Category: Quick Hits

I didn't think it was possible, but Pajamas Media has actually gone downhill in the past year. Like all sources of demagoguery, it's only a matter of time until they give in completely to paranoia. It appears that the time is now. On Monday the great repository of truth (the "PJ Tatler", which I believe is supposed to represent "tattler") loudly blared: BIZARRE NEO-SWASTIKA REMINISCENT OF "THE GREAT DICTATOR" USED AS POWER SYMBOL BY O.W.S. LEADERS. The symbol?

It's a pound sign. To anyone under 50 – obviously outside the range of the Pajamas Media writers and authors – it doubles as a hash tag for Twitter, i.e. "Hey, PJ Media is a front for the Viet Cong!
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#stuffimadeup" Or at least that's what it is to the untrained eye.

Note also how when the "leaders" put the symbol on their sleeves (as in the first and third photos), it is rotated 45 degrees just like the Nazi swastika was. Don’t these people see an echo of the swastika in their new power symbol? Don’t they realize that the early Nazi Party was (among other things, obviously) also overtly anti-capitalist? …Don’t they know that the early Nazis tried to garner sympathy with street rallies and marches?

I…I don't even want to waste the thirty seconds it would take to mock this. It makes its own gravy, so to speak.
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Then a funny thing happened. The first commenter pointed out "Hey, it's just a pound sign/hash tag." So the author had to backtrack and revise his "argument":

As a commenter notes, the symbol may have derived originally from the Twitter "hashtag," but that in no way diminishes its creepiness. It may "just" be a rotated hashtag, but that doesn’t lessen its significance as a power symbol.

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The swastika, after all, was "just" a Buddhist good luck marking before the Nazis adopted it and started using it to indicate something else. And how did the Nazis alter it for their purposes?

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They rotated the Buddhist swastika 45 degrees, to give it a new association. Just as the hashtag sleeve marking has been rotated here. In fact, pointing out that the symbol may have originally had a different association, and then was later rotated to give it a new purpose, only makes it echo the swastika even more.

So in reality, being a clueless dipshit actually makes him more correct. Lucky, that.

I rarely recommend this, especially for a cesspool of personality disorders and intellectual impairment like PJ, but you absolutely have to read the comments. It's beyond hilarious to listen to the 55-and-over crowd talk about current politics using the only language and framing they know – the propaganda of the Cold War. The protesters are all communists (some of the commenters even appear to have been explained the plot of 1984 and Animal Farm at some point). Just look at the pictures! What a bunch of comsymps.

Just for the heck of it, I tried rotating that website 45 degrees. It went from retarded to sinisterly retarded.

A vignette from a nation in the final stages of dementia:

Last night, in between approving city expenditures and other routine agenda items, the Topeka, Kansas City Council debated one rather controversial one: decriminalizing domestic violence.

Here’s what happened: Last month, the Shawnee County District Attorney’s office, facing a 10% budget cut, announced that the county would no longer be prosecuting misdemeanors, including domestic violence cases, at the county level.

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Finding those cases suddenly dumped on the city and lacking resources of their own, the Topeka City Council is now considering repealing the part of the city code that bans domestic battery. […]

Since the county stopped prosecuting the crimes on September 8th, it has turned back 30 domestic violence cases. Sixteen people have been arrested for misdemeanor domestic battery and then released from the county jail after charges weren’t filed. "Letting abusive partners out of jail with no consequences puts victims in incredibly dangerous positions," said Becky Dickinson of the YWCA. "The abuser will often become more violent in an attempt to regain control.
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"

Well, at least we have our priorities straight. Better to decriminalize things than to pay enough in taxes to allow the government to enforce the law.

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And if you have to decriminalize something, why not start with wife beating rather than, you know, something important like possession?

Yes, I understand that part of this is a political pissing match between the city and county, each trying to embarrass the other as they quibble over shrinking budgets.

That said, legalization schemes of this type are like cannibalism: if you're seriously considering it, you're either beyond desperate (say, on a desert island) or completely divorced from reality. We're beyond desperate, alright – desperate to cling to a failed, debunked political and economic ideology no matter how absurd the costs.

I have a good topic for today but I am too fatigued from a long weekend of travel and wedding joy (note: after someone divorces you, going to weddings is kinda depressing) I lack the 1:00 AM strength to do it justice. Instead, let's all console ourselves with some comforting thoughts about the next four years under President Perry/Bachmann/Tancredo/Camacho.

The poll, which was conducted after Mr. Obama’s economic address to Congress last week, contains considerable warning signs for the president. The poll found a 12-point jump since late June, to 43 percent, in the number of Americans who say the economy is getting worse. And for the first time since taking office, his disapproval rating has reached 50 percent in the Times and CBS News polls.

“I don’t disapprove of Barack Obama as a person, but as a president he has disappointed me greatly,” said Ann Sheets, 69, a Democrat from Chattanooga, Tenn., speaking in a follow-up interview. Ms. Sheets added, “I’m realistic enough to know how difficult it is and I am not against compromise, but I voted for a backbone. You have to draw some lines in the sand, and I don’t think he has done that.”

The poll found a 43 percent approval rating for Mr. Obama. It is significantly higher than Jimmy Carter, who had an approval rating of 31 percent at a similar time in his presidency, according to the Times and CBS News poll, which showed Ronald Reagan with an approval of 46 percent and the elder George Bush at 70 percent.

The president’s support has fallen to its lowest levels across parts of the diverse coalition of voters who elected him, from women to suburbanites to college graduates. And a persistent effort over the past year to reclaim his appeal to independent voters has shown few signs of bearing fruit, with 59 percent of this critical electoral group voicing their disapproval.

Good idea trying to win "moderates" by being all bipartisany and compromisey.

In other news, I want to hang out with 69 year old Ann Sheets of Chattanooga, TN. She sounds pretty cool.

Happy Labor Day!

Having just celebrated the 20th anniversary of the 1991 Hamlet chicken plant fire in which 25 workers died (mostly low-paid immigrants willing to do unpleasant work) because the plant owner chained all of the exits shut from the outside, workplace safety inspections are happening less frequently than ever.

Meanwhile, Fareed Zakaria wonders why Americans don't take more vacations. Because we're working incessantly by choice, and it never previously occurred to us to take the dozens of paid vacation days we have accrued.

Finally, read up on Joe Hill if you're stuck in the office today.

CNN also has a terribly brief piece on what labor conditions were like before the reforms of the 1930s. It also gives us a glimpse at what they will look like in a few more years.
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Many news outlets are reporting that PayPal founder Peter Thiel is investing more of his billion dollar fortune in a scheme to create floating libertarian city-states in international waters. Physically they would be similar to a large oil platform or artificial island.
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Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties.
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The idea is for these countries to start from scratch–free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place.
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Details says the experiment would be "a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons."

I've always wondered if it's possible for people who make a shit-ton of money in the real world to relocate to exclusive, private island communities and to live as though they are above the law. This experiment should answer that question once and for all.
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Thank you, Peter Thiel.

If anyone offers you the opportunity to close out a comedy show before an audience of humorless feminists, accept the challenge.
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When the people whose mission in life it is to be offended start yelling shit at the stage – because you told a Sarah Palin joke – aggressively lecture them about how comedy works and why their bizarre, provincial worldview ensures that they'll never be able to enjoy it. It's exhilarating.

Hypothetically.

You know how I hate Link Salad, the laziest form of blogging, but these three items are insufficiently complex to serve as fuel for a full post. Enjoy.

1. As an avid reader of Autoblog – I like cars, as you can clearly see when I hit the streets in my 1999 Nissan Sentra with 160,000 miles – I've noted with interest that the sales of high-end luxury brands have been doing very well lately. Mercedes, Audi, and BMW, for example, all saw strong sales growth in 2011 despite not selling any vehicles under $35,000 (with most offerings well over $50,000 and some as high as $200,000). I kept meaning to turn this into a "So I guess it isn't a recession for everyone" post, but the NYT beat me to it by noting the strong demand for ultra high-end consumer goods ($2000 designer shoes, etc.) while Wal-Mart has had to introduce smaller packs of toilet paper for shoppers who lack the cash to buy the big 12-roll pack. The Brazilification of the American economy and society couldn't be more succinctly explained.

2. Anyone else notice that the U.S. is averaging a mass shooting (something like 7-15 victims) every week or two and it isn't even headline news anymore? A guy caps 8 people in the crown in Ohio and it's like Page E10 news these days. It's nice that we're so used to workplace rampages and general spree killings that they fade into the background of the news cycle, reported like the weather – and treated to the same degree of retrospective analysis.

3. David Gergen lays bare the pointless nostalgia and flimsy reasoning behind his peculiar brand of milquetoast Beltway elite consensus politics with this ridiculous column about how America needs a Winston Churchill. It's actually too stupid to be FJMed. Let's all close our eyes, have a glass of warm milk, listen to Paul Harvey, and pretend that any Leader, no matter how Great, could achieve consensus in the current political environment. Jesus Christ himself could be elected president and if he was a Democrat, the Tea Party would be hellbent on destroying him. We could resurrect Thomas Jefferson and our TVs would be full of shameless attack ads slandering him. It's amazing that Gergen can breathe with his head that far up his own ass.

I'm going to keep it short today on account of the copious incoming traffic chewing on Monday's and Tuesday's posts.
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But we have enough time to indulge in a fun hypothetical.
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Let's say that through a combination of fund-raising prowess, ideological militancy, and personal charisma, Jesse Jackson Sr. is able to assume a position of considerable behind-the-scenes power in the Democratic Party. His sway over elected Democrats is such that he manages to get 95% of the Democratic Congressional delegation, House and Senate, to sign an oath of personal loyalty to his policy goals. Specifically, they pledge that under no circumstances will they ever support cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other social welfare programs. Jackson believes that any such cuts will affect the poor and people of color disproportionately.
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Throughout the debate over the budget and debt ceiling, House and Senate Democrats refuse to even consider any proposal that touches any of those programs. It is a non-starter. Full stop. Because they swore an oath to Jesse Jackson that they wouldn't.

I'm sure you can see through this thin shoe-on-the-other-partisan-foot analogy to Grover Norquist's "Taxpayer Protection Pledge" that currently holds sway over the GOP. I do think it's interesting to draw out the hypothetical scenario, though, to underscore a point: Can you even imagine the sheer violence of the pant-shitting that the GOP, Teatards, and Beltway media would be engaged in if the shoe really was on the other foot? If every Democrat had signed a personal oath to an interest group and private citizen that took precedence over their oath to the American people and Constitution?

When I was about 6 months old I had such horrible diarrhea one day that my mother gave up constantly diapering and re-diapering me, instead opting simply to put me in the bathtub and rinse me down at intervals until my troubles passed. This is what I imagine we would have to do with the Tea Party and House GOP – find a derelict stadium (is RFK Stadium still standing?), cover its interior with industrial strength plastic sheeting, herd them all inside to explosively shit themselves until they could pant-shit no more, and then turn the fire hoses on them.

I really don't think some of them could survive Democrats signing loyalty pledges to Jesse Jackson. Sean Hannity's pants would disintegrate under the sheer force of the onslaught, and Eric Cantor would suffer some kind of explosive decompression, rupturing into several pieces and spraying hundreds of yards in all directions like a mighty shit geyser.