A Big Beautiful War

The US is going to bomb Iran. Trump's not waiting two weeks, it might be happening right now as I write. The US was always going to bomb Iran because too many of the creeps in Trump's orbit have wanted it so badly for so long - Hegseth wants it, Vance wants it, even Gabbard is on record as an Iran hawk despite her own intelligence briefings.

 And I know for sure it's happening because otherwise, Israel would have nuked Iran already.  

For the past week, Israel has been getting hammered by an opponent who can actually shoot back. The IDF is trying to lock down evidence of Israeli casualties and it's been working so far, but only the most credulous cretins on r/worldnews thinks this is going well for them. "Missile defense," as every good war nerd knows, doesn't really work. Something always gets through.

In this, Israel is not some diabolical colonial project as has been debated during its Gaza campaign but - as always - the proxy for American hegemony. Netanyahu is happy to let the people of Tel Aviv get rocketed because he's an agent of the same Atlantic Council ghouls who've celebrated Ukraine's long suffering because for every hundred dead Ukrainians, some Russian military hardware gets mulched. Also, Netanyahu doesn't care when Jews die.

This is the fever dream of those very same neocons: regime change in Tehran. But done better this time, a decapitation strike from the air, and then the People will rise up. That they've already risen in the opposite direction doesn't fit the calculus, so it's ignored.

And Donald Trump, the dumbest thing to ever come out of New York City, is not just the facilitator but an eager participant. All that "peace" noise was just for the rubes and everyone who forgot his first term because of long covid and opiates. He was an Iran hawk from 2017 to 2021, he's always wanted this Big Beautiful War because, like every good American business pervert, he thinks it will be all profit and no loss.

If you really want, there is a decade of work from Radio War Nerd and New Left Review and everyone with any goddamn sense to explain how this will not work. Look up the Strait of Hormuz for starters. Look up how the carriers will die. Or just look at that Al Jazeera link again of the thousands of Iranians rallying around their flag. If someone wanted to give the Islamic Republic's geriatric oligarchy a fresh mandate, they couldn't do better.

And if you want to see how truly fucked this all is, look at China. They need Iranian oil for their many grand projects. That's why the American ruling class wants total Middle East energy hegemony, to freeze out the rising power. This simply won't work and you don't have to look further than Russia's attempt at regime change in Kyiv. China has satellite intelligence and "lethal aid" too. 

It's ironic, or fitting, or just gross that the same time as the anniversary of the one good war, this rotten republic would forget the words of William Tecumseh Sherman to the graduating class of West Point:

“I’ve been where you are now and I know just how you feel. It’s entirely natural that there should beat in the breast of every one of you a hope and desire that some day you can use the skill you have acquired here. Suppress it! You don’t know the horrible aspects of war. I’ve been through two wars and I know. I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is Hell!” 

Oh Shit

Putin is having his Bush Goes to Baghdad moment. Whether this is shock and awe to break off those breakaway regions or a prelude to a Ukraine-wide military occupation, it both amounts to the same thing: thousands dead and the weakness of the Russian state exposed (counter-intuitively) by it's massive violent demonstration.

I remember Stan Goff making this point in late 2004 (can't dig up the old Counterpunch/Beast article, may only be on Wayback now). That the US invading Iraq in 2003 was because they couldn't bring any other measures to bear, that US hegemony had already degraded to the point that soft power didn't work. Short-term, the US military defeated the Iraqi military but then a decade of occupation only managed to produce a corrupt government-in-name-only and the Islamic State.

That's the Russo-Ukraine War trajectory. Swift Russian tactical victory followed by long, grinding decline. It's already a domestically unpopular operation (which will probably fluctuate back and forth, people can forgive any atrocity if it achieves "victory") and has now effectively shut Russia out of the global economy with the all but stated death of Nord Stream 2. Now, the US faced a huge backlash for the Iraq adventure but the US in 2003 was also at it's hyperpower peak. Russia today has been under 8 years of Crimea sanctions and last I checked has a negative birth rate. Holding the threat of invasion was getting dialogue with the US and EU but now that's done. In trying to make Russia great again, Putin just set them on the path to being North Korea.

Anatol Lieven has been one of the war skeptics to still honestly assess what a war might be like. And he doesn't mince words:

The European Union would impose greatly intensified sanctions that would do vast damage to an already troubled Russian economy; the Nord Stream gas pipeline would be abandoned; Russia would be forced into almost complete dependence on China; parts of the Ukrainian army would fight very hard, and might inflict heavy Russian casualties; and if it occupies large new territories, Russia would face the challenge of ruling not the pro-Russian populations of the Donbas and Crimea, but significant numbers of infuriated and rebellious Ukrainians.

That the Siloviki running the Kremlin would take a look at all of this and decide Operation Ukrainian Freedom is better than it's coy brinksmanship of the past year is testament to Neocon-level idiot hubris, an air of desperation over maintaining their own power domestically, or likely both.

And, living on a different continent, this would all be so much background noise - the usual misery of the universe - if not for all the Acela corridor ghouls now salivating to arm Ukraine. Maybe that's why I'm rambling all over the place, because waking up to "War's on," in the one country that sabre-rattles the most at Russia, calling this "Our Sudetenland!" while forgetting Our Haditha means living in the crossfire of two sclerotic oligarchies, always threatening to sock each other in the goshdarn teeth while the ice caps continue melting.

Bad Apples

American politics is like a game of Bloody Mary. If any subject more taboo or complicated than a bland platitude is spoken aloud, everyone freaks out and starts sleeping with the bathroom door shut. As if merely naming something gives it power.

Like the Alt-Right, or more accurately Young Republicans who are honest about their racism. Really, there's not a single difference between Alt-Right and Original Recipe except the Nazi anime avatars.

It's really just branding. Or re-branding, as Trump's ascendancy is making more and more Republicans unelectable. And despite Hillary's histrionics, the Alt-Right very much is Repuclanism as we have known it for decades:

In this election, we have the opportunity to repudiate not only Donald Trump but Trumpism, and not only Trumpism but the entire apparatus that gave us this man and this moment. That apparatus is the Republican Party and the modern conservative movement. The movement and the party that gave us the Southern Strategy, that made white supremacy the major dividing line between the two parties, that race-baited its way to the free market as the dominant ideology of our time, that made hysterical, revanchist militarism the common sense of bipartisanship, that helped turn the Democratic Party into the shell that it is today (with plenty of assistance of course from people like Bill Clinton), that gave us Donald Trump.

Trump is a walking nightmare to his own party because he is their apotheosis. The GOP folks who'd like you to think of them as staid and rational are horrified not by the blunt fascist rhetoric but that their own deeply held reactionary beliefs are being trumpeted about. And it worries them because it's embarrassing around the other rich parasites in their little upwardly mobile enclaves in New York and DC. The Alt-Right, the Young Republicans of the 21st Century, are an echo of that trashy showmanship because they don't have any friends to offend.

Most important of all though, the Alt-Right is as impotent as their anointed Glorious Leader. Even if they constituted more than a fraction of a percent of the electorate, they're too busy masturbating over children and contemplating suicide to be an effective political force. Much like Trump's campaign logistics, there's no there there.

By the time the dust settles on this bummer of an election, the only purpose the Alt-Right will have served is as a convenient scapegoat for all those "decent" Republicans who still want to starve anyone not born into a Fortune 500 executive suite. They'll be able to point to them - "See? It was those neonazi freaks, not us!" - and Hillary will join them, since she's just as much an establishment conservative as her BFF and noted war criminal Henry Kissinger.

The Alt-Right won't mind of course. Those sad screwheads would love to be used by a woman.

Your Vote Does Not Matter

There isn't so much a silver lining to Election 2016 as there is a gallow's humor punchline. For all the striving of Third Parties and the popular push for social democracy, the choices in November come down to Donald Trump or a Republican. That's the most nihilistic of slapstick.

Since before the Philly convention the Clinton campaign and its apparatchiks have worked hard to court establishment Republican support while showing contempt for their nominal base on the political Left. Either Clinton herself is being honest about her long-held neocon principles or she is committing career suicide. Her supporters think it shows she can win in November but they also think Muslim women objecting to Jen Kirkman's shitty jokes is misogyny. The Democrats, from the ruling class to the rank and file, are sailing towards the future with an Alfred E. Neuman "What, me worry?" obliviousness to how much everyone hates them.

The same hate, much more than racist nativism, just fuels Donald Trump's campaign. It's easy to dismiss his supporters as paranoid morons because they are - every single one of them -  but this is less a collection of individual failings than it is the collective result of generations of political and government dysfunction. Trump fans thinking Black Lives Matter is secret ISIS psyops comes from the exact same social atomization and sense of powerlessness that lead so many (presumably) sane people to think September 11th was orchestrated by the Bush II administration. As documented by Matt Taibbi in The Great Derangement, the point of 9/11 Truthism isn't so much a quest for justice as it is a grasping after personal meaning in a culture simultaneously celebrating individual achievement and stymieing that very same achievement through social and economic policies by and for a 1% oligarch class.

That Trump was born and bred in that class doesn't worry his supporters anymore than Clinton's professed love of Goldwater worries the good liberals. The presidential race is too tied up in atavism and personal egos grasping for that same elusive meaning as the Truthers for anyone to give ground or admit that the majority of Americans who don't like either of these assholes might have a point. A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Hitler Trump, same as no vote same as questioning the DNC's vote-rigging in the primary. Everything is acceptable if it's your side and all the Muslims should vote against Trump if they don't want to be deported (implicitly voting for bombing other Muslims). It's the Jack Johnson versus John Jackson fight everyone expected between Clinton and Jeb! but much cruder thanks to Trump's Fox prime time manner of speaking.

But what's really ugly is that Donald Trump is the successful insurgent candidate. The Democrats have waged war on their own base to keep Sanders off the ticket, only to turn around and see the supposedly authoritarian opposition fold to some neonazi yahoos who believe Alex Jones. The same forces that have spent twenty-odd years calling for Hillary Clinton's head are now lining up behind her to protect their own phoney baloney jobs.

The most successful challenge to the system is coming from a minority fringe of cranks, the same flat-earth flatheads Karl Rove cultivated as "values voters" which, with his limited intellect, he believed could be steered by his seven-figure Yalie buddies indefinitely. Those same piggies are now running for cover behind the woman they hate most in the world and precedents suggest she will steamroll over The Donald in an electoral blowout to rival Nixon's in '72. Trumpism as a sentiment may be here to stay but the GOP as an effective political force is now castrated, their only hope for success being low voter turnout.

And would that be so bad? There's a neocon at the head of the liberal party and an incestuous con-man perched atop the wreckage of the opposition, so why bother legitimizing this farce by choosing sides? Vote Third Party or for yourself or not at all. You're vote really, truly does not matter.

Assuming it ever did.

A New Hype

It says something about the creative bankruptcy of the whole enterprise that the first joke spoiler I thought of for the new Star Wars turns out to be correct.

Han dies. Chewie dies. Leia ODs. Luke marries an ewok. #StarWarsTheForceAwakens #Spoilers

— Trevor Kroger (@tpkroger) December 17, 2015

Han Solo dies. Nominally to make way for the new generation of heroes but likely a) because JJ Abrams is limited enough in his imagination to think this will be shocking and b) Harrison Ford didn’t want to get dragged along for three more of these films. He looks half-dead in the trailers as it is.

I honestly cringe every time I see that. It’s such a perfect synecdoche for the whole Star Wars 2.0 phenomenon: repackaging beloved pop culture of yesteryear to be sold as the newest Disney product.

They don’t even bother to advance the plot from the original trilogy. That hard won battle where the teddy bears killed all the Space Nazis and Luke reconciled with his father? Flushed down the tubes, now we’ve got a New Empire and New Alliance to re-enact the battles presented on the screen thirty years ago. Why? Why not?

Maybe the studio accountants were scared too many new ideas might rub people the wrong way, like with the prequels. Those films attempted to tell a new story in the same universe but are reviled for bad dialogue, wooden acting, and bleeping-blooping effects that are seizure inducing. The new plot, even with its inherently reactionary politics, was the lesser problem.

What is there to say about Star Wars Another One? If you liked the originals, you’ll like this? Why not just watch the originals instead of rehashing them, right down to the death of the white haired mentor?

Because then there wouldn’t be a New Thing for geek culture to mindlessly consume. Star Wars is perfect for that because it has always been spectacle without substance:

The story of the hero and the great evil can admit no particularities; the Galactic Empire doesn’t have anything as crude as an actual name; the Rebel Alliance isn’t burdened by anything so weighty as an explicit ideology. All we are allowed to know is that one side is good and the other is villainous — we’re told, in those scrolling-text intros.

In this context, you see how killing off bandit hero Han Solo is both the laziest and safest “twist” Abrams and company could do. It takes all possible drama from a galaxy spanning war and reduces it to bathos over an archetype that was already moldy when George Lucas first presented this human centipede of EE Smith and Dune back in 1977. All in service of a narrative that has happened before and will happen again. And again and again...

And on the same day America embraced this Big Mac of a movie, Hillary Clinton and the DNC orchestrated the demise of the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Things You Cannot Say on TheHill.com

There is probably no “respectable” political rag in America more craven and reactionary than The Hill. Billed as the paper everyone in Congress reads, one look at it’s front page explains why those screwheads are so utterly out of touch. The Hill is both stridently provincial in its analysis and avoids real news like the terrorist attack on Planned Parenthood so it can breathlessly rehash whatever slap fight some staffers had the previous afternoon. It is the apotheosis of the neoconservative brainwave, an adaptive combination of the mean and the stupid.

And its readers are bitterly opposed to any conflicting viewpoints appearing in the comments. Here are the Things You Cannot Say on TheHill.com:















And just for perspective, here are some things you can say:















Suddenly the blatant fascism of Donald Trump makes perfect sense, don’t it?

This is John Galt

Jeb Lund finally figured out Ben Carson: the good doctor is so far up his own ass he’s in negative space.

Ben Carson might be so brilliant and talented that he cannot detect how often he's being an absolute moron.

This also puts Carson’s neck and neck race with Fuckface von Clownstick Donald Trump into perspective, as we see them not as ridiculous clowns but as the end-state of a national belief in the inherent superiority of material success. While Trump’s purported skill as a businessman is up for debate, his success is a truth no one will dispute. Similarly, Carson reached the top of his profession by being a very very good neurosurgeon long before he climbed into the GOP clown car. And neither man has had to tolerate others telling them "no" since before most of you were born.

This is what Ayn Rand’s unbounded egoist heroes really look like. Unfettered by the whims of society or archaeological records, Trump and Carson are pursuing the highest office in the land because they are simply used to getting what they want. Neither will ever actually reach it - and boy will their resulting tantrums be a sight to see - but the sheer ridiculousness of their campaigns is only possible because they have been so successful. Americans will not argue with success, so no one has ever told these potential emperors that their junk is hanging out.

One Nation Under God: Get Your Ass to Israel

This is what Joe Biden actually believes...

"And the results are in," the old TV buzzed.

"Gramma, why do you watch this channel?" Eli asked, handing the old woman her tea.

"Because it's the news," she said in that old, wheezing voice.

"Yeah but they're so political. They're practically propaganda." Eli had this argument with her nearly once a month. And always with the same answer.

"I know that, boychik. I'm not completely gone up here yet," she said, tapping her forehead. "But they've got more actual news then the other channels. You just have to know when they're reporting and when they're just saying."

"All they do is 'saying,'" muttered Eli.

"Ah, you think they're all just saying," she said with a dismissive wave. "You only listen if it's on that interwhatever."

"Internet, Gramma," he explained, like he always did. "There's free and independent news. The kind that doesn't have to go through some corporate editor." "So you're saying they're misspelled?"

The same little argument every time. This time a spelling joke. Eli once considered writing out a transcript with her final line in multiple-choice format. She probably wouldn't appreciate it though, her sense of humor didn't run towards that sort of dry, meta-concept type. More of a Mel Brooks fan.

"I can't believe She ever got elected in the first place," Gramma said, shaking her head at the triumphant graphics on the screen. "The President, the highest office, and it goes to this nudnik who can't even answer a simple question."

Eli smiled. Some things they could agree on.

"Some argue the President won by such an unexpected margin because of Her support from 'values voters,'" the TV buzzed. "The President has been very vocal about Her support for religious liberty, as well as promoting legislation to protect the rights of religious believers."

Eli gave a disgusted snort.

"Now now," his Gramma said. "As much as we don't like Her, that is a good cause."

"Gramma, She's not trying to 'protect' anyone," Eli protested. "All those laws She pushed through were to enforce Christian ideas."

"Well, some of their ideas aren't so bad," she countered. "Charity and such, everyone agrees on that."

"She's trying to start a state religion!"

Gramma just waved him off. "She couldn't do that even if She were smart enough to. It's just not allowed in this country - that's what all that talk of 'religious liberty' actually means. You believe one thing, the guy next door believes another, and you don't bother each other with it." She sipped her tea. "We should especially appreciate that because we haven't always been given that courtesy." The corner of her mouth ticked up to an almost-smile at her own understatement.

"Oh, of course," Eli grumbled, adding sarcastically, "Now we just get deported."

"For the last time, they were not deported!" she said sternly, her voice uncharacteristically rising. "They just -" she stopped to breathe, recompose herself. "They emigrated, which they have every right to do."

"But why would they want to?" Eli pressed. "And why Israel? It's a war zone!"

"Maybe they have family there," she said. "Or maybe they always wanted to live in Israel and now they can, so they do. Maybe they take a little pride in being Jews, did that ever occur to you?"

It always came back around to that. Gramma could never get over Eli needing to work Saturdays, as much as they needed the money. He also suspected that somewhere, under her usual warmth, she was forever blaming him for her own daughter getting divorced and running off with that snooty poet to Montreal. Eli still got occasional postcards from his mother and couldn't bear her any ill will, even if he couldn't stand her boyfriend. After all, she'd stuck around and supported him until he finished grad school a few years ago. Like how he stuck around to support Gramma.

"There's not much to take pride in," he said, adding hurriedly, "In Israel, I mean. You know they've got more than half the population drafted into the army? Old men and women too? I tell ya, Gramma, that whole region is going nuclear and pretty soon."

She set down the now empty tea cup. She always seemed to finish it faster when they had these heated discussions. "Oy, the kids these days... You say there's nothing to be proud of?" She waggled her finger for emphasis. "Always in someone else's land, always someone else's laws, but that all changed in Israel. Jews made the laws - finally! And all those others finally had to obey us!"

Eli wanted to point out "those others" were getting bulldozed into mass graves every week now but knew not to interrupt Gramma when she got on a roll. "I thought about moving there myself but I'm too much American. This is my home," she tapped her foot on the old rug, "Just like over there is home for them - and even a few over here. Maybe that's just something you don't understand, being young and all."

Young. If ever she didn't want to argue a point further, Gramma just dismissed it as something Eli was too young to understand. One of those petty little annoyances of living with her he'd gotten used to. "As long as you're not going over there yourself."

She laughed, the tension melting from the room. "Don't you worry about that. It's enough work just getting down the block!"

They both laughed, the argument quickly forgotten. Just like every other argument they'd had since Eli moved in. Pressure would build from minor disagreements or differences of opinion, from the close proximity to one another in the small apartment, or mostly from the mix of gratitude and loathing Eli felt from Gramma. Then they'd have a quick row and all was forgotten for a time. It wouldn't last, Eli constantly told himself. The economy would pick up, he would find a better job, social security would get its act together and start sending Gramma her proper checks again. He told himself this more and more... "I was going to have some pie. Would you like some too, boychik?"

Eli popped up, "I'll get it, Gramma." He went back to the kitchen, squeezing past the table to the refrigerator, the table with the pile of mail he brought in earlier that Gramma had since opened. He never paid much attention, the only mail he ever seemed to get were notices from the student loan people, but out of the corner of his eye he saw something. A folded, official looking letter hurriedly tucked under some junk mail.

Curious, Eli plucked it out. Unfolding it, he saw the predominant Emigration Office seal and big fat "Notice of Emigration Letter," across the header. "Jesus!" he whispered.

Oy vey! Buy my book!

FINIS

You’re staring down at a meal. Could be a turkey dinner, a pizza from Domino’s, mint chocolate-chip ice cream, whatever you like. Because this is your last meal. The last thing you taste before the elected Powers That Be take your life in the name of Lady Justice.

Because you fucked up. Maybe you caught your significant other getting some on the side and lost control. It happens. Or maybe you were a dirty crook to begin with and shot some rich prick who wouldn’t give up his Rolex. Hell, maybe you’re a methodical serial killer. Ted Bundy: The Next Generation.

It doesn’t matter.

Whoever you are and whatever you’re eating, you have a unique opportunity. Unlike many, you can contemplate your death as an immediate reality rather than a philosophical abstract. The greatest thinkers themselves were never in your position, the old being too incoherent and the young never seeing it coming. Well, there was Socrates, but we won’t get into that.

The myriad of possibilities rushes through your mind. Heaven, Hell, Reincarnation, or just plain Oblivion. The greatest question ever asked by humanity: “What comes after death?” and you are about to learn the answer and, possibly, the ultimate Truth of the universe.

You may be excited or intrigued at the thought of gaining such knowledge. You might be shitting your pants; terrified of losing the only existence you have ever known. You may have found Religion while on death row and go to your fate with a sense of peace. You may be an unrepentant monster who happily recounts every horrendous act, especially the ones the cops never found out about.

Doesn’t matter. There’s a schedule to follow and your feelings don’t factor into it.

You can be thinking of this while you eat, or while the nice guards lead you down the hall. It’s okay, no one will deny you the right to daydream.

And when you’re being strapped into the Chair, or the Gas Chamber, or whatever form of egress is currently in vogue, it hits you: the banality of the whole thing. The systematic tightening of restraints (can’t disturb anyone with you’re flailing limbs), the droning voice of whatever religious authority you have requested (if any), it’s all so mechanical. Executions, the State ordered ending of a life, are carried out with all the seriousness and emotion of a routine board meeting. You’re Executioner looks like he’d rather be at the bar with his buddies. This is when you realize there is no grand finale, no climax, no drum roll leading up to a clash of symbols. It just ends.

The Year in Hate

2014 sure was a banner year for hate. With so much racism and police state apologism exploding in just the fall, you likely forgot some of the highlights earlier in the year.

Like Cliven Bundy, the "tax protestor" who turned out to be a vile racist since those things are usually so separate. No less a national blowhard than Sean Hannity hitched his wagon to this cracker and his half-assed anti-government rhetoric until it all culminated in the murder of two police officers. The NYPD has yet to blame Bill de Blasio.

"Blah Blah racist bullshit."

In other shooting news, poisonous skitstovel Elliot Rodger tried to go on a shooting spree in retaliation for never getting his dick wet. That he didn't rack up much of a body count, including some dudes, convinced professional internet misogynists that he wasn't influenced by them at all. Nope, he just managed to regurgitate all of their talking points in his ridiculous manifesto by coincidence.

"Feminism is why I can't get any, not my repulsive personality!"

Besides, gun crimes only count when police think a black guy might have a gun. That's why they didn't even bother with the theatrics of asking a grand jury following the killing of John Crawford. They heard he might be carrying a rifle and you just can't do that in public.

Running around a toy store with assault rifles is a job for the police.

Or stolen cigars. That there's a capital offense. Especially if they were stolen by a colossal Terminator-Demon-Gorilla and you're a nebishy police officer with nothing but your sidearm, baton, pepper spray, a militarized police force, and the support of a frightening number of the population to protect you.

"That black kid is scaring us!"

And God help you if you're selling untaxed cigarettes, because freedom-loving Americans and their justice system sure won't. Sure, Jaime Dimon can obliterate the savings of millions and still walk around unmolested but he's rich and white. If you're engaging in shady economic activity just to put food on the table, you're worse than Hitler.

This is what a police state murder looks like.

Much like trying to shoot all the filthy whores, you'll find a surprisingly vocal segment of America who are all in favor of police brutality when it's against poor brown folks. This is what John Dolan calls the Sullen Majority, that bedrock rottenness of every civilization where there is no joy, just petty malice and resentment. This is how you can get the same people who have cried for years about Obama the Islamo-Commie stealing their freedoms turning a blind eye to actual abuses of the citizenry. This is how you get so many red-blooded American patriots defending anal rape by their government. The American concept of "freedom" is a narrowly narcissistic thing, championing one's every action as sanctioned by Providence while demanding the whole weight of the law smack down any of those uppity Others.

But no catalog of 2014 hate would be complete without a look at the internet! Continuing to demonstrate how SOPA might have been a good thing, lots of the same assholes who celebrated Elliot Rodger spent the past few months flipping their shit over video games. What began as a hate movement against any women who dare to get near their toys - including a threatened school shooting in October - soon devolved into pedophilia apologism and straight up white nationalism. Also, Eron Gjoni rapes goats.

Here, this is a nice distraction from all the awful.

In far more important internet news, beloved hacktivist doodad TOR was revealed to be funded by the US State Department. People who'd invested their time and trust in the TOR network engaged in serious debate about the ramifications for privacy and Nah, they flipped their shit too. Not because they're all secretly on the NSA payroll but because programmers are the modern manifestation of Jonathan Swift's Laputa. This is still ongoing and you can see all the histrionic scumbags on Twitter proving why hacktivism is a waste of time.

Each layer is more denial. And Neo-Nazis.

So there you have it: 2014 was the year of hating anyone and everyone who dared to not be a wealthy white dude. Honorable mention to Hobby Lobby, for setting a legal precedent that your employer can now control your sex life. Because freedom.

Look At These Thugs

Walking around with them gats, thinking they all hard and shit...

"Straight up dude this bitch is all sad and crying like awwww they killed my baby but she obviously didn't care enough to raise him right..." ~ a concerned citizen.

The New Normal

While Republicans were busy terrorizing Wall Street last year, a little story slipped through the cracks that says even more about that dementedly inverted hologram normal Americans treat as reality.

Kaitlyn Hunt, a girl with the poor luck to be a lesbian in Florida, plea bargained her way into a deal to serve time for having sex with her 15-year-old girlfriend without having to register as a sex offender. It's a familiar story involving statutory rape law but this time applied to a homosexual couple.

Quick legal aside - statutory rape is essentially any sexual intercourse between a legal adult and a minor, even if said minor gives consent. This is generally a good law because no matter how mature some snot-nosed teenager says they are, they're still a damned teenager. So no touchy.

Where it can  - and has - run into problems is when it's applied to a teenage couple where one is eighteen and the other is not. In Hunt's case, she was 18 and her girlfriend was at the time 14. Hunt has since moved on to dating a 27-year-old, whom the Daily News tries real hard to portray as a hardened ex-con, despite the fact that being black in Florida is even worse for your future than being gay.

What makes Hunt's case interesting isn't all these sordid details. Well it is, but not for the reasons the comfortable media class would have you believe: Hunt's relationships are reflective of a simple reality of life in America that is only rarely acknowledged.

I'm talking of course about white trash. I grew up in Woodbridge Virginia and got to see this up close. For every kid with two stable parents and a future there were about a dozen from broken homes with no greater ambition than an associate's degree from NOVA and a car built after the 1980s. A couple of them were parents themselves, while still in high school. This one girl in my 11th grade English class was a 19-year-old raver with an angel obsession. And she was Jewish because in modern America even Jews can be white trash.

Relationships with three to fours years age difference was not that uncommon. The Woodbridge kids - like all teenagers - were looking for affection and working off their hormones with whoever was willing. If one was 18 and the other was 14, so be it.

"But the 18-year-old is the responsible party! The law says so!"

That's the common defense of Hunt's sentence and it raises what I thought was an obvious question - Are you lying or just plain stupid? What 18-year-old has ever demonstrated responsibility? Isn't that why we make 'em wait three more years to buy beer?

But this world, this Real America, is stridently denied at all times. Either it's wrong for Hunt to touch her girlfriend because she was technically an adult at the time, or it's wrong to throw her in because fill in your preferred cause. "Love" was the most popular cause on display at the time, as if any teenager is capable of such a thing, and it likely doesn't hold much water now that Hunt moved on to an actual adult (who, at nearly a decade Hunt's senior, is doing even more cradle robbing but hey, legal age and all). The gay cause is sneered at more than it's actually cited, another standard of the flat normal in America. If anything, the popular response at the time was how only a lesbian would be so lucky as to not have to register as a sex offender for, you know, sexing up a minor:

"If this person was male, 20 years, no parole." ~ henrythe8iam

If you go digging through the various other articles from a year ago, you'll find that exact comment by someone. By a disturbingly many someones. This isn't just common misogyny or the bizarre double-standard of the homophobe - guy on guy is evil, girl on girl is hot - but representative of probably the most grotesque brainwave in modern America that nobody ever wants to talk about. It comes up frequently enough, whether in the latest outrage at Reddit for upvoting child pornography or pointing out that sexualizing an adult actress known for playing a minor is skeevey no matter what way you cut it, but the popularity of the sentiment is . When internet commentators like henrythe8iam say these things, it's because they can't say the simple truth of how they feel - "I'm a 30 something loser and I want to fuck middle schoolers!"

That's the dark desire at the heart of so many American men. Far more than we will ever be comfortable admitting. Whether because they never developed emotionally after the age of 15 or because the flat hell that is existence outside the coastalite enclaves has worn down their confidence when addressing fellow grown-ups, it doesn't matter. The result is this atomized culture has ever more lonely, desperate dweebs who will end up on To catch a Predator. Helps you understand why this rotten country needs a Mid-East war every couple years, keep itself distracted from its own miserable reality.

Know Nothing Nation

While everyone is busy lamenting the lack of democracy in America, it's instructive to compare the crimes of this technocratic empire to the genuine desires of the electorate. And when you do, you see that this is indeed a terribly democratic country...

Like torture. Or "enhanced interrogation" in the politically correct parlance of American conservatives. There's been another leak about all the sick shit that went on in the name of fighting terrorism and even the career spooks are admitting that yeah, it's awful. Immoral, indefensible, a big black stain on national honor.

But then you scroll down to the comments and see this:

"I am not ashamed of waterboarding Taliban and Al Quaeda terrorists." ~IndyToddrick

"Give the CIA a pair of pliers and a blowtorch. The truth is this program of enhanced interrogation was used very little, and yielded results all 6 times it was used." ~The Troll

"I dont think they went far enough , Water boarding just didn't cut it , they should have used Hog Blood instead of water" ~radical1a

"The White House quit 'speaking for me' on January 21, 2009. Oh and by the way, who gives a fuk if terrorist experienced "profound pain, suffering and humiliation"." ~Bill Board

"I, for one American, am quite proud of our CIA doing whatever it took just after the 9/11 attacks to get vital info from the Terrorists to protect our USA. The CIA saw its duty, and did it.....on behalf of keeping you and I, and our families safe. Hats off to the CIA...and their interrogations that netted valuable results!" ~Logic Driven Conservative

"AS the mother of an injured Afghanistan vet I not only support what our CIA did, I beg them to continue. More of our kids would have come home safely had they kept up these interrogations." ~tyscks

America!

Lots of Good Germans there, celebrating their government torturing other human beings. Partly because they're terrible people but mostly because the whole torture issue has been sanitized in the media, focusing on simulated drowning rather than all the other techniques practiced from Gitmo to Bagram. It's easy to defend "a squirt of water up the nose" as one rotten bastard describes it, but a whole different endeavor to argue that sodomy keeps us safe. Which isn't conjecture from what little two administrations have publicly admitted, but rigorously documented fact:

"Several Iraqi participants recalled incidents of sexual assault, most of them occurring in Abu Ghraib. One Iraqi former detainee reported that during one abusive episode in Baghdad airport he was beaten severely and the soldiers pulled his penis and testicles, causing severe pain. Another Iraqi man described an attempted rape while he was in Abu Ghraib prison. Late one night, a soldier approached him in a threatening manner with the intent of sexually assaulting him, according to the former detainee.

"Two detainees described being sodomized at Abu Ghraib. One reported that guards took him to a small, foul-smelling room, where they forced him to lay down in urine and feces, while shouting into his ear through a loudspeaker. They then forcibly inserted a broomstick into his anus while he was hit and kicked in his back and on his side repeatedly. He recalled that he was bleeding from his feet and shoulders, and the urine on the floor with which he came in contact exacerbated the pain from these wounds. During this time he recounted being pulled by a leather dog leash and being forced to howl like a dog. He explained that if he did not respond, the soldiers would kick him. He recalled that he felt a hot liquid on his back and believed that someone was urinating on him. He was kicked again, this time in his left side and in the groin, and one of the Americans stepped on his genitals, including his testicles and penis, which caused him to lose consciousness.

"The other detainee recalled an episode at Abu Ghraib where he was chained, kicked repeatedly as he went up a staircase, and when he reached the top of the stairs, 'The party began…They started to put the [muzzle] of the rifle [and] the wood from the broom into [my anus]. They entered my privates from behind.' This individual estimated being sodomized five to six times during this abusive incident and saw blood all over his feet.

"Another Iraqi former detainee described being threatened with sodomy on several occasions but said he was not sodomized, although the evaluators suspected that he actually had been(71). In one instance at Abu Ghraib, a soldier that 'had a stick in his hand [that he] was trying [hard] to insert in my [anus]…but I was saying that I will kill myself if you do these things' and screaming loudly 'like crazy people,' which in the detainee’s view may have prevented him from being raped."

71: Although this individual denied anal penetration, the evaluators found scars highly consistent with anal trauma. The medical experts concluded that these scars raise the possibility that, despite his denial of anal penetration, it may have actually have taken place

~Broken Laws, Broken Lives

Feces!

I almost titled this post "Big Government Buttrape" just to drive the point home. The defenders of this heinous shit are invariably the same loyal Bushies who did a complete 180 to small government libertarianism once a black guy was in the White House. Try reading those cheerful defenses I quoted earlier in the context of a rifle barrel shoved up a weeping man's rectum. Marvel at the mindless, moronic evil of ordinary Americans.

Or better yet, confront them with the reality and watch as their inner fascist boil to the surface:

"Terrorist have NO HUMAN RIGHTS! Neither do 'rabid dogs', same species!" ~kfromaz

They refuse to engage, brushing it off as either a lie to denigrate those selfless heroes in the CIA or they double-down, insisting that buttrape is a terrorist's just deserts. Whether or not these were actually terrorists, but they don't care to know that either.

That's the key here, they do not care to know. The details of America's War on Terror are simply too gross and are thus conveniently ignored, so everyone can get back to the much more important business of screaming over which half of the ruling class gets to pick up more seats in the national peanut gallery. Accepting the reality of torture - and all the grotesque sexual assault it entails - means a final and definitive answer to that popular question, "Why do they hate us?"

Because we literally fuck them in the ass.

Realpolitik versus Jihad

The antics of those 10,000 Sunnis calling themselves ISIS or ISIL or ASSHAT has really done a number on all the Beltway insiders. These middling careerists are still trying to figure out how to maintain a unified Iraq - as if one ever existed - or looking for ways the Almighty American Presidency can respond. But all this kvetching is couched in the delusion that these 10,000 irregulars are rational actors.

Delusional, that's the view the pundits and the politicians have of everything outside America. They assume everyone wants to live the American Dream of 2.5 kids, a sensible car, and six figure consumer debt eating out their insides. Hell, there are plenty of people right here in America who don't want any of that - I'm one of 'em and I married another - but, like Anglo-American philosophy professors who go about their work like Nietzsche never happened, this same political class keeps trying to find some neat, American way to explain what is essentially Islam's Thirty Years War.

Like that unified Iraqi government. Kerry, the poor bastard, had to travel all the way to the sand pit and personally tsk-tsk Nouri al-Maliki for not accommodating the Sunnis. "How dare you not give your blood enemies a big ol' hug!" It's willfully ignorant, not just expecting Maliki to sit down to tea with people who wish him dead - and mean it - but in assuming anyone in Iraq wants that congenial, civics class crap.

No wait -  a few people do. You'll see them mentioned by name in solemn Politico and New York Times articles, some harried nuclear family in a Baghdad apartment who are scared to go to the corner for hummus 'cause they might trip over a dead fella. That these are such cloistered, Westernized Iraqis should tip you off they ain't the norm - for starters, where's the dozens of other relatives? Sure, plenty have died in the turf wars since 2003 but only a million. The population has around 26 times more where that came from and Iraq, like most Third World nightmares, has a high birth rate.

When you don't see all the cousins and elders of the family in these little heartstring-tugging articles, it's telling you that these are the urban, modern sorts of Arabs that Western media love to talk to, love to celebrate whenever they have one of their little "Spring" moments, and never ever end up in power because they are a slim and marginalized minority. It's why so many of them live as expats in Europe and America.

If these Progressive Arabs were actually a player in the Iraq-Syria conflagration, the Beltway brainwave might make sense. These would be people with rational agendas - meaning business agendas. Peace and security and boredom are the favorite conditions of business, because it means money. These mellow, non-religious Arabs are conducive to that, since they've grown out of the belief in fighting and dying for a cause. Like their American fans.

Among the majority of Iraqis today, Sunni and Shia alike, fighting and dying is culturally normative. Religion is a matter of life or death for them, like it hasn't been for gringos since about the 17th Century (except for Ireland). For Wahhabized Sunni militias like ICECREAM, the entire point is to bring not just Iraq and Syria but the entire world of believers, the Ummah, under a single religious law. All other concerns are secondary. The Shi'ites, so far, have the slightly saner position of maintaining their own little tribal homesteads against these evangelist jihadis who think they're all kuffaar. And if that means war, bombings, and the forceful partition of every country west of Iran than so be it.

The talking heads in the American media and their muddling masters in American government could see this - it ain't exactly a secret - but it would conflict with the deep commitment to craven self-enrichment that is their true faith. The true faith of every American, even the hardest core Southern Baptists. And because not one of these fools can understand a position of "To the death!" they've blithely sat back while the Saudis set the world on fire.

There aren't any good guys here - except maybe the Kurds - but the House of Saud has got to be the worst guys of all. Already sitting on obscene oil wealth, already ruling a totalitarian state that makes North Korea look like New Hampshire, and they have to go and fund every Sunni whack-job with a grudge, from the Maghreb to Chechnya. And as though that weren't enough, they have to spread their toxic Wahhabi ideas too - where everything is forbidden and will get you stoned. Wahhab himself was expelled from every city he ever lived in by other Muslims because he was too stone-happy.

The Saudis have been infecting the brains of the faithful with their medieval madness for years, while filling up their bank accounts, all because of this "To the death!" religion stuff... and what do Americans do about it? The world's most powerful empire, and they argue over which president should have bombed the madrassa zombies, rather than attacked the root. But see, Saudis are also good for business because they got the oil. And rationally, you want business to run smoothly. So you look the other way while your business partner spends his billions on remaking the world into a crazier, meaner place.

The Hologram is Bleeding

If there's one thing reactionaries love more than getting up in other people's business, it's blaming a tragedy on something new that they don't understand.

Take the stabbing in Wisconsin. Two little idiots slashed up a third because they thought it would endear them to Web 2.0's perennial bogeyman:

"[Suspect Anissa E. Weier] told police that Slender Man is the 'leader' of Creepypasta, and in the hierarchy of that world, one must kill to show dedication. Weier said that [fellow suspect Morgan E. Geyser] told her they should become 'proxies' of Slender Man — a paranormal figure known for his ability to create tendrils from his fingers and back — and kill their friend to prove themselves worthy of him. Weier said she was surprised by Geyser's suggestion, but also excited to prove skeptics wrong and show that Slender Man really did exist."

You can replace every instance of "Slender Man" in that natter with "The Easter Bunny" and it makes just as much sense. This is an entirely artificial urban legend with its origins in a Something Awful photoshop contest from 2009. This is an easy history to track down and that any news source is reporting anything different is just because journalistic integrity died long ago.

The fake that started it all.

It's much better - as in it gets way more page views - to hype up a non-threat like Slender Man and the Creepypasta Wiki. Then you get all sorts of moral outrage from people who honestly worry that there's not enough God in the Constitution. And with a brilliant work of horror like Slender Man, who's noodley appendages strike something deep in the primate brain, is just unnerving enough to get every muddling middle-brow clamoring for the digital equivalent of book burnings.

However this is not to say media and deviant behavior are entirely unrelated. That would be a good topic of conversation in the wake of this crime as, since there's no corpse for a change, we might actually get somewhere. Like how these two girls legitimately believed stabbing someone to death would win them otherworldly favors from a series of JPEGs. That kind of magical thinking will lead to catastrophe no matter what you attach it to and it's epidemic in pelagic America, a flat hellscape where nothing ever happens despite a loudly enforced popular mythology that everyone is special and of consequence.

That Americans live in a bland nothingness while dreaming of the Homeric life is the great unspoken truth of our time. It drives everything from our jingoistic foreign policy to our retarded market economics, so it should come as no surprise that two All-American losers should concoct a power fantasy out of internet fiction. That they were "inspired" by Slender Man is as relevant to the debate as if they were inspired by raptureready.com.

Not that any such discussion will happen in the national media. It's just gonna be a few weeks of "Look what the kids are into now!" before the next mass shooting happens.

Oh Shi-

Foto Filler Friday

It's the last post of the year so what better time for some filler?

And what better time for Batman to smack his bitch up?

The Useful Idiots of Oligarchy

It's telling that those who make the most noise about liberty in this day and age are so utterly clueless about the subject...

Case in point - Edward Snowden. Yes, it was very brave of him to reveal the total information orgy the NSA was engaging in. Yes, it was a principled stand against a creeping surveillance culture that cares more about control than security. No, it does not make him a good person or even necessarily a very clever one.

That's the conclusion I've finally come to on the whole Snowden thing - he's a fucking moron. Idealistic yes but absolutely clueless as to the ugly workings of the world. Surprising, considering he used to work for a three letter agency...

Because being a spook, or at least one of their support techs, should have clued him in that Russia might not be the best place to seek asylum if personal freedom is high on your list of priorities. Putin is one of the last dictators to do it with style but he's still a dictator and Russians face a level of oppression and invasive surveillance that Americans can't - and won't - imagine.

Yeah, all you shmucks know Pussy Riot. How about Roman Dobrokhotov? The late Anna Politkovskaya? The gloriously mad Edward Limonov?  These people have dealt with real oppression, real imprisonment, real violence - murder, in the case of Politivskaya - all for daring to say that life under Putin is kinda unpleasant.

Then Edward Snowden pops up in their country, praising their blood enemy's commitment to human rights. What a sooka! Look, either Snowden is shamelessly grabbing at an alliance with a rival superpower to protect his own hide or he's adopted the Greenwald Consensus that America is in the grips of super-fascism. And I don't really think it's the former, since he went and exposed himself in that interview with Ol' Koch-Sucking Camel Face.

And none of you smug, bourgeois loafers will call him on it because this sort of dumb - libertarian dumb - is the new normal. The only thing that differentiates it from the old neocon dumb - where we just assumed the entire Middle East wanted to be converted into white-collar suburbs - is the false piety. When it used to show up at all, it was all this guff about spreading the twin goods of democracy and capitalism. Now it's some nebulous concept of "freedom" that no one's too clear on but is heartily promoted by corporate bagmen and GOP dirty tricksters.

Like Bruce Fein, lawyer to Papa Snowden and a Reaganite turned libertarian. He even did a tour with Greenwald, some College Libertarian Hoedown, funded by everyone's favorite pair of vampires. I remember college libertarians - they are, without fail, comfortable white guys primarily concerned with weed, video games, and not having to do anything for anyone. Ever. They oppose welfare and war for the exact same reason - they don't want to be called upon to make any personal sacrifice for whatever reason. Thanks to Fein, Greenwald, and the Paul clan, these degenerate lackwits have been able to dress up their pathological self-absorption in fancy freedom talk.

Which brings us back to Edward Snowden. Whatever credibility he had from exposing the US surveillance superstate is safely shot, now that he's sold out to the Kremlin. Who are paying him to set up a brand new PRISM for the Putin regime. All he managed was to encourage anti-government sentiment in America, where such sentiments only ever serve the interest of Wall Street, Oil companies, and all the other oligarchs who really run things. Snowden, Greenwald, those Ron Paul potheads - all of 'em, just tools of the modern robber barons looking to keep Obama from raising their taxes.

Theory of the Leeching Class

"The thief or swindler who has gained great wealth by his delinquency has a better chance than the small thief of escaping the rigorous penalty of the law..." ~ Thorstein Veblen.

You're not allowed to criticize capitalism in polite company these days, despite its abysmal record. Of course, by "capitalism" we really mean business. And as Thorstein Veblen so eloquently put it, business is a parasite.

For proof, look no further than your own bank. Thanks to a court decision in favor of retailers, banks don't get to pick up a third of all plastic card transactions anymore - which should be cause to celebrate. These shadow charges have been the real inflation squeezing your resources, as it necessitated everyone from Sachs to 7-11 to mark up prices just to maintain their own balances.

So this decision would be a good thing... Except banks will now screw you more directly. Higher overdraft fees, higher minimum balances, more and more hidden charges that spring up on you right when you think you've got enough for bills. Because the logic of American business, as demonstrated time and again, is "Fuck the consumer!"

"With a rake!"

It's anti-consumer bullshit on a level also seen in the more and more degenerate console gaming industry - gauge customers at every opportunity and then punish them for the vagaries of the market. The only way it's not economic suicide is because there's no real competition. Every bank is doing it, all the time.

It's really the market loving libertards who should be up in arms about this. They're not, of course. They have much more pressing concerns, like jacking off to Atlas Shrugged or sputtering at irrelevant bloggers. Because they've not only internalized the Veblen critique of business, they're thick enough to think it's a good thing -

"However important the independent owner of property may be for the economic order of a free society, his importance is perhaps even greater in the fields of thought and opinion, of tastes and beliefs." ~ Friedrich Hayek

Friedrich Hayek repeated verbatim exactly what Veblen sneered at in his Theory of the Leisure Class - that the whole point of the elite is to accumulate expensive things, reinforcing that they are expensive (regardless of actual utility) and making the elite look worthy of their station. Except he presented it as the desirable state of things, being a reactionary opposed to full exercise of positive freedom by the common workers.

"Filthy peasants..."

And libertarians, dupes that they are,  accept this as a moral imperative - "Of course the banks can screw us, they're rich!" The wealthy have the right, by virtue of all their shiny knickknacks, to set a moral standard regardless of how patently immoral it is. It's a disgustingly servile mentality, a rationalization of loserdom. And it's coming from the people loudly campaigning for freedom of the individual.

How can you support a "free market" if it makes you a slave?