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Category Rants

Rogan’s Rant

By Brian Filed in Links, Politics, Rants Tagged with , , May 27th, 2011 @ 11:23 am

I have never been a huge fan of Joe Rogan. He was funny as the geeky station engineer on the classic ’90s sitcom “NewsRadio”, but his persona gets on my nerves a bit. So I was surprised that I liked this longish video that takes some of his rants and sets them to a montage of video clips. The last minute or so of the video gets away from the topic of how we’ve been screwed over by the power elites and falls back on one of his pet subjects — 9/11 “truther” conspiracy theory — but it’s sort of incidental to the rest of the video.

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If I Were A Rich Man

By Brian Filed in Links, Misc, Rants Tagged with , , , , , December 14th, 2010 @ 12:55 pm

So, the other day my friend Shelley posted a question to her Facebook wall:

Do you think a family earning $200,000 per year is “rich”? Surely you can’t tell me they are “poor.” So what would YOU call them?

I was appalled at how many people responded back that $200,000/year means you’re “middle class”. If your household income is $200K/year, it puts you in the richest 1% of wage earners in this country! Have a look at this graph:

Indeed, even if your household income is over $100K/year, you are in the richest 5% of people in the United States. By comparison, the government estimates that anywhere from 14-17% of the population lives in poverty — approximately 45 million people compared to the paltry 3 million who make upwards of $200K. And for a little more perspective, if you make $200K/year or more, you are among the richest 0.04% of all of humanity. Almost half the population of the entire planet lives on $2.50 a day or less. In other words, by any objective measure, an income of $200K/yr makes you inarguably one of the richest people who has ever lived in the history of all mankind.

The thing is that most Americans are totally clueless about class issues because our society downplays class and the fundamental iniquities of wealth. This has two roots, I think: the political ideology that everyone in America is born equal, and the economic ideology that anyone in America can be a millionaire. It also explains why the poor choose over and over again to vote against their own self-interest by electing politicians whose every single action is done to rob from the poor to give to the rich. 66% of the American public support the tax cut extension deal, even though it has been shown over and over and over again to overwhelmingly favor that 3%, because nobody in America wants to be honest about the thin sliver of wealth and the increasingly-larger swath of people who find themselves in poverty. A third factor to consider is that most Americans, especially those in that bracket of people who make lower six-figure incomes, are so far in debt that they see the vast wasteland of their overall net worth: Prose Before Hos today cites the simply astronomical figure of $50.2 TRILLION in combined public and private debt, which is 3.5 times the GDP of the country.

Not sure where you rate? This calculator will tell you which percentile you fall into based on whatever income you put into it. Because people work so very hard to blot out the realities of class and wealth, I suspect that people like the clueless people who responded to Shelley’s question really and truly believe that they aren’t rich, but DAMN if people like that don’t need to have their heads forcibly removed from their rectum. Like I said when I responded to her question, if you are “struggling to get by” on a quarter of a million dollars a year, the problem ISN’T that you don’t have enough money.

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A Morning After Rant

By Brian Filed in Rants November 3rd, 2010 @ 10:47 am

So what you actually have to come to terms with is this: that a clear majority of Americans want the niggers on the back of the bus, the fags back in the closet, the womenfolk barefoot and pregnant, and all those damn wetback spics back on the other side of the river (unless they happen to be working under the table as somebody’s gardener, nanny, or kitchen staff). And they’re keeping their eyes on those Jew bastards, too. They want their roads and highways crumbling and their bridges disintegrating. They want anyone who loses his job to go homeless and live scavenging in the dump like they do in Mumbai. Most Americans want to pay through the nose for medical care, they don’t really want any sort of retirement income, and they’d really rather not be bothered with pointless expenditures for things like schools, fire protection, or crime prevention…unless it can be justified by throwing more of those shiftless colored boys in jail where they belong, because they’re all drug-dealers anyway. They don’t care if you lose an arm or a leg in an industrial accident, because it was your fault anyway, and they like their forests denuded, their rivers bubbling with chemical waste, and their coastlines slick with oil, tarballs and dead pelicans.

Oh, and did I forget to mention all the guns. Guns, guns, and more guns. They like guns. They like great big weapons, huge missiles, tanks bristling with things to kill all those fucking A-rabs with, and lots and lots of dead soldiers. And if they can’t have as many dead soldiers as they like, they’ll settle for tens of thousands of maimed ones, with missing limbs and as much permanent brain damage as you can manage, please. Because you never know when one of those filthy towel-head sand-niggers might blow up a bus or an airplane.

And fuck taxes. Nobody should have to pay a goddamn nickel in taxes, especially big corporations who need all that money to move their businesses to China, where those stupid slant-eyes are happy to work for a dollar a day because they’re too dumb to know any better! Nothing good ever came of paying taxes because all those bastards in government spend it all on booze and hookers anyway.

And if you disagree with anything these people have said, you’re a socialist un-American commie Nazi who should go live in France and leave this country to REAL Americans. Jesus said so and he wrote it in the U.S. Constitution!

Enjoy the next two years, my friends, and the two after that, and the two after that and so on.

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That Sound You Hear Is America Going Over The Cliff

By Brian Filed in Politics, Rants Tagged with , , , November 1st, 2010 @ 12:03 pm

I really don’t know what is more discouraging: that the Evil Racist Morons are going to win big tomorrow, or that the only alternative to them is a bunch of spineless incompetents who are only marginally less evil.

I have to tell you that I am seriously contemplating not voting tomorrow. My sitting Congressman, John Tierney, whose wife was just convicted of tax fraud, has a comfortable 2-1 lead over the Birther nutbag who is his Republican opponent. I have expressed my opposition to Tierney in the past for his support of things like TARP and the PATRIOT Act. I don’t want to vote for him, he doesn’t need my vote to win, there’s no opposition except a Koch-Sucker, and so that’s one wasted vote if I cast it.

The governor’s race in Massachusetts has been laughably bad. The incumbent Democratic governor is a complete joke. He got off to a piss-poor start by drawing attention to himself for spending a ton of money to redecorate his office after his inauguration, then he got caught making calls in behalf of his former employer, a corrupt mortgage firm. Otherwise, he’s done next to nothing except look like a deer in the headlights with each passing month’s unemployment and budget cut news. The Republican doesn’t seem to be a Koch-Sucker, per se, but he is one of those Republican guys who is a little too cozy sliding back and forth between the public sector (he’s the guy who oversaw the finances on the Big Dig) and the private sector (his last gig was running a major health insurance firm), and seems to excel at lining his own pockets and little else. Even the independent is nothing but a Democratic machine guy who has little to offer and absolutely no chance of picking up any more than 10% of the vote. The Green Party candidate is a woman who is more or less the Harold Stassen of Massachusetts politics and has just about as much likelihood of getting elected. Again, a completely wasted vote, no matter who gets it.

My state rep is a career Democrat who has been in the State House far too long but is too conservative for me to even consider voting for. He’s running against a guy who is on the local school board, who may or may not be a Koch-Sucker, but I ain’t willing to find out.

And I suspect that these scenarios are truer to what is happening across America than the high-profile races that get all the attention in the media: really lame Democratic candidates versus a crop of potentially volatile nutjob Republicans (or else the usual slimeball Republicans), and the really small group of fired-up nutjob Tea Party people can propel their candidates, because there are too many races where NOBODY is a good choice.

The problem is in the aggregate: nobody minds spending a penny on something, but if a few million people all give you a penny, pretty soon you’ve got a lot of money. The entire business model of the Internet is predicated on this very idea, and it works. So the American public is like all those people who bought iFart apps for their iPhones, paid 99 cents for a five-minute chuckle, and turned a bunch of lame-ass “developers” into instant millionaires for SELLING FART NOISES. Next thing you know, every dipshit who can learn how to fart into a microphone and digitize it is trying to cash in, and one of the most revolutionary technology products of the last decade is reduced to being a very expensive whoopie cushion. And that is exactly the state of American politics: offensive-gas-producing lamebrains cashing in on a public too distracted to notice or care that they’re trashing the place.

At least after you’ve gotten your fill of iFarting you can remove the app from your iPhone and pretend it was never there, but all these Koch-Suckers are going to be in place for a minimum of two years, and some of them are here to stay for a long, long, LOOOOOOOONG time. The problem with choosing the Evil Racist Moron Party is that they are already committed to making things worse for the foreseeable future. The problem with choosing the Spineless Incompetent Party is that they can’t do anything at all, for better or for worse. So, while you really wanted your iPhone to do all those cool things like on the TV commercials, you’re stuck with an uninstallable iFart app that forces you to upgrade to iFart 2.0 whether you want to or not, and the new version has found a way to digitize SMELL. But unless you jailbreak your iPhone, you can never get anything better, because Apple is so deeply invested in the status quo.

What worries me is that even though Election Day is Tuesday, on Wednesday the campaign for the 2012 elections will begin promptly at 7:00 a.m. with the morning shows, and the Democrats are going to have learned from the Republicans that you can scrape the bottom of a really deep barrel and still find candidates most Americans will vote for. And that’s exactly what we’re going to get.

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A Lifetime Of War

By Brian Filed in Life, Misc, News, Rants Tagged with , October 8th, 2010 @ 11:34 am

This is a photograph of my mother holding Charlotte when she was about four and a half months old. As we were visiting with my mother that weekend, indeed, as I took this photograph, George W. Bush was on television announcing that American troops were beginning their invasion of Afghanistan.

Yesterday was the ninth anniversary of that moment. This is Charlotte now:

For all but eighteen weeks of her life, this country has been fighting a war that had no legitimate purpose, no clear goals or objectives, has bankrupted the richest nation in the history of the world, resulted in the deaths of over 2000 coalition troops and countless thousands of Afghan civilians (though nowhere near as many as in Iraq), and imperiled the fundamental civil liberties on which this country was founded. My child was born in a country where peace and prosperity were still the norm, but before she could even walk those conditions would cease to be, possibly forever. And even though the torch of power was handed from the instigator of this conflict, a puppet of the rich and powerful who are the only ones to genuinely benefit from it, that power was handed to a man whose cynical calculus led him to believe that it would be in his own political benefit to continue and even expand the war.

Nine years hence it would not surprise me one whit to revisit this with a picture of my daughter fully grown and this quagmire still in progress. The “Global War On Terror” from its very inception has been nothing but a way for the security state apparatus to create a self-sustaining set of conditions after the collapse of the charade of the Cold War, and as such can never be won, can never be demonstrated for its inherent fallacies, and can be used to justify anything the state wishes to pursue as its prerogative from war to secret tribunals to torture to surveillance to total authoritarianism. If she is lucky, the state will not have imposed conscription to continue to feed its need for fresh troops to throw at the situation, but the balance of her entire life will be spent living with the consequences of something that began on a day that otherwise seemed so joyful and hopeful in her world.

For this, there can be no forgiveness granted to the people who foisted such a tragedy on her and millions of others. One can only hope that in time some proper accounting of it is made and the instigators and enablers alike are given due punishment for their deeds.

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War, Peace, And Whatever The Fuck This Is

By Brian Filed in News, Rants Tagged with , , , August 19th, 2010 @ 9:56 am

Of all the meaningless gestures from the Obama Administration regarding our illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, none is more meaningless than the declaration that “the last combat troops have left Iraq”.

Fifty thousand troops remain in Iraq and the number of mercenaries used in lieu of U.S. military personnel will nearly triple from 2,700 to 7,000. An American military presence in Iraq is unlikely to disappear for decades to come. Just ask the Germans, who still have 68,000 American soldiers in their country even though their war ended 65 years ago. Or the Japanese, who have 47,000 U.S. troops. Or the Koreans, with 37,000. “They need us to maintain order”, “they need us to defend them”, “the strategic value of forward placement is critical to our national security”, “we have to fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here”, and so on. The lies evolve as the situation changes, but there is always some rationalization for permanent occupation.

John McCain had the temerity to say this on Twitter: “I think President George W. Bush deserves some credit for victory.”

Somebody should kick John McCain in the teeth. While it’s not the first time the United States trumped up some bullshit reason to invade another country, the outright lies from Bush and his allies used to gin up a case for a completely unnecessary war are nothing short of war crimes themselves. Bush, Cheney, Powell, Tony Blair, every last one of them should be hauled in front of the same sort of kangaroo court that Saddam Hussein was tried in, summarily found guilty, and hanged for their crimes against humanity. Crowing triumph after seven years of unadulterated misuse of power should be seen as the craven act of a coward and a bully, and the bootlicker McCain deserves to have some sense smacked into him.

During the 2008 election campaign, Barack Obama received a great deal of criticism for using the phrase “putting lipstick on a pig”, but the news spin on this troop reduction is exactly that. Meanwhile, Obama himself deserves a pretty good smack for continuing and expanding the war in Afghanistan, now nearly ten years old and with even less legitimacy than the invasion of Iraq.

There will, of course, never be any proper accounting for all of this. The trillions of dollars squandered, the lives lost or ruined, the incalculable damage done to not just the people of Iraq and Afghanistan but also the people of this country. But neither should there ever be a banner raised in triumph, a head held high in honor, or a page written in history that portrays these last seven years and however many more to come as anything less than a disgrace and a shame.

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Drape The Flag No More

By Brian Filed in Rants Tagged with May 31st, 2010 @ 1:29 pm

In the course of its history, this nation has sent a little more than 1.2 million men and women to their deaths in military service. Over 234 years, they have fought and died for causes noble and just and causes shameful and wrong; they have died for the birth of the republic and the continuation of the union, they have died to help William Randolph Hearst sell more newspapers, they have died to liberate the people of Europe, they have died to prop up or knock down petty dictators, and they have died to secure cheap oil for our insatiable gluttony. In all that time, not a one of them has died for your freedom, though many of them died to bring freedom to others.

How many acts of selfless heroism, of duty, of honor, of ultimate sacrifice must we continue to squander when they could be so better used? Each headstone on the hills of Arlington National Cemetery, or the fields of Normandy, or the graveyards that dot every city and town across America is a life that could have been so much better lived if left untouched by the hubris and greed of politicians and businessmen. Our remembrance does so little to fill the void left by so many losses, yet it is the one small act every person in this country should feel obligated to. Not out of thankfulness or pride, but out of atonement and out of the realization that so much was given for so little in return.

Bow your head and beg forgiveness from these crosses and stars and flags and flowers. Raise your voice, raise your fist, and vow that their deaths will not simply be a million precursors to a million more. Not until every soldier marches home, until there are no more flag-draped coffins to lower forever into the earth will the lives of the fallen have been given their due.

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Maybe We Don’t Need Them After All

By Brian Filed in News, Politics, Rants Tagged with , , , , March 25th, 2010 @ 11:11 am

Earlier in the week, there was a blog post by a guy who calls himself American Dad posting at Talking Points Memo called “An Open Letter To Conservatives”. In it, he offers a vast laundry list of all the appalling behavior, thuggish tactics, and outright terrorist acts that have been committed by elected Republican officials, right-wing “political action” groups, straight-up right-wing wackos, and that gaggle of morons known as “The Tea Party”. It’s a pretty damning list of lies, hypocrisies, petulant behavior, and serious acts of violence, and yet he says “we need you” to them, arguing that somewhere, somehow there is something beneficial about trying to reason with these people and bring them back into the fold of normal, civil, rational political debate.

And that sounds all nice and fuzzy and conciliatory and such, but I am here to tell you that it’s totally wrong-headed. We don’t need any of that bullshit, and to pretend that just sitting down over a cup of coffee with these people will turn them back into rational, thoughtful people who just differ a little bit in opinion is not only foolish, it is quite likely dangerous.

Since the passage of the health care legislation Sunday night, right-wing groups have begun shattering windows, tried to blow up the house of a Democratic member of Congress (except they got the wrong house and almost killed the guy’s brother and his family), and have instigated so many death threats against members of Congress that no fewer than 10 of them have had to be given round-the-clock police protection. Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote about the looming threat of widespread right-wing violence and it’s beginning to look like the passage of the health care bill was exactly the match needed to set off their tinder.

So what can anyone expect to gain from trying to reason with people who have concluded that the best course of action is to threaten, intimidate, and kill? That’s not “meaningful political dialogue”, it’s terrorism plain and simple. “Conservatism” is a meaningless term in the present context, because there’s nothing conservative about the actions and agendas of these groups. Mollycoddling them with the notion that they might have something positive to offer is like hand-feeding steak to a starving grizzly bear.

The time has come to take a tougher stance in response to these people and instead of offering them a seat at the table, pushing them back under the rock they crawled out from.

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The Pyrrhic Victory

By Brian Filed in News, Politics, Rants Tagged with March 22nd, 2010 @ 2:48 pm

Regardless of the rhetoric and spin from both sides of the debate, the bottom line on the passage of the health care bill was that the political necessity of passing the bill outweighed every other consideration for the Democrats, and the necessity of defeating the bill outweighed every other consideration for the Republicans, and once that reality sank in on the holdout Dems, it was an irresistable force. The Democrats may never again hold as large a majority in either house as they have at the moment, so this was truly a once-in-a-lifetime chance to take this to a final floor vote and win, and there isn’t a soul in Washington DC who doesn’t know that. For the 34 Democrats who did vote no, at the end of the day their personal political survival was more in doubt that the political survival of Barack Obama, and Pelosi’s leadership group had the numbers, so those who needed the out were given it.

Do not kid yourself, precious little was accomplished in terms of real health care reform by passing this legislation. And for all the talk of “it’s just a beginning, we’ll do more later”, nothing of substance in this matter will be brought before Congress for decades to come. This is it. This is what we got, and it’s too fucking little to make any difference in the grand scheme of things. But the Republicans made sure it was a 100% all-out war, and in the end there was no choice but to return fire. And now there can be no quarter given by either side; every legislative battle of consequence from this time forward will have to be fought to the death, and every outcome will be zero-sum. Though I think the Republicans are kidding themselves to believe that they will flip Congress in the mid-term elections, they will probably come out ahead in the short-term calculus and thus the parity of the warring factions will level off again, to the detriment of every person who lives in the United States.

To the Democrats, I say do not rejoice even a single moment of this victory. Your win comes at the sacrifice of any genuine reform. Millions will continue to be unable to afford even basic health care, and will be permanently welded to the sides of the rapacious insurance companies by a mandate that failed to include a public option. Your cowardice and cupidity throughout the year that this legislation has ground through Congress means far more than your acquiescence to the President now. You did win the battle, but you have certainly lost the war.

To the Republicans, all that can be said is that you do not deserve to serve your country in any way shape or form. “Deplorable” does not begin to describe the conduct of your leadership or your rank and file. Nothing you say or do should ever be taken seriously by anyone ever again, and if you had the slightest bit of human decency you would resign your offices, beg for absolution, and remove yourselves from the company of decent human beings forever. There is not a brush big enough to tar each and every one of you with the shame you richly deserve. You have managed not only to doom millions of people’s lives, you have also brought the wrecking ball through the house of democratic government so completely that it might not be possible to ever govern this nation through the legislative process again. As Bob Dylan sang, is your money that good?

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Unbelievable

By Brian Filed in News, Rants Tagged with , October 16th, 2009 @ 10:36 am

BELIEVE

I was busy yesterday and completely offline all afternoon, so by the time I caught first wind about the story with the balloon and the kid, they had just found the kid on the ground, hiding. But this ridiculous story led the local 6:00 newscast AND the network newscast, and the frothing twats at our local NBC station were ready to go wall-to-wall with it all night long if the kid hadn’t turned up about two minutes into their newscast. They had reporters live at various locations to cover this IMPORTANT STORY…even though this was happening in Colorado and NOT Boston. They had “Experts” lining up to explain about how balloons work. They had animated SCARE-O-VISION graphics and that “Voice of Doom” voice-over guy they use all cued up and ready to use over and over and over. And I will wager you any amount of money that at least one station in every single major media market in the country did the exact same thing. And all you had to do was look at that balloon to know that there was no way in hell it was going to support the weight of a small child. Is there a television news director left anywhere in the country who isn’t a complete moron?

Even if it turns out that this was a complete stunt on the part of the family involved (and I can’t make up my mind if it is or not), every working television journalist in America needs to take a long, deep look inside themselves and honestly question what the hell they are doing if this sort of inanity receives that much of their time and attention. Seems to me that maybe we would be better served if the newspapers stayed in business and the television news networks were the ones shutting down; newspapers are guilty of a lot of sensationalism, too, but this story would have had time to play itself out before a single inch of print could be wasted on it.

UPDATE: Since some people coming here via the CNN link can’t play nice, I have turned comments off

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