Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

I'm normally not one to make snap judgments, but I have found that if you use the following phrases in your conversation or in your online opining, it's a sure bet you are an asshole . These should  be so self-evident they need no further discussion but since some disputatious dick-weed is probably composing a response already... Brietbart ( as a source ) - if you have reposted even once, just go fuck yourself. Fake News - the favored insult of a certain serial liar, serial sexual predator, serial bankrupt artist, when hearing something about himself that displeases him. Fox News ( as a source ) - see remarks under Brietbart Gay Agenda - code for "please go back into the closet where you belong, sodomite." MAGA / Make America Great Again - code for "make America white again." Don't even try to deny it, cracker. MSM / Mainstream Media - translated: a bunch of socialist, America-hating, eastern elitists. Second amendment rights - used by ...

I just looked and it's been almost a year since I've posted anything to this blog. I can't remember when I last posted as Dr Ralph on Facebook (and in my other guise I mostly share pictures of recent paintings from Instagram). Twitter? Bah. Most social media has become anti-social and I'm sick of it. Even for stuff that normally I would have some natural affinity for. It's tiresome and I'm tired. I no longer feel up to joining the army of angry voices out there, even though I find myself alternately pissed off and horrified. My most optimistic opinion about current events is that we, as Americans, have been stricken with a bout of temporary insanity, although truth be told, I don't think that insanity is ours alone. I don't think trying to shout louder than the folks I disagree with is going to make the situation any better. So I've decided to shut the fuck up. Mostly, anyway. I've got several friends and more than a few relatives t...

In a delicious bit of irony (at least from where I sit) the Internet is teaching Ron Paul a thing or two about free enterprise in the Net Economy. It seems a collection of his fans registered the domain "RonPaul.com" a while back and have amassed quite a mailing list through it:  170,000+  email addresses. Ron Paul now wants to buy it, but considers their asking price much too high. They generously offered him "RonPaul.org" for free, but he wants the .com version. Such is the nature of supply and demand, Dr. Paul. Refusing the free offer of RonPaul.org, and unwilling to pony up the $250,000 the current holders are asking for RonPaul.com, the libertarian icon is filing his case with the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization, demanding the current holders turn over *both* domains to him. This is, of course, the very same U.N. he was referring to in 1998, when he said: The choice is very clear: we either follow the Constitution or submi...

Now that the initial wave of shock and horror over the shootings at Sandy Hook has worn off, the national debate has again started about gun control, and to a less degree, mental health issues. Discussions about both are long overdue. After every recent shooting, the first reaction of the gun-lovers is...to buy more guns, because they fear "the government" is going to make it impossible to get guns. Am I the only one who sees this as closely related to the behavior pattern of people who are hoarders ? I'm tired of hearing some say that this happened because of some amorphous  "Evil" in the world that humankind is powerless to overcome. If there's Evil afoot, it's what Hannah Arendt, writing about the Nazis, call the banality of evil :  "normalizing the unthinkable." Such as accepting the idea that the man or woman on the street needs to own military-style semi-automatic assault weapons with huge magazines of ammo. There have been quite ...

Tired of hearing relatives and old high school acquaintances that tracked you down now bitching, pissing and moaning on Facebook about the outcome this week's election? Things like " We're doomed," and " R.I.P. America, you just died," and " Another 4 years of O and the 1st Hoe with her big Ass." I don't know about you, but I'm freaking sick of it. However good Unfriending your cousin's father-in-law in a fit of righteous indignation may feel right now, it could make for awkward conversation at the next family reunion after memories of the election fade away. Take heart - there's another way to keep from having to listen to Uncle Fred's FoxNews-fueled rants on Facebook.  Just Unsubscribe. The advantage of Unsubscribing vs. Unfriending is that he'll never know you've chosen to silence him. He'll still see your posts and be able to comment, but you'll never see another of his postings about Obama's Ke...

What to do about Ron Paul? Sometimes he makes absolute sense, other times it's like listening to your crazy uncle rant - you know, the one who goes off after a few drinks at Thanksgiving about how the Holocaust never really happened.  With Hurricane Irene heading up the Eastern Seaboard, he chose to spout off about how FEMA was just a drain on the economy and not necessary. "We should be like 1900," he said, referring to the great Galveston hurricane of that year. For those of you unfamiliar with the 1900 Galveston hurricane , here's a little context which Dr. Paul conveniently failed to supply us with. The storm, estimated to be a Category 4 hurricane, hit Galveston on September 8, 1900, with a resulting loss of life estimated at between 8,000 and 12,000. Over 3,600 homes were destroyed. Survivors lived in tents and shelters constructed from debris, and were without water service for 4 days. The suggestion here is: why get the government involved? Let th...

Well, tomorrow is my sister's birthday. It's also supposed to be the end of the world. That being the case, I've decided to put off doing my timesheets until Monday. Just in case. To be a bit more specific, tomorrow is Judgement Day (according to those in the know), a.k.a, the Rapture, when around 3 million of the Elect will be taken up to heaven, leaving the rest of us behind...just like in those "Left Behind" novels. It's always struck me as a bit presumptuous to assume one is part of the Elect. I'm actually sort of looking forward to seeing someone with one of those " In Case of the Rapture, This Car Will Be Unmanned ," bumper stickers driving around on the day after, so I can say, "Hey, asshole, what happened? Soul Train pull out of the station without you?" Now, I'll be the first to admit I won't be on that first flight out. No doubt I'll be undergoing some torment of the damned, but at least I'll be rid of ...

Glenn Beck is now officially too crazy for Fox News. Who'd a thunk it? While the Washington Post trumpeted  in its  Entertainment section  the split between Beck and Fox would "dissolve a 27-month marriage beset by outside pressures and internal tensions,"  the Fox News website  tactfully noted in the  Business News , "the show has been losing viewers recently." Who says advertiser boycotts don't work? Well, this is old news. What I'm wondering is what the Mad Prophet will do next? Radio is an obvious answer, but without Beck's visuals (chalkboard, tears, pacing the set), that's bound to get boring before long. Americans may have have a love affair with freak shows but they like to see the object of their affection in living color. My prediction is this will play out as it does with other celebrity freak shows: escalating crazy (until the public gets bored with that), followed by a reboot of the story arc in the form of some so...

This just in from several sources: Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor, failed vice-presidential candidate, political pundit and reality television star, is attempting to trademark herself . No, I am not kidding you. Reuters helpfully points out , "Legal experts said it is relatively unusual for politicians to formally trademark their names because they are generally not associated with commercially valuable products or services." That has to be the money quote for the day. Mainstream Republicans everywhere are probably heaving sighs of relief everywhere since this can be taken as a sign that Sarah Palin the former governor of Alaska has privately concluded she doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of being the 2012 GOP presidential candidate, much less a shot at actually getting elected. Henceforth all speaking, campaigning, prophesying and general self-promotion should now be considered commercial activity, not political. While it's doubtful that S...

Full disclosure: I've had a Yahoo! account for well over 10 years. Yahoo got its start as "David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" only to be later renamed as Yahoo! by its creators, Jerry Yang and David Filo , a couple of Stanford grad students.  While  "Yahoo" was backronymed to stand for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," Yang and Filo admitted they were drawn to the earlier meaning of the word, coined by Jonathan Swift . In his satiric novel Gulliver's Travels , Swift describes a race called " Yahoos " as savage and filthy, obsessed with "pretty stones." The term has come to mean a crude, thuggish uncultured yokel. Want an example?  You need look no further than any random sampling of reader comments from pretty much any news story posted on the Yahoo portal, especially something like this weekend's shooting of a Member of Congress. The level of discourse to be found makes schoolyard brawl...

Dear God, Don't let stupid people piss me off. Rinse and repeat.

News flash: the sun rose in the east.  And in other headlines, a  survey by the University of Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race & Sexuality finds that Tea Partiers are "racially resentful." Is this a fancy way of saying black people piss them off? Which is another way of saying they are racists? Hmm...I wonder. Tie this with the recent poll which found this same group of grumpy white people thought "the Obama administration favors blacks over whites."  Newsweek has more information , if you are finding this hard to believe. Just to show they don't play favorites, the TP'ers also disliked Latinos. 

I've grown weary of posting and arguing various political screeds here, as well as engaging in debate with friends and acquaintances. Across the political spectrum, the current level of rhetoric has entered a particularly shrill and nasty phase. Consider the recent health care discussions. I don't think any of this ranting solves problems.  However we've gone through other periods of bad civic manners, so I have no doubt this one will pass as well. No side is immune from this nastiness and unfortunately it's easy to get sucked into this bullshit. When I do, I find myself quickly turning into a nasty, mean-spirited person I don't much like. So at least for the time being, I've decided I'm going to resist the urge to butt heads. I'd rather find points of agreement than disagreement. Just to get it out of my system once and for all, here are my thoughts on various hot button topics of the day. While I think I'm right, I'm not going to insist ...

A short history lesson, courtesy of Wikipedia. The Freikorps were nationalistic organizations primarily composed of disaffected, disenchanted and angry German combat veterans who believed that their government had betrayed Germany and sold them out... The Freikorps were in opposition to the new Weimar Republic. The SA [Stormtroopers/Brownshirts] evolved out of the remnants of the Freikorps movement. During the 1920s and 1930s, the SA functioned as a private militia that Hitler used to intimidate rivals and disrupt the meetings of competing political parties. Sound familiar?

Much has been made in wingnut circles about the supposed "beating" of Kenneth Gladney at a St. Louis town hall meeting. Mobs of union thugs beat him! He was hospitalized! Yeah, right. MediaMatters has a clip of the incident as well as a pretty damning analysis which puts the lie to the hordes of rightwing media and blogosphere all foaming at the mouth. To quote from MediaMatters : Go watch the YouTube video. (Or, the "shocking video," as Power Line hypes it.) The first thing you notice when the camera starts rolling is a union member already sprawled out on the ground with somebody standing over him. No explanation of how he got there (pushed, shoved, punched?) and Ham couldn't care less. Then yes, Gladney is pulled to the ground by somebody wearing a union shirt. (At the :06 mark.) But instead of Gladney being beaten and punched, as his attorney describes, and instead of union "thugs" standing over him and threatening him, Gladney bounce...

Republican pinup Sarah Palin has decided to hang it up and has announced she'll be resigning as Alaska governor. Time will tell what fueled this latest bit of Wasilla wackiness. Given her competitive nature, perhaps she felt overshadowed by fellow Republican governor Mark Sanford's hi-jinks. "We've seen a lot of nutty behavior from governors and Republican leaders in the last three months, but this one is at the top of that," said John Weaver, friend and confidant of John McCain. Even now McCain must be kicking himself again for choosing her as running mate in 2008. Given the suddeness of her decision and the fact she's leaving without serving even a full term, inquiring minds will be wondering if she's trying to outrun some soon-to-be breaking scandal. God willing, this will be the last time I write about this woman. But I doubt it.

In the wake of the assassination of Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, Fox News mouthpiece Bill O'Reilly demonstrates he is utterly without shame. There must surely be no evil so great as the commoditization of hate for profit. Time magazine has an article about extremism and the anti-abortion movement.

All across America, spontaneous grassroot " Tea Parties " are springing up, protesting government spending! Woo hoo! Fox News has been flogging these for weeks now. How spontaneous is that? As for "grassroots," they have been largely organized and promoted by several big conservative think tanks/lobbying organizations: well-staffed and well-financed. Think Progress reports how these shadowy presences have been coordinating groups, producing "how-to" guides, writing press releases and registering internet domains. One of these is Freedom Works , a Washington-based "think tank," founded by Texas Republican Dick Armey, that's had a history of astroturfing . Aiding and abetting is Americans for Prosperity , a section 501(c)(4) organization funded largely by wealthy foundations affiliated with conservative and oil/gas interests (remember when gas hit $4 a gallon?). The Oligarchs may have lost power in the last election but they aren't givin...

This just in... Blackwater , America's favorite secretive private "security" (read: paramilitary) corporation has decided to change its name. Henceforth the company name is " Xe ." Officials helpfully point out this is pronounced "zee." Which is interesting since Erik Prince's little business venture already developed quite a name for itself as the Bush administration's mercenary army in Iraq. Not a particularly good name -- they've been accused of atrocities, killing innocent civilians , weapons smuggling, intimidation of US politicians , all on our nickel, and that's just for starters. The Iraq government no longer allows them in the country. Like other creatures that live on death and decay, Blackwater doesn't especially like the harsh light of publicity. So what do they do to restore their good name? They change their name. The cynic in me says this practically unpronounceable name is designed to keep the average person from t...

Just when I thought it was safe to start talking about computers, my cat and other harmless trivial things, I hear about stuff like this: All I can say is, Oh my f**king God! From Governor Sarah's Frequently Asked Questions: Gov. Sarah Palin believes all Americans must work together for the future, regardless of their party affiliation. Gov. Palin is the honorary chair of SarahPac, and its supporters are Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and those unaffiliated with any political party. Want to see her supporters?