"I think they are all homosexual communists in Satan's army...I espect as well they all live together and bathe together every morning and have the anal sex with one another, with the fisting and the guinea pigs." - Manuel Estimulo
"I can never quite tell if the defeatists are conservative satirists poking fun at the left or simply retards. Or both. Retarded satire, perhaps?" - Kyle
"You're an effete fucktard" - Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom
"This is the most pathetic blog ever..." - Ames Tiedeman
"You two [the Rev and el Comandante] make an erudite pair. I guess it beats thinking." - Matt Cunningham (aka Jubal) of OC Blog
"Can someone please explain to me what the point is behind that roving gang of douchebags? I’m being serious here. It’s not funny, and doesn’t really make anything that qualifies as logical argument. Paint huffers? Drunken high school chess geeks?" - rickinstl
I've said it before; I miss the old Catholic, grammar school God. Doesn't exist, of course, but the singularity I chose to call Tiffany is less attractive than Grandfather in the Sky with his boy Jesus and the Pet Bird.
We're probably too hard on God because of all the crap that those who worship him do to others. As an Apostate, I look at Catholicism and shake my head -- the beauty, the brilliance and the absolute, bat-shit nonsense that evolved. Protestantism is worse -- same crap, only carried either to more logical absurdity or else into an illogical set of nonsense. Human beings are supposed to be thinking animals -- the Camus quote, "Freedom is nothing but the opportunity to be better!" either spins off into the Rapture or into some other form of babbitry.
David Horsey really nails it. As usual. This is all that is necessary to understand the problem with organized religion. Man is the problem with organized religion. God - Jesus, Zeus, Mithra, Zororaster, Allah, Buddha, Odin -- has not a goddamn thing to do with it.
I don't like to talk politics with friends. We either sit there in an orgy of intellectual negative masturbation (accomplishes nothing, doesn't feel good) or I realize that they are complete fucking idiots. However, I'll talk culture and social science until the cows are butchered by Pig's guard duck and Sarah Palin because she got all the moose. Case in point, one of my buddies and I went out for lunch yesterday, stumbling on a barbecue place that appears to be a small SOCAL chain called Johnny Reb's. (Strongly recommend it, by the way. Get the brisket and the hotlinks combo plate, paying extra for some sweet potato fries, and have it with collard greens. If you want the pinto beans, make certain you get the cornbread and crumble it into the beans. They're great, but it has more of a soupy texture. The cornbread will add some consistency. I'm going to fast for my next visit, especially since they have something called a Hereshie's Chocolate Cobbler on the desert menu, which sounds scarey...) Anyway, in the space of our conversation which revolved around what's happening to my former employer GINORMOUS, he admitted to watching O'Reilly and expecting him to tear into Sarah Palin. I said something along the lines of "What the fuck you talkin' about, Willis?" Somehow, he thought O'Reilly was kind of moderate conservative. This is a smart guy, and a good friend. But, Brother, I know what you're getting for Christmas...a copy of The Federalist Papers and the Constitution.
While that kind of floored me, we agreed on the substance...the country is in serious trouble, and while it's nice that our various stock accounts, retirement accounts and so on are all doing so well after the late unpleasantness, it's all imaginary. There's no reason to think the markets are based on anything other than the itching hemorrhoids of the traders. He asked me to explain derivatives, which indicates that there is some hope. We're both pissed off at Obama for lack of testicular fortitude -- imagine the fun that JFK, RFK, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or my favorite, Franklin Roosevelt, would have had right there at the podium with ole Congressman Joe Wilson. Obama looked offended and stared hard...I watched Ted Kennedy gut the Republicans in 1970 by ignoring them and pumping up a candidate from the Left Fringe (which in 1970 Massachusetts could be pretty fringey) and turning the race into something between Liberals and Loonies...the Republicans got their 35% of the vote, and Teddy got the rest. The fall after Chappaquiddick. Obama needs to find his inner rat or hire a better guard duck.
And, on Sarah "dangit, I'm special" we agreed. There's no there there, and we don't get it. Well, Matt Taibbi does and I bow to the master . He sees it in a larger context, but she really is more representative of where 30% of the country reside. It doesn't matter that there's no there there...to a large extent, that's really what it's all about.
It doesn’t matter what the argument is about. What’s important is
that once the argument starts, the two sides will automatically
coalesce around the various instant-cocoa talking points and scream at
each other until they’re blue in the face, or until the next argument
starts...And while some of us are old enough to remember that once upon a
time, these arguments always had at least some sort of ideological
flavor to them, i.e. the throwdowns were at least rooted in some sort
of real political issue (war, taxes, immigration, etc.) we’ve now got a
whole generation that is accustomed to screaming at cultural enemies as
an end in itself, for the sheer dismal fun of it. Start fighting first,
figure out the reasons later.
What amazes the AXE is that he's nailed it. Politics was once about ideas...policy...direction...doing things. Now it's about a short news cycle and who can scream the loudest. And, most people don't relate to ideas, policy, direction, doing things. They want to sit there, shoving cheetoes into their pie hole and bitching about the assholes. Who're the assholes...everybody.
Complaining about the assholes we interact with on a daily basis is
the #1 eternal pastime of the human race. We all do it, and we get to
do it every day, because the world is full of assholes. Me personally,
I waste an enormous amount of time seething over people who get onto
crowded subway cars with big backpacks on and/or talk in the Amtrak
quiet car and/or drive 57 mph in the fast lane or, my personal
favorite, walking with glacial slowness in a horizontal row four
overweight tourists across on a New York City sidewalk. We all get into
furious arguments at work that make us want to explode in
self-righteous fury (in my office dramas I always realize I was
actually the asshole a day or so later) and when we get home from work,
this is usually what our loved ones hear about for at least the first
hour or so.
Not health care, not financial regulatory reform, not Iraq or Afghanistan, but — assholes.
What can I say...he nailed it. I expect the 2012 campaign to be about whether or not we should all drink Gatorade because it has electolytes, and the 2016 to be decided by a Monster Truck contest.
Lots of odd things have happened in the AXE's life lately, and at some point I'll write about them. However, let it suffice to say that I'm spending this evening in Fort Wayne, Indiana -- actually, a pretty nice town and home of my favorite musician's supply and equipment internet firm, Sweetwater.com. Best prices, best quality and probably best info if you call or chat. Reason I mention that is I may move here...maybe I can get a part time gig on their phones. Obviously, I'm tired. Very good and productive interview for another job.
Anyway, the Crossroads of Opportunity doesn't have a lot, and one of the things it doesn't have is a Crackerbarrel. If you're not familiar, drive south or east on the interstate until you find one. They started in Tennessee I believe, and conquered the south first. I recommend ordering a breakfast, although tonite I had a reuben (B+)and fries(C+), coleslaw (A+) and a slice of their double fudge coca cola chocolate cake with ice cream. I was struggling with that monster when I over heard a discussion about what had just gone down at Fort Hood.
Ok, at this point nobody really knows what the fuck went down. The shooter was an officer and a mental health professional with an Arabic name. Christ, I have no idea what could have happened. However, the HuffPO article asserts something to the effect that it's significant that this mass murder occurred at Fort Hood because the infamous Kileen massacre at a Luby's cafeteria in the 80s is right there, outside the gate. This is why the military gets pissed at liberals...and, let's not pretend that I am not more liberal than not, and that if anything, I find a lot of the HuffPo stuff too nuanced. Call a motherfucker, a motherfucker. Of, visit Vote Vets and sign the petition calling Tom Turkey Coburn an immoral motherfucker for blocking Vets Aid. Syphilitic dick weed...
The Luby's thing could result in some defeatist bad taste humor -- Luby's is several steps down from Golden Corral. However, that was one local nut ramming the cafeteria in his pickup truck and blowing away people for whatever tinfoil lining to his gimme cap reason the voices in his head gave him. This is a lot worse. The reports are pretty odd -- however, since the idea of two automatic pistols have sufficient rounds to kill and injure that many without reloading seems odd. The next thing is the idea that soldiers normally are packing heat. Good way to lose you freedom and career. Sorry, I do not recall ever putting a loaded magazine in a weapon while in the cantonment area. Doesn't happen. Now, if these were some sort of MAC10, then the question becomes how did a mental health worker get to be such a goddamn great shot with those incredibly hard to control weapons...but, they would have the fire power.
I can thing of few places that are supposed to seem and be safer than the soldier readiness center on an installation. While I'd like to think that soldiers would automatically move to the shooter and take him down, the odds are pretty good they couldn't process it. If you open your refrigerator to get a bottle of milk and a fucking Tyrannosaurus Rex chomps on your arm, you're probably not going to react well.
This is troubling. Regardless of faith or lack thereof, or point of view on the war, this is not good. If these goddamn silly wars have turned shrinks into mass murderers (one theory is he didn't want to deploy, which seems counterproductive -- don't want to deploy because I might get killed, have to kill someone, so I'll kill a bunch of people and then they'll kill me! --but I'm not inside the guy's head and wouldn't want to be.
Dr. Elena N. Bodnar couldn't be more serious about
her research. The trauma and risk management specialist was in her
native Ukraine during the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and helped
children cope with its aftermath. Tonight, as she accepts the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for
public health, she won't mind laughter when she demonstrates "in a very
elegant way, without removing any clothes," how an ordinary brassiere
can be transformed into a pair of gas masks."I think the Ig Nobel is not just a funny thing," she said in an
interview this afternoon. "If it makes people first laugh and then
think, my discovery fits perfectly."
I think the laugh, then think mantra is something that as a Defeatist, I can completely endorse. Unfortunately, most either don't think or think, then laugh. Or, we laugh bitterly and think about how it was all supposed to work. And didn't -- here is Professor Krugman's contribution to the festivities which he explains, demonstrates and gets the accounting wrong.
But last night I participated in the Ig Nobels,
where I gave one of the 24/7 lectures. These are 24 seconds of
impenetrable jargon, followed by a 7-word explanation of your field.
24: Given decentralized constrained optimization by
maximizing agents with well-defined convex objective functions and/or
convex production functions, engaging in exchange and production with
free disposal, leads, in the absence of externalities, market power,
and other distortions, there exists an equilibrium characterized by
Pareto optimality.
7:Greedy people, competing, make the world go round.
Cockfighting, automatic weapons, meth and pot grow operation --damn, there are times I miss the Shire of Ectopia. If this occurred here in the Crossroads of Opportunity with the jobless rate hovering locally around 20%, nobody would notice. But, in Graham? Outside of Tacoma...people need to remember, there was a reason that Neko Case fled to New Hampshire and Loretta Lynn went back to Tennessee and Courtney Love actually was able to get in a band...the place is terminally weird...volcano escape routes, tsunami warnings, vampires, Indian Casinos, floods same place, same time next year, Ichiro and bestiality brothels involving gay cross-species encounters between men and horses. And, in family value-rich Eastern Washington, they take homicidal maniacs out on the state dime for snow cones and midway rides...Petting Zoo, anyone?
Let’s not mince words here: We now have an entire political party that
is not only dedicated to the mediocre. It is dedicated to the nearly
deranged...
But that is not the case here. We
have one party that is severely compromised by its ties to big money,
and another party that is just plain nuts. There is no other way to
parse it. According to recent polls, a majority of its followers either
believe that President Obama was born in Kenya or aren’t sure, believe
there is no such thing as global warming, believe that the House health
care bill calls for death panels to euthanize senior citizens, and
believe that Obama is responsible for our economic woes (61 percent!).
The only bright side is that according to a recent Pew poll, only 23
percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans, which makes
them not only a fringe in beliefs but also, thankfully, in numbers...
Republicans
haven’t always been like this. For most of our history, America was
pretty much like our European allies. We had two sensible parties with
different traditions, constituencies, and orientations...Maybe Democrats should be happy that Republicans have been reduced to a
lunatic fringe. But the lunatics still have their seat at the table,
and someday they may be sitting at its head again. What then?
Well, my guess is that things will go totally in the shithouse. But, in the meantime...I'm starting to question the idea that we have a left-of-center party. Kind of starting to think we have a party made up largely of cowards afraid to exercise authority and vision, focused on technocratic manipulation and one made up by, well, Montgomery Burns and Friends.
I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer —
the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a
foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who
would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much
to do with race.
I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that
Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from
paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against
Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing
conspiracy against Bill Clinton.
But Wilson’s shocking
disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted
“liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq —
convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president
and will never accept it.
Yeah, well, I wasn't hesitant to say it, but I'm not a lady with a degree from the Gentile side of Catholic Education. She is, and the rapier is more Maureen Dowd's style than the AXE. But, she's skewered the bastards. This is what every commentator and citizen who is not comatose has thought for months. They've done everything but yell "Coon-ass half-breed nigger at the guy, call his mother a nigger-lovin' whore and hung him in effigy. Guess what -- Michael Steele is an Uncle Tom; there's a reason why finding black faces in the Republican party is hard. The party of Lincoln has been captured by the party of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Not the great General, but the racist slave-trader who butchered Black Union soldiers.
This madness is sooooo Birth of a Nation. Joe Wilson appears to be getting ready to ride; all he needs is a sheet. South Carolina is almost a theme park anyway -- they have Charleston, Columbia, and alligators; an endless supply of toothless hillbillies; and, an actual bunch of nitwits. We really ought to consider walling the place in and charging admission.
Andrew Jackson threatened to hang John C. Calhoun for his nullification nonsense. I kind of wish he had -- the last 170 years might have been quieter.
I was a new state employee in a program called the "Governor's Executive Fellowship" working for the Department of Transportation up in the Shire of Ectopia. DOT was the Shire's Waffen SS, in that unlike a lot of government, they actually did things in a more or less rational, results oriented way. They were hobbits, as all civil servants are; however, Hobbits with a purpose...which can be dangerous. At the time, we were trying to grow infrastructure which meant hiring engineers. Well, we were in competition with California, who needed to hire a lot of engineers to handle seismic refit for things like the "Bay Bridge." I lost interest and left government...although at times, I wish I hadn't. Government, especially state government, could be a good place for a left-libertarian-anarcho-syndicalist to hide out. Kafka worked for the government; didn't seem to inhibit him, much.
Anyway, I was amused to read this piece this morning. Seems the Bay Bridge, after 20 years, is still fucked up, and during a simple inspection discovered a potentially catastrophic crack that will keep it shut down until it's fixed. Ok, or falls into the bay.
Now, I'm not sure whether to chalk this up to living in California or to the basic hobbitry of the well-meaning technocrats. Or both...It's tempting to consider this the Shire of "Dude!" except it is far more schizo-psycho-WHAT THE FUCK IS THE MATTER WITH THESE PEOPLE than that. The last guy with a coherent idea in state government was probably Jerry Brown. And, look what happened to him...from the Birchers to the Truthers to the Surfers to the Huffers, this is one hell of place here in the golden west. We don't have shit and our taxes are high, but the old bastards have lower property insurance because of it.
Speaking of birthers-etc., Gary Trudeau and Doonesbury remain a gold standard for social commentary. Today's strip is a kinda wry but marvelous portrait of a nation in need of a new place on the space-time continuum. In a sane world, the Roman style Republic envisioned by the founders, which of the clowns currently driving the public debate would be anything more than a member of some Asian mystery cult hanging out in the backstreets or in the catacombs, babbling eschatoloical nonsense to each other? And, for those of you thinking that Obama might be Marcus Aurelius, well, remember how that ended up? The thought "utterly fucked" comes to mind...although, I have decided that it's time to end this farce, and Crusader AXE of the Lost Causes is declaring for " Michelle Bachman-Michael Steele in 2012." Proposed motto -- "What could possibly go wrong? How hard can it be?" While Bachman is SpaceBat crazy, I think Steele is an utterly useless dickhead who's a credit to his race and completely without principle, compassion and public service. One of the generals I worked for used to say that there were great Americans, great great Americans, and GREAT GREAT GREAT Americans -- the last being politicians. Who as a class should hit in the head with a hammer and composted. I don't generally agree completely, but in Stella Steel's case, I wholeheartedly endorse General Roe's conclusion.
Let's just get the end of the Republic and the elimination of the human race overwith...the game is really getting old.
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