Winter Song

Winter Song --Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Micaelson

Lying Media

The DumFux News affiliate in Baltimore ran a clip that made it sound like protesters were ending their chant with "kill a cop".

And of course, it was bullshit (Hanlon's Razor notwithstanding).  The station took the story down after they got a lot of push-back, and they even made with the usual "apology", saying it was accidental - which is also bullshit because you don't accidentally do a quick-cut edit unless you're trying to make the thing say something it doesn't actually say.  This does not happen by accident.  Somebody wanted that clip out there.  Somebody OK'd that clip for air, and for posting on the website.



But it's prob'ly not gonna matter to the rubes - they got their Scary-Black-People fix and that's all anybody cares about.

In case anybody wants to know:
We won't stop
We can't stop
'Til killer cops
Are in cell blocks

Hanlon's Razor

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained in terms of stupidity.

I'll be trying a little harder to keep that in mind from now on as I try to sort my way thru some of the phenomenally idiotic political arguments that have come to be the benchmark of public discourse here in USAmerica Inc.

After Xmas Pix

A Song For Christmas

An Atheist Christmas Carol --Vienna Teng


It's the season of grace coming out of the void
Where a man is saved by a voice in the distance
It's the season of possible miracle cures
Where hope is currency and death is not the last unknown
Where time begins to fade
And age is welcome home

It's the season of eyes meeting over the noise
And holding fast with sharp realization
It's the season of cold making warmth a divine intervention
You are safe here you know now

Don't forget
Don't forget I love
I love
I love you

It's the season of scars and of wounds in the heart
Of feeling the full weight of our burdens
It's the season of bowing our heads in the wind
And knowing we are not alone in fear
Not alone in the dark

Xmas Pix

A Little Rational Thinking

...goes a long way.  From Rolling Stone:

After months of escalating protests and grassroots organizing in response to the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, police reformers have issued many demands. The moderates in this debate typically qualify their rhetoric with "We all know we need police, but..." It's a familiar refrain to those of us who've spent years in the streets and the barrios organizing around police violence, only to be confronted by officers who snarl, "But who'll help you if you get robbed?" We can put a man on the moon, but we're still lacking creativity down here on Earth.

But police are not a permanent fixture in society. While law enforcers have existed in one form or another for centuries, the modern police have their roots in the relatively recent rise of modern property relations 200 years ago, and the "disorderly conduct" of the urban poor. Like every structure we've known all our lives, it seems that the policing paradigm is inescapable and everlasting, and the only thing keeping us from the precipice of a dystopic Wild West scenario. It's not.

I have no plans to stop bitching about things - when I think something's wrong, I'm gonna bitch about it.  But while it's really lotsa fun to unleash a good cathartic-feeling tirade, eventually, there's no point in it if all I ever do is bitch about it.  So here's the thing: we've gotta come up with alternatives.

We have a problem with violence.  Recognize and deal effectively with that problem, and we're a big step closer to being able to solve some of the other problems that grow out of our problem with violence.

Right now, we look a lot like the townsfolk in the old westerns who hire a gunslinger to deal with (insert local bad guy here), but then realize they've only substituted one bully for another.

Violence in service of politics is at the heart of what we're supposed to be the exception to.

Let's try something else.

Like It's Christmas

Santa Claus Is Coming To Town --Ramsey Lewis Trio





Please Come Home For Christmas --Charles Brown





Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis --Tom Waits




The Christmas Song --Siatigas





Christmas In The Room --Sufjan Stevens





All I Want For Christmas Is You --Mariah Carey and Jimmy Fallon et al





O Holy Night --Dublin Gospel Choir





Christmas Tears (cover) --Eric Clapton





Someday At Christmas --Jack Johnson

Deadly Rhetoric

Via Mock Paper Scissors:

(tengrain asks for citations to back up the claims of "propaganda", but of course, "conservatives" just get really upset when you press for things like evidence, so yeah - good luck widdat)

“We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police. The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged. The protests, even the ones that don’t lead to violence, a lot of them lead to violence, all of them lead to a conclusion: The police are bad, the police are racist. That is completely wrong.” --Mr 9/11, Rudy Giuliani

But even if I grant the assertion of "4 months of propaganda", how could that come anywhere close to the years of toxic anti-government slagging coming from the Radical Right?

"Government's not the solution, government's the problem."

"...drown it in a bathtub."

and on

and on

and on

And that's nuthin' compared with the deafening silence coming from the Ammosexuals at the moment.

Wanna talk about all those cuts in funding for Mental Health now?

Then this from TMZ:

I'm getting one of my lousy feelings that the Press Poodles will spend most of their time and energy spinning this into another episode of "Both Sides".  They'll report the controversy as if all things are equal, and we'll end up staying paralyzed in the middle.

Big fuckin' problems.  But the really big one boils down to this:  We can't go on being further and further isolated from our government when we were set up to be self-governing.  It astounds me to think of how much we bitch about "nobody taking responsibility for anything" when we sit on our thumbs and do nothing but bitch about how shitty everything is.

The Trouble With Bryan

Bryan Fischer (affectionately dubbed Reverend Fishsticks at Mock Paper Scissors), has decided that the homosexual agenda represents the greatest single threat to religious liberty we have ever seen in the history of our existence as a nation."

As usual, the "conservative" has shown some true colors here.  It's not a conservative value to deny people their rights.  Which should make it really clear that Bryan Fisher is as radical as they come.

Forget the usual bullshit about stirring up fear of the big bad homos - that shit does keep working surprisingly well on an awful lotta rubes, but by now shouldn't it be about as frightening as the Haunted House that the PTA puts on at the local middle school that's the same fucking thing every fucking year?

It's a pretty simple premise - the best way for me to ensure my own right's is by ensuring everybody else's rights.  

As we progress a little further towards Equal Rights, the only thing Bryan Fisher "loses" is what he believes (in his carbon-black little heart) to be his birthright as a white middle-class Christian American; his anointment by the almighty to have dominion over everything; to dictate to us what his imaginary friend tells him we must do to please him.  I can't think of anything more arrogantly and quaintly out-of-step with everything we've learned about self government over the last 2 1/2 centuries.

Entitlement much, muthuhfuckuh?