all killer, no filler

so, last year when tilikum, the orca moral equivalent of our founding fathers, bagged #3, my then five year old daughter came up with an idea that might give captive orcas enough fun in captivity to stop murdering humans.  her idea was to take about 300 live penguins and drop them from a helicopter into the big orca tank a couple of times a week and let the big black and white dolphins go crazy eating as many penguins as they can while a big crowd watches.  any penguins that live through three drops get to live out the rest of their lives in a chilly, orca-free penguin house.  i think this idea has merits.  people would pay big bucks to see the orcas sucking the juicy innards out of the penguins and spitting out the floppy skins full of bones.  that's a hell of a lot more entertaining than the usual shamu performance.  and it might mean there's something a little bit different about my daughter.

workbook

22 years later, there's not much left to say about bob mould's workbook.  mould took the disintegration of husker du as an opportunity to stretch his composition and peel away much of the noise and establish himself as a major american songwriter.  it's hard for me to understand that this record has not been more widely heard, but it surely remains a mostly hidden gem.  well-regarded by those who have heard it, the record as a whole commands attention through understatement and introspection.  after the intro, 'sunspots', the four song suite 'wishing well', 'heartbreak a stranger', 'see a little light' and 'poison years' just amazes.  by this time, mould was a young man who had already had a long career.  workbook signaled his transition; now he's out and proud, buff and happy in ways he wasn't while in husker du.  this was the beginning of that growth, and workbook remains a touchstone.

dark, dark, dark

happy three mile island day.

serial killer whale 4, the return of tilikum

tilikum, the serial killing killer whale returns to his killing fields today to stalk his next victim.  this brave freedom fighter, proven breeder and madman is looking to take his honorable resistance and killing spree into its third decade.  given the patience and intelligence he's shown thus far, it's highly likely he'll get away with it again eventually.  fight the power, shamu.

larry o'donnell doesn't heart eric cantor

holy shit, lawrence o'donnell used the open to his show on weds. to call eric cantor the stupidest person ever to serve in the u.s. congress because he didn't know how a bill becomes a law!  not at all nice.  every once in a while, o'donnell is downright nasty on his show.  that's something.

u heart mekons

i stumbled across a pretty good blog post about the mekons.  it's a nice rundown of the mekons recordings and some random youtube clips, including a great lu edmonds 'heaven and back'.  i'll disagree a little bit with some of this opinions, though.  i got into the mekons with mekons rock 'n roll; i think i bought the cd after the first time i heard 'memphis egypt' on the radio, so i jumped pretty quickly into the back catalog available at the time.  so good it hurts is a very strong album, right behind fear and whiskey and curse; to me, it holds up better than honky tonkin'.  so good it hurts, rock 'n roll and curse might be the best three albums in a row in the history of the known universe.  i'll also stand up for retreat from memphis and natural.  retreat is a fantastic rock album.  plenty of hooks and rocking songs; i know jon langford has said over the years that he's disappointed with it, but what would he know!  i got natural at the show, so i saw the songs live before i heard the record; over the years i've listened to it over and over.  great songs there; nice job, lu.  lastly, in a better universe, 'only you and your ghost will know' would have been the biggest country single of all time.

poison years

plutonium: it's what's for dinner.  the devastation from the quake and tsunami in japan continues to be made worse by the deteriorating situation at the fukushima facility.  the responsibility to bomb civilians in libya and the hilarious flameout of various third-tier republican presidential candidates and television personalities have pushed japan and the quake and the leaky, melty nuke plant over the horizon, but that's not making any of it go away.  we'll be dealing with this long after the rest of the clean-up and rebuilding is done.  plutonium is not iodine.

galaxy class

interesting blog by the galaxian here.  not about archaic video games, it's more about homelessness and philosophy and has a great bit for students.

hello cruel world: joe bageant is gone

a wonderful voice has left the chorus of righteous smiles.  joe bageant has died; his wonderful, humorous writing lives on.  he was always genuine and genuinely funny, a bracing antidote to the typical spoiled 'liberal'.  whether you've read him yet or not, you will miss him.

cheesing, it is fon to due

was this the last really good south park episode?

another perspective on stossel and his fluffer 'stache

she's got a different perspective on stossel and his disingenuous ass-hattery, probably because she's got actual experience and john stossel is a douchebag.

juan cole, meet john chuckman

punch, punch, counterpunch.  while this piece was not specifically addressed to cole's smarmy screed--who the fuck is this provincial 'left' cole thinks he's schooling, exactly?--john chuckman does a hell of a hit job on the hypocrisy of the liberal interventionists who are so smug regarding the war in libya and their responsibility to protect _some_ civilians.  bombing for democracy indeed.

last weeks of the war

michigan, ohio, wisconsin, florida, texas: there's a class war going on, and there's a 99% chance that you are losing.  democrats appear more than willing to abandon every constituency except jeffrey immelt and lloyd blankfein; the republicans are little more than valets to the koch brothers.  without an army to battle on the side of most americans, it's not really not much of a fight, and not much of a war; it's more like a slaughter, without any responsibility to protect the innocent victims.

please note: the suicide booth is exact change only

captain sunshine, mark kozelek.  rollercoaster is a great album, harrowing and raw, as well as bordering on self parody, too much or too something for lots of folks.  i dig it.

like a hit parade of stupid

into the top ten on today's hit list is this turd, a column by the apparently reliably dim-witted and helpfully incurious dan rodricks.  this scores high on the ass clown scale, from nobody died at three mile island, to a big supposed environmentalist who just 'learns more' and suddenly becomes a _huge_ nuclear power advocate, and even biofuels!  here is a major paper columnist who either doesn't understand what he's talking about or just doesn't care.  this, right here, is the biggest problem we face.  an ignorant and incurious opinion class who either by mistake or by design encourage and reinforce failure and retard necessary debate.  much like the minimizing of bob herbert and his opinions in the times by the village idiot cheerleaders, this vapidity is a symptom of our corroding political and intellectual culture.

a fox news commentator passes

see you in hell, buckaroo bonzai.

geraldine ferraro, failed vice presidential candidate, failed senate candidate, questionable parent, and enthusiastic fox news commentator has died.  while i'm sure she's missed by many who knew her personally--and her family is of course at a loss as anyone's family would be in this circumstance--the disingenuous hagiography of the g.f. the politician and talking head from the village and those who aspire to village idiocy is gonna be unpleasant.

hey, look, lu edmonds! and parthenogenesis.

call in the airstrike with a poison kiss

as we continue to do god's work in libya,  upholding the 11th commandment of the responsibility to protect civilians, we will follow god and samatha power's word and protect the helpless civilians in yemen, syria, bahrain, saudi arabia and israel?  coming next week: the rest of africa?

health insurance reform, or blame canada

the health insurance reform bill turned one, and both the brain damaged and evil were out in force to announce the end of days, while the easy to please, the reading impaired and the true believers were celebrating like mardi gras as the rest of us were simply mortified.  for all the benefits that supporters point to, the reality of the now year-old law is thin gruel when compared to the great need for not insurance reform but real, universal health _care_ coverage.

the triumphalist warblers and political tools see fit to ignore the very careful language: health insurance reform.  was it the best we could get?  did they do all they could?  did they bargain from a position of strength?  or was the outcome exactly the goal all along: preserve the insurance industry and insurance industry donations; preserve the welfare queen pharmaceutical industry and it's money?  we may never know the answer to these questions, but tune in next week to 'bullshit or not?'.

lots of these fools ask, 'well, how will we get what universal coverage, smart guy?'  'obama couldn't do it.'  whatever.  i don't believe it; obama had no intention of delivery universal health care; he had no intention of negotiating for universal health care; he had every intention to maintain what is essentially the status quo while putting on a puppet show for the democratic faithful, and reforming the current system at the edges to relieve much of the political pressure.  democratic health reform 2009 was cutting edge republican health reform circa 1994.

so, how's it gonna happen, smart guy?  the best hope is innovation in individual states.  that's how it went down in canada.  blame canada!  certainly many states are cesspools of backward thinking; we've seen it now in wisconsin, ohio, arizona, south dakota: utter fools and vile, santorum-baby conservatives fucking up their states.  it is very easy at the state level to sweep in and fuck up.  with luck--and after some hard work and hardball politics--the teabagging and overreach will also be undone as quickly.  not all states are so full of assholes, though.  in places where better people have some say, there has been real work on the health care issue.  both vermont and connecticut have been working for some time.  vermont has passed a single payer bill that has a good shot at becoming law.  connecticut has been working to use both state laws and federal programs and their wavers to put together a system that will have the ability to cover everyone in the state.  states are more flexible, for good and ill, and they can move more quickly _and_ with more resolve on this vital issue than the federal government is able or _willing_ to take.

the political belief is that once these programs are in place in individual states they will become very popular and spread from state to state, just like in canada.  as long as the united states has as much sense as canada.

a low-budget geraldo rivera

looking like a 70's gay porn fluffer, john stossel, primarily known as a low-budget geraldo rivera, once again shows just how abrasive and dim-witted he is on this fox 'news' train wreck.  jesus he's a douche nozzle.

so, for 24 hours, arizona was the most popular basketball team on the planet

i thought that honor was going to belong to uconn again.

gnome chompsky

classic chomsky from the boston review a generation ago on humanitarian intervention, also known as freedom bombs or liberty slaughter.  chomsky's always a properly well-considered and acerbic take on this issue.  it's not new, and it's not going away.  one of the not-discussed facets to this latest round of glorious freedom bombing is that if the u.s. doesn't do it, it doesn't get done.  nobody else _can_ do this; only the u.s. can project force to any spot on the globe.  britain and france may have aircraft carriers and submarines, but they're strictly little league.  the arab league is t-ball.  when there's bombing to be done in a far away land, either the u.s. does the bulk of it, or it aint happening.

you're there enshrined in memory

where friendship never dies.

i remember when i first heard this on the radio.

thanks for coming in

every little bit helps?

dancing with tears in my eyes

meanwhile in japan, the nuclear crisis continues, adding fear and obfuscation to the devastation.

i've seen all good people

atrios linked to this from thinkprogress.  these republicans--and their masters--are vile people.

always sunny in petrolia

counterpunch has a contrarian yet honest take on the freedom bombing in libya.  sure to cause much derision from the professional 'liberal' fuckwads and the 'liberal interventionist' cheering class.

martinis on the roof

live!  with 2 minutes of banter but much better sound than the cell phone vid.

it's about time.

freedom toast!

freedom bombs: protecting your right to be freely bombed if you live on top of our oil.

we rule!

this sort of bullshit shouldn't bother me.  it's just more auto-fellatio by the cheering class, designed to make themselves feel smart and useful when faced with a political reality that they cannot influence and only comment on.  smarmy, self-satisfied and ultimately useless debate is about all we get these days.  freedom bombs only fall where we want them to fall.  we as in the united states.  we're the only ones who can.  france, italy, the uk, really can't project force the way we can.  they're helpful lickspittles, sure, and maybe useful for a little public relations, but the united states gets it done bombing-wise or it doesn't get done.

it's not about protecting civilians, not matter what some say they believe.  it never was and it never will be.  it's about protecting our interests and ensuring that oil and other useful commodities continue to flow to their rightful, god-given consumers.  coming soon: water.

half a life in japan

what's the half life of a crisis?  pretty short if it's measured by the attention span of the media.  but things are not going well.  the sexy freedom bombs and rescued f-15 pilots are sucking up much of the coverage, and exelon, jeffrey immelt and his pal foot-foot the president are very happy with this development.  it will help them and their plans for our glowing nuclear future if this thing disappears forever, but it's not gonna help japan.  or us.

randy, randy hopper

yeah, it's pretty funny.  and he's an asshole hypocrite who couldn't resist the opportunity to hop on the careerist little tramp.  but i hope to christ his picture and the picture of the paramour are all over the airwaves during the election cycle.  he's a midget gingrich, and whether he is recalled or not, if the democrats and their foot soldiers don't use this asshole against gingrich and the rest of the republicans everywhere, they're hopeless.  this is an easy one kids.  it's got it all.  make sure it's got legs cuz i'm starved for quality entertainment.

freedom tower glass made in china?

sweet jesus.  so i'm reading us glass magazine yesterday.  yes, there is such a thing, and no, don't ask why.  anyway, in the dec 2010 edition there is a single pager reporting that some of the glass for the freedom tower, now one world trade center, building will no longer be made in china but instead will be made by one of the original bidders, ppg.  wtf?  even better, the panes will have to be shipped to china to be made into the windows because the machine to do it is in china.  it seemed like a joke.  stuff for that building, the most american of american monument office towers of freedom and america, being made in china?  seems like there might be some really bad p.r. there if someone actually gave a fuck, but when i googled it, i got a trade publication editorial from 2009 and a rant on some pissy right wing blog from the same era and not much else.

holy shit.  i would have thought this would be a big deal.  you're going to rebuild the site, and you're going to use off shore suppliers instead of domestic ones, and nobody cares.   after all the outsourcing and off shoring and all the other betrayals of america and the american people by our galtian overlords, and the surrender of the political class to onslaught of ge and koch brother money, nobody cares that their american freedom memorial office tower isn't even made by free american hands. 

we have some pretty twisted priorities if the fine folks who are making a tidy sum rebuilding that site didn't think it was just a good idea to use domestic suppliers and labor to build the fucking building without having to be told.  assholes.

get to work on that time machine, chiswick

right about now, i could go for a sugar and cracker double headlining show.  not husker du and cvb, but sugar and cracker.

husker du and cvb next week.

or you could just go on and leave me alone

no shit

now the arab league is all bent because we're bombing the piss out of libya, not doing whatever it is they thought we'd do.  apparently it's their first cruise, but fuck them for being sean hannity stupid.  this is us, and libya has oil, yummy oil that the french and brits love, so what exactly did you think was going to happen, morans.

wednesdays with elmo

this makes me happy.

just an ordinary night

meh.

so i placed a call, person to person. connect me to steve albini.

months old gq interview with steve albini.  he never fails to amuse in print.  i still remember his practically pre-interwebs mauling of liz phair, urge overkill and smashing pumpkins.  overflowing with win.

alexander cockburn on fire

alexander cockburn shines a bit of light on the snuggly relationship between the big green groups and the nuclear industrial complex.  everybody likes a giant paycheck.  counterpunch rules.

hey sandy

zoology or anthropology?

limbaugh is a carnival barker.  he's the guy on the sidewalk outside of a sexshow featuring a couple of tired crack whores, hustling and selling to increase his share of the door.  small, though not in volume, he craved success and acceptance and would have joined any travelling show that would pay him.  he's found his circus and his marks, so he's going with it, but he's full of shit and an asshole and not much of an ideologue.  had democrats had a taste for failure and bad, bullying comedy, well, he would have joined them given the chance.

hannity is a true believer and an absolute fucking moron.  he couldn't even keep alan colmes in check.  he gets that bug-eyed, vacant look at the slightest deviation from the script and always keeps his guests under his own two-watt limit.  anything above that dimness he dismisses easily because he simply can't follow it.

beck is just fucking insane.  he used to be the most entertaining, but now that he is fading and loosing his ability to read his compass, he's getting a bit tiresome.  yet, this is a man that the teabaggers believe absolutely; his word is second only to gospel.  about now he's so far gone that he probably really believes he's fighting cylons, obama, bin laden and george soros alongside glen larson, starbuck, brigham young, adama, and joe smith outside the gates of heaven.  i'd imagine he ends it all fairly quickly in a tranny's closet wearing a rubber gimp mask with not one but two nooses tugging him home to kobol.

santorum babies

maddow had some fun a few weeks back highlighting i-like-ike's position on unions and the tax rates under the president general and doing a pretty good job of showing how he'd be to the left of most elected dems today going by his speeches.  funny.  and a little bit useful to those saying that obama and clinton are both center-right politicians, kinda like nixon with blowjobs and weasellyness substituted for extreme paranoia and felonies. 

that being said, is it possible that the conservative movement in this country has in 30 years so polluted the gene pool of the republican party that they will be unable to function in even the most rudimentary governing?  mitch mcconnell, scott walker, chris christie, jim demint, john boehner, clarence thomas, rick scott, paul ryan, michelle bachmann, newt gingrich, these are all seriously disfunctional people, with little understanding of even the basic neccessities of government in general and the offices they hold in particular.  the koch brothers, the mellons, the coors family, the olin family, these are bad bad people, and they created this fundamentalist conservative movement to further their personal goals and feed their personal fortunes.  but have they done too well?  have they bred even the slightest ability or intelligence out of their class of government servants that they will be unable to do anything?  rather than the center-right democratic party withering and blowing away, will it instead be the hard-right, brain-dead republican party when they are unable to keep any branch of the u.s. government operating?  are all of the republicans now conceived in a slurry of leaking shit and bathed in astroturf tea and too stupid to remember to breath?  it looks more like that every day.

santorum babies all!

bradley manning

it's easier to dismiss failures--or downright surrenders or utter from-the-start bullshit--on large, nebulous issues.  the failure to achieve national health care reform, with single payer or a national health service or something, anything, and instead settling for absurd insurance reform can be obfuscated with talk of the senate and big pharma and rationing and the best deal.  it was a failure, but where did it happen, exactly? yes, many people understand that obama was never in favor of anything interrupting the insurance industry violation of the american people, single payer, national health public option, anything--and he lied about it from the start--but that fact is not as obvious to many others as it should be, especially staunch obama supporters and democratic apparatchiki, because the fuck-up is spread all around, and the final failure is shared broadly.  bradley manning is a different story.  it's one man being tortured by the entire united states government through the u.s. military with full knowledge of everyone including the president.  the fact that president obama did not order an end to this crime clearly puts the blame exactly where it belongs.

here's the invaluable counterpunch with ellsberg on the manning situation.

like the shaggs without the charm. or talent.

and yes, it's friday.

libya

another one of the places that we wouldn't bomb if their primary export was turnips.

and this

happy sunshine perspective on three mile island

given the unfolding events in japan, on the issues magazine has a piece on the long-term health effects of the three mile island meltdown.  each and every time you see, hear or read that exactly zero people died and/or were harmed by three mile ilsand, remember this.

it was amazing that the official health studies just happened to validate the official narrative.  what are the chances?

any thought could be the beginning

but i heard this:

before this:

you won't be happy anyway

i heard this:
before this:

superchunk is the greatest rock and roll band in history

i don't actually believe it.  but if you wanted to, you could prove it in a court of law.  they had all the ingredients: cuddly punk pop songs, medium cute girl playing bass, curse words, some of the absolute worst singing ever, without any of the creepy, low-level sex pervert vibe from charles thompson.

destroy your safe and happy lives before it is too late

what we have here apparently is a homemade video of some school children in their pajamas covering the mekons.

santorum, baby!

santorum baby: the birth product of an accidental fertilization by leaking santorum.

oh the rich people want what the poor people's got

saying that our political culture is broken is not exactly an original statement.  it's obvious that our republic has degraded into a cirlce jerk.  we are a one party state.  in theory there are differences between republicans and democrats, but two years of obama have shown that the results are mostly the same.  health care.  bradley manning.  war.  taxes.  economic policy.  energy.  no matter the style, the outcomes are equivalent.  the actual left wing of american politics is totally without representation.  the democrats are a center-right party; the repubs are an ever more extreme and ignorant right wing party.  the politicians described as far lefties by dickheads like bill o'reilly are pretty tame centerists.  yet, there are people in the streets in wisconsin and ohio.  they have no real representation. 

third parties won't work in this country.  without a parlimentary system, it's too easy for the two major parties, who represent exactly the same interests in every way, to keep them out.  and most americans buy into the status quo, egged on by opinion manufacturers of whichever jersey they've chosen to cheer for, so they resist even those who might actually represent them.  watch what happens on the blogs when anyone dares to acknowledge the actual conduct of the obama administration and compare it bush, raygun, whoever.  mass hysterics.  the folks who are honest are quickly surrounded by the circle jerk, and, well, nobody gets out of that alive.

in our system, political parties die and are replaced.  how might that happen to one of our two right-wing parties?  the folks in wisconsin and ohio probably point the way: by witholding support.  obama and walker are in the same party.  there are opponents of that party mobilizing in various states.  if those people had the will to withhold their support long enough to kill the democratic party, then perhaps a true center-left or left-wing party could form.

will that happen?  no.  there'll always be a funny anthony weiner soundbite, or bernie sanders rant, or something to keep enough of the serfs on the land.  americans don't have the balls for politics.  our only hope is that the ruling party might actually get so inbred that it will forget to breath and die.  santorum, baby.

the flame that killed john wayne

after the fires and the snow, the horror in japan will persist for years.

raise a glass to jfk and a dozen more besides

hey you fuckin micks, slainte!

just a thought

i guess i understand that many of the large, leftyish blogmeisters get stiffies imagining themselves becoming the next david broder or even ross doo-hat.  if they ingratiate themselves to the village just right, then some friend-of-obama-or-pelosi will pluck them from their seat on the lawrence o'donnell show and lead them to sententious tenure.  it's human nature, and few can resist the paycheck when they get that close.  after all, you're on cable, and obama says nuclear power is our future, so you puke up some misinformed banalities and just maybe you can skip the viagra tonight.  fine.  but where do all the other idiots come from?  this is not freerepublic, for christ's sake.  from the back bench left-wing bloggers to the legion of idiots and their comments that parrot the company line from their trenches in the realtiy based community, it is just a tiny bit disheartening to see all the stupidity on shameless display.  you don't work for the company you fool, so why do they carry their water for free?  of course, i dismiss the industry types and university shills.  they are hopeless and to be ignored.  i'm not talking about them.  it's the garden-variety igorant fuck that you find under every rock littered all over this new, left-wing media. 

again, it makes sense to be a toady if you're already getting paid and really really believe you could get a huge fucking paycheck some day.  and some of the folks out there have been properly sceptical from the start, but not as many as you would think!  are the rest just morons, misinformed or perhaps lickspittles by nature?  i'm not sure.  perhaps rather than hope for better from stars and up-and-comers, we should look for intellectual leadership and information from the old hands.  they've done their work, have found their voices, and are not interested in being careerist ass clowns anymore, if they ever were.

the nuclear issues in japan have highlighted a lot of the ignorance and useful idiocy of plenty of folks who should--and claim to everyday--know better.

magic, fear and superstition

surfing around the perportedly reality-based blogs in the wake of the earthquake in japan and subsequent nuclear catastrophy, i've been struck by the ignorance and misunderstanding polluting those sites.  i really do think it's a weakness of many 'liberals' or 'progressives' to embody the nerdgasm view of technology and believe that there's an easy answer right around the corner.  the issues with nuclear power have been hidden in plain sight for three generations, and these folks should know better.  perhaps they're being blinded by all the time they spent playing star trek role playing games before they discovered the internet.

for the record, the greenhouse emisisons for nuclear power are high.  the uranium has to be mined, after all.  then it has to be turned into fuel.  spent fuel will always be a problem, unless you happen to be in the business of building nuclear weapons. 

how much of our 20% dependence on nuclear power today could we eliminate with conservation and efficiency?  as soon as we can turn energy-star appliances and triple pane windows into atomic bombs, there will be a cabinet post demanding them.

wriggling around like a lizard in a tin

i've been told i'm a bad bad man, but the only fun even i've seen in regards to the truly terrible events in japan has been watching nbc news dance around trying to support general electric.  that jerkoff robert bazell spent the first 5 days minimizing as fast as he could, but last night he looked downright grim.  over the last 2 days the critics have finally come out on the tee vee, especially msnbc.  now the g.e. tee vee p.r. mouthpieces admit that they don't know and never did know what the fuck was going on, and that yah, it's pretty bad.  can we talk about a sane and cost-efficient energy plan now?  of course not.

check one