If people ask me where I stand on the border issue, vis-à-vis more or less enforcement, can I say I'm firmly planted on the fence?
Mexico has an upcoming ballot initiative on whether or not to build a ramp.
This has probably been said before, but if someone's willing to hike through the desert, swim across a river, climb over a wall, and evade the police just so they can get a job picking asparagus, well, we can do far worse as a country than letting that person stay. The only change I would suggest is maybe adding a puzzle element to the obstacle course.
The question we need to ask as a society is: how do we define the eugenic ideal?
Adam Carolla has a lot of anger, but one of the things he hates most is getting "chickenshit" traffic tickets in Los Angeles. Last week on the podcast, he went off on this old standard with a fury like none before (tirade starts at 25 minute mark).
"OK, we definitely can't sell the lead as handsome..."
Carolla's take is that in Los Angeles, the cops write tons of meaningless tickets just so they can bring in more revenue. He says Los Angeles is the one city stupid enough to fuck over its own taxpayers; essentially the employees (cops) are shaking down their bosses (voters).
While basic stupidity is usually the best explanation, here's another theory: Los Angeles isn't a single city, its a sprawling commuter metropolis of over a hundred separate municipalities, and when the cops pull someone over in, say, Glendale, there's a good chance that person is actually a resident of another town.
LA County alone has 88 different municipalities.
In the smaller municipalities, the cops usually aren't shaking down their own taxpayers, they're exacting a toll on outsiders who are just passing through. The city of LA has a smaller incentive to ticket because, being the biggest city, they're more likely to pull over their own residents, which would make the cops more likely to piss off the voters. This theory is born out when Carolla says the worst cities are Santa Monica, Burbank, and Glendale, not the City of Los Angeles itself.
Donny suggests that he and Adam "sue the city for poor performance and lack of ability", but as Adam says "never gonna happen". What should happen is for the county as a whole to form an agreement where the "profit" from traffic tickets (funds above the cost of writing the ticket) in each city goes into one big pot for the whole county, those funds would then be dispersed back to each city in proportion to their populations.
There's a reason Donny gets told to "shut the fuck up".
The one big pot would remove the incentive for each municipality to "rape" the passers-through, cops would only pull over the people who cause real problems. To replace the lost revenue, each city could simply raise taxes a little, they'd also save by paying for fewer chickenshit cops; the taxpayers would more than make that money back by having to pay fewer traffic tickets. The revenues would stay the same for the cities, but you'd eliminate the transaction costs of all the BULLSHIT! and FUCKING HASSLE!! from the ASSHOLE COPS AND THEIR CHICKENSHIT TICKETS!!!
As everyone knows, in TV and movie plots, there's a gradual building of tension until right near the end when there's an explosive climax. Afterward there's the denouement: this is when the energy falls back to normal and some time is spent thinking about the consequences of the action that preceded.
This pattern really resonates with the architecture of the human mind, perhaps it somehow echoes some vital part of our evolutionary past. Here are a few of the classic types of denouement that, for some reason, seem to pop up again and again:
The two lovers end up in each others arms and live happily ever after. This is the ending that Middle-America wants to have.
After pounding the hell out of somebody, Renegade instinctively feels the impulse to get out of dodge. As he knows he's made someone's life just a little bit better, he says his goodbyes then rides off into the sunset, alone.
At the end of Critters, the camera pans to a shot of the barn, where a couple critter eggs still remain. You always know when this ending is coming: the action was fun, exciting, and a little bit scary, but as the temporary fulfillment quickly subsides, there's a vague sense of dread, a feeling that the seeds have been planted for trouble down the road. There will be further consequences...
Its been in the news lately that more and more women are outearning their male counterparts. Pundits are worried about what this means for the future of marriage; many men will not accept a woman who makes more money, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Did Pew Research really intend for this graph to look like a set of (fake) tits?
The paragon of feminism is a career woman who outearns her husband. The paragon of misogyny is a motherfuckin' pimp. These two archetypes aren't in conflict, in fact they're the perfect fit.
A pimp is an extreme version of the male housewife. A pimp does not work for a living, a pimp stays home while the woman goes out and gets that money. A pimp's job is to maintain his appearance, to stay in the freshest outfits and to keep himself in immaculate condition. A pimp's appearance is the foundation of the woman's self confidence.
But a pimp must also provide emotional security. The woman's job is extremely demanding; if she can't rely on him for support, she'll carry those burdens from one day to the next, and as those burdens mount, it compromises her abilities as an earner.
You can stand under my umbrella.
In order to reconcile the changes wrought by feminism with the traditions of masculinity, the modern career-woman must encourage her man to embrace the role of a pimp. Its the ideal marriage, two opposites that compliment each other to perfection.
There's a good episode of Planet Money from Jan 27, 2010. This Harvard economist, Jeffrey Miron, talks about the "concern" that legalizing drugs would make them way cheaper. He believes that the prices would go down, but not quite as much as you think.
Dude, don't let me forget to take a picture for my myspace.
He says that if drugs became legal, the suppliers would have to spend all sorts of extra money on taxes, lawyers, and compliance with regulations (guess what: he's a libertarian). For example, he says they wouldn't be able to hire 10-year-olds to sell the drugs anymore.
Kenard reacts: You're gonna fire me?
But one thing he's forgetting is how much of a hassle it is to deal with a drug dealer, that's one of those hidden costs that's not included in the price tag. Economists would call this a transaction cost.
Imagine if you had to call a guy every time you wanted to buy a gallon of milk. He'll take like two days to get back to you, when he does, he'll say he has to call his guy to see when he's getting more milk. Three days later you finally go over to the guy's filthy apartment. He only has a half gallon for you and its 2% instead of the skim you'd asked for. You have to sit on his disease-ridden couch and laugh at his shitty jokes while worrying about getting scabies. Then he'll be like:
"Hey man, wanna drink a glass of milk?"
And you don't really feel like drinking a glass of milk right then, you actually wanted milk five days ago. But you don't want to be rude so you say yes.
"Dude, check out this glass...isn't it cool?"
There has to be some sort of classical conditioning effect to explain the stoner fascination with glass pieces. 'Man, this is like a maze where you can't even find the start and finish.'
He's talking about the glass that the two of you are both drinking out of, and it is "cool", as far as drink-ware is concerned, but it looks like it probably hasn't been washed in a long time. After you're done with the milk you start wondering if its ok for you to leave now, or if this transaction is the guy's solution to the dual problems of being both unemployable and incapable of sustaining normal friendships.
The New York Times is putting up a paywall again; each month, the first X number of nytimes.com articles you read will be free, after that they'll block your ability to navigate the site unless you pay a subscription fee. Media watchers speculate that the NY Times will lose a lot of readers. Lets all pretend we're sophisticated enough to be among those effected.
Remember back during the early "aughts", when TV was for morons. The only show people would admit to watching was The Sopranos. Part of the appeal of that show was that the common dullard couldn't watch it. In order to watch it, you either had to be rich, or you had to know a guy.
The exclusivity of The Sopranos made you feel sophisticated, it gave you higher status; its possible this created more demand for the show than if it were offered for free. This runs contrary to the normal law of demand, but it applies to many luxury goods in the economy. These are called Veblen Goods, and they're a real, verifiable phenomenon, unlike the as-yet undocumented mythological Giffen goods. By the way, why can't we call them Griffin goods?
Important question: do griffins take bird shits or lion shits.
For some people, NY Times articles are a Veblen good. Part of the appeal has always been that reading it makes you feel superior, which makes it a source of self-identity. We all know people who would go out of their way to read more NYTimes just so they could tell people they had to pony up the subscription fee.
The opposite of a Veblen Good is pussy, the value of which drops to nothing the instant its price rises above zero.
This is a product you don't want to identify yourself with.
On Slate's Jan 26 Culture Gabfest, Mike Pesca mentions "World Music", then as an aside notes his discomfort with the whole concept of the genre. He raises an interesting question; why does Khazakstani music get lumped in with African music but not French music? Maybe the usage of the term "World Music" is similar to the usage of the term "Country Music".
NY + LA : Rest of The Country :: US + EU : Rest of The World
In other words, brown people are the hicks of the world.
But Pesca has to admit, society's made a lot of progress; we used to call it "Earth Music", and before that it was "Dirt People Music".
They're tired, they're poor, and if you huddle them together they form a single mass.
There was this show on Animal Planet about the moose, they were talking about how the antlers are a symbol of the moose's manhood: they use them to fight other bulls for the right to have sex with the women.
The moose symbolically rub their metaphorical cocks together.
But apparently, should a moose become castrated, he immediately sheds his current antlers and grows a new set of hideously deformed, permanently soft poop-antlers.
Wow. Not only can they not defend themselves, or get laid, they also have to walk around with a gigantic, symbolically flaccid crown of shame, letting everyone know that they're the king of impotent pariahs. And for them to hang their heads would only put their inadequacy more up front.
If these moose don't commit suicide, is it only because they can't see their own antlers? But then again, isn't that true of humans too? Isn't life, in many ways a game of Indian Poker?
We go through life taking the objective measure of those around us, but don't we all have a blindspot right behind our eyes? (I originally wrote this up as what I thought was a very solid spec script for Sex In The City.)
Me in my apartment!
"Am I a seven or an eight? I'm definately hotter than him, theres no way I'm a six, right? I wish there was someone I could just ask but I don't trust anyone to actually tell me the truth....Maybe the reason women don't respond to me is because of my low self esteem....I just need to accept that I'm at least an eight and a half."
We can take an indirect measure by pairing up with someone, but even then the questions may arise.
"Did I marry too young? I think I may have sold myself short. Do the numbers change over time or are we now who we were in High School? Shit I forgot what number she was and now I can't see it because she's been next to me for the last few years."
Obviously the moose is too stupid to even be sentient, let alone self-aware enough to commit suicide; this is the species where, if a hunter hides behind a tree, it will immediately forget the hunter exists. But isn't that the way humans are about their own insecurities? Every time you're actually happy, isn't it only because you've temporarily forgotten about all the things that are wrong with you?
"He reminds me of me a lot." - Michael Jackson discussing The Elephant Man on Oprah in 1993; he still had a lot of work to do on himself.
Some people think we're in a Golden Age of TV, music, podcasting, and reading material. Theres a ton of great stuff out there and its all free for the taking, but gold lasts forever and this era will not. This era is more like a gold rush and if we're not careful, soon we will be living in a ghost town!
Because of the internet, its becoming harder and harder to monetize the work being done by musicians and writers. After awhile, potential artists will become discouraged and choose more "respectable", high-paying careers as doctors, lawyers and businessmen. When art is free, making art becomes an act of altruism, and if society needs heroes its because they're in short supply, in as short a supply as gold after there's no more gold left in the ghost town.
In the past and the present, heroes like soldiers, firemen, and everyday joes have gone above and beyond for the greater good. Society just can't pay these heroes enough for all the sacrifices they make. Because of the nature of the heroism, there's no way to have an agreed-upon payment beforehand, so in the moment of crisis, the hero commits the good deed because he has faith in the goodness of humanity.
In return, society gives them their reward in the form of adoration, with the folk dropping to their knees in gratitude. That's why we pin medals on the heroes' chests, so the women will know who's cock to suck. A true hero has so much trust in humanity that he'll refuse taking any money, this is a classy way of saying "Don't worry about it, maybe someday you can pay me back in blowjobs."
Society needs to stop glorifying doctors, lawyers, and businessmen. These men are not altruists; they're already being compensated enough financially. Instead we must change the cultural climate. We must encourage our women to redouble their efforts by giving more and better blowjobs to musicians, writers, and podcasters.
I say this as a public service, I'm not trying to make any money off this shit.
The lede: Conservatives more responsive to advertising? Dig deeper for more on this and other questionable assertions...
Air America went off the air last week and no one cared, but people love to give reasons as to why the liberal station failed while conservative radio has flourished.
Bill O'Reilly: Its a sign of the "collapse of far-left media".
Air America: Its because of tough economic times, a "perfect storm in the media industry".
Michael Harrrison, editor of Talkers Magazine: The station didn't know "whether they were a political campaign or a broadcasting company. They ended up not being terribly good at either."
The bad management explanation seems pretty widely accepted by people affiliated with the station, supposedly there were four or five different management teams over a six year period, and for the most part, each had very little experience in radio. And some former Air America hosts have found homes on other stations. But that still leaves the question as to why liberal radio fails to approach the success of the conservative radio "goldmine", which includes people like Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity.
NPR's David Folkenflik points out that the real counterweight to those conservative voices isn't in radio, its in websites like The Huffington Post and The Daily Kos. Oh yeah, that's right: liberals actually read, whereas conservatives like being read to. And as many others have pointed out: liberals actually think, whereas conservatives like being told what to think.
They love going to church, where a guy reads from a book and tells you how to live your life. They love the military, where a guy barks orders at you and if you disobey you can get shot or put in the brig. Radio is such a great fit for these people. They don't have the time or intellectual capacity to sift through the internet, gathering information and evaluating it on its merits. They don't want to think for themselves, they want to be given their marching orders over the loudspeaker.
So doesn't it seem likely that conservatives are more responsive to advertising? During elections, they always seem to fall for the lies told in political ads. Remember these classic hits?
Al Gore claims he invented the internet.
John Kerry lied to win medals in Vietnam.
Barack Obama pals around with terrorists.
Harold Ford wants to have sex with our white women.
All of these slanderous ads had profound impacts on each campaign, but how often do you hear about a liberal ad changing a race? Almost never, because people who swing that way aren't as easily swayed by commercials.
Perhaps even more than during his campaign, after he was elected, George Bush was able to control public perception using what amounts to the same exact technique as the ads for Head-On.
If you repeat the same thing over and over again, conservatives will believe it. This is why they're such a great target demo for advertisers, and you can bet these advertisers are willing to pay extra for air time in front of these easy marks. Meanwhile, liberals have such a skeptical view of advertising. Ad-men just don't get much bang for their buck trying to fool those fact-obsessed rational assholes.
Did you ever listen to Air America and hear one of the hosts do one of those in-program ad reads, where the host'll talk about some product as though its still part of the show, when in fact its a paid advertisement? It always sounded so incongruous, like, who does Ed Schultz think he's fooling? But when a conservative host does it, you can almost picture the dumb yokels nodding along, thinking "wow, this sounds like one heck of a product, thanks Rush!"
And by the way, have you listened to top 40 radio in the past ten years? Its music for stupid people who crave conformity and repetition. If commercial success in radio is contingent on catering to that type of person, the failure of Air America is a sign of our success as human beings. Head On!
Apparently there's been this cooking show called Nigella Feasts, and it stars what is probably the hottest fat woman on TV other than Joan Holloway. I stumbled across it one morning before work and almost ended up undoing the shower I'd just taken. Instead I DVR'ed it. The episode was called "Solitary Sensations".
Joan Holloway
vs
Nigella Lawson
This show's been denounced as food porn by many health advocates; they say this in part because the food is shot like a nice set of fat tits. Nigella happens to have some of those, and they're showcased quite prominently as she sensually moans while savoring the food. Its no joke, this is a cooking show that you might very well (have already) jerk(ed) off to.
But ultimately the porn is for the ladies. As with a lot of girl fantasies, there has to be some back story, some emotional rationale for the indulgence. With this show, the indulgence is indeed the food, and the back story is "see, curvaceous women can be sexy too...why not stuff my fat fucking face?"
Two of my favorite podcasts are "Jordan, Jesse, Go!" and "Comedy and Everything Else". Most of the other ones I listen to have lengthy ads for audible.com or a subscription fee; these podcasts don't, instead they occasionally ask for donations to defray their costs.
"In the past year, we've probably made 100-125 hours of programming. Of course, we give it all away for free, so we pretty much rely completely on people's voluntary donations to support us". - Jesse Thorn of "Jordan, Jesse, Go!"
This works out nicely for me; they're giving me the option of doing nothing. But for some reason, when they ask for donations, they seem like beggars and cheapskates, even though I'm the one who's freeloading.
Eugene Fama is supposed to be a respectable economist. In the Jan 11, 2010 issue of the New Yorker, he continues to tout the gospel of rational expectations theory. This theory is the foundation of the worldview that businesses are always right.
The theory says that as a whole, businesses make rational decisions based on projections about the future. These projections are based on models of how the businesses believe the market works. Because of the magic of capitalism, the models they use are inherently free of systematic flaws or bias. This theory was originally intended to describe behavior in simple theoretical systems; people like Fama co-opted it as capitalist dogma and applied it to the complexities of the real world, giving birth to the idea that if businesses are doing it, it must be smart.
This worldview permeates society from corporate boardrooms on down to ordinary working folk. Adam Carolla likes to talk about how terrible it is that airlines serve "Fiesta Mix" as a mid-air snack. He says you know Fiesta Mix is shit because the only place people eat it is when they're trapped in planes and have no other choice. The airlines could spend an extra 10 cents a bag and serve something thats actually good, like pretzels, but instead they pass out something that tastes like shit and alienates the customer. When he tells people the story of Fiesta Mix, they often respond by saying the airlines must have some rationale because, due to the power of free-markets, businesses are always smart.
A few months back, Paul Krugman wrote a great article in the NY Times Magazine about how this market-fundamentalist worldview fell out of favor among economists during the recent crisis. Yet Fama and his kind still believe in the same old shit, that businesses make projections using models that are inherently free of systematic flaws or bias.
Businessmen have to be some sort of special, elevated class of people because the conceptual models of pretty much every other profession have, at different points in time, been proven to be completely wrong in their understanding.
"You don't know the history of psychiatry. I do."
If you can get past his good looks, you have to admit Cruise has a point: the widespread practice of lobotomy suggests that there may have been a systematic flaw in psychiatry's conception of the brain. It would be one thing if they made this mistake during midevil times, unfortunately they were doing it in the 1950s.
Then you have "medicine", and its long-held philosophy of bloodletting, which, even through the 1800s, was the most common medical procedure. They thought it balanced the levels of Fire, Earth, Water, and Air in the humours of the human body. They used it as a treatment for almost every ailment, the exceptions were probably shootings and stabbings. They got this wrong for 2000 fucking years!
EitherHans von Gersdorff's "Feldbuch der Wundarznei" (Points For Bloodletting) - 1517 , or The Back of a Slayer Fan's Math Notebook - 1993.
Businessmen would say the cases presented thus far are bullshit; they think the sciences are for "eggheads" who always get it wrong. They have the same dismissive opinion of economists and their "pinhead theories", although they do buy into the one about how businessmen are always right and the other one about how there shouldn't be taxes.
The problem, the businessmen would say, is that there wasn't enough competitive pressure on the doctors to get it right; that oath about not killing your patients wasn't really a strong enough incentive. Well, sports are pretty competitive, right?
Basketball coaches used to think blacks were too stupid to play basketball.
Even though the NCAA had been desegregated for decades, as of the mid-1960s, very few teams would start more than a couple of blacks; they believed there needed to be some white guys out there to supervise the action.
"There was a certain style of play whites expected from blacks. `Nigger ball' they used to call it. Whites then thought that if you put five blacks on the court at the same time, they would somehow revert to their native impulses."- Perry Wallace, first black player in the SEC
In 1966 Texas Western, the first teamwith five black starters, played against Adolph Rupp's all-white Kentucky for the national championship. In this Mike Wilbon article, Maryland Coach Gary Williams talks about the perception that Texas Western was too stupid to win that game.
"I think back on how even the people who taught the game thought that black players weren't smart enough to play the game well. Every coach I had when I was young would say, 'Now listen, you're playing against a black player tonight. You've got to pump-fake him because he'll automatically jump in the air and foul you.' But that night, watching the way Texas Western played, if you had stereotypes in your head about basketball and you were in Cole, it changed the way you thought, changed the way you felt. It's very seldom that one event, that something which took less than two hours, could affect people so dramatically."
Texas Western coach Don Haskins won a national championship, 40 years later they made a huge movie about him, and all he had to do was let a bunch of black guys play basketball. How come he was the first guy who thought of that?
A white man set them free...
Perhaps it was just a different time, certainly no one has that type of fundamental bias in their thinking nowadays...
Up until a few years ago, people thought a tall sprinter couldn't excel in the 100 meters, they thought tall guys were too slow getting out of the blocks and up to top speed. For that reason, 6' 5" Usain Bolt was always discouraged from even trying to compete in the event despite being one of the best 200 meter sprinters in the world.
At age 20, a grown-ass man, he had to beg his coach to change his mind.
"I wanted to run the 100, not just the 200. My coach told me if I broke the national record for the 200, I could run a 100." - Usain Bolt
So he broke the record in the 200; in May of 2008, within a year of starting training for the event, he set the world record in the 100 meters. Later that summer, he destroyed the field at the Beijing Olympics, and did it in style, showboating across the finish line.
“People think you have to be short, strong and stocky to be a great sprinter and Usain Bolt has defied that. It's the beginning of something else.” - Richard Thompson, runner-up to Bolt in Beijing
As of now, Bolt owns the world record at 9.58 seconds, the next fastest time run by someone other than Bolt is a 9.74. The stereotype that tall guys can't run the 100 no longer exists.
Market-fundamentalists will say those two cases are examples of prejudice, well that's exactly the point: track coaches and basketball coaches were making projections using models that were systematically biased. In highly competitive arenas where the best ideas are supposed to win out, every single coach got it wrong for decades. Can these market-fundamentalists still seriously believe that market forces create inherently valid models in the minds of participants?
If you look at their views on climate change, the answer is no. As you know, the actual climate scientists have reached a broad consensus that climate change is almost certainly driven by man, yet most of these market guys keep insisting (wonder why?) that the jury is still out. If that's the case, the jury should be back any minute to send them to prison-for-assholes.
But seriously, if they really believed that market forces were infallible, wouldn't some climate scientist come out of the woodwork with a good idea of how to debunk the concept of man-made climate change? Wouldn't the oil companies be offering that guy hundreds of millions of dollars to generate reproducible evidence to support that theory? All of the money in the world (except the powerful homesteading lobby) badly, badly wants climate change to be a myth. But all the money in the world still hasn't found a champion to fight for them. Market fundamentalists have to choose which child to save: "rational expectations theory" or "the jury's still out on climate change".
Remember this thing?
But these market-fundamentalists seem to contradict themselves a lot. Why is that they have such a devout faith in the infallible, instantaneously self-correcting Darwinian powers of financial markets, yet so many of them refuse to believe in evolution itself. Actually, there is some consistency in those two views, in that both of them are wrong.
Unless you learned your biology in church, you probably know that evolution takes time, and if the environment changes faster than species are able to evolve, entire ecosystems can be wiped out. In the four examples listed earlier, you saw how long it took for mind-frames to evolve: decades or even millenia. These market-fundamentalists believe that orthodox mind-frames across the entire economy evolve faster than you can click a keyboard.
The truth is, the pervasiveness of the "business is always right" worldview may actually prevent mind-frames from evolving at all. If you believe that business is always right, and was always right, why would you ever change your strategies? Likewise, if businesses are always right, and businesses believe in market-fundamentalism, doesn't that mean market-fundamentalism must neccessarily be correct? This type of self perpetuating stupidity is also seen in religion, which is also known for resisting the evolution of ideas.
Now lets take a look at the environment of the modern economy. Its a system that's far more complex than a 100 meter dash, or a basketball game, or even the human mind. Everything has become interconnected, on a level more intimate than global ecology, to the point where there is only one economic ecosystem: the whole world. And that ecosystem is changing extremely rapidly.
The things that caused the most change in the recent collapse have been called "financial innovations". They are the Wall Street version of high-technology. Technologists are always talking about the concept of Technological Singularity. The idea is that technological innovations build off eachother, with the advances coming at a faster and faster rate. At a certain point, the changes will become so fast that man kind can no longer even conceive of whats happening.
They theorize that this singularity point might happen when we create an AI that can spawn other, more advanced AIs; the dreaded robots-making-robots-making-robots scenario. Wall Street's financial innovations haven't become sentient yet, but many of them were designed by quantum physicists, and they are financial derivatives of derivatives of derivatives, almost spawning off one another like so many droids. In 2003, Warren Buffet, the man known as "The Oracle of Omaha", called the new derivatives"financial weapons of mass destruction that could harm not only their buyers and sellers, but the whole economic system". He said these innovations were designed by "madmen".
Like the scenario of technological singularity, the financial markets are evolving at progressively more ludicrous speeds. Speeds that the human minds in the financial market cannot keep up with, and when keystone species can't evolve as fast as their changing environments, the whole ecosystem can end up crashing. The ecosystem being the global economy.
The lessons of history are clear: mankind is capable of a stunning level of stubbornness and stupidity, it often has a hard time remembering the past, let alone understanding the present, or predicting the future. Mankind is also capable of incredible, robots-making-robots-level innovations. Sometimes those innovations can have unforeseeable consequences. Sometimes you can't know the future until it sticks a gun in your face.
Meanwhile, these same conservatives are up in arms anytime someone:
Smokes a bowl
Has gay sex
Lights a piece of cloth on fire
Criticizes a conservative politician
"If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations, then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media." - Sarah Palin
These conservatives disapprove of anyone who's not a buttoned-down, church-going, flag-waving conformist. The one form of self-expression worth protecting is having more money than everyone else.
Roman Abramovich
Larry Ellison
Paul Allen
Oh yeah, and this:
Decked out in full-on camouflage hunting gear, Nugent wielded two machine guns while raging, “Obama, he’s a piece of shit. I told him to suck on my machine gun. Hey Hillary,” he continued. “You might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless bitch.” Nugent summed up his eloquent speech by screaming “freedom!” - Rolling Stone
When this blog was started, my goal was to improve my writing skills. Now I'm realizing that with zero readers, maybe the only thing I'm learning is how to act like an isolated wacko.
Imagine what a worthless shit-scape Nevada would be if it didn't have whores and gambling. Is this a coincidence?
If you're in any major American city, and you're in the mood for a hooker or a dice game, you go straight to the ghetto. Its always the worst possible real-estate where they resort to this shit.
This week on Fresh Air, Terry interviewed Aram Roston, who'd written an article in The Nation titled "How the US Funds the Taliban". Apparently US trucking contractors have been paying off the Taliban warlords along the supply routes. If they don't pay up, their convoys are attacked by snipers and rocket launchers. As a result, our army is giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the enemy its supposed to be fighting.
This sounds like some hardcore David Simon shit. Let's spend the next few minutes pretending I know anything about this war.
Simon says people don't always serve the interests of the institutions they're supposed to represent. The question here is who's cheating their employer.
1) Are the contractors cheating the US military? No. The article says its "an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting." The military has known for awhile what the contractors are doing, yet they keep paying them, so you can't say they're being cheated.
"Fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again."
2) Are the contractors cheating the US taxpayers? No. Because the military is aware of what the contractors are doing, and has the ability to fire them, the military bears the ultimate moral responsibility for the contractors actions. Seriously, you expect the contractors to be money grubbers, so if they're grubbing for money, you can hardly call it a betrayal.
3) Are individual officers in the US military cheating the US taxpayers? Yes.
"One major hauler in Afghanistan, Afghan International Trucking (AIT), paid $20,000 a month in kickbacks to a US Army contracting official, according to the official's plea agreement in US court."
At a bare minimum, that corrupt asshole overpaid the contractors by at least $20k. You can guess that its probably a lot more, the contractor has to be getting a premium in exchange for wading in shit.
4) Are the local Taliban warlords cheating the greater Taliban war effort? Possibly. The Taliban is not a monolithic entity, its a loose coalition of hillbilly warlords. The local Taliban chiefs care more about themselves than the greater cause. They can take the bribes without caring if it aids the "enemy"; most likely those supplies will be used against some other warlord down the road, not against them. And after all, if they started attacking convoys, the convoys would find another route and pay someone else.
In this situation, the US contractors are like drug runners and the local Taliban are like crooked cops. The crooked cops let the shipments through and say "What do I care? Its not like this stuff is hurting my people."
5) Is the US military-industrial-complex, in collusion with the Taliban, cheating the US taxpayers? Possibly. War isn't always a zero-sum game; it can be lose-lose, with the two armies destroying each other, or it can be win-win, with both armies enriching themselves. For professional warriors, the two sides depend on each other for their livelihood.
This applies to the drug war, where the police and the drug dealers have a symbiotic relationship. If there were no drug dealers to arrest, the cops would be out of a job. If there were no cops to arrest them, the kingpins would make less money than an organic farmer.
There's also a symbiosis between the combatants in Mixed Martial Arts. People want to see a war, and they pay to see a war, and the bloodier the war, the more money there is to be made in the rematch. You'll never see more man-hugging than after a really brutal fight in the UFC.
Sometimes you can't tell if they're fighting or hugging.
Never forget that after 9-11, people wanted to see a war, and they've paid to see a war. Some of that money is funding the enemy's effort, but is the Pentagon really cheating if they're just giving us what we wanted?
