Eagle and Moon

 

Busy today, so you didn’t get a post.

In compensation, have some Alaska:

It was about minus twenty Fahrenheit.  My son and I were digging giant blocks of ice out of the driveway and moving them with the plow when I looked up and saw this.

The sun was setting and turning the landscape a kind of golden yellow. The air was so cold and clear it was like you could reach out and touch the moon.  I grabbed the camera and climbed the hill across from my house and managed to take several dozen shots through the telephoto lens.  I didn’t bother with setting the exposure manually, it was too damned cold to fumble barehanded with the camera controls, I just put the Nikon into full auto mode and held down the shutter release with my gloves on.  

I posted this earlier today on Facebook and Twitter. For those of you who don’t follow me on social media, well, I wouldn’t want you to think I was neglecting you.

Be patient, actual blog post to follow.

The Special Kind of Crazy

The frothy hyperventilating began immediately, didn’t it?

I would have been disappointed if it hadn’t.

Last year’s State of the Union address was a bit subdued, what with Gabby Giffords having been shot through the brainpan not long before.  When Obama entered the House chamber in 2011, Republican and Democratic lawmakers sat together as a show of bipartisan support arrayed around Giffords’ empty chair. The booing from the opposition was subdued, as were the cheers from the president’s own party. Of course, despite the new seating arrangement and the vague empty promises of bipartisanship, the frothy insanity, finger pointing, blame laying, chest thumping, dick waggling, comparisons to Hitler and the long-awaited Anti-Christ, and dire proclamations of Islamofascicommunazis started even before the President finished speaking.

On a side note, yesterday Giffords’ border bill passed the House by unanimous consent, proving once and for all that Congress can get things done in a bipartisan manner – providing that the bill’s sponsor gets shot in the head and resigns first. So, yay for progress. But I digress.

As we enter into the final fevered ten months of the frenetic spittle-flecked shit-fest that is the modern American version of democratic civilization, I expected this year to be different only in the intensity of the maddened venom tinged rhetoric.

Needless to say, I was not disappointed.

It started with Mitch Daniels.

At first it appeared that Daniels would be, perhaps, a bit more reasoned, more staid, than Paul Ryan’s strident call to arms last year – and vastly less entertaining than Michele Bachmann’s squalling glassy-eyed paranoid Tea Party response. Daniels looks kind and grandfatherly, like he should be seated on a tractor wearing a worn comfortable woolen sweater and hawking diabetes supplies next to Wilford Brimley. It’s only when he starts to talk that you suddenly realize that Daniels is nuts, his vague fixed smile and unblinking walleyed stare are a thin veneer over what looks to be the early onset of senile dementia. Daniel’s “response” resembled an actual coherent rebuttal, but upon closer inspection was actually just a bunch of conservative talk-radio sound bites lifted whole cloth from the usual pundits. The criticism was obviously cut and pasted together long before the president’s address was even in rough draft, and Daniels delivered it like a heavily medicated mental patient triggered by some unseen stimulus into reciting the Gettysburg Address as a party trick.

I think my favorite part was when Daniels lamented Obama’s evil Orwellian plan to outlaw incandescent light bulbs. Oh no! Anything but that! Keep your filthy government hands off of my hot yellow bulbs, goddamnit!

Just one problem, it was actually George W. Bush who signed that into law on December 18, 2007.

That’s a full year before Obama took office, just in case you got your history from Professor Gingrich.

In fact, that particular bill sailed through Congress with broad bipartisan support, 314 to 100 in the House, 86 to 4 in the Senate. It was only after Obama took office that energy conservation suddenly became government overreach. When it was a conservative in the White House, LED bulbs were just common sense, but when it is a liberal occupying the Oval Office suddenly we’re talking about the stark monochromic light of fascism!

Funny thing, last month Obama signed legislation delaying the regulation – at the opposition of manufacturers and importers who have already geared up to sell the new CFL and LED bulbs. You’d like to think a sitting lawmaker would know that, wouldn’t you? If it bothered him so much that he felt compelled to mention light bulbs on national TV in response to the State of the Union address, I mean.  You’d also think that if Daniels’ GOP handlers were going to write his little rebuttal in advance, they would have at least done some research – wait, unless that was the day Wikipedia was down due to the SOPA protest, but, hey I digress, as is my tendency. 

Yes, I expected bizarre hyperbole and foamy red-flecked froth this year. 

I expected bellicose outrage and ranting punditry and pompous bloviating.

And I was not disappointed.

Turns out, Daniels is a piker. 

Mitch Daniels was nothing but the warm up act.

For extra crunchy crazy, well, you need to step out into Statuary Hall where republicans gathered to vent their spleens after the address.  Universally, conservative lawmakers were offended by the entire speech and testily pointed out how Obama’s optimism is really defeatist hatred of the United States, his praise of the US Military and the US Navy SEALs (who were at that very moment rescuing an American held hostage by pirates in Somalia on Obama’s orders) is really disdain for America’s men and women in arms, his call to bring jobs back from overseas is really contempt for business, and his establishment of consumer protections and regulations on the banking industry is really both a hatred of the free market and white people in general. But for the absolute zenith of the absurd let’s focus on reaction to this line from the President’s address:

Tonight, I am proposing that every state, every state, require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18.

The sheer unmitigated gall of the man! Where does he as President of the United States get off suggesting that American kids get the minimum educational qualifications necessary to compete in our society at the most basic level?  How dare he! Why it’s outrageous! What if kids actually did that and managed to get entry level jobs and started working their way up the ladder instead of ending up on welfare and other entitlement pro…. ok, bad example, but I think I’ve made my point here.

Tea Party darling, Utah Senator Mike Lee responded, "That's none of his business! He's not a principal! He's not a public school teacher! He's not a governor, he's not a mayor. These are matters for state and local government!"

Yeah! Damned right! Why…uh, wait, what was that about “he’s not a teacher?”  Are conservatives listening to teachers now?  Because I thought teachers were liberal commies who hated America.  Did that change? Also, point of order, Obama actually is a teacher, or rather a professor of Constitutional Law. Does that count? No, I suppose not.

Arizona Republican Trent Franks was equally outraged, "What are you gonna do, give them the electric chair? It should be handled on the parental level." 

Exactly.

Huh? You there, in the back, do you have a question or do you just have to go to the bathroom?  Speak up.

Seriously, are you blind? It’s right there! Obviously Obama was saying that he intends to implement a federal regulatory agency that will put kids who drop out of school to death! Duh. How do you not see that?

Georgia Republican Phil Gingrey agreed, "To require them to stay in high school to age 18, those who have absolutely no intention of getting an education or value an education are disrupting the other kids in class. I think it's just a government misguided run amok quite honestly.”

Amok! Amok! Government run amok! Oh stop the Amok! (Sorry, I just like saying Amok! Amok! Amok! That’s a funny word. Amok!)

Here’s my idea, why wait until they’re teenagers?  Most kids know if they hate school or not by the time they’re in second grade, I say it’s never to early to drop out! More for the rest of us.

Question, why is it just good old American conservative values (which made this country great, darn it!) to suggest that black people should get jobs instead of food stamps when Newt Gingrich says it, but fascist government overreach worthy of red-eyed outrage when a black liberal President suggests that maybe kids should stay in school?

Say, wasn’t no child left behind a republican idea? So what, now it’s ok to leave some kids behind?

What? Put your hand down, I’m just asking is all. Sheesh.

 

Do you ever wonder who votes idiots like this into office?

You do?

Well wonder no longer.  They’re all over on the Yahoo news forum, lets go check out their comments:

I am not for mandated government control of our schools. Obama is from a system where kids are forced to attend or they get beaten, their father's have their hands cut off, the women are stoned - don't tell me I don't know. I am a Republican

Obama is from a system where kids get beaten for not attending school, fathers have their hands cut off, and mothers are stoned to death for their children’s truancy.  Damn, school in Hawaii is harsh.

It is NOT education: It is INDOCTRINATION for the Communist Party.

Oh noes! Communists! Communists!  Help us Tailgunner Joe!

Question, the countries that are beating us economically right now? China, for example, aren’t they communist?  Isn’t India socialist?  Hey! You stop that right now. No spitting.

the Dems only hope to get anyone off the welfare rolls is to force them to stay in school and somehow learn enough to get them to stay out fo prison for dealing drugs or raping someone. Republicans meanwhile take the approcah that we should elt the kids who want to learn, actually do it. Meanwhile, if you wash out you should fend for yourself, instea dof living off the ones who do stay in school [sic].

The logic, it burns. 

Burns like trying to piss with a case of the clap.

There’s more, oh so much more, but it hurts me to type it. If you want to read more comments on this subject, you can go Google the Yahoo for yourself.

Snark aside, there may be good reason for Republican outrage. And even better reasons why so many conservatives today are advocating for the right drop out of school. 

A new report in LiveScience spells out why.

(Ok, you got me, I didn’t put the snark aside after all. Sorry)

 

Finally, I think it’s important to note that all things are relative, even stupidity. 

There’s never a politician so nuts, that you can’t find one crazier.

Much crazier.

Seriously.

SOPA, PIPA, Good Intentions And The Road To Hell

Do you get high?

I’m talking about controlled substances.

High. Stoned. Buzzed. You know, like that.

Now, now, relax. Don’t get all paranoid. I’m not asking if you’re a crack-head or heroin junkie. I’m not asking if you’re an addict. I’m not instituting a piss test or anything here on Stonekettle Station. I figure if you’ve got a meth monkey on your back, you’re probably not reading this anyway. 

What I’m asking is if you use drugs on, let’s say, a purely recreational basis. That’s what I’m asking.

No, of course you don’t, that would be illegal (so you probably shouldn’t actually answer my question in the comments, for example).

But let’s say, hypothetically speaking, that even though you yourself would never use drugs, you know somebody who does because this is America and we all pretty much know somebody who does illegal substances in one fashion or another.

So let’s talk about your hypothetical friend, the recreational drug user, shall we?

Your “friend” gets high. He smokes a little weed after work (or maybe before work if he’s an airline pilot or nuclear power plant technician). Maybe he pops a little speed once in a while, you know mother’s little helper. Or does a little Oxy (if he’s a politician or a minister). Or whatever. He’s always got a bag of oregano, or couple of those blue pills and a roofie for date night. You know this guy, right?

Where does he get it?

He always seems to have some, doesn’t he?

And it’s illegal, right?

So, where does he get it?

Drug dealers don’t advertise, at least not in the usual manner.

People who sell illicit drugs don’t go around telling people they’re drug dealers, they don’t list “Drug Dealer” as their profession on resumes and tax returns. They don’t wear a sandwich board that says “Lookin’ to get baked? I can help!” They don’t have those little magnetic signs on the back of their cars like the Mary Kay pushers do. You can’t Google your local dealer. They don’t list “blow” in the Yellow Pages. And the cops are looking for drugs dealers. Hell, there is a veritable army of law enforcement actively hunting drug dealers, from cops to the DEA, FBI, NSA, CIA, DIA, ATF, TSA, the Coast Guard, the Navy, the Air Force, and a hundred other federal, state, and international agencies all the way down to the school guidance counselor.

And yet…

And yet, your “friend” has no problem whatsoever scoring whatever recreational chemical he wants, whenever he wants, in whatever quantity he wants. Period.

And if you wanted some, hypothetically speaking of course, well it wouldn’t take you more than a day to find whatever it is that you went looking for even if you had no idea how to go about it.

Those of you who know me, know that I’ve spent some time in the counter-narcotics field. I’ve hunted drug smugglers in South America and on the high seas. I know more than a bit about counter-narcotics.  And I’m intimately familiar with the soup sandwich which is the so-called “War on drugs” and the agencies responsible for waging it.

I’m going to let you in on a secret: the war is over, we lost.

The war is over, and everybody is out back smoking a fatty in celebration.

It’s been more than twenty forty years now since Reagan Nixon declared war on drugs. Forty plus years and billions upon billions upon billions of dollars, and what? Nothing. That’s right, nothing. Not a goddamned dent in the drug trade. And in fact, it’s worse now because now we’ve got a bunch of new drugs and our idiotic, disorganized, ineffective efforts to curb the problem have only made the drug makers, smugglers, and dealers more innovative and cunning.

Oh sure, we’ve burned thousands of tons of pot and coke and hash and heroin in DEA incinerators, we’ve killed a few drug lords, and we’ve got hundreds of smugglers (about forty or so I helped put away) and we’ve managed to put tens of thousands of smalltime penny ante drug users in prison.

And yet…

And yet, anybody anywhere in the US can get any kind of illegal drug they want any damned time they want and there isn’t a thing anybody can do about it.  And that, my electronic friends, is a goddamned fact.

The so-called war on drugs is a joke.  A sick, sad, stupid joke.  It didn’t get rid of drugs, it didn’t reduce drug use, or drug smuggling, or drug violence, or drug related deaths.  It didn’t, in fact, do a damned thing.  All it does is keep a lot of law enforcement types employed chasing their tails.

See, counter-narcotics law enforcement is big business. There’s a lot of money in it. Counter-narcotics operations fund ships and planes and intelligence centers, it buys tactical training and satellite time and banks of monitoring equipment, it funds a dozen three letter law enforcement agencies and government operations and drug sniffing dogs, it pays hundreds of thousands of lawyers and judges and legal eagles and special courts, and it pays the salaries of uncounted thousands of enforcement folks in a dozen different uniforms, it buys the fuel that powers the Coast Guard and Navy ships patrolling the drugs lanes of the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific, it pays informants, and it pays billions in foreign aid.

But what the war on drugs doesn’t do is actually stop anybody from using illegal drugs – including the folks currently in prison for selling and using illegal drugs.

And the reason that the war on drugs doesn’t stop anybody from doing drugs is because it attacks the symptoms and not the disease.

Here’s the simple truth: illegal drugs exist because Americans want drugs.

Americans want to get high, they want drugs and they will get them. It’s really just that simple. Prohibition should have taught us that, but apparently we were stoned and didn’t get the message.

Until you fix that, there will be a lucrative illegal drug trade here in the United States.

Just so.

Now, let me ask you something, what makes anybody think that a bill as utterly stupid as the Stop Online Piracy Act or the Protect IP Act is going to actually stop online piracy in any way whatsoever?

Because it won’t.

It won’t even slow it down.

At least drugs are a tangible object that can be detected with a lot of hard work.  Dogs can sniff out drugs.  You smell some drugs on people, and you can spot the physical and mental effects too. There are piss tests and blood tests for drugs.  You have to have a lab to make certain drugs. You need precursor chemicals.  Drugs have bulk, weight, mass, they have to moved over the border in trucks and planes and boats or smuggled through tunnels.  And you still can’t stop illicit drug use.  You don’t even have that basic advantage when searching for illegal downloads.  A kid with a bunch of pirated music on his MP3 player doesn’t smell any different than any other kid.  Dogs can’t detect pirated movies.  We’re talking about a collection of electrons here. What in the hell makes anybody anywhere think that they’re going to stop illegal downloading just because Congress passes a law? Especially one as utterly stupid and ineffective as this one?

At best, SOPA/PIPA will be a momentary inconvenience to online piracy – and a monumental long term headache to everybody else. Just exactly like the war on drugs is a mild inconvenience to drug users and a huge sucking chest wound of a problem to the rest of the country.

And at worst, SOPA/PIPA will mean that for all intents and purposes, the American version of the Internet will become indistinguishable from the Chinese version or the Iranian –  and likely worse since we’re currently actively helping the Iranians and the Chinese circumvent their government’s restrictions. Goddamned ironic, that, don’t you think?

Just like drugs, Americans want online content, and they are going to get it.

One way or the other. Legally or not.

Does that mean that I think online piracy isn’t a problem or that we shouldn’t do anything about it? No, of course not. As a creator myself of online content which is routinely pirated, I damned sure would like to see some protection. But SOPA isn’t it. SOPA is a hell of a lot more likely to result in the end of Stonekettle Station rather than its protection.

The simple fact of the matter is that the vast majority of Congress doesn’t understand how the internet actually works, just as they have no idea how the illegal drug trade works either.

There are a few, very few, elected officials in this country who have any idea whatsoever about what makes the internet the place that it is.  Politicians talk about freedom and innovation and free speech, but real freedom and innovation and unfettered free speech scares the ever living beejeebers out of them.  The chaotic uncontrolled untaxed dynamic of the internet is anathema to everything your typical governmental bureaucrat holds sacred.  This isn’t particularly surprising considering that over forty percent of the House is made up of people with law degrees, in the Senate it’s well over fifty percent. Most of the rest have business degrees of one flavor or another. There are a few doctors. There’s one nurse. There’s a distressingly large number with degrees in theology. And about thirty members of the House have no advanced education at all.

So far as I can determine, none of them have a degree in computer science, information technologies, or any computer/network related field.

Or any experience at all working in the IT field.

Or much experience in social networking since they usually pay staffers to do that sort of thing.  There’s no way to determine how many congressmen download music or shop online, or read blogs, or watch YouTube channels, but it is likely that number isn’t particularly high given the average age and lack of technological curiosity that pervades much of Congress.

Other than tweeting pictures of their junk to random woman, or hiring a rentboy to carry their bags on a trip to Cancun, or surfing for gay porn, it would appear on the face of things that the vast majority of lawmakers who are right now deciding how the rest of us will use the internet have no actual education or experience or expertise in it whatsoever.

So, no, it’s not particularly surprising that SOPA/PIPA has jumped the shark.

Of course, Congress didn’t actually write SOPA. Hollywood executives did. Recording industry executives did. And it shows.  SOPA and the Senate version, PIPA, are specifically designed to preserve a dying industry, to perpetuate a model of pre-internet monopolistic studio systems that made a few media moguls very, very rich, but didn’t do much at all for either the public or the creative folks who make the movies, sing the songs, write the stories, and paint the artwork.  This really isn’t about piracy at all, it’s about the death rattle of those very same media moguls.  Once giants of the media industry, now they are as wrinkled and pathetic as Hugh Hefner whining on about how the internet has degraded the porn industry.

Every time I see some thick-lipped studio exec in Armani talking about how he just wants to protect the rights of the poor artists I want to vomit.  On him.

SOPA and PIPA are about forcing people to buy buggy whips long after the world switched up to jetpacks.

Both versions of the bill are fundamentally flawed and demonstrate a profound lack of understanding of network architecture by lawmakers.

Start with the central idea behind both Acts:  putting a stop to online piracy.

Now, piracy, i.e. copyright violation and the theft of intellectual property, is already illegal in the United States. You can already go to jail for it, and people have.  SOPA doesn’t make piracy any more illegal.  The copyright laws of the United States as they exist right now are more than sufficient to address online piracy inside our own borders.  If a site within the legal jurisdiction of the United States is found to be engaged in illegal activity, be it content piracy or kiddie porn or terrorism, it can be shut down and its operators jailed just like any drug dealer in the real world. 

However, the nature of the internet is such that it ignores political and physical boundaries, and that’s what SOPA/PIPA was designed (poorly) to address.

See, the United States has no authority over sites that operate outside of its territorial borders (I know, shocking, right?) – the most infamous example currently is without doubt The Pirate Bay, a media sharing site based (probably) on servers located in a former NATO Cold War nuclear bunker somewhere in Northern Europe and run by a couple of Swedes.  The site hosts links and bit torrent files which allow users to share electronic media. Not surprisingly, the vast, vast majority of those files, more than three million of them, are pirated copies of popular movies, TV shows, music, games, and software.

Despite the fact that the site has been sued repeatedly by both American and foreign parties, and despite the fact that operators were found guilty of copyright infringement and online piracy and fined millions of dollars and given jail time, and despite the fact that the site was taken offline, blocked, and hacked, and despite the death of one of its founders, it’s still up and operating.  And thousands of Americans access it every single day to upload and download the latest episodes of their favorite TV shows, music files, movies, and game software.

SOPA and its even more retarded sibling, PIPA, were supposedly designed to address this. 

Not by taking down The Pirate Bay or other off-shore pirate sites, but blocking American access to them.

See, under SOPA, anybody, copyright holders or folks just claiming to be copyright holders could report a site for piracy.

Then the US government would have the authority to order search engines and internet providers to remove the names of those sites deemed piratical from their lookup tables. In other words, the domain name of the suspect site becomes invisible.   Understand something, the site itself doesn’t go away because the US doesn’t have the power or authority to make it go away, the only thing that changes is just your convenient access to it, i.e. it stops showing up in Google search results and DNS tables. 

There are many, many, many things wrong with this approach.  So many in fact, that it’s impossible to see all of the ramifications.  The more you pull the thread, the more idiotic it gets.

For starters, removing the offending site’s domain name from global DNS tables does absolutely nothing to block access to the site.  Domain names are simply easy ways for human beings to remember Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.  For example, the IP address of Stonekettle Station is 216.239.32.21, which tells internet routers that the data that makes up this website is physically located on a specific server somewhere in the bowels of a Google server-farm in Sunnyvale, California. When you type “www.Stonekettle.com” into your browser’s address bar, a DNS (Domain Name Service) server somewhere looks up the appropriate entry in the global address book and takes you to IP Address 216.239.32.21.

Here’s the thing, you can still get there even if the Domain Name is blocked, you just have to know the IP address of the site you want to visit.

What?

How will people find out the addresses of hidden sites if the easy names are blocked? Simple, the same way they do right now.  Exactly the same way your friend up above always seems to know how to find a drug dealer any damned time he needs a bag of weed. The web is full of hidden sites right now.  Addresses not indexed by the search engines.  Not in the DNS system. Hidden from the view of the average user, but there if you know where to look.  Ask any pedophile or any member of the Aryan Nation.

Blocking the offending site’s domain name does nothing except mildly inconvenience those who engage in illicit activity and it does absolutely nothing to stop piracy itself.

However, for those folks trying to gather information on piracy sites, such as reporters, bloggers, researchers, network security firms, copyright holders, law enforcement, and government agencies to name just a few of the obvious folks who might have legitimate need to search for pirate sites, blocking the domain name takes away the best tools they have, i.e. commercial search engines.

As Homer says on my pirated totally purchased in a store with real money copy of The Simpsons, Doh!

The road to hell might be paved with good intentions, but the traffic on that road is governed by the law of unintended consequences.

Blocking the domain names of illegal sites means that law enforcement and government agencies won’t be able to use standard, i.e. free, tools. Instead they will have to have special custom-built search engines to do their jobs and an infrastructure similar to Google’s.  Want to guess what that will cost the taxpayer?  Get in on the ground floor now and you likely stand to make billions.

How long do you think it will take before an entire black market arises to provide the exact same software to civilians for basically nothing? (Note, software like this exists now, if you know where to look). 

I’m going to make a prediction here, if this law passes and you feel the need to download the latest episodes of Glee illegally, ask any random 14-year old to help you find the secret invisible sites and I strongly suspect you’ll be watching your show within ten minutes. In HD. Without commercials. And 14-year olds work for soda and a bag of chips. Just saying.

Expect off-shore search engines that index blacked out sites to arise almost instantly.  Note that American laws cannot touch such sites, and they wouldn’t be illegal anyway, outside of the United States. Certain countries stand to make a tidy profit hosting such enterprises, North Korea or maybe Kazakhstan say.  Or, more likely what will happen is that Google, Yahoo, Ask, YouTube, and so on, will simply move their corporate headquarters off-shore.  I hear Trinidad & Tobago has a very favorable tax climate and some great beaches.  You’ve really got to admire the irony when a bunch of politicians who whine endlessly about government red tape and regulations that make America a shitty place to do business turn right around and dream up a law that will very likely drive our most forward leaning, profitable, and innovative companies either out of business or overseas.   Really, well done.

 

Here’s a funny question: how exactly would the copyright holder, or his lawyers, know if his material is being pirated, if he can’t see the pirate sites in search engine results? 

 

Yeah, you’re going to want to think about that for a minute or two, because it’s just that fucking stupid.

I’m a copyright holder, will I be issued a special search engine? Or allowed unblocked access to foreign sites? Or will the government steadfastly defend my copyrights along with the millions of other Americans who also hold the rights to their material?

Didn’t think of that, did you?

So, where does that leave us? 

I’ll tell you where, nowhere.

Just like the war on drugs. 

So, we’ll have to go a step further and actually block the IP addresses.  That’s a whole different ballgame altogether.  See, to block actual IP addresses, you have do what China does, what Iran does, you have to intercept and analyze every single bit of web traffic. That’s right.  Basically you can throw the 4^th Amendment right out the window, because every single packet sent from your computer will have to be searched, based on the assumption of guilt without any proof whatsoever that you might, just possibly, be visiting a proscribed site.   There are a couple of ways to do this without a fundamental trillion dollar overhaul of every internet device in the world:  a) you can force each ISP to monitor all traffic from their customers, or b) you can route all internet traffic through a central hub and monitor that yourself – kind of how a company implements gateway based nannyware, only on a massive national scale.

Option a) would turn your internet service provider into an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, and would require that the ISP be subsidized by the same organization because they would need to install large amounts of very expensive equipment and software and hire a whole bunch of tech savvy folks. Obviously each ISP would have to be standardized and any changes to their hardware and software, i.e. their service, would have to be approved by the government. So much for competition and innovation. Also, given the nature of both people and businesses, I’d expect immediate corruption, i.e. unscrupulous ISP’s providing uncensored access for a certain fee that somehow doesn’t end up on the company’s account sheet.  So, then the ISPs will have to be policed. Who’s going to do that? And how much do you think it will cost?  And likely that would result in unlicensed pirate ISPs, tapping into the internet undetected. So we’d have to hunt those. And so on.  We’re going to need a whole new, very large, law enforcement agency.

Then there’s Option b), which would require all internet data to be routed through choke points, just like in China and Iran.  The enormous and exponentially growing volume of internet traffic will require vast, vast, vast resources on a scale never implemented before - for comparison, imagine if you had to monitor the origin, position, speed, contents, and destination of every single vehicle on every road in America every second of every day – times about, oh, a billion.  I would expect that wouldn’t be cheap, even if it wasn’t being done by a defense contractor (because who else do you think would be doing it? Seriously?).  Also, given my experience in similar architectures in a much smaller setting, i.e. secure military networks, I wouldn’t expect your surfing experience to be anything but horribly slow, painful, and fraught with massive amounts of fail.  Just the kinds of things that make innovation and web-based business suffer massive failure and screaming death.  All of which is fine, if you like living in 1970.

One other note, also from my military experience, one of the pillars of information warfare is physical destruction. Choke points are points of vulnerability.  Route everything through a few choke points, and you give an enemy a vastly simplified target set should he decide to take down your network.  Right now, no single physical strike could take down a significant fraction of the internet, route everything through a single point and that is no longer true. A fire, a lightning strike, an earthquake, a flood, terrorism, and no more internet in America.  Of course, the rest of the world would go on while we devolved into the stone age.  Imagine the impact on the economy, but I digress.

Those are some ramifications of this idiotic law, there are many, many more.

And of course, we really couldn’t implement either Option a) or b).  Not that we wouldn’t try. And not that we wouldn’t happily create the same kind of massive, bloated, ineffectual monstrosity that is the current war on drugs.

Here’s a few more things to think about:

SOPA/PIPA would require that sites accused of copyright infringement be immediately shut down, not that content in question be removed, that the site itself be shut down.  Note that SOPA/PIPA doesn’t require those accusations to be proven true.  The copyright holder, or anybody purporting to be a copyright holder, lodges a complaint and the site host would be required by law to shut down the site while the site operator appeals – if the site operator can afford to appeal, which somebody like me probably wouldn’t.   Don’t like what I have to say here on Stonekettle Station? All you have to do is accuse me of stealing your ideas, and Google will have to shut me down (I’m hosted through Google’s Blogger service). 

What you’re looking at here is nothing short of a return to Napoleonic Law, i.e. the accused is assumed to be guilty unless he can afford to prove his innocence. 

Now, tell me that won’t be abused. 

You’re a politician running for president say, and your SuperPAC is running attack ads against your rival in South Carolina and using clips of his speeches.  Those speeches are copyrighted material – or could be, easily.  See where this is going? Politicians would use this to silence critics and rivals. So would business. So would any jerk attempting to settle a score.  Tell me that Rupert Murdoch wouldn’t use this power to shut down anybody who criticizes his media empire, go on, make me laugh.  Needless to say, Murdock is one of the SOPA’s biggest fans.  Think about that.  SOPA/PIPA wants to protect copyright holders at the expense of one of the most sacred rights we Americans have, the right to free speech.  

I know, I know, sounds extreme doesn’t it? Sounds Alarmist. 

Yeah, look at the political climate in this country, look at the number of frivolous lawsuits in this country, and tell me again why it wouldn’t happen.  It will, and it will destroy the internet you are looking at right now.  How many irrational trolls do I get here on a daily basis? How much hate mail?  I’ve lost track.  Just one, just one, of those angry unbalanced goofs would have to make a complaint, and Stonekettle Station goes dark. Ditto YouTube. Ditto Boing Boing. Ditto everything else.

Here’s something I bet those self same trolls didn’t think of: a provision in SOPA makes IP maskers illegal.

Heh heh. Didn’t know that, did you?

SOPA/PIPA prohibit the use of any technologies that are used to interfere with the implementation of monitoring and/or the blacklist.  So, any anonymity tool used to mask IP addresses or hide the routing path between your computer and the website you’re viewing becomes illegal.  Tools like this are used by trolls to leave nasty comments here without revealing who they really are, or to get around spam and comment blockers.  IP blockers are also used by perverts and criminals to download kiddie porn and conduct other illegal activities, but IP anonymizers like Tor, for example are also used by groups worldwide to speak out against corruption, genocide, oppression, and repressive regimes.  IP Anonymizers are used by whistleblowers right here in the United States.  If SOPA/PIPA goes through, all those sources of information, the information coming out of Iran and North Korea and Syria and from within our own government will go away, because without the ability to remain anonymous who the hell would risk it?

The simple depressing truth is this: SOPA won’t work. 

It just won’t.  It can’t. It absolutely will not stop or reduce online piracy in any way whatsoever and may in fact increase it by forcing it under the radar of basic search tools and law enforcement. SOPA/PIPA cannot work. Not without a complete and total radical redesign of the internet itself at a fundamental level, a redesign that would create a communication network counter to every basic freedom the United States of America was founded on. 

Not that any of that would stop the government from trying.

Allow SOPA/PIPA to pass and what you’ll get is yet another massive governmental bureaucracy, another “war on (drugs, poverty, debt, etc),” another Czar, another  endless giant money sucking black hole that does absolutely nothing whatsoever in any way to fix the problem it was created to address.  We’ll shut down websites and kill business and innovation, we’ll jail people, we’ll fill the dockets with endless petitions and silly minor court cases, and meanwhile, online piracy will be completely unaffected.

As I write this, it appears that the online protests by Google, Wikipedia, Boing Boing, and other internet giants have finally gotten through to the politicians.  But you need to understand that the totalitarian sons of bitches backing this abomination aren’t going to go down without a fight.  You need to write your congressman, you need to write your senator, and you need to voice your opposition to this UnAmerican nonsense in the strongest possible terms.

And you need to keep doing it until Congress listens.

The truly sad part about the whole thing is this: There is obviously, obviously, a massive insatiable legitimate market for online media.  If the recording industry and the movie makers would stop clinging to an outdated studio based concept that only benefits a tiny handful of selfish greedy backward looking bastards and got into the modern internet market whole hog themselves, the issue of online piracy would become moot. And we’d all get rich doing it. But it would take innovation on their part. It would take dropping woefully outdated business models.  It would take acceptance of the fact that artists are going to finally get much greater control of their own work and not be routinely bent over the barrel by studio and network executives.  It would take an understanding that people are sick and damned tired of having to wait for media to be released weeks and months and sometimes years after it first débuts. It going to take an understanding that people simply will not put up with bullshit like DRM. People want to enjoy media their own way, not how some studio exec thinks they should enjoy it.

It’s going to take understanding of this simple fact: People want online media, and, just like drugs, they will get it. 

One way or the other.

Again, don’t get me wrong.  Piracy is wrong.  And we need to do something about it. But SOPA is most emphatically not the way to go about it.  SOPA was designed to protect a handful of very rich people in a dying industry. It most certainly wasn’t designed with your best interests in mind and it certainly wasn’t designed to protect artists, innovators, or the folks who actually make the internet the vital future core of our economy and I say that as not only somebody who enjoys the internet as it exists right now, but as an artist, a writer, a blogger, and one of those people who create content.

SOPA and PIPA are bad, bad ideas. They are fundamentally contrary to the core concepts of liberty and justice we Americans hold dear.

Anybody who believes otherwise is high.

Write your congressman.

Write your senator.

Do it now.

Freedom Fried

What do you call a man who speaks multiple languages?

A polyglot.

What do you call a man who speaks two languages?

Bilingual.

What do you call a man who only speaks one language – and poorly at that?

An American.

 

Goddamned right. There’s only one language worth knowing and that’s English American.

Speak it loud, speak it proud.

Speak it really slowly so that that natives will understand.

Turns out that Mitt Romney speaks French.

Can you believe it?

French.

Of all the languages that are not the biblically musical angelic language of Heaven, i.e. English American, Romney chose French. The language of beret wearing socialist surrender monkeys. The Romans who killed Jesus? They were speaking French, that’s a fact and you can look it up on the internet. While you’re at it, look up French in the dictionary, there’s a picture of Adolf Hitler French kissing Chairman Mao.  It’s totally true.

And Mittens croaks like a froggy Frog eating a little gay croissant.

French is probably the language of the Anti-Christ himself – well when he’s not speaking Chinese that is. 

French!

See, it turns out that during his college years back in the socialist hippy 60’s, Mitt Romney spent two years in France as a Mormon Missionary. Two years! And get this, instead of proudly wearing a huge cowboy hat and a Chinese made T-shirt with a picture of US Marines eating actual French babies covered in ketchup, and instead of demanding in a really loud voice that all Frenchmen address him in God’s English American while serving extra double bacon cheeseburgers as is the inalienable right of all Americans abroad, Mitt actually learned French and actually conversed with Frenchy French people in French! 

Probably while eating French Toast with a side of French Fries dipped in French Dressing while wearing a French Tickler!

What real American would do such a thing?

And would you really want him in the White House?

I mean, honestly, what kind of American President would speak French?

Besides George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, William Henry Harrison, Teddy Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt.  Turns out Ben Franklin spoke French too, he wasn’t the president, but his face is on our money so it’s pretty much the same exact thing.  Ok, so besides those anti-American Frenchy-loving socialist traitors, what kind of President would speak French?  Did Reagan speak French? I don’t think so because Ronald Reagan was as American as the Statue of Liberty! You damned right he was.  Did George W. Bush speak French? Hell, he could barely speak English American (Texan being his native tongue), but darn it he tried and that’s what matters.

You know who else speaks French?

Liberals!

That’s right, filthy America-hating socialist Nazi moderate limp-wristed wussy liberals speak French:

And he speaks French too…

Mitt couldn’t have a couple of bastard children out of wedlock with his undocumented nanny, or a couple of extramarital affairs, or a history of ethics violations, or a conviction for snorting cocaine out of a gay prostitute’s shaved ass crack in a public restroom, or claimed a personal endorsement from Jedi Jebus, or have put out a bunch of racist and bigoted newsletters, or consulted for the very organizations what destroyed our economy, or even have a couple of pictures from his college days sitting on a Kegerator smoking a doobie and wearing a Party Naked T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off like a real patriotic conservative American hero of Patriotic America. Mitt hasn’t even molested one Congressional Page! Oh, no. No, Mitt has to go and learn French.

Why, I bet he listens to the Dixie Chicks!

Mitt Romney is the kind of guy who would have an autographed poster of Anthony Weiner tacked up on the wall in his garage!

Oh you think that’s going too far, do you?  He speaks French! French! He’s bilingual! And bilingual sounds a lot like bisexual! Which is only about one slobbery French man kiss away from just being out and out a flaming rainbow colored sparkly homosexual!

Bilingual, sounds a lot like two-faced to me.

He speaks French, just like John Kerry!  John friggin’ Kerry. What’s next? Are we going to find out Romney was awarded a Silver Star and a couple of Purple Hearts? Who the hell would want a guy like that as President.  Honestly, you’re talking about somebody that isn’t even smart enough to arrange something as simple as a draft deferment for patriotic conservatism. Now, how would a Commander in Chief like that have the fortitude to be able to send other people’s kids off to die in a foreign land? Seriously. Think about it.

In the name of Fulminous Angry Bearded Capitalist Jesus, what else is a man like Mittens capable of?

Why, he might even know math!

Imagine a President who believes in that science crap!  Why he might believe that the earth is more than 6000 years old! You ever talk to somebody who knows math and science and stuff?  First thing they do is start in with all that totally unsupported gibberish about how it would have been impossible for Noah to have brontosaurs on the Ark while the Deluge was creating the Grand Canyon. They’ve got all those equations and radioactive decay things and fossils and stuff  that supposedly shows that the Earth isn’t the center of the universe like it says in the Bible.  People like this think they’re smart because they know math, but they don’t even know what the word “theory” means! Honestly, people like this would believe anything. Why, why what if Mitt Romney believes in Global Climate Change?  Holy Mackerel!

I heard that Romney once gave a homeless illegal alien a sandwich!

That’s right. Shocking, I know. Just gave a hobo a sandwich. Didn’t make him earn it. Didn’t tell him to get a job and stop dragging down America. Didn’t tell him to go back to Mexico.  Didn’t force the man into indentured servitude on his family’s Texas ranch where the filthy bum could learn about American capitalism from the example of his betters.  No, just gave the man a big old socialist sandwich. Then, of course, he probably gave the man healthcare too! And a voucher for a free abortion! 

Honestly, where does this end?

He speaks French, there’s no telling where that leads – honestly what if it turns out Romney believes that the Constitution applies to everybody, even gay people?

 

French is the gateway drug to liberalism, Folks, mark my words!

 

If Romney was a real Conservative, he’d learn to speak a good capitalist language.

Like German.

 

Update:

Oh Sweet Baby Peas!

And you thought I was crazy.

Instead, it turns out that I am most insightful blogger on the net. 

Look here, it’s Romneism! Romney is redistributing the wealth!  Just out and out socialism, right there. Is this what we can expect from a Romney presidency?

Not on my watch, folks, not on my watch.

 

 

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   I’m Stonekettle Station, and I totally approve this message.

And So It Begins. Again.

And we’re off and running.

Well, perhaps “running” is the wrong word.

More like “careening wildly downhill while waving little pipe-stem arms in the air and screaming manically.”

Three hundred and fifty million Americans, and these chuckleheads are the choices?

Seriously?

I am, of course, talking about the Iowa Republican Caucus last night.

I didn’t have high hopes for this show in the first place, and in that regard it lived up to those expectations perfectly.  As the pilot episode for the upcoming reality TV series, America’s Dumbest Electorate 2012, there was nothing original.  Same predictable plot, same unlikable characters, same humorless formula, same tired laugh track, same lame jokes, same lowbrow studio audience. As I said on Facebook last night, it is during events like this where I really miss the slapstick antics of Herman Cain, because if ever there was a TV show that needed some gratuitous nudity, ribald shenanigans, and crass sexual innuendo it is certainly this one.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of jiggling boobs and ass grabbing on TV last night, but unfortunately not the kind to keep your eyes on the screen. 

The show could have used a car chase and some Kung Fu. 

And a monkey in a little silver vest playing a harmonica or a clever Jack Russell terrier riding a unicycle.

Maybe both.

The comedian Paul Rodriguez used to do this bit about how war was God’s way of teaching us geography.

…two week ago I didn’t even know what a Kuwait was! I thought it was like a fruit from New Zealand!

I think he might have been on to something.  It’s entirely possible that presidential primaries exist solely in order to teach us where the silly people live. By the time it’s over there are nice color coded charts that map out the places I should probably avoid for the next four years (Coincidently enough, those charts often tend to correspond to a geographic plot of this blog’s readership. For example, I don’t have a lot of fans in Iowa. Go figure. Maybe I should write about corn more. Of course, perversely that doesn’t explain why a significant fraction of my readership apparently resides in Texas.  I can only assume those folks are the secret underground resistance movement. Either that or they are fuming and plotting my untimely demise).  It sure would be nice if you could print those charts out in handy wallet size.

Now, Standard & Poor’s grades each state according to its financial viability. Here at Stonekettle Station we perform a similar service, i.e. we rank each state’s level of douchebaggery according to the SFMS – i.e. the Speculative Fiction Movie Scale (Battlefield Earth to The Princess Bride) – and last night I was forced to officially downgrade Iowa from The Postman to Pluto Nash.  I’m sorry to take away the dubious balding chick-movie honor of your Costner and levy a Murphy on you, Iowa, but it’s not like you haven’t been asking for it. Keep this up, and I’ll be forced to suspend your Shatner too (props if you catch all the references in that. You’re also a complete nerd).

I know, I know.  Pretty severe.  Be glad I didn’t downgrade Iowa all the way to Bicentennial Man, because I could have.

No, it’s not because Iowa republicans exercised their democratic right to vote for whichever idiot they chose, it’s because of the idiotic reasons they gave for voting for said idiots.

In the hour before voting started, I heard a dozen interviews with Iowans who still had no idea who they were going to vote for. They’d done no research. They had no idea of each candidate’s position. The only thing they were sure of was that they hated Obama and the country was going down the crapper.  After it was over,  and Romney, Santorum, and Paul were declared The Winner, The Other Winner, and third, respectively, the interviews seemed to come in three basic flavors of Kool-Aid:

a) “Well, I  really really really really really dislike Romney, I really like [Gingrich, Perry, Bachmann, Joker From Batman], but I voted for Romney because I hope he can beat Barack Obama even though I don’t really think he can.”  The logic apparently being, I’d rather have a Republican I don’t like and with whom I disagree and who I think belongs to some weirdo non-Christian cult in the White House than a Democrat I don’t like and with whom I disagree and who I think belongs to some weirdo non-Christian cult even though I consider Romney a slimy progressive elitist who probably can’t win anyway because the only thing that matters in the whole world is that I hate Obama.  Go team.

b) “Well, I really really really really really dislike Romney, so I voted for this guy Sanitarium, Sanitation, Sarsaparilla,  Santorum.  I don’t really know anything about him, but, um, well, um, Mormon! Cult! Babies! America! And I heard that he loves the Jesus and hates the homos. Good enough.”  The logic apparently being: no way in hell he’s going to beat Obama, but hey at least he’s not Romney. He’s also Catholic and not Gringrich, or a woman, or from Texas. Go Jebus.

c) “RON PAUL 2012!”  The logic being, RON PAUL 2012! Frankly, I just don’t understand the infatuation with this guy.  He’s 76 years old and apparently doesn’t understand how the internet works – but about a quarter of Iowans think it would be spiffy if he was sitting in the big chair helming the most technologically advanced economy in the world. He talks up the whole personal responsibility thing, but won’t take personal responsibility for newsletters and tweets issued under his own name.  They hate Obama, but embrace a spoiler whose only real position is to siphon off half the independents and about twenty percent of disgruntled conservatives. Go Ross Perot.

Look, I’m not saying it was all bad. Every show has its high points.  Hell, even X-Men Origins: Wolverine had its moments (none of which involved Hugh Jackman, but still).

Michele Bachmann got voted off the island. I’d consider that worth the price of admission alone.  Her I’m-a-real-person speech last night after it was announced that the only candidate she’d managed to beat was the one that didn’t actually show up for the caucus was just plain hilarious. I’m a real person? Really Michele, you’re a real live person? So are gay people. So are non-Christians. So are liberals. So are the rest of us. Screw you, I hope you choke on your defeat. Go somewhere else and cry, you nasty selfish bitch.  Don’t let the door hit you in your skinny white ass on the way out.

Edit: You know, on second thought, Iowa’s rejection of Bachmann changes things.  I’m going to bump you back up to The Search For Spock.  You’re welcome.

Gingrich was doing what he considers humility.  Before the vote, when it was already apparent that he hadn’t been able to bullshit his way into Evangelical hearts despite a personal endorsement from God, he started lining up his excuses. It’s never Newt’s fault.  “It's probably that I'm too reasonable," Gingrich said. "And I should've responded to the negative ads sooner."  I’m too reasonable?  That’s why I lost. I’m too reasonable.  I fooled around on two wives because I loved America too much. Jesus Haploid Christ, and he calls Obama arrogant. What a pair of stones this guy has. I’m too reasonable.  It’s not fair. Romney ran attack ads. Boo hoo.  Newt seems to forget he’s the guy that invented this form of political campaign.  He stormed out of Iowa headed East, you won’t have Newt to kick around any more! If only that were true.

So far, Pray For Rain Perry’s hanging in there like a chad on a Florida punch ballot, but man if he can’t win in Jesus’ home state of Iowa, he doesn’t have much of a chance in New Hampshire. Probably why he decided to skip it altogether and head for South Carolina.  Frankly, if I was a South Carolinian, I think I’d be insulted by the insinuation.

 

Here’s the thing, normally predicting the outcome of primaries this far out is a sucker bet – Obama himself is a pretty good example of that.  But, I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that the Santorum Surge is a flash in the pan. Romney is going to win New Hampshire.  And he’s going to win pretty much everywhere else too. Romney’s going to be this year’s Republican candidate.  Bet on it.  And he’ll most likely name Marco Rubio as his running mate because even if he does manage to secure the nomination he’s a weak, weak candidate at best – not even as well liked by Republicans as John McCain was.  The only thing he’s got going for him is that Conservatives hate Obama.  Romney had better not make the same Veep mistake McCain did.

In the end, Romney beat Santorum in Iowa by a total of eight votes.

Eight.

And he only got that because there weren’t any better choices.

 

It’s going to be a long, long year.

I just hope I don’t have to downgrade the entire country to Waterworld come November.

2011 in Review

And so here we are again.

On the eve of yet another shiny new year in this, the glorious future.

Is it just me?

Or was 2011 some kind of a disappointing year?

I mean, come on, it was 2011. It’s supposed to be the future.  All bright and shiny and futurey smelling.

Sure, there were some good things. 

For example, we’re now more than a decade into the zippy George Jetson 21st Century and there still aren’t any flying cars, for which as I’ve mentioned before I am eternally grateful.  Flying cars. Bad idea. So good on on Detroit for not inventing any yet. 

But, still, the first year of the second decade of the 21st Century was, well, lame.

Frankly, I expected more.

Turns out Obama isn’t an alien reptile terminator in a rubber human suit from some Future Liberal Hell of Evil sent into our past so that he could be born in Africa and then smuggled into the United States to renounce his citizenship so that he could then study abroad in a school full of Muslims which would somehow then facilitate his sneaking back into the US to become President in order to destroy Capitalist Jesus with his Socialist-Darwin White-Baby Abortion Ray powered by the sparkly rainbow emissions of same-sex marriage and the white-hot lies told by global climate change scientists (Well sure, when you say it all together like that it is a seductively persuasive argument).   Heck, as it turns out, he’s not even really black.  As conspiracies go, the sullen whimpering end of Birtherism turned out to be pretty damned disappointing – though admittedly the mascot was fairly entertaining in a wild-eyed, crazy-hair sort of way. Wait, am I thinking of Orly Taitz or Donald Trump? Man, can you imagine what the offspring of such an unholy union would be like? Actually, no need to imagine, that question answered itself – and seriously, look at the picture, Dom Deluise in drag channeling Glenn Beck, or is it just me? Just when you think it couldn’t get any sillier.

Those Swiss bastards at CERN turned on the Evil Large Hadron Collider of Mega Death and ran that sucker up to full power.  Whoopie Tee friggin doo. My unbalanced washing machine was more exciting. No earth destroying black holes. No anti-matter explosion that cracked open the crust of the planet.  For a minute it looked like there might be some kind of faster than light evil beam of evil, but it turned out to be just your standard stream of high energy exotic particles. Ho hum. Just cutting edge physics, insights into the very fabric of the universe, nothing to see here, move along. Not even a giant lightening-wreathed rift in space-time wrenching open a glowing portal that allowed monstrous blood swilling Hell-demons to cross into our world from an alternate Evil Dimension of Evil. Nothing. It didn’t even affect cell phone reception. No God Particle, no Son of God Particle, not even a Minor Deity From An Obscure Cult Particle. Apparently all that happened was some “invisible” particles that cost a lot of money and only physicists can see went whooshing around in a big circle. Not even one evil Hell-demon. Woooo. Exciting.

The much ballyhooed Rapture turned out to be just as big of letdown as the End of Days always turns out to be. Always.  Two thousand years they’ve been telling us Jesus is coming back Real Soon Now and, man, this time he’s pissed. Two thousand goddamned years, folks. You’d think they’d be right at least once just out of random chance. But they’ve been right exactly never. I mean, damn, the Cleveland Indians have a better win/loss record. They’ve predicted the Second Coming what? A hundred, two hundred, five hundred times? Hell, I don’t know, I’ve lost track of how many times Jesus was coming over, but then he stood us up, again – you’d think people would start dating somebody else. But no. This time, man, this time for certain. Read your Revelation, Dude, totally for sure this time. Bible Math don’t lie, Sinner.  Hell, they even had two shots at it this year. What happened? Nothing.  Not one Rapture Balloon. I didn’t even get in any skeet shooting.  The Rapture sucked big hairy donkey balls. Again.

They Repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Coincidently enough, that was the last New Year’s Eve post.  It’s now okay to be totally gay in uniform. And what happened? Anarchy! Chaos! Insanity! Sparkly queer carnage in the streets! Babies fell screaming from the fiery orange sky like taut little water balloons filled with chunky spaghetti sauce! War! Terrorism! The hideous undead rising ravenous from their moldy graves to lick tomato sauce from the sidewalks! What? What’s that you say? Oh. Right. Heh, sorry, I get excited. My mistake, I was thinking of the Iowa Republican Caucus. So, DADT. Gone. Gays serving openly in uniform. Two hot gay queer homosexual lesbians in uniform shamelessly kissing on the pier upon return from extended combat deployment. It was on the national news. Turns out lesbians are just like normal people. And they like to kiss. And now I need a cold shower. And what? Right. Nothing. No sparkly carnage. No exploding babies. No rampaging Hell-demons. Talk about your basic letdown. It was so gay.

They got Osama. Blam! Bullet in the brain pan. US Navy SEALs dropped out of the sky like winged death incarnate and gave him a little double-tap fuck you from America.  Turns out he wasn’t twelve feet tall.  He couldn’t shoot lightening bolts and killer bees from his dagger-like fingers.  He wasn’t living in a cave in Tora Bora making nuclear bombs out of goat skin and coconuts like the Taliban version of the Professor from Gilligan’s Island.  He wasn’t cranking out blueberry Slurpees as the night manager at a 7/11 in Palm Springs either.  He was just some unwashed asshole living like a mange-ridden rat trapped in a box.  The accounting was a long time coming, but when the cold-eyed Navy snake-eaters kicked in the door of his bedroom he didn’t go out fighting – instead he cowered behind his wife like the frightened little rat he always was.  In the end, the US Navy dumped his dead ass into the sea along with the rest of the day’s garbage.  Adios, Stinky, say hi to the fishes.

The war in Iraqi is over. At least for America.  The president promised that our troops would be home for Christmas. And they are. Damn that Obama for keeping his word.  As most of you likely know, Iraq is personal to me. My opinion on the end of the conflict is here.  By setting a date for withdrawal, Obama was supposedly setting us up for our own Dien Bien Phu.  American troops were going to get slaughtered on their way out. Jesus Haploid Christ! You can’t set a date!  Why, Evil Insurgents of Evil, twelve feet tall and shooting killer bees from their eyes, will lay ambush to our convoys on the road to Kuwait!  Except, of course, nothing happened.  We handed over the keys, showed them where the circuit breakers were located and reminded them to water the plants.  Then drove to the airport. Yawn. No ambush. No killer bees. No journalists asking Hairy Perry, the Military Genius of Texas, how come his dire end-of-the-world (oh noes!) predictions on the Iraqi withdrawal were exactly as accurate as Harold Camping’s Rapture Launch Date – this despite Perry’s vast, vast military experience as a junior Air Force reserve C-130 cargo plane pilot with no combat experience or knowledge of the situation on the ground.  Oh well, there’ll be another war, I’m sure conservatives will get that one right. Practice makes perfect.

Hell, it was a bad year for dictators everywhere, wasn’t it?  Moammar Gadhafi died in a drainpipe, again just like a sewer rat in a trap.  After forty years of raping the Libyans, he ended up with a stick shoved up his own ass.  Really can’t say that I blame the Libyans for getting some violent payback – half a century of pent up rage, Gadhafi was lucky he took a bullet in the head before he got violated with a telephone pole, instead of the other way around. Not that it bothers me either way.  Again, Gadhafi was personal to me and I won’t miss him.  Of course, it happened on Obama’s watch and he didn’t fuck it up, so it only took about five minutes for the crazies to come out of the woodwork.  That Obama, how could he betray our friend Moammar like that? Oh noes! Now Libya will become Muslim! And an Evil Terrorist State of Evil! Muslim Brotherhood! Ook! Ook! Libyans will shoot Mohammad-Shaped Killer Bees from the their eyes! Oh noes!  Egypt. Nigeria. Syria. The Arab Spring is breaking out all over, and what in the hell is the deal with that? Why, it’s like those filthy Muslims want liberty and freedom too. But, of course, that can’t be right – they couldn’t be just like us! That’s preposterous! Besides, they wouldn’t know what to do with a democracy if they had one.  No, no, better they live under a dictator. Makes you wonder what the civilized countries thought back, oh, about two and half centuries ago when the filthy American colonists had their own little spring – Good Lord! Those damned uncouth peasants! How will they live without a king? What if the Capitalist Brotherhood takes over? Next thing you know, they’ll be over here demanding that we recognize their crappy lice infested country, spreading their filthy democracy. Like they’ll ever amount to anything.  Quick, turn out the lights and let’s pretend  we’re not home!  The one bright spot is that it looks like Vladimir Putin will be Czar for life of Russia, so at least the conservatives still have one dictator they can cozy up to. Maybe they can get him to build a wall across Germany if they ask really nice.  Question: if conservatives think dictators are awesome and they think Obama is a dictator, why then don’t they… oh, you know, fuck it. Never mind.

 

 

Yep, 2011 was pretty lame alright.

No Armageddon. No Zombie Apocalypse. No Hell-demons. No Anti-Christ.  No Rapture, Rupture, or Raptors.  War in Iraq over. Terrorists dead. Dictators toppled.  Economy improving.  Jobs slowly coming back.  Housing market finally on the upswing.   Steve Jobs died, but the iPad II was released. We got Super-8 and The Debt in theaters, A Game of Thrones on HBO, and The Walking Dead and Terra Nova on TV. Justin Bieber did minimal damage. Astronomers discovered about a billizion new planets orbiting other stars and at least one of them is bound to harbor some kind of weird alien Hell-Demons who thirst for the blood of our babies.  We got a good look at Vesta, which is cool because part of the novel I’m writing (intermittently) is set thereabouts.  NASA launched Curiosity towards Mars where it will join Spirit and Opportunity – still functioning years after they should have died – and with any luck we’ll find weird alien Hell-demons in our own backyard, or fossilized evidence that little hell-bacteriums once existed on our red neighbor.  Facebook turned the sparkly fair dust of the internet into billions of dollars in the real world and made Mark Zuckerberg fabulously wealthy.  Americans are still infatuated with the talentless antics of the Kardashian Sisters – and in that regard perhaps the elusive Hell-demons do walk among us after all.

No, 2011, wasn’t terrible per se, but I’m hoping we can do better in 2012. 

 

I’ll have some suggestions on this very subject tomorrow, they may involve Hell-demons.

In the meantime, here’s hoping that 2012 treats you all better than 2011. 

And remember, no flying cars. Ever.

Things That Chap My Ass About Christmas

It’s Socialist.

Really, think about it for a minute.

Christmas is just a big old pile of steaming liberalism.

Take this guy, Santa Claus.

Santa was never elected, he apparently just took over the whole process when nobody was looking.

He wears a red suit. Duh.

Claus sounds a lot like Claws. And a claw looks a lot like a sickle, which as everybody knows is the symbol of communism.  He’s got the population under continuous surveillance, and he keeps lists of people based on some arbitrary socialist measure of good and bad.  People stand in line to see him, in fact there are queues everywhere during the Christmas season – and standing in line is one of the defining pillars of socialism.

Then there’s the whole gift thing. He apparently sneaks into your house at night - without a warrant or probable cause or any kind of Constitutional controls, I mean you don’t need to be sent to a reeducation camp to see this do you?  And he leaves presents for the “good” kids based on some kind of arcane request system – which to me sounds a heck of a lot like “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” – and the presents are made in some kind of collective factory run by an oppressed ethnic workforce.  And the “bad” kids? They get a lump of coal – the very symbol of the lumpenproletariat – it’s like he’s just rubbing your face in it, isn’t it?

Next there’s the whole green vehicle thing. Santa’s sleigh runs on hay and grain like something Ed Bagley Jr. would drive to his weekly party meetings at the Al Gore I Hate America Sustainable Headquarters. And reindeer? Where do they come from? Right, exactly, Russia!

And this entire political apparatus is propped up on the backs of the workers, who are expected to support the power structure with the fruits of their labor – i.e. they are forced to give up a portion of their grain and dairy production in the form of cookies and milk – in support of the entire society. What’s next, socialized healthcare? My God, before you know it, we’ll be living in Canada!

You have only to look around, shake off the shackles of oppression, to see it:

Music: Heroic music has long been a tool of the power elite.  Designed to lull the masses into a malleable state of submission through endless repetition.  Two months of Joan Jett’s Little Drummer Boy and Dogs Barking Jingle Bells will turn all but staunchest anarchist into a pudding-brained drone.  People will band together in collectives and go door to door spreading the propaganda of socialism through the vehicle of “Christmas carols.”  The more easily influenced will actually leave their homes and join the mob of carolers like Bolshevik peasants joining the October Revolution. 

And speaking of the the Mob: Have you been in the stores during the holiday season?  The shelves are stripped bare by crazed crowds driven to a frenzy by the sounds of Carol of the Bells blaring from every speaker in the nation.  Let the rumor spread that Wal-Mart might have a new shipment in from the state factories and mile long lines form almost instantly. What is it? Zhu-Zhu Hamsters? Fisher-Price’s Elmo Live Encore? Toilet Paper? Shoes? Cabbages? We don’t care! Get in line!  Wait, what’s that? black market Twilight Barbies sold from the back of a nondescript truck? I’ll take two, Comrade!

The Secret Police: If mind numbing music wasn’t enough, while you’re standing in line for hours on end you get to listen to the endless ringing of little bells. It’s the Salvation Army, Santa’s intelligence gathering arm. They’re everywhere, on every corner, in every store, always watching like the pervasive surveillance system they are.  Shaking you down, demanding a cut, all in order to “redistributing the wealth.” They wear red jackets for crying out loud, could it be more obvious?

Socialist Art: The symbols of this Socialist Season are everywhere. Armies of giant inflatable Frosty The Snowmen and Santas dominate the landscape like those concrete statues of Marx and Lenin that once filled the squares of Moscow.  Yesterday I saw a pickup truck that had its “Truck Nutz” replaced with two large red mirrored balls and a garland of tinsel – my friends, when the state comes for your testicles, you’re living under the jackbooted heel of communism.

Propaganda: The socialists are piping their message directly into the minds of our children. The airwaves are filled with TV specials like that one with the Island of Misfit toys, a not so subtle reference to Gulags and the fate of those who don’t fit in. Who can fail to see the subliminal message in the final climatic battle scene when the imperialists subvert The People’s Heroic Heat Miser into a decadent display of dancing?  Or how about when that communist Charlie Brown attempts to convince the gang that his miserable substandard shrub is really a beautiful Christmas tree? For the love of the Almighty Dollar, people, open your eyes!

Fruitcake.  Yes, I know, you were wondering where the hammer in the “hammer and sickle” was.  Look no further than this abomination.  When the revolution comes, it will be fruitcake that smashes the windows and staves in the head of the free man, mark my words.

And finally:

Coincidence?  Not bloody likely, folks, not bloody likely.

An Open Letter To The Lady In the Center Lane

Dear fellow driver,

Question:

What’s it going to take?

No, seriously, how bad does it have to be?

Just how outright silly stupid dangerous do things have to get before you put down your cell phone and pay attention to the road?

I left Anchorage last evening, headed for the Valley on the Glenn Highway. 

I suppose that requires some additional description for those of you who don’t, in fact, live in South Central Alaska.  See, it was about 4 PM, the sun had set and the sky was turning pitch dark.  It was snowing. No, strike that, it was snowing like a bitch with intermittent whiteout conditions driven by strong winds along the highway. In fact, it had been snowing all day in your standard issue Alaskan blizzard. The road itself was coated in an uneven, two to three inch thick, layer of packed snow interspersed between patches of black ice – because apparently ADOT no longer feels the need to actually get off their fat asses and do the job we pay them for, i.e. clearing the damned roads and putting down some sand.   It was rush hour and despite the horrible conditions, homeward bound commuters were moving along between fifty and sixty miles per hour, which of course, caused even more blowing snow and reduced visibility even further.

Then there was you.

You were doing about thirty in the middle lane, drifting back and forth from side to side.

Cars were piled up behind you for a hundred yards. 

Angry and frustrated drivers were recklessly swerving into both the inner and outer lanes trying to avoid the backup you were causing. 

As I came up the inner lane, cautiously watching out for drivers dodging out from behind you and in front of me while fishtailing on the icy roads, I thought perhaps you were having trouble handling the conditions. I thought maybe you were one of the those idiots who doesn’t bother with winter tires, or maybe you were like the guy I saw the other day at the intersection of the Parks and Glenn Highways with three “limper tires” and one headlight. I realized that I was being uncharitable.  Maybe, I thought, you were old, or had poor eyesight and maybe you were scared of the horrible conditions and simply being cautious.  Less charitably, I thought that despite your (presumed) justifiable caution, you like most Alaskan drivers were pathologically incapable of understanding Left Lane Fast, Right Lane Slow or simply didn’t care that you were making an already dangerous situation worse. 

But, of course, it wasn’t because you were being cautious. Was it?

No, you were texting.

As I pulled alongside your 4x4 SUV, I could see you staring intently down at your steering wheel oblivious to the road, the blizzard, and the traffic piled up behind you.  You face was under-lit by the white glow of your phone.  Your thumbs were moving madly back and forth over the screen like a kid caught in a Chinese finger puzzle.

Perhaps you remember me?  I’m the guy in the green truck. The one that blew his horn at you when you began to drift into my lane. 

Or perhaps not, since you just jerked the wheel to the right and never bothered to glance up.

So, back to my question.

How dangerous does it have to get? 

Icy roads. Darkness. Blizzard. Three lanes of rush hour traffic. Even combined, that wasn’t enough to make you put down your phone and pay attention to the road.

How many lives do you have to endanger before you start paying attention?

You own life obviously isn’t worth it.

Nor was the life of the small toddler you had strapped into the child seat behind you.  And indeed there might have been two kids back there, I couldn’t see the entire back seat clearly, just the one small hand drawing patterns on the fogged window facing me.

Nor was my life worth it to you.  Nor the other twenty or so lives within your immediate vicinity.

So, one life isn’t enough. Twenty lives aren’t enough.  So, how many lives do you have to endanger before you start paying attention? Thirty? A hundred?  Is there a number that matters to you more than whoever it was that you were chatting with online?

Ice, snow, whiteout conditions. None of these things seem to be important enough to make you pay attention to the road. What would? An erupting volcano maybe? A forest fire.  The return of Bearded Angry Jesus? A herd of enraged charging elephants ridden by crazed robot polar bears armed with machine gun lasers?  What?

I noticed that your tailgate had two stickers on it. 

One said, ironically, Watch For Motorcycles.  Where? On YouTube?

The other one, even more ironically said, Abortion Is Murder.  Let me ask you something.  What do you call it when a clueless idiot like yourself kills her kids because she was driving through a fucking blizzard on a dark icy highway while staring at her goddamned phone?  Would you call that murder too? Or just negligent homicide? What if you kill yourself and your kids, is that murder/suicide?  How about if you kill me, would I be just collateral damage? How about if you killed twenty of us in a massive pileup? Serial murder, or would that be genocide?

You are a danger to everyone around you.  You don’t deserve to have a drivers license.  And if it was up to me, I’d take away your goddamned kids and charge you with reckless endangerment. If I could have gotten your license plate I would have filed charges against you for endangering my life. If I had been facing you on the side of the road I would have kicked your fucking ass. The fact that you are a woman bothers me not all, you deserve a good and thorough ass kicking – because there is apparently nothing else, short of cutting off your goddamned thumbs, that will get through to you.

You’re an asshole, a selfish, ignorant, stupid fucking asshole. 

Sincerely,

Jim

 

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This country needs to implement a Federal law making texting while driving a felony on par with Reckless Endangerment and subject to severe penalty. The states are too damned stupid to get it done. It needs to happen at the Federal level, and it needs to happen right now.  I’m talking immediate loss of license, substantial fine, and jail time for starters.  I’m getting damned sick and tired of having my life and the lives of my loved ones endangered by these jackasses.

If This Goes On

Note:  I had most of this post done and was conducting my usual futile pre-posting search for typos when Congress announced that they’d finally struck a deal on the payroll tax holiday extension.  Which, of course, required that I rewrite some of the post.  I’m pretty sure they did it on purpose. Because they are dicks.

---

 

 

Remember the Cold War?

Sure you do.

You know, the Cold War, the fifty year long battle over ideology that damned near ended the world?

Basically the Cold War was a big pissing contest between the United States and the former Soviet Union.  The best summation of which was probably the so-called Space Race.  For thirty years the US and the Soviets tried to one up each other. Both spent vast, staggeringly unbelievably vast, fortunes in blood and treasure to be first in space.  First satellite. First dog in space. First monkey in Space. First man in space. First woman in space. First into space twice. First old guy. First left handed guy.  First to eat in space. First to piss in space. First to sleep in space. First to die. First to orbit. First to make a hundred obits. First to make a hundred and one. First rendezvous. First docking. First around the moon. First unmanned lunar landing. First manned landing. First probe to Mars, Venus, Jupiter.  First space station.  First this and first that. First!

Oh, yes, we – both the Russians and the Americans – cheered every first, no matter how small, by our own respective teams and booed the other side and called them cheaters.

The Russian beat us to orbit.  They were first with their Sputnik and then first with their cosmonauts.

We caught up. Then we blew up and they took the lead.

Then they burned up on reentry and we took the lead back.

In the end we beat them to the moon and so we won.  Yah! Yes, that’s right, America won. Ha! In your face, Soviet Bastards! In your face!

Except, well, what did it get us?  What did we win? Really?

What was the prize? Bragging rights?

Four decades later and who cares? I mean who really cares who was first? Russians were first to orbit. Boo! Americans were first to the moon. Whoopie! And then what? How many of the current generation do you see wandering around with an “Apollo XI, We’re Number One!” sweatshirt on?  By 1972 and Apollo XVII we’d already lost interest. To the current generation, the whole Space Race is little more than a not very interesting historical footnote and some ancient primitive hardware gathering dust in a museum somewhere.  See, the thing is, neither country got a sustainable space program out of all those trillions of dollars and rubles, out of all those lives, out of all those firsts.   Sure, both societies benefitted from the technology and the science, and we still do, every day, but after all of that, after all of those lives and all of that expense and all of that effort and all of the tears and all of the cheering, after all of the chest beating and flag waving and dick waggling and bragging rights, well, after all of that, twelve men walked on the moon forty years ago and we couldn’t go back now even if we actually wanted to. We never made it to Mars, or the moons of Jupiter, and the dreams of living among the stars that I grew up with are mostly dead in this the newest generation.  We went, we came back. Whoop Tee Doo, put that in the history books next to Kitty Hawk – if they still teach Kitty Hawk in history class anymore. I haven’t checked lately, more than likely the Texas Board of Creationism has substituted angels and Ezekiel's Wheel for Orville and Wilbur by now.

And yet, if you step outside right now and look up at the night sky in just the right place and at just the right time, you’ll see a space station.  The International Space Station.  The largest, most complex, most technologically advanced, and most successful sustained long duration mission ever lofted by the hand of man.  Americans didn’t do that.  The Russians didn’t do that. The Europeans didn’t do that.  We did it.  We did it, Americans, Russians, Canadians, Europeans, Japanese, Israelis, Indians, all of us working together.

We don’t cheer now when Americans go into orbit. But neither do we cheer when the Russians fail or have a setback. And the same is true with them.  We’re in this together.  Americans ride Russian rockets into orbit, Russians live in Japanese built modules lifted into space in the bellies of American built Shuttles and assembled with a robot arm made in Canada.  American ground control oversees the mission in conjunction with their counterparts in Kazakhstan. Russians and Americans take turns commanding the station. The first billionaire tourists have bought their way aboard that station in a Russian capitalist venture, and within a year a civilian rocket lofted by an American company will dock with the station.  And you know what? That’s a good thing. A damned good thing. Because it demonstrates very, very clearly that we, all of us, can work together if we want to.  And the more we work together, the more we understand each other, the more we speak each other’s language. 

When I was growing up, during the Cold War, the Russians were the enemy. There was a time when our differences almost ended the world for all time. Now? Now they are the people we build space stations with.

Sure, we’ve got our differences.

So?

Sure trust is sometimes hard to come by.  Sure there are fights and bickering and bad days and sometimes we don’t know how we’re going to pay for things. Again, so? So what?  This generation? The one growing up right now? They have a pretty good chance of not dying in nuclear fire. Tell me that’s not a good thing. Tell me that’s not what matters.  The more we work together, the more we realize the things we have in common, the more we accomplish. You have only to step outside on a clear night and look up to see it.  And no sane person, Russian or American, wants it to go back to the way it was.

One day, if we keep on like this, we will go back to the moon and to Mars and maybe even further, and we’ll do it together. 

 

It’s ironic, then, don’t you think?

Ironic that we Americans can work with our former mortal enemies easier than with other Americans?

Funny how we can compromise when it comes to building a trillion dollar space station with people we once called “the Evil Empire.” Funny how we can work to build a future for our kids with people we spent the better put of a century locked into a mutual murder/suicide pact with, isn’t it? 

Funny how we, Americans, can’t seem to find that same spirit of compromise and teamwork when it comes to working with Americans.

Funny sad, funny stupid, not funny ha ha.

Sad and stupid that we can’t seem to work together when it comes to something simple, something we all agree needs to be done, something that we all want.

I am, of course, talking about the mess in Congress.

You know it’s not about the tax breaks.

It’s not about class warfare. It’s not about the rich and not about the poor and most certainly not about the middle class.

It’s not about the economy, or jobs, or the national debt.

It’s not about the upcoming presidential election, well not totally anyway.

It’s not even about ideology.

It’s about face.

It’s about hubris.

It’s about bluster, and chest beating, and who can piss furthest into the wind. It’s about pride.

This latest congressional deadlock over extending the payroll tax holiday was about one thing and one thing only. It was about dicks – and like most matters of this nature, this entire adolescent pissing contest is nothing but locker-room theater by a bunch of spoiled selfish arrogant immature pricks who are worried that somebody, somewhere, somehow, might think that they have a wee little one.

Here’s the bald simple truth of the matter:   This congressional Cold War? It’s all a farce.

There was never any doubt that Congress would pass the payroll tax holiday extension, or that the president would sign it

Anything else would have been political suicide.

The Speaker of the House knows this, you bet he does.

John Boehner painted himself into a corner. As a result, he had to bend over and take it right up the poop chute. He knew it.  And he’s got nobody to blame but his own lousy leadership. Boehner has spent the last year showing us what he is, this last week he was just haggling over the price. 

The House deserves no credit for reaching a deal. None. It’s not an accomplishment to dodge a rubber bullet you fired at your own self.

Here’s the thing, the economy is in the toilet.  It may not be circling the drain anymore, it may have crawled out of the dirty water and may be inching its way up the filthy stained porcelain, but the economy is still in the crapper. You know it, I know it, and every single voter in America knows it.  So do the politicians.  Americans are pissed off. They’re tired of this bullshit, most of them anyway. They want this endless bickering to stop. They want congress to stop acting like children and start doing the job they get paid handsomely for. Americans, most of them, have had just about enough of this nonsense.  They’re out in the street. They’re out of work. They’re out of money. Half of them are out of their damned minds. They’re a year out from a major election. And they’re out of patience.

As a result, it’s a damned dangerous time to be a politician.

Luckily, for these preening jackasses, the worst thing that is likely to happen is that they’ll get voted out of power – instead of being dragged from their ivory towers and stood against a wall.  On a side note, a number of these congressmen, including the most intransigent of the current bunch of strident obstructionists, would do well to remember that they are the primary reason so many very angry Americans are heavily armed and equipped for violent revolution. But as usual, I ironically digress.

If congress allowed taxes to go up on the poor and middle class, especially going into an election year, they’d be cutting their own throats.

And they know it.

Boehner and his Tea Party masters have been trying to sell this as a war of ideology, the political Cold War version of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Nobody wants taxes to go up, they claim.  But that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t let it happen if they could somehow be sure that the blame would fall squarely and unambiguously on the President and the other guys.  But they can’t guarantee that.  Voters are fickle.  They may be unhappy with Obama, but you raise their taxes by $150 per month and let unemployment benefits expire in this economy and see what happens.   Instead of the Cuban Missile Crisis, House conservatives would have been looking right down the barrel at the political equivalent of the Bay of Pigs.  

And they know it.

And so, after much bluster and chest beating and dick waggling, they signed the Senate version of the tax holiday extension plan. 

And there was never any doubt that they would.

Because, see, this really isn’t about ideology, or doing the right thing, and it sure as pluperfect hell isn’t about us, you and me, the insignificant middle class getting dirty-dicked by these arrogant pricks. Because if it really was about ideology, if it was about principle, if they really thought that they were right – then they would have let taxes go up and damn the consequences.

But it isn’t about that.

It’s about face.

Everybody has already agreed to the basics. The tax holiday must be extended. Ditto entitlements (long term unemployment benefits included).  The only argument is how to pay for that.  Tax the rich? Or cut something else out of the budget. Or a little of both?  The senate hammered out a deal with broad bipartisan support – over ninety percent of the forum approved the bill. 

A two month extension gives both the House and the Senate time to work out a permanent long-term deal.

John Boehner himself initially agreed to this deal.

Yet, House conservatives balked - and Boehner folded like a cheap suit when his Tea Party masters yanked sharply on his choker chain.

House Conservatives suddenly swore that they couldn’t agree to a two month extension, they wanted a longer deal.   Really?  Then why in the hell didn’t they complete a bill and forward it to the Senate a month ago?  It’s not like expiration of the payroll tax holiday was a surprise.  It’s not like we didn’t know that long term unemployment benefits were due to expire on December 31st.  If this was really about a long term deal, then they should have done their goddamned jobs two months ago. Instead, they deliberately let it come down to the wire, and they did that specifically because they thought they could use this issue to make Obama look bad and for no other reason.  They weren’t expecting conservatives in the Senate to show common sense and put the needs of the country over politics. 

They gambled, and they lost.  That’s what happens when you bluff, sometimes you get called.

But instead of manning up and taking their lumps, they’d acted like petulant children and tried to hold onto the pot.

Ever try to reason with a mad child?

Same thing. 

Unfortunately, we can’t send these brats to their room for a timeout.

This morning, House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor (R-VA), insisted that the differences between competing House and Senate 12-month plans could be resolved “within an hour.”  Really? Then why the fuck wasn’t that done two weeks ago?  I’ll tell you why, because Cantor and his pals are a bunch of spoiled privileged childish dicks.  That’s why.  He’s exactly the kind of guy who would play poker in a game where the stakes are the lives of one hundred and eighty million Americans.  And he’d do it solely in order to advance his own political agenda and for no other reason.

Think about this for a minute.  For whatever reason, these sons of bitches waited until the last minute. Now we’re talking about taxes and budgets and entitlements (and an oil pipeline for fuck’s sake, which is included in this mess for some stupid assed reason that makes no sense whatsoever).  There’s about five working days left to go.  What kind of bill do you think you’re going to get? Seriously? Two days before the holiday break?  A week and half before the deadline? A bunch of political hacks all pissed off and panicked and worried about if people will think they have a little dick?

Honestly, do you really want to live with whatever they managed to throw together at the last damned minute?

Here’s a thought, wouldn’t it make more sense to sign a quick two month extension, make sure Americans have some breathing space (You know, the people you’re supposed to be looking out for) and then take that time to sit down and deliberately hammer out something we can all live with? I mean, wouldn’t that make sense considering that they screwed around playing politics instead of doing the job and now it’s a thing?

Well, yes, of course that would make more sense. And yes, sure, we could do that.  Sure. But …

We could do that but the payroll accounting software most companies use isn’t designed for two month increments. 

No, seriously, that was the argument.  Payroll accounting software is designed for quarterly adjustments to taxes and withholdings and etcetera and so on.  So? Think about that for a minute.  Why bring this up at all?  No, really, why bring that up at all?  Unless somebody is actually thinking about raising our taxes.  Funny thing, nobody has mentioned that, and what passes for journalism in this country hasn’t bothered to actually ask. So, what’s the deal?  This is only an issue if House Republicans are thinking that they might be raising your taxes in two months (or lowering them, I suppose, if you’re a millionaire).

Next, of course, was the standard GOP canard, i.e. a two month extension raises uncertainty for businesses and thus they won’t create jobs and invest in America and the sky, you know, it will fall. Oh noes, not uncertainty! Let’s just say that’s true, and not the same old tired Chicken Little bullshit excuse that has allowed these same businesses to go on for ten years now without creating any jobs despite tax breaks and huge piles of bailout money.  There’s an easy fix.  It’s called leadership. Sign the two month extension, then House, Senate, and Executive all stand together on neutral ground and sign a fucking pledge to the American people guaranteeing that they will hammer out a deal by February that doesn’t change the tax and entitlement rates that exist right now.  Period.

House Republicans should have no problem with this idea, since according to their leader, Eric Cantor, it’ll only take an hour or so to work out the differences between existing plans.

That should give business the assurance they need to invest in the future and create all those jobs they keep promising us in exchange for our tax money. Tell you what, while they’re at it, how about Congress pledge to raise taxes on Corporations who don’t start hiring Americans – and by Americans, I mean people in this country.  And if they don’t, then they can not only start paying taxes, they can pay back all those tax breaks and bailout dollars they’ve taken from us – that ought to pay for extending the payroll tax holiday. Conservatives love pledges, this should be a natural for them – though, of course, making a pledge to the American people instead of a rich lobbyist would be something new. Hell, they can even sign it in Grover Norquist’s blood if it will make them happy. 

Well, sure, we could do that, but …

If there’s one maggot in the GOP apple that I detest over all others, it would have to be that pale flaccid worm, Karl Rove. Yet, I was forced to agree with him when even he said House conservatives needed to sign the extension.  And of course, wherever the slimy trail left by Rove goes, the rest of the conservatives follow. Most of them anyway.  Hell, even the king of obstructionist partisan politics, Mitch McConnell could see which way the wind was blowing by squinting through his Coke bottle glasses.

So, what was the hold up?

Dicks.

Cantor and the rest of these self-centered children didn’t want to agree because they were afraid that it would be a “win” for Obama. 

Of all the childish, stupid, moronic nonsense.

They don’t give a damn if one hundred and eighty million of their fellow Americans lose, so long as Obama doesn’t “win.”   This should be no surprise to anybody, this is the same math plugged into the same equation that these Creationist peckerwoods use for everything of importance. These are the same selfish bastards who would let forty million women and children go without health insurance or medical care so that one poor woman doesn’t get an abortion on the government dime.   These are the same sons of bitches who would let a hundred million people die of AIDS in order to prevent one woman from using a condom.  These are the same ignorant fuckers who would cut funding for millions of textbooks and school lunches and science program, so that they can continue to fund high school football in Texas and failed abstinence-only faith-based bullshit. 

This is about dicks and nothing more.

Frankly, if it was up to me, I’d line them all up and have them drop trousers.  Then we can get out a ruler and … smack them right in their useless shriveled nuts.

What?

Oh, you thought I was going to say measure up and settle the issue once and for all?  Wrong. I don’t care who has the bigger dick. This isn’t about congressional dick. This is about doing the right thing, because it’s the right thing.  It’s about not reliving the stupid Cold War in our own back yard.  If these people really cared about the economy and business and the people who elected them, then they’d start working together.

Forty years from now, nobody, and I mean nobody, is going to give a damn one way or the other.  Like the Cold War and the Space Race and the first guy to use a urine bag in orbit, nobody will give a damn which one of these people had a bigger dick.

The only thing they’ll remember is that these people were dicks.

If we can work with our erstwhile enemies, we ought to be able to work with our own goddamned countrymen.