Showing posts with label ugly americans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ugly americans. Show all posts

28 November 2010

the goods are up for the wreckage to see

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What's wrong with this picture? WTF are my GLASSES? I need some more coffee. I need to find that hole in the ground so I don't try to put pants on it. I want to just mystically KNOW the contents of all these cables so I do not have to keep reminding myself of my decades of documentary supremacy... they were all back when I had plenty of candlepower to spare on shit that was vital to someone and sometimes even interesting to me... but it wasn't time well spent, despite the fame it was attracting. And, dammit, have I ever mentioned that I loathe the name "Wikileaks"? I do. I have never liked it, even if I love it, itself. And, being as I am so well-trained in the assimilation of oceans of actual documents, I find myself swimming in cybertude... or, well, when I say "swimming" you gotta know what it stands for: sinking. I float reliably between one and two feet below the surface. This makes my swimming a tragedy... and probably why salt water and very shallow fresh water are far more attractive to me than, say, LAKES. I'm telling you that despite the pleasing lack of chaos in online documents, they mess with my way of grasping things. Everything lives in space in my brain. There is a physical location attached to it. For instance, even after a couple decades I could probably walk into the library at UC Berkeley and go immediately to the slim volume wherein I learned of the specific carcinogenicity of benzidine. I could find you the one page in thousands that happens to mention that the use of the word "cunits" replaces the term "board feet" so as to standardize all disclosures into meaninglessness. I could find you the scrap of paper in a warehouse where the insufficiency of weatherproofing in a major airport was documented the most impeccably, the most damningly. When every scrap is on one page, despite the seeming advantage of a link, I'm just pathetic. And I'm wondering if there really are people who can review this stuff in this format and make something HAPPEN the way I reviewed all that stuff and made something HAPPEN for so long, or if it's all now just the show of having stuff upon which those of yesteryear would have made something HAPPEN....

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Even though I cannot see, I think I already have a real fondness for THIS.

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HUNNERTS OF WIKILEAKS MIRRORS....

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love, 99
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09 September 2010

oh, i just can't help myself

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I gotta have some vintage Adriano. It just keeps booming in my head as I poke around Upper Blogistan, appalled at the deuced repetitions abounding, wanting to ask Glenn Greenwald how many times he can write the same thing before his head explodes, pointing out to others that their optimism-through-well-reasoned-denial is no help at all, and, well, and all sortsa demoralizing stuff that just adds up to some basic Italian listening to pop music jibber from the US and England and coming up with the perfect response. I think he borrowed heavily from Sonny Bono, but, hey, Sonny was about the ultimate symbol of the whole trouble, rest his soul.

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love, 99
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16 August 2010

rare earth

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Somebody worth our attention on the matter of the Ground Zero mosque. Whaddya know....

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10 April 2010

the revolution could simply be fought in our heads

[click image, Part TwoPart Three, video, three hours total, and if you bother to watch these, you should ask yourself if you want Rockefellers and Rothschilds in charge of this stuff... if you want Dick Cheney to have endless replacement parts while your kid can't even get treatment for asthma... You should ask yourself just how ready ARE we for ANY revolution, for the revolutions tumbling down on us right now? WHAT SHOULD BE THE CHARACTER OF ANY SOCIETY WITH THIS KIND OF TECHNOLOGY?]

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... I ...
You aren't going to find me suddenly one day not hounding you to get off your ass and rise up, but don't mistake this for a bloodthirsty impulse, or for lethal naiveté about the ghosts of our forefathers mystically inhabiting any leadership that arises with us. My point is that there is no alternative means of stopping the harm, the outrageous criminality, the abjection to sociopathic impulses. None.

I'm not inciting you to violence. I am telling you that you must not shrink from the violence that surely inheres an effort to quell an uprising that would be effective. You have to get out in the streets both physically and metaphorically and that does mean being noticed by the sociopaths who must be stopped. So we do it in our millions. The vanguard is making itself a target so you will run out your front door to reinforce it. It's out there to get you to join it. You're dunning it for its misspellings and pitching hissies about its political misapprehensions, even as it very plainly is trying to stand up for YOUR life.

What would be wrong with having a little humility and teaching yourself to stick up for your misapprehending brothers and sisters who will never win a spelling bee? What would happen if you suddenly started piping up against the strident fuckers with sham spines, that evil tide of fascists-in-denial who want you to think of them as "progressives", in defense of the courage and altruism of the politically incorrect? How UGLY AMERICAN is it to keep deflecting the awful truth you KNOW, but terrifies you too much to admit? You scream and whine about them hating America for listening to the fascist shills on Fox, but can't hear the fascist shilling going on full blast at MSNBC and HuffPo and TPM because... because... because whut? They know how to spell? Their shilling is more subtle and nuanced?

Is that right?

That's right.

The sociopaths recognized that our side needs more nuance and élan to be brought along peacefully. So they let us have Obama, and they are now ripping the guts out of America much more subtly, and MUCH more viciously than ever before.

So what if—since yer so good with yer mouth—you just started DEFENDING the people who, agree with them or not, have the courage to defend you? What if Naomi Wolf and David Swanson and Chris Floyd started getting up to address the Tea Parties? Are you SURE Sarah Palin would stay a bigger draw? Yes, you are. Is that right? No, you stupid fucks, it is wrong. Getting up in solidarity with their American impulse to protest and to fight fascism will be met with GRATITUDE... if leaving some a bit mystified.

For the ENTIRE history of America we all, from every walk, have agreed to protect each other's rights and to stand for liberty and justice for all, no matter WHAT else we think, but only some of us are honoring that social contract... and these are mostly NOT from the purported "left".

I don't know if you labored through Kenney's dud style of interviewing my anti-Zionist homeboy last night, but in that interview he mentions about how the "left" skipped its big chance to put down Israeli aggression once and for all because Pappy Bush was the one who'd get the credit for it.

YOUR PARTISANSHIP AND PUSILLANIMITY IS GENOCIDAL.

So I'm asking you to get brave enough to STOP blasting away against the only Americans standing up for America, and, further, to save yer sorry souls by DEFENDING them instead. Maybe you won't run out onto the streets to wrest our lifeblood and treasure from sociopaths out to slaughter and enslave vast swaths of humanity—INCLUDING YOU—but you CAN sit down and pick out what you find admirable about your illiterate and gauche brothers and sisters, and emphasize THAT instead of your own immoral—IMMORTAL—complicity.

The tide of public opinion itself, if large enough, could turn this around—because these new world order fucks are in a supremely weak position, globally, just hanging on by a thread, and needing badly to have you in a lock or lose it all—but it has to be huge, and it won't be huge enough to save any of us if a whole lot of us don't cut this shit out.

Don't like me assailing your precious virtue? Tough shit. DEAL with it. WTF would be wrong with GETTING SOME instead of keeping up your sickeningly self-serving and life-harming excuses?

WHO were the Nazis? They were the dominant incarnation of a global business élite, which also showed itself in the Fascisti in Italy, but consisted behind these fronts of plutocrats from all over, INCLUDING the United States and England. We, the Allies, did not beat fascism, did not beat the Nazis, in World War Two. The oligarchs just realized they'd wrung every dollar from it they could without obliterating technological prizes, divvied up the scientists, moved them out of Germany, and called the whole thing off. They have continued in their schemes—lo, these sixty-five years intervening—and now find themselves in position to attempt what they didn't manage back then. We have all been referring to it as "globalization" for something like twenty years now, give or take, without, in the main, ever realizing what we are saying.

It's a Nazi term.

It's a fascist term.

It's what's happening to America right now. It is trite by now to remind you that THIS is the answer to our constant questioning about how ever in the world could the German people have countenanced the rise of Hitler, of Nazism.

YOUR EXCUSES ARE PRECISELY HOW THAT HAPPENED.
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... II ...
BTW, if yer reaction to my beating you over the head with your own stupidity is to become even more adamant about your excuses, your judgments about the jackasses out there stubbornly voting against their own interests, with attitude, who WON'T listen to reason, no matter what, THIS answers THAT question too. LOOK IN THE MIRROR.
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... III ...
Oh, no, 99, I can't fight against the Death Star's Lord Vader with those people because they worship an invisible friend. I can't fight for all mankind alongside anyone who would keep homosexuals from marrying. I can't be counted in a crowd against our vampire overlords if they can't even spell their wrongheaded signs. You can never convince me anyone who's been duped by a bunch of overpaid shills is brave enough to thwart the Emperor. No! 99! Yer just full of happy claptrap about courage and heart. They're cannon fodder, stupid hicks who want to slaughter sand niggers and molest children at Bible Camp. They are not trying to stop the Death Star! They just want Sarah Palin to front for it! Yeah, that's the ticket! They just want Sarah Palin to get back at Obama for being a glib community organizer where only narcissistic sociopath bumpkin governors belong! This isn't a fight between The Force and The Empire! This is a fight between the decent proponents of an enlightened society and farting and belching cavemen for whose turn it will next be to lead us.

Never mind that "lead us" is a euphemism for "follow Lord Vader's orders" and never mind that the fight that must be fought is the one common to cavemen and ivory tower dwellers alike. No, no. Don't pay attention to that. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Just look at the big looming head and keep fighting someone more your own size.


You know, NONE of that matters. If we don't blow up the Death Star we won't ever be able to duke it out to decide any of that stuff. The whole world will continue to be done to us and we will continue to be spit out at whim, continue with our health and our food and every penny we ever worked for completely subject to their whim. You'll get treated better if you work your brains out, for as long as you can work your brains out the way they say is okay, where they say it's okay, and for whatever pay they feel like letting you use to keep body and soul together. The moment something impedes your steady production will be the moment something impedes your steady breathing. And all this will only be so long as they see a profit in it. The instant they see that robbing you of more of your ability to pay for life necessities, while shortening your productive life, actually enhances their bottom line, you won't even be allowed to work your brains out to stay alive.

It's already happening.

Those farting cavemen who can't spell "moron" are protesting ever more loudly about it.
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... IV ...
Are they right to manipulate your preference for serfdom over pain? Is it okay to stay thinking like the herd when the herd is fed what to think by bastards who know how to funnel the herd from its pasture straight to the abattoir? You know that if you leave it up to them, YOU will lose, but you keep getting distracted by all these hypnotic ideas and lies and the constant goosing with horror stories... tasers... underwear bombs... scary mullahs... people going postal in the cockpits of their planes... on campuses... in the woods practicing with paint guns... toe tapping in the men's room... drone attacks... active denial technology... angry colored people... jackknifed chemical tankers... missing children... the streets of Mexico littered with corpses... earthquakes... hurricanes... tsunamis... suicide bombs.

Sure we should legalize pot.

Is that the way life on earth should be? Is that the way it has to be?

Are Oprah and Rupert and Warren really worth more than the billions living outside the castle walls?

Is that right?

Is all this happening to everyone really less important than staying too busy with your Hatfield and McCoy trip to ever have to face Vader's light saber?

I think so. I really think that's it.
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... V ...
You know, I've been listening to a couple of those wackos with an imaginary friend talking about pretty much exactly what I always talk about, and actually seem to have the same idea about removing the power of the Death Star by ceasing to fear them, ceasing to heed them, them just ending up being taken out by a population that finds itself suddenly sick to death of their shit... sort of like the end of Ceauşescu, only, optimally, without the slaughter part... but they are also counseling that we should all be praying for the Death Star people. Not that they get what's coming to them, but that they awaken to the harm and stop it. They don't seem to think that their imaginary friend will do this, but rather that there is this power when vast numbers of people set their hearts on something together, from wherever, all over, just a big enough number of humans willing certain of us to wake up....

I think that's pretty cool. I don't see what's so all-fired unforgivable about their religious beliefs that you couldn't go out there with them and pump your fist at the cameras with them... or stay in and join their prayer... or go out and pump your fist and join this prayer.

Are you really telling me you can't hang with this?

I mean, we all knew what he meant and would it be better if he'd picketed for us to get a heart?

Naw. Too sappy.
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... VI ...
I mean, did you ever stop to think that if we didn't have to be filling these few plutocrats' coffers with piles of lucre the size of Jupiter, we would not need a giant government to create our ideal world? All those "assholes" we revile for wanting to drown it in a bathtub might not actually be nearly as assholish as we suppose. Or maybe some of them are but would be mollified completely into being blandly content Joe Nobodies if they weren't having to pay and pay and pay for shit that NEVER does anything but rip us off and get us blown up and dead or maimed in some third world country... in some other third world country, that is. [See below for details.]

I bet you never stopped to think of that.
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... VII ...
Hell! They're SPACE LIZARDS, literally or metaphorically, and there's no telling. They are strict adherents to perfidies so perfidious people have died horribly of them for millennia, perfidies only ancient brutes could have concocted and modern ones still observe. Aren't we always going on about LEARNING from history? What really is the problem here?

There are people walking around on this planet who believe we are being farmed as food for space aliens. This is neither here nor there to me, because we are being farmed as food by space lizards we can see and touch and vote for... and so it's probably only their subconsciousnesses trying to shield these hysterical people from utterly unacceptable reality with all these ideas about spacecraft and ghastly flesh-eaters off-world. They're RIGHT HERE.

You can't make reality acceptable if you can't put yourself through it to see it and fix it.
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no end to ugly americans

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Found this on my rounds yesterday, but didn't post it until now because it left me speechless. I'm still speechless. This reminds me too much of the pinheads who go out and get themselves a Dalmatian puppy after seeing a movie and then swiftly unload it when they find it needs to be house trained and fed. It reminds me of the people who unload them when they turn into dogs instead of those darling little cuddly things. It reminds me of people who simply abandon their pets to the vicissitudes when they decide to move somewhere they aren't allowed to have pets. It reminds me of people who go France and demand to be treated as royalty for having liberated them from the Nazis in WWII. It reminds me of people who go to the father of the innocent Afghanis we have just slaughtered and give them two goats by way of apology. It reminds me of people who would round up a bunch of people they know are innocent and throw them into a gulag and torture them and kill them and leave them in that hole without rights for as long as they feel like it. Every one of these SAME people might jump into the ocean to save a drowning stranger, but when it isn't an emergency, a life-and-death situation that suddenly knocked off all their idiocy and caution and self-seeking, stripped them down to their innate humanity, they do these outright barbaric and cruel things to each other... and most especially to the helpless.

Be ashamed. Be VERY ashamed.
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27 December 2009

worth a skim


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I mean, the guy obviously doesn't think much of yer basic American boob, but, well, he also blends in some good points made by Hedges and Sunstein in their latest books....
Of course, the Founding Fathers knew public debate could get ugly. Sunstein notes Alexander Hamilton's belief that the "jarring of parties" was a good thing because it would engender deliberation and, over time, a "republic of reasons."

Are we one today? Not as much as we could be, Sunstein thinks. His fundamental concern in Republic.com 2.0 is the Internet's potential for impeding deliberation between groups with opposing viewpoints, eventually increasing ideological rigidity and polarization to a point of no return. It's vastly easier to join like-minded Internet "enclaves" across the world than to drive across town for a meeting in which someone might challenge one's pre-established beliefs and positions. Sunstein walks readers through behavioral studies finding that when groups of like-minded individuals are isolated from different viewpoints, they tend toward consensus on the most extreme position held within the group.

At worst, Sunstein says, Internet-induced polarization could lead to social instability. "The danger is that through the mechanisms of persuasive arguments, social comparisons, and corroboration, members will move to positions that lack merit," he writes. "It is impossible to say, in the abstract, that those who sort themselves into enclaves will generally move in a direction that is desirable for society at large or even for its own members. It is easy to think of examples to the contrary, as, for example, Nazism, hate groups, terrorists, and cults of various sorts."

Clearly, the Internet has potential to create political good. Citizens have access to vast amounts of information and commentary. Even like-minded enclave proliferation can be good: The more there are, the greater the potential for inter-enclave discussion.

But a study of 1,400 liberal and conservative blogs found the vast majority of bloggers link only to like-minded blogs. Worse, another study showed that when "liberal" bloggers comment on "conservative" blog posts, and vice-versa, a plurality of comments simply cast contempt on opposing views. "Only a quarter of cross-ideological posts involve genuine substantive discussion. In this way, real deliberation is often occurring within established points of view, but only infrequently across them," Sunstein reports.
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02 December 2009

why they buck history to prevail in afghanistan

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The only reason the Soviets did not prevail is because the United States was arming and training the mujahideen. That is why the war pigs are ignoring history. They have really good reason to believe it doesn't apply this time... and, unless the Chinese are setting up supply lines for the Taliban, they probably aren't wrong about this.

14 August 2009

cuts right to the quick

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Directly to the heart of the problem....

26 July 2009

it wasn't the time of day to be reading this

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It made me hungry for the very most fattening iced coffee imaginable....

I, of course, did not succumb because virtue is easy.

Conversely, this did not tempt me at all....

15 June 2009

still

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This guy's only yammering about the money we're letting our government steal from us, not the torture and the wiretapping and the vote rigging and the wars of aggression and the drug smuggling and the nukes trafficking and the influence peddling and the covert assassination teams and the corporatization of the public trust and the taser-happy thugs with badges and the utter mendacity of the takers of the oath of office....

[Whoa, here's another guy not too happy with us chumps.]

30 May 2009

obesity hype and twittery

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Okay. I was about the size of Kirstie in the image on the left, without the custom girders, when I decided to crash diet down to skinnier than a bird. I don't think I was fat. My esophagus may have thought I was fat. I did it because the machine to combat death by sleep apnea was going to kill me before it could save me, and the only other thing I might try is to have a bunch of the tissue at the back of my throat burned off. I think she was definitely into the zone one should think of as "obese" in the image on the right, though, and I think the linked piece at the NYT is a piece of crap from start to finish.

I think everyone with body image issues, and the people who incite them, should be locked up in the Louvre for a month or two, and have their access to tv, fashion magazines and movies taken away for a minimum of a year. They should be made to learn everything about Monsanto and other megalithic ag-corporations. They should be made to take courses in food additives and laboratory food. They should have radio collars that hit them like tasers when any closer than, say, five feet from fast food.

Yes. I am stumping for Fat Nazism. Clearly, democracy in this area is not up to the task. Clearly. Attitudes about what we call fat need adjusting back to reality, but just as clearly attitudes about loving your body when you are mortally obese need to be slapped off as well. Even as I believe in the individual right to take whatever chances with one's health one feels suit, it should not be undertaken and controversialized to the point of outright psychosis either. If you don't want to be fat, lose the weight. Do it however you want, but quit whining. Quit indulging yourself, you candy-assed "American". If you don't like people making you feel guilty about it, work on your guilt issues and/or lose the weight, and shut up. Quit acting like factory hogs to slaughter and take charge of the food you consume.

I decided to drop the weight in the last week of November. I cut out everything with sugar in it. Everything with transfat in it. Everything with chemicals in it. Everything with salt in it. And all simple carbohydrates like bread and pasta, etc. I did not starve myself. I drank regular milk. I put half and half in my coffee. I ate as much fruit as I wanted, and vegetables, and meat. I never use anything but extra virgin olive oil to cook with. I lost ten pounds a month for four months, and then I started adding back in a little bread, bread WITHOUT high fructose corn syrup and/or partially hydrogenated soybean oil, you know, bread... sourdough with garlic cloves and/or cheese baked in... sometimes toasted, with whipped cream cheese spread on it. Now I'm losing only about two pounds a month, and that is fine by me. I will get to the lowest weight I feel is healthy and I will stay there. I will know that if I cannot stay there that there is something medically the matter and get my ass to the doctor, but I will know that because I don't give myself all these STUPID excuses to eat crap I know is bad for me.

I had a good excuse before. Healthy food is extremely hard to find here, and when you do find it, it is extremely hard to afford, and I was too whupped to deal with this ugly reality until I did something about my wretched health.

Yes, but what about people who CAN'T do something about their wretched health, 99? People who can't just run to a doctor and wail, "HELP ME! I MIGHT AS WELL BE DEAD!"

Those are the people I worry about. Those are the people truly being victimized by the food poisoning and complete failure of healthcare in this country, and THAT is what this NYT piece SHOULD have been about.

WE make our world what it is. If you're capable of holding down a job, you are capable of reminding everyone around you of our shared responsibility for fixing it, and then TAKING responsibility for fixing it.

Why do you think I'm so pissed off at the president?