Controlled Demolition

THE LONE NUTS ~or ~ How Insane Radicals Keep Helping the Right Wing

Once upon a time, a lone nut assassinated a somewhat liberal president without any assistance from anyone. Then, a few years later, a different lone nut assassinated a prominent liberal black leader without any assistance from anyone. Then, a few months after that, yet another lone nut assassinated the even more liberal brother of the somewhat liberal president who had been assassinated a few years earlier. Yes, that's right. Inexplicably, not one, not two, but three lone nuts emerged from the recesses of society to take out only liberal leaders, all over the course of about five years.

Time passed.

Then one day, 19 lone nuts hijacked some jetliners and flew them into some prominent buildings they felt symbolized the belief system that was keeping them down, except for one plane, which crashed harmlessly due to the heroic actions of its passengers. Two of the buildings that had been hit by the airliners, plus one building that hadn’t been hit, collapsed just like those controlled demolitions you see all the time on TeeVee. However, despite the fact that fire had never before (and has never since) caused a skyscraper to collapse, that was precisely the explanation offered repeatedly by trusted authorities. A shocked and saddened nation accepted this explanation with the same alacrity with which they accepted their leaders’ proposed response to the assault, which was to invade and occupy two nations that had nothing to do with the attack, but which, coincidentally, had lots of oil and/or natural gas.

Again, the lone nuts had altered the course of history without any assistance from anyone.

Gradually, with the assistance of Very Smart People and despite the efforts of of a few malcontents, the shocked and saddened nation resigned itself to the knowledge that we would always have lone nuts and that they would always coincidentally help achieve the aims of right-wing ideologues and multinational corporations.

The end.

Stop watching sports. Go outside and play Frisbee or something.

Several years ago, when I was working in a right-wing office environment in Minne-fucking-Crapolis, there was a hockey riot on the University of Minnesota campus in nearby St. Paul. Naturally, the mostly racist, conservative sports enthusiasts who infested my workplace became convinced that the riot had been perpetrated by inner city anti-establishment ruffians and not the nice, lily-white U of M students who populate hockey games. There were two subsequent hockey riots the following hockey season, one in Madison, Wisconsin and another in Mankato, Minnesota. Several investigations were conducted by various entities, all of which determined that the culprits were indeed U of M students and hockey fans and that the mythical inner city ruffians played no role in the violence, which included turning over cars and damaging public and private property.

Now, Vancouver Police Chief Jim Chu is making the same ridiculously baseless assertion. “… our city was vulnerable to a number of young men and women, disguised as Canucks fans, who were actually criminals and anarchists,” he said, proudly displaying a fragment of a skull mask as proof.

I can kind of forgive or at least understand this line of reasoning from the sheltered, exurban bigots in my former workplace, but I would expect a presumably trained professional like Chu to see through this obvious canard. If Vancouver is truly a “world class city” as Mayor Gregor Robertson recently asserted, perhaps it should hire a police chief that isn’t as poorly informed and devoid of basic reasoning skills as my former co-workers.

The sporting world has long since abandoned the sportsmanship and camaraderie that are supposed to be athletics’ defining characteristics and has instead embraced a culture of cheaters, bullies and cry babies. From the hard-Right franchise owners who, hypocritically, can’t seem to keep their mouths off the public teat, to the over-indulged steroid junkies they employ, to the perpetually scandalized International Olympic Committee and FIFA and the Tour de France and the NCAA, etc., etc., sports is infested from top to bottom with humanity’s darkest elements.

I Want Eno's Synthesizer

Why Does AT&T U-Verse Suck Shit Out of a Dead Donkey's Asshole?

This page might provide a few clues. If they're going to co-monopolize the interwebz, you'd think they would at least have the decency to provide a service that's faster than dial-up. Oh. But they don't have any decency, do they? Oh. But oopth! It was just a mistake.

"AT&T spokesman (read: LACKEY) Michael Coe said that the silencing was a mistake..."

Yeah, right. We know about "mistakes," don't we?

Fuck you, AT&T.

Wall Street is a G-Unit

The superb John le Carre novel, Single & Single portrays prestigious London banks as money launderers for drug and weapons smugglers. Le Carre's previous career as a spy, combined with the detailed research he does for each novel, has produced a body of work that serves as a chronicle of the corruption and hypocrisy that more or less define the post-industrial West. Many people think le Carre lost a step when the Cold War ended, but I disagree. His post-Cold War novels do a better job than almost anything else of unraveling the shifting dual allegiances that characterize the era.

Case in point:

How a big US bank laundered billions from Mexico's murderous drug gangs

On 10 April 2006, a DC-9 jet landed in the port city of Ciudad del Carmen, on the Gulf of Mexico, as the sun was setting. Mexican soldiers, waiting to intercept it, found 128 cases packed with 5.7 tons of cocaine, valued at $100m. But something else – more important and far-reaching – was discovered in the paper trail behind the purchase of the plane by the Sinaloa narco-trafficking cartel.

During a 22-month investigation by agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and others, it emerged that the cocaine smugglers had bought the plane with money they had laundered through one of the biggest banks in the United States: Wachovia, now part of the giant Wells Fargo.

[...]

"After the Wachovia case, no one in the regulatory community has sat down with me and asked, 'What happened?' or 'What can we do to avoid this happening to other banks?' They are not interested. They are the same people who attack the whistleblowers..."

More Teeth, M'Lady

What. The. Fuck.

Katt Williams Tells the Truth

Them are little titties.

A little comedy relief courtesy of Tig Notaro.