure as hell can't think of many better words to describe the sort of motherless fucks who torture people with power drills.

But that is orthogonal to whether Iraq or any of its demonic hordes presented anything resembling an actual threat to the Homeland, or that we even had a clue as to what sort of people we were supporting or aligning ourselves with. "Destabilizing unfriendly regimes" has a nice ring to it, for the ear of the hegemon; the reality of it is much different, now more than ever. But it's not like any of the people Chris Kyle killed from afar were on the verge of hopping a plane the next day so they could strap themselves with Semtex and ball bearing and hit the nearest mall food court. Yet that seems to be the thrust of the arguments, the japing at Moore and Rogen (who, if you haven't heard, are fat).

Maybe when Martin Mull famously opined that showbiz (and that's all any of this is, folks; you might as well have TMZ doing political coverage anymore) was like high school with money, he was being too generous. Because these days it seems more like preschool.

Run Silent, Run Deep

Let's take a breather from pontificating about the cop-shoot-unarmed-black-citizen (though if you're a white person firing a real gun and pointing it at cops, they'll find a way to bring you in unharmed), and throw in on this latest instance of The Most Transparent Administration Evah getting dissidents under its thumb.

In 2009, Barrett founded Project PM, “dedicated to investigating private government contractors working in the secretive fields of cybersecurity, intelligence, and surveillance.” He was particularly instrumental in using documents obtained by the hacktivist collective Anonymous to expose secret collaboration between the government and various contractors. The covert factions Barrett’s work threatened are powerful, and fought back. Two years ago, Barrett was arrested and threatened with 100 years in prison—yes, you read that correctly—allegedly for threatening an FBI agent, concealing evidence, and linking to a website that contained stolen credit card numbers.

....

Eventually, Barrett signed a plea deal on three of the lesser charges against him, the other charges were dropped, and the threatened sentence reduced from over a hundred to eight and a half years. His sentencing hearing has been repeatedly scheduled and then delayed, and is currently set for December 16.

More here. The sentencing has since been pushed back to January 22nd. Brown now faces 8½ years, rather than over 100, which is nice, except that's still a long time to spend in Club Fed. They'll fix his wagon, just like they fixed Jeremy Hammond's wagon, and maybe Michael Hastings. Gee, I wonder why Ed Snowden prefers to wait it out in Russia.

(Just to add to any possible conspiracy guy conjecture about Hastings' death, the linked article mentions how Hastings' Mercedes leaped the median on N. Highland just south of the Melrose intersection, into the palm trees. Here's what that looks like, courtesy of Google Maps:

I don't know which exact spot Hastings dies, but I know this area, have driven through it many, many times over the years, and it's nothing, it's cake as far as urban LA streets go. That's just a few hundred yards south of Melrose, here's another couple yards south:

So yeah, in an age where vehicle computers can be hacked, yeah, I'd say it's fairly hinky that a guy who followed a high-ranking general around a war zone suddenly loses his shit driving around a fairly sedentary Hollywood neighborhood. Maybe it's paranoid, maybe we can see what happens to people who get too inquisitive for their own good.)

I'm in the middle of reading Cory Doctorow's Information Doesn't Want to Be Free, which is quite good. So far, Doctorow describes the venal shenanigans perpetrated by tech mega-corps (cough Apple cough) in the name of "copyright" -- not only is it basically illegal to hack your iPhone and disable the tracking software on it (which is vulnerable to spyware and rootkit viruses, plus it tracks you), but the music you think you're purchasing outright from iTunes are merely "licensed"; you don't actually own them like you would a physical CD or vinyl record. Why? Because those physical objects can't be tracked the way an MP3 can. And life is too short to read and parse the EULA.

So that's the benign side of the matrix, what do you imagine the deep-state implications are, the level of collusion between government and private contractors. The whole reason government outsources everything from war to cybersecurity is because government is still at least theoretically accountable to its constituents (though in reality that's laughable), while a private contractor can cloak itself in proprietary "security" mumbo-jumbo, protected by rather liberally applied digital copyright laws, which go far beyond anything applying to dead-tech physical media.

Remember, this has largely taken place or accelerated under the supposed commie librul preznit; aside from maybe Rand Paul, what do you think it'd be like under any of the Republican goofballs? They'll leave your guns alone, but go overkill on hackers and dissidents.

The Paranoid Style

So let's see if we have this straight -- one of the world's largest entertainment companies just got intimidated to its knees by a system hack supposedly perpetrated by a hillbilly cult disguised as a country, whose sole officially-sanctioned internet presence is hosted by another country's TLD extension and looks like it was put together by a random sixth-grader from any industrialized nation.

The only way North Korea has the technological sophistication to pull this off is with help from the Chinese, since no one else will even look in their direction. And on the off chance that NK did manage to do this entirely of their own volition and ability, so what? Why does that mean that American studios feel compelled to pull every NK-related project?

When did we become a society of such cosseted, mewling ninnies? You are infinitely more likely to get hit by a bolt of lightning (or, more realistically, plowed into by a drunk driver) while exiting a movie theater than attacked by a North Korean splinter cell because you saw a middling Rogen-Franco comedy. This is just a test case; it will get bigger and weirder and with more interesting targets, and soon.

And as Steve points out, where are those bold champions of free speech when you could really use them, why does George Clooney, like always, have more balls than all of those lying, chickenshit hacks put together? The answer (of course) is that when your "philosophy" operates primarily as an ongoing persecution complex, the constant challenge is to portray yourself as a disempowered, beleaguered minority -- even if, in fact, the opposite is plainly true.

Protest and Survive

Great interview in one of the local free sheets, with a gentleman who did a couple years for the high crime of crashing a land auction. What's particularly galling about this case is that not only did the judge rig the jury selection process by stocking it with people who pledged their allegiance to his decree rather than their consciences, but that it wasn't even allowed to be discussed at the trial that the auction in question had been ruled illegal.

There are other worthy tidbits throughout, not the least of which involves a cop who, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, realized his basement was being shoveled out by on of the Occupy kids he had been told to truncheon in Zuccotti Park.

I differ from Mr. DeChristopher in his hope or belief that the cop might have been transformed even a little bit by such an encounter. Oh, it might have made him think a bit, but probably not enough to question seriously why he mindlessly did what he had "been told" to that kid and others like him, not enough to change the trajectory of his ways or beliefs.

DeChristopher's dismay (I was hoping for more palpable contempt, but the guy is simply too nice) for the chickenshit bien pensant liberal baby boomers is also choice -- and also not enough to get them to change their ways. They are clearly content to believe that shopping organic and voting Democratic is sufficient, that climate change is a problem for the next generations to figure out. They hung on, made their money, and they're going to by-god take as much of it -- as well as the health care and Social Security funding of the next generations -- with them as possible.

The problem is, since they have most of the money, they have most of the political power, and so pay for a system that keeps inert just long enough for them to finish their days in comfort, and then everyone who's left can start sacrificing.

I don't think Americans of any generation will start to take climate change seriously until there's a truly catastrophic -- and I mean like mid-five figures of casualties -- event, something like twenty Katrinas or Sandys all at once, on an "important" US city like Los Angeles or New York. Somebody famous will have to perish.

And even then, because the system more than anything counts on inertia, counts on people's willingness to be distracted from their fate for just one more day, there's always the chance that it'll go away. Think of the huge events of this new century already, man-made or natural -- 9/11, Fukushima, Katrina, the extended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. After all the news coverage and the hand-wringing in the aftermath, what actually changed in the wake of any of these things?

Did 9/11 change our approach to dealing with the Muslim world? No, we still prop up corrupt petrocrats, sell them weapons, let them oppress their people into a senseless rage, and then wonder what the fuck is wrong with "those people". Did we take any measures that showed that we take seriously the clear ramifications of global warming and carbon concentration in the atmosphere after Katrina or Sandy or the 2004 tsunami? You tell me.

Consider -- in the space of a few minutes, nearly a quarter-million lives in fourteen countries were ended, and hundreds of thousands more transformed, by the tsunami. Yes, it was caused by an earthquake, and no, there wasn't anything man-made about an undersea subduction. But it should have been a potent reminder of the power of nature, and the powerlessness of humans to stop it.

It's not just Americans, though we certainly set the stage for all this. The Chinese and Indians, after all, are just following our model, empowered by the blessings of globalization and the credo of The Chicago Group. It's difficult to blame them for wanting to catch up with us in standard of living.

Yet that bears consequences, when 1 in every 3 humans lives in China or India, and 1 in every 2 -- think about that, especially if you're in America, which has comparatively sparse population density overall, every second human being -- lives in Asia. And most people live in cities, and most cities are near oceans, and the levels are rising, and will take as long or longer to reverse than they did to set in motion.

We don't all have to go full eco-activist and go to prison, in a system that's rigged to begin with. But if enough people, just in the US, looked at the three primary factors -- what/how we drive; what/how we eat; what/how we consume in general -- all of which are within lost people's control, a real dent can be made in this very real and growing problem.

Velikaya Voyna, Letom Akuly

So, now that some time has actually passed since Malaysia Flight 17 was shot down, by Russian-backed separatists using Russian-supplied weapons, have we actually learned anything new?

Putin is a bastard. Well, no shit. Good thing he got the Winter Olympics this year, and the 2018 World Cup. Sanctions are one way to hit this prick, another is to delegitimize his prestige goals. So we'll see how many of these outraged countries boycott the World Cup in 2018. But that's a pretty effective way to take the piss out of the guy.

Despite what armchair tough-guys Poor Ol' Straight Talk and Huckleberry Closetcase are braying every Sunday morning on the network circle-jerk, we aren't going to war with Russia. Here is where The Googul, or a history book, or even a decent memory, is helpful. Despite being in some sort of conflict or other since World War 2 ended, almost none of those military actions have been against countries that can actually fight back. Oh, your Iraqs and Vietnams and such like can muster enough guerrilla insurgency to wear us down and make us leave, but I'm talking about countries who can strike back in the US. That hasn't happened, and it ain't gonna happen.

Russia may be something of a Third World despotate (albeit an enormous one), in terms of laws and life expectancy and such, but they aren't in the same league as the banana stands and oil cans we're used to knocking over with our swinging dick.

What we're seeing in Ukraine is a civil war, pure and simple, and it's one that at least in part could have been avoided by more prudent action on the part of the US and Europe. Continuous instigation to get Ukraine into NATO and/or the EU, or to get them on the IMF debt hook, was always going to be unacceptable to Russia, just as Soviet incursions and overtures into (for starters) Cuba and Nicaragua were completely unacceptable to us. Do these people not recall the Saint Reagan years, or was it all just a collective coke-fueled dream?

"So what?", you might say, and not without some justification. "Fuck the Russkies, we run this popsicle stand, baby! USA! USA! Dee-fence, unh-unh! Dee-fence! We're the hegemon, we run the show, we call the shots."

Well, ah, yes and no. This is a classic case of "we got the guns, but they got the numbers"; yes, we have 11 aircraft carriers where no other nation has any, and we have state-of-the-art machinery in every phase of war -- land, sea, air. Hell, our killbot roboplanes are more sophisticated than all but a few conventional manned air forces.

But this has all come at a cost. Fat, drunk, and stupid, as Dean Wormer acidly observed so long ago, is no way to go through life, son. Militarists can jabber on about how the defense budget is at or near an all-time low as a percentage of GDP, but that is meaningless in the context of banana-republic levels of economic inequality and mobility. It is a zero-sum game; all those aircraft carriers and killbots come at the price of something else along the line -- a school, a road, a bridge, an educational grant, something to give someone in the lower dalit strata of 'murkin life an opportunity besides working multiple shit jobs just to survive, or worse yet, becoming a Juggalo.

In the meantime, they attempt to whip the maroons into a jingoist frenzy about Russia, or Syria, or whoever. Ambrose Beirce famously said that war was God's way of teaching Americans geography, but he would be disappointed to know that that is no longer even true, as in order to teach someone something the other party has to be willing to learn. And Americans just don't give a shit about where any of the multifarious objects of this or that week's Two Minutes of Hate are, or what the history or context might mean.

(Or that, uh, it ain't just Ukrusky separatists that shoot down passenger jets. There's your inconvenient truth, podna.)

The thing is, you're supposed to completely ignore the fact that the owners are screwing you over, every day in every way, that quite literally the more people they fuck over, the wealthier they get. Instead, you get bombarded with either a barrage of "the world is going up in flames" stories, again devoid of meaningful context or analysis, or completely meaningless features on the comings and going of "royals", or how some imperceptible change in yet another interchangeable comic-book movie franchise is, like, rilly rilly important.

When 1% of the people control more assets than the bottom 90%, it's a recipe for destabilizing levels of inequality. An increased level of anxiety and fear becomes systemic, and must be, via the corporate propaganda machine, projected onto The Other as much as possible. Whether it's assholes in a country you can't find on a map, or teeming hordes of Central American maras coming to steal your flat-screen teevees and virgin daughters, it's always someone else's fault. Pay no attention to the leveraged-buyout specialists behind the curtain.

Not to fear, though, gentle reader -- though your job has been outsourced to Bangalore, you will still be able to purchase the item you once manufactured for less money, so long as it doesn't exceed your gubmint assistance allowance. But hey, those Apaches are swell, aren't they?

The 1% needn't worry about any of this, mind you -- they can and have put millions of their countrymen out in the street without a care in the world, because increased capital mobility. And if there's one thing they know, it's that large groups of people will literally go live in tents before they'll mobilize and at least try to do something, anything about the fuckers that put them there.

And on the off chance we actually were to send any sort of ground force into Russia, or Ukraine, or anywhere else for that matter, there won't be any one-percenters' kids in the action. There is never any rich skin in this game.

Also, too.

Takin' Care of Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Home On Derange

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

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

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

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

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

All Poodles Are Dogs, But Not All Dogs Are Poodles

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

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

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

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

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

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