Your boy Grover Norquist is about to look as nebbish and stupid to you as he is to the rest of us, the majority of the human race. Now that Saxby Chambliss (a girl's name?), the Foghorn Leghorn from Geor-gia, has kicked your boy's dumbo "no-tax pledge," your time in the sun is over. Anyone with more than two brain cells knows that American Libertarianism is a white boy fixation, and not many of them at that, in reality. That same demographic wave that's going to consume and destroy the GOP is going to take you down, because you're really extremist Republicans. Maybe that's too fair. I think what you really all are is a textbook example of emotional and intellectual retardation having a political expression. Over, done. Enough with the delusions of adequacy.
Showing posts with label The Maoist Cult of Ronald Reagan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Maoist Cult of Ronald Reagan. Show all posts
Friday, November 23, 2012
and another thing (Libertarians)...
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Ronald Reagan Hologram to Address 2012 RNC Convention in Tampa?
That's great, lovely. I was in a mall in Chicago in 2002 and they had a static hologram (didn't move, like the real one, and just as intelligent) of St. Ronnie's well-coiffed-and-empty head. That wasn't the first time I'd seen one: the Museum of Science and Industry had the one Salvador Dali did of Alice Cooper's head, with an exposed brain, so I knew he had one, his own conservatism aside. Holograms aren't very convincing up close--the Cooper one was greenish, and it photographed badly. I believe it was made in 1973, when the Watergate hearings were reaching a crescendo.
That Ronnie-the-vegetable one, however, was impressive. They'd shot a close-up of him that had close to a 3/4s wraparound of his head. Every hair (the fucker had dandruff and trout eyes), every pore, every liver spot, every wrinkle, and every glint from his Irish eyes (yes, they were-a'-smil'in, yes) was there in incredible photographic detail. Now, from some angles, sure, the color spectrum started to shift, and it looked transparent--a hologram. Of course, for laughs, I was miming the same moves that put John Wilkes Booth into the annals of history, really milking it for a friend, a lot of yuck-yucks. And yes, there were laughs, 9/11 (the American public) hadn't ruined things as badly, there hadn't been enough time for that yet.
Fox News (entertainment for the emotionally challenged) is throwing around a rumor of a yet-to-be-revealed speaker at the tail end of the GOP mosh pit in Tampa, after all the lawful demonstrators have been brutally, criminally beaten and pepper-sprayed by dirty cops and private security, and after most of the drinking and whoring has sated the...uh, bought press, the delegates, candidates, incumbents, and key SuperPAC donors, maybe a few Rotarians, heh. Because I think their corruption is, in the words of one of the Founding Rapists, self- evident. Why bother writing about it? Because someone in the back row couldn't hear last time, so shut up you loud-mouthed assholes in Section A seating, you animals, you rabble, Jesus.
So, they had this two-dimensional Tupac on stage not more than a few months ago, and creepy it was dear readers. From what I could see, an actor's body was composited with footage of Shakur's face from a variety of visual sources, but it could have been modeled from imagery too and made lifelike. Either way, the head was generated, the body was not, making this a sentence that was destined to be written one day. Top that, Cybermen. You know, the GOP isn't doing anything new here, as always, but putting out their usual historical revisionism onto vulnerable people who don't know shit about where the country's been in the first place.
They've been flogging everyone with this moronic, delusional (delusions of adequacy, Republicans aren't even that) "no new taxes" bullshit for over 30 years. What does it say about someone when they keep falling for it again and again, expecting different results? Those are gamblers stabbing in the dark, looking for what? A Leader, a dictator, to tell them what to do, and that's a lot of Americans who harbor these authoritarian tendencies, many of whom have convinced themselves otherwise. The old models of male-headed authoritarianism are at a crossroads. These clowns down in Tampa are at a funeral wake, America died long ago, back when they sold out after the sixties and became the most irresponsible citizenry in modern history. Watergate gave millions of Americans what they always wanted: an excuse to no longer be engaged in the political process. Voter apathy gave us Ronald Reagan and while it probably won't give us Mitt Romney, it's given us weak and compromised candidates for well over a generation. That's the fault of the public, and so is the decline of the unions, out of selfishness, laziness, and stunning stupidity.
Everyone knows that a computer generated hologram of a dead corrupt president isn't going to change the fact that everyone owns a piece of this economic and political crisis, no one is immune, not me, not anyone. The wealthy, the criminal management class, and the politicians own the lion's share of this. Every branch of government is to blame. From this, one should get that we have a fundamental flaw in how our society is ordered, what it's centered around. Now go have fun watching the dead guy who gave us a lot of this crisis, the one with the CGI stick rammed up his ass.
Monday, January 02, 2012
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Wikileaks mirror: http://213.251.145.96/
WWW--Hit it, I am.
There are daily updates on the State Dept. cables at this point. This is much bigger than the Pentagon Papers. Regardless of what happens, no matter what foolhardy legislation gets passed to ban this whistle-blowing, Pandora's box has been opened and the lid cannot be closed, ever again.
For those of you out there who don't get how the dissemination of technology works--too bad--you cannot stop this, it's a done deal. The negative response from the mainstream media was to be expected. A healthy democracy requires that the public not be deceived. We have to know the machinations of power to remain free. Sad and pathetic then that so many Americans are knee-jerking right now on this and insisting as is their wont to remain ignorant, to remain in the dark about what their government is doing in the name of corporations.
That's how a slave that's been beaten into submission thinks...if you want to call it thinking. Seeing yet another Populist-opening, Ron Paul (in his role of "good cop" to his son Rand's dueling banjo "bad cop") has been advocating for such leaks and saying there need to be more groups like them. This is interesting since he must be anticipating the next round of leaks--if they actually make it out the gate--coming from Bank of America, and possibly even Goldman Sachs and other major corrupt financial players on Wall Street. I'm skeptical of his sincerity and view most of what he says and does publicly as political theater. Let's not make it a tragedy, shall we? In Paul's hands, it's likely to be tragicomic.
Paul can say such things because he knows he'll never have to follow through on them. Like Democratic representatives who constantly crow over sundry social-ills--knowing full well thhat the political context is wrong to expedite it and that they're not going to do anything about them of any substance--he's just sounding off as he usually does. Great, have fun with that one, but what about fixing our nation? That's called rhetoric, folks, demagoguery, and it makes one wonder where all the adults went.
Recall that Paul's not so far removed from Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman in his wackiness. Today he's talking about taking down the Federal Reserve with a parallel system of backing currency with gold when everyone should know there's not enough in the entire world to do it. As usual, he's trying to create a false impression. The reality is, he's no Robert M. Lafollette, one of the very few genuine progressive Republicans that ever was, the legendary Senator from Wisconsin.
If the GOP ever had a soul, it lost it when Lafollette died in 1925, giving into corporate interests over the role of government in American life, the very forces the senator at that time railed strenuously against. In case you didn't notice, he lost to people like Paul and the rest of them now occupying our government via the GOP's corporate-political nexus. Does that sound like a friendly crowd to you? Paul isn't exactly a friend of the working man and woman at all and doesn't believe in a social safety net, but neither do most Democrats these days since they report to the same bosses.
Where does the Wikileaks release of State Department cables covering 1966-2010 fit into to all of this? The warnings of Mark Twain, of Marine Corps General Smedley Butler that imperialism will be the ruination of the United States.
The State Department figures highly in all of this since they lobby relentlessly for American corporate interests overseas all of the time. It's their primary job besides formulating the policies to expedite this overall agenda and--this is key here--selling it to an American public that they do their best to keep in the dark. They have every reason to since most of us would reject that agenda outright if we were to know of it in real time. Yelling "national security" gets results and keeps the locals at bay. This abuse of secrecy is what makes the "sell" easier and why at least half of the public goes along with the dumbshow that's going to take the rest of us over the cliff.
Wikileaks is doing the work of an impaired corporate-owned press, and now the real scrambling begins. The battle for your mind has truly begun, to keep it ignorant so that their agenda can continue, one that's a direct threat to you and everyone you know. It began this summer when the State Department realized their post-9/11 sharing of information with military analysts had backfired, coming in the form of the whistle-blower PFC. Bradley Manning.
Make no mistake: Manning is a hero, this is a turning-point, an opening, and we had better start taking it. Read the cables and decide for yourself whether the State Department is acting in your best interests and why you don't want to know the facts contained within them.
Give them hell.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Fox News brings America a weekend of Coolidge-o'-rama
Roger Aislesland--If you want your children to gain an accurate picture of American history from life, keep them as far away from Texas and Fox News as humanly possible. For no logical reason (which is their wont), we've got an entire weekend of little blurbs and even entire shows with gushing over one of the most useless presidents in American history besides Herbert Hoover or Warren G. Harding: Calvin Coolidge. Who? Exactly.
Like George W. Bush, the ignorant and unimpressive Coolidge prided himself on being away from his desk more than previous executives, so much so that it almost became a pastime photographing him lounging around the White House lawn and at his personal residence. Being a Republican in 1920s America, after the demise of the Progressive movement (at-the-hands of middle-class and wealthy patrons like Woodrow Wilson), and after the destruction of unions like the I.W.W. and a brief collaring of the AFL, Big Business and finance were able to pretty much do whatever they wanted to, and they did.
Banking regulations? There weren't very many in those days, and Coolidge wasn't going to push for them anymore than his predecessor and successor did. As we know, the crash of 1929 was coming, and it came thanks to a lack of regulation of the banking system. Coolidge was so ineffectual and immobile that he was referred to as "silent Cal." The notion of a hands-off government was popular with a certain crowd then too, and it's likely to get the same results, another global crash.
Needless to say, Coolidge was Ronald Reagan's "favorite" president, albeit he was once a New Deal Democrat. What he really was was a lifeguard and sportscaster who couldn't act, got in over his head in Hollywood, and ran to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the Chamber of Commerce (CoC), and corporations like General Electric, when his mistake-of-a-career began naturally going south--but that's another story for another time. However, this story really is about Reagan and his legacy as a president, the destructive legacy of his administration's ideology and policies.
Why? A couple of weeks ago, former Reagan administration adviser and Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), David Stockman, wrote an Oped column blaming Reaganomics and the GOP (and the DNC) for wrecking the economy, for killing it. Stockman was one of the primary architects and salesman of "Reaganomics," meaning massive deregulation of business and finance, returning us to those "glory days"of the 1920s when there was none...and we got the world's largest global economic depression. These crazy ideas gained real credence after Reagan and have continued into today; just watch Fox News at almost any given time of the day and you'll see it.
In fact, you'll see these once-wacky notions of economics (cut taxes for the wealthy, increase spending, especially defense and handouts to the aforementioned rich) arill being preached as gospel on CNBC, MSNBC, CNN, and much of the rest of the conglomerate owned mainstream media. Naturally, the majority of the public doesn't see it this way, and these memes are falling into very real disrepute as millions of Americans lose their livelihoods, their homes--their very way of life. If you want a great example of an ignorant, hollow-eyed nebbish contributing to the downfall of a nation while being applauded by a new generational round of middle-class fools, you need look no further than Coolidge...or Reagan. Or Clinton. Or Bush I and II. Or President Obama.
There's a good reason few remember--or even care about--Coolidge and why he was chosen for a callous and mercenary rewrite of American history: market extremists in this nation always go running to a remote and untouchable past that never was, a hallmark of nihilism and a retreat into the abyss. That's why this economic crisis is really a referendum of the last 30 years of class warfare in America, courtesy of both major political parties, but more of the responsibility rests with the Republican Party. Not only are they not the solution, they're a nexus of anti-Americanism, potentially poised to drag us kicking-and-screaming into Mother Night.
Calvin Coolidge? Who gives a shit? They just come off like the dorks that they are, with no answers since they're the problem.
Friday, May 14, 2010
President Obama is to the right of Reagan
In case you haven't figured this one out, ostensible President Barack Obama rhetorically "slammed" BP and the contractors that caused the oil rig explosion and leak fifty miles off of the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico three weeks ago and topped it off with a not-so-cute cherry from the past: a comment made by Republican President Ronald Reagan, that other GOP executive the whose policies the current president is so in love with. The President himself almost seemed to choke on it when he uttered it, but the Mighty Oz had once again been invoked, albeit indirectly, and ambiguously. Reagan stood for...what? Big business and deregulation, little else.
At least in Lincoln's case he was fighting for the preservation of federalism, a basically settled issue most Americans appear to have missed. In Obama's case, he's just continuing more of what we've seen over the last thirty years which went into warp drive under the Republican president. Reagan was also a lot of rhetoric and bluster, and offered little in the realms of real substance or constructive social action.
Indeed, President Obama and his speech writers are going to tell us what we want to hear in decidedly Populist overtones, but we all know that it's hollow, that it has no substance. Well, at least most Black Americans appear to based on more recent polling, whatever that means. Sure, as far as anyone can tell, nobody's running prostitution and sex-for-contracts out of the offices of the Department of Interior anymore, but that's because the GOP is out of the power for the moment. They tend to get caught with their asses hanging-out, they're slow like that. The American public can be counted on to bring them back into office before long out of mindless habit and few options, and they'll continue the Republicans' own version of wrecking society that's impossible to miss since they don't care what anyone thinks. The Democratic Party's incumbents are more cunning and sell themselves as being of the people. That's a myth that's dying hard, but dying it is.
Comparing President Obama's record so far in dealing with our current economic crisis, you'd have to wonder if his other favorite Republican president was Herbert Hoover, a man who was roundly despised by the WWII generation for his inaction during the first three years of the Great Depression. As a result of Hoover's stupidity, the GOP became a minority party for fifty years, give-or-take, but they did their best to cause as much trouble as possible after WWII. Being from the same mold as them, Obama's no FDR, not even close. Lincoln? At least in Lincoln's case he was fighting for the preservation of federalism, the Union. In Obama's, he's just continuing more of what we've seen over the last thirty years and is really just another advocate of deregulation. He is most likely to be viewed as a mediocre president in the intervening years, if he's lucky. But the Democrats know hope fiends when they see them, they know where to hit people where they live.
Indeed, President Obama and his speech writers are going to tell us what we want to hear in decidedly Populist overtones, but we all know that it's hollow, that it has no substance. Sure, as far as anyone can tell, nobody's running prostitution and sex-for-contracts out of the offices of the Department of Interior anymore, but that's because the GOP is out of the power for the moment. The American public can be counted on to bring them back into office before long, and they'll continue their own version of wrecking society that's impossible to miss since they don't care what anyone thinks. The Democratic Party's incumbents are more cunning and sell themselves as being of the people. That's a myth that's dying hard, but dying it is.
In comparing the Obama administration's record so far in dealing with our current economic crisis with the 1930s, you begin to wonder if his other favorite Republican president was Herbert Hoover, a man who was roundly despised by the WWII generation for his inaction during the first three years of the Great Depression. The reality is that we've strayed even further to the right in the last generation in a way that's hard to describe, partly because of the cultural wars on language, something the economic establishment always benefits from.
From the president's comments yesterday:
...Let me also say, by the way, a word here about BP and the other companies involved in this mess. I know BP has committed to pay for the response effort, and we will hold them to their obligation. I have to say, though, I did not appreciate what I considered to be a ridiculous spectacle during the congressional hearings into this matter. You had executives of BP and Transocean and Halliburton falling over each other to point the finger of blame at somebody else. The American people could not have been impressed with that display, and I certainly wasn't.I understand that there are legal and financial issues involved, and a full investigation will tell us exactly what happened. But it is pretty clear that the system failed, and it failed badly. And for that, there is enough responsibility to go around. And all parties should be willing to accept it.That includes, by the way, the federal government. For too long, for a decade or more, there has been a cozy relationship between the oil companies and the federal agency that permits them to drill. It seems as if permits were too often issued based on little more than assurances of safety from the oil companies. That cannot and will not happen anymore. To borrow an old phrase, we will trust, but we will verify. ...("Text of the remarks of Obama to the oil spill," Breitbart, 05.14.10)
Yes, it's also an old Russian saying, and has been used in other contexts. When politicians use it, it usually means that they're in deep shit and aren't a part of the solution (albeit, one day, we'll all be the solution!). Yes, he was also extending yet another laurel to those Republicans who so badly wants to woo. Why doesn't he get that it's never going to happen? Because he's operating under false assumptions. It's reminiscent of the Clinton administration for a reason: most of them are back in office. What should be implicitly clear is that the Obama administration isn't cleaning up the Department of Interior anymore than they're cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico.
But rest assured, the speculators are. In America, they always do. It helps to have your man in office seeding the bureaucracy with corporate executives and lobbyists (sometimes the same thing), creating that proverbial "revolving door" where the people are shut out, but the suits are always welcome. That's an bum rush, and the current administration is no exception in all of this. At this writing, they've yet to remove hundreds of Bush II appointees, an administration now going into its second year. That rarely ever occurs under the GOP. When they come into office, they sweep the place clean of past appointees with few exceptions. You might ask your president why he's so cozy with such questionable people who come fresh from the cocoons of Wall Street, most specifically from Goldman Sachs, but also coming from other "interest groups."
Only the public can reform government, and they're sitting on their hands, hoping, waiting, for someone to do it for them. That's certainly a big part of the problem with many of the attitudes surrounding President Barack Obama.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Cheech & Chong, live @ The Morris Performing Arts Center, April 11, 2010 (review)
What do you expect from a Cheech & Chong concert? A lot of pot jokes, right? Some of the old routines from the albums, how the boomer and gen-x crowd (the latter being my generation), some Q&A, some songs, etc., right? That's pretty much what the show was, with some interesting surprises and insights from two of the most recognizable counterculture's personalities.
Even though the war on drugs is hardly over with the election of Barack Obama, it's safe to come out, and the duo beckon everyone to do likewise. Fear and loathing were not the main themes of the night. For most of us, Cheech & Chong were untouchable icons who were over and done with after the 1986 album "Get Out of My Room," a pretty lackluster coda at that, and their movies weren't especially funny by then either.
But imagine it: Cheech & Chong haven't done a show in South Bend, at the Morris since 1977. 1977. That's 33 years ago, an entire generation. The world is beyond changed from that time after the Reagan blight (still ongoing). The next year, the comedy duo would foist "Up in Smoke" on the world, grossing $100 million at the box office and holding the record for the most successful comedy for a little over two decades. Americans still smoke a lot of pot, but I have to wonder if a film like Up in Smoke would do as well today. Very possibly looking at the polls when it comes to legalization! The real treat of the night for me was when Cheech began talking about Tommy Chong's days up in Vancouver during the early 1960s when he was playing with the R&B combo of Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers (one of their sometime stage names was rumored to be "Four Niggers & a Chink"). Cheech had fled the United States in 1967 along with a lot of other Americans to avoid the draft.
Chong had started up a blues club in Vancouver in 1962, began playing with the Vancouvers not long after that, and in a few years, they were discovered by the management of the Supremes and on Motown records, charting at #29 on the R&B charts for Chong's co-written "Does Your Momma Know About Me?" The Supremes went on to do a rendition of the song that Cheech later saw a copy of, and noticed the co-writer was a "T. Chong," right before he met Tommy. Rumors that Jimi Hendrix played with the Vancouvers are unfounded according to Chong, but he played his song during the show with Cheech accompanying him on vocals. What was a little sad is how it became evident that Cheech & Chong began as a musical duo and kind of wanted to do that mainly, but that nobody knew when they were kidding or not simply because they were and are entertainers who are just inherently funny.
This was the case at the Morris when they did this song--some audience members actually began laughing at what was a fairly heartfelt rendition of a really great song, but oh well, they got to enjoy being a musical act anyway. What makes them funny is what makes Mel Brooks and a lot of the comedy of the 1970s funny: obvious, dopey (in their case, literally) humor. Sketches like "Dave," "Let's Make a Dope Deal," "Blind Melon Chitlin," and even trotted out the character "Hairy Palms," a real treat! The sketches were also a reminder that the majority of C&C sketches aren't funny because they're about drugs.
Chong's chops as a guitarist were excellent and Marin showed that he does indeed have a very pleasant voice and put it to good use. Besides that, the duo did fine renditions of "Save the Whales" (from the opening of the movie "Nice Dreams," a favorite of mine), "Basketball Jones" (1973), "Earache My Eye" (1974, just the song, not the entire sketch), "Born in East L.A." (which is really closer to a solo thing for Marin), "Beaners" (from "Next Movie"), "Mexican Americans" (ditto), and a few others I was too stoned to remember at the time, or even now.
But the show basically began with Shelby Chong conducting a kind of Q&A about where they'd been all these years, Chong's time in prison, the state of the nation and the war on drugs, and even a few personal tidbits about the comedy team that were both funny and sometimes harrowing to hear. Chong seems pretty unfazed and unafraid to speak out against marijuana prohibition thanks to his nine months in federal prison and spoke of how easy it was "to kick" smoking pot when he went inside and extolled the health benefits of the soft drug as did wife Shelby. Cheech was unapologetic as well and has said in recent months that he realized he was "never going to escape" the legacy of Cheech & Chong. So be it.
To say that there are a lot of "heads" in Michiana would be an understatement: the place was packed and you could see nearly everyone heading on foot to the venue imbibing in the sacred plant, so really, you didn't even need to bring anything since a contact high would have probably done you straight anyway. My mother saw C&C in 1972 at the Morris, so this was truly a full circle affair. Was it a good show? Did we laugh? Yes we did, and sometimes at the most innocuous things Cheech & Chong said about themselves and their lives. A good evening out all around, catch them if you can...literally. They still got it folks, they still got it, and people shouldn't have to apologize for being heads, it's harmless. They were unapologetic, as it should be.
Saturday, April 03, 2010
Why do the Tea Baggers, militia nuts, and screechers get more coverage?
This seems to perplex a lot of people, and it's understandable: why would a truly lunatic fringe movement get this kind of airtime when the public opinion is almost completely against them on social issues like health care reform and all the others?
Why? The reasons are manifold and go back to that other period of near anarchy, the 1920s. But it took time after the Republicans handed the airwaves to business, though on a thin legal leash. There was that post-New Deal chipping away, but the big first was when we lost the Fairness Doctrine at the FCC in 1987 thanks to Republican President Ronald Reagan. The doctrine wasn't law, but it guided the broadcasting standards of the United States for decades and allowed for a more equitable access to the airwaves for differing opinions and viewpoints, and it worked. There was at least some variety, not that it was stellar or truly representative of the social/cultural landscape, but it was better.
It also worked because the structure it brought about would never have allowed for the existence of the current echo chamber of the right we now inhabit, and that's including CNN and the major networks that were already traditionally to the right thanks to ownership. This is why Republicans and enemies of free speech everywhere don't want anything approximating a return to something like the Fairness Doctrine. Never mind that the public technically owns the airwaves and has from the start, the interests of big business are more important. But day after day, we see the right-wing nuts on the idiot box. Why?
It's not that complicated, and there's another reason why all the useless flailing is all over the airwaves: it's because the Tea Baggers, the militia nuts, white hate groups, Ted Nugent, Sarah Palin, lost white girls, the "birthers," the operatives like James O'Keefe (the "ACORN pimp"), and yes, the multimedia gaggle of mumbling, anti-abortion nuts, Libertarians, babbling morons like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, both of whom have resorted in recent weeks to all but advocating acts of violence against the current President of the United States, Barack Obama, aren't a genuine threat to the status quo in America.
In reality, these mutants and wackos are badly needed by a pro-big business and finance Republican Party that has nearly lost its entire base over the administration of George W. Bush. After that, all you have remaining are the wackos, the fringe, and crumbling establishments often reach for the closest set of cranks when the curtain's about to close on them (including within the political establishment). Some say this is "all part of the plan" (which one?), but I disagree. You couldn't make this shit up, and that's why even the GOP cannot control them. These babbling jackasses, these morons, these throwbacks to the time of the Frontier hick and the lynch mobs that once ran riot in America are, in fact, in many cases, their very descendants. Yes, there is an element of "astroturf" to a lot of it, but these goobers are here, now, and they've been with us, hobbling the rest of us, from the beginning of this nation and will for the foreseeable future.
The message? There is no message coming from these people except, "More of the same." That's pretty pathetic considering many of them are now or are going to be the victims of the very policies they're advocating. Some of us simply like to shit where we eat because it's easier in the beginning. Of course, there is the underlying racism in these protests and the movement, and for many of these lost fools, the biggest fools alive on this rock called earth, it's the only reason they're at a Tea Party rally or why they were at a health care protest against reform: they're angry that a "nigger" is president. The thread connecting the economic elites of America and the white underclass is that they're all Eurotrash and can never truly be "European," no matter how much they prattle on about their respective heritages. Why wouldn't we see them on television, print, and Internet media all of the time?
These idiots are really chasing after an America that never was, but everyone likes watching a spectacle, even me. That'll learn 'ya (or not, maybe ever)!
Monday, February 08, 2010
On the upcoming 30th anniversary of the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan...
I think this was a terrible and heinous act on the part of Hinckley...for missing the heart, lungs, and other vital organs that would have done the job properly. I also want to excoriate the idiot for doing it for all the wrong reasons--to impress Jody Foster, a lesbian. In addition to that, it gave Reagan a second term since Americans are sentimental assholes who cry at a John Williams string-swell on command like Pavolv's fucking dogs.
In addition to that addition of their house of cards, that of the myth-makers, I want to say that we need to face that fact that President Reagan--the construct--was so fucking dumb he couldn't even be assassinated correctly or impressively like President Kennedy, McKinley, or Lincoln, and had no idea he'd been shot for several minutes since he was barely sentient, like the people that voted for him. Hey, at least Booth had some kind of ideology and some reasons that made more sense, Lincoln really did act like a dictator during the American Civil War.
And McKinley? He was in the pocket of the Trusts and the Monopolies, people like Rockefeller and Carnegie. Kennedy? We don't even know why he was fucking whacked. It's a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, rolled into some club papers, and smoked by some fucking hippies somewhere...
Monday, January 18, 2010
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Product review: "Throwback" Pepsi™
How long ago was it since I had a real Pepsi ™ or a real Coke ™, or any other kind of soft drink for that matter? It must have been the early 1980s, but no later than 1986. When did the onslaught of HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) begin? Under Reagan ™, when else would it have begun? Well, OK, as usual, it's not as simple as that. It took successive administrations of Republicans.
For close to an entire generation American soft drinks, and many other beverages, have had this garbage pumped into it, contributing to making many in that generation sick and obese. The soft drink corporations wanted to sell us more of their fizzy-liquids and there were incentives all over the place for corn farmers to implement corn syrup production for use as an all-purpose sweetener (of bottom lines). Note the next time trade agreements between the United States and other nations occur. The recriminations over subsidized American agricultural commodities are sound.
So began one part of this trend so that King corn could thrive at the taxpayer's expense:
Previously neglected because of low yields and bad coloring, HFCS became an industrial reality in the 1960s, when a xylose isomerase enzyme was successfully used to convert glucose into fructose at levels of 42% fructose and higher (Landis 86). That breakthrough, in conjunction with the fact that corn is both planted on nearly 80 million acres (Baker) and is subsidized in the USA (Hopkins), led to a huge gain in HFCS’s popularity because HFSC soon became cheaper than actual sugar. In fact, the “use of HFCS grew rapidly, from less than three million short tons in 1980 to almost 8 million short tons in 1995” (Forristal). Furthermore, “during the late 1990s, [the] use of sugar actually declined as it was eclipsed by HFCS… [And] today Americans consume more HFCS than sugar” (Forristal). ("HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP: HISTORY, SPREAD, and CONSUMPTION," Cosmos Cluster 7, 25 July, 2009, UC Davis.edu, P.2)The links to adult and even child diabetes and obesity are gradually coming in from academic studies and are sure to continue coming in; but just take a look around the social landscape. We've gotten fatter. The worst part of all of this is the sheer number of sources that Americans get HFCS from, but one of the most jam-packed ones is from soft drinks. The average American gets 200 calories-per-day from HFCS. No one ever accused Ronald Reagan's administration--or subsequent ones--correctly that they were against subsidies for large-scale farmers and agribusiness. Reagan was all for it. So was most of Congress during the 1980s, and selling to grain to the former Soviet Union didn't bother them either. Pork? Don't get me started.
Just a few years ago I was shopping at a local supermarket chain and lo-and-behold, in the Mexican foods section was a real find--Mexican Cokes. Who cares, right? Me! Other shoppers, other households, who remembered what soft drinks used to taste like previous to the 1980s! The truth is, the problems really began--as they often did--under Richard Nixon:
In 1973, Earl "Rusty" Butz, President Nixon's USDA chief, did away with the agricultural price supports introduced by the Roosevelt administration. These supports were intended to protect farmers' finances by limiting supply when bumper crops would have otherwise flooded the market and to avoid squeezing consumers by releasing the warehoused grain when crop yields were low and prices would naturally spike. Butz ginned up political support for the administration by encouraging farmers to plant "fencerow to fencerow" while the government provided them with subsidies to cover the difference between market prices and production costs.
Of course, growing "fencerow to fencerow" did exactly what one would expect: production exceeded demand, and prices took a dive. This didn't sit too well with Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), the nation's largest corn refiner.
Now, there's only so much corn one person can eat. ADM suddenly needed to figure out how to somehow stimulate sales of all that excess food. ("America's Crazed Corn Habit," Mises Institute, 12.22.2009)Thanks again Dick! Indeed, we are "all Keynesians now," and so was Reagan! I could have told you that, and I'm not even remotely an economist.The best part about those Mexican Cokes™ was that they were in glass-bottles, so icing them up wasn't going to be a problem, that taste was coming, and those coveted bottles didn't disappoint at all. Why? Because Mexico doesn't have the kinds of crop subsidies we do on corn, they don't put HFCS in everything for that and a variety of other reasons, they got it right. I bought-up as many of them as I could that summer, it was a real treat, and it ended quickly. The local bottler had them pulled, they're gone.But how did throwback Pepsi™ taste to these buds? Coupled with the vintage packaging, it was like being rocketed back to better times--or at least better than now, the 1970s. I was literally taken aback at how familiar it tasted, I hadn't forgotten after decades of HFCS film on the surface of every soft drink (and the roof of my mouth), even in fruit juices! Childhood memories and images flooded into my brain after that first sip. It was truly refreshing in the best sense of the word. I could recall some blistering summer days that were punctuated with a Pepsi™ or a Coke™, and they tasted so much better back then because they were made with cane sugar rather than HFCS.
I didn't notice as much of a change with their throwback Mountain Dew™ (before there was meth...), but the Pepsi was perfect, and the throwback packaging really takes me back to another America. Not necessarily a better one, but one before the fall of America to Reaganism and a slimmer public! Oh yeah, and early in 2009 it was found that mercury is often found in trace amounts in HFCS.
Biased, but in a reasoned sense (better to err on the side that HFCS's bad): http://www.highfructosecornsyrup.org/"America's Crazed Corn Habit," Mises Institute, 12.22.2009: http://mises.org/daily/3934
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