Kind Of A Weird Amalgam

Today's Term Coining

"Trumpkins"

A very special thanks to National Review (yeah, I know - seems a little weird coming from me, eh?)

“But he speaks his mind!” shout the Trumpkins. Indeed, he does, in a practically stream-of-consciousness fashion: His announcement speech was like Finnegans Wake as reimagined by an unlettered person with a short attention span. The value of speaking one’s mind depends heavily on the mind in question, and Trump’s is second-rate. “He’s the candidate who will take the fight to Hillary!” protest the Trumpkins. Maybe, maybe not: He is on record as a supporter of Herself, and he’s not on record as a presidential candidate, having not bothered to file the FEC paperwork making his candidacy official. “He’ll build a wall on the border and make the Mexicans pay for it!” Unlikely, but even if he did, half of illegal immigrants arrive not on the banks of the Rio Grande but in the airports. Trumpkins: “He’ll show the political elites who’s boss!” They already know, because they already own him: You don’t get into Trump’s game without being a creature of the ruling class. Neither casino licenses nor Manhattan building permits find their way into the hands of the unconnected, in this case the heir to — not the creator of — a New York City real-estate empire.

--and--

Trump may be made out of cookie dough — he has a lot more in common with Paris Hilton than with Henry Ford — but he plays an iron man on television, and a certain sort of man — forgive me for pointing this out — finds the theatrical preening of Trump’s alpha-male act erotically compelling. (Properly understood, The Apprentice and its ilk constitute a subgenre of pornography.) That is not entirely surprising: We live in an age of economic insecurity, and it is attractive to imagine having Trump’s wealth and confidence, even if neither of those rests on as sure a foundation as Trump would have us believe. It’s better to be the boss — to be the man who says, “You’re fired!” — than the man who has to go home emasculated and face his wife’s disappointment.

I would normally have to take the National Review calling Trump a blowhard phony and make the connection for myself regarding what they must be implying about anybody who believes what Trump is saying - but they've left very little room for doubt on that one this time.  So...thanks, guys - uhmm...I'll have to hold off thinking you might make a habit of it for now, but yeah - way to go.  I guess.

Today's Podcast

...is actually from last Thursday: 

And I have to paraphrase George Carlin: "Think about how stoopid the average DumFux News viewer must be - now consider the fact that 50% of 'em are even stoopider than that.

And also too - the rebuttal for the standard bullshit argument, "...a good guy with a gun..." gets pretty simple: What if the good guy with a gun is the first one to be shot and killed?

And then of course, everybody should have a gun because "an armed society is a polite society".  Yeah - everybody knows what a Paradise of Courtesy they've got going in places like Somalia and Syria and Yemen and Nigeria and Sudan.  Pick any truly fucked up joint anywhere in the world and tell me the ubiquity of guns isn't at least a top 3 factor contributing to the fucked-up-ed-ness.

Nuthin' New

9 dead church-goers.  This makes 14 times the shit got real enough for Obama to address the nation about gun violence.  Over 100,000 gun-related deaths and injuries every year in USAmerica Inc.  And we can't do one fucking thing about it?

What worries me most right now - given the color of the most prominently shown victims' skin lately - is that somebody must already be saying, "Nothing changes until rich white people start dying in large enough numbers".

The conventional wisdom is that Reagan signed gun control legislation when he recognized  the need to placate his white majority Californians who were freaking out because the Black Panthers were walking around "their own" neighborhoods with weapons, and a few had decided to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights with a little open-carry demonstration in Sacramento.  (Some of those good times from the 60s everybody seems so selectively nostalgic for)

Like the man said, history doesn't actually repeat itself, but it sure enough rhymes like a motherfucker.

Rainin'

Riders On The Storm --The Doors

Here Comes The Rain Again --Eurythmics

Have You Ever Seen The Rain --Creedence Clearwater Revival

Early Morning Rain (cover) --Eva Cassidy

Here Comes That Rainy Day Feelin' Again --The Fortunes

A Rainy Night In Georgia --Brook Benton

The Sky Is Crying (cover) --Derek Trucks and Warren Haynes

The Manifesto

No idea if this is the real deal, but I'm betting on a coupla things here -

1) it sounds to me like Roof didn't expect to survive; this is as much a suicide note as anything else.

2) I think we can expect the False Flaggers to go more than a little nuts because if this thing is real, Roof is confirming an awful lot of what lotsa people have been assuming all along; plus it confirms what lots of us have been trying to warn the wingnuts about when it comes to the extreme-ness of the rhetoric coming from certain rather large pockets of the "conservative" end of the spectrum.

This shit doesn't happen in a vacuum for no fucking reason.

Reportedly from Dylann Roof per Raw Story:

I was not raised in a racist home or environment. Living in the South, almost every White person has a small amount of racial awareness, simply beause of the numbers of negroes in this part of the country. But it is a superficial awareness. Growing up, in school, the White and black kids would make racial jokes toward each other, but all they were were jokes. Me and White friends would sometimes would watch things that would make us think that “blacks were the real racists” and other elementary thoughts like this, but there was no real understanding behind it.

The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?

From this point I researched deeper and found out what was happening in Europe. I saw that the same things were happening in England and France, and in all the other Western European countries. Again I found myself in disbelief. As an American we are taught to accept living in the melting pot, and black and other minorities have just as much right to be here as we do, since we are all immigrants. But Europe is the homeland of White people, and in many ways the situation is even worse there. From here I found out about the Jewish problem and other issues facing our race, and I can say today that I am completely racially aware.

Blacks

I think it is is fitting to start off with the group I have the most real life experience with, and the group that is the biggest problem for Americans.

Niggers are stupid and violent. At the same time they have the capacity to be very slick. Black people view everything through a racial lense. Thats what racial awareness is, its viewing everything that happens through a racial lense. They are always thinking about the fact that they are black. This is part of the reason they get offended so easily, and think that some thing are intended to be racist towards them, even when a White person wouldnt be thinking about race. The other reason is the Jewish agitation of the black race.

Black people are racially aware almost from birth, but White people on average dont think about race in their daily lives. And this is our problem. We need to and have to.

Say you were to witness a dog being beat by a man. You are almost surely going to feel very sorry for that dog. But then say you were to witness a dog biting a man. You will most likely not feel the same pity you felt for the dog for the man. Why? Because dogs are lower than men.

This same analogy applies to black and White relations. Even today, blacks are subconsciously viewed by White people are lower beings. They are held to a lower standard in general. This is why they are able to get away with things like obnoxious behavior in public. Because it is expected of them.

Modern history classes instill a subconscious White superiority complex in Whites and an inferiority complex in blacks. This White superiority complex that comes from learning of how we dominated other peoples is also part of the problem I have just mentioned. But of course I dont deny that we are in fact superior.

I wish with a passion that niggers were treated terribly throughout history by Whites, that every White person had an ancestor who owned slaves, that segregation was an evil an oppressive institution, and so on. Because if it was all it true, it would make it so much easier for me to accept our current situation. But it isnt true. None of it is. We are told to accept what is happening to us because of ancestors wrong doing, but it is all based on historical lies, exaggerations and myths. I have tried endlessly to think of reasons we deserve this, and I have only came back more irritated because there are no reasons.

Only a fourth to a third of people in the South owned even one slave. Yet every White person is treated as if they had a slave owning ancestor. This applies to in the states where slavery never existed, as well as people whose families immigrated after slavery was abolished. I have read hundreds of slaves narratives from my state. And almost all of them were positive. One sticks out in my mind where an old ex-slave recounted how the day his mistress died was one of the saddest days of his life. And in many of these narratives the slaves told of how their masters didnt even allowing whipping on his plantation.

Segregation was not a bad thing. It was a defensive measure. Segregation did not exist to hold back negroes. It existed to protect us from them. And I mean that in multiple ways. Not only did it protect us from having to interact with them, and from being physically harmed by them, but it protected us from being brought down to their level. Integration has done nothing but bring Whites down to level of brute animals. The best example of this is obviously our school system.

Now White parents are forced to move to the suburbs to send their children to “good schools”. But what constitutes a “good school”? The fact is that how good a school is considered directly corresponds to how White it is. I hate with a passion the whole idea of the suburbs. To me it represents nothing but scared White people running. Running because they are too weak, scared, and brainwashed to fight. Why should we have to flee the cities we created for the security of the suburbs? Why are the suburbs secure in the first place? Because they are White. The pathetic part is that these White people dont even admit to themselves why they are moving. They tell themselves it is for better schools or simply to live in a nicer neighborhood. But it is honestly just a way to escape niggers and other minorities.

But what about the White people that are left behind? What about the White children who, because of school zoning laws, are forced to go to a school that is 90 percent black? Do we really think that that White kid will be able to go one day without being picked on for being White, or called a “white boy”? And who is fighting for him? Who is fighting for these White people forced by economic circumstances to live among negroes? No one, but someone has to.

Here I would also like to touch on the idea of a Norhtwest Front. I think this idea is beyond stupid. Why should I for example, give up the beauty and history of my state to go to the Norhthwest? To me the whole idea just parralells the concept of White people running to the suburbs. The whole idea is pathetic and just another way to run from the problem without facing it.

Some people feel as though the South is beyond saving, that we have too many blacks here. To this I say look at history. The South had a higher ratio of blacks when we were holding them as slaves. Look at South Africa, and how such a small minority held the black in apartheid for years and years. Speaking of South Africa, if anyone thinks that think will eventually just change for the better, consider how in South Africa they have affirmative action for the black population that makes up 80 percent of the population.

It is far from being too late for America or Europe. I believe that even if we made up only 30 percent of the population we could take it back completely. But by no means should we wait any longer to take drastic action.

Anyone who thinks that White and black people look as different as we do on the outside, but are somehow magically the same on the inside, is delusional. How could our faces, skin, hair, and body structure all be different, but our brains be exactly the same? This is the nonsense we are led to believe.

Negroes have lower Iqs, lower impulse control, and higher testosterone levels in generals. These three things alone are a recipe for violent behavior. If a scientist publishes a paper on the differences between the races in Western Europe or Americans, he can expect to lose his job. There are personality traits within human families, and within different breeds of cats or dogs, so why not within the races?

A horse and a donkey can breed and make a mule, but they are still two completely different animals. Just because we can breed with the other races doesnt make us the same.

In a modern history class it is always emphasized that, when talking about “bad” things Whites have done in history, they were White. But when we lern about the numerous, almost countless wonderful things Whites have done, it is never pointed out that these people were White. Yet when we learn about anything important done by a black person in history, it is always pointed out repeatedly that they were black. For example when we learn about how George Washington carver was the first nigger smart enough to open a peanut.

On another subject I want to say this. Many White people feel as though they dont have a unique culture. The reason for this is that White culture is world culture. I dont mean that our culture is made up of other cultures, I mean that our culture has been adopted by everyone in the world. This makes us feel as though our culture isnt special or unique. Say for example that every business man in the world wore a kimono, that every skyscraper was in the shape of a pagoda, that every door was a sliding one, and that everyone ate every meal with chopsticks. This would probably make a Japanese man feel as though he had no unique traditional culture.

I have noticed a great disdain for race mixing White women within the White nationalists community, bordering on insanity it. These women are victims, and they can be saved. Stop.

Jews

Unlike many White naitonalists, I am of the opinion that the majority of American and European jews are White. In my opinion the issues with jews is not their blood, but their identity. I think that if we could somehow destroy the jewish identity, then they wouldnt cause much of a problem. The problem is that Jews look White, and in many cases are White, yet they see themselves as minorities. Just like niggers, most jews are always thinking about the fact that they are jewish. The other issue is that they network. If we could somehow turn every jew blue for 24 hours, I think there would be a mass awakening, because people would be able to see plainly what is going on.

I dont pretend to understand why jews do what they do. They are enigma.

Hispanics

Hispanics are obviously a huge problem for Americans. But there are good hispanics and bad hispanics. I remember while watching hispanic television stations, the shows and even the commercials were more White than our own. They have respect for White beauty, and a good portion of hispanics are White. It is a well known fact that White hispanics make up the elite of most hispanics countries. There is good White blood worht saving in Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and even Brasil.

But they are still our enemies.

East Asians

I have great respent for the East Asian races. Even if we were to go extinct they could carry something on. They are by nature very racist and could be great allies of the White race. I am not opposed at all to allies with the Northeast Asian races.

Patriotism

I hate the sight of the American flag. Modern American patriotism is an absolute joke. People pretending like they have something to be proud while White people are being murdered daily in the streets. Many veterans believe we owe them something for “protecting our way of life” or “protecting our freedom”. But im not sure what way of life they are talking about. How about we protect the White race and stop fighting for the jews. I will say this though, I myself would have rather lived in 1940’s American than Nazi Germany, and no this is not ignorance speaking, it is just my opinion. So I dont blame the veterans of any wars up until after Vietnam, because at least they had an American to be proud of and fight for.

An Explanation

To take a saying from a film, “I see all this stuff going on, and I dont see anyone doing anything about it. And it pisses me off.”. To take a saying from my favorite film, “Even if my life is worth less than a speck of dirt, I want to use it for the good of society.”.

I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.

Unfortunately at the time of writing I am in a great hurry and some of my best thoughts, actually many of them have been to be left out and lost forever. But I believe enough great White minds are out there already.

Please forgive any typos, I didnt have time to check it.

Today's Fuck This Shit

I'm not completely down with everything he said, but Joe LaPointe gets it mostly right in an OpEd at Detroit Free Press.

hat tip = TPM

Today's Keith

I was going to say at least this one got pushed off the front page by the murders at Mother Emmanual, but really it's part and parcel of the same problem.  Which will stay a problem and which will continue to give rise to a variety of manifestations of that problem until we find the courage to look at it straight-on and deal with our shit.

Today's Eternal Sadness

9 dead church-goers in Charleston SC.

Nine people were shot to death by a white man at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday night, the Charleston Police Department confirmed at a news conference early Thursday.

Calling it "the worst night of my career," Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen said the gunman entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church during a prayer meeting and opened fire. Eight people were found dead at the scene. Two others were transported to a hospital, where one later died.

None of the victims has been named by police. However, State House Minority leader Todd Rutherford said the church's pastor, state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, was among those killed, according to the Associated Press.

-and-
Can you say, "tone-deaf, Guv"?

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) also issued a statement, and urged people to pray for the victims and their families.

“While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another,” she said. “Please join us in lifting up the victims and their families with our love and prayers.”

I'll now indulge myself in a little speculation while insisting on calling it an attempt to think a little more generally: We don't know what moved this one asshole to do this one incredibly shitty thing, but I'm thinking maybe part of that motivation has something to do with "conservatives" almost constantly setting Americans against one another by promoting policies that require Us-vs-Them choices (ie: "We don't have the money to take care of all those veterans because your Democrat neighbor is giving it all to The Welfare Moochers".  -or-  "Teachers are just a bunch of elitist union thugs with college diplomas, and they're teaching the children of hard-working patriotic Americans to hate Jesus."), and then shrugging it all off when something bad happens because of all that, saying, "Whoa - who coulda knowed?"

And then this:

A new study attempts to debunk the claim that gun owners rely on their firearms for self-defense.

The left-leaning Violence Policy Center released a study Wednesday that finds people are much more likely to use a gun to kill someone without cause than to protect themselves.

According to the study, gun owners committed 259 justifiable homicides compared to 8,342 criminal homicides in 2012, the most recent year data was available.

That means gun owners are 32 times more likely to kill someone without cause than to act in self-defense, the study reasoned.

First, I really don't know why this comes as any kinda news to anybody at this point.

But anyway, secondly, the American Civil War didn't end in 1865 - partly because it started a long time before 1861.  We just take breaks once in a while.  The shit is never very far below the surface, and it bubbles up in an amazing variety of ways.

And third - as kind of a recap - I just have to wonder about a certain brand of politics that  advocates violence (in a subtle plausibly deniable way of course) while refusing to limit the principle means of violence, and then pretends to be confused as to the connections that seem so obvious between the two.

Chicken Fried Humor

This is the one guy from that Redneck Tour thing who could bring it without needing any victim other than himself.

Plane Crash --Ron White

Today's Maher

He starts it off right, but then it gets a little side-tracked with the standard malarkey about "bad apples" - there was one bad cop, but what about the 11 other cops who didn't do anything wrong?  Yeah OK, except for the fact that when one of the cops is the problem, you gotta be able to count on the other cops to deal with that problem cop.  Those other 11 cops did everything wrong when they failed to address the real problem in that situation.

So no, Mr Dahmer - I'm sorry, but you don't get any credit for the teenaged boys you didn't murder.

A little less gauzy obfuscation and a lot more harsh reality please.

Up-Chuck Todd

Driftglass and BlueGal take this guy apart on a fairly regular basis, but here's my short take on what I think is the fundamental problem with Chuck and Press The Meat:

He says he knows that sometimes his guests are straight-up pandering; that they don't believe what they're saying; and that "off the record", they admit as much, cuz hey - it's just politics, y'know.  But he "can't" really ask the tough questions because it's a commercial network and if he gets too snarky-barky, he loses access and his big-deal mover-shaker guests won't come back.

So there it is.  Chuck Todd says the business model at NBC requires him to provide a national broadcast platform so crooked politicians can lie to us repeatedly with near-total impunity.  That's his job.  And if he ever questions them too closely, they'll stop coming on his show, which means they wouldn't have the chance to continue telling us all those lies - and that would be - bad(?)

The Professional Left Podcast:

And here's the interview they mentioned (The Moment with Brian Koppelman):

A Tommy Tune

Questions --Tommy Emmanual

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Learning Curves Are For Pussies

hat tip = TPM

Today In Woo

(paraphrasing):

"Teaching one religion to children is called indoctrination.  Teaching all religions to children is call inoculation." --Matt Dillahunty

Here's what bugs me about the religiousness of a certain brand of TheoPolitics in USAmerica Inc right now:

Kids go off to school and they learn about Evolution, which eventually and necessarily requires them to question their religious training, especially if it's been all about Gardens and talking snakes and Jesus walking his pet velociraptor in the park etc.  Well, sometimes that leads to trouble because their parents have been so busy trying to make sure those kids are securely bubble-wrapped in dogma, they're gonna make sure the next school board meeting turns into Night Of The Living Dead.

And yes, you have the right to know what's going on in the classroom, and yes, you have the right to be heard when the curriculum decisions are made.  But let's not get off into the weeds, cuz here's the point: 

Let's say I've taught my kid that the world is a flat disc under a crystal dome, and it's being carried thru the ether on the back of giant turtle.  Then one day the kid comes home from school and he tells me his teacher has come up with this thing called "math" and he says the numbers lead him to believe the world is a sphere.  As a living thinking human possessed of a living thinking brain, do I conclude there must be something wrong with that stupid teacher and you can bet that stupid school's gonna hear from my lawyers?  Or am I honor-bound to consider that maybe there're things I don't know about - things I may find useful - and need to learn?

Science starts with a hypothesis, tests it against what's already been reasonably proven to be true, and then draws a conclusion as to what's now most likely to be true given this new information at this point in time.

Religion starts with an arbitrary conclusion, and then has to manufacture evidence (ie: make shit up) to support it.  The kicker: You don't really think it was simple coincidence that GW Bush made way too many of his disastrous policy decisions based on that model of "thinking" didya?

Ya'll knew all that already - but it bears repeating.

Openly Secular

Iraq-mire

NYT:

WASHINGTON — In a major shift of focus in the battle against the Islamic State, the Obama administration is planning to establish a new military base in Anbar Province, Iraq, and to send 400 American military trainers to help Iraqi forces retake the city of Ramadi.

The White House on Wednesday is expected to announce a plan that follows months of behind-the-scenes debate about how prominently plans to retake Mosul, another Iraqi city that fell to the Islamic State last year, should figure in the early phase of the military campaign against the group.

The fall of Ramadi last month effectively settled the administration debate, at least for the time being. American officials said Ramadi was now expected to become the focus of a lengthy campaign to regain Mosul at a later stage, possibly not until 2016.

The additional American troops will arrive as early as this summer, a United States official said, and will focus on training Sunni fighters with the Iraqi Army. The official called the coming announcement “an adjustment to try to get the right training to the right folks.”

--and today's Understatement-That-Makes-It-Sound-Like-Ya-Really-Don't-Give-A-Fuck award goes to:

The United States Central Command’s emphasis on retaking Mosul depended critically on efforts to retrain the Iraqi Army, which appear to have gotten off to a slow start. Some Iraqi officials also thought the schedule for taking Mosul was unrealistic, and some bridled when an official from the Central Command told reporters in February that an assault to capture the city was planned for this spring.

A slow start - from 2003.  12 years.  That's not a slow start.  That's not a start of any kind.  That's an ending, and it's called "petrification"; or "putrefaction"; or some other term we use to indicate that it's over.

Iraq has no army, and Iraq has nothing out of which anybody can hope to build an army; because there is no Iraq.  Iraq exists only as the memory of a few arbitrary lines the British drew on a piece of paper 90-some years ago.  It's Done. It's Kaput. It's Finished. It's Dead Dead and Fucking Dead.  Give it up already.

And gee - it's almost as if somebody put the whole thing in motion on purpose; like they figured on it being one big unfixable FUBAR; and they'd leave it for the Dems to waste time and resources trying to tidy up for a while; and when enough Rubes are ready for the Etch-A-Sketch move, they amp up the rhetoric with, "well - it's Obama's problem now - been Obama's problem for a while - he can't just blame it all on Cheney forever - looks like leadership trouble to me - y'know the Bush Doctrine is good policy, but Obama's incompetence blah blah blah..."

This is a very standard play. 

• Fuck something up
• Point at it and say, "Hey look - it's all fucked up"
• "I have a plan..."

But let's be sure not to talk about any of that.  And let's definitely not concentrate on how our mighty military will once again be showing us their Selflessly Courageous Awesomeness by going back to some desert shithole to fight and to bleed an to die so Halliburton and Royal Dutch Shell and Northrup Grumman can add a coupla nickels to their Quarterly Earnings Reports, and then turn around and use a good buncha those hard-earned Blood Dollars to create an even more reliable generation of Coin-Operated Politicians.

Let's just keep blabbin' about what a wonderment it is that there can be so many voters in the big squishy middle who can't quite make up their minds about all this.

Fuck me silly, Bubba - I just can't stand this shit sometimes.

The Golden Arrow

A classic from 2007:

Special note 1: starting at about 02:15, she makes the point that among the 100 biggest economies in the world, 51 of 'em are Corporations - 8 years ago in 2007.  

Things have "improved" since then, with the number of Corporations in those top 100 spots dwindling to 37 (as of about 2012 or 14).  So, OK, but take a look at how the smart money has been playing its hand of late, and you might notice that the power those companies can wield in terms of controlling interests in governments has increased (by orders of magnitude me thinks) - so the actual number of dollars in those "economies" isn't as significant as the fact that they've been very busily ensuring themselves of a reliable military capability (eg).

And how do they do that?  Well, in terms that are admittedly kinda simplistic, they don't have to own the whole government when they can own several of the key people who run the government.

Out of these 10 randomly selected folks: John McCain, Bruce Rauner, Lindsey Graham, John Boehner, Dianne Feinstein, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, Tom Cotton and Jack Lew - which ones do you think would go against the opinions of the people who spent the money to put them in their positions of power in the first place?

Special note 2: Externalizing The Costs - about 08:15 - is where she addresses the bullshit notions of Supply Side Economics.

Anyway, what really and truly bugs me is the fact that we're still not talking about sustainability as a guiding principle.  I can see some efforts here and there, but it looks more like a fashion thing than it does a real shift in how we do things.

Change is scary, but the like the man said, it's either change or die.  So yeah.

Today's Charlie

Charlie Pierce at Esquire Magazine:

It doesn't matter how many people climb into the Republican clown car or how close Bernie Sanders is polling in Iowa. The deep-seated rot that has been injected quite deliberately into our elections is the story from which all others flow. The primary and fundamental debate must be between those who profit from the corruption, those who simply accept it and opt out, and those people who want to reverse the slow suicide of democratic government. God help us all if the latter group doesn't win.

At the risk of being just the tiniest bit too fucking obvious, the results of an election literally mean nothing if the process itself is crooked.

In whatever despotic shithole you can name - Saddams' Iraq or Pol Pot's Kampuchea or Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, et cetera ad nauseam - the election returns are always lopsided wins for the strong-arming dickhead du jour.

Cutting to the chase here - if I can manufacture a landslide, I can manufacture a horse race.  

So I have to ask myself, in a country where ⅔ of the voters are clearly in favor of 3 or 4 or 5 top issues, and when it's also fairly clear that generally the candidate of one party agrees with them and the candidate from the other party doesn't - how do we keep getting these down-to-the-wire-by-a-nose "victories"?

Seems more than a little curious to me.

Perspective

Via HuffPo:

Interesting that "war" isn't being fought quite the same these days.  Where it used to be all about sticks and rocks and guns and bombs and hyper-active teenagers blowin' shit up, now we use lawyers and trade agreements and Techie Hacker Interns and 30-something MBAs to keep the cost down.  Although one thing seems never to change - there's always a very aggressive media effort to make us think we're all gettin' a helluva deal.

But Conquest by Corporation does no less violence to the populace, it's just that the  infrastructure is left more or less intact - it's much more cost-effective that way - and it looks a lot better on TV.  I hear "Trade Agreement" now, and I'm thinking "White-Collar Neutron Bomb".

Of course, the resulting immiseration effect is almost exactly the same because you can't do greater violence to somebody than to push them down into the abject poverty that has always grown out of the kind of Run-Away Darwinian Capitalism being put in place by Coin-Operated Politicians.  And that last sentence should be more like "being put back in place..." because the world is starting to look a whole lot like the world of the 18th century - you remember, way way back when we decided not to play that fucked up game here; when we promised ourselves to work hard at being the exception to it.

So, trying not to go Full Cynical, and to maintain some glimmer of hope - even if it's only a hope for people I won't live long enough to know - my standard admonition still holds:  A wide variety of assholes have been out to conquer the world for 20,000 generations.  But somehow, the world remains undefeated.

Too Obvious?

Watch this:

...and try not to think of this:

But always always always try to remember that nobody's trying to save the planet.  The planet doesn't need saving any more than it "needs" people - or any other life form for that matter.

What we're trying to do is to keep the joint from becoming uninhabitable for our own bad selves.

The decisions we make about work and family determine how our kids will live.  

The "bigger" decisions we make about the economy and about politicians and governments and about the biosphere and how we all co-exist in (and with) the natural world - those decisions are all about how our kids will die.

Gotta start making some smarter choices.

hat tip = Addicting Info

Towards The Meritocracy

I have nothing against some good and healthy Intergenerational Wealth Transfer - it's an important tool in building strong communities.  And it's worked wonders for everybody who's been born into White Middle Class America because of course, our system is the perfect mechanism for separating the people who're smart and rich from the people who're lazy and stupid.

To paraphrase: Capitalism has not failed us; you have failed Capitalism.

But "good and healthy" is not what we're doing with the No-Taxes-For-Rich-People-Ever policy drift, and it should be really obvious that it's not what we're doing, now that we've been trying to do it that way for 35 years (rapidly accelerating for the last 15), and we've ended up having to spend billions of precious few tax dollars to subsidize millions of Americans who can't quite make it working their asses off at Wal-Mart just because we refuse to elect politicians who have the balls to tell Alice Walton she'll have to figure how to eke out a living on something less than the interest she "earns" on her personal fortune of more than THIRTY-FUCKING-BILLION-DOLLARS.

Tax the fuck outa the estates of the UberRich and we won't get any more Legacy-Fuck-Pukes like George W Bush as "president". 

Call it the Paris Hilton Prevention Act, and make sure it never sunsets.

Shut Up And Take My Money

Some Tweets

Rick Perry. Because America needs a leader who talks about quitting America.

— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) June 4, 2015

Rick Perry, the governor who signed off on the most executions in American history, asks voters for a second chance.

— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) June 4, 2015

Hats off to @LindseyGrahamSC for building a foreign policy using only 100% recycled Neocon crazytalk: http://t.co/sgwfrmKNJ1 @SMShow

— driftglass (@Mr_Electrico) June 4, 2015

Today's Charlie

Esquire:

Most of the poll-related buzz today has to do with the new CNN numbers that are alleged to be bad news for Hillary Rodham Clinton (and for Jeb too, truth be told). But The New York Times has another poll that is both a cause for great optimism, and a source of some dread. Simply put, the numbers in the poll show that an overwhelming majority of Americans of all ages, and of both parties, realize that the Citizens United decision and its progeny have deformed American politics almost beyond recognition.

--and ending with-- 

So what the polls shows is the country knows that its elections largely are a rigged business, but that the country also rather has given up on the only mechanism through which the problem can be corrected. At a fundamental level, this should surprise nobody, since we've had 30 years of successful propaganda about how politics and politicians, and the government they inhabit, is some sort of alien beast, rather than something we all create, over and over again. We've had almost a decade now of efforts to make it more difficult for people to vote, a campaign run by the people whom the tidal wave of campaign money have swept into office. So what we have now is a citizenry that realizes the corruption that the Supreme Court has embedded in the political life of the country when it legalized influence peddling. And it has convinced itself that there are no remedies. So what we end up with is a WWE democracy -- rigged as hell, but entertaining. All that's missing is somebody getting hit with a ladder.

Today's Pix

Today's Video

Amy Schumer seems to be working hard and she's getting better at it.

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Today's Pix