Learn to appreciate your kids more. They're phenomenal human beings, due in large part to you. It's time to start making that transition in your head that reclassifies them as real, honest-to-god adults. While you're at it, we've got to do something about that nasty habit you have of being so damn accepting of me. A guy's liable to to get all misty about being accepted into someone's home so readily. And quit being so damn critical of your cooking/baking. It's world class, accept it, and move on.
I'm really glad you're happy. Now just go further away and be happy.
Get your collective shit together. You are the best matched, most in love, beautiful couple I know. Start acting like it. Oh, and let me throw out a resounding, "Fuck that shit," to any thoughts of moving away. Not happenin'. And stop treating me like I'm so damn smart, Bean. If you aren't at least 10 I.Q. points, and 5 years of education ahead of me, I'll eat that Equity hat I bought tonight.
You still have to work on that whole delivery thing, man. I know you're almost always right (except when you disagree with me), but you credit people in general with having a thicker hide than they really have. Go easy. Also, that whole thing where your drinking habit paid off with the coolest job ever. Fuck that, so not fair. You're still too generous, and you enjoy life way more than a body should be allowed. Gotta few things to learn about treating women, too. Hurry up and figure that out.
You really need to let go of that whole "Jesus" thing. I think you know it's time, I think you've been questioning things for a while, but oh, how you fear change! I'm pretty sure Jesus didn't hate faggots, or love killing brown people for profit (remember the money changers?), so if you do have to believe, at least read the damn book once in a while. You need to be more appreciated for raising Rissy. You don't get enough credit where it's due, and you are to unassuming to demand it. Work on that.Toshi's Mother:
You are a beautiful human being that needs to slow down and enjoy life a bit. Stop letting boys treat you like shit, you're better than that. Remember that this is only a ride (a la Bill Hicks), not a race. And that whole generosity thing. You're cutting in on my schtick here, love. Allow a fellow his vices, all right?
The bottom line of the report, though, seems to be that it's time to pass the buck over to the Iraqis, after a few handy steps: "Iraqis may become so sobered by the prospect of an unfolding civil war and intervention by their regional neighbors that they take the steps necessary to avert catastrophe. But at the moment, such a scenario seems implausible because the Iraqi people and their leaders have been slow to demonstrate the capacity or will to act."
Call it the "sand nigger explanation": like slaves after the Civil War were more or less just expected to get over it and become good little demi-Americans, so must the Iraqis forget about the decades of deprivations under Saddam Hussein, U.N. sanctions, and, well, fuck, war, and just get on with it. It's there in Recommendation 21, the "No Iraqi Left Behind" idea: "If the Iraqi government does not make substantial progress toward the achievement of milestones on national reconciliation, security, and governance, the United States should reduce its political, military, or economic support for the Iraqi government."
How can one completely poo-poo a report where the authors say shit like leave Iran to the United Nations and fuckin' talk to Syria, that sets a timetable of "milestones" for Iraq to achieve, that states "The United States should not make an open-ended commitment to keep large numbers of American troops deployed in Iraq," and more? Because the whole document, massive press coverage and all, carries about as much actual legislative weight as, say, the 9/11 Commission report.
Hell, in that case, we've been told that the vast majority of the recommendations have been carried out, which may be true, in the same way that chimpanzees are mostly the same genetically as human beings, 98.8% so. But, looking at all the nit-eating and shit-throwing, one might think that the remaining 1.2% is crucial.
Dead Flag Blues (Intro), Godspeed You Black Emperor
This, Mitt believes... (Volume 1)
The kerfuffle over Andrew Sullivan's post on Mitt Romney's magical underwear inspired me to do a weekly series of posts on Mitt's Mormon beliefs. As the great great grandson of a Mormon prophet, Willford Woodruff, a holder of the Aaronic Priesthood, and an LDS Seminary Bowl champion, I think I'm more than qualified to do so.
We'll start out with Kolob. It's the star nearest to the planet where God lives. It's important to remember that. We Mormons get very angry when gentiles say we believe God lives on Kolob. It makes us sound crazy. God couldn't live on Kolob. He isn't a sun person; he'd burn his feet.
Summersong, The Decemberists
Yankee Bayonet, The DecemberistsAgainst All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now), The Postal Service (Phil Collins Cover)
My Half-Year of Hell With Christian FundamentalistsWhen Polish student Michael Gromek, 19, went to America on a student exchange, he found himself trapped in a host family of Christian fundamentalists. What followed was a six-month hell of dawn church visits and sex education talks as his new family tried to banish the devil from his soul. Here's his story.
*snip*
*snip*"When I got out of the plane in Greensboro in the US state of North Carolina, I would never have expected my host family to welcome me at the airport, wielding a Bible, and saying, 'Child, our Lord sent you half-way around the world to bring you to us.' At that moment I just wanted to turn round and run back to the plane.
Things began to go wrong as soon as I arrived in my new home in Winston-Salem, where I was to spend my year abroad. For example, every Monday my host family would gather around the kitchen table to talk about sex. My host parents hadn't had sex for the last 17 years because -- so they told me -- they were devoting their lives to God. They also wanted to know whether I drank alcohol. I admitted that I liked beer and wine. They told me I had the devil in my heart.
Then, seeing as we were already on the topic of God's will, the religious zealots finally brought up a subject which had clearly been on their minds for a long time: They wanted me to help them set up a Fundamentalist Baptist church in my home country of Poland. It was God's will, they said. They tried to slip the topic casually into conversation, but it really shocked me -- I realized that was the only reason they had welcomed me into their family. They had already started construction work in Krakow -- I was to help them with translations and with spreading their faith via the media.
And South Dakota Discovers Its Citizens Are Sane:Exactly.
Looks like the good citizens of South Dakota decided that the crazy law banning virtually every abortion was bullshit, voting it away. Power to the people. Eat shit, fundies.
Now I realize that an alleged scandal involving a gay hooker, a Right-wing evangelical leader, and crystal meth is enough to make the Rita Cosby's of the broadcast news world tremble with excitement. But I thought a story about how our illustrious War President and Defender against Terrorism over rode his own weapons security experts at the behest of the Rubber-stamp Republican Congress and posted highly classified, detailed technical tips for making a fission bomb on the Internet might be worth a mention.
Here's a summary of some of what is being reported:
- In the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, facing the embarrassment of no WMDs found, the White House found themselves in possesion of thousands of pages of Iraqi documents pertaining to obsolete WMD programs from before the first Gulf War
- To provide fodder for out of context quoting and neocon fear monergering, to save time and money on translating, and to retain a few votes, the Republican Congress with the cooperation of President Bush wanted to post the raw docs on the Internet and invite right-wing bloggers and web surfers to pitch in and read through it all to find any quotable gems.
- John Negroponte, bless his black little heart, had enough brains to oppose this incredibly asinine idea knowing full well that the data had not been read and vetted.
- Apparently, Bush the Decider, a guy who wouldn't know a neutron from a noble gas, reportedly decided to over ride expert advice and do it anyway.
- Buried in the stacks of dull inventories and mundane trivial minutia were the plans for how to fabricate and assemble the critical components of a working fission bomb.
On top of everything else some of it was published in Arabic and available for several months, thus giving the bad guys plenty of time and saving Al Qaeda the bother of having to translate it. I can only imagine that Islamic terrorists and sympathizers the world over fell off their camels peeing in hysterical laughter. Which would make a convenient segue for bowing to Mecca and praising Allah for answering their prayers with George Nukular Bozo Bush backed up by the Republican Big Shoe Atomic Clowns. Speaking of the latter, I can't wait to watch the warm-up GOP Solid Gold Pundit Dancers uniformly step-ball-chain from the Mushroom Cloud Stomp-n-Fear number right into the "accidentally posting the plans for a nuke in Arabic on the Web is no big deal" Tap Dance & Election Finale without missing a beat.
Why Vote Against Republicans? Because Fuck Them:
America, the good ol' USA, is a country that was brought into existence by groups of terrorists and insurgents aided by foreign powers. Its first rallying document was the Declaration of Independence, a list of reasons why King George III and the British sucked balls. However, no matter what that hand-scrawled Declaration told the colonists, a good many people living in Massachusetts or Maryland could've bottom-lined it for you: "Why revolt against the British? Because fuck them, that's why."
Now, even through the deadening fog of Fox "News" rhetoric, multiple jobs, dying pensions, depleting health care, the waterboard effect of credit card debt, force-feedings of fatty foods, soul-killing reality TV, the entire cultural apparatus telling us we must want more and more stuff and shit, the dead-ends of public debate, government-instilled paranoia, dementia masking itself as religious faith, the unsubtle shove towards xenophobic isolation, an antagonistic corporate media, the vicious street-beating death of American intellectual thought, and Bush-worship masked as patriotism, through it all, man, all of it, we have come to this magnificent moment, frightening and exhilarating in its implications, where we, as a majority, are looking at the ruin and waste that surrounds us, piles of shit that we are told are mountains of gold, and we can finally, in this savage season of 2006, at long last come to say, "You know what? Fuck them."
Fuck them for trying to make us believe that America's acts of mass destruction, its bumblings into conflagration and apocalypse, in Iraq are actually just speed bumps, commas, if you will, on the road to a peaceful world of democratic nations bowing down to blow the cock of American hegemony.
Fuck them for holding themselves up as arbiters of morality and when they were confronted with a simple moral equation, they cast their lot with savages and genocidal maniacs. No, not the embryonic stem cell research vote, you backwards ass anti-science fundamentalist fucks. On torture and judicial rights, where even those who proclaimed themselves defenders of the detained and imprisoned ended up dancing like slut marionettes on a puppet pole in the Oval Office when it came down to actually, say, defending the detained and imprisoned.
Fuck them for making Americans fucking hated around the world, as if we're all ex-Nazis or, maybe more accurately, members of Pinochet's Chilean army back in the day, squandering the real triumph of America as a beacon of rights and fairness. However unreal that image was, it's better than being "that big ass country that tortures innocent people."
Fuck them for leaving New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to die, as if somehow those parts of the country were gangrenous toes that could just be cut off.
Fuck them for telling us we're too stupid or traitorous to understand what it is they're doing in trying to re-make the earth in their image, for keeping secrets in the name of their own security while literally and figuratively selling out ours.
Fuck them for lying to us about so goddamn much, about science, about their own policies, about what they actually, really were recorded saying, about what's genuinely important, like the out of control debt and the melting planet, instead trying to get us to think that, if a couple of guys wanna get married or if some pop singer's tit jumps out of her blouse, Godjeebus will smash the earth with his mighty Bible-club of divine justice.
Fuck them for...well, you know what? Just fuck them.
Bob Corker is gay. He may not know it yet, he may never know it, he may go to his sarcophagus wrapped in denial, but his fascination with Ford's prowess and good looks gives him away, as does his political affiliation. All Republican political figures are gay, especially the men. When President Bush insists on kissing one bald head after another, the psychosexual symbolism speaks for itself. He's planting his lips on big uncircumcised Kojak peckers. When Rush Limbaugh packs his Viagra and jets off on a tropical jaunt with the guys, it's assumed there are saucy wenches awaiting him under the sultry palms, but I wonder--I wonder if it's cabana boys making the hammock sway under the moonlight. Republican women--those masochistic saints--are more like Joan Allen playing Pat Nixon under layers of frosting, their rigid smiles forged by years of living a lie with a man infatuated with other men and too timid to take out a subscription to Details magazine, lest he be exposed. The closet in which he dwells doubles as a panic room with a convenient minibar, so that if he ever stumbles or strays, he can blame it on the creme de menthe, not the burning yearning of his heart. Perhaps Corker has a special thing for black men, and can't get enough of that smooth and creamy Blair Underwood. There's no shame in that. Many a significant look has been exchanged in the locker room at half-time.
The only shame is that Harold Ford can't run for office without his Republican opponent, Karl Rove, and Ken Mehlman leching on him and taking turns at the keyhole. The South has made such progress, yet in affairs of the groin, it still has so far to go.
So we need to counter their counter-g.b."Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war"Senate
Connecticut: Ned Lamont
Maryland: Ben Cardin
Michigan: Debbie Stabenow
Missouri: Claire McCaskill
Montana: Jon Tester
New Jersey: Bob Menendez
Tennessee: Harold Ford
Virginia: James WebbDemocrat Held Seats
(CO-03): John Salazar
(GA-03): Jim Marshall
(GA-12): John Barrow
(IA-03): Leonard Boswell
(IL-08): Melissa Bean
(IL-17): Phil Hare
(IN-07): Julia Carson
(NC-13): Brad Miller
(PA-12): John Murtha
(WV-01): Alan MollohanRepublican Held Seats
(AZ-08): Gabrielle Giffords
(CT-04): Diane Farrell
(CT-05): Chris Murphy
(CO-07): Ed Perlmutter
(IA-01): Bruce Braley
(IL-06): Tammy Duckworth
(IN-02): Joe Donnelly
(IN-08): Brad Ellsworth
(IN-09): Baron Hill
(FL-13): Christine Jennings
(FL-16): Tim Mahoney
(FL-22): Ron Klein
(KY-03): John Yarmuth
(NC-01): Heath Shuler
(MN-06): Patty Wetterling
(NM-01): Patricia Madrid
(NY-20): Kirsten Gillibrand
(NY-24): Michael Arcuri
(NY-26): Jack Davis
(OH-15): Mary Jo Kilroy
(OH-18): Zack Space
(PA-06): Lois Murphy
(PA-08): Patrick Murphy
(PA-07): Joe Sestak
(PA-10): Chris Carney
(VA-02): Phil Kellam
(WI-08): Steve Kagen
The Rude One has a great post up on how to properly frame the Iraq occupation debate.
A Quick and Easy Test to Determine Where You Stand on the Iraq War:
Let's say we line up, oh, hell, a couple hundred thousand American soldiers, fine men and women in combat uniform, officers, non-coms, grunts, and we put them on TV. Then George W. Bush walks in with a loaded glock. Now let's say that the President puts the gun to the temple of the first soldier and says, "If I shoot this Army private dead, there's a chance America will be victorious and democracy will bring peace to Iraq. Do you want me to do it?" There's no guarantees, though - just the chance. What would you say?For the sake of argument here, let's say that you answer, "Yes, it's worth a soldier for the chance for peace in Iraq." So George W. Bush shoots the soldier in the temple and turns to his advisors, who check reports and, no, still no peace.
*snip*
How many soldiers would you let George W. Bush shoot dead? One? 3000? More? How many would you let him injure? 10? 20,000? More?
If you think the test is biased, unfair, and overly emotional, then you haven't been paying attention. For, really, and come on, is the current U.S. policy in Iraq any more wishful than a lottery of death and mutilation.
Feel free to play with friends. For big fun, substitute Iraqis and multiply by a couple hundred.
Thought I'd give a couple of concert reviews this week. The Dresden Dolls played the Crystal Ballroom last night, and The Decemberists will be playing the same venue tomorrow evening. I guess I'll leave the set list on the front page, and my thoughts on the show "below the fold."
So...
Tunes:
Sing (video), The Dresden Dolls
Backstabber (Live), The Dresden Dolls
The Perfect Fit, The Dresden Dolls
Truce, The Dreden Dolls
Just People And Leaves, The Red Paintings
Walls, The Red Paintings
The Dresden Dolls.
I got there at about 9:00. There were two opening acts. The Red Paintings played as a two piece combo. Apparently they've had a whole slew of problems this tour. Last night, one of their vehicles crapped out. Several of the band members did not make it to the show, so the violinist and the guitarist/singer performed together. It was great. They were very friendly, and the crowd really got into it. Ono, if you're out there, they're from your continent, so when they get back there, check 'em out.
Jason Webley followed The Red Paintings. Really high energy, got everybody on their feet pretty quick. Which is weird, 'cuz it's just him and his accordion. Think Tom Waits meets Jimmy Durante (credit to my friend Bean for that observation), with a dash of Weird Al. I absolutely loved it. Fairly short set, though. I think he did four songs, plus a guest appearance with The Dresden Dolls later on.
And then the Dolls went on.I can't do them justice here, but The Brigade are a great addition to live shows. Much kudos to them
So, yeah. Overall, probably an 8 or 9 out of 10 as far as indoor concerts go (for me, at least). The venue is great. The whole floor is set on springs, the ballroom atmosphere is perfect for the Dolls, and the people were having a good time.
So, that's all I got.
Many blessings!
p.s.
Enjoy the unofficial video for "Backstabber"!
I don't really have much in the way of commentary to add to this, but I'd just like to say how much it pisses me off to see these assholes trying to prevent high school kids from promoting tolerance. I don't get why, in an age of school shootings and apathetic teens, anyone would try to silence voices preaching peace and understanding.
Anyway, the General's satire is better for this sort of thing than my poorly written irritation, so...
A threat greater than the homosexuals
Superintendent, Yakima County School District
You can see the rise of anti-US sentiments under Bush most starkly in non-Arab countries such as Turkey and Indonesia which used to like us, believe it or not. In 2002, 52 percent of Turks had a favorable view of the US. In 2006, 12 percent of Turks have a favorable view of the US. In 2000, 75 percent of Indonesians had a favorable view of the US. In 2006, 30 percent of Indonesians have a favorable view of the US.Even in major European countries such as France, Germany, Spain and the UK, Bush has cut the approval rating for the US in half or nearly so. Isn't that a bad sign, when the publics in our NATO allies rethink their view of us so radically? Won't we need the support of those publics at some point?
Bush by his Iraq misadventure has made us hated in much of the world, and especially in the Muslim world. Communist China is now widely viewed as mush less dangerous than the democratic United States. Don't you think that might turn into actual consequences?
Here's a link to the rest of the post.
best daily show clip EVER:
Jason Jones on The Daily Show and the dangers of gays in the military:
Posted by: conbo at September 21, 2006 4:41 AM
Evening.
Or morning.
Whatever.
I can't sleep.
I like this set. I can't seem to find the thread, but I think it all goes together somehow.
Goddess On A Hiway, Mercury Rev
Five On It (Remix), Luniz, featuring Dru Down, E-40, Richie Rich, Shock G, Spice 1
Empire (Video), KasabianFinch On A Saturday, Horse Feathers
Yeah, alright maybe it doesn't all go well together, but that's tonight's set.
Much love, many blessings
<crap><header><disclaimer>piracy = "communism";<justification>educational = "doubleplus good"</justification></disclaimer></header>
<something witty>I got nothing, sorry</something witty>
<tunes>
Processed Beats, Kasabian
Lost Souls Forever, Kasabian
F-Stop Blues, Jack Johnson
Behind The Sun, Red Hot Chili Peppers
Dumb, Nirvana
Hotdog In A Hallway, NOFX
Dying, Hole
</tunes>
<close>Many blessings</close>
</crap>
Brooks is the perfect priest of American conservatism, and by conservatism I don't mean the bloodthirsty, gun-toting, go-back-to-Africa, welfare-bashing right-winger conservatism of the NRA and Sean Hannity and the Bible Belt. I mean the dickless, power-worshipping, good-consumer pragmatic conservatism of Times readers and those other Bobos in Paradise who have exquisitely developed taste in furniture, coffee and television programming but would rather leave the uglier questions of politics to more decisive people, so long as they aren't dangerous radicals like Michael Moore or Markos Zuniga.
That's why the marriage of David Brooks and the Democratic Leadership Council makes perfect sense. It's repugnant and the kind of thing one should shield young children from knowing about, but it makes perfect sense. Both prefer a policy of being "cautious soldiers," "incrementalists" who shun upheavals and vote the status quo, although they subscribe to this policy for different reasons. Brooks worships the status quo because he has no penis and wants to spend the rest of his life buying periwinkle bath towels without troubling interruptions of conscience. The DLC, a nonprofit created in the mid-1980s to help big business have a say in the Democratic Party platform, supports the status quo because they are paid agents of the commercial interests that define it.
