Drug It Up

By now we all know it, but it's good to keep it in mind - It's not really a war on drugs.  It's more of a war on the drugs that aren't controlled by Bayer and Glaxo and Pfizer - or any of the other big houses.

It's also good to remember that Coin-Operated Politicians have been put in place by the Big Bux Donors to ensure the flow of money out of our pockets, into theirs.

Chris Hedges

People are not moved by fact or reason.  They are moved by skillful manipulation of their emotions.



And so, what is Hedges doing?  
And so, both sides...  
And so, we remain paralyzed.


Manufacturing Consent

The Message

...to the United States of Amnesia:

The Real News

I'm not nearly as optimistic as Col Wilkerson, as you may notice in the next post down from this one.

We Lose

Tom Brokaw (aka: The Designated Dumbest Fuckin' Guy On TV At That Random Moment) went on MSNBC to tell us all how miraculously amicable Congress will suddenly become as the Repubs take control of the Senate and decide to reach across the aisle to give the Democrats something in order to achieve some measure of what the fuck is this idiot even talking about!?!

The Repubs have to govern now?
The Repubs will have to compromise?
The American public is angry and fed up with the dysfunction in Washington and so we're about to see some resurgence of The Era of Good Feelings?

Seriously - what the fuck?

We're looking at 2 more years of Do-Nothing-And-Blame-Obama-For-Everything.  Because it's not enough to have both houses of Congress and 5 Robes at SCOTUS.  Ya gotta get the White House too.  So if voters are mad enough to act a little crazy and elect more of the idiots who're doing the things that're making voters mad, then it certainly follows that if you do more of the Making-'Em-Mad stuff, then there's a good chance voters will be mad enough to deliver a Repub Prez in 2016 - especially now that you know how to fuck with the election process itself (Voter ID Suppression) to swing just enough precincts to make it come out in your favor while feeling pretty sure your guys at DumFux News and all the Press Poodles on TV will say it still looks like a fair fight.

Don't forget that this has never been a fight between Red and Blue, or Dems and Repubs, or Conservatives and Liberals.  It's always a fight between Radicals and Moderates.  That's what the whole Checks and Balances thing was all about.

Still, it's an amazing time to be alive.  I'm sure it had to be truly astounding to watch the beginnings of our little experiment in self-government - it's no less awe-inspiring to sit here and watch it die.

Buh Bye

We'll hear a lot about the Midterm Massacre of 2014 - about how the Dems just didn't get the message quite right, and about how the Repubs got their ground game going again, and how angry voters rose up and begged the GOP to beat them all a bit harder because apparently we need to get our minds right and beatin' us is exactly the kind of incentive we need.  Yassa boss.

But here's the difference as I see it:  Repubs got real busy making it harder for people to vote, while the Dems were busy doing absolutely nothing to make their voters willing to fight thru it to get their votes counted.

Obama has put together a pretty decent record in spite of constant Repub obstruction.  So maybe a message like, "Things got better.  Imagine how much more we could do if we didn't have to fight The Recession and the GOP and DumFux News and the Press Poodles..."  instead of, "Vote for me because I'm not quite the asshole that other guy is".

And if you tho't the Obama Hate was bad before?
If you tho't the fuck-off-and-die economic policies were bad?
If you tho't shit can't really get a lot worse?
You ain't seen nuthin' yet.

I'm kinda done beating my head against this wall.  Y'all're on yer own.  I got shit to do.

Go Vote

Today's Pix

Go Vote

TOMORROW

Fun With Numbers

So, let's try to remember one silly little thing when we hear all the frenzied screeching about ebola:  Exactly .0000003% of the entire population of USAmerica, Inc is currently infected with the ebola virus.

That's one guy out of 316,000,000 people - and that one guy's actually doin' pretty good right now.

Don't Vote

Happy Halloween

Vintage Halloween

Today's Pix

A WTF Podcast

Marc Maron talks with Robin Williams (2010)

Today's Toon

Today's Poodling

Jason Chaffetz (R-is-for-rocks-in-head):

"Why not have the surgeon general head this up?" Chaffetz asked in a Wednesday appearance on Fox News. "I think that's a very legitimate question. At least you have somebody who has a medical background whose been confirmed by the United States Senate...It begs the question, what does the surgeon general do? Why aren't we empowering that person?"

The basic dig against Chaffetz of course is that his guys have blocked Obama's nominee for SG, so he sounds pretty stoopid - not that that's gonna matter to the rubes.  OK, maybe he was referring to the "Acting SG"?  No way of knowing because of course the DumFux News Poodle managed not to mention any of that.  Which kinda reinforces the basic point that DumFux News is not a news thing.  It's a GOP thing.

A New Meme

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Unfortunately, even as monumentally stoopid as it sounds - and even tho' somebody's bound to say he put it up just to see if he could get a rise outa the Libtards -  ya gotta know there's a whole-number percentage of rubes out there who're gonna buy into it no matter what.

So OK - let's play:

We haven't had a catastrophic economic crash since Obamacare.
We haven't mistakenly invaded Iraq since Obamacare.
Terrorists haven't flown any hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center since Obamacare.
There's been no Zombie Apocalypse since Obamacare.
There are no Badger/Unicorn hybrids playing in the NBA since Obamacare.

We're not seriously thinking about putting a douche canoe like this guy in charge of anything are we?

A Star Died That You Should Live

"The universe is huge and old, and rare things happen all the time." --Lawrence Krauss

The Strategy

...or: Politics In The Age Of Clutter-Busting Viral Messaging

(Maybe we should talk in terms like "blinding the radar with chaff in order to penetrate the victims' defenses and bomb the fuck out of 'em before they even knew what was happening", but that seems a little too bleak even for me.  So...)

1) Make wild predictions of gloom and doom - be sure to slag Obama at every opportunity, and tell everybody that he's "in over his head", and he's paralyzed with indecision, and that he's unable to provide the right kind of leadership etc etc etc.

2) Once you're fairly sure the bad shit you knew wasn't going to happen - but said loudly and repeatedly that it was going to happen - is actually not going to happen, step forward and take credit for saving all of us, once again, from Da Gubmint's incompetence.

This shit goes on all the time, and this ebola shit is a really good example.  Repubs have been savaging Obama for weeks.  They're pretty sure nothing all that bad was gonna happen anyway, so it's the perfect political tool.  They get to bash the prez for not doing something (which they already knew he didn't need to do), and then they can pop right back up afterwards and claim they were the ones who warned us about the terrible thing, and that they took decisive action blah blah blah, and then they slag Obama some more on how awful he's been.

It's all a stoopid game, and it's taken on a very obvious wrinkle that I'll call Entrepreneurial Politics.  It goes hand-in-hand with Entrepreneurial Religion, Entrepreneurial Medicine, Entrepreneurial Education, Entrepreneurial Policing, Entrepreneurial Incarceration - whatever you care to name; it can be turned into a great way to shear the sheep if you just follow the simple formula.

Find an "issue" that sounds big and scary, but one that doesn't really present any great risk.  (Remember: reducing risk to something as close to zero as possible is a big part of this scam. And BTW, what we used to call Capitalism had lots of risk, but now what we call Capitalism is more like owning the local casino and then buying enough Coin-Operated Politicians to pass laws requiring everybody to come in and "gamble" at least part of every day).

Wanna peddle some "harmless quackery"?  Let's try Reiki - we know the patient is under a real doctor's care, which puts us in the "no harm no foul zone", so we can wave our hands over the afflicted areas in an ookie-spookie way and chant a buncha mystical nonsense and really bring the low-key-but-nonetheless-intense drama of ritualistic hoodoo bullshit and make the show worth the money, while knowing it's going to be the real science and knowledge and skill of the medical arts practitioners doing the real work while we get a chance to take some of the credit and make some of the money for doing nothing more than providing a little distracting amusement.  So it doesn't matter that the patient really does have something at least potentially serious wrong him, cuz that's not your problem - you're just trying to make your mortgage payment this month yada yada yada.

Anyway, you flack the shit out of whatever Disaster du Jour you've come up with in order to raise possibly huge amounts of money that you can then turn around and spend on Advertising aimed at making sure that the "facts" are muddied to the point of incomprehension, knowing the rubes are gonna turn out and vote exactly the way you tell 'em to vote, and that a huge slice of the big squishy middle will stay home on election day because you've made sure they're pretty disgusted with the whole sorry mess.

And guess who stays in power.

The US Congress has an approval rating in the single digits, but the individual Critters get re-elected along the lines of 95% of the time.

In Soviet Russia, the Communists were the only ones allowed to run for office, and you couldn't vote if you weren't a member of the Communist Party.  It was a closed-loop system, and under that system, members of the Duma (their version of Congress) were re-elected 91% of the time.

Shouldn't that be some indication that maybe we've got a fucking problem here?

Parting thought:  Pessimism is the only sensible default position because you're gonna be proved right or pleasantly surprised every time.