Today's National Shame

USAmerica Inc came into the world with some pretty serious baggage - the most prominent of which we've started to address in pretty good shape. We've fixed the mechanical parts of the astounding shittiness of slavery, and of not letting women vote. So two-outa-three ain't bad, but we gotta get right with the guns or we're headed back to the bad old days - and I'm talking about the bad old days before 1790.

Quartz:

America’s gun problem can’t be distilled down to one single issue, of course, but it’s clear that on top of crime and fears of terrorism and insufficient mental health resources and the Second Amendment, America’s gun problem has something to do with America’s masculinity problem.

--and--

As Alankaar Sharma, a social worker and researcher, tells Quartz, “Possessing a gun is considered by many men, if not most, as a straightforward way of subscribing to dominant masculinity.” In his view, the patriarchal system, which privileges a certain set of masculine behaviors, values, and practices, provides men with “a clear and justifiable reason to own guns.” It cements their identity as masculine men.

And for many men today, it’s an identity in particular need of cementing. In this May 2015 op-ed for The Los Angeles Times, sociologist Jennifer Carlson argues that men are clinging to guns as a way to address a broad range of social insecurities. Author of a book on the social practice of gun-carrying in America, Carlson found that gun owners often characterized their fathers’ generation as an era when men had important roles to play as providers and breadwinners.

But men’s participation in the labor force has been declining since the 1970s. As The Economist’s cover story, “The Weaker Sex,” explained earlier in 2015, poorly educated men in rich societies aren’t coping well in the 21st century. Changes in the home and the labor force, especially the loss of manufacturing jobs, have created a class of disgruntled, financially insecure men. Meanwhile, women, who now earn more university degrees than men, are surging into the workforce.

So it isn't simple; it doesn't fit neatly on a bumper sticker; it takes guts and honesty and some real intellectual horsepower to figure out what we can do, but we'll hafta start by insisting the drama pimps like Wayne LaPierre just shut the fuck up long enough to give the adults a chance to think this through.

In the meantime, we can brainstorm on that bumpersticker.

USAmerica Inc

It's about dicks and chicks, dummy

And here's an encore from Jim Jeffries:

Part 1

Part 2

Saturday Pix

Today's Podcast Winner

Been jonesin' on this all day.

driftglass and Blue Gal

"You're isolating yourself from the whole "Spelunking In A Port-a-Potty Experience".



The Brewing of the Soma --John Greenleaf Whittier

The fagots blazed, the caldron's smoke
Up through the green wood curled;
'Bring honey from the hollow oak,
Bring milky sap,' the brewers spoke,
In the childhood of the world.

And brewed they well or brewed they ill,
The priests thrust in their rods,
First tasted, and then drank their fill,
And shouted, with one voice and will,
'Behold the drink of gods!'

They drank, and to! in heart and brain
A new, glad life began;
The gray of hair grew young again,
The sick man laughed away his pain,
The cripple leaped and ran.

'Drink, mortals, what the gods have sent,
Forget your long annoy.'
So sang the priests. From tent to tent
The Soma's sacred madness went,
A storm of drunken joy.

Then knew each rapt inebriate
A winged and glorious birth,
Soared upward, with strange joy elate,
Beat, with dazed head, Varuna's gate,
And, sobered, sank to earth.

The land with Soma's praises rang;
On Gihon's banks of shade
Its hymns the dusky maidens sang;
In joy of life or mortal pang
All men to Soma prayed.

The morning twilight of the race
Sends down these matin psalms;
And still with wondering eyes we trace
The simple prayers to Soma's grace,
That Vedic verse embalms.

As in that child-world's early year,
Each after age has striven
By music, incense, vigils drear,
And trance, to bring the skies more near,
Or lift men up to heaven!

Some fever of the blood and brain,
Some self-exalting spell,
The scourger's keen delight of pain,
The Dervish dance, the Orphic strain,
The wild-haired Bacchant's yell,--

The desert's hair-grown hermit sunk
The saner brute below;
The naked Santon, hashish-drunk,
The cloister madness of the monk,
The fakir's torture-show!

And yet the past comes round again,
And new doth old fulfil;
In sensual transports wild as vain
We brew in many a Christian fane
The heathen Soma still!

Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
Forgive our foolish ways!
Reclothe us in our rightful mind,
In purer lives Thy service find,
In deeper reverence, praise.

In simple trust like theirs who heard
Beside the Syrian sea
The gracious calling of the Lord,
Let us, like them, without a word,
Rise up and follow Thee.

O Sabbath rest by Galilee!
O calm of hills above,
Where Jesus knelt to share with Thee
The silence of eternity
Interpreted by love!

With that deep hush subduing all
Our words and works that drown
The tender whisper of Thy call,
As noiseless let Thy blessing fall
As fell Thy manna down.

Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire
Thy coolness and Thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm! 

Fucking brilliant is all that is.

While There's Still Time

I heard Lil Donny say "bullshit" on the air today, and I just needed to get this up before the polls and the Rube-On-The-Street feedback floated to the top of the cess pool.

How much will this increase Trump's lead over those other malignant puffballs?

Just wondering.

And Now We Go A-Caroling

The Price of Things

Way back when Star Wars first became the biggest thing ever, we wondered how it blew up so big so fast.  I mean, how do you make half a billion dollars in a coupla months in 1977 selling movie tickets at $2.75 a piece, and action figures and masks and posters and bed sheets and various other low-end shit like that?

Wanna make the large dollars?  Develop the cross marketing tie-ins with the guys with the really deep pockets - the health insurance companies, the docs, and their buddies in the medical supplies industry.

Just kidding, ya weenies (it had me goin' for a while tho).  These are from a master joker extraordinaire named Richard Littler who blogs deliciously viciously at scarfolk.blogspot.com

The Internal Conflict

I grew up in a family that just never had enough money for the cool shit.  We never went hungry; and we were never in any danger (that I can recall) of losing the house or even the crappy little cars that my dad could afford.  I had the stuff I needed, but there was always something I wanted that was just a little out of reach - usually clothes.

I felt a little deprived I guess, but every now and then, something floats by on the inter-toobz to remind me that missing some things - especially missing out on certain fashionably fashionable fashion trends - is going to turn out to be a really good thing later on.

Like this:

I knew guys who wore that kinda shit - to work; not just to those abysmal disco joints on the weekends.  And while I can say honestly I laughed my ass off back then, I also have to be honest enough now to say that I'm really glad I didn't have the bucks to look and act just like them, cuz I can't be sure I wouldn't have done exactly that.

Peer pressure works in mysterious ways.  

And it's gonna get you too, little hipster dudes.  Just you wait and see.

Hey, Facebookers

Remember when we weren't all so fuckin' stoopid we couldn't recognize a hoax when we saw one?

Click like if you remember. 

Oops.  So, OK - we've been falling for this shit for a long time.  But hey - click Share if you agree we could be just a tad more diligent about keeping our heads out of our asses.

Today's Charlie Pierce

Esquire:

When Abraham Lincoln took actions based on military considerations, he gave himself the proper title, "commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States." That title is rarely—more like never—heard today. It is just "commander in chief," or even "commander in chief of the United States." This reflects the increasing militarization of our politics. The citizenry at large is now thought of as under military discipline. In wartime, it is true, people submit to the national leadership more than in peacetime. The executive branch takes actions in secret, unaccountable to the electorate, to hide its moves from the enemy and protect national secrets. Constitutional shortcuts are taken "for the duration." But those impositions are removed when normal life returns. But we have not seen normal life in 66 years. The wartime discipline imposed in 1941 has never been lifted, and "the duration" has become the norm. World War II melded into the cold war, with greater secrecy than ever—more classified information, tougher security clearances. And now the cold war has modulated into the war on terrorism.  —Garry Wills, 2007.

I needed to put that on the record because its basic truth was completely lost in a dark land of fear and amid the waving poison ferns in Wolf Blitzer's amygdala. First of all, none of these people will be my commander in chief. None of these people will have the job of keeping me "safe." The first priority of a president is not keeping the country safe. The first priority of a president—indeed, the only priority of a president—is to preserve, protect and defend not me, but the Constitution of the United States. So sitting there, listening to a bunch of people who never served a day in combat talk about how they're going to turn the Middle East into obsidian glass and how they will keep me safe, it was hard not to fall off my chair. Frankly, I wouldn't hire any of these people to watch my car in a valet parking lot, let alone lead the country into what they never miss a chance to call, "the Third World War." Chris Christie? Ted Cruz? Marco Rubio?

All this hyper-macho blather gets us nowhere but deeper into the hole.  I'm not saying we should never just kick ass and take names, but when that's our only approach, we've become predictable and the 'bad guys' can anticipate what our moves will be, which gives them the advantage.  Obama knows all that.

Cruz and Trump and Bush et al - they all know that too; they just don't know what all Obama knows because - you know, POTUS knows shit that you and I just don't get to know.  

So when they get up there and they start the basic Strut-n-Bluster routine, it's a lie.  They do that to keep us distracted from the simple fact that they don't have one fucking clue about much of anything going on in The Situation Room.  What they do have is mountains of feedback from polls and focus groups telling them the rubes are pissed off about having been mis-led and taken advantage of by the RINOs and others who fail the Purity Test du Jour, but also that there's no danger of them voting for the Dems because the 25-year project of demonizing Libruls plus True Conservatives Can Do No Wrong has been a spectacular success - so what it comes down to is this: Our favorite lies are no longer working for us; please give us a new set of lies.

We're jonesin', man - we're jonesin' real bad.

Winning Tweet

GOP Says: They need guns to fight tyrannical government Then: Rallies around Fascist Candidate and yells Sieg Heil. pic.twitter.com/RJz1PKD8pn

— All Things Flynn (@AllThingsFlynn) December 15, 2015

Is there really any such thing as 'Peak Wingnut'?  And even assuming there is, and also assuming we've reached it - so what?  It seems not to matter at all.

Today's Toon

Arm The Good Guys

So, again - why do we have to go to the comedy guys to get the straight story?

Today's Tweet

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Some Jesus For Christmas?

Say What?

French far right National Front 'routed' in key vote!! https://t.co/PWSNpNHepY

— Eddie Izzard (@eddieizzard) December 13, 2015

So this seems like a big thing.  Lots of us (me too) got kinda puckered when the Paris attacks went down, and it looked like it would play into the hands of the French equivalent of the Right Radicals.

But then they headed out to the polls on election day and the Nationalist Front kinda got their butts kicked.  

Shading back towards Nicolas Sarkozy isn't exactly the best of all possible worlds, but it ain't Marine Le Pen, and that's important.  

In fact this development is so important the American Press Poodles will absolutely be totally forced to ignore it completely.

Until of course the GOP reboots the French Surrender Monkeys thing (or some such), which can translate back to Dems Are Soft On Terrorism or whatever, and then we can look forward to round after round of Red vs Blue Horse Race bullshit back here in USAmerica Inc.

Too much of this is all about the Ad Revenue, kids. Too many MBAs and PR Flacks got too much ridin' on a business model totally dependent on selling a Political Soap Opera.  They can't afford to let too many of us agree on much of anything.