Giving Thanks

We thank you, o lord, for the banksters who have murdered the economy of the planet, who have turned the profit and productivity of others into a lint-ridden pocket for themselves to dip into.

Thanks for overpopulation, for idiots who seriously think they should have a dozen or so children, while entire species are driven to extinction at an unprecedented rate and resources deplete.

Thanks for punk bitch thug cops, wannabe tough guys who strut around in their Spaceballs stormtrooper suits (Taibbi's line) and spray blinding chemicals in the faces of their fellow citizens, which is the only reasonable response to peaceful protest, n'est-ce pas?

Thanks for a holiday that was once about reconnecting with family and community, but has long since devolved into a mindless orgy of pornographic consumerism, of people who actually look forward to the opportunity to go to Wal-Mart in the middle of the night and do battle to spend money they don't really have on shit they don't really want.

Thanks for the gaping hole in this nation's soul, and its collective inability to see or do anything about it.

Thanks for an interminable series of breathless "reports" on subhuman scumbags who think a college football program is more important than -- well, pretty much anything, apparently. Because there are actually people who are violently angry at the unfair persecution of poor ol' Joe Paterno. Lord, may their children all get ass-raped in the shower by Jerry Sandusky. (Not really, but perhaps make them take a second to reflect "what if", and double-check as to whether they are actually human beings or not. Because it's pretty unclear right now.)

Thanks for the fucking fascist scumbags who run this country now, who cravenly use a terrorist attack by a bunch of Saudis a decade ago as cover for their paramilitarizing of urban police forces. We thank you, sweet lord, for these gutless, inhuman thugs who wipe their asses with our constitution every chance they get. Good to know that official press passes must be obtained to "report" officially-sanctioned "news". Wouldn't want reg'lar citizens to think they can just show up unannounced at Tahrir SquareZuccotti Park and, you know, document what occurs, write about or even film the armored pussies who pepper-spray old ladies and coeds. Lord, please jam lightning bolts up their asses, and melt their dead hearts, in Tebow's name, whatever and ever amen.

Some simple truths (pezzo di merde):

• Lloyd Blankfein, and every other bankster, for what they've done to literally billions of people at this point out of sheer greed and nothing more, are pieces of shit.
• Mike Bloomberg, for his craven support of the banksters, and for unleashing his punk-ass thug cops on unarmed peaceful citizens who are simply tired of taking shit from well-heeled thieves, is a piece of shit.
• Lt. John Pike, caught on video as a gutless, heartless bully, is a ten-pound growler, truly a king-sized piece of shit. Do your duty and flush twice on this motherfucker. It will truly be a fine day when this asshole finds himself in the unemployment line.
• There are many more, too many to mention. This nation seems overrun with numberless pieces of shit, from the halls of Congress to the boardrooms of Wall Street to the frontlines of Occupied America to the chat rooms defending the pussy paramilitaries who push around the citizens they're fucking well sworn to protect.
• What this nation needs is an enema, and a big one.

What the OWSers need to realize is that, however well-intended, what they are doing is not enough, might really never be enough. Rather than risk sacrificing their lives and well-being to an indifferent thugocracy and a complicit, compliant, complaisant corporate media who are already bored with their tubthumping antics, what the OWSers -- and everyone, including you 'n' me, friends 'n' neighbors -- need to do is avail themselves of any and every opportunity to divest from the matrix, to starve the beast.

Because it most certainly is a bloody beast, voracious, insatiable, red in tooth and claw, utterly indifferent to the misery spawned by its actions, indeed taking perverse glee in the pain it causes. It does not care about you, and by "it" I mean Wall Street, Congress, Obama, the urban paramilitary gangs masquerading as cops, the hump-your-leg-till-you-waste-more-money media, the whole wretched lot of them.

The decision we have to make is whether we continue to put up with it just for the opportunity for more flat-screens and iPads, or decide that having a lifestyle is a piss-poor substitute for having a life, and that maybe we won't miss our Dancing with the Has-Beens and Never-Weres and the hourly Kardashian updates as much as they think we will. The greatest fear these motherless fucks have is that we one day decide to stand on our hind legs and be men.

I can't think of a better day than today for us all to resolve to do exactly that. I think we would all be more thankful, and right now an attitude of gratitude might be just the thing.

Otherwise, I've had quite enough of this hollowed-out police state, and its revolting cheerleaders, and I'd rather make it a goal to get the fuck out of here once and for all, find a bungalow in Costa Rica and spend the rest of my life surfing and playing guitar, which is all I ever really wanted to do anyway. Bageant had the right idea.

The bullshit going on right now in multiple quarters on multiple levels, and the vocal support it engenders from some of the more insane quadrants of the mediasphere, make me positively ill. One can still believe in Hume's Paradox, the old "they got the guns but we got the numbers" maxim, but there's really no substitute for just pulling out whenever and wherever possible, divesting from the beast and re-investing locally.

Psycho Finance, Qu'est-ce Que C'est

Ce que j'ai fait ce soir-là
Ce qu'elle a dit ce soir-là
Réalisant mon espoir
Je me lance vers la gloire... OK -- Talking Heads

George Monbiot is shrill:

In a study published by the journal Psychology, Crime and Law, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon tested 39 senior managers and chief executives from leading British businesses. They compared the results to the same tests on patients at Broadmoor special hospital, where people who have been convicted of serious crimes are incarcerated. On certain indicators of psychopathy, the bosses's scores either matched or exceeded those of the patients. In fact, on these criteria, they beat even the subset of patients who had been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders.

The psychopathic traits on which the bosses scored so highly, Board and Fritzon point out, closely resemble the characteristics that companies look for. Those who have these traits often possess great skill in flattering and manipulating powerful people. Egocentricity, a strong sense of entitlement, a readiness to exploit others and a lack of empathy and conscience are also unlikely to damage their prospects in many corporations.

In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded. Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you're likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you're likely to go to business school.

Monbiot avers to the classic "all poodles are dogs, but not all dogs are poodles" chestnut, which is at least intellectually honest:

This is not to suggest that all executives are psychopaths. It is to suggest that the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills. As the bosses have shaken off the trade unions and captured both regulators and tax authorities, the distinction between the productive and rentier upper classes has broken down. Chief executives now behave like dukes, extracting from their financial estates sums out of all proportion to the work they do or the value they generate, sums that sometimes exhaust the businesses they parasitise. They are no more deserving of the share of wealth they've captured than oil sheikhs.

Here we're getting closer to the nut. Success in the high-stakes finance world is not predicated on raw skill; there is very little chance that Jamie Dimon or Lloyd Blankfein possesses skill sets that the average college graduate could not be trained for in, say, a year or two. Yes, they are highly specialized skill sets, but not uniquely so.

More and more, it becomes clear that their defining characteristic is willingness to push boundaries, to engage in what would previously have been considered transgressive behavior.

Finally the crux of the biscuit.

The rest of us are invited, by governments and by fawning interviews in the press, to subscribe to their myth of election: the belief that they are possessed of superhuman talents. The very rich are often described as wealth creators. But they have preyed on the earth's natural wealth and their workers' labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.

Exactly. The persistent myth has been that taxes and regulations must be kept low in order to maintain robust growth and profits. Well, what of that, then? Both have been at historic lows for the entirety of this preceding decade, the paper profits of which have been wiped clean -- except, of course, for the engineers of that destruction. Securitization policies were upended to facilitate this mendacious scamboogery, and we can all see the results.

Yet again, the myth persists that if we just stay the proverbial course, the ship will right itself anon.

Taibbi, per usual, has been all up in this shiznit. Handing Social Security and Medicare over to these thieves was a dreadful idea before they monkeyfucked the world economy; it is incomprehensible that any remotely serious person would still be considering such a thing at this stage of the game.

As Taibbi points out, not only is their chicanery exhaustively documented and simple to trace (though hopelessly convoluted in scope, and hence beyond the attention span of the average 'murkin, which is precisely what they count on), but so is their incompetence. You have to give props to people who have the balls to demand to be thanked and rewarded not only for their malfeasance, but for their ineptitude as well.

Here's how I've explained the situation to people, to make it a bit less muddled, feel free to use or modify as you see fit:

Say you have an idiot brother-in-law. He fancies himself a pigskin prognosticator, and decides to take a loan out on the value of his house to bet on the Super Bowl. But wait -- not only is the bank allowing him a loan at full value, they're allowing him to "leverage" on a 30:1 margin. That is, his house is worth $200K, but Bank of Stupid is letting him borrow $6 million. Still with me? Okay, good.

You can guess what happens next -- he bets on the Steelers, who lose to the Packers, and he's on the hook for way more money than he's ever going to see in his life. The bank basically tells you and your neighbors that you get to pay for it, since your asshole b-i-l sure as hell ain't gonna cough up a thin dime for his stupidity.

Of course, there are additional layers of complexity to this admittedly feeble analogy, but the point still stands. It's public subsidy/private profit at its worst.

Now, to add insult to njury, the richies are bemoaning their lot, and pushing back against the tubthumping DFHs in the park, with their usual condescending sneer:

Mike Bloomberg wants you to believe the banks didn’t want anything to do with those unworthy borrowers. Yet in reality, the banks not only went to every conceivable length to take on the home loans of those subprime borrowers, they actually invented new technology to make clones of those Barney Frank debtors.

And there were thousands upon thousands of those synthetic deals, meaning each and every one of those deadbeat subprime borrowers have been Xeroxed by the banks fifty or a hundred times over, and are flying around the globe to this day as toxic assets.

Nomi Prins pointed out in her book It Takes a Pillage that we could have paid off every subprime loan in America at the start of the crisis for about $1.4 trillion dollars. But the bailouts ended up being four, five, perhaps as much as ten or twelve times that size.

Why? Because we weren’t paying off the underlying loans of those subprime, personal-responsibility-deficient homeowners. We were paying off the banks' bets on those loans. We were adopting all those clones they made.

Anyway, there's is a massive gap between making a bad decision with one’s personal finances and committing criminal fraud in billion-dollar amounts. Morally, the two acts are not even in the same universe.

Here is a perfect example of why I detest bien pensant limo libs nearly as much as I despise the usual mouth-breathing, window-licking, up-to-the-fourth-knuckle nose-picking conservatards. Animals like Mike Bloomberg, who presents a media-friendly image and aligns perfectly with their socially-liberal-but-fundamentally-authoritarian impulses, know perfectly well that there's more than enough blame to go around.

As long as Bloomberg appears "progressive" enough on vital issues such as abortion and gay marriage, these putatively librul tools could give less than two shits about whether he regards the peons as human beings. Not that abortion and gay marriage aren't relevant issues, but I'll go out on a limb and stipulate that everyone's right to live a decent life commensurate with the work they put out is a tad more critical.

But Bloomberg, his proxies, and complicitly his starstruck audiences, they're all happy to lay it all at the feet of the one group that has no media or political presence whatsoever -- the working stiffs who got juked into these bullshit mortgages.

Yes, they should have known better, yes they should have done the math and figured it out. But a lot of people made -- and are still making -- a shitload of money for all that, really for taking deliberate advantage of their lack of financial sophistication.

Even worse, in addition to the foreclosed millions you hear about, there are millions more -- I count myself among them -- who did everything right, spent wisely, lived frugally, locked in the mortgage rate opportunistically, didn't use the HELOC as an ATM, and still got fucking hosed by decimated property values, reduced credit limits, fewer decent job opportunities, etc. Trust me folks, there's no reward whatsoever for doing things "right", and indeed only the finest of lines between those folks and the folks who are being jeered at by smug billionaires for their supposed stupidity and recklessness.

Really, if there's one thing that Bloomberg and his scumbag friends have proven time and again, it's that stupidity and recklessness pays quite handsomely, provided one has taken care to rent the right people ahead of time.

As the slow burn of Europe continues apace, and eventually spreads here, and shit really starts raining down, keep all that in mind when it's time to choose a side. Wall Street has the moral compass of a Mexican drug cartel. These motherfuckers would skin you alive and feed you your own nutsack if they thought it'd gain them two cents on their portfolio.

Has nothing to do with the virtues of "capitalism", the magic of the "free market", or the vicissitudes of the peons. It's just the nature of the beasts. Perhaps a viewing of Grizzly Man might jog one's perception of how this thing really works.

News of the Weird

This is not exactly burning front-page material, but it is passing strange at least that scientists would expend any real lengths of time, effort, and research dollars to limn the plight of chicken-fucking hillbillies. I mean, I don't quite get the "they deserve to burn in hell" vitriol of some of the commenters, but I would say that if you're the sort of person for whom buggering livestock is a habit, a way of life, the trajectory of your existence on this here earth is already pretty well charted.

This is just all kinds of charming:

The researchers found no association between penile cancer and the number of animals the men used over time, the species (which included mares, cows, pigs and chickens, among other animals) or the number of other men who also participated. However, the higher rate of reported sexually transmitted diseases in men who had sex with animals could be a result of group sex, said lead author Stênio de Cássio Zequi, a urologist inSão Paulo. More than 30 percent of subjects practiced SWA in groups.

Ahahahaha, there's a lovely visual, no, a bunch of inbred goobers gang-raping a cow. Well, there are 7,000,000,000 lost souls on our fair slab of rock, the law of averages dictates that at least some of them are going to be disgusting wastes of oxygen. Nothing new under the sun, but never a dull moment either.

Predators

I don't know what sort of self-respecting man -- and a 6'5" athlete at that -- observes a ten-year-old boy getting buttfucked in the shower by a grown man, and not only doesn't intervene directly at the scene, but doesn't even call the fucking cops. I cannot imagine what went through that child's head at that moment, first probably thinking that Mike McQueary, seemingly a responsible adult, would jump in and rescue the kid. Instead, McQueary slunk away, went home, called his dad for advice, and then told Joe Paterno, who told Penn State's athletic director.

Again, keep in mind that McQueary was 28 years old at the time. Did he not get the memo about how sexually assaulting children is a bad thing? Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, one gets that Sandusky is a piece of shit pedophile, and Paterno and the PSU athletic department had the semi-plausible deniability of hearing everything second- or third-hand, but I have no clue what McQueary and the others who witnessed Sandusky's behavior were thinking. It is inconceivable to me that someone could witness the abuse of a child and not physically intervene immediately.

McQueary is likely to follow Paterno to the unemployment line; indeed, his coaching career is likely over. Good. Hopefully he lives to Paterno's ripe old age, and his gutless inaction haunts him every second.

It's amazing to consider the sorts of awful things humans will conceal just for the sake of reputation. Penn State's rationale is exactly that of the numberless Catholic dioceses worldwide that excused and covered up, perpetuated the exact same conduct systematically. Just as McQueary's inaction is unfathomable, so is the notion of anyone continuing to support organizations such as these with their (presumably) hard-earned dollars.

As always, you get what you pay for.

The "No Shit" Moment

I like to give center-to-center-right people like Fareed Zakaria and Niall Ferguson some leeway because they generally present smart, moderate arguments which just happen to land a bit to the right of where I normally would on most given subjects. This stands in stark contrast not only to the numberless goons the wingers have peddling numinous fictions for them, but to ham-fisted NYTimes "moderates" such as Bobo Brooks and Ross Douthat. People like Brooks and Douthat are not necessarily nasty players like their more wingy counterparts, but they do tend to be messy thinkers, whereas folks like Zakaria and Ferguson, who have actual educations and curricula vitae, and write actual books and know serious facts, generally impart their ideas with clarity and logic.

So I have no idea what got into Ferguson all of a sudden, but given his "killer app" metaphor, I'm tempted to assume he's been boning up on some Tommy Friedman and decided to up his book sales by giving that lazy tack a try. The earliest incarnation of "killer apps" seems apropos enough, anyway, in describing how the West surpassed the East after around 1500 (that is, around the time Vasco da Gama set the Portuguese navy in every seaport from Lisbon east to Macau, subjugated the natives and converted them at sword-point, and set up trading ports to put the locals out of business).

1. Competition. Europe was politically fragmented into multiple monarchies and republics, which were in turn internally divided into competing corporate entities, among them the ancestors of modern business corporations.

2. The Scientific Revolution. All the major 17th-century breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology happened in Western Europe.

3. The Rule of Law and Representative Government. An optimal system of social and political order emerged in the English-speaking world, based on private-property rights and the representation of property owners in elected legislatures.

4. Modern Medicine. Nearly all the major 19th- and 20th-century breakthroughs in health care were made by Western Europeans and North Americans.

5. The Consumer Society. The Industrial Revolution took place where there was both a supply of productivity-enhancing technologies and a demand for more, better, and cheaper goods, beginning with cotton garments.

6. The Work Ethic. Westerners were the first people in the world to combine more extensive and intensive labor with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation.

A knowledgeable historian without an agenda could easily pick apart most or all of these points, seeing as how Ferguson so easily elides over the era of colonialism, and the technological advantages provided by its immense labor-to-capital ratio. But to be fair, the era also brought us Scottish Enlightenment figures such as David Hume, James Watt, and Adam Smith -- the latter of whom is most important for pseudo-econs who have clearly never read Wealth of Nations as a totem to invoke every time they need to make a Serious Point about Capitalism.

Not only do they not understand capitalism nearly as much as they think they do (unless they seriously think that socialized debt and public subsidy of institutionalized, leveraged gambling has fuck-all to do with legitimate risk-reward scenarios), but they don't even understand that Smith himself very clearly came down dead against unproductive vorocracies masquerading as merchant princes, loyal to none but themselves and each other.

Anyhoo, where Ferguson really puts the rock on the ground is when he attempts to apply his "killer app" model to the current crises continuing apace:

Ask yourself: who’s got the work ethic now? The average South Korean works about 39 percent more hours per week than the average American. The school year in South Korea is 220 days long, compared with 180 days here.

....

The consumer society? Did you know that 26 of the 30 biggest shopping malls in the world are now in emerging markets, mostly in Asia? Only three are in the United States. And, boy, do they look forlorn these days, as maxed-out Americans struggle to pay down their debts.

Modern medicine? Well, we certainly outspend everyone else. As a share of gross domestic product, the United States spends twice what Japan spends on health care and more than three times what China spends.

....

The rule of law? For a real eye-opener, take a look at the latest World Economic Forum (WEF) Executive Opinion Survey. On no fewer than 15 of 16 different issues relating to property rights and governance, the United States fares worse than Hong Kong. Indeed, the U.S. makes the global top 20 in only one area: investor protection. On every other count, its reputation is shockingly bad. The U.S. ranks 86th in the world for the costs imposed on business by organized crime, 50th for public trust in the ethics of politicians, 42nd for various forms of bribery, and 40th for standards of auditing and financial reporting.

What about science? It’s certainly true that U.S.-based scientists continue to walk off with plenty of Nobel Prizes each year. But Nobel winners are old men. The future belongs not to them but to today’s teenagers.

....

Finally, there’s competition, the original killer app that sent the fragmented West down a completely different path from monolithic imperial China. Well, the WEF has conducted a comprehensive Global Competitiveness survey every year since 1979. Since the current methodology was adopted in 2004, the United States’ average competitiveness score has fallen from 5.82 to 5.43, one of the steepest declines among developed economies. China’s score, meanwhile, has leapt up from 4.29 to 4.90.

....

What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our system: the anticompetitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent—to say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our overleveraged personal finances, and our newfound unemployment ethic.

Then we need to download the updates that are running more successfully in other countries, from Finland to New Zealand, from Denmark to Hong Kong, from Singapore to Sweden.

And finally we need to reboot our whole system.

I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe’s PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it’s America.

Kee-rist. It goes on like that, and worse yet, Ferguson even musters Charles Bell Curve Murray for his arguments at one point.

Look, the problem is much simpler than all that. Thirty years ago it was decided that while Americans were happy and productive actually making things they and their neighbors wanted to use and buy, it simply cost the bosses too much. Margins could be increased by outsourcing manufacturing, and 'murkins would be retrained to make far more money selling each other five-dollar cups of coffee. Productivity increased massively over the last fifteen years, it's just that nearly every cent of gains went straight upstairs. There was not even the pretext of marginally spreading a bit of those gains around. Oh, and you're welcome, America. Enjoy your hi-def flat-screen, the better to see Chaz Bono's knee dimples.

Everything since then has been a futile attempt to paper the consequences of those decisions over, with cheerleading for the emerging economies and the rentier financiers running the shell game. They don't even bother to mask their contempt anymore, you all just get to bail out the TBTF banks that fucked you out of your job and are foreclosing your house. How you like them apples, Champ?

Ferguson gets close in his "reboot app" jabber, but what he misses is the most important thing -- health care is a racket. Ditto "higher education", credentialist mills that churn $200 textbooks and pull fat raises for academic sinecures on the backs of broke students and their strapped parents. Even the public education system, enough 'murkins have been bamboozled into believing that fat teachers' unions are bleeding them dry.

This absence of critical thinking, it should be pointed out, might just be the very consequence of a desiccated educational system that no one can afford anyway. Just a thought. But the fact is that all these "viruses" are not bugs, they're features built into the system.

The "updates" Ferguson refers to, in all these far-flung geographic locales, require government investment in infrastructure, massive revenue injections -- yes, tax increases, especially on the 1%, since they are the only ones who have anything anymore. Good luck selling that one.

The idea that only the plebes should suddenly have to learn the virtues of self-discipline is one that has probably underpinned the aristocratic philosophy since Sumeria. But hey, folks, just work harder and smarter, and this ol' ship'll turn right around.

Booty Call, Too

Not sure how the publicity-stunt sexual exploits of a horsefaced Armenian chick with a fat ass, a sex tape, and an infamous dad, whose primary talent seems to be banging pro athaletes, merits so much attention. No doubt the Today show, most noted for having a chimp (other than Lauer) as a sidekick back in the day, will be milking this through Thanksgiving, no doubt thanks in no small part to esteemed relationship expert Star Jones.

Really, I'm repulsed that I know even this much about it, but it happens the same way I know that the most recent American Idol was won by some kid that looks like Alfred E. Neuman, without ever watching a blessed second of the show. You can only switch channels -- or turn the infernal thing off, or kill the browser link -- so quickly. Cultural osmosis, incurable even with antibiotics.

Do we even need to ask whether any corporate media outlets will turn away from Kim Kardashian's hypnotic cowcatcher ass long enough to talk about anything important to anyone's actual life -- say, the likelihood that Bank of America may have overextended itself (and, of course, all of us, since we're on the hook for their bullshit whether we like it or not) irretrievably [via Taibbi?]

5. Bank of America is officially rated the biggest, scariest bank. Its stock price also fared the worst of the group of banks (which also included Citigroup and Wells Fargo) when Moody's Investors Service downgraded it on September 21.

B of A's long-term holding company (parent bank) rating was chopped two notches to Baa1 from A2, and its retail bank rating was cut two notches from A2 to Aa3, placing B of A four notches below rival JP Morgan Chase and one below Citigroup, the third-largest US bank. Its bank holding company has the lowest rating among the top five banks with the largest derivatives positions.

This caused great fear for investors involved in derivatives trades with the Merrill Lynch division, prompting them to request trades be moved to the part of the bank with the better rating - the retail part with the insured (peoples') deposits. That way, B of A doesn't have to pony up as much collateral to back the trades, as it would in a subsidiary with a lower rating. The Fed was recklessly happy to approve, despite the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's (FDIC) misgiving about having to insure more risk, even if it can borrow from the US Treasury to do so. Meanwhile, Bank of America's stock price got so crushed that Warren Buffett scooped up a $5 billion preferred stock deal, effectively betting that the government won't let this big bank go bust.

6. B of A's derivatives position keeps rising. The total amount of derivatives in the FDIC-insured portion of B of A as of mid-year was $53.7 trillion, up 10 percent from $48.9 trillion the prior year, and up nearly 35 percent from its pre-fall crisis level of $40 trillion (the Merrill Lynch securities division holds $22 trillion in addition.) The bank has $5 trillion of credit derivatives, nearly double its $2.7 trillion pre-Merrill amount. In addition, because of its inherent zombie status and rating downgrades, the cost of insuring B of A against a possible default continues to rise in the credit derivatives market - a pattern that American International group (AIG) once followed.

Nice, huh? Read that again -- that's not $53 billion, but $53 trillion, roughly the equivalent of the entire on-the-books global GDP. The idea that we're forced to subsidize these ricockulously bad bets, while Ken Lewis gets nine figures of walking-away money, would merit the guillotine, in a society that didn't have the attention span and priorities of a seventh-grader.

Obviously it was ever thus. But anymore it seems the circuses-to-bread ratio is skewed in Paretian fashion. Herman Cain should not be disqualified because he played grab-ass with a couple of subordinates back in the '90s (though that is a reason, just not the most damning); he should be disqualified because he is a ludicrous person with stupid ideas, who is doing this just to bump up his book sales and speaking fees.

The more the corporate media (who of course have no vested interest in keeping you distracted with shiny baubles and plastic personalities, nosiree bob) indulge in this nonsense, as Neil Postman sagely pointed out a generation ago, the more we (in the collective) lose our capacity for meaningful engagement.

Instead of commiserating over the water cooler about the few picking the pockets of the masses, and getting away scot-free, we ponder the fairytale aspects of reality teevee wannabes and their contrived love lives. We debate the momentous occurrence of Chaz Bono being on a dancing show, without pondering for a second that Chaz Bono is way too fucking fat to be on a dancing show. (Or that, you know, the idea of sitting there and watching Chaz Bono or yet another of these Kardaashians dancing is a supreme waste of time and cable bill.)

I dunno. I am back as always to that poisoned well, the unleashing of easy "people are morons" snark, while realizing at the same time that there are a lot of intelligent people out there that are tired of this stuff, the debasement of "news" and "discussion" to its lowest common denominator, the sage review of idiot sexcapades, the common culture of collectively watching has-beens and never-weres sort their sock drawers. It's pathetic and unnecessary, and ultimately self-defeating.

When you're already in a deep, deep hole as a nation-state entity, these miserably inept cultural touchstones are not ladders, they're shovels, things deliberately placed to keep us from looking at the real problems. It's not just that the "stories" are stupid; they are, but the real issue is that, like the shows whence these creatures emanate, weeks and months are spent telling and rehashing what is really about five minutes' worth of one-view trivia. after that, really, who gives two shits about the Kardashian sisters or interchangeable reality twits? But they are marketed for months on end, until it's played out and the next meaningless thing comes along for another six months.

And I think there are a lot of folks who really just don't want to know. They understand just enough to realize that the game is fixed, the players bought, they are not in the club and are going to lose regardless, so they may as well distract themselves with comforting effluvia, cultural macaroni-and-cheese. The subject, its facts and its players are too complicated to keep track of, by design.

Actually getting on the same page to change the game would be too much like work, unless you're some DFH beating a plastic bucket in the park. Hopefully those folks keep all that in mind when their destitute grandkids are bailing out Ken Lewis' lucky-sperm-wealthy-from-cradle-to-grave grandkids.

And if you're a one-percenter, that is precisely the collective mentality you count on.

Booty Call

Yeah, it's a real shock that Long Dong SilverHerman Cain turns out to be a sexual serial harasser. (Right, alleged, falsely accused and unfairly maligned. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger.)

The real curiosity here is that, while Cain has been surging -- throbbing, if you will (and you might) -- in the (ahem) polls for the last month, this just now comes out. Accusations and settlements from fifteen years ago taking a month to see light, in the age of 30-second Google hunts.

If you didn't know better, you might narrow it down to one of two rather unseemly assumptions: one, that our intrepid corporate media would take weeks to find its own collective ass in a dark room with both hands and a flashlight; or two, that whoever's been bankrolling this dog-and-pony show from behind the scenes finally decided to pull the blessed plug.

Either Rick Perry suddenly discovered oppo research, in between hits of ecstasy and paint thinner in New Hampshire, or the Koch Brothers finally decided to drop 185 pounds of dead weight. They're obscenely wealthy for a reason, and at least part of that reason is that they realize that there's not much percentage in bankrolling certifiably batshit candidates.

Expect Jon Huntsman to receive an anonymous manila envelope stuffed with photos of either Perry or Romney in a compromising position with: a dead girl, a live boy, a terrified farm animal, or each other. Such a moral dilemma!

Mystery Meat

"I don't mind the taste!"

I am definitely not a food snob, and while I eat very little fast food in recent years (In-N-Out maybe once every couple of months), I certainly ate more than my fill of Carl's Jr. burgers back in the day.

But despite originally hailing from Los Angeles, McDonald's was always verboten growing up. It wasn't because it was fast food, or completely non-nutritious. It was because the food tasted like an unholy blend of cardboard and ass, flash-frozen and then thawed out under a heat lamp. The burgers are nasty, and the fries are pure grease and salt. It should not be mistaken for actual food, it is suicide by slower means. This is not exactly news, even to frequent customers.

So I have been to Mickey D's literally maybe a half-dozen times in my entire life. One of those times I tried a McRib, currently being overpimped on its 112th farewell tour.

I don't recall the exact circumstances which led me to try this bestial thing, probably peer pressure, possibly the occasionally profane amounts of drugs ingested in my twenties. Whatever the case, clearly there was impaired judgment involved.

As I recall, it tasted exactly what you would expect something concoted to offset the chicken shortage caused by McNugget sales to taste like -- a slab of pressed goo, slathered in sauce that must have had 10W40 as one of its main ingredients.

Now, it's not a secret that Americans, more than just about any other nationality, are accustomed to associating an utterly inane concept like "convenience" (as opposed to, say, nutrition, taste, quality, sustenance, or even actual hunger) with "food". And sentimentality may be one of the common touchstones of all cuisines, the ability to conjure up a rustic kitchen, whether grandmother's or anyone's, with well-placed manipulation of the olfactory senses.

But the marketing of this mystery slab ("Think smaller, and more legs.") is very perplexing. Maybe not as much as the grotesque glutton factories that continue to litter the landscape, but bizarre nonetheless.

I hold dear as a simple longstanding empirical axiom that Americans are enormously weird about, and have very dysfunctional relationships with, money, sex, and food. I think there are some people out there (and many of the comments in that first link seem to confirm the idea) that want to take the McRib out behind the middle school and get it pregnant.

Which, come to think of it, might help explain that nasty sauce.

Clownocracy

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Mitt Happens

When it comes to describing the Republican preznitential primary process so far, with its increasingly bizarre and inane "debates", and the string of three-week candidate crushes going back to Donald Fucking Trump's transparent publicity stunt, words begin more and more to fail. The usual metaphor of rubber-necking at the scene of a particularly grisly road accident doesn't cut it anymore.

It's more like trying to figure out the wave of torture-porn movies in the middle of the last decade, as sadistic schlock-meisters set out to limn the agonies of the human condition by trying to out-spatter the likes of Eli Roth. When your bar is already set low from the outset, you are absolutely guaranteed to GIGO your way through things.

So it is with this protracted sideshow, which ostensibly has the goal of presenting a viable replacement for Barack Hussein OsamaObama who, some continue to insist, emerged fully realized from his mother's womb in a turban, waving a scimitar in one hand and clutching the Qu'ran and Das Kapital in the other, ululating "Death to Amreeka!" at the top of his tiny little lungs.

Of course, this negates the facts that Obama is actually the one who found and killed bin Laden after a decade on the run, turned a militant American-born cleric in Yemen -- whose stated goal was to radicalize American Muslims and create more Fort Hood massacres -- into a greasy spot on a donkey path, and assisted in bring down Moammar Qaddafi, a truly nasty character, without risking a single American life. When it comes to foreign policy, Barack Obama is as hawkish as they think they are.

Economic policy is even easier -- he's on retainer to the Wall Street thieves and grifters, to every bit the extent that one would expect from any of his Republican challengers (excepting, perhaps, Ron Paul). It is remotely possible that a McCain White House would have dropped the corporate tax rate to zero (which for many corporations it essentially is), but while Johnny Mac had to dance with them who brung him in '08, it's safe to wager that he is still rational and lucid enough to read a balance sheet.

So this summer has been merely a tedious exercise in trotting out an increasingly moronic series of candidates, in order to pander to what is apparently the most regressive, knuckle-dragging political base in a couple of generations. Seriously -- reasonable people from both sides can discuss at length the manifest failures of the Obama administration, but what sort of window-licking fuckwit actually thinks that Herman Cain would be anything but a disaster in any elected post higher than dog-catcher?

Oh sure, Cain would open the doors to the Koch brothers, let them and their subsidiaries pull favors and run riot over the regulatory agencies and labor unions (what remains of those entities, anyway). The magic of The Invisible Hand Making The Tide Rise For All Boats and such like. Because that's been working out so fucking well, hasn't it?

But Cain is interesting not in the sense of what he's revealed about himself -- a bumptious, ignorant tool who literally thinks that poor people should blame themselves first and foremost, and whose main actual idea is a 2000-mile fence to electrocute Mexicans -- but about the people who would actually vote for someone so comical and nonsensical.

And we won't even get into Cain's much-vaunted campaign video, which more than anything seems to allude to off-camera accessories such as a van with tinted portholes and a sex dungeon cluttered with missing hitchhikers.

Now, all of this has been an attempt by the Republitard base to avoid endorsing the Stormin' Mormon, Romney. Perhaps it's Romney's religion, or the way he keeps changing his positions day-to-day, or the fact that virtually nothing out of his cakehole is believable in the sense that you think he might actually believe what he's saying. But the bottom line is that the base hates him, but he has money and name recognition, so he's the perennial #2 in this dog show.

The fact of the matter is, when compared with the rest of the doofuses on the scorecard, Romney is not only the most competent and accomplished of the bunch, he is the only one of the front-runners that might be sufficiently competent to actually do the job. Romney's problem is the opposite of the rest of them -- he is actually an intelligent guy.

Romney, unlike Cain, understands why it's important for the president of the United States to know who the fucking dictator of Uzbekistan is, that there are important logistical capabilities for the US military about to be transferred there, and that Islam Karimov is a Saddam Hussein-grade brute who has literally boiled dissidents alive. He understands how economics and finance works. Romney, unlike Trump (who obviously was never an actual candidate, merely pimping his piece-of-shit teevee show), Bachmann, Perry, and Cain, is not an idiot.

He is, however, an unctuous, insincere turd who made his bones gutting manufacturing companies and sending American jobs overseas, instantly making him easy money for the Democrats to run against. And the Goopers know it. And the rest of their dance-card is a cluster of shit-scary goons and apocalyptos, people who, if they were really sincere in their belief in the dominionist claptrap about Christ coming back to scorch the earth and cleanse it of sinners week after next, should be spending their last days in style, having fun, not jockeying for the blue ribbon like a fattened pig at a county fair.

People have danced around Romney's (and to a lesser degree, because of the much lower name recognition, Huntsman's) religion, not wanting to appear bigoted, but treading dangerously close to ofay "some of my best friends are" territory. This is understandable; every religion is goofy to outsiders. Certainly in the years of running this blog, and before that on chat boards, I've never shied away from taking cheap shots at whatever religion crossed my sights, and Mormonism was definitely in there somewhere.

Perhaps counterintuitively, though, I would say this about Mormonism in general, and the many Mormons I have personally known, in particular: They're nice people. They place an emphasis on work ethic, and on individual self-sufficiency, but in the context of strengthening family and community. And not just the usual empty "fambly valyews" guff (though there was a video company in Utah whose specialty was bowdlerizing mainstream releases for "safer viewing"), but most of them seem to actually like their families, and make the effort to spend time with them.

Again, as an atheist, as far as I'm concerned every religion has wacky, far-fetched, completely fantastical belief systems and mythos underpinning them. Magic underwear is funny, there's just no getting around that. And certainly the Mormon church, just like the Catholic church, has many institutional wrongs to atone for. (Although, unlike the Catholic church, which took half a millennium just to acknowledge that it might have screwed the pooch on the whole Galileo thing, and that bit of nastiness with the Inquisition, the LDS church does update its dogma and amend its more racist undertones a bit more quickly.)

But institutional wrongs do not necessarily and always fully incriminate individual believers. Every Christian is not individually responsible for the Ku Klux Klan; every Muslim is not responsible for Osama bin Laden. And whether atheists like it or not, someone who professes to a mainstream religion is going to hold high office, at least for the near future. When enough people come around to the idea that you can be a very moral person without the burden of a particular established superstition, that will change. Till then, here's what you have to choose from. And Mormonism, as peculiar as its backstories are, as transparently scammy as its origins and its founder were, is merely the young child in a very old, far more established crowd of scams and fantasies; it is neither more nor less empirically valid than any of them.

I still think that in the end, Huntsman, if he can keep his powder dry, and just enough money coming in to keep breathing, gets this by attrition. The rest of them peaked too early and fell too hard; Perry, alone among them, has enough money and charisma and favors from his home state to rebound some, but it ain't gonna happen. The whole "if you like Dubya, you'll love Perry" schtick is exactly where it's at, and when was the last time you heard anyone admitting to missing George W. Bush?

And Huntsman, alone in the entire group of intellectual reprobates and buffoons, still has the ability to appeal to anyone outside that base. This will be a test for the far-right wing of the Corporate party, to decide if it still wants to be taken somewhat seriously by rational people, or it wants to continue its devolution into the "crazy aunt in the attic" wing of a hollowed-out corporatocracy.

Either way, metric fucktons of cash will be thrown around, and you, Tonstant Weader, won't see a red cent of it. Might be a good time to bone up on political consultancy.

Erin Go Blah

OK, so it is duly noted that money bunny Erin Burnett should never be mistaken for a friend of the masses. I mean, at the risk of belaboring the blitheringly obvious, she has never been that person. If she were, she would not have the job she has.

Burnett's pedigree -- worked for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, and is set to marry a Citigroup exec -- is exactly the curricula vitae one would expect for someone in her job. Same with Jim Cramer. It should not be a blindside surprise that Burnett comes across as a smug, overprivileged twit, functionally ignorant of how people outside of Manhattan get by in life. That is not an accident, that is a job requirement.

Look, the financial system itself is simply a polite fiction that people have agreed to agree on, to passively accept. Americans of all wealth quintiles, whether they have investments or not, have some awareness of how the DJIA works, insofar as it is "good" when it increases, "bad" when it decreases. But that's about the extent of it; even people who work in the financial services industry display little specific acumen as to why -- or more importantly, for whom -- those indicators necessarily mean those things. For the most part, it is about as scientific and empirical as astrology, or the reading of chicken entrails. Again, this is by design; the industry has a vested interest in protecting the arcana of their vested interests, and the mechanics therein.

This is where the cheerleading sector comes in, the CNBC money bunnies and balding galoots, the Burnetts and Cramers and Maria Bartiromos. The women present a veneer of knowledge and a frisson of sexuality, not-so-subtle reminders that money equates power and both will get you more ass than you can handle. The men present either the appearance of gravitas and expertise, or in the case of Cramer, the illusion of expertise coupled with a shameless buffoonery one normally associates with the local morning zoo radio drive-time show.

But they're all there for the same reason, in the end -- to make you believe that they know what they're talking about, that Wall Street's interests coincide and overlap with the interests of people outside of Wall Street. They are there to elide the increasingly obvious notion that Wall Street financiers simply regard the rest of the country and the rest of the planet as a dead-brain milch cow to be periodically cleaned out.

Don't ever tell yourself differently, folks. I am not exaggerating even a little bit when I tell you, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Six-Pack, that nobody in that industry, from Erin Burnett on up to Jamie Dimon, gives a red-hot monkey-fuck whether you live or die, whether you can find a job, whether you live in a fucking cardboard box while they pick out $10K leather couches for their East Side penthouses.

They do not care, nor do they care about the banana-republic levels of income and wealth disparity, and the only emotion they feel when you resent this indifference and chicanery is antagonism and open hostility. There is not a moment in the lives of these people where they wonder why the peons don't have more, because that would interfere with them wondering why they themselves do not have more.

If the financial services system is a racket -- and Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, how can any sentient being at this point not understand that that is exactly what it is? -- then financial "journalists" are the procurers and whores of that racket, shamelessly exhorting and pimping anything and everything, whether they know better or not. They are the kids on the street corner in Goodfellas, running bets on the rigged numbers game to Tuddy and Paulie at the neighborhood pizzeria. They are Crazy Vince selling you the ShamWow and the pajama jeans on your midnight teevee, call within the next 20 minutes and get a 30% discount, tonight only.

Because one thing they do know is that the system is predicated on belief, like Tinkerbell. If people start understanding the flawed mechanics of that system, the shenanigans and outright thievery and graft that so much of it is built on, they might get wise and stop believing, and Tinkerbell dies.

Getting upset with a financial journo for doing what they've been conditioned and groomed for years to do is like getting upset with, say, Pat Robertson for saying something completely stupid and hypocritical. Like religion, modern de-leveraged and de-securitized finance is simply an ungainly belief system, but one that is necessary for its believers to maintain. They are balls-deep up in this biznitch, and if people stop buying what they're selling, they might no longer be able to have thousand-dollar meals at Cipriani's, or send their kids to $50K private kindergartens. Can't you feel the pain of the 1%ers, you heartless motherfuckers?

But there's nothing stopping anyone outside the bubble from taking a look at this shit, watching someone like Burnett waltzing down to the OWSers to fuck with people who are up to their eyeballs in debt and can't get a job because Burnett's cocksucker bosses might lose a quarter-point on their stock bonuses, and saying, "Wait a minute. How the fuck do credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations and MERS benefit me in any way, directly or indirectly?" I mean, who you gonna believe -- Erin Burnett and Jim Cramer, or your own lyin' eyes?

The answer, of course, is that those alphabet-soup financial devices don't benefit you at all -- if anything, their only net effect on the average 'merkin is more debt and pain. That's where Erin Burnett comes in, to convince you that that pain you feel in your ass is not Lloyd Blankfein's tiny, barbed cock, but the invisible hand of the marketplace giving you a nice prostate massage.

American Spring

It's a wonderful, terrible thing to watch the Occupy Wall Street protests. The belated but increasing corporate media coverage, as well as the prospects for the protests themselves, present some possible dilemmas.

First, the media. One could go back a couple years, and compare and contrast coverage of the teabaggers versus that of the OWSers. While some media observers surely did point out the incoherence and logical inconsistencies of the 'baggers and their proclaimed goals, just as many covered them almost reverently, as if they took the be-Rascalled tri-corner hats as a new wave of founding fathers, righteously battling an oppressive, indeed despotic, regime. Vituperative cranks hollering at hapless aldermen at local town hall meetings, and protest signs announcing that the bearers were unarmed "this time", were simply manifestations of this new breed of self-actualizing, totally-not-astroturfed codger.

The Occupiers, otoh, were portrayed (at least initially, and even still in many instances) as having no goals or leaders or stated political outcomes as such. And that's true, as far as it goes, but there's an actual reason for that, one which the media fails to comprehend so far.

The simplest way to put it is the old Upton Sinclair chestnut that it is impossible for someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on their not understanding it. But it is also ingrained, institutionalized in the corporate media DNA, to "properly" limn the narrative of a political story by long-established principles and benchmarks -- appointed spokespersons, bullet-point goals and negotiating tactics, etc.

It does not occur to your average corporate media bear that the OWS folks have quite clearly stated what they are pissed about -- a system that is rigged against the majority, that insists on practical impossibilities: that you can't get a decent job without going into hock for a degree, preferably a graduate degree; that the best time to look for a job is when you already have one, because apparently prospective employers smell rotting meat when an unemployed job-seeker walks in for an interview; that cutting taxes for corporations and financial insitutions is an imperative for job creation and growth, even though taxes have been at historic lows for a decade, and job creation has run at a net negative, while corporations outsource jobs and offshore revenues.

And that's not even touching on the too-big-too-fail banks sitting on reserves, refusing to lend or help jumpstart a moribund economy, continuing with the crooked derivatives that got them into trouble in the first place, pushing people out of their homes with retroactively falsified MERS and bullshit tranched promissory notes that no longer have identifiable holders because they've been sliced and diced and resold so often, etc.

It's a goddamn racket, folks, from A to Z. They don't even bother trying to conceal it anymore, one of the ancillary benefits of owning the political system outright, both the center-right and the far-right wings of the Corporate Party. That is what the OWSers are protesting, their complete economic and political disenfranchisement from a hollowed-out system. And they -- and by they, I mean the media and their owners -- know full fucking well what these people are fed up about, why they're risking being truncheoned and pepper-sprayed in their "free speech" cordons by chickenshit cops.

No doubt Lloyd and Jamie and the rest of the banksters are hoping for an early, frigid winter, the better to shut the rabble down forthwith, lest any substantial portion of the populace actually start believing this populist guff and daring to stand on their hind legs and be men. That simply would not stand, especially since the proles do have plenty of weaponry.

Wall Street is never willingly going to give in or even haggle with people -- literally everyone who is not on Wall Street -- they hold in such deep, unabiding contempt. Make no mistake, America -- Wall Street fucking hates you, considers you nothing more than sheep to be repeatedly fleeced, financial Soylent Green.

But it should be admitted and observed that, since in the conventional sense OWS does not have achievable, realistic outcomes to aim for -- the banksters are not going to voluntarily renegotiate their bloodsucking; unless OWS gets some measure of big, committed donors for candidates, they are not going to make a dent in what passes for a political system.

Certainly this doesn't mean their efforts aren't valid, worthy, even necessary -- they absolutely are, first as catharsis, then as curative, if possible. But "success", however one defines it for OWS, would seem to be automatically fraught with at least two noteworthy dangers: the inevitable attempt by someone from within the corrupt political system to co-opt them, or a (not necessarily inevitable, but not at all unlikely either) violently catalyzing event, a cop going full thug on a defenseless coed and provoking a riot, a lone nut in the crowd going after a bankster in person, that sort of black-swan game-changer that you just can't predict but resets the entire perception of the situation.

But those things are all different from a positive outcome, obviously a subjective, difficult-to-define thing to begin with. One dynamic is impossible to walk back from, though -- the spectacle of working-class people being told by millionaires that other working class people are the enemy, and worse yet, actually believing it, instead of their own lyin' eyes. I know Jay Gould wasn't bullshitting when he said he'd pay half the working class to kill the other half, but I still balk at the prospect of the first half actually falling for such a transparent ruse.

If the teabaggers actually believe their own stated precepts, and aren't simply a group of angry cranks that simply can't stand any government spending that doesn't benefit themselves, then they do have common cause with the OWS crowd. And for their own sake, they may want to find that common ground sooner rather than later, since the Koch brothers will sell their dumb asses down the river first chance.

Maybe the biggest takeaway of all is the quintessentially American notion of loudly supporting rebels and protesters in other countries, but denouncing the selfsame breed here as morons at best, traitors at worst.

Capital Games

Some interesting developments and strange juxtapositions in the death penalty arena the last couple weeks (duh).

On the one hand, you have the case of Troy Davis, who may or may not have committed the crime for which he was executed in Georgia Wednesday night. Regardless, after reviewing the salient facts of the case (no DNA or physical evidence, 7 of 9 eyewitnesses recanting, an associate who was known to be at the scene openly bragging about actually pulling the trigger), even the most ardent death penatly advocate has to honestly acknowledge that such punishment should only be carried out under conditions of zero (or damn near zero) doubt. There was not only enough doubt raised in Davis' case to not warrant the ultimate penalty, but to question his guilt in the first place. And of course, it's now too late.

On the other hand, you have Lawrence Brewer, executed in Texas the same night as Davis. Brewer was one of the three white-power knuckle-draggers who beat James Byrd unconscious, then dragged him behind a pickup truck until his head hit a concrete culvert and popped off. There was never a second of doubt about the guilt of Brewer and his two accomplices, one of whom is also on death row pending appeal. Brewer had ceased his appeals, and in fact had said he preferred death to rotting away in a cell for another thirty or forty years. Even the staunchest anti-capital punishment person has to at least reasonably ask themselves if Brewer's crime does not warrant the ultimate punishment, does anything? If not, why not?

As a long-time (really lifelong) member of the decidedly "pro" side of the argument, I can only speak for myself. It is sort of a mantra for me (here and in daily life) that you cannot use rational responses with irrational people; almost by definition it will not work. That doesn't necessarily mean that you should try irrational methods for dealing with irrational people. It is simply an acknowledgement of the basic fact that it is nearly impossible to have a successful outcome by expecting the irrational person to respond rationally to your rationality. I mean, duh, that's why they're irrational.

Similarly, I would stipulate that there are crimes that are so transgressive in nature and scope, that the person who commits those actions is essentially irredeemable. It is a waste of time to try to rehabilitate, say, Richard Ramirez, or John Wayne Gacy, to pick more extreme examples. I would say these fucking animals fall into that category as well.

There's just no walking them back from the things they did. Such a person is capable of just about anything. Warehousing them for the next several decades, in attempt to be "humane", simply gives them absolutely nothing to lose, in essence making them a danger to anyone and everyone they come into contact with, guards, prisoners. The world is simply better off without someone whose pastime is inflicting misery and torture on his fellow humans.

Now, usually you hear the sound bite from victims' families, talking about "closure" or some such. Or you see the garden-variety meathead "hangin's too good fer 'im" comments from the rabble, taking perverse joy in the opportunity to inflict the same punishment on the perpetrator; i.e., dragging Larry Brewer and his friends behind a truck until they disintegrate like putrefied hunks of meat in the broiling Texas sun.

For me it's simply a utilitarian argument, there is no joy or pleasure or revenge fantasy in it. Some people, as the prophet John Cougar Mellencamp once pointed out, are simply no damned good, and warehousing them indefinitely to assuage your conscience (as if your tax dollars don't kill innocent people around the world every fucking day already) does nobody any true favors. But it should never be anything but a solemn undertaking, after exhaustive efforts to ensure truth.

Perhaps that's cold and dispassionate, but actually I think that's how such a process needs to be if it is to be done. You're simply deciding that the crime is transgressive in the extreme, and this person made a conscious decision to no longer act like a fucking human being. Deriving actual pleasure from executing even a John Wayne Gacy is a sure sign of yahooism.

Which takes us back a bit further, to the Republitard debate a couple weeks ago, when Gubnor Dubya Junior bragged about his kill rate -- which almost assuredly includes an innocent man -- and was received with cheers and applause. Even if all 234 notches on Perry's belt are clearly and irrefutably red-handed guilty, this is fucking disgusting, this chimp-like hooting at a death tally. (Christians all of them, no doubt.) This is no longer about the administration of justice, this is a lynch mob, the baying of hounds at a trapped, miserable fox, waiting to tear it to shreds, sating its bloodlust for a minute, before looking for the next kill.

So it seems with Davis' execution; despite the demonstrably flawed evidence of Davis' guilt, the family could not achieve "closure" until they knew Davis was dead. I do not think it will happen for them quite like that; if they could not move past their grief after 22 years, the demise of an abstract figure they presumably had never seen or met outside of the literal and figurative distance of courtroom proceedings is not likely to have the permanent effect they seek, more anodyne really.

I dunno. I do still seriously feel that some things, some people are simply too awful to let stand, that a serial killer or a child rapist is simply irredeemable, and in principle should be dispatched the second the burden of proof is sufficiently addressed. But it's not a conclusion easily arrived at; as with the abortion debate, I don't think this should be a conclusion easily reached on either side, both sides need to listen to one another, and quit shouting and rending garments.

All that said, between the tragically flawed mechanics of the system, the ruthless politicking of players who are all too willing to further their careers on the blood of poor people (notice that people who can afford decent representation never get executed), and the toxic yahooism undergirding that side of the issue, it makes me sick to my stomach to even be in the same philosophical house as those people, much less the same room.

I don't think that life without parole is necessarily as humane (and certainly not as cost-effective or safe) as opponents think it is. If the state of Connecticut decides it would rather shell out sixty grand or so a year to warehouse Joshua Komisarjevsky for the next several decades, while he takes metal shop classes and cyberstalks lonely women in between dodging sharpened toothbrushes and the threat of gang-rape, then okey-doke. Most rational people would rather die, you'd think. But then rational people don't do what Komisarjevsky and his scumbag sidekick did. And if they decide to ice their worthless asses after all, I can't imagine who'd fucking miss them.

But if leaving them to rot steals a cheap thrill from the vicarious switch-thrower, maybe it's for the better.

I Wish I Was Taller, I Wish I Was A Baller; Or, Drill Baby Drill

Hilarious. Not damning -- if there's a less surprising thing in this world than a 23-year-old sports reporter hooking up with a college basketball star, I have no clue what it would be -- but from our Patron Saint of Abstinence, at least as hilarious as her first two progeny becoming parents before marriage.

Even the allegations of drug use -- our last three presidents, including the current one, have at least tacitly admitted to occasional use. (Which one might think would at least in principle undermine the validity of the massively failed War on Some Drugs, but that's another post.) This will only endear her further to her base, who must be growing tired of defending her manifold stupidities by now, but which is also their raisin-detree. Without a perfidious librul booga-booga to rail against, they wouldn't know what to do with themselves.

This, however, is just weird:

But for the Chicago Tribune and Newsday and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to drop
DOONESBURY for a full week because the strip contained quotes from THE ROGUE?

....

Has Sarah become the Blessed Virgin, and the USA a new Vatican City?

Major newspapers in Chicago, New York, and Atlanta refuse to run–for a full week or more–a comic strip that refers to excerpts from a book that dares to criticize a woman who once ran for vice president and then quit as governor of her state and has subsequently made millions of dollars by doing reality shows and appearing as a highly-paid political commentator on a right-wing TV channel?

Funny, Faux News has never worried for a hot second about Saint Sarah's slanderous calumniations, but these shit-scared media dinosaurs can't scramble fast enough to appease the threat of a slander suit. Over a comic strip.

Gutless, but like the story itself, not a bit surprising. For all its First Amendment pretensions, the vaunted fourth estate rarely misses opportunities to cave to corporate misgivings and apprehensions.

Decade of Decadence

Xan had always known the importance of giving people a choice in matters where choice was unimportant. -- P.D. James, The Children of Men

All the commemorations, benedictions, genuflections, invocations, pronunciamentos, and various ceremonial prostrations are fine and/or dandy, and entirely in keeping with the usual expectations. No surprises there; really, there are very few surprises to be had anymore, when it comes to the political realm.

And this is nothing if not a chiefly political issue, tribal identifiers binding with solemn rituals. The key rule for any political issue is that it is infinitely more important to be seen and perceived as Doing Something, than it is to actually do something. It has always been thus, bizarrely symbols frequently become far more important and protected than the actual ideals and values they symbolize.

These sorts of things, candlelight vigils and solemn public liturgies, rote speechifying, have never done anything for me, regardless of the occasion. It's not that I don't think or care about what happened ten years ago -- I did and do care very deeply, and scarcely a week goes by that I don't think about it, the event, its repercussions, still unfolding, still metastasizing.

It's incomprehensible to me that anyone needs to be reminded of it, or feels the urge to display and share their grief. Unless it's completely spontaneous, an extemporaneous situation, frankly I don't trust people who grieve with complete strangers. And I sure as hell don't trust individuals who get weird and insistent about, say, the supposed divine meaning of intersecting I-beams, in the wreckage of a building that had countless such pairings. I don't discount the value of such anodyne objects in the wake of tragedy, it's just that people seem to think it absolves them from anything and everything else. It doesn't; after any tragedy, large or small, we move on, or we wallow and die a little more inside every day.

And there need to be concrete sentiments bolstering the sacred rites. Without actual commitment -- to finding a better way to do things and resolve problems, to planning for an increasingly dismal future for the seething majority of 'murkins -- and acknowledgement -- of using grief and rage to inadvertently carve a lost decade into history, blood for blood a hundred times over (and the wrong blood at that), of chucking every principle we once stood for right out the window because of some psychopathic asshole in a cave halfway around the world -- nothing will change, at least not for the better. The question is whether that has been a flaw or a feature in the first place.

So we should definitely take a moment and reflect on that awful day, and spare something for all the awful days since then, what we might have done or not done if we knew then what we know now. The resilience of a country lies in its ability to come away from catastrophes with ideas about things, lessons learned, ideals to strive for. There is more to be done, and more that we're capable of, than lighting candles, wearing ribbons, and chanting "USA! USA!" at the Jets game, until same time next year.

A Man, A Plan, A Canal; Or, Hope Floats

The Post commentariat work on their next round of bons mots and fnords for the plebes to digest and regurgitate.

Maybe it's Hopey-Changey's increasing dithering, or the limitless antics of the 'publitools, but it's genuinely tough to say with absolute certainty whether Milhouse (channelling his inner MoDo) is in his Beltway polemicist/satirist mode, or if the slithering fucktards on the right-hand side of the proverbial aisle really did tweet and giggle and moon each other throughout The Big Speech.

Here's the thing, though -- nobody fucking watched it anyway. I seriously do not think the twitterati (said coinage had greater clarity of meaning before the inane-ovation of Biz Stone pervaded the mass of semi-literate self-marketing goobers) quite get it. For all their follies and fatuity, for all their deep-fried sticks of butter and craving for dancing has-beens and never-weres, the 'murkin people are canny in one key area -- they're too smart to waste one sweet second on this televised kabuki. Even without it being NFL opening day. If they wanted to watch these State of the Union-type circle-jerks, C-Span would have higher (or indeed, any) ratings.

If Obama cares about preserving his own job, not to mention producing some for millions of others, he had best stop with these half-hearted calculations, and find his inner Rick Perry already. People will vote emphatically for a swingin' pair over diffident posturing every day of the week.

Rule of Dumb

Ed nails it. Once again, your intrepid corporate media manages to create and encourage a teabagger movement where there was none. Outside of fringe church book giveaways and conservatard book club specials, Christine O'Donnell will probably not sell, in the honest meaning of the term, more than a dozen books. Count on it.

There are a multitude of reasons for that, not the least of which are that O'Donnell has nothing whatsoever new or interesting to say about anything at all, nor is anyone who is actually enamored with her by definition a reader. I say this not just to be insulting (though that is an important part of it), but to point out an obvious and simple fact: people like O'Donnell, and Palin, Perry, Bachmann, etc., gain notoriety not for anything they've done, have the ability to do, or even intend to do. People like that are popular because they ventriloquize the antagonism, the endless butthurt of a claque of marginalized chumps.

In fact, even going back to the more successful movementarian jeremiads of yore (Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter), it would be surprising if most or even many of the people who obtained their books actually read them. And even if they did read them, it would not be to add to their arsenal of factual information, and certainly not to actually learn anything, or even to gain something resembling a meaningful intellectual perspective on the notions they routinely parrot. No, if they read the books, it would be to simply affirm what they already "knew".

So it is with fifteen journamalists hanging around a book signing with only five customers, and having nothing to say about the actual book in question. It is this sort of just-show-up coverage that has allowed the teabagger "movement" to metastasize far beyond where it would have landed normally, and to have a disproportionate effect on American politics. (And, it should be noted, to become a convenient scapegoat for the self-inflicted woes of the Democrats.)

I swear it's true -- when it comes to the media, there really used to be a time when both we and they understood the distinction between actual news and Jerry Springer reruns.

In Other News

I have a couple of projects that I've been working on, that I may decide to do some self-publishing through Amazon's DIY Kindle program. So I have a few questions for all of you (okay, both of you) out there. Have any of you had experience with that program? If so, what was the outcome? Are there any issues with setup, publishing, etc. that I should consider going in?

Mind you, I am not looking at this as some life-changing career move, and no, I am not feverishly cranking out some basement rendition of the Twilight/Game of Thrones canon. But I do have some ideas that I think some might find useful and/or entertaining, and wouldn't mind pulling a modest supplemental income from, if possible.

Anyway, if you've tried the Kindle program, or something similar, and have some observations to share, please add in comments below, or email the Gmail. Thanks.

Graphic Violence

The next time someone asks for a nice visual of the banana-republic wealth/income disparity this nation continues to endure, show 'em this:

[Via Decline of the Empire]

I'm not even sure what to say anymore, hence the almost non-existent posting level these days. For a long time I attributed my dwindling output to the rigors of school and work, and to a great extent those things did and do occupy a great deal of my time.

But it's also a lack of knowing what to say anymore. When I started this little thing back in 2005, I figured there was a niche for this sort of parodying and lampooning of public figures, especially politicians. And there still is, though The Daily Show handles much of the heavy lifting, in terms of knocking out the easy meat most reliably. (Maybe I should have become a writer for TDS, if I had any clue how; at least once a week I'll know what Stewart's going to say before he says it, or predict the comic headline.)

Everything about this nation has simply become impossible to parody at this point -- our political choices and sentiments; our pop-culture touchstones; our propensity to put up with the viciousness and abuse of a corporate media structure that runs interference for the robber barons who have burgled this country's future for themselves. The media is such an easy target, over and over again, because it is the correct one. They engage, in the aggregate, of polishing corporate turds, and presenting them to you, gentle viewer, as something worthy of attention.

Anything and everything, from the interchangeable chlamydia-ridden Joisey Shore mooks, to the daily "missing attractive white woman" updates on The Today Show, to the sculpting of whatever manufactured crisis crops up next on the nightly news radar, is presented as equally important, equally meaningful, equally impactful to our lives, when in fact very little of it is. Maybe our (and by "our", I mean the majority of 'murkins) critical faculties have just been irreparably dulled, worn down by attrition, from the daily -- hell, hourly pummeling of this contrived nonsense.

Next week, media-wise, will especially suck -- starting with the tenth anniversary 9/11 remembrances, that day where everything changed, but we all went right back to doing what we were doing, and changed nothing about ourselves, certainly not in the collective sense. Nevertheless there will be interminable, mawkish plaints to the sky, and any number of other modes of emotional manipulation.

Then on Thursday we get Obama trying to compete with the opening of football season with yet another proposal that will require fruitless negotiation with the Boehner gang. Assuming that Obama even has "good" (meaning those he campaigned on) intentions anymore, or if he's even permitted by the rentier class to retain them, it is all for naught if he does not learn to negotiate with even a modest amount of skill.

Again, giving Obama some small benefit of the doubt that he has not a completely owned tool of Wall Street at this point, let us sketch out a reasonable metaphor for his pattern of negotiating things. I've probably used this one before, but whatever.

Let's say you are dealing with somebody who insists that 2+2=6, and they will brook no disagreement, will not discuss the issue, will not listen to entreaties of empirical reason and cold rationality. You know that 2+2=4, and no amount of magickal thinking on the part of you or them or anyone else is going to change that. However, you also have to figure out a way to work something out with your idiot opponent. What do you do?

Well, whatever you decide to do, one thing you most definitely don't do is open with, "Well, what if we compromise and say 2+2=5, and work from there?". You may, after long and hard-fought debate, eventually be forced to concede something along this line to move things along and get something done, but only an asshole does this as an opening gambit.

Yet this is what Obama has done and continues to do with every major economic initiative. He doesn't just punt on first down, he routinely concedes before the ball has even been kicked and the clock has started ticking. I would not at all be surprised if he fucks over the entire next generation (or more) on Social Security and Medicare, and grants yet more bullshit "job creating" tax cuts (because the ones he's given up have created so many already) just to get some hopelessly-compromised "job bill" going.

This is how the man does every blessed thing. It does not seem to occur to him that granting upfront concessions to an irrational opponent does not defuse the antagonism of the negotiating scenario, it emboldens the opponent. If you give up that much without even so much as a fight, before the bell has even rung, how much more will you give up when you take a right cross to the nose. Over and over, again and again, Boehner and Cantor and their merry little friends delight in playing Lucy to Obama's Charlie Brown, getting that sadistic frisson every damned time he lands on his back, not knowing or caring why he can't ever seem to believe his own lyin' eyes.

And of course the Thankralphers are already scuttling out of the woodwork, reminding us all of the burn-at-the-stake heresy of even murmurs of dissent at how Mister Man has chosen to make good on any of his campaign promises. You're getting a shit sandwich either way; Rick Perry's will probably come with one slab of stale crust, but other than that, essentially identical.

It's not that that isn't true and correct, mind you, that as awful as Obama has been and continues to be, and his inability and unwillingness to fight has wrought his current stature, he's still preferable to an unrepentant knuckle-dragger like Perry. But it should beg the question of why this is our "choice", why this is always our choice, why it is we, every bit as much as Obama, who plays the Charlie Brown sucker role, whatever and ever, amen.

Friends 'n' neighbors, that helpful little graph at the top of your screen is the answer to all of those questions, why your politics, culture, news, economy, and so much more is just a big box o' turds. It is that, and absolutely nothing more, I promise you. And it is never, ever going to change until we do something about it.

The Power of Positive Thinking

Bury your treasure, burn your crop
Black water risin' and it ain't gonna stop." -- Clutch, (In the Wake of) The Swollen Goat

Like most of y'all out there in Blogoland, I've spent the last few weeks more or less observing the increasingly choreographed Debt Ceiling Debate (which, like Health Care Reform and the Holy Roman Empire, is none of those things -- discuss!) out of the corner of my eye, a slo-mo train wreck in peripheral vision.

And of course, like everything The One touches, the end result was saturated in epic fail. Wait till Monday, when Moody and Fitch follow S&P's lead, to get the full flavor of how well and truly fucked we are now. Nice work, guys. Can't wait for the SuperCongress, or the League of StuporFriends, or whatever slipshod claque of corporate butt-boys and dogsbodies they throw together, to find newer and better ways to make it even worse. Except for their donors, of course.

Between the brazen, barely-concealed contempt both sides have for each other and for the peons, and Obama's carefully crafted, constantly refined MO of non-existent negotiation skills, punting on first down, and giving the other side concessions they didn't even ask for, somewhat heretofore unconsidered thoughts about What We Can Do kept twirling in the firmament.

Fortunately, Monsieur IOZ has returned, for however long, with a vengeance, and per usual crystallized what I'd been thinking better than I could:

Yea verily, I have returned unto you to put it straight to yinz: there is no tea party; there are no Democrats; there is no America. There is only global capital. There is no keeping American competitive for the future against the Chinese children of the math-science learning gap to win tomorrow today with the power of innovation. There is a single transnational elite whose allegiance is to itself. They would've fucked you on Saturday; they'll fuck you next Wednesday instead. There was no debt crisis. THERE IS NO DEBT CEILING. You are like prisoners in a concentration camp, tearing each other apart over crusts of bread. The guards check their rifles. The kommandant shtups his mistress. The carrion birds circle against the concrete sky.

You must destroy the rich.

Fuckin' A. On the one hand, no one's calling for violent insurrection as such, mind you, but on the other, that's all these motherfuckers understand, other than the threat of losing their money. The American motto is no longer "E Pluribus Unum", nor even "In God We Trust", but rather "The Fuck You Gonna Do About It?". It actually changed to that during the Cheney regime, but was mostly directed at the rest of the world. Now it more explicitly applies inward.