I figured out this wonderful way to End Evil In Our Own Time. The strategy depends on three basic techniques for confronting Evil wherever you may find it:

1. Deny that the Evil actually happens
2. Deny that it's Evil
3. Blame it (the Evil) on your political enemies.

Now you are prepared. Go forth and conquer. With these weapons Evil will soon be only a memory.

I sure don't. Why do I have a political blog anyway?

Alright, sorry about the lack of posting. It mostly comes out of not having anything to say for the time being. If you got some opinions though, feel free to post them.

Also, for those of you who don't read the comments, TUA mentioned she should be becoming a contributor over at Knowledge is Power pretty soon, so check dat shit out.

I saw the The Dirtbombs last night. They rock like you wish you did.

It seems like the right weenies of the world sometimes lack collectively the necessary finesse in articulating their ideas to the public in a way that the left weenies of the world would find respectable. So maybe it's just a matter of finding a credible enough medium. Probably the Bad Haiku is the best place at which to post a junction of Philosophy and Art (both with their Pretentious Capitalized First Letters).

For instance, this seems a fine example of a conservative principle articulated in sublime Bad Haiku:

life should be much more
than trying to get yourself
a cleveland steamer

I'm sure this is bigger than any one provincial viewpoint. However, I sort of failed to get that one Alistair Crowley (or however the hell he spelled his name) quote to fit the structure. It's necessary to add a cheap red Mad Dog belch to make it work:

an' it harm no one
do as thou wilt - BELCH! - shall be
the whole of the law

The world of metaphysics awaits translation into this form. Don't keep it breathless too long.

A few years back, well before I started up this blog, and probably before I even knew what a blog was, I used to draw comic strips in a notebook for the entertainment of my friends and I. Most of them were not very good, but there were some gems scattered throughout. One of the strips contained two guys in dress clothes, one carrying a female mannequin. The guy with the mannequin says "Hey, check out this sex mannequin I invented!", to which the other guy responds "For the last time, that is not a 'sex mannequin'! It's a regular mannequin, that you raped!"

Well, life immitates art, it would seem. It is a bit horrifying to realize that no matter how deep I reach into the darkest recesses of my perverse imagination, there is someone out there somewhere who is more than ready to act out these vile deeds in the real physical and material world that I am sadly forced to share with such deviants.

Now it is my intention to sit down and play video games for several hours.

When you want to figure out if a restaurant is worth going to and you don't have anyone to ask, do you ever check out the bumper stickers on the cars in the parking lot for signs that the place wants to choke you with tofu-infested idiotarian-kosher slop?

I've got a Three-Sticker Rule - or you could call it a Two-Sticker Amnesty - that basically reads "run screaming in fear if you see three ideological stickers on an automobile." Some stickers are vile enough to count for more than one, but in general even light-in-tone ones indicate something seriously wrong when they take over the back of a car. Do not even walk on the same side of the street as one of the pickups with the back covered in stickers.

And the most ironic sticker of the week goes to "Separation of Church and Hate," owned by someone who hates churches. Or was that intended just to apply to the other guy?

There is a new Angry Stick-figure Man cartoon. Enjoy. Or don't.

UPDATE: Compare and contrast my veiw of communism with a socialist's view of capitalism. It's kind of sad that my own art is more historically accurate.

For serious. I need have some for me some money. Me not can blog good without. Me only now can link to Oliver Willis, because I not can afford money to have buy good links. For to make have good blog have need must get money. Please?

Establishment science seeks to prop up some inflexible aristocracy of living and dead Celebrities and Rock Stars of Science as eternally beyond question; quack science adds two plus two and gets a bucket of orgone flavored with aether and phlogiston plus the number "17" inexplicably written in Roman numerals; and real science boldly stares down questions like "what would happen if I took double doses of laxatives every day for a week?"

...the Governator doesn't carry any of his ballot initiatives. And then:

He doesn't invent a conspiracy involving voter fraud to explain why his proposals didn't win;

He doesn't denounce his state as "Patchouliland" or curse the voters as a bunch of Che-shirt-and-Birkenstock wearing nutcases;

And he doesn't threaten to leave the state, country, or continent in a fit of theatrical pique.

I find myself liking this guy more and more.

He's not just a fixture of decades of bad movies...he's a way of life. Presenting the irreplaceable Udo Kier!

Chris Kallini has a very interesting post up about children in Iraq.

Mike at Coldfury seems to be taking some exceptionally excellent vitamins lately - perhaps a specialized kind of B-12 grown in the sawdust ground from fine vintage guitars, or maybe the ashes of Rabelais in gelcap form. Whatever they are, let me have some.

I met him. someone poke me next week, and I'll talk about him. For now, sleep.

here.
Can someone who's more here mentally go through and edit this to make it witty?
I've got a war story sort of two weeks I'm coming off of.

I was reading this post by Frank J at IMAO, and I thought he brought up some pretty good points about politics in entertainment. Now, I don't really mind politics I don't agree with in entertainment too much, but I hate when they're being preachy about it, or when they think they're being subtle but they're not. Now, I've never seen the show Boston Legal that Frank is talking about, nor any of what feels like thousands of courtroom and police dramas on late night television, in fact I really don't watch much TV drama period because the drama always seems so hokey to me, and I've never seen anything to draw my interest into doing so. However, I think I tend to inadvertently pay accute attention to political themes and messages in shows and movies.

Now let me go on a complete tangent and compare The Simpsons and South Park. I haven't watched South Park in a while - it's often too vile for me - but it takes on many hot topics and often comes to the conservative conclusion. This can be very cathartic for those used to be inundated with the liberal viewpoint with whatever were watching, but it looks clumsy when compared to The Simpsons (or at least, older Simpsons episodes) which would take on an issue and not reach any conclusion. It’s much more skillful; it involves primarily making jokes at the expense of the stereotypes of both sides and then ending ambivalent – no alienating anyone.

Frank sort of articulates a thought I've had about politics in recent Simpsons seasons versus earlier seasons. In the old seasons there were some left-wing messages, and I'm certain they had some left-wing writers (not to mention Groening himself being a hardcore Democrat, though he rarely ever wrote for the show), but it was not a left-wing show as many of the comments to Frank's post suggest it always had been. In fact former Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder, the most prolific writer ever on their staff (he is credited with writing almost 1/6th of Simpsons scripts), is identified by Groening as "very politically conservative" on the season 5 DVD commentary. But here's the thing that the Simpsons got right, as Frank points out, they really didn't try to push any political ideology through the show back then. They could make a right-wing joke or a left-wing joke, but they would be totally nihilistic and absurdist about it. As Homer famoulsy once said when trying to come up with a moral for one of their episodes, and I'm paraphrasing, "There's no moral! It's just a bunch of stupid stuff that happened!" For the longest time this was a defining attitude of The Simpsons. Hell, a lot of times they would make their resolution to the story a moral that was obviously wrong to any viewer. It was that spirit of defiance of things as they were "supposed to be" that made the show great. Look at a few recent episode of the show though and you'll see recurrent and preachy references to global warming, WalMart, the religious right, and a plethora of all the trendy left-wing causes du jour. The old Simpsons did stuff that nobody else was doing, the new Simpsons is treading the ground already paved a thousand times over by Morgan Spurlock and Michael Moore and countless others. There's nothing original. It's the same favorite targets, WalMart, McDonalds (the KrustyBurger RibWich episode was obviously trying to make the connection to the McRib sandwich), and Lisa seems to take the most cliched left-wing opinions on anything. Springfield, in the good old days of the Simpsons, always seemed so far behing the rest of the country. There was a strong Old Time-y spirit to the town, Bart despite supposedly being hip was an obvious callback to older, less hip cartoon characters like Dennis the Menace, and there were constant obscure references that were from before the time of most of their audience. In fact, I'll bet you can trace the moment when the show jumped the shark to being fairly close to the time when Simpsons characters first started using the internet on the show. Springfield went from being this closed, brilliantly unique and sort of retro world of its own, to being trasnformed into a world of Starbucks loittering, trendy urban youth. I imagine this has a lot to do with older writers leaving the show, but whatever it is it shows in the politics of the show.

Uh, I typed up the draft of this post this morning, didn't finish it, and now I can't remember where I was going with it. So, I guess it's just a post about The Simpsons now. Anyway, talking about The Simpsons is always cool, I guess.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar, in his Black Profiles in Courage : A Legacy of African-American Achievement, mentioned his belief that for someone to succeed he must possess both a philosophy and a mission. I'd say a good deal of the man's success owes to understanding this as a truth; his observation makes sense on smaller and on larger human scales. Think in automotive metaphors if you need to about this one - the philosophy determines how you intend to drive the car and the mission determines where you intend to drive it.

Many folks have one but not the other. And collective operations like political parties may suffer from it. I'd say in a general sense the American political parties all have some degree of weak/nonexistent philosophy and/or mission. For example:

Republicans. This party seems to have a mission - a combination of certain advancement-of-party objectives plus some long term strategic objectives in the WoT. As a party, however, they seem to have an unclear philosophy. Their libertarian wing and their conservative wing both wish for displays of backbone, which would be some confirmation of commmitment to principle. However, the stress between the two aforementioned strains of Republican largely means that to gain support from one wing threatens to alienate support from the other; these conditions favor the advancement of devoid-of-ideology types who advance the interests of the party per se.

Democrats. This party tends to have moderate philosophical commitment - the leftward drift of the party does indicate philosophical commitments, even if some of us question their merit - but seems to lack in the mission department. Beyond a desire to do harm by any means possible to their political rivals, I don't see a consistent agenda, let alone a viable one, coming out of these folks. Impeach Bush and Raise Taxes and If it moves, regulate it are strategies - tools for implementing goals - but not an overarching mission.

Libertarians. Libertarians (as a party) have a clear philosophy but tend to lose on the mission side less because they don't have clear goals - they do, and "less taxation, less regulation, less activist government" are fairly understandable by Everyman, whether he agrees or not in specific application - but they generally overreach, mission-wise. The big successes from this party have tended to be local affairs, where Libertarian Party candidates get into an office and then move to eliminate it (I recall a "Weigher's Office" meeting its end this way, but can't remember if this happened in Texas).

Other political parties lack market share but this may be an effect rather than a cause of weak or absent substance in either philosophy or mission. But the widespread dissatisfaction - one that transcends party allegiances or the associated philosophical underpinnings of any one faction - suggests that partisan politics in general ails from something (Who do you know that claims to real satisfaction about his chosen party?). I'd say Kareem Abdul Jabbar's principle is a very important part of it, to the point that the perceived success of politicians might be measurable in terms of this dual axis.

Sony has started sticking malware on their CDs. It's badly written, opens a large security hole, and I would bet a lot of money it does jack to actually prevent copyright abuse.
It is not mentioned in the EULA, so it isn't a question of "read your abusive contracts, dumbass."

[edit] Well, turns out that I didn't actually link it up.
HERE.