cheese it, the cops!

redeemed by our very ineptitude

what's encouraging about this wave of terrorism is the whole slapstick quality, both of the perpetrators and the heroic first responders, the relentless all-too-human flamboyant mediocrity of it all, hedged about by a relentless hyperbolic rhetoric of earnesteness and non sequitur super-americanism. boston strong, son. next time be ready with a better writer for your sticker. that's basic preparedness. 

anyway, the tsarnaev brothers, in their carjacked vehicle, improvise in collaboration with the car's owner a plan to bomb times square. later, they're chucking large exploding items of cookware out the window of the car at the cops and sort of getting away. finally, all the police in the world are searching watertown mass, overlooking for many hours the poor little wounded chump shivering in the boat two blocks away as they chase various vehicles hither and thither throughout the metro area. they pull him out of the boat in a fallujah-style fully armoured and mechanized mega-assault, disabling him with robots and percussion devices before unleashing a hail of automatic-weapons fire, somehow leaving him alive. dzokhar tsarnaev, like so many of us, no doubt owes his life to the incompetence of others, whose courage has made them heroes.

meanwhile, the ricin lame-attempt-to-assassinate-everybody case has broken down into an academic super bowl, a world chess championship of sheer white trash douchebaggery, pitting the elvis impersonator against the child molester. first they charged the elvis impersonator, which i could have told them was futile, as he was obviously framed by the envious child molester, who's also a martial arts entrepreneur and politician. the latter gentleman now appears to have absconded (?), which would be outstanding and remarkable. where is h.l. mencken in this golden age?

the obvious explanation

8:15 bolo on a dark-skinned individual in a black hoodie. if anyone sees anything like that, shoot to kill. dude. it's trayvon martin. while you're at it, intern all white male loners.

7:25 sources tell me that the winklevoss twins are under suspicion. those fuckers hate america.

6:12 or wait. of course. it's a coup by ben bernanke.

6:00 PM obviously, the obama administration staged the explosions in boston so they could declare martial law and fully implement nationalized healthcare. no doubt they justify this to themselves with the fact that they'll be able to offer treatment to the victims of their own dastardly crimes!!

be sure to listen for anagrams and codes in the president's statement.

 

badassery without precedent

before i do this, let me remark that i am an opponent of murder. ok: whomever is killing prosecutors in texas and possibly prison chiefs in colorado, is - despite some conspicuous moral flaws - an unprecedented badass. after you kill your first prosecutor in texas, you'll have an extreme manhunt on your ass. then if you kill the prosecutor that called you scum and promised to hunt you down - and who of course is aware, like the rest of the law enforcement community, that you might try to kill him - you're in a situation in which there are thousands of heavily armed men with unlimited resources trying to keeel you. maybe this person will be caught tomorrow. but she (i'm speculating that it's a woman, possibly a lingerie model) hasn't been caught yet. in my opinion, this might teach even texas lawmen something about extreme bluster: do it, then brag about it, not the other way round.

much respect

crime connoisseur gives mad props to the perps of the all-time snatch and grab. in and out in three minutes. 

i see the whites of their eyes

as you have possibly noticed, i often rag on the new york times, roughly on the grounds of the boringness and extreme safety-consciousness of the opinion pages. however, i am often impressed by and grateful for the reporting, such as the stories last year that exposed the chinese state as a mega-scale kleptocracy. the idea that they're invading the times's computers is insufferable, and i wouldn't be waiting for the american gov to do anything about it. did i have any influence on the world's hackers, i'd recommend total invasion. wikileak anything that might be interesting and defoliate the rest with mutant stuxnet. leave nothing but a smoking crater. i want to hear wen jibao wimpering like a smacked dog. i very much hope google is working secretly on this. 

and of course wherever you live, remember to trust your government. chris matthews and paul krugman do! 

nuke yourself

she might not have been a particularly effective dean, embezzler, murderess, and so on, but she was an extremely impressive suicide. 

She started a fire in a bedroom fireplace and closed the flue. When death did not come quickly enough, she went downstairs to the kitchen and turned on the gas. For extra measure, she slit her wrists.

Stereo speaker wire was her final weapon of choice. She took a length of it back upstairs, lowered an attic ladder and hanged herself from it.

most people kind of kill themselves with a whimper of sadness; she assaulted herself repeatedly in a total rage.

ALF

i speculate that the folks who knocked over that dutch museum are art-rights extremists who are trying to free all the works of art that are imprisoned in museums. how can i help? let my paintings go. we need to bring the art back into the world and stop locking it up behind layers of bulletproof glass and impregnable marble. also, while i'm at it, stop pretending to like picasso.

yellowism

defacing art as itself art: well, not new, but exploring new problems in aesthetic criminality. i'd have to say that much of modernism and post-modernism has been dedicated to iconoclasm of one sort or another.even the basic move to abstraction has that element. but hostility toward art is a basic element of, say, dada, pop, conceptualism, jeff koons. or we might ponder rauschenberg's "erased de kooning":

but glock is psyched

smith & wesson executives must be mortified that their ar-15 jammed. 

a tribute too all the empty instant explanations, via greatest hit, philly inquirer 2001:

I Was a Disgruntled Male Loner

"FBI believes angry male loner sent anthrax letters." When I saw that headline, I assumed that there was an actual suspect, but what they have in custody is a profile, developed by forensic specialists.

Now the FBI meant this announcement to be reassuring, to show that they're all over the case. But it had exactly the opposite effect: it made it clear that they haven't been able to do a damn thing, though I guess we can now eliminate your mom and the Dalai Lama.

FBI "behaviorist" Jim Fitzgerald said he hoped members of the public might recognize these characteristics and give the bureau some leads. But to be honest, most of the people I know are disgruntled male loners. Come to that, I am myself an disgruntled male loner. Consider that a tip, Jim.

Possibly it is time to stop interning Arabs and start interning disgruntled male loners. We'll set up a network of camps where loners can be gruntled. We'll have a bowling league and a drum circle.

The disgruntled male loner has truly become an icon of American culture. Perhaps it is a mere coincidence, yet it seems that assassins and terrorists such as Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Lee Harvey Oswald, Tim McVeigh and so on were all disgruntled. On the other hand, our heroes - such as the characters played by Clint Eastwood and John Wayne - are also disgruntled male loners. We love our disgruntled male loners, yet we fear them too.

It's so damn hard being a disgruntled male loner these days. We receive mixed messages from the media, which disgruntles us further. We used to be admired, even venerated, but in the post-September 11 world, our heroes aren't cowboys, but friendly, well-adjusted bureaucrats.

Profiling is an interesting business. It consists in reading character from its effects, inferring who someone is by what they do. In fact, we're all profilers. To figure out who people are, all we have to go on is what they do.

A character in a play by Moliere, asked why opium makes people sleepy, says with a grandly scientific air that it has a sleep-inducing property. To say that someone is angry isn't much of an explanation for their violent behavior: rather their violent behavior is the explanation for our attribution to them of anger.

In the FBI profile, the "male" part comes from the fact that most people who send threatening mail are men. According to these experts, the perp probably also has "some scientific background." I'm hoping that the bureau didn't actually use my tax dollars to pay someone to tell them that the person who did this was angry

When we infer a personality with as little specificity as that attributed by the FBI to the bioterrorist, it seems evident that we are dealing with a ghost, a mere abstract postulate. When you're dealing with your best friend, the ghost in the machine seems more vivid, but it's no less an artifact of imagination.

Even our sense of ourselves is more or less an inference from our own behavior, and an inference from what other people infer about our behavior.

The FBI might believe that they are piecing together "who" the perpetrator is. But all they're doing is restating the information we all have in slightly different terms. We are all skilled at this kind of paraphrase, and any of us could have done as well with less information.

Let me see: the perp is not an Al Gore supporter. He's liable to be over ten years old and to have at some time been in the state of New Jersey. He has a conflicted relationship with his Dad. He's not a tee-ball coach or a member of the Loyal Order of Moose. He isn't a very good ballroom dancer. He's resentful. He's unhappy. He's not much of a talker. He's not on anti-depressants, or if he is, he needs his medication adjusted. It's unlikely that he's a native of New Guinea; after all, most people aren't. He's not regarded as sensitive. Women have treated him badly. He probably does not like opera.

If you know this person, call your local FBI field office.

 

furiouser and furiouser

if i was a political advisor to obama, i would have advised against asserting 'executive privilege' in the face of congressional subpoena in issa's investigation into 'fast and furious.' well, i would unless the documents were extraordinarily embarrassing. and that in itself shows the problem: by saying you're willing to go all the way to a constitutional confrontation, you are indicating that there's something big there that you don't want people to know. well, it could be some quasi-legit law-enforcement info, but what the subpoena focuses on is the decisions the justice department took in investigating the matter. but this reaction makes the whole thing a much bigger story, blows it up like mad. btw, "fast and furious" and "fast five" (starring vin diesel and the rock) are really pretty great dude movies, with the intervening sequels a mixed bag.

Because Garage Door Openers are worth dying for...

One of the things that binds Crispin and me and my loose collective of malcontented malevolent dissidents, anarchists and engineers is our general aversion to the impact of the totalitarian mind on life, language and discourse. Particularly when afraid -- when they're afraid, they come unglued with weird explanations of events...Orwell could have had fun with that realization because it is when under pressure from the unknown that the basic spiritual bankruptcy and ontological void that is the totalitarian way becomes most obvious. Case in point, China.

Now, China has the potential to explode at any time. It's fairly obvious to anyone with a basic knowledge of Marxist thought that the victory of the Communist Party in 1948 preceded the rise of the industrial proletariat. Pretty much the way that Communism has spread everywhere, by the way, except for the countries in eastern Europe that were conquered by the Soviet Union. So, since the Party still rules the country as a vicious oligarchy, it should not be surprising that the government is terrified of anything that might blow it all up. Tibet, Western China, displaced living lives of misery in Guangzhou and Shanghai...labor unrest, the incredible imbalance between rich and middle class and middle class and poor...disease, famine, water impossible to drink, etc. etc. The place is an economic dynamo sputtering away on top of a volcano. 

Which presents a fair amount of hilarity masquerading as WTF? Not unlike Rush Limbaugh confusing contraception with the adult film industry and Israeli fellow-travellers eagerly sounding the drums for a war with Iran because our last religio-WMD-"Make the world safe"-enterprises have gone so well, the Chinese government is definitely after the root cause of problems at all levels. Jezebel picked up a story from The People's Daily that really makes it obvious that fantastic explanations for things is not just a Republican plutocratic art but one shared by totalitarians univerally. 

Ok, girl one loses a "remote control" to a rolling door for her home. Girl one is obviously fairly rich for China since this looks like a really bad translation of "Garage Door Opener..." although I suppose it could have been a rolling steel shutter door to a patio or perhaps a French Door with a remote to the patio but, WHAT THE HELL?  The silly damn Khardasians don't have remote controlled French doors; Trump doesn't have remote controlled French doors. That makes no sense...even in China, which at some levels, times and places is really like Batman's Gotham City, on meth...So, the kid lost a garage door opener. She decides to kill herself, so she hides in a closet -- another sign that we're dealing with some level of wealth here, there's actually a closet that is not so much in use that hiding in it is possible -- until her little friend comes over. She says she's going to commit suicide, the little friend says, OK, me too and Girl 1 writes down a note saying that she's killing herself over the garage door opener and Girl 2 is doing it because, well, they're friends and it's Tuesday and there's nothing on TV and...they are planning on visiting the Qing dynansty to make a movie of the emperor -- any emperor -- and then going to outer space. Girl 1 tells her sister to "Take Care of the Parents" because it's all about the parents, and they jump in a pool and drown. 

Sister? The Chinese still have their one child rule. Only the very well to do and party elites get to have multiple children. WHAT THE HELL? This passes no reality test...but, the inspiration for the suicide is ...TV shows about people travelling in time and marrying royalty. 

Yeah, and comic books caused juvenile delinquency and rock and roll and teenage pregnancy and communism. Ask your great, great senile grandmother!

Imagine the dialogue in the TV movie...if you've ever listened to the dialogue in a Chinese TV show, as I did by reading subtitles while there -- you'll recognize it. 

Chechette: I lost the garage door remote and have brought dishonor on myself and my family. I must kill myself! 

Chongette: I am your best friend. I will also kill myself. 

Cheechette:Well, if we kill ourselves, we can go back in time and make a movie of the emperor in the Qing dynasty!

Chongette:Oh, good. Then we can travel in space.

 

Cheechette: My parents will be so proud...let's go drown ourselves in the pool!

Both: All hail the Glorious People's Liberation Army and Chairman Mao!"

Yeah. Now, they could have blamed this on Falung Gong because everybody knows that weird calestenics and such make you crazy. They could have blamed this on the influences of capitalism. They could have blamed it on a lot of things. Hell, blame it on Guy Clark ...Time travel on the Chinese equivalent to The Gilmore Girls? Jezebel has an excellent point, by the way.  

This sounds like a cautionary tale about parenting — if your kid thinks killing herself is a good response to losing the remote control, you might not be sending the right message about the value of everyday objects. But Sun Yunxiao, deputy director of China Youth and Children Research Center, has a different moral in mind:

Schoolchildren are rich in curiosity but poor in judgment, so this kind of tragedy happens in every era. I have heard of children jumping from high buildings after watching an actor flying in a magic show. This kind of imitative behavior is in the nature of young children, but it's very dangerous. So we should give some sort of warning for children on TV programs.

I'm actually not sure that killing yourself so you can travel back in time and film an emperor (where do you get the camera?) is a tragedy that "happens in every era."...

Being not so sure about the impact of TV on suicides -- childish deaths from imitating superheroes, pro- wrestlers and such in the west aside -- and being slightly alert to conspiracies and coverups, I gotta say, this looks more like a cover-up of something else. There are lots of possibilities -- a spree of mass murder of children with or without child rape, a problem with some powerful "Big Bucks" in the local or regional Party-Wealthy Complex, drug-crazed People's Liberation Army veterans of the unpleasantness in Western China which dwarfs what we are seeing in Afghanistan or saw in Iraq -- but TV is a convenient scapegoat. Always has been and always will be...Dr. Who, in Mandarin drag, seducing the young with opium and time travel. 

My money is probably on some sort of Child 44 coverup  but who the hell knows about these things? Totalitarian countries are weirder than weird and China's internal dissension, cultural dissonance, and Commie-Confucian-Oligarchic messiness kind of makes it all seem possible, and that's funny in a weird way...and sad. 

Another possibility is that this is just some Politboro thug having a shit fit at time travel TV. Again, the oddities of totalitarianism...

 

 

when comedy writers write reality

human life is redeemed by moments like this.

DENVER—A former Colorado lawman who was once named the nation's sheriff of the year was charged Friday with drug and prostitution offenses after authorities said he offered methamphetamine to a man in exchange for sex.

Patrick Sullivan Jr., 68, was being held on $500,000 bond in an isolation cell at a jail named in his honor in suburban Denver. Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said current or former law enforcement officials are usually kept from the general inmate population for their safety at the Patrick J. Sullivan Jr. Detention Facility.

Prosecutors charged Sullivan with felony distribution, possession of meth as well as a misdemeanor charge of soliciting prostitution. Authorities say he offered methamphetamine in exchange for sex from a male acquaintance in a sting set up by officers with a drug task force.

 

you've got the look

 

(dylan and michele.) might try to blog the gop debate this evenin.

 

don't mess with america, baby

i know i'm late to the appreciation of the dougherty rampage. awwww redneck girl will kick your ass.

 

"her hands are calloused, but her heart is tender."

ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch

hello daddy. hello mom.

 

a fresh take on democracy

the knesset passes a law making it a crime to call for a boycott of israel. as a response, i'd suggest boycotting the state of israel. some crimes are easy and fun! and some crimes are right.

crime wave, contd.

the fearsome crime wave continues here in new freedom, pa. theresa and rickard koller were arrested for trying to bust their own golden lab out the animal shelter.

thank you for your cervix

am i the only one getting tired of 'thank you for your service'? the left people and politicians on tv are even more elaborate in the ceremonial bow than the right. now they're not only thanking commander thad allen or whomever it may be, but also casey anthony jurors.

keep on rockin me, baby

few human beings have ever outrocked the barefoot bandit.

if i was interested in starting a...resistance movement, i would proceed by simulated terrorism. such a procedure is suggested by things like this, where i'm thinking the authorities evacuated a mall or at least closed in en masse to get a guy wandering around a mall with a rifle, when it was in fact a sap with an umbrella. i'm telling you our hyper-vigilant security condition allows anyone to shut down any facility, or indeed bring to gridlock any major metropolitan area, without actually doing anything that would directly harm anyone. (of course, harm would be done; and yet it would be the response and not the act that caused it.) a few random backpacks with goodwill books or gideon bibles could shut down any transit system. you could disrupt whole military installations or airports with the right umbrella or some empty boxes. not that i'm advocating this, mind you, at least not until i work up a coherent set of demands (perhaps i'd start with: keep chocolate milk in the schools). but hyper-vigilance makes you vulnerable to freakouts; it is in fact a form of unreasoning fear. in a way, you'd give a reductio ad absurdum of the idea that a whole society can be mobilized into a surveillance machine to prevent terrorism.

in local news: Man Hit in Head With Frying Pans

note the plural: she kept reloading.

ok she shot her teenage kids on the way home from soccer practice because they were 'mouthy.' in other news, amy chua is still on her book tour.

Assange's London attorney, Mark Stephens, told AOL News today that Swedish prosecutors told him that Assange is wanted not for allegations of rape, as previously reported, but for something called "sex by surprise," which he said involves a fine of 5,000 kronor or about $715.

"We don't even know what 'sex by surprise' even means, and they haven't told us," Stephens said.

sometimes you're running through the possible jokes and you realize that it's just not necessary. happy birthday, baby!

headline: Woman Says She Stabbed Husband Accidentally While Cutting Cheese

(stabbed him through the heart, actually.)

i notice that, more and more, women are getting into the bloodbath biz. well this is a blow for human equality, of course: a demonstration that we're all from the same solar system. however, there will be an important difference. when men kill everybody available, it's cause we're psychotic, testosterone-laden monsters: men are lower than beasts. however, when women kill everybody, it is because of low self-esteem, a serious condition as troubling as athlete's foot. however, unlike athletes' foot, it is incurable. i would anticipate an ever-escalating cycle of total, yet completely understandable, violence. rather than execute female murderers we ought to try makeovers. good luck!

i just want to say that that barefoot bandit dude is something else.

so like i say, the party-crash was funny and harmless, and i always admire a good con etc. but you know it is also very pathetic, and more and more pathetic as details of the salahis' lives emerge. they spent all their time and energy pretending to be rich and beautiful and important. they tried to get into any and every event that they thought lent them some kind of prestige, she pretended to be a former redskins cheerleader (?!), e.g.. the fakery was at times ingenious, but the motivation is disgusting: it doesn't matter what i am or what i do: what matters is that other people think i have cachet of some kind.

it's not only pathetic because they were constantly simulating a social prestige they didn't have: it's pathetic also when people do achieve it. really this is true of many people: all they really care about is that other people think they are...rich, famous, beautiful, important. there is never a moment when they confront themselves, or when they're alone in their head assessing their lives from ther own point of view. astonishingly, they have no point of view, no subjectivity that isn't an imagination of how theyappear to others. i think of, perhaps, bill clinton this way. but i have actually known a number of people along these lines. it's an invitation to evil, but it's also just really sad, pointless, stupid, futile, self-refuting: empty empty empty.

oh i don't know.  i'm a lot less worried about a professional athlete being assaulted by a tiny blond person than i would be about a tiny blond person being assaulted by a professional athlete, like i'm more worried about bigotry against black people than bigotry against white people. the kneejerk reaction is always: what if it were the other way round? well, if it were the other way round, it'd be different, because not all persons and situations are the same. you know bad things can happen in gender-inverted abuse: i knew a couple once where she hit him with a car and pinned his hand to a counter with a steak knife. but there are kind of overall actual differences between men and women, etc.

so this morning in the tacoma cop-killer case, police were reported to have surrounded a house, and to be trying to remove the suspect using "loudspeakers," "explosions," and "occasional gunshots." now he's on the loose? so what the hell were they blowing up and shooting at?