We Lost A Good One

...when Richard Jeni killed himself - 7 years ago today.

Music For Monday

The Last Of The Mohicans --Luca Stricagnoli

One CPAC Thing Only

Attendees at the annual "conservative" fap-fest they call CPAC (Corporatized Panderers And Clowns) had a fine time over the weekend.

Two things:

First, the word is that the Casual Encounters section of Craiglist (for hookups and one-night stands) went crazy with traffic in and around the beltway, and the big hits were of the m4m variety.  To wit (via Addicting Info):

CPAC looking for discrete fun – m4m – 26 (Prince George’s County)

Staying in town for the conference. Looking to get my rocks off. discretion assured. Versatile looking for a masc man in his 20s or 30s.

--and--

CPAC 24 m4m NSA – m4m (CPAC)

It is that time again and I want to have some NSA fun after the speechesI want to fuck your mouth while I sign you up on the health care market place.I want you to be the gipper and go down on my jelly beans. I want to be discrete

The author at AI does note that some of these could easily be jokes, but even if they are, ya gotta know that some closet case at CPAC will likely take some of them perfectly seriously, which points up the ridiculousness of the anti-people policy positions of "the conservatives".

Second, here's a picture tweeted by a guy named John Hudak (Brookings Inst - so, a grain of salt on this one as well) that he says shows the "crowd" at the "Minority Outreach" panel discussion at CPAC, about 10 minutes into the session:

There is simply nothing of substance in anything the GOP has to say about how people-friendly they are or want to be.  You may have noticed they don't talk much about the big tent anymore.  It seems an awful lot of them don't feel they even have to pretend that's what they want.  And it's getting harder not to believe that their positions on issues like Immigration and Voter ID are all about an effort to establish minority-party rule.

Stand Up And Scream

Things Goin' On --Lynyrd Skynyrd



Have you ever lived down in the ghetto?
Have you ever felt the cold wind blow?
If you don't know what I mean,
Won't you stand up and scream?
'Cause there's things goin' on that you don't know.

Too many lives they've spent across the ocean.
Too much money been spent upon the moon.
Well, until they make it right
I hope they never sleep at night
They better make some changes
And do it soon.

They're goin ruin the air we breathe
Lord have mercy.
They're gonna ruin us all, by and by.
I'm telling all you beware
I don't think they really care
I think they just sit up there
And just get high.

It's Gotta Stop

How stupid do we have to be?  How bad does it have to get before we know that it has to stop, and it can only stop when we stand up and make it stop?

If you have the stomach for it, look at these pictures closely, and then tell me you don't understand how men and women in uniform are all fucked up in the head when we finally let them come home.  Why can't they just chill out and relax?  Why do so many of them look away - sometimes they seem embarrassed or even ashamed - while we're falling all over ourselves trying to convince them how grateful we are when all we can do is recite a few meaningless cliches about service and sacrifice that we heard on TV or we saw on a Facebook post?

There's no such thing as a Non-Combatant, and there sure as hell ain't no Un-Wounded Warriors.  What we've been doing for the last 15 years; the damage we're doing - purposefully - to an entire generation of American kids, as well as populations around the world - I guess all I can say is that every one of these asswipe TheoCons better hope there's no god after all, cuz he's gonna be pretty fuckin' pissed at all this shit.

Thinly Veiled

They don't call it influence-peddling, and they sure as hell don't call it bribery - they don't even call it lobbying any more - and before too much longer, they won't have to call it anything because we won't be able to see it.  The whole rotten thing will be scrubbed and sanitized to the point where not even the people participating in the scam will be able to recognize the stench of their own corruption.  Remember, we have great capacity for rationalization; bordering closely on self-delusion.



BTW - it's Russia TV.  So grains of salt are in order.  That said, sometimes the most honest criticism comes from your fiercest rival.

Here's the Link to Republic Report

Today's Pix

Logical Fallacy # 4: The Fallacy Fallacy

From Wikipedia:

Argument from fallacy is the formal fallacy of analyzing an argument and inferring that, since it contains a fallacy, its conclusion must be false.[1] It is also called argument to logic (argumentum ad logicam), fallacy fallacy,[2] fallacist's fallacy,[3] and bad reasons fallacy.[4]
Fallacious arguments can arrive at true conclusions, so this is an informal fallacy of relevance.[5]

Form[edit]:

It has the general argument form:

If P, then Q.

P is a fallacious argument.

Therefore, Q is false.[6]

Thus, it is a special case of denying the antecedent where the antecedent, rather than being a proposition that is false, is an entire argument that is fallacious. A fallacious argument, just as with a false antecedent, can still have a consequent that happens to be true. The fallacy is in concluding the consequent of a fallacious argument has to be false.

That the argument is fallacious only means that the argument cannot succeed in proving its consequent.[7] But showing how one argument in a complex thesis is fallaciously reasoned does not necessarily invalidate the proof; the complete proof could still logically imply its conclusion if that conclusion is not dependent on the fallacy:

All great historical and philosophical arguments have probably been fallacious in some respect... If the argument is a single chain, and one link fails, the chain itself fails with it. But most historians' arguments are not single chains. They are rather like a kind of chain mail which can fail in some part and still retain its shape and function.  --David Hackett Fischer, Historians' fallacies[3]

Making The Case

...with the case being that "conservatives" and DumFux News are all about the hyper-partisan politics and not about the policy at all.

From Media Matters (hat tip = Democratic Underground):



Another straightforward conservative, being all rational and pragmatic.  And of course, that's just crap all day long, because Chuckles Clownhummer said very nearly exactly the opposite when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008:

What is to be done? Let's be real. There's nothing to be done militarily. What we can do is alter Putin's cost-benefit calculations.

I wonder what changed.

Today's Reality

I don't watch "reality TV" because it's anything but reality.  I guess I should say I don't watch much of it.  I do feel the need to check in on it once in a while - partly because I have teenagers who watch way too much of that shit, and partly because ya gotta take a peek at whatever passes for "the popular culture" once in a while.

So anyway, the Kardashians and the Robertsons and all these other over-privileged addicted-to-themselves attention whores have absolutely nothing to say and nothing to do unless they first go as far outa their way as possible to find something to piss and moan about; and once they find something to get bitchy about, they go even farther outa their way to make sure their friends and family members are the ones they scuffle with over it.  BTW: they keep it "in the family" because the writers and the producers (and most importantly, the marketeers) have told them that's what the rubes viewing public want to see.  Nobody's that dysfunctional without being Deliberately and Purposefully Dysfunctional.  So that's pretty fucked up right there, but knowing it's what we asked for is even more fucked up.

Anyway - take all that and go one tiny step farther, by overlaying it onto what we see in politics practically every day.

Why does Walt Putin need to fuck with Crimea?  And why do Huckleberry Fauxbutch and Grampy McDumfuck then have to work so hard trying to figure out how to take the caricature of Obama as the feckless dictator who rules by Executive Order whenever he calls the GOP on obstructionism, and turn him into a dithering stumblebum who couldn't lead ants to a sugar bowl because he won't immediately launch all the nukes when Putin decides to wiggle his dick at somebody in western Asia?

There's plenty that's both real and wrong about what's happening in and around Ukraine.  I just wanna see a lot less of the fake shit.  Show me more of John Kerry stepping on his dick with a track shoe scolding the Russians about not invading countries for bullshit reasons - that was real and fun - and really funny.