Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

 I just checked and the last time I updated this thing was in October 2017. Why was I gone so long? Call me lazy, or a coward, or just not willing to shout outrage into the shitstorm thunderstorm that America under our previous grifter-in-chief had become. A man could go permanently hoarse yelling that much. It was a mental health decision on my part, okay? But now I'm back. Things still suck a lot (<cough>Ted Cruz, Matt Gaetz, Mitch McConnell</cough>) but they don't suck as much as they did last year. Plus I retired from Sisyphean Corp last year after 20 years of whining and having a steady income, and God only knows there's nothing the Internet needs more than another old white guy with too much time on his hands pissing and moaning about what's wrong with the world on his blog. So don't expect much.  I've given up the world of IT and resumed my past life as a painter, which is fun. If you know anything about me In Real Life, you can probably find...

...But then I saw this on my Google+ feed and thought about my old friend, The Whited Sepulchre, who loves weiner dogs. After watching it, I decided the world would be a better place if we all talked less about politics and did this instead. Enjoy...there's time enough for arguing later...

In the wake of the Newtown shootings, people are struggling to come up with ways to prevent future tragedies involving mass murders by gun-toting crazies. Some are calling for renewing the ban on military-type assault weapons and high capacity ammo magazines of the type used to gun down the victims at Sandy Hook elementary school. The previous ban was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994, and expired in 2004. Previous efforts to renew the ban have never gotten out of committee. Others have suggested that instead of banning weapons, a hefty tax be placed on certain types of ammunition. After all, without bullets, a gun is about as useful as a length of pipe in a fight. Back in 1994, Daniel Patrick Moynihan introduced a bill to impose a 10,000% tax on hollow point ammo, saying, " Guns don't kill people, bullets do. " Earlier in the year, Chicago discussed imposing a 5 cent per bullet "violence tax," which ended up going nowhere. Still others hav...

Lately I've heard a number of people (friends, acquaintances and strangers) toss out the line " an armed society is a polite society. " I wonder how many of them are aware this is a quote from the Robert Heinlein novel, Beyond This Horizon , first published as a two-part serial in 1942, and in novel form in 1948. Some context: in the novel, openly carrying weapons and dueling are the social norm; one can wear special clothing to opt out of this practice but to do so is to be relegated to second class status (you chickenshit bastard). Some other things in the novel my gun-toting friends may not be aware of: in it the world has become such an economic utopia that working has become optional, and projects with no possibility of any economic return are favored above all else.  So, in other words: a fantasy. The reality of the situation is that carrying a weapon doesn't make you more polite, it only serves to make other people more polite to you . That's not bei...

The great circus sideshow that is our political process continues to be about the "debt ceiling." It's like the cliff-hanger ending at the end of a mediocre reality show. The self-aggrandizing and self-righteous Tea Party wing of the Republican party is hell-bent on driving the school bus off the cliff to make a point. Stephen Colbert sums it up nicely: Meanwhile, not a peep from much of anyone about such things as the tracking of American citizens via cell phones , warrantless wiretapping , or other Bush era shenanigans now taken over by the present administration ( Wired has more on this ).   I guess the Tea Party is okay with this sort of thing as long as it doesn't raise anyone's taxes. The Romans learned a long time ago the best way to distract the citizenry from the signs of their crumbling republic was with circuses. I'd say that lesson was not lost on our present elected officials.

It's hard to speak in absolute terms about the Libertarians, since they come in so many flavors -- mostly bitter. They all claim to stand for individual liberty (duh), a goal which, like mom, apple pie, and the flag, is hard to argue with. In the past they proudly pointed to their support of social rights -- as manifested by such hot-button issues as abortion rights and gay rights. Lately, as a result of in-breeding with Tea Partiers (why cousins shouldn't marry) they seem to have forgotten about all that. Rand Paul, scion of Ron Paul, and darling of the TeaLibertarians states, " I believe life begins at conception and it is the duty of our government to protect this life ," and came out against same-sex marriage during his 2011 Senate campaign. Hardly the stuff of individual liberty. So, what's left after social rights are gone? Property rights. Yes, the Libertarians are all about property rights. Property rights apparently trump civil rights. Said Paul , "...

In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, an oppressed minority decided they'd taken all the shit they were going to and rose up against their persecutors. The scene of this uprising was the Stonewall Inn, a Mafia-owned bar in Greenwich Village in New York that catered to a primarily gay clientele. The spark that ignited this was a police raid on the Stonewall Inn. The end result was 3 days of sometimes violent demonstrations against police persecution by patrons and neighborhood folk. In the words of one anonymous participant, "Tuesday night was the last night for bullshit... Predominantly, the theme (w)as, 'this shit has got to stop!'" The Stonewall Riots are often identified as the beginning of the gay rights movement in America. PBS recently aired an excellent documentary about this watershed event called Stonewall Uprising which can be viewed online (at the present) on the PBS website. It should not be missed. Watching it places current strug...

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...

Okay, kids, today we are going to discuss the differences between being a shill and being a tool. Wikitionary has a couple of definitions for "shill" : A person paid to endorse a product favorably, while pretending to be impartial. An accomplice at a confidence trick during an auction or gambling game. I was in advertising for years -- I am (sad to say) well acquainted with the art and science of shilling. A classic example: back in the day, my then employer had as a client a very large brewery, which I shall call "A-B." When a proposal to require a 5 cent deposit on non-returnable bottles appeared as a referendum item on the Oregon ballot one election year, A-B took a very dim view, since they were a major producer of non-returnable bottles. Their response? They set up and bankrolled some phony grassroots committee ( "Citizens for Sensible Packaging" or some such bullshit) to oppose the measure. This is now referred to as "astro-turfing. A-...

Much has been said by some of my Libertarian friends about Al Gore's career as a shill for the global-warming crowd after losing the 2000 election to George W Bush. Let's take a look at what Bob Barr, our latest losing Libertarian candidate for president, is doing now. CNN has a story today about former Haitian dictator "Baby Doc" Duvalier, who wants to use $5.7 million in frozen Swiss bank accounts belonging to a "family foundation" to help rebuild Haiti. Baby Doc, in case your Haitian history is a little rusty, inherited the position of President from his late father, "Papa Doc," in 1971 and held it for 15 years until his countrymen threw him out. While marginally better than Papa Doc, Baby Doc lived like a playboy, looted the struggling nation's treasury, and allowed his father's cronies to continue to run the country. Under his rule thousands of Haitians were killed or tortured. Now representing the Former President of Haiti is For...

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...

Youngest son reports that the security check at Dulles was no big deal, contrary to the breathless predictions only a couple of days ago. No protesters, no long lines, no junk. He said he wasn't even scanned. Yet another blown-out-of-proportion story; a product of our 24/7 news cycle and a cynical few on both sides who want to game for their own purposes. Glenn Greenwald, while guilty of ramping up the amps in his Salon article, Government yells "Terrorism" to justify TSA procedures , has some pointed observations to make that pretty much leaves all the actors in this latest bit of Security Theater with eggs on their faces. First the Transportation Safety Administration: This is the all-justifying, cure-all solution for every problem: government officials run to the nearest media outlet they can find and anonymously scream "TERRORISM."  No evidence is needed; the anonymity precludes all accountability; fear levels are quickly ratcheted up; and everythi...

On the eve of the 2010 elections, I find myself puzzled by the choices of some of my Libertarian friends. They are lining up in droves behind Tea Party candidates: a mixed bag of wannabees characterized by angry anti-Washington rhetoric, mostly around the government spending and taxes (TEA = Taxed Enough Already). I'll ignore for now the obvious question of where these hot-heads were during the Bush years. The Libertarians have always prided themselves on being fiscal conservatives and social progressives. Indeed, the banner from the Libertarian Party website says "Minimum Government, Maximum Freedom." Hey, sounds good to me. Their 2010 platform preamble goes on to say: We believe that respect for individual rights is the essential precondition for a free and prosperous world, that force and fraud must be banished from human relationships, and that only through freedom can peace and prosperity be realized. Consequently, we defend each person's right to...

Here's a philosophical question for you with real world implications. Given a choice between ONLY one of the following two options, which would you choose? Governed by criminals Governed by lunatics  Speaking for myself, I'd choose the criminal element: they are at least predictable and on many occasions, their ruthless self-interest will align with mine. If, on the other hand, you'd prefer to be governed by lunatics...well, you had your chance this weekend to show your support for the local members of the Flat Earth Society .  The choice is yours. PS - Had enough of these whack jobs?  There's hope for reasonable people again courtesy of the most trusted newscaster on television .

Tom Tomorrow (real name: Dan Perkins ), is the creator of the comic This Modern World . Read his recent strip, " What could possibly go wrong? " to understand why we now have millions of gallons of crude oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. And bitch-slap some sense into the next person who acts like this is no big deal.

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. 

The latest CBS/New York Times poll reveals this shocking information:  people who identify themselves as members of the Tea Party movement are, for the most part, angry old white people who watch Fox News. In other news, scientists expect the sun to rise in the east tomorrow. Here's a snapshot of your basic Tea Party sympathizer/supporter: 75% are over 45 years old 95% identify themselves as Republicans  or "Independents" (ha!) 73% say they are conservatives 89% are white 63% say they get most of their political and current events news from the Fox News Channel More interesting takes on reality from the Tea Party: 92% think the country is on the wrong track 59% think President Obama was born in another country (30%) or say they don't know (29%) 52% say too much is made of the problems facing black people 25% think the Obama administration favors blacks over whites When pressed for why they objected to Obama, 19% said "they just didn't like ...

" The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. " -- H. L. Mencken , American journalist, essayist and social critic. Consider that next time you find yourself watching anything on the Fox Network.

Former Arkansas Governor/Baptist Preacher Mike Huckabee has the "aw shucks" act down pat. He can spew the most incredibly offensive drivel imaginable and still sound like a reasonable, well-intention person. I bet if he'd been in Salem, Massachusetts he'd have convinced those poor women they deserved to be burned as witches. Brother Huckabee recently compared efforts to legalize same-sex marriage to legalizing incest, polygamy and drug use. He's quoted in The Perspective ( student publication of The College of New Jersey ), as saying, "You don't go ahead and accommodate every behavioral pattern that is against the ideal...That would be like saying, well, there are a lot of people who like to use drugs, so let's go ahead and accommodate those who want to use drugs. There are some people who believe in incest, so we should accommodate them. There are people who believe in polygamy, so we should accommodate them." Afterwards, Huckabee took...

Wisconsin Republican District Attorney Scott Southworth sent a letter to 5 school districts opining that teaching children younger than 16 about contraceptives could be construed as contributing to the delinquency of minors ( PDF of his letter -- warning: big file ).  Rep. Kelda Helen Roys, author of the bill authorizing the sex-ed classes, said, "I think this is about trying to intimidate school administrators and teachers into staying silent." Interestingly enought, Southworth, a member of the Wisconsin National Guard who served in Iraq, s ued the University of Wisconsin, Madison back in his student days, saying he shouldn't be forced to pay student services fees ("segregated fees") because a percentage of them might end up supporting campus organizations with whom they disagreed ideologically or politically. The US Supreme Court said, sorry, it doesn't work like that. Refreshing to know that my home state of Texas has no monopoly on bone-head R...