Mohammed Jihad

I hate to even admit this, but i went ahead and deleted a comical Mohammed picture from my art website that i posted way back in 2010.  It was just a copy of Mohammad as he appeared in the Super Best Friends episode of South Park?

I did this because several Muslim kids were harassing me about it, and raving that such insults to the prophet must not be allowed. I asked them all the usual questions -- why do you think your religious beliefs should take precedence over the freedom of speech of others? How would you feel if a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu tried to force you to abide by their beliefs?

All i got back were a bunch of programmed assertions that such questions are meaningless because Islam is TRUE and everything else is not. Christians shouldn't force others into Christianity because it's wrong, but Muslims should because it's right. End of story! This is of course ridiculous, and reminds me of everything wrong with the world.

Now, don't get me wrong. I have no respect for these people. Like every other religious fundamentalist, they need to chill out and realize that their little inherited belief system is a paper construction, an abstract collection of myth and legend, one of thousands of such belief systems on the planet....

....but i deleted the pic because i can't accept the SLIGHTEST possibility that my account might get deleted by an overzealous moderator. Unlikely, but possible. It's taken me ten years to build my audience there, and i won't put all this on the line for one snarky pic that was just an homage to someone else's work anyway. That fear kept wiggling like a worm in the back of my brain and was keeping me from concentrating.

It's this fear that keeps me from using much saltier language right now in describing these people.

I'm a sell-out. I'm overcautious. But it's for the best.

Now, let me pivot around 180 degrees and yell at the people that i was originally going to yell at -- those American conservatives who might read what i just wrote and say "See! Muslims are bad! We should tell them that if any more terrorism ever happens, we'll nuke Mecca and be done with it!"

You people are idiots. Evil idiots. Over and over again, they assert that the current violence in the Middle East is all because "they perceive us as weak" and are "emboldened by appeasement." That we should strike back brutally and indiscriminately because "that's what they respect in that part of the world."

Bullshit.

It never ends, does it? Both radical Muslims and American Teabaggers think that if they just apply enough force, all opposition to their wonderful truth will wither and vanish. People have tried this forever and it never works.

"Let's arrest everyone who smokes weed. Then, no one will smoke it."

"Let's make homosexuality a crime. If gay people think that they might be killed in a bar because they're gay, they'll stop being gay."

"Hey, if we just beat and arrest these civil rights protesters, black people will learn who's in charge here and give up."

"Hey, if we just kill and rape enough Viet Cong and burn down enough of their villages, we'll win this war."

"Hey, you want to get rid of these uppity Christians who don't respect the Emperor? Just drag that Christ guy out of his house and crucify his ass in front of everyone. Stab him in the side with a spear and let him bleed out slowly. That will solve all our problems."

It always works, right?

Both sides are vile. Nobody ever learns. If you have a functioning brain, it's like being an adult in a room of squalling and bickering children.

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Prometheus?

Prometheus.  It's old news now.  Just another movie that i missed when it was in theaters, and i felt bad because i was no doubt missing an irreplaceable theatrical experience...

...i don't feel so bad anymore.

This movie is kind of dumb.  I mean, the visuals are great and all, and it's a good ride to see it once, but it's one of those films that i don't see myself ever watching again.  I feel like they could have done more than the same old "scientific team assembles and then explores an environment, and discovers nothing but hostile monstrosities."  We've seen it a million times.  The characters expect that they might find a shining world of benevolent alien creators but are shocked to find monsters, but the audience already pretty much knew that was going to happen.  No real surprises.

All the characters are dumb and make no sense.  

Old Man Weyland funds a trillion-dollar mission on some longshot quest to find an alien creator in the hope that they'll nicely save him from death?  Ridiculous.  It would make more sense to stay home, go into cryosleep, and wait for your team of scientists to develop a way to transplant your brain into a robot body.  That can't be that hard to do in 2094.  And once he arrived, he should have seen that there was no thriving society of aliens that might possibly help him, just a single straggler in a desperate situation himself.  And yet he marched right in.  There's no way anyone is this stupid!  It's like finding a lone bloody starving savage on a desert island and saying "hey, maybe he can perform open-heart surgery on me!  He's a human, right?  Humans can perform heart surgery, this guy can probably help me."  And then the savage stabs you with a sharp goat bone and you're like, hey, that's mean, now i'm gonna die probably.

And that old man makeup was awful.

Shaw, after seeing everyone else die, and resigned to the unfathomable horror of slowly dying alone on a hostile planet, is offered a reasonable chance to return home, which any person would take.... and instead, she vows to venture off on some impossible quest with a severed android head -- an android who has proved that he is capable of despicable actions and cannot be trusted?  Oh.  Sure.  She could return to earth with the knowledge of the alien's homeworld, and urge humanity to send out a proper ambassadorial mission to the aliens... but no, she and the David head can do it all by themselves.  Hey, bring on the sequel.  Shaw and David go in search of a clearly hostile alien race to ask them why they're such meanies.

The hoodie scientist, who is shown to be logical and skeptical in his one line of character development, is immediately entranced by an alien snake?  Ooooh!  Alien snake, so beautiful, i want to pet it.  I'm sure it's not venomous or dangerous like our earth snakes, no, it's probably a friendly snake that will do good things to me. 

What the fuck.  

This movie.  Looks great, kinda dumb.

( At least Charlize Theron is hot and and Noomi Rapace is cute.  Especially in her medical bandage underwear.  Leeloo Dallas multi-pass!)


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Youth is Wasted on the Young

This morning, i was going about my usual routine, which involves putting in my contact lenses and immediately taking my dogs outside for a walk. Although i had only been awake for fewer than five minutes, my mind was already slowly grinding into reluctant action, cataloging the numerous small tasks and mundane responsibilities that i would have to handle during the day. Oil change, mail some bills, be at work by 11:50... but then, i was startled by some sudden movement, a flurry of giddy activity. My neighbor's two small daughters were playing outside my door. They were both clad in homemade masks and capes made from gaudy cloth, and were gleefully zooming about, arms outstretched, transformed in their minds into superheroes of some variety, laughing and totally lost in their innocent play. The older one, who is perhaps nine, stopped a bit short when she saw me, and grinned a self-aware grin, suddenly aware of reality intruding on her fantasy. In just a few short years, she will be too old for such sport. The younger one, about five, continued her delirious swooping, totally oblivious to my adult presence...

...and then, i realized that my own childhood was gone forever, and that i could scarcely remember being so incredibly young. And you know, thank god for that. I mean, those kids just looked so fucking stupid, like a couple of retards or something. All small and weak and dumb, and they probably don't have any money, either.
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Trayvon Martin

Have you been paying attention to this Trayvon Martin business?

Look, there's nothing wrong at all with wanting to get to the bottom of the story. This is a complex situation, and it's hard to discern the real truth because only two people know what really happened and one of them is dead. It's entirely possible that George Zimmerman acted foolishly, pursued this kid, and was almost entirely responsible for the tragedy. But it's also possible that Trayvon himself became the aggressor at some point. Did Zimmerman attack or threaten Martin? Was he attacked from behind? Both obviously felt threatened, so why does this ridiculous stand-your-ground law seem to reward the person with the itchier trigger finger? What really happened? It's perfectly okay to reject the simplistic "he killed a black kid because he was a vile gun-toting racist" narrative that many are trying to push. The truth is never that simple.

But... if you heard the bare basics of the Trayvon Martin shooting -- the news that broke almost a month ago -- and you said "whoa, buddy, i don't need to hear any more. I made up my mind. This kid was obviously up to no good and deserved to die. The shooter said as much and what possible motive could he have to lie? Heck, he deserves a freakin' medal for what he did. Case closed, end of story."

Congratulations, you're racist scum.

And what's with this presupposition that racism cannot be a factor in any way because George Zimmerman is Hispanic? I've actually heard a right-wing talker state plainly "racism cannot be a factor, because George Zimmerman is not white, he's Hispanic." What, are people of Hispanic descent so inherently noble that they are incapable of it? Oh, wait, i get it. He's Hispanic, and that's the same thing as being black to you. There are whites and then there are the mud races. Whoever heard of one mud racer discriminatin' against another? Yeah, gotcha.

These people think it's a "media conspiracy" that the photos of Trayvon Martin that were shown on TV were the ones provided by his family, pictures of the kid smiling and looking clean-cut... instead of, say, his grainy MySpace photos of him posing like a gangsta and showing off his tattoos... it's a conspiracy! They're trying to gin up sympathy for this predator! They're unwilling to show the "real" Trayvon Martin!

But does anyone make this case when some redneck kid dies? If a white kid in Arkansas is tragically killed, are you allowed to use his nice school photo? Or are you obligated to dig up that picture of him muddin' on an ATV and holding a deer rifle, his mouth caught in mid-holler, shirtless and holding a beer in one hand and flipping the bird with the other? If you use any photo except that one, are you conspiring to protect Whitey?

Remember when this used to happen to white kids who were dressed like hippies or metal fans? The West Memphis Three? Yeah, officer, we're not really sure what happened but that guy there has long hair and a Metallica t-shirt, so he probably done it. Most white people now realize what's wrong with that mindset. But when it comes to black kids who wear clothes that they see in rap videos, that's different. It's different because those white kids are just going through a rebellious phase; those black kids are making a lifetime choice to be a criminal who hates society and will murder us all the first chance he gets.

Sigh.

I'm exhausted. This country vexes me.

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The Three Stooges

Like everyone else, i've seen and thoroughly enjoyed the new Hollywood remake of The Three Stooges. It's a well-crafted film that pays just homage to the legendary performers of yesteryear while updating the mythos for today's generation of emerging Stoogaholics. This gives me ample opportunity to ramble on with others at length, for while most people enjoy the antics of the Stooges, i am, for lack of a better term, a dedicated Stoogologist. You've seen the incredible array of Stooge paraphanalia in my house, so you know that i speak the truth when i claim that only a handful of persons in the world -- two or three, at most -- might know more about the Stooges' oeuvre than myself. And even that i would dispute. Would you like to know Larry's blood type or the zip codes of their respective places of birth? I have that information. Oh, i'm moving into the realm beyond the interest of the layman -- forgive me. Well, how about this interesting wrinkle of Stooge lore -- did you know that nearly every Stooges short that you see played on television these days is one of their early works? The latter ones are hardly ever shown. Here's why...

...in the early forties, Jerome "Curly" Horowitz began to suffere severe hypertension as well as ailments related to his heavy drinking, which were exacerbated by the stress of the strenuous shooting schedule imposed upon the troupe. Curly lost weight, developed severe jaundice, and was too exhausted to remember his lines or engage in his trademark physical shenanigans. The resulting material is therefore decidedly subpar and, to be perfectly honest, very depressing to view. An infamous shot in "Hootenanny Hijinks" in which a gaunt and delirious Curly suffers a grand mal seizure and looses control of his bowels was mistakenly left in the initial cut before it was noticed and later removed. (Although it has since been restored in the new Criterion DVD versions.) The next year, Curly suffered a catastrophic stroke that ended his career and led to his untimely death from massive cerebral hemorrhages. Curly's eldest brother, Moses "Moe" Horowitz blamed the head of the studio, Harry Cohn, and assaulted him by throwing hot roofing tar in his face. Fortunately, Moe was sufficiently wealthy and well-connected to avoid arrest from the incident. Curly was replaced by brother Shemp Howard and the Stooges continued on for many years.

As for Cohn, the boiling tar fused with his flesh and went so far as to alter his DNA, and in the next five years he gradually mutated into a tar-skinned abomination, a barely-human monstrosity that was unable to survive without constant medical care. He became reclusive and rarely left his Palo Alto ranch except to occasionally act -- often without the aid of makeup -- in science fiction films. He's best remembered as playing the recurring role of "the Toxic Terror" on the old 1960's-era Adam West Batman serial. Of course, the show wasn't called Batman back then; it was first aired under the title Captain Coward and the Amazing Danger Squad. It began life as a documentary but was heavily edited because it contained a good deal of proprietary military information that later became classified. Once in syndication, all dialogue was redubbed, the signature sound cards (Blang! Wazoom!, etc) were added, bat ears were digitally grafted to Captain Coward's hood, and all the overt homosexual references were removed, much to the dismay of Burt Ward.

As for the remaining Stooges, they ultimately died within mere weeks of one another, and were interred with great honor in their native land of Czechoslovakia. There the Stooge Mausoleum stands today, where its beneficent presence is said to cure various ailments and offer spiritual succor the the afflicted.



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Why I Stand Proudly With Barack Hussein Obama

I suppose i should have written this a month ago, if i wanted to sway anyone's mind about this election. But better late than never, i suppose.

Let's cut through the clutter and the crap. Let's not start hurling accusations about Ted Kennedy killing a drunk girl, or Anthony Weiner taking a photo of his crotch, or any of this other silliness. Let's get down to the real talk. Let me lay out why i voted for Barack Obama, why i'm proud of it, and why i think you should vote for him as well.

And let's just focus on the last four years, the essential state of things.

As everyone knows, by the end of 2008, the American economy was in freefall after a decade of conservative economic policies. Tax cuts for the wealthy and two frivolous wars exploded the debt, American jobs were vanishing overseas, and a deregulated Wall Street -- no longer hindered by the rules that once prevented commercial banks from engaging in the same speculative behavior as investment banks -- bet the farm on junk securities and leveraged their money into a house of cards that collapsed, obliterating trillions in wealth overnight.

Things were very bad.

Almost any Democrat could have won the 2008 election in such circumstances. But we didn't have just any Democrat, we had Barack Obama, who seemed new and different because he was young and black and hip and cool in a way that most politicians aren't. He won in a landslide, and vowed to work with Republicans on getting the country back on it's feet...

...but it takes two to tango, as they say. We now know, for a fact, that the core of the Republican party -- Boehner, McConnell, Cantor, and Ryan -- called a meeting to formalize their strategy in the coming years. And that strategy was to ruin Obama by any means necessary. To vote against him, even if he were proposing things that they agree with. Stall, delay, and filibuster legislation. When your side is losing a fight, after all, you can't just build yourself back up -- you have to tear the other guy down.

Obama did try to compromise. The necessary stimulus package included huge tax cuts, favored by Republicans. Republicans like Paul Ryan received hefty chunks of money to help their districts that they would disavow later. Obama's healthcare reform plan was not the progressive Clinton plan of the early '90s, but rather a market-based approach that was modeled after Mitt Romney's Massachusetts model...

...Obama extended his hand, and the Republicans spit in his palm. They placed party warfare above the interests of the American People in nearly every case.

The conservative media began a smear campaign unlike any other, on several fronts of society. The Wall Street bankers, who largely went scot-free for their misbehavior, were aghast that they should suffer even token measures to keep their venality in check. Their support for a generic Republican candidate to replace Obama was a foregone conclusion...

...but on the ground, things got dirty. Before Obama, one might have assumed that the election of a black president would result in his enemies' holding their tongues and pulling their punches as not to appear like racist creeps -- instead, the opposite happened, and Obama was subjected to a campaign of racist bullshit unlike anything i've ever seen. Every conservative voice whispered -- he's really a Muslim. He wasn't born here. He doesn't like America and wants it to fail. He's an anticolonialist. He's a socialist dictator. He wants to take money from hardworking white suburbanites and give it to lazy inner-city blacks and mexicans. He's not a Christian. He's a Black Panther. He apologizes for America. He's not one of us!

Remember the birth certificate sideshow?

Do you think that a single one of those howling loons would have cared if there was some suspicion that Sarah Palin wasn't born in Idaho, but across the Canadian border while her parents were on a hunting trip?

'Course not.

And as a result, we ended up with the Teabaggers, the single most wrongheaded political movement in modern American history. These people -- who didn't bat an eye when Republican presidents and Congresses drove up trillion-dollar deficits, and cheered when Dick Cheney said "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter" -- suddenly decided that the looming national debt was the single most important issue facing the country...

...which of course, was just a cover for their emotional rage. Willing tools of their media masters, all their hatred and racism could be channeled through this issue in a desperate attempt at political legitimacy. The truth that our massive debt was almost entirely caused by slashing taxes and needless wars was unacceptable to them, so they created an alternative universe in which Obama was giving away trillions of dollars in "free shit" to undeserving "looters and moochers" as part of some "socialist plan" to "create a nirvana on earth." You only need to read their sneering rants in which they express outrage that Michelle Obama eats the same food as other First Ladies (as opposed to what, crackers and Spam?) to see their motivations.

Their masters know the truth, but the grunts and foot soldiers swallowed those lies whole. White suburban Americans don't want to look at the last thirty years and realize that everyone is to blame. They don't want to realize that Saint Ronald Reagan and subsequent Republicans started the nation down the path of ruin. They were told that they could enjoy lower taxes during their working years, and then reap the benefits of Medicare and Social Security during their retirements...

...no, that would require intelligence and honesty. It's much more appealing to them to believe that some invading socialist Democrat Secret Muslim caused all of it four years ago.

Even worse, legions of young people who were of a libertarian bent bought into the lie. They had probably never paid much attention to politics before, and the problems of the last three decades could all be wrapped up and placed on Barack Obama's doorstep. Jobs are hard to find? Why blame decades of offshoring and wage stagnation and corporate malfeasance, combined with new technological realities and the rise of India and China? Why take that responsibility when an old white guy is pointing a finger at Obama and saying "he did it!"

It's been horrific to watch.

Curiously, the same libertarians who insist over and over again that politics is entirely corrupt and that ALL politicians are liars and scoundrels -- don't think that the Republican Party is capable of orchestrating this kind of smear movement. They're just all acting in good faith, right?

Meanwhile, Obama soldiered on and did what he could. He passed healthcare reform. He brought the war in Iraq to a sensible close. He's wisely avoided ground wars with Iran and Libya. And as a bonus, he killed Osama Bin Laden -- something that George Bush was never able to do, something that both Mitt Romney and John McCain said they would NOT do because it might be too risky. The fact that conservatives could not even acknowledge this single achievement is proof of their blindness and reality evasion. Give Obama credit for a gutsy move? Why do that when you can just construct another false narrative where Obama supposedly hid in a corner crying and protesting while someone else gave the order to pull the trigger?

Has Obama been a perfect president?

Of course not. He's done things i don't agree with, and hasn't done things i think he ought to have done. Most of my criticisms are of the latter sort -- there have been too many times when i think the President should have raised holy hell against Republican obstructionism rather than compromising.

He's still trying to reach across the aisle, no matter how many times he gets spit upon.

Anyway, that brings us to this election. The fact that it's even close is shocking to me. You don't need me to tell you why Mitt Romney is a hypocritical, deceptive fraud when Matt Taibbi can do it so much better...

...nah, this is about Obama. See, the conservatives have this goofy belief that everyone is let down by Obama. That everyone voted for him last time did so just to prove they weren't racist. That everyone voting for him this time is doing so because they're either an illegal immigrant or some lazy moocher who wants more welfare.

Screw that!

I'm a hardworking American who left home at age 17 with a bicycle and $500 in my pocket from a Fountainhead essay contest. And i proudly voted for Obama a second time.

If Mitt Romney wins, it won't be the end of America -- that's the type of drooling hyperbole that Teabaggers indulge in -- but i do think he would be a rotten president. And the Republican strategy of lies, obstructionism, hypocrisy, greed, and racism will have been totally vindicated.

They don't care if it's right, they just care if it works.

Don't let it work.

OBAMA 2012.

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A few links

I'm just storing a few links here for now.  More to come in the future as i get things organized.

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