Stop the Inanity

Company man Peter Wehner, in Commentary (hey, I was just there to jerk off to the pictures, not read the articles, m'kay?) finds himself on the horns of a dilemma, what with the bumptiousness of Trump and all, undermining Serious People Doing Very Important Work.

Citing not just the popularity of Corbyn but the rise of Donald Trump and avowed socialist Bernie Sanders in America, as well as unfolding events in Greece and France, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair argues, “There is a politics of parallel reality going on, in which reason is an irritation, evidence a distraction, emotional impact is king and the only thing that counts is feeling good about it all.”

He went on to say this:

The explanation for this parallel reality is something to do with people feeling empowered by their ability through it, to “fight back” against “the system”, the traditional ways of thinking about politics with all its compromises, hard decisions and gradual increments. It is the clarity of full-throated opposition versus the chin-stroking nuance of: “What would we do if we were in government?” It’s a revolution but within a hermetically sealed bubble…

Mr. Blair concluded this way:

Because it is a vast wave of feeling against the unfairness of globalisation, against elites, against the humdrum navigation of decision-making in an imperfect world, it persuades itself that it has a monopoly on authenticity. They’re “telling it like it is”, when, of course, they’re telling it like it isn’t.

Jesus H. Christ. Talk about a hermetically sealed bubble. Blair is firmly encased away from the consequences of his decisions, and the decisions of his friends, hard and otherwise. Corbyn's election, and the candidacy of Trump -- and yes, that of Bernie Sanders as well -- do in fact all share a common thread of frustration with the mendacious tendencies of "the system" Blair worked within. There is much talk about "hard decisions" and "compromises" but no talk at all about who bears the brunt of those things, every goddamned time.

You have to wonder sometimes if these assholes really and truly don't get it, or if they're just Oscar-caliber actors. If one of their hectomillionaire backers loses, say, 10% of their net value in a recession, well, it sucks, but fortunately they have many other tens of millions of dollars with which to cushion the blow. Not so for an average lower-middle-class (since the US hates the fucking middle class, and has driven it into the dirt) family, whose net worth is mostly tied up in the value of their home, which went underwater in the recession, and will take years to recoup its value, assuming he can hang on to it long enough.

Joe Hecto has cash flow, cash reserves, and an economy of scale to help him get back on his feet and recoup his losses quickly and reliably, while Joe Schmo has none of those things, and has to hope his job doesn't pull up stakes from under him and leave him destitute while he's trying to recover from the economic downturn -- the naturally foreseeable result of all those "compromises" Tony Blair described with such smug anguish.

Whatever policies Blair and his ilk -- and this includes the Clintons and the Bushes alike -- the outcomes are predictable: successes accrue to the elites, while failures fall on those least able to bear it. The rich do not send their kids to die or get maimed in some bullshit war, don't have to deal with a fracking company turning their water table into flammable chemicals, never have to worry about their job getting sent to Bangalore so some cocksucker can make one more million on top of the dozens or hundreds he already has.

If the risk-reward scenario were spread out more evenly, if Our Betters (bettors?) faced even remotely the same consequences for their own decisions that everyone else does, it would be a different story. But they never do, and it's not even close. And now Tony Blair has the fucking gall to come out of the woodwork and chastise the peons for their ingratitude. Look, asshole, I'm about the last person to defend a troglodyte like Donald Trump, or the ignorant mouth-breathers who support him. But it's almost impossible not to get why they're frustrated, and that they intuitively understand that the politicians are out to get them.

I don't know enough about Corbyn to comment one way or the other, but that's really the brass ring that just barely evades the Trump-lodytes. They are correct that the system is out to fuck them over; what they miss is that their boy is playing them like a fiddle as well. Like any good huckster, he's going to pull the rubes along until the critical moment, and then pull the rug out from under them.

What's tough to figure out here is what Trump's endgame is. He's almost certainly not as wealthy as he claims, but he is wealthy. And he's already taken some hits, between losing his deals with NBC and Univision. Unless he's got some mad scheme to compete with Shelly Adelson for some Macau casino real estate, where's the financial gain for him? Secondly, while Trump is not as smart as he thinks he is, he's not stupid, either; in fact, primarily because of his immense ego, he probably understands the ideals of rational self-interest more than most people. And he has to know that the odds of actually succeeding are against him; a snake-oil salesman knows better than anyone that the media is geared to a build-them-up-and-tear-them-down cycle, and that his time is coming.

Maybe his ego outweighs his better sense, who knows? Again, this is a guy who spends his time -- or at least pays someone to spend their time -- fucking around on Twitter, picking and responding to fights over the most mundane, idiotic things. You don't see Warren Buffett doing that, you don't see Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, any other billionaire, doing that stupid shit. Trump's a queer duck, no doubt. Good luck figuring out his master plan.

But whatever it is, the fact is that the rage he's channeled, however poorly, to whatever end, much of that rage is justified. Because these elites, these transnational merchant princes and their political dogsbodies, like Tony Blair, with no loyalty but to themselves and each other, have screwed them over royally. The plebes don't know much, and they don't know what exactly to do about it, but they know that much well enough. When they finally figure out the proper direction to focus their anger and frustration, it might be a good idea to look at property in The Okanagan or some such.

Something for the Ladies

Although most of my musical tastes tend to revolve around various shades of metal, with a bit of classical and Beatles/Beach Boys pop once in a while, I grew up on old-school R&B, and still have a soft spot for it. And this is a great rendition of a newer song that harks back to those classics. Just amazing. And almost poignant, stripped of the production doodads of the original.

Fuck You got billed as something of a novelty hit by a can't-miss auteur, but it's exposed here as a truly sharp, bitter cri de Coeur. Anyone who was ever sixteen years old and had an unrequited crush can relate to this. It's every bit as legit as anything Marvin Gaye or Al Green did.

Lie of the Crier

Not sure what the hell Mike Huckabee thinks he's going to get out of bandwagoning and orchestrating the small (300 people? really?) pep rally for oft-married, recently converted super-Christian Kim Davis' release from county jail. If he thinks his single-issue preaching to the converted is going to get him so much as a low-level cabinet appointment in a never-gonna-happen Ted Cruz administration, he's even dumber than he sounds trying to defend this sanctimonious dunce.

Are her fifteen minutes up yet already? Again, who gives two shits what a handful of inbred rubes and jokers think about anything? They've already got their minds made up; we know who they'll be voting for next year and for the next ten to twenty years. There's no mystery about places like this. These are people who literally cannot decide whether or not they should be allowed to purchase alcohol. Are they Moooslims, or just stoopid?

No Lives Matter

Oh good -- the organization whose protected members decided to accost and assault an innocent man for no reason, in broad daylight on a busy city street, is going to investigate itself. Awesome.

While they're at it, they might want to investigate precisely why these assholes need to go all Delta Force on "a ring believed to be using fraudulent credit cards to buy cellphones". Since when do they give two shits about white-collar crime?

Wait, that's right -- when it's banksters stealing billions of dollars and rigging interest rates, fucking the world over, they do jack shit. But if they suspect you might be a credit-card fraudster, they will throw you down on the sidewalk and fuck your shit up before they even ask your name. I suppose Blake should just be thankful they didn't fill him full of lead.

Speak English or Die

If this nation had any sense of irony anymore, it would be ironic -- a vapid, notoriously incoherent moron whinging about immigrants not learning Gawwwd's Favrit Language quickly enough for her liking. But irony is deader than William McKinley at this point, so not only does no one get the joke, most of 'em don't even understand that there is a joke.

Let me tell ya something, sugar-tits:  if I had just a goddamned penny for every time I saw a native-born 'murkin confuse you're/your or they're/their/there, write "ect." instead of etc. (which fucking stands for et cetera, see), or throw apostrophes around like they got paid for each use, I could have retired at the ripe old age of fifteen.

And there seems to be some sort of law of inverse proportion to these mutton-heads -- the more strident they are that everyone should learn English the day they get off the boat and receive our blessings, the more likely it is that they make these comically dopey, basic errors of usage.

I am just arrogant enough to tell you with 100% confidence that I can tell you with almost absolute certainty how much  -- or if -- someone else reads, just by reading a few lines of what they write. Even celebritard ass-sniffing magazines know how to use homophones and apostrophes (or in the current dipshit parlance, homophone's and apostrophe's, since every word that ends in s need a fucking apostrophe).

But, you know, the last thing the world needs is another tedious language lesson. What's more interesting about La Palin's plaint is that, as Suckaterry o' Energy in a Trump administration (brought to you by Brawndo), her goal would be to disband that agency. Because we have an infinite supply of oil and coal, and no other energy source matters or is useful, and climate change is a complete hoax. Seriously, what fucking planet do these idiots live on?

The real problem with people like Sarah Palin is not their opinions per se, which any reasoning person can instantly dismiss as the random, opportunistic jabber that it is. The real problem is that plenty of fools buy into the nonsense, believe what these dummies are saying. Worse yet, they drive automobiles, reproduce, vote. It's like they set out to prove Mencken right, over and over again.

1 Thing You MUST Know About Assholes

That douchebag dentist is back to work, and probably with little to no drop-off in business, since his long-term patients will pull the Yew Cain't Tell Me Whut Ta Do card, and show all y'all jest whut the deal is. Or he might actually be proficient at his job, in which case his patients almost certainly won't pull away. Maybe their insurance doesn't cover a lot of other dentists.

At any rate, the salient point here is that this guy clearly still doesn't get it. The problem is not that he killed a lion that had a name, or was "popular" with locals; the problem is that he, Walter Palmer DDS, enjoys killing things just for the sheer fun and pleasure of killing them, and he gives zero fucks whether the animal in question is already endangered to the point that every act is an impactful destructive act.

Hang your fucking trophy on that, asshole. You're part of the problem; you are what's wrong with humanity. And either your actions mean nothing in the scheme of things, in which case nothing you do means anything at all, or karma is actually a thing, in which case you are well and truly -- and deservedly -- fucked.

The Right, Stuffed

Of course "right people" can (and for the most part should) be interpreted to mean whites, but the teabaggers' disdain runs deeper and broader than that, and who comprises the "right people" is even simpler than that. They really just don't want any gubmint dollars going to anyone besides themselves, or some rich asshole who might "create" a "job" for them, even if they're beyond working age, or don't have any marketable skills, or are too addled on meth and/or oxy to do much in the first place.

Working in social services for several years now, I've seen and heard many people and stories in this area, both pro and con. One of the most common sentiments is that people shouldn't have children they can't afford, which is reasonable enough in principle. Nobody wants to feel like they're being forced to subsidize the bad habits and poor impulse control of others.

But many of the people saying that have nothing at all to say about the billionaires and corporations that they're also forced to subsidize. They have an iPhone, but no reservations about the conditions under which their devices are constructed, and no thoughts about Apple offshoring billions of dollars in order to avoid paying taxes. They shop at Wal-Mart, but can't be bothered to care about the fact that if the employees can't get by on their shit jobs (and can't get a second job because of unpredictable scheduling constraints), they have to seek gubmint services to supplement the shortfall. Great racket for the multi-billionaire Walton family, to soak up the profits and force taxpayers to pick up the tab for food stamps and medical care.

The teabagger "movement" itself, regardless of what its addled adherents think, is bought and paid for by Koch Brothers types who hire shithead consultants who know how to sell shit to these rubes, over and over again. These are the people who lose to tic-tac-toe-playing chickens at county fairs. That people like Reihan Salam and Frank Luntz and all the others continue to have lucrative careers either selling the scam or writing about it proves that maybe the rest of us should just get in on the racket, since it never seems to run dry.

Snark Week

Look, I'll go along with the argument that verbally smacking Kentucky dingbat Kim Davis around for her looks or her (in the past) apparently loose moral code might not be all that productive, might even be something that the flying monkeys on the other side would do. [Ed.: There's no "might" about it.]

But Davis chose to put her selective religious observations above the law, above the functions of her job, above basic common decency. And because her cause is explicitly deciding who can and can't get married on her watch, because said institution is a sacrament in the eyes of gawwwd, it is fair game to point out that Davis' own track record with said institution is a hell of a lot worse than what she takes it upon herself to impose on others.

Since Davis was elected rather than hired, she can't simply be fired. But instead of letting her make herself into a martyr behind bars, maybe the county board of supervisors might initiate a recall election, or a recommendation to suspend and dismiss Davis, something along that line.

Over the past year or two, we've seen several high-profile stories where small businesses owned by religious people have been fined, threatened online, etc., by your garden-variety social justice warriors looking to set them straight. Those folks I can see a little more neutrally, in the sense that within reasonable bounds, small businesses should have the right to refuse service to people you deem objectionable.

The line gets finer and the slope gets more slippery as you try to parse the intellectual difference between refusing to bake a cake for a neo-Nazi versus a gay couple versus a black person, but for now, if I don't want to (for example) give a guitar lesson to someone who posts on Stormfront and talks about his love for Hitler and hatred for those people, that's my right. The point (and there is one) is that it is possible to have an intellectually honest debate about small business rights, and air both sides to at least some extent. (Should a neo-Nazi who owns a small business be compelled to serve me, even though he's offended by what I said about people like him?)

But Kim Davis is a public servant, and the Supreme Court has affirmed the right for same-sex couples to petition the state to recognize their union. No clergyman can be compelled to officiate their ceremony, no beleaguered baker or hand-wringing photographer can be forced to cater or capture the magic moments. But the person who issues the licenses can and should be expected to do her job.

The hypocrisy of Davis' personal history simply serves to illustrate not only her own ethical impasse with what she's trying to impose on others in defiance of the law and the government she works for. Like the Duggar family and countless other religious folks who've made it their mission to hector and lecture us heathens about our wicked ways, Davis' hypocrisy serves as yet another in a long line, a veritable pattern of this sort of "do as I say, not as I do" behavior. That is precisely why it is not only okay, but practically necessary to hoist these idjits on their own petards every time it happens.

And the louder they proclaim their virtue, the more likely it is bound to happen. Say what you want about Larry King and Mickey Rooney, they never took it upon themselves to serve as moral arbiters of the personal lives of consenting adults.

A Mighty Windbag

When I heard that 'murka's Favorite Dingbat was going to "interview" 'murka's Favorite Gaping Asshole, my mind unfortunately went all Fifty Shades of Lame for a too-long instant, and concocted the outline of a porn parody script in which Palin unleashes Li'l Donald (yes, all two-and-an-eighth inches) right from the start, then spends the entire time trying vainly to coax him to his full four inches, alternating between generous questions and even more generous slobbers on Trump's thumb-sized pecker, pretending that it's the biggest she's ever seen, ignoring the taste of tanning lotion and old-man ball-sweat and Trump's increasing Viagra-fueled desperation at not being quite able to close this particular deal. Master negotiator indeed. Whatever nut he breaks is probably powdered milk.

(Sorry, I'll give you a few minutes to bleach your brain of that visual. I find that Coke and Bacardi 151 can be a pretty effective mind eraser.)

But fuck those two, and fuck the handful of maroons who actually watched that shit. The "One America News" thing is pretty choice, as far as arrogant punchlines masquerading as unifying names go. Look, you fucking mouth-breathers, you are the fucking minority. Bokay? No matter how many times you lose, no matter how badly, you keep coming back with this Nixonian "silent majority" horseshit, thinking that everyone agrees with your delusions.

Who the fuck is "everyone," your Facebook friends and the chuckle-headed mutants you share a break room with at your dead-end job? No, assholes, "we" are not silently waiting to be unified under a couple of fuckwits like Trump and Palin. Just because most people of any political persuasion agree that our political system is a broken, corrupt joke, doesn't mean we remotely agree on the value of these two hucksters.

It's like finding out you have cancer, say a year left to live, and hate the chemo and radiation treatments, but disagree on where to go from there. Some may want to stick with what they know for just a little longer, as awful as it is. Some may want to go to Mexico and see what experimental drugs they can try. Some folks may have the means to cash in their savings and assets, and use that money and remaining time to travel as much as possible. Some may choose to go home and pass more peacefully, without being poked and prodded and tortured every minute of the remainder.

Making jokers like Trump and Palin even part of the discussion, much less part of the solution, is more like deciding that you're going to fuck cancer over by jumping feet first into a wood-chipper. Yeah, that'll show 'em! Jesus H. Christ, who are these fuckin' people?

Well, I'll tell ya who at least some of them are -- the good ol' eeeev(il)angelicals, the god-bothering twits and twats who have beaten the rest of us over the head for several generations about how much more principled and moral they are than the rest of us worldly degenerates. These sanctimonious motherfuckers stand for nothing, they are hypocrites, loudmouthed bozos who think that volume makes you accurate and a majority.

The most recent concrete proof of all this is how quickly deity-pesterers have jumped ship on genuinely (however misguidedly) evangelical politicians, such as Mike Huckabee, for a quick thrill ride on the hype train to nowhere. Let me jump in on the choir and agree with Steve and Maha on this one, that it is a complete waste of time to expect even basic conviction of principles from these shitheads, much less any sort of philosophical consistency.

This is an important point to make and realize, not just about the pharisaic douchebags who insist on cluttering up the political process with their childish lies, but also about self-styled "conservatives" and such like. They don't really care about any religious or philosophical tenets, not nearly as much as they care about pissing off (or on) the librul caricatures living rent-free for eternity in their fevered brains.

That's what this is all about; that's why people who swear fealty to an imaginary bible (I don't mean this from an atheist standpoint, but that the document these idiots claim to live by and love doesn't say what they think it says) can leave it behind without a second thought. That's why they can root for a proven dumbass like Trump, who says the bible is his favorite book, but cannot cite a favorite verse. (Even I, a loser atheist, can tell you my favorite bible verse.) They would rather have someone who they think will shit on the people they truly hate, than someone who actually believes the things they purport (but again, don't actually) to believe.

The joke will be on them; the joke is always and forever on them. They condition their lives around things they do not believe in enough to actually abide by, yet expect the rest of us to cater to; they insist that their politicians repeat these rote, tiresome incantations as if there were some actual effect on anything.

Their love of softly spoken magic spells explains their love for a decadent, thrice-married playboy with a vulgarian's flair for self-aggrandizement and obscenely tacky decorations. It's all a pose, or as Maha says, a uniform, a banner, a cheap symbol that means something only to them. The attempt to explain the nonsense of racists and paranoids is, while well-meaning, again a waste of everyone's time. I don't want to know what some white-power asshole, who claims to be a web developer and drinks his coffee out of a cup with a swastika, thinks about anything. I couldn't care less what a fence-hopping dingbat like Stephanie DeVolder think about Serious Issues. Look, lady, if you seriously "educated" yourself on your presidential vote by binge-watching the fucking Apprentice, then kindly do us all a favor and stay home on Election Day, and every Election Day to come.

The neo-nazis and race-baiters are bad enough, but at least you know what they stand for. I don't know what the fuck is wrong with people like DeVolder, who started off by endorsing Trump because of his (empty) stands on border security and treatment of veterans, and ultimately punted after the Megyn Kelly kerfuffle, when DeVolder suddenly realized that -- get this -- Trump is a rude prick.

While it's important for political bloggerses and professional schmucks to keep in mind that the average 'murkin has very little knowledge (or even interest) in the comings and goings and intricacies of policy, and those who manufacture it, we have to take it as a given that the folks interviewed in the New Yorker are not reg'lar foke; they are, in fact, taking an extra interest in the political future of their nation. As such, it is entirely fair to expect at least a basic level of knowledge and engagement from them.

For years I have definitely been part of the "they're all alike" crowd in demonizing individuals from "both" parties. I do believe that the parties, in their mechanical and logistical operations, are more similar than different, and I do believe this is proven by the fact that most corporations donate to both parties. I believe that there is no "leftist" political party; you have center-right and far-right branches of The Privilege Party.

That said, of the nearly two dozen buffoons crowding the Republican short bus, none of them is worth a shit. I can't stand Hillary Clinton, and she'd be a damn sight better than any of 'em. There's not even a question. And while Democratic also-rans such as Martin O'Malley and Jim Webb might be little more than distractions, either of them would be better than a fucking chump like Ted Cruz, or any of the other halfwits.

And then, of course, you have Bernie Sanders, whose compelling message and rumpled sincerity have drawn crowds at least as large as Trump's, and have whittled away Clinton's lead to a mere seven points. Sanders is a throwback to what the Democratic Party used to aspire to be, before it got co-opted and triangulated by the Third Way douchebags who sold the working class down the river. Sanders is certainly doing and saying all the right things, but he's old and cranky and Jewish, and promises to make the wealthy pay their share of taxes, which sorta limits the number of those people who normally bankroll political candidates.

But at least the people supporting Sanders -- and even the people supporting Clinton -- are able to articulate their rationales. They can tell you, even if (as in Clinton's case) it's not always crystal clear where their candidate might stand on a particular issue, what their expectations are, and why. With Trump's supporters, it's the opposite -- since the few things Trump has articulated are either patently ridiculous or completely untrue, they have nothing to hang their hats on with him.

And frankly, they seem to prefer it that way. Certainly Trump prefers it that way, as it completely absolves him from having to even pretend he knows or cares what the hell he's talking about. This puts Trump in a direct lineage with other recent vintage conservative intemellectuals, such as Palin and Cruz, neither of whom have ever seemed to give much of a shit whether what they're saying at a given moment is true or realistic. It makes sense that Palin would attempt to pose as a journamalist, and lob puff questions at Trump. It's a natural progression for both of them, and for the idiots who hang on every fake word from either of them.

When nothing is real, everything's real; when you pick and choose your sincerely-held beliefs with all the intellectual honesty of a fourth-grader, challenging all doubters along the way, it becomes very easy to change horses as easily as most people might change their shorts. (Which, by the way, would be DA CLASSIEST SHORTS EVAH! Pure silk, and they're yooooge where it counts!)

Look. We can talk all we want about the value of inserting "chaos" and "disruption" into systems -- and there is some value to that, if it's the right thing at the right place and time -- but this is just a megalomaniac being true to his nature, and reaping predictable (if fleeting) benefits. What we're seeing is the American version of the resurgence in European right-wing nationalism, where populist assholes rise up and pick on the easy meat of immigrants and such like.

In the linked article, Kaplan sees globalization as a "mitigating" factor in the rise of populist European fascism. I like Kaplan's writing and thinking a great deal, but I would suggest alternatively that globalization is a contributing factor to this rise, both in Europe and now in the United States. The problem is that, while globalization looks and sounds great in theory, with its theses of peaceful, profitable interconnectivity, in practice it simply enables the elites of each of the interconnected entities to, well, interconnect, and thus become international merchant princes, beholden to no society or nationality, only to themselves.

So let's see if we have this straight -- if we make it easier for the owners to hook up with each other, avoid paying taxes, influence national politics, and drive down wages, benefits will naturally accrue to workers. You have to be (to put it kindly) really fucking stupid to not be able to at least envision a scenario in which the aforementioned benefactors might craft a world in which they are the sole beneficiaries of that outcome.

And that is precisely what has happened, therefore no one should be surprised that there are these inconvenient eructations of slobbering proles, blaming their inconvenient outcomes on the immigrant down the street, doing the job you wouldn't do in the first place, instead of the douchebag in the suit who literally sent your job to India or China.

This is hyper-capitalism wrought large, but with fewer and more powerful players, and as such, becomes a different dynamic in a different game. Europe's higher tax rates, traditions of social democracy, and shorter and less commercialized election processes do serve as mitigating factors, to the extent that right-wing populists can still scapegoat immigrant populations, and their presumed refusal to instantaneously assimilate.

But here in 'murka, a master salesman like Donald Trump understands that chaos is a ladder, and he is just the man to climb it. So he has chosen to stoke what are, in pure financial terms, essentially minimal issues compared to the wholesale gutting done by the moneyed class to the very selfsame rubes that have chosen to cling to Trump's mighty leg so tightly.

None of this is news to anyone who's paid attention to these miscreants and their manifest failures. If Trump weren't pretending to run for preznit, he'd have nothing to do with these useless rubes; he's part of the tribe that sent the rubes' jobs overseas. But the media need to step up their game, now that they've had their fun this summer. They need to challenge Trump when he asserts things, and they need to hold groups like evangelicals accountable when their sanctimonious bullshit inevitably turns out to be just that, nothing more.

Clown Syndrome

Everything you need to know about Trump's appeal (such as it is) is summed up in this here article, including its main photograph. His fat-old-cracker ratio is nearly perfect; aside from that, not so much. And he's leading in five of our most useless states, most of which fall squarely into the typical red-state paradigm of low quality-of-life metrics, and aside from Florida and Texas, take more than they contribute in federal revenue.

This is a consistent dynamic, the takers who think they're makers, the stereotypical teabagger who fancies himself a rugged individualist, even though he'll be goddamned if he'll stop collecting his Social Security even after he's recouped what he put in, and he's got a brother-in-law on the public tit. These are the same fucking rubes who bought into Sarah Palin, and still hold out hope that she'll become Trump's running mate. These dipshit crackers would write in the ghost of Lester Maddox or Bull Connor if they could.

It will be fun (and hilarious!) to watch their inevitable caterwauling after their latest wampeter lets them down. There is no other possible outcome, unless every minority and everyone under forty just decides not to vote, or loses their collective fucking mind. The bottom line is, the demographics are just not there; the angry old assholes may vote 100% of the time, but there are fewer of them than they suppose. The idea that Alabama might be remotely representative of the nation as a whole would keep most of us up at night, if it weren't so ludicrous.

The Democrats oughta send Trump a thank-you card when this is all over. There is a very good chance that, as the silly season continues and solidifies, Mister Man's campaign will be the catalyzing event that either demolishes a reeling party, or in the event of an early third-party bail by Trump, allows it to jettison its nutjob base and begin a return to some version of sanity.

All In

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.

OK Stupid

So looks like good ol' Josh Duggar has stepped on his dick yet again, getting caught in the Ashley Madison hack not only as a denizen of that site, but apparently he has an OK Cupid account as well. Knock me over with a feather.

Unlike sanctimonious, holier-than-thou shitheads like, well, the entire Duggar family, most of us realize that humans are messy, complex, full of contradictions and complications. The difference is that most of us do not earn a cushy living trying to legislate morality for all.

Flag Hags

It's been a minute since America's Favorite Shitbird, walking ham sandwich George Zimmerman, has done something stupid, but like the sun being forced to rise in the east to watch us collectively abuse the planet one more blessed day, it was inevitable that Zimmerman and stupid would be paired up again.

Since one would assume that Zimmerman is virtually unemployable at this point -- I mean, it's not like any of his mouth-breathing supporters have stepped up to, you know, offer him a fucking job -- it makes sense that he'd try something like this. Joining up with some other Florida doofus, this one a gun shop owner who has bravely (and illegally) declared his bidness a moooooslim-free zone, seems almost made-to-order.

When it comes to judging art, I am pretty much aligned (believe it or not) with Rush Limbaugh, of all people. Limbaugh, in a Playboy interview many years ago, once said (more or less verbatim):  "Look. If I can do it, it's not art. Okay?" As someone whose artistic output is strictly limited to musical instruments, and only then after thousands of hours of hard work and practice, I am not fond of the notion that just because someone puts a frame around a turd, that it suddenly won't stink.

And near as I can tell, Zimmerman's magnum excrementum looks like he spent about an hour slapping paint on a slab of OSB with a used Ace Hardware pig-bristle brush. He might as well have been painting a chicken coop. The stenciled letters are a nice touch, though his free-hand needs some work. I mean, there are guys in every small town across this great land of ours who do shit like this with much better lettering, for about a hundred-fifty bucks a sign. This fucking maroon thinks he's going to split high-five/low-six G's with Maynard for this thing. And knowing this country, he's got even odds on that. Nothing surprises me anymore.

But Zimmerman's yard-sale sigil is useful in plumbing the continued teleology of southern apologists and unrepentant rednecks. Why does Zimmerman choose that particular symbol, what heuristic purpose does it serve? Or, working in reverse, what does the traitor loser battle flag have to do with the pudgy killer who painted it, or the islamophobic business owner the painter has allied himself with? The answer there, of course, is absolutely nothing, except that it will piss off Those People. Which naturally answers the first question as well, its heuristic purpose in the first place.

This has been one of those summers where random internets keyboard warriors have bravely declaimed the "offense" that others have taken against their traitor loser flag. This is purely anecdotal, but everything I've seen has indicated the opposite:  countless Facebook memes whinging about how a good ol' boy jest cain't have his flag anymores without someone complainin' 'bout it, and more variations on that theme than anyone in their right mind would care to contemplate.

Maybe the best part about all of this is just how hilarious the history of the traitors' various flags really is. They kept having to change the design, first because the original flag was too close to that of the nation they were betraying, and then because there was so much white it looked like a surrender flag. I think this bespeaks the utter ineptitude around which the entire concept of this vile slave-holding traitor despotism took hold.

The biggest problem is that the south never had a true reckoning, not one that meant anything. Sure, Sherman went scorched-earth en route to Atlanta, but that was about it. The southern states spent the subsequent 100 years persecuting the people they had enslaved, kidnapped, raped, tortured, murdered, and plundered for the previous 200 years. They were unrepentant of all crimes in both eras. They have never apologized because they are not sorry.

Once again, let's simplify the entire dynamic for the cousin-fuckers out there: 

• Nobody cares about you flying your confederate flag on your truck or your house or your wall. Nobody is offended by it, they just assume that it's a signifier to like-minded halfwits, that meth and/or pit bulls can be found within fifty feet of the bespangled bumwipe.
• The Dukes of Hazzard -- a silly teevee show that no one in their right mind had even thought about in at least thirty years -- was taken off of TV Land ten days after its syndication run began, not because of some imaginary outcry by bien pensant libruls, but because Warner Brothers, which owns the rights to the show, had suspended sales of all of its confederate flag merch in the wake of the Charleston shootings. As with the Dork Density mishegas, this was not political correctness, this was pure business.
• The most outspoken supporters of your piece-of-shit flag are the worst fucking examples of humanity this country has to offer. They are straight from central casting for "someone who looks like they just got done fucking a farm animal". You are fighting a losing battle -- worse yet, for no goddamned reason at all. The biggest adherents to your lost cause are also the biggest arguments against it.

Frankly, I don't put too much stock in delving into the "mindset" of these cretins, anymore than I get the idea of trying to "understand" child rapists or animal torturers. It's a waste of time, as far as I'm concerned. But some folks of a more scientific bent like to tilt at such windmills, as if it will help in the fields of psychology or penology or what-have-you.

Once again, I'll take the liberty of repeating one of my many mantras, as they are central to understanding people and life, and we should repeat them often, to remind us of what should be obvious:  It is a waste of time trying to deal rationally with irrational people. That doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't try to figure out what their deal is, if only to deal predictively with their behavior, if nothing else.

But converting them, talking sense into them, showing them the light -- it ain't gonna happen. They find out on their own, when life breaks one too many off in their ass, or they never figure it out at all, dying angry and embittered at their imaginary demons. These traitor-loser-flag folks have been voting against themselves for going on three generations now. Your facts mean nothing to them.

Moral Majority

Another day, another hypocritical "values" asshole with his dick caught in some strange:

Federal and state officials are calling for a Michigan lawmaker to resign after it emerged on Friday that he used his taxpayer-funded office to launch a smear campaign against himself, claiming that he had been caught having sex with a male prostitute.

In audio recordings obtained by the Detroit News, Representative Todd Courser was heard asking a now-fired aide to email Republican activists with the false report, in an attempt to distract from an alleged affair with another social conservative, state Representative Cindy Gamrat.

....

Neither Courser, a married father of four, nor Gamrat, a married mother of three, directly confirmed or denied having a sexual relationship during the recorded conversations. But they also didn’t dispute Graham’s characterization of their relationship as an extramarital affair, the newspaper reported.

Courser said the email he wanted Graham to send would “inoculate the herd” – an apparent reference to his and Gamrat’s supporters.

I'm not sure why he would go to so much trouble to cover up his misbehavior. It's not like these "values voters" morons actually mean what they say. How do you think that shithead Scott DesJarlais keeps getting re-elected?

US Representative Candice Miller issued a statement on Friday, calling for his immediate resignation. “This behavior is a slap in the face, especially from someone who presents himself as a moralist.”

Liberal advocacy organizations also jumped into the fray, with one saying the pair violated their oath of office. And the whirlwind of a story that involves two social conservatives who consistently cite their religious beliefs – Courser has a penchant for penning verbose manifestos on state issues, and occasionally signs off with “In Christ Alone” – didn’t emerge without a joke from across the aisle.

State senator David Knezek, a Democrat, tweeted: “On the phone since 3am trying to find out which of my gay friends ruined these two traditional marriages. No leads.”

Courser and Gamrat are known for their strenuous opposition to same-sex marriage. In June, Courser introduced a bill to prohibit municipal officials from officiating marriages. Writing on the bill, he said: “Our elected officials could be forced to perform same sex marriages” if the US supreme court overturned Michigan’s ban.

Yup, same as it ever was.

Blood Libel

You knew the Clownstick implosion was inevitable, but this quickly? Maybe the most fun part of it will be watching his maroon "fans" piss and moan at the unfair treatment their wampeter got from what has basically been his home team.

This is as good an opportunity as ever to bring up again just how weird Trump is, in this observer's humble opinion anyway. I've said this before:  if I'm even a tenth as wealthy as Trump claims to be, if I have walking-away money for the next several generations, I'm fucking walking away. I am not spending my time on Twitter wars and virtual slapfights; I'm not even paying a flunky for that bullshit. I'm on my fucking 300-foot yacht wherever the weather is nicest, living on endless surf-and-turf and Ketel One and Russian supermodel poontang. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with this guy?

Beyond all the bluster and bullshit and dick-waving self-aggrandizement this asshole has been known for, beyond the cult of dipshits who think he can "fix" everything, this is the most unsettling thing about Trump. There's something to be said about someone who doesn't take any shit from anyone; many's the time we all wish Obama had had a little "fuck you" in his bones to throw back at McConnell and Boehner and the rest of them.

But that seems to be Clownstick's default setting. This is the guy that's going to be negotiating trade deals and arms treaties, this thin-skinned douchebag, this cartoon character blow-dried mook? He can't take a "tough question" at a dog-and-pony debate, but he's going to go balls-deep with Putin and the Chinese and the mullahs? Really?

So far, the guy has proven to be Palin with a penis and a worse hair weave. Everyone else is a loser, crude assertions are pulled directly out of the alimentary canal and waved around as empirical facts, disagreements and cheap shots are reacted to as if they were the gravest of insults. No true solutions are offered for anything, just magic-wand if-I-were-king bafflegab. He'll keep the Mexicans out by building a wall and making them pay for it. He would have resolved the Iran nuclear crisis by doubling or tripling sanctions. You bang your wife doggy style, he'd do her reverse cowgirl and make her forget all about you. And so forth.

I don't know what's scarier -- the fact that Trump's followers clearly swallow this horseshit unquestioningly, or that Trump might seriously believe it himself. He understands his audience, knows that his "message" appears to old, bewildered shitheads who don't have the goddamned decency to go find an ice floe to push themselves off onto already. The idea that he can't be bought because he's already wealthy doesn't quite stick either, because as Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina found out the hard way here in Cali, only a moron spends their own money running for office. So Clownstick has to raise money just like anyone else, once push comes to shove.

I think we need to start looking at the long game here, and what ramifications it has for the Republican Party, which may implode regardless of whether Trump goes third-party or stays in the GOP fray. The party is increasingly driven by its most vocal, loose-cannon extra-chromosome base, people who do not do nuance or big-picture thinking. The world and the nation keep moving on, have left these dopey, ancient crackers behind, and they just can't stand it.

So the question becomes which blustery goofball becomes their next rock star. They get worse and worse with each iteration, from Fredo Arbusto to Caribou Barbie to Ted Cruz to Fuckface Von Clownstick. Sooner or later they're going to strike oil on one of these kampfers, someone with the same message, but smoother, subtler, bluster-free and truly charismatic.

Watching future Cali governor Gavin Newsom last night on Bill Maher's show, sandwiched between Republican consultants Steve Schmidt and Mary Matalin, I was struck at how effortlessly charismatic the guy is. He's good-looking and well-spoken, but what sets Newsom apart is how carefully he chooses his words, and how deftly he co-opts moderate Republican talking points. He understands intrinsically that politics is niched too much to be won by doubling down on your base appeal. You have to get the fence-sitters to take a look at you, and you do that by not saying or doing stupid things that spook the horses. It will be a few more election cycles, probably 2024 or 2028 (or 2020 if Clinton somehow loses next year), but I would be very surprised if Newsom doesn't take a shot at the big ring at some point.

Sooner or later the Goopers will figure that out; indeed, they may have that very person waiting in the wings in Marco Rubio. Out of all the clown car occupants at the big kids' table Thursday night, only Rubio and maybe John Kasich came off as anything resembling reasonable. Neither of them would make a good president, but both understand the value of appearing inclusive and comparatively moderate, and not stomping every hot-button issue into the floor.

And while Hillary Clinton is no doubt dancing in her pantsuit watching this slow-motion clusterfuck, nothing is settled. She has as many negatives as positives; she turns off as many people as she appeals to. Probably ninety percent of the people who will vote for her will do so reluctantly, waiting and wishing for someone better, someone less oleaginous and transparently insincere. Why on earth would I want to vote for someone who willingly hangs out with the likes of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, did someone seriously tell her this would be a selling point to anyone? (Yes, I get it, they attended a fundraiser and snapped a selfie; the larger point remains valid.)

The Republicans will beat mercilessly on Clinton's negatives, real and fictitious, and no doubt create some new ones in the process. It is going to be ugly, and probably closer than people might assume, whether or not Clownstick blows up the narrative by going, um, rogue. If Rubio can polish his own narrative a bit, moderate his impulses, reach beyond the doddering base that can't seem to decide on which asshole of the week they want to roll with, he could make things even weirder than they already are. Getcha popcorn.

Spy Kids

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?

Golem

I've never really been the "guilty pleasure" type, but I have to confess that I'm enjoying this Clownstick thing more and more by the day. Whether he intends it or not, Trump and his candidacy have revealed more about our sclerotic joke of a political system in general, and the Republican party in particular, than perhaps even Trump himself would want.

This is the natural, entirely foreseeable result of Citizens United, of the teatards' jabbering incoherence and raving toxicity being empowered and enabled. Since they are for nothing, only against things, and don't know or care how things actually work, the teatards act as an attacking swarm of fire ants, mindlessly converging on a target until they're bored with it, moving on to the next one. Johnny Walnuts had their reluctant fealty when he had the northern sorceress at his side, and hardly seven years later, he might as well be Jerry Brown or Jimmy Carter as far as they're concerned. Boehner and McConnell are next.

Clownstick understands how this game is played, understands his audience, knows that you never apologize and never admit wrongdoing. Even ol' Billy Jeff, likely to be your future first First Gentleman come November next year, once famously opined that 'murcans would rather be strong and wrong than weak and right. Trump has honed this knowledge to a science, perfected the technique, finessing his bluster and turning his greatest weakness -- an almost bizarrely thin skin, a complete inability to take even a mild joke at his expense -- into a "take no shit" demeanor that jibes perfectly with how his maroon followers see themselves, at least when their parole officers aren't around.

Pack all of your ongoing "cultural" signifiers into a hobo's bindle, and to an item they perfectly align with these miscreants' view of everything -- the world, the country, themselves. They seriously do not get that they are in the minority on these issues, that most people know that the traitor loser flag was a direct product of one of the most vile institutions known to humankind, and the only reason it was brought back in 1961 was to tell civil rights activists to fuck off. That most people understand that Benghazi!!1!one!! is a crock of shit kept alive by liars and intellectual perverts. That the Republican party has become a haven for crackpots and sociopaths, bankrolled by a handful of evil old men who literally do not understand money the way you or I or almost anyone else understands money.

The Iran nuclear "deal" is just the newest sack of steaming horseshit for them to sift through and smear on the walls. It is a perfect example of how their collective mindset is about fifty years out of date. The Cold War mindset is no longer operational, no matter how much Putin "rears his head" and annexes pieces of Ukraine. Iran is not going to blithely accept the conditions of a treaty signed by the hated shah 45 years ago, while its next-door neighbors build their arsenals.

Trump's reaction to the deal was just priceless, though. He said something to the effect that he would have "doubled" or "tripled" sanctions on the Iranians, presumably until they said  "uncle". That's all well and good, but it rings with the mindless bluster of someone who doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. For one, sanctions were internationally imposed, and were on the verge of expiring and collapsing, with no international support for renewal. European countries trade quite freely with Iran, and as the EU continues to unravel, the sanctions are hurting their bottom line. It's just business, and even a thrice-bankrupted casino huckster like Clownstick should understand that. Without international support for sanctions, you've got another Cuba on your hands, something the rest of the world looks for decades on as a monumental waste of time.

Secondly, despite how the deal is being portrayed as a handshake between John Kerry and the mullahs, this is a multilateral deal -- Russia, China, Britain, France, and Germany are also signatories to this. It's an acknowledgement of reality, that the world is multipolar rather than unipolar or bipolar (heh) and we can't just piss on any and every hydrant we feel like anymore. Trump reinforces the notion, which should have been dispelled over the last decade in the sands of Sykes-Picot's hundredth anniversary, that we call all shots. It ain't like that anymore, hoss, and no amount of John Wayne posturing will change that.

That too is the fault of the elites:  globalization really means interdependence, which means that if we fuck around too much and China decides to stop buying our T-bills as a hedge for their own economic issues, we're fucked. They're fucked too, of course, but they dropped some 20 million souls during the Great Revolution, just from famine and hardship. They're not afraid to take a hit, where we talk a big game about sacrifice, but reserve the actual sacrifice for the 1% who actually participate in the warrior caste. There are no Clownsticks in the fucking army, nor will there ever be. This is all a money game, and there is no money to be had in serving, only in contracting.

While the Koch Brothers and Shelly Adelson and Foster Friess and Donald Trump use money to keep score and measure their shriveled, lifeless cocks, the rest of the world scrambles for crumbs just to stay afloat, to pay the mortgage, to buy food and medical care and birthday presents for the kids, to keep the student loan sharks at bay one more month, to purchase the fading glimmer of hope that maybe things will work out. It would be bad enough if these obscenely wealthy, do-nothing cocksuckers just hoarded their pelf and hid from the world; far worse that they instead choose to use said pelf to turn what's left of the working class on itself, against each other.

I don't feel a bit sorry for the working-class dogs who've been tricked mercilessly into voting against their own rational self-interest. I agree with them that the beauty of freedom and capitalism is that we are free to choose a great many things. And in a world where information is free and over-abundant, they choose to run after the bright shiny object, the fools' gold of reality teevee hucksters and comic-book movie franchises. They asked for all this; they still want it. Mencken was right that they deserve to get it good and hard. Try to insulate yourselves from the consequences as best you can. As I've been saying for some time now, I hear Costa Rica is nice.

Wondering Where the Lions Are

While the spontaneous outrage over the senseless murder of a magnificent, endangered animal is heartening, it's not enough to even scratch the surface. Some 600 lions (out of about 30,000 total, so 2%)are killed by hunters every year; some two-thirds of those hunters are American. Finally the US Fish and Wildlife Service, after declining the opportunity last year, is looking into reclassifying lions from "threatened" to "endangered" status. This would ban the importation of "trophies" and other such totems for over-compensating douchebags with too much money and not enough penis.

Fuck Walter Palmer, right in the fucking eye socket with a rusty corkscrew. I respect hunters who stock their freezers for the winter, and work with wildlife ecosystems. There is a legitimate role for deer and duck hunters. But I have no respect for rich cocksuckers who just enjoy killing shit. So I'm sincerely joyful that, at least for the time being, Palmer's practice and life appear to be ruined. He's a liar and a poacher and a piece of shit. He spends more money than most hard-working people earn in a goddamned year for the cheap thrill of killing an increasingly scarce animal. Seems like Viagra or enlargement surgery would be more cost-effective.

It's been impressive to see how quickly the popular tide was turned against the currently pre-eminent symbol of division and hate, the confederate flag. The only thing good about that flag is that it comes in two-ply. If I wasn't such a lazy bastard I'd get a full-sized flag, make a video of myself taking a massive, steaming, soupy, vodka-and-beef-jerky dump on it, then wiping my ass with it, and driving to some "sacred" traitor loser monument and leaving it on Nathan Bedford Fucking Forrest Gump's bronzed fool head.

Fuck that flag and everything it stands for. But what it took for the tide to take a righteous turn was a tragic catalyzing event. Since that event and the righteous shitstorm, there has been some pushback, but mostly of the useless-white-noise ('scuse the pun) variety on Facebook. The only ones getting out there on the issue are the lunatic racist fringe, the knuckle-dragging shitbags that even hardcore teabaggers can't defend.

Maybe the same thing can happen here, with trophy hunting. The trophy hunters are bad enough, but they are at least technically legal, so they can be kept track of. Illegal hunters and poachers are worse, lurking in the shadows, waiting opportunistically, uncaring about the destruction they cause. Habitat encroachment is a huge problem as well, but one that could be managed, theoretically.

Most of us wonder from time to time what we might do if somehow awarded with what I would call "walking away" money, the kind of eight- or nine-figure windfall that would enable you to either be like some clichéd Powerball loser, or make a real difference. I shit you not that in such an event, I'd put some serious money toward rounding up a team of mercenaries, real Delta Force / Soldier of Fortune types, and just give them a hefty year's wages to go find every poaching gang or individual within 500 miles of a nature preserve, and skull-fuck the lot of them with Kalashnikovs.

I don't even care if they're poor villagers with families to feed; it is not the role of endangered animals to go extinct in order to support overpopulation of the human virus. That too is the fault of wealthier countries, though, since they pay dearly to either kill the animals or to harvest their parts for trophies or aphrodisiacs. Vicariously it'd be wonderful to hunt those fuckers down as well.

Realistically, I think we're at an impasse. Tigers are already nearly gone -- there are more tigers in Texas than in the rest of the world combined, and that has been the case for some time -- and elephants, lions, and rhinos are not that far behind. The fucking Chinese, who are almost solely responsible for the use of tiger parts, need to start cracking down on their gluttonous idiots, the way they control everything else in their citizens' lives.

I'd happily send my big-money Delta team to the tiger ranches as well, tune up those motherfuckers and their shitbird customers. These are people who add nothing to the world, they just take and kill and destroy. Fuck them. Let them find honest work. Seriously, is every dick broken over there or something, is there that much of a need to send everything into extinction because they can't get a fucking boner?

But China won't crack down on them, won't do anything about any of this. The tigers will be gone soon enough, followed by the other species mentioned, but there will be ever more humans, breeding, greeding, grasping, killing, fucking, sucking their way to oblivion. Most humans do not hate the earth and its wondrous creations, but those that do, that vile minority, do so with impunity, and have scaled their heedless destruction to the point of no return. We do not need an infinite supply of eaters in those already over-supplied areas, we need more of our precious wildlife resources and ecosystems. And we don't need any more assholes who self-actualize by destroying the rare and the beautiful.

The fucking meteor can't hit soon enough.

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.

Devil's Advocate

So this must be one of those "assaults on religious freedumbs" we keep hearing about:

Shofars sounded amid the chanting and cheering, clapping and crying as about 100 people crowded together on a strip of sidewalk in Eastern Market today to pray and protest the Satanic Temple’s plans to unveil a Baphomet monument in Detroit later tonight.
....
A news release billed the unveiling as the largest Satanic ceremony in history. The event was ticket-only, and the location was to be given via email to ticket holders on Saturday.

Those in the crowd were not having it.
....
The bronze statute weighs one ton and stands nearly 9 feet tall. It has horns, hooves, wings and a beard. It had been planned for the state Capitol in Oklahoma City, until Oklahoma’s Supreme Court banned religious displays on Capitol grounds.

As the crowd grew, two women huddled on their hands and knees as people sang and prayed over them. One of them crawled through the crowd, tears falling in big drops to the pavement. “The blood of Jesus,” she recited, over and over.

Yeah, that'll help. Good grief.

It would be nice to know a little more about this "Satanic Temple" beyond the Baphomet statue. Where are they based? How many people are part of it? Do they have a spokesperson, do they have other plans? Answering questions such as those is admittedly a bit more challenging than transcribing the babblings and brayings of the addled faithful, but if this organization plays its cards right -- and so far they have -- they could conceivably push to get all religions back into their places of worship and the homes of their respective believers.

Which is where such things belong.