And Jesus told the masses in North Carolina: “Tolerate not the Sodomites for they are like vermin, infectious, and will make you into a homo, too.”
And the masses listened.
Background: Last week I asked Mark Smollin to make me a cover for a fake book — The Compleat Sayings of American Jesus.
With my suggestions he came up with the above and a word balloon that needed filling.
I told him to use one of the first “sayings” published last week here. It had to grab with that special kind of nastiness one has come to expect in the white vote in the south and much of the heartland. It also had to have a quality that would immediately buzz off the same pismires because they never see themselves in such a bad light, viewing what they’re doing as defending something special instead of what it actually is — using law, truth determined by majorities and rampant ignorance to pick on people they hate.
What was the citation from yesterday? Yes, here it is, with regards to a country in a state of fail: “Comedy thrives; indeed writers are hardly needed to invent outrageous events.”
Today’s double dose:
Just how unpopular is President Barack Obama in some parts of the country? Enough that a man in prison in Texas got 4 out of 10 votes in West Virginia’s Democratic presidential primary.
The inmate, Keith Judd, is serving time at the Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution in Texas …
Brown, [a West Virginia electrician who voted for the jailbird], went to the polls Tuesday with his 22-year-old daughter, Emily. She planned to vote for Judd too until she found out where Judd has been living.
“I’m not voting for somebody who’s in prison,” she said.
She was certain about one thing: “I just want to vote against Barack Obama.”
American Jesus told the masses in West Virginia: “Even the lifetime criminal has more virtue than a socialist Muslim from Kenya.”
Just breaking:
And American Jesus said, in a press conference from Charlotte, NC: “Malum est dux qui est infecta homosexualitas” or “Evil is a leader who is infected with homosexuality.”
One of the badges of the stupid right wing bigot, in other words virtually all of the modern Republican Party, is the pass around e-mail joke.
It begins something like this:
Over five thousand years ago, Moses said to the children of Israel, “Pick up your shovels, mount your asses and camels, and I will lead you to the Promised Land.”
Nearly 75 years ago, (when Welfare was introduced)Roosevelt said, “Lay down your shovels, sit on your asses, and light up a Camel. This is the Promised Land.”
I was startled to get this in my e-mail on Monday. I patiently explained to the friend who’d sent it that I knew he’d probably received it in e-mail from one of his Republican friends, someone not even around when FDR issued in the New Deal.
The e-mail ends with an attack on Muslims in Pakistan. Between slurs on those on welfare, a complaint about too much taxation and Obamacare, plus a blanket condemnation of Muslims as suicide bombers, it contains all the sweets the Tea Party loves.
I did a quick Google search and it’s published in lots of places. They all have one thing in common: They’re chat boards and sites for right wing or Tea Partiers who believe it’s hysterical. It also goes well with the idiot wish to wave or display the Gadsden flag so that everyone knows how patriotic you are.
The people who pass it don’t see themselves as bigots. They really do believe it’s a bit of smart wordplay, not something dreadfully dull and telegraphed.
It’s like Rick Santorum’s wealthy sugar-daddy, Foster Friess, on television laughing and smiling at what he thinks is a fine attempt at humor – that women practiced contraception by holding an aspirin between their knees — while everyone else sees someone who’s just sprouted a third eye on a stalk.
It also indicates big differences in the brains of right-wingers and progressives.
I never get jokes in e-mail from my progressive friends. It never happens. All I get from progressive groups are solicitations to contribute or alerts when Occupy Wall Street is planning something in my area.
However, the right wing mind works in lockstep. They religiously use e-mail lists of friends to pass things around. They immediately go viral, having a quality hitting all the right buttons, one in which the recipient always feels his world view reinforced by the like-minded.
And Jesus of America said to the unemployed masses: “There can be no gold for you because it is needed to pay for the scourging of the underwear bombers.”
“The U.S., which has a long history of violent plutocratic rule unknown to the textbook-fed, will stand out as the best-armed Third World country, its population ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-educated, ill-cared for in health, and increasingly poverty-stricken: even Social Security may be whittled down, impoverishing tens of millions of the elderly.
“As empires decline, their leaders become increasingly incompetent — petulant, ignorant, gifted only with PR skills of posturing and spinning, and prone to the appointment of loyal idiots to important government positions. Comedy thrives; indeed writers are hardly needed to invent outrageous events.”
Lately I’ve remarked on the lack of any obvious leadership or conscience from the official face of the US military. However, consider another important part of our culture of professional bootlicks — those who cover the US military — with these types of stories:
The Pentagon halted its cooperation with Marvel Studios’ blockbuster movie The Avengers because the Defense Department didn’t think a movie about superheroes, Norse Gods and intergalactic invasions was sufficiently realistic in its treatment of military bureaucracy …
“We couldn’t reconcile the unreality of this international organization and our place in it,” Phil Strub, the Defense Department’s Hollywood liaison, tells Danger Room.
So who’s worse? The Pentagon being trivially uncooperative and routinely illogical with Hollywood moneybags. Or Spencer Ackerman, his job, in a manner of speaking, to suck the Department of Defense’s cock for Wired copy, weekly or even daily.
So we can all know the fun details of such things mentioned above.
Richard Clarke, who advised President Bill Clinton and tried to advise both presidents Bush on counter-terrorism and cyber-security, points out that “Sophisticated cyber attackers could do things like derail trains across the country…They could cause power blackouts – not just by shutting off the power but by permanently damaging generators that would take months to replace. They could do things like cause [oil or gas] pipelines to explode. They could ground aircraft.”
“Without computer-controlled networks, there is no water coming out of your tap; there is no electricity lighting your room; there is no food being transported to your grocery store; there is no money coming out of your bank; there is no 911 system responding to emergencies; and there is no Army, Navy and Air Force defending the country . . . All of these functions, and many more, now can only happen if networks are secure and functional.
“A systematic [attack] could come from a terrorist group, a criminal cartel or a foreign nation . . . and we do know of foreign nations that are interested in our information infrastructure and are developing offensive capabilities that would allow them to take down sectors of our information infrastructure …
One possible scenario would feature a demand leveled by a foreign government or terrorist group. When the U.S. government refuses to comply, this adversary demonstrates its capabilities by reducing a region of the United States to chaos. ‘I think the capability to do that probably exists in the hands of several nations,’ Clarke states. ‘I think it could exist in the near future in the hands of criminal and terrorist organizations.’”
“Envision all of these things happening simultaneously – electricity going out in several major cities; telephones failing . . .” — Signal magazine, 1999
“I’m talking about people shutting down a city’s electricity . . . shutting down 911 systems, shutting down telephone networks and transportation systems. You black out a city, people die. Black out lots of cities, lots of people die.” — Clarke, the New York Times, 1999
A key House committee has voted to cut food aid, health care and social services like Meals on Wheels to protect the Pentagon from a crippling wave of budget cuts come January. — AP
If there are any men or women of stature [at the Pentagon] aghast at the length of the conflict and how millions upon millions of their countrymen have been economically disenfranchised and cast into ruin on the home front while they have continued to meaninglessly fight on, we will never hear it … We do not need or train good military leaders. They are only needed to ensure the machine continues to grind.
Jesus of America sez ‘Guns, not butter. The rest just goes all for naught.’ And I’m going to push this until I see numbers.
While fresh out of any semblance of outrage from leadership, we have replaced it with quite the talent for knee-jerk indecency.
Still collapsing job markets include lousy minimum pay work at big box retail stores because nobody’s buying except the halves. Also, lousy minimum and sub-minimum pay work in childcare has been hurt. Economic collapse has forced families to rely on grandparents who do it for free. Or they can do it themselves because someone in the family has been de-jobbed again.
Also, gambling is off. Because the gambler cohort, those that go to Atlantic City on the party bus for the weekend, have been hit hard by firings. Plus, having seen their wages compressed and the cost of living escalate by a few inches, they’ve lost even the little gold they formerly threw away at casinos.
Hospitality work is also not happening. Because that Discover America dog I mentioned last weekend just won’t hunt.
“The gambling industry is not showing much growth,” says Gregg Mulholland, analyst with Sageworks, a financial information company. A spokeswoman for the American Gaming Association — which represents casinos and, therefore, only one-third of the amusement and gaming sector — says employment was largely flat …
With childcare costs increasing and income growth stagnant, more grandparents have stepped in to look after young children – roughly 40% to 60% of those living within 30 minutes of their grandchildren now provide some care …
Worth special mention is Apple. No one ever mentions how much job loss Apple is responsible for in this country — and I’m not speaking of the iStuff manufacturing sent to China — but the employment destroyed because of the ubiquity of GarageBand and similar things.
Now you may think the wide distribution of cheap digital recording software has been a boon. Think a little more deeply about it and consider how well served society is when everyone who can make music, but maybe shouldn’t, does it anyway.
The software contributed to a radical devaluation, not only of the making of music, but also in any employment associated with it, transferring what was left of the spoil, to Apple.
So while there has been much demonstrable creative destruction, the creative replacement of that which was ruined with compensating value has been much harder to categorize.
The salient graph:
Jobs in motion picture and recording have remained stagnant over the last three months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The slowdown in hiring is partly seasonal, as some of TV shows end their productions this time of year, says producer Jonathan Taplin, a member of the Academy of Motion Picture, Arts and Sciences. Digital music recording equipment like Pro Tools and Apple’s software package GarageBand, which was launched by Apple in 2004, have also replaced some studio jobs in the music industry, he says. “Digital technology is pretty much killing the standalone recording studio business,” says Taplin, who is also director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, an arts and media research group. “Every band has much higher quality tools on a Mac than we had with 24-track tape in the 1970s or even five years ago …”
Fuck the guy from USC, I’m using recording software I bought well over five years ago. On a PC, not a Mac.
What might have been more perceptive an observation is that each copy of Apple’s Final Cut Pro video-making software transfers a substantial amount of money to Apple without enabling many sucked into buying it to recoup their investment. Because the economy now dictates that all video and music be free.
Unless you siphon it though Apple iTunes and pay an enabler site to put it there. Then somebody gets theirs, it’s just not you. The enabler and Apple divide your tithe right before they plant you way out back and six feet under in the vast on-line digital market.
If Apple and the technologies of creative destruction give the working majority any more help like this — well, most just won’t need it ever again.
Done without Apple’s “help.”
“We are facing a very difficult transition from manufacturing to a service economy. We have failed to manage that transition smoothly. If we don’t correct that mistake, we will pay a very high price. Already, the average American is suffering from the failed transition.” — Joseph Stiglitz, economist and Nobel laureate.
After a week or so of posting on how to take out the trash on Facebook, the ‘friend’ list is purged to less than 50 percent of its former size. Getting rid of one layer of picture/article/charticle spammers at a time, only to reveal still another, like the peeling of an onion.
Once you get going you realize you’ll have to give at least 90 percent of them the chop. Alternatively, you can demote individuals in your feed with Facebook’s option to see only their ‘most important’ updates. However, for the most efficient and highly rated Facebook spammers in your list, it may not work.
You’ll again wonder why I’m actually on Facebook.
Facebook is for bootlicks and gobble-wallahs, and like the other super social network — Twitter — it’s principal demographic is people who are easily offended by criticism and hard words from anyone who is not an officially designated celebrity or authority figure. Daily, Facebook astonishes with hordes of Americans imprinted with a stupid-from-eating-lead-paint-chips-as-a-child Norman Vincent Peale-like belief that, above all else, it’s important to be sunny no matter how wretched and intelligence-insulting conditions get.
So yesterday Mark Zuckerberg played to the national lickspittle crowd, as usual, with his new “organ donation tool.”
Is Mark thinking it will get him the Nobel, or perhaps a great inventor/discoverer and humanitarian award alongside the doctors, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, who came up with the vaccines for polio?
Only Zuckerberg is more efficient and tight, needing a few lines of code to mark on your Facebook profile that you wish to donate your organs.
Of course, if you don’t have work or an insurance plan and you need an organ transplant, it won’t help. But you can still let Facebook know that you’ll donate your organs to the people who have medical insurance and need your liver or heart.
Remember to keep your wall info current so they know where to pick up your body.
Big ups, Saint Mark Zuckerberg! Ten million likes!
Instead of noting at the mortuary, or in the car wreck, or in the hospital room, that the license pulled from the wallet on your corpse shows you to be an organ donor upon departing the earthly existence, they can just fire up Facebook and tell. (Note that so extensive was all the bootlicking, the link for driver licenses/organ donors’ search term has to be crafted with “-Zuckerberg” to get his contaminating mug out of the picture gallery.)
If they know your login and password. Damn! It’s not in the sticky note pasted on the morgue monitor!
Well, anyway, as soon as you’re dead, through the power of magic, perhaps the life-giving Facebook tool will notify the nearest organ reclamation center near you with an automatic e-mail.
And hopefully it won’t get sent to the junk folder and they’ll arrive within that short window of time before you become too rotten to use. And that they’ll believe it’s really you that’s dead, not someone else who is either pretending to be you in cyberspace, or with a similar name the Facebook search engine returned.
Mark’s life-giving Facebook tool, much like the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell. The telephone, a life-giving tool, has saved millions and millions of lives during its existence, so who can say what the future holds for Mark’s few lines of code!
And the computer keyboard! Let’s not forget the inventor of the software driver that sends the tapping of text to the lowly computer!
Or the app in your iPhone that speed dials 911 because it can connect you one or two entire seconds faster than you can manually. That must certainly be a life-giving tool, too!
Well, anyway, Mark’s tool — thought up in minutes just chatting over dinner about children who need organ transplants! Maybe after a few glasses of really good wine. God knows what the this man will come up with next when he really sets his mind to it!
But wait … I’m feeling a pain … in my arm … getting hard … to … breathe! Tell the people to come. And … that … I … wish to … be … an organ donor … in payment … for all the mean and thoughtless things … I have said!!
Tell ‘em not to take my heart because that’s what’s failing. But the spleen, that’s in really good condition.
