the defeatists!

the revolution will not be blogged

blogging for me is like talking to an answering machine: nobody is really home, or they're hiding from you, or listening and snickering.  the feeling you get from blogging is similar: you know noone is listening, but you're trying real hard to get past the voice in your head that has you questioning your tone and forgetting the reason you called in the first place.  this awareness can be pretty creepy, especially when compounded, globally!  ahh!  holy shit!  the whole world is listening; good god!  what shall I say?  typical blogging is about as satisfying as masturbation: you know what the outcome is going to be, and hopefully nobody is there to witness your throes of self-inflicted agony.  most people are pretty content seeing the words they type magically appear on the internet.   some of it is real good, some of it is real bad.  pictures help.  it is important that the author(s) recognizes the inherent self-aggrandizing nature of the medium; witness their propensity for vanity and understand the absolute futility of one person reaching out and writing to an entire world - on the internet, no less!  the blogger, no matter how good they are, must realize that they're special and unique, just like everyone else.  for some this is not enough.  witness:

One of my pet peeves has long been a certain strain of defeatism.
Understandably we all feel defeated at times, but there's a certain
kind of defeatist out there on the internets, people who spend most of
their time chastising others for thinking it's possible to have any
influence and attacking the "stupidity" of those who even bother to
try. Maybe those people are right. Maybe there never is anything to be
done. But if that's the case, get a new goddamn hobby. It's rather odd
to spend all your time following political news and blogs if the only
reason to do it is to provide justification for your view that All Is
Lost. Just go out and have some fun instead.

wow, a pathetic diatribe attacking trolls.  a troll, to trolls!  from, get this, an internet troll!  to paraphrase Atrios: get out, you fools!  and let the professionals get r done!  seriously, people, listen up!  how will we ever reach a consensus with all these damn people kicking my shins and tripping me up?  do they not fathom the importance of this, that which I just wrote, and the movement, man, the freaking movement.  so what if I'm wrong?  you're the one's who are slowing down the structure and mechanisms of real motherfucking change, yo!  begone!  we, brothers, we have the power to affect, and effect even, real change...if only.  if only! 

if only, Atrios, you didn't suck large donkey dong. 

you'll note that we've been blogging here at Defeatist Central for about 3 years now, and we're as organized as a bunch of old college roommates trying to get to the homecoming pre-game parking lot party.  we've organized nothing, contributed little, snarked and poked and slipped and joked our way through the tubes, creating a vast log of half-thoughts, some semi-truths, but mostly we've just generated ironic and back-handed insults and wise-cracks laid in disgust.  and that's about as good as this gets, or is supposed to get.  there's no rallying spot.  this shit is digital, man.  people don't run home to check out the hot blogging action at Kos or whatever.  (I myself am a 43 year old, 400 pound, blonde tipped, brunette at the roots, female shut-in, to, I am sure, many people's surprise.  there's not a lot of rushing going on here.)  and yet, we're as relevant as the next guy.  which is cool.  if there is anything blogging, and the internet for that matter, is good for, it is bringing down the median, and highlighting just how exciting alienation can be.  dude, we just don't want you to get all power mad and actually believe you influence change, any more than the rest of us.  shouting into the `tubes is not sane!  no one cares.  and your final ascension into an influence peddling corner of the empire will not be blogged; nor will the revolution.  thankfully.

so, you win, dude.  you're the King of the Internet.  let the rational polity and organizing begin, hencewith!  forthwith!  bitches!  over yonder and under the bridge and through the river and yada, freaking, yada.

we seriously.  fucking.  give up.
 

(the fact that some of the pointers that have led me in the past to Eschaton were to little nuggets of Atrios snark, is itself, not completely lost on me, in the realm of teh universal.)

I'd still wear a cup

every once in a while it's good to feel good about yourself - this world, it beats you down, you know?

well if a legitimate national security threat ever rears its imaginary head, I'm proud to say I could possibly take 27 five-year olds in a fight. 

http://www.howmanyfiveyearoldscouldyoutakeinafight.com/

                            TYLER
                 Any historical figure.

                             JACK
                 Okay... Ghandi.

                             TYLER
                 Good answer.

                             JACK
                 You?

                             TYLER
                 Abe Lincoln.  Big reach.  Skinny guys
                 fight till they're burger.

yes, yes we do.  it's these little mental victories that keep me strong and virile. 

don't let the bastards get you down - especially if they're wielding sticky Legos.

Cthulhu might get testy if you're not careful

Honorary Defeatist and sometimes Pittsburg Penguins Substitute Mascot Monsieur IOZ has demonstrated some degree of interest in fleeing the embrace   of Candidate for Life Benito Guiliani and Cthulhu in this years presidential election. One hopes he comes to his senses. If not, who knows what Cthulhu might do? Hell, who knows what Rudy might do...send Bernard Kerik to slap IOZ in the back of the leg with an iron bar? ( Where the fuck did they get an iron bar? They have this stuff called steel these days...even rebarb is made of steel or some other alloy? )

If you're getting the Cthulhu Dream Girl/Tonya Harding/skating/thug references here, well, that's just the second saddest part of this. The first is that when I read the story, I knew exactly who they were talking about and remembered the whole whole silly story. Hell, maybe Benny will send Andre Lemieux to slap IOZ around with a hockey stick. I think things are best the left alone.  Hell, he might even send Tonya,which could get really nasty. Note the white socks...

Romanian Car Tuning Babes-01

 

My brothers read other blogs to increase their blood pressure -- they go to oddball sites for the same reason. Me, I gotta say that the thought of taking off in a hot Lada at 4000RPM that is "smooth, like a snake..." makes me want to visit Romania with my Charger; instead of racing for titles, we can race for a ride in that helmet thing.

Romanian Car Tuning Babes-01
Video sent by ChristianPaprika

Romanian Car Tuning Babes-01

Guilty pleasures....

I'm heartened by two unusual news stories this week. A Somerset farmer showed off his massive prize-winning bull called Field Marshall. We oohed and aahed at photos of the beast which is set to become Britain's biggest bull. Then in Paignton, Devon, Maurice Fox was sent an angry letter by his social club complaining about him breaking wind in the bar.

And the reason why I'm happy about these two stories? They prove that, despite our technology and spiritual advancement, we are still the same base creatures we were 500 years ago.

If we can still read stories about prize-winning bulls and farting, we'll be all right.-- Richard Hammond, Daily Mirror

I am addicted to a few guilty pleasures. AGI thinks my enjoyment of Bare Naked Ladies is criminal, but I think that's actually pretty tame. Remember the Lancer Commercial with the hot chicks driving out of the parking garage singing along to "One Day?" BNL rock...

One of my most guilty pleasures is Top Gear on BBC. Despite the exaggerated Mickishness of ole Crusader AXE, gotta admit that the show really tickles my anglophilia. I'd love the gig that they have -- they get to drive really fast cars and talk bad about them; they get to do insane things like build home made amphibious cars; they cut the roof off a Mazda van to make a convertible that ended up caught in a carwash in Yorkshire and burned the place down. I can drive fast, I love cars, I talk a lot of smack about stuff I know and about stuff I'm clueless on. Come on, give an American brother a break.

The three presenters as the Brits call them are Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammondand James May. They are all eminently qualified for the gigs --- Clarkson is a recovering journalist, Hammond was a disk jockey and May was a concert pianist. Clarkson's personna is the British version of Cooter Brown only he lives in Oxford and drives a Ford GT as his personal car. Talking about the ZO6 Corvette and everyday driving, he said that " If I had to live with it every day, I'd rather have bird flu." This is his bit on the "nanny state" --

Today you can’t land unless the tray table is up, you can’t smack your children, you can’t smoke in a pub, you can’t take shampoo on a plane, you can’t climb a ladder if you’re a policeman, you can’t eat more than six grams of salt a day, you can’t urge your dogs to kill a rat, you can’t sell food unless you explain on the packet precisely what’s in it and where it came from, you can’t reverse without a banksman, you can’t go to work unless you have a yellow high-visibility jacket, you can’t have an operation if you smoke, you can’t tell Irish jokes to your friends, you can’t say “ginger beer” on television, you can’t talk on your mobile phone in a traffic jam, you can’t sit on a coach unless you’re wearing a seatbelt and you can’t drive a boat if you’ve had a beer. Of course, you can’t blow up an airport terminal building either, and that makes sense. But then you cannot blow up someone’s armbands at a municipal swimming pool. And that doesn’t.-- Jeremy Clarkson, Times of London

There is a fourth character, the Stig, retired formula one driver who never shows his face. About the Stig, on a recent episode, Clarkson intoned, "They say his genitals are upside down..." The Stig takes these amazing rockets amazing rocketsat a BBC airfield and pushes them hard while listening to "chamber music" or "books on tape." Lately, he's been alternating between romance novels and learning Italian while (whilst) doing 70 degree corners at 120MPH.

James May is the solid citizen of the group. He would just as soon repeal the 20th Century. They consider him the "slowest man in the world." On the amphibious car episode, he took an old Triumph convertible and turned it into a sail boat. His was the only one that actually completed the water course. Hammond's sunk immediately; Clarkson would have won except the 240HP outboard motor he mounted on back of a Toyota pickup swamped the cab and the bed. When he tied to turn into the dock, he rolled the boat. He described Clarkson once as " You know, Jeremy thinks he can solve complex problems by yelling at them."

Richard Hammond is the energizer bunny of the three. He's the youngest by a couple of decades, and is probably in a lot of ways the most responsible. At the same time, he is also the least risk averse. The others will get in trouble through stubborness or finsanity. He does it because the technology fails. On a recent episode, he raced a member of the Red Devils -- the British Army Parachute Team -- on a two mile course rally course over dirt tracks in Cyprus. He had a Porsche Cayenne; the Brit had a parachute and a 10000 vertical drop. They also have a dog -- a labradoo, half labrador and half poodle. As Clarkson said, " That makes her a hybrid. We would have called her prius, but then she would have eaten twice as much as we expected and only gone half as fast."

Devolution is...Creators.com!

The Defeatists began this enterprise because of a common interest in the columns of Crispin Sartwell, bon vivant and sometimes reality TV star on Creators.com. I started reading Creators because of Molly Ivins. Crispin left creators about 18 months ago, and Molly Ivins died. So, Creators became a lot less interesting. While they have yet to find a worthy successor to Molly, Crispin has now been replaced by...Chuck Norris.  I guess that's different...since Crispin is largely into philsophy, music and card tricks while Chuck is largely into breaking boards. With his nose.

File Under "Mindless Headcrashing Gridiron Entertainment"

Ah-ha...the blueprint!

The New England Patriots have been discussed and debated, compared to the greatest teams in NFL history and -- in this column and elsewhere -- all but fitted for their fourth Super Bowl ring. But over the past two weeks, we've discovered something shocking about the Patriots. They're human.

Well, I guess someone needs to end the Bostonian hegemony on the 2007 sporting landscape. The Jesus-infused Rockies were unable to stop the Saawks. The Celtics are rolling along...and the Patriots, well...

Look, I don't get all the rules in the NFL - there are just too goddamned many. Can't some linebacker just charge Brady and take out his knees?

That's how you defeat the Patriots.

intractible

Friedman's a goddamn idiot.

back when I was a gradual student studying, get this, sustainability issues in engineering, I used to get together with my advisor once in a while on a Friday afternoon and we'd slap each other's backs and hoot and holler about how if we were in charge a minimum five dollar tax on gasoline would bring about the changes we want to see in the world.  yea, what tools we were.  we wished we had the time to write a book like Kunstler, or some shit, and then everyone would be made to read and understand why change needs to come.  as if, like instantaneously, all zoning code would read as form-based (poof!), localities would shift tax code towards best use, and people would sell their cars - to nobody, or plant them in their yards.  as if transit oriented havens of walkable heaven would spring up like the cheap wood framed mcmansions have over the past decade.  little pockets of hope, or something.  as if more expensive oil is going to make anything else easier to do.  as if anyone cares.  as if it's impossible to move into a city or commute by bicycle as we sit here today. 

I've since refused to be a useful idiot for such idiots, and have instead found a home being a miserable illiterate cog in the mechanics of the current convention.  I am, or I perceive myself, stuck precisely because I cannot see my own way out of the mess, towards anything I might see as a worthwhile occupation of my time.  this affects my demeanor, my personality, my relationships, and so on and on.  I'm utterly and incorrigibly hopeless, aimless, apathetic, cynical and mean.  I also planted this blog's seeds.

so when I read Friedman's corpo-pseudo-intellectual-American-ho! inflections and reflections and unspoken wishes and dreams and so on, as backhandedly applied as they are in this piece, I can't help but think back, and shudder in disgust, like repeating something nasty I've eaten, or smelling a candied liquor that got me sick. 

I was at a very fine dinner awhile back with the wife, herself a former buy-side CFA, a hardworking and very lovely woman I may add, who used to work with on occasion, the host and other guests, all sell-side analysts from some German banke.  one of them mentioned a book he was reading, and I fucking forget what it was about, which kills this anecdote, but press on I will.  at any rate, in the conversation, I wound up mentioning something about how local indigenous people were able to avoid the giant tsunami a year or so back by paying attention to - what we call - nature.  this was interesting and new to them, but something I've known about since eco-gradual school days.  but, the theme was: get this, culture clash!  shock!  it was foreign to them that some other people somewhere else might live and recognize other things about this world, far differently from the western, detached-from-reality-at-the-brain-stem, awareness we've got.  it was amusing, because it bewildered them.  the meal was excellent.

and that's it, isn't it.  Friedman is, in his own way, a mother-fucking cargo-cultist. 

The inception of cargo cults essentially is based on a flawed model of causation, often being the confusion between the logical concepts of necessary condition and sufficient condition when aiming to obtain a certain result.

----

Famous examples of cargo cult activity include the setting up of mock airstrips, airports, offices and the fetishization and attempted construction of western goods, such as radios made of coconuts and straw. Believers may stage "drills" and "marches" with sticks for rifles and military-style insignia and "USA" painted on their bodies to make them look like soldiers, treating the activities of western military personnel as rituals to be performed for the purpose of attracting cargo. The cult members built these items and 'facilities' in the belief that the structures would attract cargo. This perception has reportedly been reinforced by the occasional success of an 'airport' to attract military transport aircraft full of cargo^{[citation needed]}.

Today, many historians and anthropologists argue that the term "cargo cult" is a misnomer that describes a variety of phenomena^{[citation needed]}. However, the idea has captured the imagination of many people in developed nations, and the term continues to be used today. For this reason, and possibly many others, the cults have been labelled millenarian, in the sense that they hold that a utopian future is imminent or will come about if they perform certain rituals.

why, oh why, do I picture a grass skirted Tom Friedman leading seances and chants on some remote island near Fiji or wherever, channeling the great god iPod and lesser god Toshiba, hoping for the great New Day to arrive, where all are one and one is all, forever is forever and ever, amen, in glorious techknowleconodgtopia. 

I think I might just have made myself pleased today, with this.  thus, blog. 

and, Mr.Friedman, re: democracy.  any rational choice theorist will tell you, that if the candidates appeal to the people's base instinct's, they will get elected.

Letting His Eagle Soar

This month's honorary inductee into Defeatist International is...

Opera singing Brit Tony Henry has become a Croatian hero for mispronouncing a line in the country's national anthem before its team consigned a lamentable England to the dustbin of footballing history on Wednesday night.

The ditty is "written in the old Croat style", the Telegraph explains, and instead of singing Mila kuda si planina - "You know my dear how we love your mountains" - Henry thundered Mila kura si planina, or "My dear, my penis is a mountain".

And the Croatians deserve an honorable mention for their sense of humor.

This evidently delighted Croatian players Vedran Corluka and Luka Modric, who were seen "grinning at each other" at the gaffe, and fans claim the slip helped relax the team before its 3-2 drubbing of McClaren's lacklustre side.

Accordingly, Croatians are now calling for Henry to be awarded with a medal and appointed their team's official mascot for Euro 2008. Mate Prlic, of Croatian footie mag Torcida, suggested: "He obviously relaxed the players so why not invite him to Euro 2008 to keep the winning streak going?"

Nice one, Henry. Your gaffe contributed to the defeat of your national team.

I wonder what U.S. Americans would do if someone butchered their national anthem...

oh, and I forgot this one...

England are the Cubs of World Football

File under: Defeat in Real Time...

Yesterday was do or die for England. All they needed was a draw against Croatia in this last game of qualification and they would be on their way to the Euro 2008 tournament next summer. Due to the important nature of this game, I went to watch it with a bunch of English fans at The Olde Ship in Santa Ana.  A couple pints of Boddingtons  and a plate of curry and chips later...

Goalkeeper Scott Carson, who will forever be known as "Horror Show", allowed two easy goals to put England down 0-2 by halftime. Fat Frank Lampard converted a penalty in the 50th minute and Peter Crouch scored a killer goal in the 65th minute. It looked as if they might hold on for 25 minutes to earn their much needed draw. But it wasn't to be. Croatia scored another and the match ended 2-3. When I left the packed pub, their clientele of British ex-pats was not too pleased. The England defense was probably the worst I've ever seen. The Croatians were running circles around the them. The nation that invented the game has failed to qualify for their own continental tournament. The Irish and the Scots, who both failed to qualify, must be rolling in schadenfreude at England's failure.

The morning after: The England coach was sacked and the fans are voicing their disgust. The English players can spend next summer on holiday instead of playing the likes of Italy, France, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Croatia, Greece, Turkey, Germany, Czech Republic, Spain, Sweden, Romania and the Netherlands.

Mi esposa and I will be in Spain and France during the tournament (which takes place in Austria and Switzerland) so I plan on watching a few games with local fans at pubs in Madrid, Barcelona and Paris.