14:38, Tuesday, September 7, 2010

A Fitting Monument

By Al Schumann on Tuesday September 7 02:38 PM

The Al Gore Memorial Academy is perfect. It's a tremendously expensive edifice, dedicated to a narrow interpretation of good intent, which is reinforced by an implicit comparison to actual good intent, and it's beset by problems with toxic vapors. It reinforces crackpot meritocracy and has drawn humorless defenders whose solution to a crucial problem is: a drive-by acknowledgment of the problem and circling the wagons in defense of the status quo.

A Cynical Ploy

By Al Schumann on Tuesday September 7 09:04 AM

In a move Democrats characterized as a cynical ploy, designed to siphon votes from Democrats, who are entitled to them, a Republican operative put homeless people on the Green Party ticket in the Arizona elections. "They're human beings," noted the bewildered operative. "They're really human..."

In a move Republicans characterized as a cynical ploy, the Democratic Party announced it would adopt the Green Party platform in order to counter the Republicans' cynical ploy. "We're entitled to those votes, and we'll have them, even if it entails adopting principles*."

In a move the Democratic and Republican parties characterized as a cynical ploy, the Green Party announced that it continues to welcome anyone who supports their platform, provided they actually support it. "We're entitled to a welcome," huffed a Democratic spokesman. "Exactly," added a Republican. "Be my brother. Or I'll kill you."

*Not really, no.

Hogging the limelight

By Al Schumann on Tuesday September 7 06:40 AM

The insufferable David Petraeus stepped up to demand his share of the Quran-burning spectacle.

"It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort," Gen Petraeus said in a statement to US media. "It is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems.

"Not just here, but everywhere in the world, we are engaged with the Islamic community," added Gen Petraeus, who heads a 150,000-strong Nato force against a Taliban-led insurgency. "We engage them here, we engage them there, we engage them with a thrum-thrum tiddle and a military air," concluded Gen. Petraeus as he produced a fife to signal the end the of interview*.

Bless his heart, he's not quite on the ball. The biggest danger to the troops is the overall effort, closely followed by the general himself, his fellow generals, the Obama regime and Congress. The concept can be difficult to understand for people accustomed to communicating entirely in euphemism. But it's not one of those tricky post modern things. There are no grand numinous forces working unseen. The "overall effort" didn't appear out of the blue and demand compliance. It's traceable.

*An editorial gesture, forced on me by grand numinous forces.

21:30, Sunday, September 5, 2010

Decline and fall

By Michael J. Smith on Sunday September 5 09:30 PM

I wouldn't have thought anything could possibly make me miss Bill Clinton, but I had forgotten about Smith's Twenty-Fourth Rule of Life, which states that every President makes you nostalgic for his predecessors.

Nostalgia for Bush Jr may take a few more weeks, but suddenly I miss Bill. A sidelong obiter-dictum in the previous post gelled it for me: this administration is a crashing bore. Even blogging about them -- easy as blogging is -- starts to seem like a Sisyphean sentence to a life of endless, unrewarded tedium.

But Clinton! Not nearly as much fun as Nixon, of course -- who could compete? But good God amighty, it's all relative, and where's the louche zaftig girl in this administration?

Obie needs to start shtupping the interns, preferably under the gaze of a surveillance camera concealed in one of those dull heavy artless plaster moldings in the Oval Office. It's his only chance of re-election, and more importantly, it's the only actual human pleasure his life might have to offer, poor man.

Fetish vs. fetish

By Michael J. Smith on Sunday September 5 07:41 PM

What a rush this must have been, don't you think? You aim the truck at the flimsy siding, you stomp on the accelerator. The wall leaps out of the middle distance into the foreground. Maybe you'll survive the crash, maybe you won't. But in that euphoric millisecond before impact, perhaps you sense, without having the time to form it into words, that you've set one of your masters upon the other?

* * * * *

I'm back from my bucolic -- or rather, riparian -- Maine holiday. Still can't afford a cottage in the very nice place where Better Half and I usually go, so naturally I'm rooting for a major drop in real estate "values". Perhaps I'll get it, or so the Gray Lady of 43d Street seems to think:

Grim Housing Choice: Help Today’s Owners or Future Ones

The unexpectedly deep plunge in home sales this summer is likely to force the Obama administration to choose between future homeowners and current ones, a predicament officials had been eager to avoid.

It's all downhill from here, of course; in spite of the sensational headline and lede, the story goes on to make it crystal-clear that Obie & Co. will continue to prop up the fictitious "equity" of "owners" to the extent possible, and the hell with non-owners (or, as the Times humorously refers to them, "future owners"). The "grim choice" was made long ago, and made quite blithely; and as with a number of other previous grim choices, Obie and the rest of the Donkery are right down with it.

The silver lining is that whatever the Obienauts can do may not be enough. My delight in a further plunge of real-estate prices, should that occur, will be greatly enhanced to the extent that it knocks the Democratic Party into a cocked hat, or rather, knocks it farther into an even more cocked hat. How much can prices fall in the two months before the midterms? Here's hoping we set a record.

One of my lefty mailing list colleagues wrote recently, in response to a thread entitled "Ciao, Dems":

Of course the subject line, "Ciao, Dems," needs, for the sake of accuracy, to add something like "for the next few years." Over the last 50 years there have been several predictions of the permanent disappearance of one or the other of the parties after some landslide election, but of course the loser always ended up the winner in 4 to 12 years.
It's always astute to observe that the future is likely to resemble the past. Still, there are occasions when the car finally runs out of gas (though let's hope it gets through the siding and the balloon-frame first).

This is not your father's Democratic Party any more. What committed constituency does it still have left? Liberals -- a tiny and inconsequential social formation. Union bureaucrats, ditto.

Of course, there may be a kind of oxygen-tent effect: Perhaps there are elite interests who derive some advantage from having an A team and a B team of flunkies. Play 'em against each other. Every officeholding sycophant serves at pleasure, and there's always some lean-and-hungry B-teamer waiting in the wings if the incumbent doesn't give satisfaction.

* * * * *

What I really want, of course, is for the precarious house-of-cards occupation regime of bribery and subornation in Iraq to break down spectacularly. If I were a truly conscientious person, I would add, the sooner the better. But in fact, I hope it happens in October 2012. Or no, that's unimaginative. I hope it happens on September 11, 2012.

Wouldn't it be exciting to witness the actual disappearance of one of the duopoly parties? We haven't had that pleasure in this country for quite a long time -- even I am not old enough to remember when the Whigs evaporated, and the extinction of liberal Republicans, while gratifying, wasn't quite so tectonic.

I desperately need some excitement; don't we all? This is turning out to be a very boring Administration and Congress. There is a certain arid pleasure in having been right, but nothing to compare with the wild ride Clio can give you when she decides to kick up her heels and surprise you.

Ms Clio! Paging Clio!

Proportional Vacuity

By Al Schumann on Sunday September 5 07:40 AM

H/T Mike Flugennock.

The Gawker opines on another pseudo-trend uncovered by those tireless crackpots at the New York Times, where vacuity goes to be nurtured into robust category error philistinism. This time, the Times is interested in political implications of the silliness of the youth of today, which is narcissistic and creepy, like a man with a comb-over reading Nietzsche to impress hipster baristas.

The Youth of Today® suffers from vacuity at the same rate and pace as their elders. There's no need to worry that they'll make a hash of things. Of course they will, just as previous generations have. Tradition is secure. The slick campus psychopath will become president, the ambitious sycophants will become reporters at the Times and interesting, relevant news will remain on the margins.

07:39, Saturday, September 4, 2010

Condensed Cock A Doodle Doo

By Al Schumann on Saturday September 4 07:39 AM

This is, in its way, perfection.

I have a personal story that might help. In my native land, we rise at dawn, stuff beans up our noses, mount our pogo sticks and hop to work. None of us asked to be born into that. Some of us can see the imperfections. A few reject the beans and the pogo sticks, bless their hearts, but what do they offer in place? Fantasy, that's what. And what they fail to take into account in their fantasies are the people who wear underpants on their heads.

pogo_stick.jpg

Those of us who are sensible, like woodchucks, don't especially enjoy the beans. They hurt. They make our eyes water. Sometimes we fall off our pogo sticks and writhe in agony. Hence, Obama. His proposals make sense. We can't have perfection, but we can have better beans and better insertion methods. Admittedly this hasn't worked out. In consequence, some people are dispirited. They asked, how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood, and the answer was provided by Robert Gibbs: urine samples and mental hospitals. Discouraging, yes, I can dig it, man. But does this mean we should abandon our program? Does this mean we should hand our country over to the people who wear underpants on their heads? Because those are our choices.

Marmot.jpg


The tyranny of empiricism is a dead end. A failure of morale is our greatest threat. Let us renew our hope for change instead. It's time to hop.

00:24, Wednesday, September 1, 2010

A disappointing speech

By Al Schumann on Wednesday September 1 12:24 AM

I expected bromides and I received bromides, but I was still disappointed by the president's speech. It was a wasted opportunity. He should have entered the oval office carrying a fake turkey and wearing a codpiece. This would have lent dignity to the rebranding of the occupation. But he blew it. What a dipshit.

23:43, Monday, August 30, 2010

Dr. Socks

By Al Schumann on Monday August 30 11:43 PM

To tell you the truth, though, I’m still not convinced that Obama actually wants anything, at least not in a political sense. He seems to me an utter blank. He’s a self-propelling election device that exists solely to get itself elected. It continues to amaze me that so many people somehow thought this empty suit was a savior. Even his campaign message was just a recycled leftover from one of Axelrod’s earlier clients.

The rest of the post and the comments are very good.

19:59, Sunday, August 29, 2010

Status Intoxication

By Al Schumann on Sunday August 29 07:59 PM

I don't want to start one of those ghastly "failure of the Left" threads, but I want to throw something out there. And that is, the Left has nothing to offer to people whose political concerns revolve around protecting their status.

People who complain about "big government", but vote for Military Keynesians and Corporate Millenarians aren't interested in any kind of democratic control of capital. That's the last thing they want. Look at what they do. They're sending bagmen to the federal government and those bagmen do their jobs, with a vengeance. The rank and file is hanging on to its status in capitalism's race to the bottom. Without extravagant corporate entitlements and federal contracts, they're sunk and they know it.

When the Left talks about material security and economic justice, they're adding "relative to whom and not at my expense", not relative to what they have in an absolute sense. They despise and mistrust their petty nobility and its plans, and rightly so, but they have no problem with the concept of petty nobility itself. A true left wing program would mean complete upheaval in their world.

Credit where it's due

By Al Schumann on Sunday August 29 12:21 AM

Book burning is not entirely without merit. There's a catch (not that one). It needs to be done in a way that increases book sales.

Also, three cheers for the Nanny State. When you need an infantilizing response to an infantile act,

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Officials in a Florida city have denied a burn permit for a church that is seeking to burn copies of the Quran on Sept. 11.

Interim Fire Chief Gene Prince said yesterday that the open burning of books is not allowed under Gainesville's burning ordinance.

The Dove World Outreach Center drew international attention after announcing a plan to burn copies of the Islamic holy text on church grounds to mark the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Prince says the church will be fined if the burning is held.

In an e-mail sent yesterday, the church said, "City of Gainesville denies burn permit - BUT WE WILL STILL BURN KORANS."

The Gainesville church made headlines last year after distributing T-shirts that said, "Islam is of the Devil."

Why not do the book burn inside the church? That would teach the fire chief a stinging lesson. Fill it to rafters, by all means, for it is written that pointless, faked-up, self-inflicted martyrdom is pleasing to the Lord, who shall ridicule them in His own time and at great length, for His mercy is infinite. But please forget about the Quran. There's no need to add insult to Predator drones, and there are worthy writers who need all the publicity they can get. Burn blogs in effigy too. Purify the ether!

22:43, Saturday, August 28, 2010

More Infantilization? Why not!

By Al Schumann on Saturday August 28 10:43 PM

There's no end to it. I really thought the death of the Hope And Change sparkle pony would collapse the market for it, but see for yourself, if you have a strong stomach. And don't say I didn't give you fair warning.

obama_reading.jpg

That's the least toxic of the screen shots. The rest are much worse.

Corporate Performance Art

By Al Schumann on Saturday August 28 08:47 PM

Is there a qualitative difference between "Restoring Honor" and "Change We Can Believe In"? Their respective enthusiasts are equally sincere and have the same chance of achieving their notional goals. In practice, the notional goals will evaporate into a bad smell. Once they've achieved it, they'll feel the same maudlin sense of victimhood. The difference is one group will be sore losers and the other will be sore winners. Both will then want to "take back the country". The only thing that comes close to being real is the soreness.

I can sympathize, but only up to a point. Suffering caused by persistent, freely chosen victimhood is real suffering, and the degree of it is wildly unjust, but dragging everyone else down too is simply vindictive; the sufferers' ignorance and vulnerability to peer pressure notwithstanding.

06:51, Friday, August 27, 2010

Predictive Policing

By Al Schumann on Friday August 27 06:51 AM

Human behavior is not irreducibly complex. I can, with little effort, give an accurate prediction of criminal conduct right down to the crimes and individuals who commit them. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Or, more to the point, like the mass murder of defenseless subsistence farmers.

I can also predict, with the same degree of accuracy, that the use of statistics-driven predictive policing to control less spectacular crimes will be used as a means of harassment, entrapment, false imprisonment and mass criminalization driven by moral panic. The great social philosopher, Richard J. Daley, observed that "[the] police are not here to create disorder, they're here to preserve disorder." Feed that into your program for change.

When it comes to reduction of less spectacular crimes, money is better spent on facilitating compliance than on enforcement. Policy is better directed at increasing economic security than on reducing it. Etc. It's hardly rocket science and the methods for doing so are well known.

Orthrus:
mascot of the two-party system

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