TBGO: Meme-o-rizing

Dear Murka:
"First you gotta reduce yer population from 300 MILLION to 300 THOUSAND, reduce the size of the country by 1000 percent, and set it atop an active volcano, in the middle of the fuuking ocean, for energy.
When you get that done, call me again...We'll talk..."
There are so few similarities between "Iceland," as a gestalt, and the USofA similarly construed as to make ANY comparison--politicial, economic, social, historical, philosophical, whatever--meaningless.

 
Wait a minnit! There's FAR more than a mere, meager 925 Million starving/hungry people in the world. Hell, there's near that many in India alone.
And then what?
After you feed 'em, and they wanna start to consume, like the REST of the world?
When we're running OUT of resources (think "potable water," just for one example) on which those newly fed folks would come to depend?
Besides, there's never been a "peace" that wasn't administered, maintained, or promulgated by the biggest, toughest, meanest mo-fo warriors around.

Woody DETESTS bullshit like this: it's a destructive anti-intellectual canard.
That is: An allegation designed to denigrate and diminish actually THINKING about what you read, and redolent of the kinds of literalism which make the bible-blatherers both so wrong and so annoying.

Authors DO convey meaning by the application of symbolic tropes. They DO count on their readers to interpret them.

I'm sorry if you never went to Kolledge or did any 'real' literary analysis... It was fun.
Just sayin'...

A "Graphic" Meme: Astonishingly accomplished without a misattributed quote, bad statistics or otherwise erroneous information. Who gnu it could be done?

Woody'd demur. Most people aren't smart enough to be meaningfully disobedient.
Oh, they can say "no."
But so can any two-year old.

The Moustache of Mendacity, John Stossel, showed up on Fbook this week in a story about how Righturd money is trying to insert his brand of so-called 'libertardian' codswallop into the school curriculum--as the Koch Bros have insisted that Ayn Rand's coprophagic ramblings be included in the readings in business schjools which they support. I have ALWAYS thought that the text-string "John Stossel" should never appear without this reminder of the true character of the sniveling little shit-whistle...

TBGO, Baaah-di-baaah-di-daaah: Vafanculo, Paisan!;

Kiss My Ass, Cully: Vafanculo, Nino...

During today's Supreme Court hearings on a suit attempting to overturn the Voting Rights Act, the skeevy scum Scalia said renewing VRA is a "perpetuation of racial entitlement."

MY editorial comment: This man is a pig!

 I'm pretty sure Nino is old enough to recall himself or relatives being denigrated as "guineas." According to the Urban Dictionary:

"The most vile racial slur that can be used against an Italian-American. Refers to the Guinea Coast of Africa; using this slur is a very offensive way of implying that Italian-Americans are non-whites (something we tend to get very defensive about!!).
Unlike the "N-word", which African-Americans sometimes use to address each other, no Italian-American would ever address another Italian-American using this word. Nor would they use the word "wop" (also offensive, but not in a racial way). HOWEVER, it IS common for Italian-Americans to refer to each other as "dago"; this is used the same way that blacks use the N-word with each other."

Nino obviously has learned top "roll widda punches."

TBGO~~La-di-da-di-da: SOTU; Torturous; Crisis? Etc.

What Climate Crisis? If Prez. LowBar TRULY cared about the impending consequences of catastrophic, anthropogenic climate change, he would have used the SOTU last night as an occasion to issue a pledge that HIS 'gummint/regime' would put the climate change crisis at the VERY TOP of the national agenda, and would devote every energy, resource, and influence of his office and his party to addressing it.
He didn't.
Which is all you really need to know. -- WNNK

Parenthetically: Copyright, 1989, John ("Woody") Konopak
The "Myth" of Sisyphus

There is NO "myth" of Sisyphus.
It's true as it is told to us:
Life takes its deadly daily toll;
But we know it's only "rock'n'roll!"
--WNNK 

 NOT On the SOTU Agenda? If Prez. LowBar TRULY cared about the impending consequences of catastrophic, anthropogenic climate change, he would have used the SOTU last night as an occasion to issue a national call to action and to pledge that HIS 'gummint/regime' would put the climate change crisis at the VERY TOP of the national agenda, and would devote every energy, resource, and influence of his office and his party to addressing it.
He didn't.
Which is all you really need to know.
I flat PROMISE you:
He DOES NOT MEAN that he'd replace hydro-carbon energy with solar or wind.
He DOES NOT MEAN that he'd EVER stop drilling, refining, and burning petroleum products.
There are still (conservatively estimated) $25 TRILLION in unexploited petro-pools under ground.
NOBODY will EVER stop mining/extracting them as long as there is a dollar to be wrung from 'em, or a single, unamortized expense. 
Parenthetically: Woody ALWAYS wonders about the use of the subjunctive in a headline: What's with the "conditional," ["may?"]...
He may use executive orders, but he may NOT use them?
Either he fucking is going to, or he isn't fucking going to issue orders.
It's fatuous and specious to put the headline in the fucking subjunctive mood...It's dishonest. Makes people think he's actually gonna DO something about it, when EVERYBODY knows he'd rather sell a daughter into slavery than disturb the status quo.
Also, it seems to me, IF he could merely issue an order, why the FUCK has he waited four full fucking years? What the FUCK was/is he waiting for?
--WNNK
 
Torture Tactics:

If you've never experienced a "torture" museum (there's one in just about every tourist-trap city in Europe--I especially recall the one in the lovely little walled city in the north of Bavaria, Rothenberg ob der Taube)--you should; it will--it OUGHT to--leave you shaken--if you have the remotest sense of empathy for the cruel, consciously inflicted suffering they represent. The instruments the authorities at the time devised are horrible, and should give you nightmares, unless you're a monster.

THEN, while you're trembling from your encounter with TRUE 'inhumanity,' you remember these instruments were used MAINLY for the "correction" of "unGodly" sentiments. People who were blasphemers, and apostates, and heretics--ALL "religious" crimes--were the ones who were subjected to and ruined by these devices. They were designed to extract "confessions" from those accused of insulting the "Faith." These machines were applied zealously, enthusiastically, by RELIGIOUS men, HOLY men, men with VOCATIONS to "serve God."

Descriptions of their use tells me as much as I'll ever need to know about about the "climate of love" in "Holy Mother Church," then or now.-- WNNK

TBGO~~La-di-da-di-Daaa: Propaganda; A Frame-up; Bless Me, Father;

It's ALL Propaganda: Woody thinkz: It is juvenile credulousness which expects to hear the unvarnished "truth" from the "State." Governments of ALL kinds communicate with their constituencies EXCLUSIVELY via 'propaganda."
Lasswell, who wrote the book on Propaganda in the '30s defined it as:
"...(t)he expression of opinions or actions carried out deliberately by individuals or groups with a view to influence the opinions or actions other individuals or groups for predetermined ends through psychological manipulations."
The State cannot speak the unedited 'truth' because it's constituencies are so varied.
So it must communicate in ways which can be interpreted differently by different audiences, even though using the same words for all...

It's a "Frame-up":  The deficit hawks and Govt. haters are still framing the debate because that gutless twat-wafffle, Prez. LowBar, who is the ONLY one in a postion to reframe the debate, won't challenge the frames.
Why?
Well that's quite an interesting question.
Personally, I believe it's because he, and the Dims, along with the GOPhux, are perfectly HAPPY with the frames as they are, and don't WANT to change 'em.

So here are five SURE THINGS to "reignite" the economy:
1. Double Social Security payments.
2. Double the minimum wage.
3. Rescind ALL income taxes on wages/earnings at or below minimum wage.
4. Remove ALL taxes on food.
5. Initiate a Green-tech CCC to transform the failing grid, and put the 10 million workers still unemployed from the '07/08 recession back to work.





Sighnts Presarve Uus! Remember the flack the poor woman caught for tearing up a foto of the fuukin popish Pederast in Chief on SNL?
It now appears, in the context of the recent revelations about the feudally (to put it mildly) brutal, harsh, punitive conditions which the Irish Catholic Church, in total collaboration with the Irish state, inflicted on these young women, that her rage and fury and disgust with the whole lot of them in her music was, if anything, restrained!

In a similar vein, though lighter, this is hysterically funny.

TBGO~~La-di-da-di-di: Stormy Whether

 

Don' Let No Gummint Push YOU Around: The brain-dead, ignoranti, "I-Ain't-Lettin'-No-Gummint-Tell-MAY-What-To-Do" contingent is complaining about "martial law" in Massachusetts, and being prohibited from sight-seeing on the snow-covered streets, in the interests of public safety.
Personally, I'm okay with letting the ignorant motherfuckers in Massachusets, who absolutely GOTTA drive around in two or three feet of snow do so.
Yeah!
Fuck martial law.
I'm gonna take the ol' Hummer out for a spin.
GEEZIS!
G'wan! All of ya moronic half-witz: Get out there and drive the fuck around Massachussets in the worst snow storm in a decade.
Just don't expect the State to rescue you, for free.
You stick yer Hummer--or yer Prius, either-- n a snowbank or slide it off a frozen bridge? Sorry, mate! Expect towing and rescue charges in the mailbox, and liens attched to the titles of yer fuuking carz AFTER the "Gummint" pulls yer sorry ass out, warms ya up and sends ya home with a ticket.
Wadda buncha fuuking dickwipes!



Don't TAZE me, Bro!~Woody thinkz this fella Dorner, the rogue cop/swat/sniper guy engaged in a vendetta with LAPD is--or SHOULD BE--a Second Amendment nut-case's wet-dream.
Not only 1) for what he's doing, in gun goon, abstract, 2nd Amendment terms--taking up arms and waging war on the state--but 2) also cuz he's what they think they need AK-47s to defend AGAINST: some bat-shit crazy Negro dude with an arsenal and an attitude!

TBGO: Right 2 Work Wrong 4 Workers

Attention-Getting: So-called "Right-to-work" legislation is under consideration in many states' legislatures this year: New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, and Michigan, at least. Wisconsin and Ohio passed it last year. Plus that Grand Poobah of Fucktardery, "Sen." Rand Paul, has introduced legislation in Congress that would nationalize the arrangement.

This is just one part of a nearly universal assault on labor all over the country. Another is the full-frontal assault on the USPS.

The sole and only purpose of these decades-long assaults on the USPS is and has been to destroy the postal unions, the largest federal employees unions remaining, in the whole country. Once the break the Unions, they can privatize the USPS and nobody can complain.

Remember: It cost the lives of thousands and thousands of workers--and their families--to extract from the Money Goons even the barest concessions, in 1937/38.

Now, with "Right to Work" legislation, and other anti-worker/anti-union/anti-liberal expedients, the Money Goons are successfully rescinding the deal.

If so (and there's no "if" about it), then it seems to me only fair that some of the fucking Goons trying to renege on the deals should pay the same price that our ancestors paid to secure them: death.

That's right.

Some of the Honcho-class needs to die, and pretty publicly.

Like those planters in India a couple of months ago who, after repeatedly stone-walling their plantation workers' complaints for YEARS and ignoring workers rquests for better wages and conditions, were trapped in their luxurious bungalow and incinerated when the workers set the building on fire.

I wouldn't want anyone to think I was suggesting such a plan, but ya gotta make an impression. Just sayin...

TBGO ("La-di-da-di-da"): Bad Meme On The Rise; Law/Justice?; Slaves to Violence:

,

Bad Meme Arising: This is one of those typically, sincerely,  incredibly dishonest  Facebook 'memes' which seem so apt, but which are so misleading: It's fuukin insidious. Think about it.
"The American Indian" did not "let the Government" take care of them. They resisted it pretty fiercely, and ultimately unsuccessfully, for a couple of hundred years. "The American Indian" was violently dispossessed by the US Govt operating wholly and solely at the behest of private, corporat/industrial/moneyed interests which prospered handsomely, thank you, by ensuring that the US Governmentt was taking care of THEM by exterminating the indigenous competition.

As my ol' pal, Prof Wombat put it :

"Well, the government killed them, drove them onto worthless land, fenced them in, introduced them to smallpox and alcohol, swept buffalo off the prairies, like that. Wasn't as if the Indians 'let the government take care of them', 'zackly..."

And then there's Henry Ford, himself; we needn't dwell on his well-known, blatantly fascist sympathies.

#

Our "Good" Neighbors: Why do our northern neighbors seem to comport themselves with so much more restraint, vis a vis their armaments, than do Murkins?
Woody guessez: Because, though there was a 'minor' strain of the disease there, mainly enforced on indigenous, rather than imported, populations, Canadians never fought each other--never engaged in a civil war--to keep slavery in Canada. Being a British possession, Canada peacefully relinquished the "right" to own other persons in the 1820s and '30s when most of the rest of Europe and the world abandoned 'the peculiar institution.'
I think the stain of slavery, finally, is responsible for the apparently in-bred inclination in Murka towards violent acting out...

#

Dept. Of Law Or Justice: Woody's not a lawyer, though I took the LSAT (170) once and even played a pirate once in a movie, but: Such clauses are or at least do strongly seem to be prima facie cases for summary declaration. But:
They'd have to be ruled unconstitutional. You'd have to bring suit. You'd have to "show cause," and "demonstrate harm."
That would mean someone would have--not NOT to be elected, but--to be expelled from an office once they were seated in it BECAUSE they were atheists.
That would mean that such a case would have to go through the whole, judicial process, from State courts to District, to Appellate, and thence the SCROTUS.  And the outcomed would not be certain, certainly NOT with the current incumbents still seated.
Probably the biggest impediment to that happening is that it would be PHENOMENALLY fuukin' expensive. Talking MILLION$ and MILLION$.
So it's pretty unlikely, especially given the sympathies of the places which enacted such egregious violations.

#

TBGO: La-Di-Da-Di-Da--Regretable; Ya, Basta; Chem-Trail; Breeds

With Regret: Woody's a bit rueful that there is in me some perverse genie which bids me note, of this seemingly encouraging sentiment, that the one thing about which this is true for everyone at all times is the expiration of y/our mortal clocks.

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Enough, Already! Someone on F-book was extolling the virtues of "Anarchism." Someone on F-book is ALWAYS extolling the virtues of  "Anarchism" (as well as 'chem trails," and the wonders of Icelandic politics)...
I raised my usual objection: that ANARCHISM is impractical and unpracticable in societies numbering more than about 300-500 members.
The correspondent pointed to the Paris communes and the Spanish Republic.
Which, I said, proves my point. They failed, in short order.
Anarchism works fine, until somebody ELSE comes along with an army and an attitude.
Hobbes, in the mid/late 17th century described "life in the state of nature"--which I take to describe the conditions under anarchism--as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."
Things haven't really changed that much since.Power structures are INEVITABLE when managing the interests of disparate groups.;Why is that so hard to understand.  People cooperate WITHIN kinship groups. They compete OUTSIDE kinship groups. Always have, always will. Some bigger "power" is ALWAYS required to keep non-kinship groups from killing each other--see, e.g., the "erratic retaliator."

“Predators don’t do battle with their prey, they just eat them. When animals do battle, it’s always within their own species, for territory or mates, and no one despises them as morally flawed or dreams of a happier day when they’ll learn to live together like Thumper and Bambi.”

“Tribal warfare doesn’t work that way. Tribes living in a given area are more or less constantly in a state of low-level war with each other, but when Tribe X attacks Tribe Y, it doesn’t typically take over its territory or its mates; rather, after inflicting a certain amount of damage, it typically turns around and goes home. Before long, typically, Tribe Y returns the favor, attacking Tribe X, inflicting a certain amount of damage, then going home.” The same relationship exists among any other tribes in the area."

Far from being peaceful savages, humanity is always in a state of low-level, mortal conflict with those neighbors who are NOT also family.

WTF R "Chem-Trails?": CON-trails--Short for "Condensate" trails--occur when unburned hydro-carbons and water, by-products of hydro-carbon combustion in airplane engines, are expelled into the sub-zero, low-space environments from the hyper-heated engines.
You saw 'em all over Western Europe, starting this time 70 years ago. B-17s, B-24s and B-29s got up that high easily.
You don't NEED bogus conspiracies to demonize this shit. Have you ever spent any time under the flight path of an airport?
NOTHING stays clean/white; a fine, microscopic dust of unburned and partially burned kerosene settles on everything.
There are close to 100,000 , high-altitude air-craft flights of all kinds in USer air-space every day...Internal combustion aircraft engines, both jet and radial, at altitude,will do that...Not "mysterious": It's a function of physics and chemistry.
Just sayin...

Stop the Crop!  He's a cutey!
But tell me: WHY must fucking morons crop dogs' ears? It was originally done to fighting dogs to prevent them being siezed by the ears during a dog fight. We don't DO that crap anymore, do we AKC? Fight dogs? Plus, it REALLY is painful. So why crop the ears, other than ignorant, idiotic, stupid human vanity?<

BTW: NO! To BSL: HB 63 PROHIBITS "breed specific legislation"--local ordinances banning particular breeds of dogs as inherently dangerous--in New Mexico.

CONTACT members of the NM House Judiciary Committee and demand the skeevy fuckers pass it.

(Ignore that vapid, feculent, flap-jowled, ignorant, reeking pustule, Cathrynn Brown, (R-Carlsbad), the author of the bill to prevent rape victims from ABORTING fetuses that result from rape by prosecuting them (or their doctors) for "destroying evidence.".)

N.b.: New Mexico Bill HB 63: IMPORTANT CLARIFICATION: Each legislative committee only has 12 - 16 members. These committee members, although elected by their own constituents within their own districts, represent all the people of New Mexico when they serve on these committees - there are not enough seats within each committee to have a representative from every district.

When you are writing to and calling Judiciary committee members asking for their support of HB 63, it does not matter where you live in NM. Your voice matters and is needed now so please keep contacting Judiciary Committee members today.

Please send your phone calls and emails and request in-person meetings with Judiciary Committee members (http://www.nmlegis.gov/lcs/committeedisplay.aspx?CommitteeCode=HJC) to ask for their support for passage of HB 63. Their emails follow: gail@gailchasey.com, georgene.louis@nmlegis.gov, eliseo.alcon@nmlegis.gov, zachary.cook@nmlegis.gov, brian.egolf@nmlegis.gov, kelly.fajardo@nmlegis.gov, miguel.garcia@nmlegis.gov, natefornm@gmail.com, emilykane4nm@gmail.com, antonio.maestas@nmlegis.gov, docmcmillan@gmail.com, paul.pacheco@nmlegis.gov, bill.rehm@nmlegis.gov, pat.roybalcaballero@nmlegis.gov, mimi.stewart@nmlegis.gov, cath@cathrynnbrown.com

TBGO--La-di-da-di-di: Vafanculo!; Busted; Growth?

 

Vafanculo!: Woody tried to post this rejoinder on Politico, but was thwarted, so I'll repost it here, with a different header:
The irrefutable rebuttal to Scalia's--and the rest of the brain-dead twaddlers agreeing with him there--is the Constitutional Amendment protocol. Fucking duh!
If it were, indeed, a "dead" document, whose meaning were fixed for all time, then there would be no need for further amendment, would there? So accommodations and instructions for amendment would be superfluous. Would not have been incuded in the document.
Ergo--use yer brains, twaddlers, this is the hard part--the Constitution is NOT a "dead letter," but a living one, designed to be reinterpreted.(Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/scalia-the-constitution-is-dead-86853.html#ixzz2JOMBriJu. Especially the comments.) Vafanculo Tony--Leave the gun, take the canolis--Scalia is declining into senile dementia, in plain sight, on the record, for all the world to see. So long, Nino!

Busted: Woody thinks this is a fascinating and interesting image, not least because there is not the faintest, tiniest trace of a scintilla of a hint ANYWHERE visible that the "War on Drugs" was primarily intended, designed and prosecuted to be nothing so much as the continuation of "Jim Crow" oppression of Black folks by other, "legal" means, after the civil rights movement deprived the peckerwoods of  their 'traditional" means. Pretty muchj ALL 'public intoxication laws" were there for the purpose of providing (white) officers with cause to jail and rough up "undesirables." The crusade was originally inspired--as was pretty much the whole of the drug-suppression industry--by racial fears and hatred ("Coked-out darkies gonna take our wimmins!"), stretching back more than 100 years.
Read, i.e., Michelle Alexander on "the New Jim Crow."

"Police departments across the country have become dependent on federal drug war grants to finance their budget. In March, we published a story revealing that a police union lobbyist in California coordinated the effort to defeat Prop 19..."

Sustainable Growth is an Oxymoron: Eternal growth is the ideology of a cancer cell. --Ed Abbey