"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
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Showing posts with label welcome to the machine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label welcome to the machine. Show all posts
Did I tell you or did I tell you that, aside from being an arrogant, off-putting asshole, Donald Trump is just plain fucking weird? I doubt if any of your political bookmaking sites had "insists during debate that dick size is sufficient" for any of the candidates. That in response to Rubio making fun of Trump's hands, which as we all know is an ancient Spy magazine joke that took up residence under Trump's amazingly thin skin over a quarter-century ago.
Only Trump could take a jibe about short fingers, and not only extrapolate it into a cock reference, but pretend he doesn't know whence the meme originated, as if a goodly number of people weren't aware that he's been obsessing about it all these years. Seriously, what's wrong with this fucking guy? He never gets tired of telling you how impossibly wealthy, intelligent, happy and perfect he and his family are, and yet he gets immensely butt-hurt over the slightest slights.
I managed to stomach just a precious few minutes of tonight's circle jerk, but apparently I caught most of the highlights. Obviously, it's down to fuck-or-walk for Cruz and especially Rubio, in that they needed to learn to start cockpunching back if they were going to make any headway against Herr Drumpf.
We don't even need to wait for hindsight on this clusterfuck to see how consistently this "deep bench" managed to hand it over to Trump, over and over and over again. It begins with there simply being too many of them to begin with, preventing a consolidation of opposition. Plus they're all just fucking horrible; it's a sad state of affairs that of the five remaining candidates, as awful as Trump is, he may be the least awful of them.
The 2016 primaries don't even start for another five months or so, making it premature to start counting Hillary Clinton out, or even down. Way too much emphasis is placed on states like Iowa, where no one lives and whose votes align with the rest of the country mostly by statistical coincidence. And the email server scandal will probably go the way of Benghazi(!), slowing the momentum and distracting a few fence-sitters, but not much else.
The decline in Clinton's numbers lies partly due to Trump, partly to Sanders, but mostly to the fact that she's flat and uninspiring and temperamentally insincere. Her numbers will reverse and stabilize, as will Trump's, but in the context of late-summer empty speculation, it at least provides an opportunity to look both at the Democrats' bench, and how heavily the party establishment had already committed to Hillary's success. Notably absent from that is any sort of endorsement from the leaders of the current administration, the junior member of which had a weekend pow-wow with Elizabeth Warren.
Weirdness is afoot for the time being, but again, all that will shake out in the months to come. But what bodes for the party in the years to come? As the GOP becomes more and more unhinged and marginalized, a truly enterprising political party might see this as an opportunity to decouple from the ratchet-pawl pelf-grab the system has become.
Knowing the obscene amounts of money spent on this circus is one thing, knowing where it goes is another. Advertising through the same media that needs a horse race to keep the rates high is the primary use of the money; the industry of peckerhead pollsters and consultants is another. These folks get paid regardless of the outcome. In the meantime, more profit is generated by keeping it close, by inflating buffoons and downplaying contenders.
Hillary has an ace-in-the-hole that no other candidate from either party has -- Bill Clinton, easily the most charismatic politician since JFK, whose stature inexplicably wasn't even diminished by his signing the repeal of Glass-Steagall. The man is politically bulletproof, and can still convince people like the best televangelists only dream of. Once the real season gets underway, Hillary doesn't need to say much of anything -- she just needs to pull the Big Dog out of whoever he's balls-deep in that week, and put him at the podium.
In a political season where "populism" and "antiestablishment" sentiments are supposedly the driving factors, you just watch how soon the tide will predictably turn right back to tedious incrementalism. I hold out hope for Sanders, but also realize that the "left" in this country is really just a bunch of yuppie suburban assholes who would sell their children's economic prospects down the river just for the false promise of selecting a couple of SCOTUS occupants who might hold the line for the right to get an abortion (which has been severely curtailed throughout the country with or without the Supreme Court). They'll turn on Sanders the very second they can find an excuse to exhume the sad bones of Ralph Nader.
Just as the movement to curtail reproductive rights cannot survive without the involvement of misguided women, neither can you end up with a "liberal" party that does very little for true economic and social justice, without the bien pensant meddling of former idealists who play just not to lose, and have lost whatever compelling vision they thought they had when they were dropping acid and blowing Jerry Garcia at Woodstock. The only thing worse than someone who sells out is someone who refuses to admit the obvious.
Like you need to be told, but don't be fooled by the bullshit Microsoft commercial with the dopey, grinning babies. Windows 10 is just a permanent low-jack on your system, archiving your porn searches, keylogging your diatribes, compiling an ongoing dossier on your ass. "She'll be able to log in with her smile!" Hey, fuck you. I don't want it, and I don't need it. My computer ain't broke, and yet they're insisting on "fixing" it for me. Stop. Just stop.
They can't even explain why they're skipping from 8 to 10; my assumption is that they got balls-deep into 9 before realizing it was so botched, they had to get moving on 10 before they could even close out the 9 project. Having a project management degree, I know how these guys think. It would be against PMBOK principles to close out a failed project without a "lessons learned" end cycle.
From a technical standpoint, I'm caught in the middle: not technically adept enough to work with Linux, nor do I want to learn; but also not a drooling moron who needs my computer to wait on me like a needy sex slave. I don't need something that catalogs my every thought and lets the inept gubmint look at it when they please. I just need something that I can keep my tons of books and music on, play games once in a while, work on my websites, use office software to keep writing books and working on various projects, and the occasional porn. Windows 7 does all that just fine. There is no need for this shit, and I resent them trying to push it with babies. What next, kittens playing?
Look, I've never made any made any bones about it -- I do not like Hillary Clinton. More accurately, I don't like the idea of her becoming president. Even in a business populated solely by insincere people, her defining characteristic is a chilly, impenetrable insincerity.
That's not to say that "sincerity" is, in and of itself, an automatically virtuous trait. Ted Cruz appears to sincerely be an asshole. Bush the Lesser seemed sincere in his utter indifference to the world around him, in his desire to be a cowboy, and play dress-up when the occasion called for it. Sincerity is not the be-all/end-all of an inherently cynical game; it's not even a terribly important factor. But it does at least provide some sense of what a politician's actual positions are, beyond the rhetoric they spout.
I may not like what people like Cruz or Bush stand for, but I at least have an idea of what they stand for, and how they plan to go about achieving those objectives. I honestly don't see how Hillary Clinton's supporters can say the same thing about her. There's absolutely no reason not to assume that she will function exactly as Obama has, exactly as her husband did -- lots of happy hopey talk, lots of confrontational dudgeon about uncooperative Republicans, lots of futile tacking to the right to appease said gridlockers, not much to show for all that. Lather, rinse, repeat.
This doesn't hurt my feelings so much as make it virtually impossible to make even a semi-educated guess as to what she would actually do. Most likely a less personable, more hawkish version of her husband. But since the financial racket's just about exhausted its possibilities, she won't even be able to muster the appearance of prosperity Bill was able to, before NAFTA sucked all the jobs out and the economy became Rubinized, and he sold the working class' interests down the river by repealing Glass-Steagall, sending all productivity gains to the scumbags who already own everything. People recall the Clinton years fondly only because Fredo Arbusto was such a colossal fuck-up from the word go. And sure, compared the aforementioned shrub, Bill Clinton is Thomas Jefferson, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Ron Jeremy rolled into one.
And that's really the sole appeal of Hillary Clinton -- the Republicans will run a group of scandalous morons who have about as much to do with responsible governance as truck nuts do with operating a motor vehicle. Whatever Clinton is, she's not an idiot, not a climate change or evolution denier. Pelf-grubbing corrupt triangulator with way too much baggage? Sure. But that also describes her likely opponent in the end.
(Seeing the name "George Herbert Walker IV" in the IBT article is a fresh reminder that the only people who have Roman numerals appended to their names are constitutional monarchs and assholes. Although, to be fair, the Bushes are essentially both of those things.)
The added benefit of holding one's nose and pulling the lever for the next Wall Street candidate is that it will annoy insufferable twits such as this. Though she does have a point -- a country so besotted with empty bullshit, a country that revels in truck nuts and rolling coal, really does deserve having to spend the foreseeable future having to choose between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.
Doop-de-doop -- oh gee, what's this, media monkeys defending their cohort's foolish behavior? There must be a hard-hitting "water is wet" headline on the cover of the next issue of No Shit, Sherlock magazine. Good thing we all have a subscription, whether or not we want one, right?
"I'm proud of what I did," [Financial Times Washington bureau chief Megan Murphy] said Friday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "When you have a campaign like that and they are not going to let us ask her any questions in any settings, what are we supposed to do as journalists?"
Wow. Hokay, here's the deal -- if I can answer that question, seriously rather as an amateur blog smartass, then maybe I should be a capital city bureau chief at a major magazine. Jesus Christ, these people literally do not know what they're supposed to do as journalists when a career politician kicks off an extended process of yanking their collective chain.
Welp, just in case there are any news orgs out there looking for people who actually understand what journalists are supposed to do, here is the answer for Megan Murphy, so pay close attention folks, 'cause this is highly complimicated shit here:
If, as Murphy whines, "they are not going to let us ask her any questions in any settings," then they should do some research -- on her, on the campaign, on the people running the campaign. Whether it's debunking Benghazi or poking holes in her pseudo-populist bullshit, do something, anything.
Hell, maybe just ask why we continue to have these stupid "traditions" where candidates are supposed to legitimize themselves by genuflecting to states with more livestock than humans. Why is a candidate considered legitimate if they can win over a state with literally 1% of the population, mostly by promising ethanol subsides and opposing humane treatment of food animals? Why are we talking now about an election that is still eighteen months away? Why do we have a system where billions of dollars are thrown at a perpetual campaign machine, and where does all that money go? Hunh, I dunno, let's just run after her van like a gaggle of fucking maroons, so she can blow us off face to face, instead of from a distance.
Are these people for real? Do they seriously not understand why the average person does not respect the vaunted integrity of their so-called profession? You do not gather useful information for public consumption, you engage in increasingly desperate antics in the hope of bamboozling the public to watch your hastily-scrawled chyron, just long enough to hang around for the commercials, and support the many fine sponsors in the automotive and pharmaceutical industries.
Which is precisely what sportscasters do for the athletes they cover. But the thing is, Tom Brady isn't going to determine policies that may result in fracking chemicals poisoning your water table, or your job getting outsourced to some third-world shithole so your CEO can buy another vacation home and send his asshole kid to Phillips Andover.
One thing's for sure, and this is true of any politician: the more unfavorable the research, the sooner said candidate will adjust their attitude and start answering some goddamned questions. Until then, why should they?
But none of this occurs to any of these chumps, so yes, they run after a van (strangely dubbed "Scooby," maybe because "Mystery Machine" would be a little too on the nose) like kids after an ice cream truck, as one critic in the Post article rightly pointed out. And I doubt they're terribly well-compensated for it; it seems safe to assume that these stringers are the equivalent of the classic bit about the guy shoveling elephant shit at the circus for minimum wage, but not wanting to quit "show business."
I can't imagine what sort of mouth-breathing, window-licking, up-to-the third-knuckle nose-picking halfwit would actually sit and watch a bunch of dopey court stenographer wannabes chase futilely after a minivan, and think that it means anything at all. There's not much point to having a 24-hour news cycle and instantaneous technology, if this is the fecal matter that gets shunted out of the alimentary canal of the Fourth Estate. But then, we get the media machine we're willing to put up with.
This song came out last summer, but I just heard it today for the first time (yes, I make little effort to keep up with what the kids are listening to), and quite liked it:
A cursory glance at the Google informs me that Nothing More is a Christian band, but whatever. Either a song is good or it isn't. (And for this sort of "bro-metal" style of music, somewhere between Five Finger Death Punch, Avenged Sevenfold, and Tool, it's done quite well. But I get why many people do not like that sort of music in general.) I like the song, the musicianship, the message. I like Spock's Beard, too. I liked Kansas when I was a kid. Hell, I revere J.S. Bach, whose output was mostly devotional. If that makes me a bad atheist, well, I've been called worse. But this really is a scathing look at modern American culture.
(Of course, the irony is not lost that the band just signed a large deal with Eleven Seven Music Group, which isn't Warner Bros., but it ain't selling shitty cassettes out of the trunk of the bassist's mom's Buick, either.)
Anyhoo, I offer that as a palate cleanser to the musical topic I really want to look at, which was apparently the only musical news this week -- that Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke got stuck with a mammoth fine for plagiarizing Marvin Gaye. I think any genuine fan of music in general, and certainly every musician, should be wary of that decision, but also consider all sides of this.
From a purely aesthetic standpoint, I can take or leave the song in question; it neither offends my sensibilities nor gets my dick hard. It's bland, inoffensive, and unchallenging, like most music, popular and otherwise. It tries to conceal its deficiencies in that regard with the hugely popular video, featuring some amazingly hot chicks and Thicke's smug countenance emceeing the proceedings. I grew up on a steady diet of soul and R&B as a kid, and it is at least a competent, if uninspired, iteration of the style. I would hate to imagine what Williams and/or Thicke would sound like outside a studio, with nothing but an instrument and natural voice, but then apparently Thicke got a piano into the courtroom and played some variations of his song and Gaye's song, so he has to have at least some musical talent there.
So on the one hand, Blurred Lines is derivative, to say the least. It's not as blatant as some -- remember, even Saint George Harrison got sued for this sort of thing -- but anyone familiar with the original will hear it right away. I don't think it's unreasonable to speculate that you would not have Blurred Lines if Got to Give It Up did not exist. There's clearly a strong influence.
Now the question here -- musically, ethically, legally -- is, at what point does influence become stealing? It's a question that fans, musicians, musicologists, and random passersby have all attempted to answer, with the best of intentions, and varying levels of success.
You don't need me to tell you the answer, because Nona Gaye told us all -- when it makes money. That is the sole criterion here, just as it's always been. And while I don't see the value necessarily in dumping a pile of money on someone because of something her father did forty years ago, that's kinda the way it works. It's also an unfortunate provision of our archaic copyright law, which was set up to ensure continuing revenue streams for the then-new recording industry.
And the poor record companies, to the extent they still exist, have a rough time extracting pelf from the peasants, when not only do fans no longer pay for recordings, but musicians are able to record, produce, and distribute their own music. The revenue stream is now in live performances and swag, and even then, the only way to make any real money on it is to bundle bands together into huge outdoor festivals with multiple stages.
Music piracy is and should be a real concern, but never doubt that the people who really want to compose and record their own music will always do so regardless of how much money there is to be had. The more pressing concern is what the mass audience perceives and expects from their musical experience, if they're just after another event and another event to record on their iPhones and post to demonstrate their presence, or if they want to seek out and hear sounds and ideas that can genuinely transform the way they perceive their world.
The biggest tragedy out of this lawsuit, I'm sure you'll agree, is that the Black Guy Pees appear to still be intact. This is a sadness that no mere court of law can address.
Interesting article in the NY Times about the apparent statistical correlation between higher taxes, stronger social safety nets, and lower unemployment rates. It makes sense to be at least skeptical about whether correlation is causation (hint: it generally isn't), but there are a couple of things worthy of note, if for entirely different reasons.
Robert Greenstein, the president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, notes that wages for entry-level work are much higher in the Nordic countries than in the United States, reflecting a higher minimum wage, stronger labor unions and cultural norms that lead to higher pay. (In October, my colleagues Liz Alderman and Steven Greenhouse wrote about $20-an-hour Burger King employees in Denmark.)
Perhaps more Americans would enter the labor force if even basic jobs paid that well, regardless of whether the United States provided better child care and other services. The employment subsidies Mr. Kleven cites surely help coax more Scandinavians into the work force, Mr. Greenstein agrees, but shouldn’t be viewed in isolation.
“You get into trouble when you cherry-pick things,” Mr. Greenstein said.
Needless to say, there are a few things to unpack here. First is the seeming philosophical disparity that the notoriously Calvinist (at least as applies to work in general, rather than a specific teleological view) work ethic of Northern European countries. Scandiwegian countries may be louche and highly sexualized -- and only an American puritan would think that was a bad or questionable thing -- but they get shit done, and do it well, and have consistently high levels of quality of life and general happiness 'mongst their plebes.
Second is the reflexively (and again, almost uniquely) American stance that fast-food work is and deserves to be the lowest-paid in the conventional (in other words, non-immigrant) workforce. While it's true that, at least in theory, compensation in the American workforce is based more on value-added and difficulty of training or replacement, rather than mere difficulty or exertion of the workload, this principle completely ignores how it takes money out of the economy. If you pud-pay the masses for their grunt work, they don't have any discretionary income after paying their bills. And the one-percenters can buy only so many toys.
The American business community is obsessed with the quest for "optimization," yet that differs from how other business cultures understand that word. A European businessperson will optimize processes in order to maximize profit; their American counterpart will re-jigger every process possible -- even if the process becomes more inefficient or dangerous -- if it will increase profit even a hair. And where the European executive will generally spread at least some of the spoils downstream, there's no fucking way any self-respecting 'murkin bidness tool will do jack shit for the peons unless forced at gunpoint.
And as always, the wealthy actually have the working poor on their side, so there is literally no disincentive to bad behavior or sociopathic indifference.
The second quote, completely decontextualized but valid all the same:
The system is designed to keep us working.
You're goddamned right it is, until the Age of Automation takes over, and everything that can be commodified will be. Then we'll see what the powers that be figure out to do with you lot. I'm guessing something of the soylent variety.
We've done a few "revenue model" posts this year, highlighting the rapidly changing dynamic taking place on these here internets, and how it has radically altered the traditional pelf-scooping activities that were enjoyed unhindered -- indeed, with a 10-year-old Cuban cigar, a 15-year-old Scottish single malt, and a 20-year-old Malaysian escort performing spectacular fellatio -- by the establishment media impresarios in the past.
So now it's a brave new world of content curation and such like, and so, since we're willing to put up with commercials, we must of course be willing to put up with pop-up ads. I dunno about you, Tonstant Weader, but I'll share this with you -- I pay about $90/month to DirecTV for I have no idea what, and aside from HBO, there's commercials up the wazoo on every fucking channel. I remember as a kid watching broadcast teevee being told that commercials were the price we paid for free content -- so now we're paying for the content and the commercials? Hunh. Spare me the lecture, So-crates.
There are two competing ideas here, both of them absolutely true. One is that people who create content -- even shitty "12 Weird Things You Didn't Know About Justin Bieber" copy-and-paste articles -- deserve to be compensated for their effort, commensurate to the value they create. Unfortunately, almost all value on the internet is created by selling advertising.
Which brings us to the second thing, the idea that the internets, just like the broadcast airwaves, should belong to the people. I mean you paid for it, right?
But because advertising, like gorging on food, is one of the few things Americans do well anymore, we get to sit through a million fucking commercials selling cheap insurance and expensive pharmaceuticals. Apparently we are running out of these things, if the wisdom of the marketplace is to be duly heeded.
And the wild wild web is no different in that unfortunate respect, a veritable wasteland waiting to be populated by pop-ups and embedded videos and such. Maybe they have packet sniffers waiting to spoof your computer's cloaca and give it the violent malware buttfucking it's been waiting for, maybe not. The choice is yours, valued consumer!
Where you used to just purchase a device that allowed you access to the entertainment infrastructure -- a television, in other words -- you now have to purchase the device and the access and the content itself. And you still have to put up with all the goddamned commercials!
Most of this, of course, is just a sop to the telecom giants who own and operate the infrastructure, per the supposed capitalist model. Capitalism, you may recall on the off chance that it occurred somewhere in the past for you, is predicated on the idea that someone creates a product or provides a service, and you exchange a fair amount of money for that product or service. This idea is commonly known as "fair value" or "getting your money's worth."
So, uh, when was the last time you really felt that you got your money's worth from the telecom industry -- $100/month for 500 channels, maybe 12 of which are worth watching; $50/month for "broadband" that really isn't (though at least your choices on the internet really are damn near infinite; it's your own fault you chose to while away your time jerking it to midget porn and playing internet spades all night); and another $40 or so per month to play Candy Crush and take selfies on your smartphone.
Now, value judgments aside, the point here is not really about our entertainment choices, it's about what kind of value we get in return for renting an infrastructure paid for by tax dollars in the first place. Imagine what you could get if your infrastructure wasn't controlled by demotivated greed-sucking monopolistic enterprises.
It's difficult to decide exactly what is the most tedious aspect of Blind Lemon Clinton's will-she-or-won't-she pas de dunce:
the sheer inevitability of her candidacy (and really, the "my turn" campaign is usually a Republican thing);
the shameless crying of poor mouth, at a country still reeling from an economic setback caused in great part by, um, the repeal of Glass-Steagall;
the promise that Preznit Hillary will sell out the working class almost as quickly as your garden-variety Koch-sucker;
the predictable scramble by the overpaid talking heads to provide their breathless analyses of loose cocktail party chatter;
the continued use of "commentary" from proven shitbirds like Newt Gingrich, whose peanut-gallery bullshit will be exactly the sort of thing that nudges nauseated fence-sitters -- who will by then be exploring real estate in Croatia at the prospect of being "given" a "choice" between Clinton and yet another Bush -- over to Clinton, so we can get pretty much what we were going to get in the first place.
Oh, just run already, dear, it'll be a historic moment and all that. Not because of the woman thing -- hell, even a woman-hating country like Pakistan has had a female president already -- but because the bottom is falling out of this country, the foundation is giving way. The transnational merchant princes won, in no small part thanks to Hillary's husband Rubinizing the economy and leaving it the exclusive province of the sociopathic spreadsheet diddlers.
Perhaps the Clintons genuinely thought that the rising tide would lift all boats, that massive productivity gains and ease of financial regulations and securitization would create enough wealth for all. And it did, to a point. But left in the hands of a greedy few, for whom the word "enough" has no definition, even crumbs stopped falling from the table. Obama hasn't had the testicular fortitude or the juice to do anything about any of this, and will most likely be rendered as lame a duck after the midterms as Saint Billy Jeff was.
Say what you will about the teahadis -- FSM knows I've said my share -- but one important part of their argument that actually resonates is that their country has been taken away from them, and no one in Warshington gives a shit about them. Of course, their country has been taken away from them by the bottomless rackets that run this country, and own the media, so as to convince them that it was gays and illegals that did it, but whatever. The core is true enough.
So it will be a(n) historic moment, no doubt. The next president will get to preside over the continuing implosion of a once-vibrant republic, a society that actually gave a shit whether its children could read or count, communities that understood the nature of community and mutual good, businesses that actually paid their employees enough to survive on, to purchase the things they made or sold.
For a time I thought there might be some catalyzing domestic incident that expressed this discontent on a large scale, not necessarily violent, but something that would be apparent to all. It seemed like the Occupy Wall Street movement might be just the thing, but sure as shit, the corporate toadies rushed to their battlements to marginalize and defame these people, while the NYPD let every scumbag they could out of jail and set them loose in the park.
People are simply too atomized anymore, connected electronically, but not socially enough to translate into any meaningful action. The cops are paramilitarized to the teeth, and get away with pretty much anything anymore, so there's no percentage there either. There's not really anywhere to turn -- either you get lucky and generate enough multiple revenue streams to eke your way through what passes for a life, addled by pills and distracted by sports and reality shows, or get pulled under, quickly or slowly, the result is the same.
So here you go, Hillary, congratulations. How do you like it?
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 itwhen 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.
Driftglass brings up some nice points regarding the esteemed institution of the Sunday morning punditocracy. One would think that the holiday weekend had a substantial role in yesterday's Meet the Press being pre-empted by F1 racing.
The question still remains, though: who watches this shit, especially on a regular basis. Do you watch any of these idiotic Sunday morning fuckfests, do you know anyone who does? I sure as hell don't on both counts. Most people will say that life is too short, and weekends are spent in infinitely better ways than tuning in to liars being interviewed and analyzed by insular chumps.
These people are talking to each other, not to any of us. Politics, never a respectable pastime in the first place, is now rather transparently just another racket, in a nation run by rackets. It was already a foregone conclusion by the time the two-ply bumwipe known as Citizens United passed through SCOTUS (yet another American institution that has outlived its usefulness) like a pork tamale from a disreputable taco truck.
But the CU (next Tuesday) ruling sealed the deal, legitimized the blatantly transactional nature of the American political system. The total 2012 election spending topped $7 billion. More than $2 bn was spent by the two major candidates for president. The bulk of all that money was raised and/or donated by large contributors. It is not merely naïve to suppose that the large donors, and the corporations who own the networks which broadcast the Sunday morning follies, don't have directly vested interests in the outcomes of these rituals -- it is flat-out stupid to not understand intrinsically the power and purpose of those connections.
Chomsky laid this all out more than 25 years ago in Manufacturing Consent, but the point bears repeating -- there is no hidden, dark conspiracy, no oaths or rituals sworn in smoke-filled backrooms. This is all out in the open. The hyper-concentration of ownership of these resources is self-perpetuating, and anyone wanting to enter the game knows this before they even get into the game. Any and every talking head we gawp at on any given day, or time of day, knows what the rules are, without even having to have those rules explained to them.
For every outlier like, say, Bill Moyers, there are two hundred Erin Burnetts or David Gregorys. Hell, when was the last time you saw Noam Chomsky on your teevee, versus the usual rotation of known liars, calumniators, and just lazy thinkers, giving bad or false analysis of a situation they know jack shit about? These things are not by accident, but by design -- there are large, grotesque amounts of money in play these days, and these fuckers aren't taking any chances.
The buildup to the big Battle of the Dynasties, Hillary versus Jeb, will continue apace, people will show up like they think have a real choice, and then the second after the winner is anointed in 2016, the circle jerk to 2020 begins anew. It is an industry in the truest sense of the word.
Elaborating a little further on "Benghazigategate", which is to Fux News what the missing Malaysian jet is to CNN, a steaming fnord in the punch bowl, meant explicitly to distract folks from anything of actual import. Again, Congressman Car Alarm and his merry band of idiots know full well that there is no there there, that compared to US Embassy deaths in the past, the most damning thing about Benghazi is that it was a PR fuck-up.
I shouldn't have to say this, but I do anyway -- that is not to minimize the tragic, violent death of foreign service personnel, but simply to point out that dozens of people were killed in multiple incidents around the world during Fredo's tenure, and no one said jack shit. In Beirut in the early '80s, between the US Embassy and Marine barracks attacks, over 300 people were lost, and there were glaring security issues in the latter attack that should have gotten someone's ass whipped.
And that's not even to mention the weird fact that some of the most strident criers of this particular "wolf!" are the same folks who voted to defund embassy security. So, you know, fuck you and the horse you rode in on, fellas.
Now, all that said, I think it's a splendid thing for these folks to continue with their obsession, and I think the Democrats should (and probably do, but won't say so) embrace it as well. For one, it is only going to get the base to vote in the midterms, it will not sway or convince a single person truly on the proverbial fence. It is of no strategic use.
Second, and maybe this is just my personal preference, the only possible long-term outcome of obsessing over this nothingburger is that it sticks to Hillary Clinton's "my turn" presidential campaign, and that would be just fine. It is a sad state of affairs when, in a fairly sophisticated nation of 320 million people, and a hyperactive electoral industry with dollars flowing through it like water through Niagara Falls, the best our "two" parties can come up with are Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.
Let me be even more clear: if the "choice" in 2016 comes down to Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, then we might as well just dispense with the endless campaign, the tedious analysis, the useless debates, and just have a fucking coin toss at the Super Bowl, and not bother to look at the result. It would be as explicit an indicator of the truth about the political system as one could imagine, the open acknowledgement that your vote is worthless, outcomes are inevitable, and the best you can hope for is for some rich tool to toss you a better piece of flotsam on which to weather an endless storm.
Don't get me wrong. If it comes down to Clinton versus whatever clown-shoes psychopath the Republicans roll out, you hold your nose and vote for her, and hope next time there'll be a better choice, just like you've done since day one. This is based on the presumption that at least the Democratic candidate has at least a slight chance of being marginally less catastrophic to the interests of what remains of the American working class.
It's just that it is always going to be this way, and it is not an accident but by design, and the only way to make it stop is to, well, make it stop.
The Benghazi fever can probably be cured with more cowbell, but honestly, why bother or worry? This is one of those pointless things that will convert or motivate absolutely no one; statistically, there is virtually no living human who is going to look at this ongoing handjob and say to themselves, "Self, I was going to vote for the Democratic candidate in these here midterms, but because of the vague, unfounded speculations surrounding the Benghazi attack, I'm going to go right ahead and vote against my rational self-interest, and endorse the red-assed baboon that the Republicans are running. While I'm at it, I'll just hit myself in the head with a hammer or a large rock for a while."
But hey, whatever. Look, instead of griping about the ludicrous idiocy of the House Republicans, maybe start running some viable candidates and putting some real money behind them. I mean, Darrell Issa is not really Jesus H. Christ, he just thinks he is.
Can someone kindly explain why, in a job market where thousands of people holding master's degrees are either looking for work or holding jobs way beneath their skill levels, David Brooks is still employed? Seriously, if one were to sit down and scrutinize each individual player in the professional pundit industry, they'd come away completely perplexed.
Or, you know, with a deeper understanding of why utter morons are entrusted with the important job of manufacturing acceptable opinion and consent. It is neither accident nor mere circumstance that you'll see someone like Bobo on your teevee a hundred times for every occasion that, say, Noam Chomsky is allowed anywhere near a corporate media newsotainment program.
By now, Bobo should have massive arms, from carrying water for his dark overlords lo these many decades. Strangely, he still looks like he's made of pipe cleaners and broken dreams.
Yes, if we don't find some way to curb the excesses of the several dozen people who own every goddamned thing of value in this country -- the media, the political system, the modes of production and distribution -- why, we might eventually become an oligarchy. That would be a bad thing, you see.
It doesn't take a history major to see that all countries have always been run in the interests of the majority owners of capital. But it's been a while since there has been such an obscene level of hyper-concentration, of wealth stratification, of the utter lack of upward mobility. What we're experiencing is, in the physics term, called stasis, and is defined in this case by lives of inertia and clutter.
This is an area where hope consistently triumphs over logic; poor and middle-class people are consistently rolled into voting for rich people because they hope to be part of that club, someday, someway. This is a fantasy straight out of a perverted version of Lake Wobegon, where everyone is good-looking and all the children are above-average, where no one ever gets laid off or poisoned by the chemical company up the road, where everyone has the same opportunities, and so forth. It's similar to the fantasy that voting for a fake Republican will produce much better results than voting for a real one.
But let's not shit ourselves, friends 'n' neighbors -- in the sense that all important decisions are made by the same class of people, in the sense that all modes of political discussion and accession are made by the same owners and donors, this is an oligarchy, more so than any time in the last hundred years. It may be slightly more benign than your garden-variety banana republic, or Russia, but only by matters of scale and degree, and where you live, and what socioeconomic or racial background you have. As long as the Albuquerque Police Department doesn't think you might be carrying a joint in your asshole, you should be fine.
This week, it came to light that a small error in the open-source OpenSSL implementation of the SSL encryption protocol opened a gaping hole in the security of hundreds of thousands websites and networking equipment across the Net—and that hole had been wide open and exploitable for years. Passwords could be easily grabbed. User names matching those passwords could be easily grabbed. Heck, userdata could be easily grabbed. The “Heartbleed” moniker attached to the devastating bug seemed all too apt.
And Friday afternoon, Bloomberg reported that the National Security Agency has been aware of and actively exploiting the Heartbleed bug for at least two full years, citing “two people familiar with the matter.”
A September Snowden-supplied revelation revealed that the NSA can easily defeat many of today’s encryption technologies, and in an aside that now seems precognizant, the SSL protocol was then rumored to be a particular favored target for the Agency.
Keep that in mind next time you're "choosing" between Candidate Coke and Candidate Pepsi.
Heads up, Kim Jong Un -- the United Nations is coming hard for your doughy ass. Check this shiznit out, yo:
In one of its stronger resolutions, the United Nations Human Rights Council urged global powers on Friday to back an international criminal investigation of North Korea for crimes against humanity and to consider targeted sanctions against those responsible.
....
“You couldn’t expect a stronger resolution,” Julie de Rivero, Geneva director of Human Rights Watch, said of the measure. “The package as a whole is unprecedented.”
So, like, wow, right? A "strong resolution," which mandates a "special rapporteur," which may even culminate in a -- wait for it -- "field presence." Oh my. These are forceful, fearsome phrases. I'm sure Kim is trembling in his wee elf boots.
Look. I'm not saying that the US or any treaty organization should initiate bombing or invasion of North Korea at the earliest opportunity; in fact, such a move, given the apparent mentality of the NK populace and its leadership cadre, would be catastrophic for South Korea at the least. But the notion that the dickless, finger-wagging, bureaucratic postures of the UN carry any weight with the monsters of the world will, in retrospect, prove to be one of the more dismal ideas of the age we live in.
It's an unusual but perhaps critical issue on which I beg to differ with the estimable Charles Pierce, who feels that Obama has lost his grip on his administration. This is very similar to the media gabble heading into the weekend that Grandma Feinstein is suddenly mounting a principled stand against the vicissitudes of the intrusive meta-security state.
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. People are welcome to insist upon and celebrate the substantive differences between the current boss and the previous, insofar as they do exist, though I suggest that perhaps Obama has not been and never will be the transformative figure he originally campaigned as. For the most part, in fact, he is simply a smoother and more articulate continuation of many of the Cheney regime's more objectionable policies.
Perhaps nowhere is this more true than the expansion of the capacity of the internal state security apparatus to spy upon and permanently archive the metadata comings and goings of its inhabitants, who through political and economic attrition have become less and less the traditional idea of "citizens," as in an informed and empowered body electorate, but rather a collection of demographics to be herded and cajoled, so as to make the picking of their pockets a simpler process for the rentiers who actually own the system.
In other words, Feinstein has been a US Senator for a very long time, and the head of the Intelligence Committee for a long time, and never before had any issue with the spying capacity or activities of the CIA or FBI or NSA -- in fact, it has been part and parcel of her office to enhance those capabilities. But now it's a problem, because the watchdog has stretched its leash, and is spying on elites and peons alike. You can see the problem for poor DiFi, suddenly the champion of principle, after previous tilts at such threats to the republic as flag burning and video game violence.
Similarly, Obama's problem is not that the CIA has exceeded its operational portfolio but rather, as with the self-serving data dumping of Edward Snowden, that the organization has now been observed doing so. These things are not errors or flaws in the system; they are features. The organizations in question are doing precisely what they've been asked to do, designed to do.
What's really unclear is why any of this should be worthy of note, especially under the hoary rubric of a "free society" -- the average 'murkin, like his proletarian counterpart in Russia, is much more authoritarian, or at least comfortable with the characteristics of such governments, than he lets on. Hell, this is a country where you can literally get away with murdering a kid for sneaking into your daughter's bedroom for illicit nookie, you think enough people give a shit that the Feebs are archiving their porn searches?
