cheese it, the cops!

Asking for a Friend...Does Trump's Ass Make Him Look Stupid? Or Fat? Or Both.

 

An odd part of the fallout from the Facebook-Twitter-Instagram Bot investigation is that a lot of internet publications that depend on outside collaborators can't post various places like Facebook because their content won't pass the Decency Test. Veterans Today is one of those places, and they've been struggling to find the right formula to differentiate from old bad actors and new, possibly more bad bad actors who are a bit more politically correct. I guess that did us in at Veterans Today -- I think that our awarding liars "Motherfucking REMFs" for the extent and grossness of the reality may have been the proximate cause. 

Not to worry. Despite losing a lot of retweets and views and various things, we still exist.This is a new piece -- I confess that for someone with a seriously bent sense of humor and a tendency toward satire, the Trump administration is an embarrassment of riches. It's just impossible to write seriously using satire to make points while presenting an argument when you're dealing with this chiseling lowlife. I know that Maddox prefers some varions on Military Monk as a nickname pointing to his dedication, straight shooting integrity, and disdain for comfort and wealth. However, life with Trump for someone in his position probably felt a lot like self-flagellation with barbed wire. Somehow, it just didn't pass the smell test. So, he lasted a helluva lot longer than someone not a Military Saint would have. Trump would have had me at the Bastille Day ceremony. 

Anyway, one thing that has been a problem for me is finding the right epitet for Trump, one that mocks but captures his pieous side. Tragedy, according to Aristotle, belongs to the realm of stories where the hero is destroyed by a fatal flaw in his own makeup. Well, Trump is a nexus in and of himself of lots of fatal flaws. Did he ever give or get a blow job from Roy Cohn? Possibly. Knowing Roy Cohn well enough to have a personal opinion about the guy makes him unqualified to be president -- but that might give his base pause. You need to have a really well developed handle on recent American History to know what a louse Cohn was. He was a genuinely evil man; he died of AIDS denying that he had the disease or was Gay in public up until he died. He probably ran a bit of a gay cabal on Senator McCarthy's staff, which the drunken fool wouldn't have caught on to. He was disbarred for various nasty stunts like suborning perjury, witness tampering, embezzlement, and who knows what else...that's who he's referring to when he'd complain he wanted his own Roy Cohn...

 

I've given it a lot of thought, and had  settled pretty much settled on some variation of President Manatee, but realized that was unfair to sea cows. Then I heard someone say Trump is from Queens and I thought, yeah,,,and then Howard Fineman said something about his administration being the most corrupt government since Caligula. Well, I don't think it's close; I think it's probably worse. Of course, Trump hasn't married his horse yet after appointing it to the Supreme Court -- As Gaius "Caligula" Caesar did -- of course, we know that Trump is scared of animals, and I suspect that horses really scare him. And, Caligula did decide to invade Britannia and then had his Army beat the waves with the flat of their swords and fill their helmets with seashells to represent his booty, planning to display this on his triumph.On the other hand, there was the great parade debacle and the "guard the border against the caravans" nonsense, so...close enough. 

So, does "the Queens' Caligula work for him? Or does it make his ass look fat? 

Damn Socrates, Wittgenstein, Authenticity and Your Own Bullshit

Farrell's Guide to Authenticity. Don't believe your own bullshit. Laugh at it...

 

The sense of the world must lie outside the world...What we cannot speak about we must remain silent about...What can be described can happen too, and what is excluded by the laws of causality cannot be described -- Wittgenstein

A good guide will take through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide. -- Wittgenstein

There's a great article about Wittgenstein and the problems of authenticity in The NY Times Series The Stone this morning. It got me thinking.

Damned authenticity! It roughly means, for me, the 1=1 congruence of thought, action, belief, speech, dreams and prayers. It's bloody near impossible, because nothing is really congruent. As a born, baptized, educated and apostate Roman Catholic, it is similar to things like being in a state of grace or "making a good act of contrition." If I confess the sin of anger -- a sin I'm really, really proficient at -- to make a good act of contrition requires that I be sorry for what I did, and that I intend unreservedly to never be angry again. Yeah, right...not happening, Brother Jesus, not happening.

Damned Wittgenstein, for that matter. His philosophy is so dense because he sought absolute congruence between thought, action, and belief. But one thing the universe is, and remains, is not congruent. Trying to understand it can make multiple very bright people flee to things like cultivating a rock garden, as my buddy, indicted coconspirator and practicing Philosopher as well as Philosophy Professor Crispin Sartwell has done. Or, run for Congress. Or, run to prayer.

Confession, authenticity, congruence, integrity...Damn them all, I say. And, I recommend than taking a deep breath and getting back to trying to figure it all out. It's not the job of the academic philosopher to do this; it's the job of the authentic human being.

"But one thing we can understand about Wittgenstein is that he longed to change himself; and he saw confession as a means to fulfilling this. “Nothing is so difficult,” Wittgenstein wrote in 1938, “as not deceiving oneself.”’ His vision of the authentic self is perhaps always beyond reach, like the exemplars of authenticity with which he was familiar through the writings of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Authenticity throughout the history of philosophy is often conceived of as an ideal to which we should aspire, but that doesn’t prevent it being a useful means for self-improvement. Confession can help remove obstacles standing in the way of our becoming our authentic selves. "If it can do that for Wittgenstein, it may do the same for us."

Or, maybe not. 

Maybe you should just not think about it all. This one is for Crispin, Jeff, James, Agi and Adam...

 

What strange hell...Part II

I didn't post part 1 of this, but Part II is very stand alone. 

I kind of like this one. I'm 90% or so through Nussbaum's book and about 70% through Woodwards, and they're both interesting. Toss in the new one by Gelfand, and I may begin to understand.

https://www.veteransnewsreport.com/2018/09/17/wolf-country-gazette-what-strange-hell-part-ii/

 

Few comments on the material -- I did the sentence that refers to the US as a country of broad shoulders, and decided that the poem, or most of it, belonged in the article. As a nation, our mojo kinda sorta is on vacation; I think that Trump's election depended in large part on a lot of people showing off their pencil necked geek. Chicago was a great image of America, a country with flaws but broad shoulders. Trump's triumph requires that a part of us give up and just slump our shoulders and demand our American version of Dostoyevsky's Inquisitor. It's ok to be depressed, but damn it, you need to go out shoulders back, head high and be aggressively depressed. Or something.  

 

Dylan number is from his 88 tour of Australia with a little known band from Gainesville as his backup....Tad Putty and the Heartburners? Something like that. Looks like he's playing a Dean acoustic guitar which strikes me as odd. 

 

New Vets setup limits the amount of music I can post. As I was finishing up, I realized I wanted to add this, mainly for the first verse -- 

 

 Same old tune/fiddle and guitars/ where do we take it from here?

Rhinestone boots /big shiney cars/ it's been the same way for Years

We need a change...

Somebody told me when I got to Nashville

Son you really got it made

Old Hank made it here and we're all sure that you will

But I don't think Hank done it this a-way

I don't think Hank done it this way?

 

If old Hank did it this way, it would sound like Chuck Prophet. 

https://youtu.be/gc-9Hf_dnwE

 

A Sad, Shortsighted Species

I've been very sick the last couple of weeks. One course of pretty nasty antibiotics and I started to feel better and then wham! Back to the local Stop&Doc where I got the first prescription and the office, which serves a couple of hundred people daily. They couldn't find a substitute to cover while the normal guy took some vacation. We commiserated back and forth, since I needed help; and they -- four people -- were waiting for the word to close shop and 3/4s of a day's pay.

While this was a personal problem, it got me thinking. I've had 2-4 cases of strep throat and associated problems every year since before Crispin was born. Had the tonsils out when I was 20 and the idea that no more sore throats was a total lie. However, there was a lot less misery. Still, when it gets full blown, I'm pretty useless. More so than normal, according to some. 

On the other hand, I've never had smallpox, tetanus, swine flu, diphtheria, thyroid, tetanus, rabies, rubella, shingles, malaria, plague, anthrax or any of the other stuff I've been vaccinated for. Made me wonder why this is so...

So, channeling Phil Ochs, I wrote about it.   

 

Stupid people place equal importance on all things...

Bit of military nostalgia and wisdom this evening...just because entropy increases doesn't mean we have to like it or even give in gracefully... Oh, the gray is links the green is music.... 

Bad Craziness...Russia!

 

Seriously, how can Crusader AXE take those people any more seriously than Margaret Thatcher or Ted Cruz?

 

Most patriotic thing sometimes is to scream incoherently and leave

 

In which Crusader AXE reflects on the cooption of patriotism into something more vulgar than an ad for Stars and Stripes Personal lubricant, the nature of nations as Phrog Farms with the help of noted Management Consulting Anarchist Jerry B. Harvey, and points out some personal responsibility through the prose of a better writer in The Guardian. With music. 

 

 

ST Dominics Peview as performed by House Blissful Idiot Chorus

 

In which Crusader AXE stops by and raises some questions about whether blissful ignorance ends at the ballot box for the Dumbasses who pass laws not realizing that things like Sequestration have an impact, and the government does things with the money that they appropriate and that they control appropriations... with the help of Jackson Browne, Joan Baez and the Doobie Brothers with a quote from Phil Ochs...who would be a lot of fun if he was still here, sane, sober and not wearing a gold lame suit.

 

Hotter than a bored out, 400 CC 57 Chevy with Dual Carbs and a HEMI! And Headers...

 

In which Crusader AXE muses on the positive aspects of moonshining, rumrunning, beer brewing , and marijauna over Chrystal METH and tobacco; and, on being a craft brewer, craft distiller, moonshiner or herbal remedy distributor as opposed to a regular job...and advocates bounties for METH COOKERS and Hookah lounge operators, both on aesthetic grounds. 

 

Just to make Crispy a little nervous in the night...

One of the loose collective that binds Crispin and me -- The Defeatist-Malcontent-Anarchist Slacker Collective and Bait Shop -- a Vet who's trying to get his band going in upstate New York doing kind of boogie rock with metal overtones, spends time he should spend doing something like picking up bottles for the return fee on a Marshall Amp blog, and one of the folks on it posted something about a piece of software that my pal had not heard of. He tossed it out to the collective, and one of the guys explained that it is really kind of an auto-cad system that enables engineers, architechts, and marketing types to overlay everything and walk the customer through the whole bloody thing. He then commented that if he wanted to go back to working for somebody else, he's take some classes...and then realized what he just said. Commented that he hated his life, and went off to drink copiously in the pine woods of Maine. 

This made me realize something. The goal is not 3D confusion but infinite dimensional confusion. Then,
people can do things like compare the budget and expenditures of the United States with your family checkbook, and have people pay attention. This software then is part of the Koch agenda and goal for the brave new world where You can confuse the customer in multiple dimensions, including time, simultaneously! What is it? It's all of this. When will it be done? When it is done. What will it look like? Like all of this in layers. Why is this here? it's in the regulations. In France, it would have to be here, but we're not in France so it has to be there. Don't blame us, it's in the regulations. What is it going to cost? What it costs. Cost =f(X,L) where X is the "cost" and L is "a lot" and the relationship is undefined...either you add a lot or you multiple by a lot, but it's going to really cost a helluva lot.

So, I decided to hide in music for the rest of the day...Anybody besides me remember The American 


Breed? 60s garage band that incorporated a trumpet in a lot of their fadeouts. Almost recruited a chick trumpet player for my non-existent but brilliantly conceived garage-punk-blues-rock band...The Barstow Bad News Blues Band. However, she can't sing and only knows how to play marches. Wouldn't really help get a unique sound. Have been thinking about substituting kazoo for the trumpet if we do a cover version of their hit, though?

 

Looking for the one thing led to a lot of others. Here's some other garage-type stuff from my youth...For example, the Knickerbochers.  Guys were from Yonkers, or someplace else in the neighborhood,  but everybody thought they were either the Beatles or from Liverpool. Yeah...Liverpool, outside Syracuse, home of Heides Hotdogs...

The Beau Brummels were an interesting group. With that name, in the 60s, they should have been dressed in electric suits (really electric, plugged in like Christmas trees) but I guess they just liked the name. Pretty good song...

The Zombies had an interesting kind of vibe and were a talented band. Sort of stuff the Moody Blues originally did before they discovered psychedelia...and flutes.

Here are the Yardbirds with Jimmy Page supposedly playing the Beck riff because he was off being "brilliant" some place. I hate Jeff Beck, although I think his current bass player is hot. Actually, seeing her with that geezer is something I find scarey... I also think this was lip synching. Here's the   Original with Beck --and, I don't hear the difference. To complete the circle of jerks and egos at the time, here's one their first lead guitarist, What's his name, Dick Crampton or something...I read something recently that said that the Minor Pentomic Blues Scale was what differentiated the three of them. Beck rarely uses it; Page was sloppy with it; Clapton precise and thorough. Yeah...sure.

Now, We Five was an interesting group -- kind of folky, with a big voiced lead singer named Beverly. Who had a helluva voice...since by then the folk voices for women were the amazing altos of Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell, not too surprising that they got lost in the dust. Kind of a shame -- she's dancing, shaking and jiving on stage like she might mean it, in a nice Christian California girl way. 

Syndicate of Sound -- A classic song, but what a waste of two Rickenbackers including a George Harrison 12. Couple of Japanese Squier knockoffs from Kresge's before it was K-Mart would have done the trick for that rif.  Saw these guys in 66, one of the opening acts for the Stones.

Finish up this nostalgia with two organ songs...despite the legend, not  Augie March on both of them.  She's About a Mover  was Doug Sahm, Augie and some other guys. Flip side was his attempt at being part of the summer of love, which I think was horrible. MENDI-cino. MENDI-cino. Mover was a helluva number though...\ Then, of course, there's that great American Band, ? and the Mysterians.

There is nothing about these numbers that doesn't say the yearning of teenage sex, Budwieser and cold duck on a Friday nite after the dance in the gym...who wouldn't like that, again?...

That should ruin the weekend for those of you with daughters!

And for us to pretend to be interested in Hank Williams Junior and the sign at Rick Perry's hunting camp. Been a long time, long time, long lonely, lonely time indeed...

 

Lobbing a softball into Crispin's wheelhouse

I try not to abuse my guest blogger privileges over here. It's all Crispin's fault anyway...

The idea that punk rock, skepticism as a way of thinking about everything and science have some sort of relationship is pretty intriguing. And, of course, why didn't I think of this before... Although, the YouTube request to disable embedding makes me wonder about how pure the motives can remain. 

bought a baseball today with the following warning: "for recreational use only."

this is what it's like to have a brother. after the suicide of anthrax suspect bruce ivins, here's how his brother described him to the washpost:

His oldest brother, Thomas, said he was short and slight as a child and grew up with a fascination for books and science. "He was like a wuss," he said.

yo check out my paper for the workshop on critical posthumanism, which was last week at concordia college, montreal.

Occasionally you wonder what you might do if you were smarter

Crusader AXE here, occasional guest blogger and long-time fan of Crispin's Sonata in A Minor for Kazoo and Jewsharp. I know that he occasionally despairs about the ability of his undergraduate students to read, write and think critically. I did with mine and found a solution; I ceased teaching. This was especially rewarding for me personally, since my students were graduate students.

However, it's wonderful to see what happens when highly intelligent adult scholars and scientists choose whimsical idiocy over serious endeavor. It makes me feel warm inside to know that there is indeed hope for the sword-swallowers amongst us.

sometimes, life seems interminable. other times, death does.

when someone loves you, they want to change you. but when someone kills you, they kill you just the way you are.

i felt bad about my mental deformity...until i met a man with no head. he told me, without a mouth, that he felt bad until he met a man with no torso. and the man without a torso told the man with no head that he felt bad...until he met a man who was "perfectly intact."

the meaning of beer

if you want american culture's deepest take on human meaning, you have to deal with the beer advertising of the anheuser-busch corporation. "this is what i believe in, when the day is done. this is budweiser." michelob amber bock: "it's everything you want to be."

vs

disease vs disease / art vs art

this i believe

maybe you've been tuning in to npr's new series "this i believe" - the revival of an old edward murrow radio show in which people articulated the fundamental principles by which they lived and how they came to those principles. the first contribution to the new version, from colin powell, was just unlistenable: a little collage of cliches, as in "i believe in america." yeah whatever. but anyway, i decided to have a crack, though i have this funny feeling they're not going to bite. so anyway:

The applicability of principles to situations is always at best inexact, because situations bristle with specificities of which no principle can take account. Indeed, the broader the principle, the wider its application, the more it approaches the status of sheer yammer that no one even hears: it merges into the white noise of politics and advertising, the rote muttering of educators.

Some people, perhaps in a momentary delusion, manage to commit themselves to a principle, or a slogan, or even the merest word, such as "excellence." The problem may not be in the state of the enthusiast's  sincerity, but in the absence of anything in the world that corresponds to or causes that enthusiasm: there is nothing out there that attaches itself as the reality to the abstraction that is "excellence." One floats into the term like a balloon into the sky, then pops. "God" is a word like that. "Truth." Even, God or whatever help us, "love."

  Principles always have the possibility of imposing or nurturing psychosis: a mere detachment from the real world, life among the abstractions, life that has left the world behind and now is lived nowhere.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in "This I Believe": the phrase, especially under the tender ministrations of, say, Colin Powell, quickly degenerates into cant.

Principles do such a sorry job of finding reality that people have been tortured slowly to death as an expression of love or because of a commitment to human freedom.

I have no idea what principles are worth living for or what the purpose of life is, and perhaps the only real purpose I want is letting go of purposes: immersing myself in the process in all its detail and renouncing the fantasy of transcending or explaining it.

   This I believe: Children are our future. Believe in yourself and you can do anything. Freedom isn't free. I believe in the promise of America. I believe in the amazingness of the sheer wonder of life.

I believe that I have a dull headache here, right behind my eyes.

sometimes

onr feels just a mite plagiarized, even if what they are grabbing, or reproducing by coincidence, is something everyonw else roundly condemns. radley balko, the agitator, issues the following expression of stern disapproval.

Responding to my Fox column someone pointed me to this James Wolcott blog entry from a few months ago. It was a stupid thing to write then. In light of recent headlines, it makes him look like a particularly skanky piece of dung today:

I root for hurricanes. When, courtesy of the Weather Channel, I see one forming in the ocean off the coast of Africa, I find myself longing for it to become big and strong--Mother Nature's fist of fury, Gaia's stern rebuke. Considering the havoc mankind has wreaked upon nature with deforesting, stripmining, and the destruction of animal habitat, it only seems fair that nature get some of its own back and teach us that there are forces greater than our own. Sure, a hearty volcano can be enjoyable. Burning rivers of lava: so picturesque. But a volcano is stationary, like Dennis Hastert after a big lunch. It doesn't offer the same dramatic suspense. Hurricanes are in unpredictable flux. They move, change direction, strengthen, weaken, lose an eyewall, repair an eyewall; they seem to have volition and opera-diva personalities.

So there's something disappointing when a hurricane doesn't make landfall, or peters out into a puny Category One.

I guess 100,000+ dead in South Asia must've given Wolcott reason to pop his New Year's champagne early.

well below is a column i wrote in 1997 for the philly inquirer. anyway, this thing has completely overwhelmed my ability to watch the weather for entertainment, and i'm sure that's also true of wolcott. i mean shit, rad, give us a break. now also in 1997 i wrote a paper called "why the world trade center has to explode." and on sep 11 i got a couple of emails sayying: you got what you wanted you sick fuck. but a nasty piece of prose or a humor column does not kill people.

A Storm Named Tiffany
By Crispin Sartwell
     This is going to be sick; brace yourself.
      I root for natural disasters.  In particular, I’m a fan of bad weather.  The worse the better.
     I like nothing more than watching a hurricane track across the Atlantic from Africa until it
demonstrates that Florida is in fact water-soluble.  Most nights, I’m glued to the set enjoying the
mudslides and the floods, the tornadoes and the tsunamis:  the pain, degradation, homelessness,
and death visited upon us by our abusive mother, nature. 
     El Nino is cool.  El Nino is this rocking disaster-making delinquent loitering off the coast and
lobbing terrible icestorms into Canada.  I hope it gets worse, much worse.  I’d like to see our
region scraped so clean by the next noreaster that we are forced to abandon North America and
move en masse to central Asia.
    Before you condemn me as a nasty sociopathic monster who gets his jollies by immersing
himself in the stomach-churning spectacle of other people’s pain, let me, as the politicians say, be
clear: I am a nasty sociopathic monster who gets his jollies by immersing himself in the stomach-
churning spectacle of other people’s pain. 
      And pardon me while I observe that you too are a nasty sociopathic etc.  Or at least, I am not
the only one who is tuned to the Weather Channel watching some engorged, raging river devour
Sacramento or whatever.  Most of us,  in the sweet little secret heart of us, are praying for an
earthquake to destroy Lima, as long as there is good videotape. 
     In fact, other people’s pain is the basic product provided by the entire entertainment industry.
You see?  We go to the movies to see gorgeous models being blown to smithereens or getting
into romantic entanglements that would leave most of us rocking back and forth in a rubber room,
mumbling randomly.  Do you watch “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” “Leeza,” “General
Hospital,” “Homicide,” “ER,” “Tom and Jerry,” the NFL, the news?  Then go ahead and admit
you are a connoisseur of other people’s suffering.  Been to a video arcade lately?   Even music is
about inflicting pain.  How else do you explain the popularity of Pearl Jam or, for that matter,
opera?  Huh?  How?
      But the hip thing about natural disasters is that they cut us puffed up, paltry people down to
size.  Even with our amazing technology, even with our obsessive control over every part of the
environment, even with our climate-controlled vehicles and mega-malls, we can still get our
pathetic little butts smacked by the world.  What I want to see tonight on CNN is, like, the Mall
of America slowly collapsing under the weight of seventy-seven feet of snow that fell in a single
hour, pureeing hapless consumers into a kind of human soup.
     That would show that even while we’re shopping at Bloomies we’re still mammals running
around on the surface of a planet.  Essentially, we’re overgrown, egomaniacal squirrels.  We’re
smarter than squirrels, maybe, but not as much smarter as we think we are.   We are vulnerable to
reality; we exist at the world’s whim; we are not in charge, thank God.  Get used to it.
      So next time you’re watching luxury homes lapse into the Pacific or a storm named Tiffany
beating the fecal matter out of Cape Hatteras, get real and admit that you’re actually rooting for
the weather.  It’s a lesson in humility.  And it’s darn good television.
____________
Crispin Sartwell’s most recent book is Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality.

person of the year

i'm unable to update my website (which should at least be viewable again; it's been down for a couple of days). so i thought i'd just publish this here: my creators column:

 

The Real Person of the Year

By Crispin Sartwell

   Every year, the world awaits the announcement of Time magazine's Person of the Year. Time's 2004 choice was extremely bold: they honored George Bush for paying down the national debt.

   But true connoisseurs of the Person of the Year concept know that the definitive award is made by this column. Every year we measure the zeitgeist with our supersensitive "scientific" instruments and locate the person who crystallizes it most perfectly.

    Overall, there were two great themes of 2004: pure pop pleasure and sheer degraded death. We searched the world over for the people who made those things happen for all of us.

     First, the short list.

     In one of the great achievements of the year, Yasser Arafat lapsed into a coma and died.

    P. Diddy brought out the youth vote in unprecedented numbers, leading to John Kerry's victory in the presidential election.

     Kerry himself would have been a plausible choice. He shone like a moral beacon across this great land. As the most electable Democrat, he substantiated yet again the old adage: Moe was the smartest Stooge.

     Like every other year, 2004 was an extremely good year for white men, led by Dick Cheney and Eminem.

    Shortlisting publishing uberbabe Judith Regan was literally a no-brainer. She brought together the two most important stories of the year: the Scott Peterson trial (Regan signed a book deal with person-of-the-year finalist Amber Frey) and the Bernard Kerik meltdown (trysting with Kerik at his love nest).

    It was the year of the neocon. American idealists such as Richard Perle, William Kristol, Islam Karimov, Augusto Pinochet, and Crown Prince Abdullah spread democracy and good cheer throughout the world.

   Jesus Christ visited a storm of death upon His enemies in Fallujah.

    Before resigning over the oil for food scandal, Kofi Annan spearheaded the heroic multinational effort in Sudan that saved tens of thousands of lives. The next Secretary-General, Bam Margera, can only hope to follow in the footsteps of greatness.

     Vlad Putin had an amazing year. He seized dictatorial power, killed the last few Chechens, and published the bestselling "Cooking With Dioxin" (Regan Books, 2004).

     A strikingly similar set of accomplishments must be attributed to Kobe Bryant.

     In 2004, like Yasser Arafat, government of the people, by the people, and for the people perished from this earth. A few people shed a nostalgic tear.

     No one on earth has ever had more magnets and less armor, more support and less chance of success than our troops.

     Men with erectile dysfunction stayed on the scene like lovin' machines this year, while James Brown underwent prostate surgery.

   In a world gone mad, Sponge Bob Squarepants was the last voice of sanity. 

 

    But no figure combined pure pop pleasure with sheer degraded death like our Person of the Year. She was at once the best and most typical American artist. As Afghans and Iraqis contemplated her greatness, they understood for the first time the true meaning of their liberation. Her ten-gallon leadership style brought the world to heel. Without further ado, I give you the Person of the Year: the great Lindsay Lohan.

dream big

i kinda wish that op-ed columnists were more like rappers. i could devote column after column to snapping on michele malkin's mamma, or matching quotations with george f. will. i could get into a beef with ellen goodman that would spin out of control into exchanges of gunfore between our crews. at heart, i'm a soldier, son.

phil

in my continuing effort to bring the history of philosophy to the masses, though in a completely irresponsible way, i've added the british empiricists to my remarkable philosophy tilt-a-whirl  .

the eternal return

like ken lickiss (deseret news , ut), i've been thinking about rewinding to my teenage years and this time trying to get it right. ok, ok, maybe this 35-year-old was just into dating cheerleaders. but anyway, i could remake my life, expunge all my mistakes. this time i would definitely drop out, thus preventing the misery of an academic career. then i would triple my intake of alcohol and drugs, to hasten my recovery, so that i could relapse while still in my early thirties. then when i got to my late thirties again, i just might return for yet another round of adolescence. it's as american as american pie.

appreciate what you have

check this  from the charleston, wv daily mail. seems pauline lester's home was burgled. the crooks took quite a miscellany of trinkets. a few days later, the stuff showed up on her porch in christmas wrapping. now that is a profound act. pauline lester has been given what she already had, as a gift. she has inventoried what she had, and she has learned to receive it, no doubt with gratitude. indeed, this act transcends all dualisms: of giving and receiving, charity and greed, property and theft, christmas and crime.

suicidal whales

dude. why did these perfectly nice, and mostly healthy, whales all beach themselves simultaneously? (story)
who knows? and yet...i think this is final proof that whales and dolphins are the intellectual and spiritual equals of you and me. really, the only difference between us and the so-called lower animals is that we kill ourselves. these guys might have been part of a suicide cult a la jim jones. or maybe they just collectively started contemplating the abyss that is a world and life without god, without meaning, without truth. either way, it's a remarkably hopeful sign.