Tag Archives: Popular Culture

Bullshit making instructions

Posted on by
1

Writing an column for Crank Magazine some years ago, I announced my intention to describe how to make a bomb. Crank Magazine took out a newspaper ad in the local daily to publicize the upcoming issue , mentioning the forthcoming bomb recipe. As a result we received letters and legal threats warning us not to reveal bomb-making secrets to the public at large.

The point of my article was not just to dispel the impression that bomb making was easy, but to argue the importance of the public’s access to that information. Several publishers had been hounded for their efforts to keep THE ANARCHIST’S COOKBOOK in print. The instructions are relatively simple to understand, but to execute them is another matter.

My point was illustrated by last week’s fantasy bomb plot. British and American authorities scared us with descriptions of dark skinned operatives sneaking aboard transatlantic flights armed with bottles of liquid bomb ingredients. If enough of us were conversant in basic chemistry, we could debunk such sky-is-falling wolf-crying. The Register has sorted out what it would take to successfully make an explosive from liquids smuggled aboard by airline passengers.

Several American columnists have now alluded to the Register article, but without the customary hyperlink. Perhaps they are still fearing to call attention to explicit chemistry instruction. I think that’s still playing gatekeeper with knowledge. Let the poorly-educated American public, too hung-over in highschool to have gotten anything out of early morning chemistry lab, understand what is required to make a bomb in an airplane lavatory: a miracle.

Digital reproduction of aluminum

Posted on by
Reply

1. Aluminum Siding
In the German film epic HEIMAT, an unscrupulous brother brags about the lucrative post-war business of aluminum siding. Barry Levinson’s 1987 TIN MEN depicted the same competitive salesmanship arena stateside. In Germany the aluminum siding industry was more of a scam because the aluminum wasn’t covering clapboard houses.

In Germany the salesmen were offering aluminum siding to replace historic decorative trim. Modern aluminum doors and window frames were being offered to replace old-world crafted wood pieces. The same salesman installing shiny new aluminum were warehousing the original antique pieces for resale to more savvy consumers.

Aluminum has been the wonder material with the cache of being aeronautic light and rust free. But took a hit when aluminum cooking ware was linked to alzheimer’s.

Element Digit2. Digital a new aluminum
Is digital the new miracle element on the alchemist’s Periodic Table? Is it better than its representative predecessor, analog? A digital watch might be easier to read than an analog dial because you don’t have to learn how to convert the information. But digital time is not really as versatile from a distance, or at an angle, or upside down.
 
But so it began. Digital is cheaper to manufacture, no mechanical parts, and without it we would not have computers. Computers rung in the digital age. Thus the digital halo.

Next up for the consumer, digital sound, and next, digital visuals. That’s where digital’s ascendancy may stumble.

Are digital compact discs indeed better than vinyl records? Music audiophiles will tell you no. Let’s revisit that question in a moment.

Who is convinced that digital cell phones are better than analog? Cheaper to make certainly, cheaper to broadcast, the recordings are easier to archive. Better for the telecoms, but for you? Digital cellphone service means more drop-outs and degraded signals. Remember when you could say, “wow, it sounds like you’re in the next room”? That wasn’t digital. Digital is the age of “can you hear me now? Um, how about now?”

I am not sitting in judgment of the potential of digital representation obviously, merely of cheap digital representation. With the technology of digital processing came fuzzy logic and compression. Each innovation was designed to reduce the digital reproduction to its most efficient lowest quality necessary.

CDs reproduce music for the average not so discerning ear. Sony’s Minidiscs reduced the complexity of the signal for what they determined the average ear could discern in the midst of car or jogging noises. MP3s filter out further signals based on the user’s own sense of what quality is good enough.

3. Digital is unnatural
It turns out we’re all a little more discerning with our vision. We can easily tell the difference between film and video. The film image is richer, warmer and more lifelike. Video is higher contrast and more stark. On the Internet we can all recognize compression artifacts and noise, even if we don’t know it by name. We see it because it does not look natural. That’s digital compression and it’s creeping into TV and DVD products because it’s cheaper for someone along the line.

Do we mind digital images? I guess not. Do we prefer them? No.

Musicians prefer the more natural sounds produced by analog amplifiers. Of course everyone is trying to represent the original, natural sound.

We can see the unnatural aspects of digital imagery. It may hurt our vision or it may not. Perhaps we can deduce that our ears are being assailed with similar digital mediocrity. So far it’s only the discriminating audiophiles who liken digital reproduction to nails on a chalkboard. Until it’s linked to Alzheimer’s.

Animal cruelty at the rodeo

Posted on by
13

Cruelty
I just learned how they make horses and bulls jump up and down at the rodeo. I must admit I wondered why it was that the animals suddenly leaped about madly (bronc’d) after they got out of the gate and not before, and why did they stop once the rider was thrown?

It turns out there’s a strap that the other cowboys cinch around the animal’s testicles. They yank it tight as they open the gate. Then, once the rider is thrown, attendants chase the animal and release the cinch.

This is why animal rights groups protest the rodeo. Oh they may protest the general mistreatment of the animals, and the risk of injury to which the animals are routinely and senselessly subjected, but that strap around the reproductive organs cinches it.

White Native Americans

Posted on by
3

A branch of our local library is hosting a discussion about a recent work of popular fiction, One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus. I’m thinking of stopping by to puke.

The novel begins by alluding that its unspeakable historical premise has factual merit. ALLEGEDLY the author’s great great aunt, a “May Dodd”, left a journal about her life experience, hidden all these years in shame by her family. The author takes it upon himself to tell her repressed tale, and because it is the untold fate of 999 nameless more, we infer it to be one of the dark secrets of the American national identity.

The story concerns 1000 white women who were traded to the Indians in exchange for resettlement and peace. One thousand white women. The title does grab you. It has undeniable where-the-white-women-at? appeal.

Another prominant White IndianThe phenomena also shares something with the White Indian Series by Donald Porter. That’s a western series for readers who couldn’t be bothered to know about the lives of the Native Americans unless they were WHITE Native Americans. These readers can’t sympathize with Indians as victims, unless they are white Indian victims, and then preferably of course they should be white Indian victims of Indians.

The mythic white Indian abounds on film, and it’s not just Indians. The story of The Last Samurai had to be about a white man in Japan (Tom Cruise) or who would care?

Here you have the fate of 1000 women sold, sacrificed or let loose down the river to become Indian squaws. One part romantic fantasy, several parts feminist grudge, (1000 parts rape fetish?), all at the hands of red heathen.

To be fair, the author does provide a disclaimer that 1000 white women never changed hands. Fergus implies however that an original Cheyenne proposal to be given 1000 white women was real and asks readers to ponder, what if?

If true, it’s a piercing lesson on the embarrassing legacy that can come from sarcasm.

How deeply insulting is it to suggest that Indian tribal leaders would have asked the army negotiators for white women? And as a condition of laying down their weapons? I think it’s indescribably racist to be susceptible to thinking that Indian fathers and braves sought white mates with whom to raise new generations of their tribe.

Neither in-breeding nor poor education are excuses enough for this prevalent self-centered bigotry.

Chain emails and Saint George

Posted on by
Reply

About this time each year for some reason, a certain friend of mine gets into a panic and passes on chain emails in renewed hope that she will come into money. Last year she sent everyone the It-Really-Works-Bill-Gates-Will-Pay-You-$275K email. A day later she apologized.

Does she recognize what all these chain emails are really about? Chain letters and Ponzi schemes in the cyber world take on an entirely different purpose than they used to have through snail-mail. And they succeed wildly. Chain emails circulate for large computers to map contact patterns and networks.

When you forward a chain email, its authors track whom you sent it to and how quickly. That’s why the email is launched in the first place, to chart enormous networks of who is in touch with whom. At the most superficial level, the process determines which email addresses are valid. To information traders the emails reveal social connections and hierarchies.

We’re not just talking about the pyramid schemes, we’re also talking about all those clever emails you get in the morning that apparently made one of your relatives smile. Where did you think those come from? Did you think some cherub with time on his hands, sitting at his kitchen window in Hawaii, composed a funny story addressing impish Americanisms which through myriad cyber degrees of separation found itself in your aunt’s incoming email? You’d be right. Except about the cherub’s clients who are watching the logs as their whimsical package bounces along.

Especially if the message involves embedded graphics. Server-side graphic files telegraph the whereabouts of an email in real time. Often graphic files are disguised as text. (MSN and Hotmail track all their email using embedded graphics that pretend to be text. Given that linked files require many times more computation power than does text, disguising the files AS TEXT would seem to concede that Microsoft knows we would not appreciate what they are doing.)

Don’t you wonder why at the end of each and every one of those clever emails, the funny sentiment is always followed by urgent instruction to send it on?

Do these authors think that they are just SO funny, you MUST pass their work on to everyone you know? Do you see this at the end of newspaper columns or comic strips? Do book authors end their novels by recommending that you tell all your friends to buy a copy or face three years of bad luck?

If an email asks to be sent on, and you want to, and must, here’s how to do it without contributing to the fortunes of direct marketers and spammers. Copy and paste just the text into a fresh email, then send it on. If there is a graphic, save it to disk and then attach it.

2.
Or put it on the web. Here’s an email forwarded to me from my good friend Paulette. 🙂 It’s an old joke, presented this go-round as Saint George.

Life is good TM

Posted on by
3

Gitmo
I encounter the LIFE IS GOOD mantra across hundreds of leisure products carried by boutique retailers. While the enjoy-life ethic would seem highly likeable, it does seem particularly ghoulish to be asking Americans to stop and smell the roses over the mass graves of our current third world horrors. I think it’s as perverse has handing everybody lemons so you can smell the lemonade.

I’d like to solicit readers to submit any photos of westerners wearing LIFE IS GOOD gear in the vicinity of global or environmental injustice; perhaps a grinning American traveling through a refugee camp in Darfur, Indonesia or Pakistan?

Meanwhile I may have to doctor such a photo, as Americans aren’t really looking at refugees, are they? Submissions will be published here.

The Taco Bell Fourth Meal gambit

Posted on by
1

for insomniac fatsosIn case we’re not getting fat quickly enough. Taco Bell is trying to schedule a fourth daily meal -the 24 hour day that is- somewhere in the vicinity of MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT.
 
And a meal of junk food at that. What do they take us for- big fat idiots?

As if we need to break up our sleep time (bad health and weight-loss planning), stick a meal immediately between sleep times (very very bad for digestion and weight-loss), add another full meal (three full meals a day is already unwise nutrition, better to eat small meals between activities), and again it’s high-fat, high-colesterol, hi-sodium fast food.

When Morgan Spurlock of SUPERSIZE ME took a wide-ranging survey of nutritionists to ask what would be a safe percentage of fast food meals which could be incorporated into a balanced diet, the consensus was: “ZERO.”

Go to Hell.

Desecrating the flag

Posted on by
Reply

This fourth of July I was enjoying the usual cook-out buffet, everything looked quite patriotic, Red White and Blue everywhere, including of course the table ware, including the napkins.

Every time I wiped barbecue sauce from my mouth, it was into an American flag. Would burning a flag be more irreverant?

There are countries which forbid the representation of their national flags in any form other than a flag. This even extends to wearing the flag. Such laws are probably to prevent the juxtaposition of their patriotic symbols with impropriety. Would you say wiping one’s mouth or feet on the flag might be an applicable example?

In this country, we’re only concerned about flag burning, the symbolic repudiation of our country’s questionable actions. Maybe that is worse.
 
Writing on US currency is illegal. So is writing on the lids of missile silos.
 
Here’s our chimp-in-chief on a rare occasion, doing something legal. 		  autographing flags

Organic food judged by the label

Posted on by
Reply

You can judge a book by its cover if the book’s edible and the judgement has to do with how it tastes.

Detractors of organic products like to criticise the label as if it’s some sort of scam. And they’re right, organic labels are hard to enforce. And getting harder. Big agra wants a piece of the organic produce market, and they’re fighting to dumb down the regulations so that they can label their usual crap organic.

But the argument that you cannot trust the organic appelation only flies with a dumbed down public. An organic apple tastes organic. That’s really a lot of the point. It’s healthier, yes, and it tastes quite a bit better.

The general public needs to be told it seems what a food is, because food no longer tastes much like it used to. You have to look at what it says on the bag for example to identify a red delicious.

It occurs to me that Koolaid presented an early challenge like this. You could only taste that it was red. You had to look at the package to see if it was cherry, strawberry, rasberry or none of the above.

Light summer fare

Posted on by
Reply

Congressman Westmoreland do-nothingHere are some wonderful video clips, if you haven’t seen them already:
 
1. Georgia congressman Lynn Westmoreland wants to post the Ten Commandments in the halls of congress, if only to be reminded of them himself. Here he is in an interview with Stephen Colbert.

2. If you haven’t seen it yet, Stephen Colbert’s address to the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. While you’re at it, read Colbert’s follow-up commencement speech.

3. Jon Stewart spars with Republican Party Chairman Ken Mehlman, and empathizes with him because “you have to spray perfume on the turds.”

4. Ask-a-Ninja explains net neutrality.

5. A David Copperfield sendup and an amazing juggling finale.

A Freudian mixed metaphor for the GOP

Posted on by
Reply

elephant gorillaI’ve read it several times now, the eight-hundred pound gorilla in the room. This would seem to confuse 1) the proverbial 600-900 lb primate (gorillas not named Kong seldom excede 400 lbs) who outclasses everyone else in size and power, for 2) the pachyderm in the room whose relative mass overwhelms our capacity to ignore it, though we try.
 
In this corporate age of Darwinian monopolies, maybe the de facto brutality of alpha-male corporate monopoly has become something the corporate media mouthpieces won’t let us talk about. There’s an elephant in the room, and the three hundred pound gorilla won’t let us talk about it.
 
The gorilla is the elephant is the new metaphor for the GOP.

Micky Ds Token house

Posted on by
2

TokenHere’s an unfortuante byproduct to what may have begun as an earnest environmental action. McDonalds was encouraging the recycling of aluminum cans. To offer credit for each can, to calculate a donation they intend for the Ronald McDonald House, McDonalds asks that you detach the flip-tops and collect them in a cute Ronald McDonald cardboard house.
 
Here’s what happened. People began recycling just the flip-tops. “They’re more important to recycle than the cans, apparently. Must be something about the density of the aluminum in the flip-top.” Uhuh.

Used American soccer balls

Posted on by
1

Soccer ball used in one gameThere’s a local drive to round up soccer balls to send off to the children of Iraq. And they don’t want new ones.
 
An eight year old friend of mine came home from school and explained the logic. “Iraqi children want soccer balls that have been played with by American children. Just like when I go to the ballgame and catch a ball that’s been hit into the bleachers. American kids are excited to have a baseball that’s been used by professional players. Iraqi kids are excited to have soccer balls used by American kids!”

Except that the distinction kids make between new and used is universal. Everywhere there are such things as hand-me-downs probably. Otherwise the concept of children of two nations sharing their toys with each other sounded nice.

Then I learned further instructions. If you do not have a used soccer ball to give and are inclined to purchase a new soccer ball, the organizers would like you to give the new ball to your local soccer league in exchange for a used one of theirs. Thus the local soccer teams will benefit from this program as well.

Does that sound like unmitigated self serving crap to you?

When charities solicit donations of toys for AMERICAN children at Christmas, they always specify that the toy must be NEW, not the least bit used.

Pictured: A soccer ball fit for Iraqi kids. Scuffed and scratched by American kids before the American kids got a new one.

Crappuccino

Posted on by
Reply

pictureWhat’s a coffee-free coffee? Does it say on the bottle it’s a “Crappuccino?” What is that? It’s not a milk-frapped espresso. Is it a strawberry milkshake? Is it a smoothie? A Yoo-Hoo? A DQ Freeze? Maybe it’s Pepto-ccino.
 
When Starbucks begins to sell burgers like Dairy Queen too, and when their customers begin avoiding Mad Cow foods, Starbucks can sell hamburger buns without the hamburgers [burger-free hamburgers] and call them crapwiches!

Bullshit artists

Posted on by
Reply

Penn, Teller, corporate AmericansOne of these likable dweebs may not be a complete asswipe.
 
But it isn’t Penn Asswipe Jillette.
 
I just caught an episode of BULLSHIT in which the dynamic duo was poking fun at the Endangered Species Act. The ESA is complete bullshit apparently because it doesn’t protect animals which may or may not be endangered, rather it protects land to which property rights advocates may feel they are entitled.

The Laurel to this Hardy is silent throughout, so it’s hard to accuse little Teller of the damnable untruths spewed by his well fed partner. This was an unforgivable attack on nature at risk. This was crapola from guys who have shown themselves on other subjects to know better.

Am I being too Politically Correct? Let me show you how PC works. Nothing’s inviolate, fine, but suffer the consequences for making light of defenseless animals in dire need. Nothing you can ever do will redeem you for minimizing the problems of your fellow beings who cannot speak for themselves.

You concluded your segment with Jerry Springer-like soft advice about animals facing extinction: “yes worry about them, but don’t pass laws, that doesn’t help anything.” Really you corporate prigs? You small minded, otherwise hip-sounding, gutless asswipe agents of corporate culture. Nothing you ever have to say will redeem the swill you have pitched here.

“Ninety nine percent of all creatures who’ve ever lived on earth are now extinct.” Really? Isn’t that kinda like saying one hundred percent of everyone who lived before us has died? Not a figure that tells us anything. How about saying, in the span of several billion years for which Earth has been in existance, twenty five percent of all extinctions ever have occured in just the last one hundred years? That might be more helpful, if hopefully also alarming. Yuk yuk.

And then to suggest at the very end of the show, not just that man might someday endanger himself and disappear, but that he might be replaced -ha ha- by one of the species currently endangered, is the height of cynicism. You goddamn twit. You know better, that’s what makes your message damnable. You call Paul Watson an asshole for ramming (illegal) fishing vessels, you accuse the Endangered Species Act proponents of using tear-jerk emotional manipulation, and yet the only example you give of the downside of the ESA is a crippled girl who has to shower outside at her friend’s house because she cannot build on the lot of land she has purchased because it is protected sanctuary for a protected bird.

You couldn’t have been more repulsive if this EPA segment had been satire. Instead you were part of the well-funded corporate lobby against nearly the only tool the environmental movement has ever had. And you portray California Representative Richard Pombo, the congressman with the worst environmental record ever, not to mention being an Abramoff and DeLay crooney, as some kind of folk hero.

It is true that the EPA is less about the species and more about land use control. Of course it is. The real story is why environmentalists cannot fight the corporate rapists on their own terms and have to couch their efforts in the language of saving the species.

By the way, is the Endangered Species Act by some coincidence facing an attack in congress right now? Yes.

The Salvation of Yasch Siemens

Posted on by
Reply

The Salvation of Yasch Siemens. The title of Armin Wiebe’s novel gives the story away. I would like to postulate that this coming of age tale depicts a young Mennonite imperiled by worldy lures. Yasch faces selfishness, sexual idolatry and homosexuality until he is ultimately saved by the guidance of a woman who asserts nature’s will with his semen.

Spika’s sledgehammer

Posted on by
Reply

Tonight was Gwyn Coleman’s Art Wars III at the historic City Auditorium, a great success as usual, everyone on the youthful side of the Colorado Springs art community was there. Spika had a performance piece in the show, and here’s what Spika did, the big goof.

Early in the evening Spika and an assistant painted a huge mural on stage of the United States in neon red against a black background. At the center of the red map was a yellow circle with a blue outer ring, over which was a green hazmat symbol.

Just before his performance piece which he called Metaxis, Spika led a robed figure [his wife dressed in burlap and darkened skin] resembling a Middle Eastern Muslim of irrelevant gender. She sat before the symbol at the middle of the America mural. Spika stood centerstage before a blacklight clad only in a pair of black shorts.

To a recording of Bob Dylan singing Masters of War, Spika rolled up his shorts into the sides of the waistband so that his attire resembled that of Jesus or Tarzan or Captain Underpants. Then Spika began to rub fluorescent red paint all over his legs and bare feet.

Spika wiped his hands on the front of his shorts, a repetitive move which looked uncomfortably indulgent until we saw that he was cleaning his hands for the next color. Then Spika covered the upper half of his body with blue paint. By this time the soundtrack had progressed to Jimmy Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner. Spika rubbed the blue into his face and poured what remained of the blue paint over his hair.

Now Spika wrapped a skirt of white stripes around his waist. These were strips of white paper suspended on a wire waistband. Then he draped a similar shawl of white paper stars over his shoulders. Having made a living flag of himself, Spika donned a yellow crown of spikes, whatever it is that the Statue of Liberty wears, greatly amplified and struck a pose. Once the applause subsided, Spika walked over to the robed figure at the center of the America mural.

We were not sure as he turned his back to her, if he wasn’t bending to take a crap on the Muslim, but instead he sat between her legs. Then Spika slowly reclined into the arms of his robed non-westerner to create …a pieta, and the crowd went wild.

Handcrafted aggrandizement

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve always been irked by the Starbucks invented term “Barista.” It’s the equivalent of Walmart calling their workers “associates.” It means nothing except to delude the workers that they are something more than slave-wage, unskilled workers.

Barista might imply that someone who serves coffee has a cultural legacy, shielding the subject from their more relevant historic socio-economic legacy: low man on the totem pole.

Recently I’ve been hearing a locally owned coffee joint using some of this psycho-syntax to its own advantage. “Handcrafted coffees.” They’re made by hand, obviously. But unlike a parking ticket, or a shaken welcome mat, a “handcrafted” coffee inplies the work of a craftsman.

While it’s certainly a nice sentiment, wouldn’t we all like to be thought craftsmen of our own realm? It doesn’t matter that it’s a delution of what it means to be a craftsman. Rather, it’s a lie. Shit by any other name would smell as sweet.

Hee Haw rides again

Posted on by
Reply

Hee Haw rides again!
Reprise: Junior Samples, Grandpa Jones, Buck Owens and Roy Clark.
 
No I’m messing with you. This is the cast of Blue Collar Comedy Tour Rides Again or something like that. Three funny guys who make an enormous living by speaking for the common man, plus the Cable Guy, their greek chorus, in this case impersonating the common lower common man. Really, when Larry The Cable Guy, Bill Engvall, Jeff Foxworthy and Ron White appear in promotional pictures, CD covers or movie posters, they are never shown in any other order than where their fans have seen them sit on their Comedy Central special. What an interesting opinion of the intellectual incapacity of your target audience.

I caught a little of this popular act on TV and I knew I’d seen it somewhere before. HEE HAW! It was funny then, and it’s funny still. But back then we didn’t have hicks for country music stars and for race car drivers and for president of the United States. Is this where you get when you idolize people who behave like they were schooled in a barn?

We make multi-millionaires out of people who talk like hayseeds. Nothin’ wrong with hayseeds, on tractors naturally. And clearly country music stars, like redneck comedy stars and like NASCAR driving stars have a lot more going for them upstairs than your average service station gofer. Most of the time we can tell that politicians and preachers who pander to the lowest common denominator, are not themselves so gullible. However, we don’t want our doctors to be hayseeds, nor our scientists, nor our news reporters, nor even customer service representatives. Why are we looking for comedic wisdom from hayseeds?

Lauding a hayseed for comedic wit seems to me to set a terrible example. We’re supposed to laugh at what stupid thinks is stupid? It’s terrifying to me that there’s even an entire auditorium full of stupids who want to hear country dumbkins opine about life. This is misogeny and gay-bashing and oversimplification of everything. Sure it’s funny to laugh at political correctness, until you consider why something is thought correct or incorrect in the first place. Life is a little bit complicated, and we don’t mind admitting that we like the most qualified person to be driving the bus. What is so funny about an idiot sounding off? Especially in a world where the court jester resembles the radio commentator and worse our presidential dauphin.

These guys tell the same jokes to each other, even work in ad libs for each other from their own original routines. This would not be so bad except that the good ol’ boys give each other kudos for their clever repartees, even though the audience would know from the CD they’ve already memorized that even the joviality is canned.

Most of us, when retelling a story in the presence of someone who we might have told already, will begin by saying “I was telling such-an-such…” so awkward are we about repeating ourselves. Performers naturally have to repeat themselves, and have to act among each other like the material is fresh. But to give each other credit for extemporizing a put-down is pretty damn lower denominator.

Prizefight fixed

Posted on by
Reply

Autist-in-chief snickering
We are watching a prizefight. Bush is swaggering and staggering around with his arms in the air having declared himself winner before the bell has rung, as he’s done through every round. This time he’s looking deliriously vulnerable. He’s got the typical bad guy aura of a smug WWWF villain. He could be in a wheelchair and the crowd would cheer to see him clobbered.

We are yelling at the top of our lungs for Bush’s opponent, any opponent, to knock him down! A child could do it! Go up there and push him over with the pinkie finger of your left hand! Now! Get in there you bum! Do it! Impeach! Censure! Ask him a tough question!

But his opponent won’t touch him. Won’t even get in the ring. Won’t even look us in the eye. You bum! Worse, the opponent won’t let anyone else get into the ring either. It’s becoming clear that we are dealing with a ringer who’s being paid not just to lose, but to keep other challengers out of the ring. This bum’s job is to ensure that Bush comes out on top no matter what. This bum is on the same payroll as the rampaging little tantrum.

Let’s not forget that as terrible as the fight has been to watch, everything’s going swimmingly for those who are paying the bills. The Iraq war has paid off handsomely. Katrina relief a windfall. Tax cuts for the rich a wet dream. The promoters could not have imagined such success. Their little dictator is stomping roughshod around the ring and the Democrats are pulling their punches, doing a remarkable job making it look difficult to take a swing at Bush the autist-in-chief. The bums!

Intellectual property rights in the bathroom

Posted on by
Reply

You can get a calculator for 99 cents. Glossing over for a moment the issue of the third world child/slave/prison exploitation that goes into these cheap products, consider that we can manufacture incredibly complex and intricate gizmos for pennies.
 
Why then do razorblades based on a patented design cost nearly two dollars a pop? They’re also made in China for pennies. Why do blades for electric razors cost six dollars? Why do brushes for electric toothbrushes cost four dollars? If the design of those products were in the public domain, their consumer price could be in the pennies.
 
That’s the cost to you in the bathroom of intellectual property rights.

Plague upon Iraq

Posted on by
Reply

Swarm of locustsNevermind that this operation appears to have been a diversion.
 
This is a picture of U.S. locusts launching the largest airborn assault on Iraq since the U.S. invasion. The attack upon a suspected resistance stronghold north of Samarra was called OPERATION SWARMER.

Where have you seen this imagery before? How about in A BUG’S LIFE, the nasty grasshopper gang, swarming the little ant colony to terrorize them and take their food.

If you missed A Bug’s Life, perhaps you recognize the malevolant silhouettes taking to the air in geometric formation from THE WIZARD OF OZ. The flying monkeys unleashed by the Wicked Witch.

An article from Time about the airborn assault ended with this description:

Before loading up into the helicopters for a return trip to Baghdad, Iraqi and American soldiers and some reporters helped themselves to the woman’s freshly baked bread, tearing bits off and chewing it as they wandered among the cows. For most of them, it was the only thing worthwhile they’d found all day.

Neverland vs. Disneyland

Posted on by
Reply

Michael Jackson kid collectionOf course Michael Jackson is closing Neverland, his kid-themed estate in Southern California, he doesn’t need it, he’s gone to Disneyland!
 
(Caution: this article may get a little gross.)
 
The California Disneyland where children run around unattended? The Florida Disney world
with its similar kid-sized attractions? No, it’s just an expression. Jocko’s gone to the proverbial ne-plus-ultra destination for those who’ve hit the jackpot. Well you be the judge.

Michael Jackson got off charges of child molestation, statutory rape, contributing to the delinquency of minors, kidnapping, unlawful detainment, all now curiously summarized as “child abuse.” After which he immediately scooted out of the country! Despite the most unbecoming of evidence, Michael Jackson got away without being declared a sex offender. Maybe he knows something we don’t because he decided he didn’t want to stay within reach of U.S. law enforcement, and he obsconded to… Bahrain.

Where’s Bahrain? What’s Bahrain? Michael Jackson says he has friends there who he feels are more simpathetic to his inner whatever he is. His friend is a sheikh in Bahrain with oil to pay for harems.

Bahrain is like the United Arab Emirates, which are small sultanates set up by the British in such a way that the oil wealth would not have to be shared by national populations but rather by simply the occupiers of each particular stretch of desert. The Dutch did the same thing in Brunei, carved out of Indonesia. These are artificial borders meant to exclude the actual indigenous inhabitants who might require the traditional colonial investments in infrastructure and social welfare.

Imagine if instead of launching the California gold rush, Sutter had walled up his Mill, declared it an autonomous Sultanate, and all the gold wealth had gone only to fund vast automobile collections, Manhattan real estate investments, decadent harems and orgies, ad vomitum, leaving the rest of Californians to a tribal existance outside the flow of the gold largess.

What do Middle East sultans do with themselves which Michael Jackson finds so simpatico? It’s probably not to do with subjugating their populations with poverty and repressive religious dogma. Maybe it’s speedboat racing, who knows? More likely it has to do with the secretive harems, collections of captive sex partners lured and trafficked from all parts of the globe, reputedly the “white slave trade” which what do you wanna bet includes children?

To recap, how did the various pedophelia behaviors so graphically documented by Jackson’s prosecutors, from the Jesus Juice to the predatory grooming, come to be summarized as “child abuse?” Mere balcony-baby-dangling by comparison. This mirrors the current media subversion of the word rape, and all the horror it conjures, by using the more ambiguous term “sexual assault.”

The white Olympics

Posted on by
7

Smokestacks of TurinToday I watched the opening ceremonies of the White Olympics in Torino.
 
Yes, White Olympics. Virtually all the athletes are white. White because winter sports take place in northern climes where most everybody is white. White because winter sports require equipment beyond what tropical non-developed countries can afford their athletes. White because that is the color of the world aristocracy.

But the Summer Olympics were very much the same. Compared to World Soccer, or the NBA, or the NFL, or the AFL-CIO, the Summer Olympics are lily-white.

So everyone at the Winter Olympics is white, the entire South African team is white. The few dark faces among the white are citizens of white countries who trace their roots elsewhere.

When the American team made its entrance, I wondered, where were the boos? The American athletes were smiling and waving, many were hamming for the camera, one was talking on her phone. An audience was never shown, either booing or applauding.

But there would not have been booing at this pageant. This was a fete for the developed countries, presently at war with darker skinned countries. This was a white man’s club. The few delegates from dark countries were vestiges of the old colonial representatives, cousins of the western nations, returned home having lost their lands and authority to land-reform and indigenous efforts to reclaim territorial autonomy.

So this celebration was the bi-annual gathering of the ruling class, their athletes who can afford to practice their athletics full time, and the spectators who can jet around the world and attend the events.

And the symbol of power from which the ruling classes owe their supremacy was visible in the Olympic flame. Some might also find it was appropriate for the industrial city of Torino.
 
I thought it looked right out of Antonioni’s stark 1964 film Red Desert about industrial ennui, the multiple-funneled smokestack that is this year’s Olympic cauldron.