Hmm

Next year's World Cup in Brazil would seem to be the most natural thing in the world.  And certainly I would never suggest that 'those people' are innately incapable of pulling it off.  Such blue-eyed blue-eyed northern chauvinism is beneath any decent person and even myself.  But this.....  This is no good, not at all.

  

FC top 10

1. Bayern Munich
2. Barcelona
3. Arsenal
4. Paris. St. Germain
5. Juventus
6. Atletico Madrid
7. Roma
8. Dortmund
9. Cruzeiro
10 Zenit St. Petersburg 

You Learn Your Own Soul in Winter

I tend to binge on coffee when it's very cold outside, as it was here Saturday and I decided to stay in last night for the very same reason. After some hours of listening to music and reading I came across a bag containing three of my bosses' prescription hydrocodeine (why he left it there I don't know) and, feeling slightly bored, decided to take the whole lot. The opiate combined with caffeine produced a strong 'tweaking' effect. I spent the next several hours walking in circles around my house, chain-smoking naked with the heat at full blast while the walls breathed and the shadows flowed like a quick sand oil. At  about one in the morning someone visiting  the next door neighbors pulled up in an SUV and left the headlights bearing on me for 5-10 minutes while they went inside. When the person finally came back out he saw me staring through the window like a wounded feral beast and laughed. I think the neighbors are dealing something or another for money, which is fine for so long as they use it to pay the rent next Saturday when I return from the holiday outstate. 

Good!

Fuck the filibuster.  Get rid of it completely.  It has proven of little use in preventing the GOP from running roughshod over the people when they have the majority anyway.  Now use the minimum year and two months to 'pack the courts' with judges who almost pretend to care about the common peoples civil rights.  End of analysis.    

Maybe It's Just Wishful Thinking on my Part

But US society is becoming gradually more progressive on some things, gay marriage most famously and recreational drug use as well.  Should our liberalizing trend in regards to drugs continue I wonder, how will the nation's police deal.  As we move ever further from the extreme violent crime rates of the seventies and eighties,  (and yes crime is still going down)  how will our police police deal with the loss of prestige they must suffer as an incidental consequence of social improvement?  Because the day will come when they are no longer seen as by far the most important force in maintaining social welfare, when they are no longer given first priority in state and local budgets without thought or challenge, when drugs are no longer seen as so fiendishly evil as to justify giving police military-level training, gadgetry, and epic power, when even governors and Senators feel obliged to show deference to police.  At some future point, when I and my peers are old but not quite dead, all of that is likely to be a thing of the past, something our heirs will be unable to imagine  any decent person accepting as normal.  How will the police themselves, with their established prestige and heroic self-image, deal with what is to come?   Very,    very, very poorly, I fear.

BBC News Headline

"Venezuela Head Nears Special Powers"

I have nothing intelligent to say about this.  It's just funny is all. 

The Once and Probably Future President of Chile

Looks for all the world like an aunt of mine circa 1992. 

I bit thinner, I've sat at tables where auntie served steaks and pork chops at the same lunch.

She's not morbidly heavy mind. 

I Say This in All Seriousness

"The night of frenzied partying allegedly involved cocaine, OxyContin, vodka, a prostitute and Ford telling staffer Olivia Gondek, “I want to eat your p*ssy.”

Rob Ford and Anthony Keidis should trade jobs.  There are two keys between the Chili Peppers being a great vs. mediocre band.  One is having Frusciante, the other is having at least one member in constant risk of sudden death from a hard drug habit.  Without either of these things the band
has been hopelessly stale for a decade now and there can be no serious doubts that Rob Ford by his presence alone would bring much of their old fire back.  Keidis for his part, would probably find Toronto a likable place to run, now that he insists on being all old & responsible.  Similar to some California bay area cities in sensibility with a little bit of Chicago and a touch of Youngstown thrown in.  Different sure but one can always find something familiar to plant their roots in.

Stupid, Stupid Poland

You know kids, Russia is still bigger than you.    I don't mean that to say that you should knuckle other to abusive pressure from Putin's Kremlin or any other Russian government, but picking a fight?.....I suppose that Poland is NATO, in a fight against Russia we would help them as much as we could without starting some nuclear shit.  Which is to say not very much, and Russia is still way, way, bigger than you kids.  Are you actively trying get your asses kicked so you can heroically suffer like your ancestors?

And again, why the total focus towards Russia in regards to past grievances? It's ignorant and untoward, at best. 

Even if This Were True

That is, President Obama actually did regularly trade gay sex for cocaine in his youth.  And of course everyone involved here knows damned well that it isn't true, get the fuck out. 

But if it were true then well, I do not wish to say that I'm 'okay' with that, because that would imply some mere libertarian neutrality towards trading gay sex for cocaine, and I wish to be very clear that trading gay sex for cocaine is inherently, universally and indisputably virtuous.  I am saying that anyone who seeks to be a good person must by definition aspire to trade gay sex for cocaine.  I am saying that it is impossible to be historically great, to have one's face on the money a thousand years from now, without having at least once traded gay sex for cocaine as a sacrament to Mohamarx.  If I learned that I had twice voted for a man who had never traded gay sex for cocaine I could never truly live with myself again.  Thank you, Mia Marie Pope, for allaying my fears.  Satan bless. 

Veterans Day

After my grandfather, Ivan Beran died three years ago, we found in his papers that he had been personal secretary to Douglas Macarthur in the war, the big one, the last one worth fighting.  Grandpa was physically safe in this position, and today here among others am I. 

He despised Macarthur, as it turns out, considered him to be the strutting arrogant peacock we know him to have been from historic record.  Reading about just how much leverage the Pentagon had; in the early days of the Cold War up through Vietnam (and at some level to this day) never fails to scare the hell out of me.  It was the cultural norm there, (I do not say this as a self-strawmannig flag burning lefty but in plain fact), the cultural norm you see, to view the potential mass annihilation of their compatriots to be worth the cost of feeling like the most important creatures who have ever been.  Macarthur, in particular, even more so that that chucklehead LeMay, was the closest thing to an M Bison. Pinochet that our own military has ever produced; the whole business of posing with expensive shades well into his sixties and that giant wooden cock of a pipe of his, Christ on a stick.  Also that whole business of trying to start a nuclear war on his own volition, that thing too sure. 

Perhaps this whole spiel has been inappropriate for this special day.  I know my mother, out laying regalia along graves for the VFW women's auxiliary right now, wouldn't approve.  Really though I couldn't care less.

FC top 10

1. Bayern Munich
2. Barcelona
3. Arsenal
4.Paris St. Germain
5. Roma
6. Dortmund
7. Atletico Madrid
8. Juventus
9.  Cruziero
10. Zenit St. Petersburg

Yes I'm One of Those

A white rural man from a long established American family hat leans conservative*    who went to college, moved to 'the city',  and grew up to become a flaming lefty.  ( *my mother and aunt are blue-dog Dem, though culturally their perception of what is unfathomably strange can be safely said to encompass a solid 80% of everything and everyone.)

Dennis Prager is a hack who can often be half or one-tenth honest in the service of his own Greater Truths.  But I don't doubt that the sense of loss among him, his friends and my stepfather is perfectly sincere.  The old delusion of gaining second-hand immortality via shared belief in unchanging truth and one narrowly defined cultural identity through the generations is very much alive and well, especially in regards to religious doctrines with their pretense to eternity.

Prager's stated points here are all bad, though none are as disturbing as his overall tone of existential tragedy.  It reminds me of the five minutes of Mark Levin I happened on while driving through the Platte Valley some years ago.   As I recall Levin was riding to the rescue of Michelle Bachmann and said something along the lines of  By attacking her they are attacking our conservative principles; who we are'.   I've always had a strong interest in politics myself and I'd say that many of the things I believe are felt with what could be validly described as passion. But though I'm a solid liberal by American standards there is still enough mushy moderate in me to be appalled by this attitude of 'who we are.' No. Belief, no matter how truly important and no matter how much real impact it has on peoples lives is not who we are but simply a byproduct of who we are.  For belief, even those I would agree with, to play so dominant a role in defining oneself is menacing towards liberty in itself.  Such a relationship to belief is the first necessary step towards fanaticism violent or otherwise.  Everyone, after all, wants their own identity, their selves to be fearfully strong and destined to triumph.      

More basically it is impossible for one with this attitude to hold to both the letter and the spirit of liberty's rules.  If one's relationship to political belief is an existential one, then the electoral defeat that must eventually come, even if you're right, is bound to be seen as an act of banishment and condemnation from one's own kind.  Of course no person who chooses to live another day is self-loathing enough to think they deserve this, and the tension here is I think a large part of the modern US rights 'I win or you cheated'     response to it's recent difficulties.  The fact that modern conservatives spend the bulk of their mental energy, (in addition to purer than-thou internal witch hunts) on painting liberalism as not just wrong but illegitimate.  The painting of America's mild Keynesian left as alien and radical, the conspiracy mongering and logically tortuous tu-quoques   the necrotheist myth that the founders wrote the Constitution to cement One True philosophy of governance for all time, the despicable restriction of voting rights in pursuit of  some Higher Liberty, etc. etc.  I'll close now with comment on some of Prager's direct points.
 
"So it is sad when a parent who believes, for example, in the American trinity of “Liberty,” “In God We Trust,” and “E Pluribus Unum” has a child who believes that equality trumps liberty, that a secular America is preferable to a God-centered one, and that multiculturalism should replace the unifying American identity.
It is sad when a pastor or any other parent who believes that the only gender-based definition of marriage that has ever existed — husband and wife — has a child who regards the parent as a bigot for holding on to that definition.
It is sad when a parent who believes that America has always been, in Lincoln’s famous words, “the last best hope of earth” has a child who believes that America has always been little more than an imperialist, racist, and xenophobic nation."

By what coherent definition of liberty is equality ever opposed to it?  Some feudal state where every patriarchal 'head of household' dominates his wife and children, is all I can guess.  How can multiculturalism possibly be opposed to 'The' unifying American identity.  The fact that we are still here after several decades of being far too big for one narrowly defined culture is proof enough that there is no such conundrum.  Finally Mr. Prager I tell you personally that this is my country and I will not stand to have you tell me what I must only either feel about it.  Being conservative does not make you the normative default and it is not your or anyone's place to define the poles which everyone else must choose. 

There is no choice between believing that the USA is essentially glorious or essentially villainous.  It makes me feel like a kindergarten teacher to write that, and if Prager did not see his own self as personally embodying the United States he'd probably be able to see that 'clear eyed' choice for the nonsense it is.  And why should this one man, prominent in his own way but narrowly so, see himself as embodying the nation?  Well, as much as I don't believe that the US is fated to always be 'imperialist, racist, and xenophobic' it is a matter of factual record that we can be and have been. 

Dennis Prager is a comfortable WASP man who sees himself grandly enough to speak for America's soul.  The mathematical odds that one has nothing to do with the other are very low, and this is what ails modern right today.  It's demand for absolute submission of one's identity to it's dogmas is about White Americans who can agree, on the surface, that racism is wrong, but still long for some assurance that they will always be the 'mainstream'.  Conservatism in it's current form endows them with that sense of biblical 'chosenness' they suppose our ancestors felt without challenge.  It's no way to live.  It basically dooms them to have their essential selves rejected (aka. their opinions disagreed with) by family, neighbors, and compatriots at least every once in a while, along with all the sense of mortal loss that comes with that.  

Protip

Whenever you hear about "those people" doing fantastically evil things in regards to eating babies or using puppies as bombs, it's probably bullshit.  Anyway a properly constructed puppy bomb does not need to be dipped in gasoline to go boom.  If forced to watch its mother flogged to death by its siblings and then fed on nothing but a precisely arraigned recipe of devil voodoo humus  the puppies very own tears shall become flammable.  Even then the damage a puppy bomb can do is quite minimal.  The threat from a Mohmadian rabble is the summoning of suicide bomber genies.  A coordinated attack from those things can take out an entire megalopolis.

FC top 10

1. Bayern Munich
2. Barcelona
3. Dortmund
4. Roma
5. Arsenal
6. Paris St. Germain
7. Atletico Madrid
8. Juventus
9. Cruziero
10 Porto