cheese it, the cops!

Unscrupled and unlearned and Rubes

In which Crusader AXE corrals Moses, Mohammed, Newt Gingrich and Jeff Imelt's predecessor and drags them over to Crispin's place for a game of Texas Hold'Em dealt by William of Occam.

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":

mo

one thing that happens in these campaigns is very analogous to sports: a natural ebb and flow. so if you get the lead, your impulse is to relax slightly, fall back and play defense, even if that's not what you're telling yourself to do. like a decent nfl or premiere league game or championship chess match will feature a very clear ebb and flow of momentum. obviously usually the axelrod-type operation is quite good, but i think that here they really decided to play defense; they decided that the main thing was not to blow it, not to make a mistake. that's not irrational but it's the way you lose the initiative. sometimes that's exactly the way a team comes back on you when you take a big lead. as the color man says, they 'went away from what got them here': started to call running plays up the middle, or went into a slowdown and started giving up turnovers; they 'lost their aggressiveness.'

blogging the debate

am debrief. so romney had a good evening. but what happens is a stampede. like me, they had low expectations. so one person says: my sense is that romney had a good night. then there's a contest for who can express the now-approved common wisdom in the most extreme way. somebody this morning on msnbc said that obama's performance was the worst in the history of televised presidential debates, romney's the best. that's just wacky. obama was definitely kind of listless, but he wasn't disastrous. could definitely have been more combative. of course there's romney's basic actual policy strategy: simply reverse any attacked position, right there.

10:29 o's 'i believe in the american people' schtick is so tired. he is tired at this point as he delivers it yet again.

10:13 romney is holding its own, which as i say would exceed my expectations. but i'm bored.

10:05 obama is now saying that obamacare is "the same plan" as romney's mass. plan.

9:59 my healthcare plan courtesy of jerry jacks on gh: release a deadly biological agent into the water supply.

9:52 but lehrer always has a perfect flatline 50% whenever he speaks. it's an art.

9:40 romney's all about 'care for our poor.' doesn't that sound like eisenhower cice 1953?

9:35 r dominating the discussion effectively right now on deficits. also playing offense: pressing o.

9:27 is this a good idea to be watching cnn with a graph showing real-time focus-group reaction? certainly that means something about the media if only i felt profound.

9:24 o is fundamentally right on romney's projected budgeting. tax cuts + increased defense spending cannot be your deficit-reduction plan. romney is standing up there though. not getting blown off the stage.

9:17 the idea that romney will not reduce taxes at the upper end is a new thing to emphasize and is probably not ingenuous.

9:14 i am riveted by the details of tax policy. lay them on me baby! the locus of social justice and all our other ideals.

9:13 now he's breaking into that whine. smirk too.

9:08 romney's opening was not incompetent. even the anniversary joke was ok. see? i have the lowest expectations.

7:02 i will be checking in with baseball. last night was quite a beautiful baseball evening, even though the yanks won.

6:42 tonight romney needs to come on like a snarling, whining lapdog, a whirlwind of ultra-aggressive, randomly unfocused aggression. tonight, romney needs to re-introduce himself to the american public, pivot, show his human side etc. it's as though there's always only one thing to say!

6:34 it's unimaginable how much pressure people are putting in particular on romney. it must be rather difficult for an actual human being, if any, actually not to choke; it's like playing in the super-bowl, only moreso.

will do

i'll be liveblogging the debate tonight. my prediction is that gary johnson will emerge victorious. naw my prediction is pain. romney has had way, way too much preparation; they don't actually at all seem to understand his problem. i just don't think romney can like win a debate against obama, and i think he will be rattled as hell, and i think he's likelier to make that mistake. it is very much like watching that nascar race, though; one thing that just might happen is someone dies in a ball of flames.

what mitt romney has to do tonight is to connect with the american people. 'connect' in the deepest way, in the most physical or even visceral sense.

Bitchslap a reactionary with me for the sake of your health

It's sad, but due to high student loans, exploding tuition costs, costs of text books and the rising pice of Ramen,  this is what our suffering graduate students go through in order to fund their education...well, that and sell sperm and eggs and organs and stuff...

http://madartlab.com/2012/10/02/creative-dissonance-episode-4-trampolarchery/

Now, on a vaguely related topic, I invite you to visit my last post over at Veterans Today which I mentioned here and cross posted at the Defeatists and Vets...the subject of Pussy Riot really dumbfounded some folks...who were already pretty dumb. I managed to offend the anti-semites, the anti-Bolsheviks, the pro-Russian orthodox, the anti-Solzhenitsyn capitalists and the anti-Zionists. Hurrah! A pick five...

The poor suffering Russian Church...which of course was totally subservient to the Czar, did a deal with Stalin and then continued with the bureaucratic-oligarchy of demented old men and signed on with Putin as soon as he showed up on the screen. 

So read or re-read the post but have fun with the comments. What I've found in my reading of various blogs is that a lot of them don't get a lot of comments. There are a lot of smart, informed and interesting folks who write and post over at Vets. However, the comments are far less diverse than the opinions of our readers. Crispin has had the rare success of actually attracting readers who respond and do so intelligently...you folks can be trusted to dangle few particles and not begin sentences with a preposition. In fact, some of you actually show familiarity with the subjunctive. And, beginning a sentence with a conjunction, you are not ignorant, race-baiting, anti-semites and reactionary fools. 

So, should one of the comments so move you over at Vets, please, comment back. I find that my habit of responding to comments produce more comments as well as responses. Of course, these people have nothing to do when they've patched their tin-foil hats, covered the windows to prevent the CIA black helicoptes from seeing them and Fox News has reverted to Laura Ingrahm re-runs and Vegematic-Pocket Fisherman-COMBO!!! infomercials. 

Have some fun with them. 

like a monstrous, red, pre-historic flower

one thing about authorship in the age of word processing: one definitely no longer thinks in terms of discrete drafts and revisions: the thing can grow from within with rolling revision. or you're working on two or more chapters simultaneously, while every so often trolling for corrections or obvious additions throughout. one suspects that this had just got to change the final product, though it's perhaps an elusive matter to say just how. you might dick around with all sorts of different organization, to the point of fucking your shit up or getting strangely fragmented. i have to say, i would much much rather write this way than on a typewriter, which is how i started. or i used to write on pads and then type. obviously there is something to be said for that, but how many writers would go back? for one thing, it's just a far more refined product; you've been over it dozens of times, though perhaps not with the same concentration as on the two stabs you used to get.

unconditional surrender

obviously, we got beat in afghanistan. it's actually the 'green on blue' stuff that turned out to be the decisive tactic in the war. people purport to be puzzled by the whole phenomenon; with a straight face, they're like 'after all we've done for them...' now, i do think trying to smash al qaeda immediately was both morally necessary and practically imperative. but, you know, looking at it from their point of view...we occupied their country, blew even more of it and them up, and unilaterally imposed on them the most corrupt government in the world.

also if you don't see romney all over this immediately, they are even more imcompetent than i thought, if that is strictly possible. this is, actually, defeat, which perfectly fits the picture romney wants to paint of obama.