A Brief Moment Of Enlightenment

Libertarians (for lack of a better label) are opposed to ObamaCare because taken to the logical extreme - which is where an awful lot of 'em seem to be located now - they have to be opposed to any and all efforts to suck them into any and all kinds of Collaborative/Cooperative/Collective endeavor.

It's not that they object to ObamaCare per se - they have to object to the very notion of Insurance itself.  The idea of getting together with a bunch of people you don't know and can't trust is off-putting enough, but being forced to pool your resources with these unwashed, unwelcome, undeserving miscreants?  Child, please.

Insurance is the Communism of Capitalism, and it must be avoided by all self-respecting Rugged Individuals.

Pay What You Owe

So here we go again.  We're still in a position of having to borrow money from ourselves to pay the bills, and we'll have to raise the debt limit (again) in the next coupla months, and of course that means the Repubs are making noise (again) about "getting some concessions" from the president in exchange for their support.

OK - as if we weren't all just sick o' this shit - here it is (again):  The House of Representatives decides how much money we're going to spend on what things.  It's right there in Article 1 of the US Constitution - look it up.  The Prez and the Senate and your dead Aunt Tilley can submit budget requests until Michele Bachmann grows a brain, but nobody spends one brass farthing if John Boehner and his merry band of Sludge Divers don't agree to it ahead of time.

So Boehner says it's OK to spend the money; Obama spends the money; and then Boehner says whoa, you spent too much money - we'll have to punish you for spending the money we told you it was OK to spend, so instead of paying for all the shit we told you to buy, we're going to shut down the whole government until you agree to keep us from telling you to spend all that money next time, which will cause our credit rating to drop, which will cost us even more money - and it's all your fault.

How in the blue-eyed-buck-naked-fuck does this make sense to anybody?

Our Glorious Empire

If this pic doesn't enbiggen very well for you, go to Federacion de Asociaciones Cannibicus for a better look.

Today's Best Blog Line - #2

"Ignorance Arbitrage"

Here's the whole post from No More Mister Nice Blog:

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

EVEN THE TRIVIAL TALKING POINTS FROM THE RIGHT ARE DISHONEST

I saw that Newsmax was pushing this ridiculous story and wasn't sure it was worth a post, but now I see it's a front-page story at Fox Nation, so here's the ridiculousness:

'Butler' Box Office Sales Plummet by One-Third

The movie "Lee Daniels' The Butler" saw its weekend box office receipts plummet by nearly a third, from $24.6 million in its opening week to $17 million last week, after a storm of protests from Republican and veterans groups.

The film depicts a White House butler who served eight presidents, and has come under fire for its portrayal of former President Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy as being racially insensitive and for casting Jane Fonda as the first lady.

Supporters of President Reagan and veterans groups especially have criticized the film, with some calling for boycotts....

Oh, its box office plummeted? By nearly a third? And it's all because of boycotts by Reagan lovers and Jane Fonda haters? (Or, as the Fox Nation headline implies, because America has suddenly become tired of Oprah Winfrey?)

Nonsense. Every movie that reaches #1 at the weekend box office "plummets" the next week. Boycotts aren't necessary -- moviegoers just move on.

Yes, The Butler's box office dropped 33.0% in its second weekend, according to Box Office Mojo. But the previous #1, Elysium, suffered a54.1% drop in its second week. Before that was 2 Guns: a 58.4% drop.Before that was The Wolverine: a 59.9% drop. Before that was The Conjuring: a 46.9% drop.

Do I need to go on? In fact, The Butler had the smallest second-week drop for a #1 movie since Identity Thief back in March.

This story is up at Fox Nation even though Rupert Murdoch runs a movie studio. It's not as if the moviegoing habits of Americans are unknowable to the Fox media empire.

But this is what I call the right-wing media's "ignorance arbitrage." The conservative purveyors of this nonsense know it's nonsense. But they know they can sell it to people who don't. And that's what they do.

Today's Best Blog Line

Actually it's more like the naming of a concept - something I've been trying to find for a very long time now:

Compulsory patriotism does nothing for soldiers who risk their lives -- but props up those who profit from war

So simple - like the Jitterbug - it plumb evaded me.

From a piece in Salon by an English professor at Virginia Tech:

In addition to donating change to the troops, we are repeatedly impelled to “support our troops” or to “thank our troops.” God constantly blesses them. Politicians exalt them. We are warned, “If you can’t stand behind our troops, feel free to stand in front of them.” One wonders if our troops are the ass-kicking force of P.R. lore or an agglomeration of oversensitive duds and beggars.

Such troop worship is trite and tiresome, but that’s not its primary danger. A nation that continuously publicizes appeals to “support our troops” is explicitly asking its citizens not to think. It is the ideal slogan for suppressing the practice of democracy, presented to us in the guise of democratic preservation.

 --and--

In reality, the troops are not actually recipients of any meaningful support. That honor is reserved for the government and its elite constituencies. “Support our troops” entails a tacit injunction that we also support whatever politicians in any given moment deem the national interest. If we understand that “the national interest” is but a metonym for the aspirations of the ruling class, then supporting the troops becomes a counterintuitive, even harmful, gesture. 

Today's Freedom From Religion

This is Eddie Castillo - a student at Texas Tech:

Eddie is fighting the good fight.  The Texas DMV allowed him to wear his pasta strainer for his driver's license picture.

From Raw Story:

A Texas Tech student said that he was celebrating religious freedom for atheists when he fought to wear a pasta strainer on his head in his official driver’s license photo.

KCDB reported on Saturday that Eddie Castillo spent four months researching and contacting government officials before he got approval to wear the pasta strainer, which he claims is religious garb worn to “worship” the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Castillo is part of a group of “pastafarians,” a name coined by atheists protesting the Kansas School Board’s decision to teach intelligent design in 2005.

“You might think this is some sort of a gag or prank by a college student, but thousands, including myself, see it as a political and religious milestone for all atheists everywhere,” Castillo told KCDB.

Way to go, Eddie.

College Then And Now

How do I get into a decent school?
1983: Pay enough attention in high school to graduate with a 2.5 GPA, then fill out 3 forms and mail them to a college somewhere that sounds like an OK place, and where a few of your friends plan on going.
2013: Graduate HS early with a 4.8 GPA, be fluent in 3 languages, write the greatest Entrance Essay anybody ever read explaining how easy it was for you to find a cure for cancer in your spare time after church.

How do I pay for college?
1983: Work a construction job in the summer after HS, and then bus tables for a few hours a week during the school year when you need cash for beer and pot.
2013: You know you don't need both of those kidneys, right?

Once I get my degree, what can I do with it?
1983: Find a good job in your chosen field (or in almost anything, really) and begin building a rewarding life for yourself.
2013: Hang onto that diploma - you'll be short on toilet paper soon enough.

Out There Amongst Them

So here I am at the Dunkin' Donuts on US29 north of town - for reasons I don't need to explain - and there's this old guy at the counter feeling a bit chatty, complaining about all the bums and freeloaders he's encountered lately.  He tells of the panhandler he talked with not long ago, who claimed to be making $300 or $400 a day, and how he has a late model Mercedes, and one of his panhandler buddies just bought a nice new RV.  I successfully resisted asking him if he's in the habit of striking up conversations with people he has so little respect for when they accost him on the street and ask him for a handout.  I'm always a bit curious how you can get such a wealth of information from someone you think is a total bum.  Unless of course one of you is a liar.

The kid doing the cooking chimed in with his story of a "homeless guy" he met who told him about getting a boatload of hotel vouchers - at $60 a pop - and how he stays at the Hilton four nights a week, and blah blah blah.

Then, wanting not to be left out apparently, the cashier lady just had to throw in with "if I have to take a drug test to get a job, then they should take a drug test to get their free stuff".

Maybe I've been around too long or something, but these stories and the standard reactions and observations and what somehow passes for insightful comment have all grown pretty fucking boring.

I don't believe most of what spills out of people's gobs most of the time anymore.  I get the weird feeling that an awful lot of these "regular folk" have heard these anecdotes in one form or another for so long, they not only take them as the truth, but have actually absorbed some of them to the point where they think the tale in question has sprung organically from their own experience.  It seems like a variation on Munchausen's Syndrome - Munchausen's By Osmosis maybe?

So, Here's A Question

What if Antoinette Tuff had been laid off?



If the school district in Decatur had come up a little short this year (because of a thoroughly bizarre problem we have of not being able to figure out that we have to pay for stuff), then there's a real probability that this one turns out just a bit different.

PS) Ms Tuff can "give it all" to her god if that's what she feels the need to do - for myself and (I'm bettin') for the 870 kids in that school, and the thousands of their family members, we're just pretty grateful for Antoinette Tuff.

A Special Message

For all of our friends out there who're still hung up on the conventional wisdom - stuck in the rut of False Equivalence  - still convinced that "both sides do it" - "they're all the same".  These are otherwise good people.  And no matter how fucked up the Repubs get, they're just always going to say, "Yeah, but the Democrats..."

This is for them - because we love them: