Saddam Hussein (rest his noble, Iraq-stabilizing soul), came to power in 1979. In 1980, he invaded Iran and instigated a war that lasted until 1988 and cost hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides (some estimates put Iran's losses alone at over 1 million lives). Partly because of the debt (including a debt to Kuwait) that Iraq had built up during this war, Saddam decided to invade Kuwait in 1990, which resulted in the first Gulf War, which lasted until 1991. When this war ended, UN sanctions were imposed upon Iraq in order to keep Saddam contained and in check. Saddam was able to deflect the brunt of the sanctions' negative effects onto portions of the population he sought to suppress, and during the course these sanctions ran, they cost hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, almost entirely from the most helpless parts of society. These sanctions remained in place, with all of their horrific effects on innocents, until the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States.

Iraq under Saddam was never stable. Almost every year of Saddam's presidency that wasn't speant under harsh, Western-imposed sanctions, designed to contain him at a rather brutal cost in innocent Iraqi lives, Iraq was involved in a violent war that Saddam initiated. The only reason people are able to believe that Saddam, bad as he was, was minding his own business before the 2003 invasion, is because prior to 2003 it was an easy luxury for most Westerners to ignore Iraq altogether, and before the 2001 WTC, to ignore the entirety of the Middle East. Not going to war would have meant the indefinite imposition of sanctions, just to keep Iraq within its own borders.

I took one of those mostly meaningless online political tests, since I was bored. Not surprisingly I am located well into libertarian territory (and would probably be further in the libertarian area if the political test could differentiate between what you personally find distasteful and what you think should be regulated or banned). Of course, there wasn't much on there about foregin policy views, so my increasingly positive disposition towards benevolent imperialism probably doesn't show up on there.

I got the boxed set of the first season of Saturday Night Live and was laughing at the clothes and period stuff - I'd say I'm long in the tooth to remember this stuff somewhat from when it first aired, but that would mislead you into thinking I still have teeth to be long - and on the second ep they had a faux commercial with sixties radical Jerry Rubin.

Since sixties political celebrities generally make me want to have an attack of projectile diarrhea, and since SNL bits featuring political figures have (in my experience) tended to be smug skits of self-admiration and congratulation (I remember the not-very-funny Jesse Jackson game show), I was groaning. But then it reminded me: In the mid-seventies people actually made fun of the sixties, and by "people" I include the folks that believed themselves "hip, current, with it."

Rubin was doing an ad for wallpaper covered with sixties graffiti in several themes - violence and militancy slogans, peace-and-love slogans, freedom slogans. I can't remember the names but they were consistent with air fresheners and commercialized decorations.

The writers of this skit got it exactly - the morbid nostalgia of sixties worship, plus the consumerization of politics. Circa 2006, the Cult of Counterculture is a method prosperous middle class people use to give themselves a sense of danger in their completely safe and boring lives, plus make themselves feel superior - for whatever goddamned imaginary reason - to ordinary joes such as the guys who put the roof on their houses or the plumber who fixes their pipes.

Rubin's silly wallpapers would sell today. As a matter of fact, their contemporary equivalent exists in the form of all that stupid Che merchandise - tee shirts, CD cases, watches, musical tributes to Che the Buey, hagiographic movies, and what not. Politics for many people is, primarily, emblematic, a fashion statement, a gentrification of something to distinguish it from superficially similar merchandise that commoners, peasants, and vulgarians consume - designer jeans with precise styling features compared to the dreadful Rustler jeans one sees the gardener wear while he resods the back yard.

The twisted piece of this is that it's statistically possible that the abominable Al Franken wrote that commercial. But if he did he's had 31 years to live with his regrets, repent, and write long gushing apologies to the Last, Great Progressive Hope who even now lies dying in a bed in Cuba.

Okay, as is the case with most Christmas seasons, my stupid friend came up to Cleveland, and consequently I ended up seeing more movies within a few weeks than I do during the entirety of the parts of the year he's out of town. My friend is fairly trendy, and thus tends to enjoy many shitty movies, which due to my being a huge pushover I often end up seeing when he's in town. I'll start with the good movies, though.

Little Miss Sunshine - Excellent, excellent movie (worth noting that I actually saw this one before my friend was in town). If you haven't seen it, go check it out this instant. Probably my favorite movie since Serenity. The entire cast was great in their roles, but I absolutely loved the little girl who played Olive. I can't recommend this one enough.

Slither - Not breaking a lot of new ground here, but as someone who generally finds horror movies retarded and uninteresting I actually enjoyed this one. It's definitely not on par with Shaun of the Dead, but it did kind of feel like Shaun of the Dead in rural America. Also, it stars Nathan Fillion, who played Mal on Firefly. Not a lot of new ground, but it seems like (based on the comments of the writer/director) they set out more to create a deliberate homage to cheesey horror films with this film, and the movie has enough funny humor to wrap the old horror cliches in and make them enjoyable. My favorite moment in the film would probably be a scene towards the end where the town's mayor, whose political affiliation is never overtly suggested prior to this, is being chased by one of the zombified townfolk and the zombie woman is yelling "YOU'RE A GODDAMN REPUBLICAN! YOU REPUBLICANS SHOULD ALL BE RUN OUT OF TOWN!" Classic. Also, plenty of over-the-top death scenes played for comic relief.

Cars - I rather liked this movie, though it's not up to par with some of the other PIXAR movies, and the story felt more cliche to me than in their other movies. Still, it's about as good as you can expect a movie where every character is a talking car to be.

Sin City - Mixed feelings on this one. My friends DVD came with a copy of the Frank Miller comic that the Micky Rourke plotline was based on (actually, copied pretty much word for word and scene for scene from), so I read that, and I actually found the comic book to be more enjoyable than the film. I think this is because the big screen adaptation of the fight scenes tended to look kind of retarded, and the noir-style narration seemed fairly hokey (though it seemed well written reading it in the comic book). I thought the actors themselves tended to look pretty cool with the highly stylistic black & white visuals, but the scenarios tended to look kind of dumb on screen. Hollywood movies that are supposed to be gritty and brutal always feel to me like they try to oversell it.

A History of Violence - I watched this one at like 3:00 am in the morning, and thus slept through a lot of it. So, my memory of this movie has huge gaps in the story scattered throughout, but basically I think the gist of it is that Viggo Mortenson is a small town business owner who kills some thugs in self-defense, then after he's on the news he starts getting contacted by mobsters from Philadelphia, who recognize him as a former hitman or something, and they want him to get back in the business, and his family's all pissed at him for hiding his past life. I can't make a judgement call on this movie one way or the other, because I wasn't conscious for enough of it. I will say that, despite Viggo's fairly hot wife, the sex scenes in this movie may make your penis shrivel up.

Monster House - Enjoyed it well enough until I fell asleep, not that far into the movie.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby - It was fairly decent, though I tend not to enjoy these wacky Hollywood comedies like I did when I was a teenager. I wouldn't recommend going out of your way, but if you got nothing better to do you do have some good laughs throughout.

The Break-Up - Chick flick. It seems like it tries not to be, as it seems to make an effort to draw in fans of Vince Vaughn's comedy movies, there's a brief Jennifer Aniston nude scene (rear only, fellas) that had to have been thrown in to draw male audiences (and maybe to piss off Brad Pitt), and there's lots of guys playing video games scenes (the scene where Aniston's date turns out to be more interested in playing video games with Vaughn than dating her was genuinely funny), but the themes were definitely chick flick. Oh, and I'm pretty sure the Mac kid (from the PC vs. Mac ads) was in this movie as a long-haired, effeminate gay guy. Now that sounds like a real Mac user.

Fun with Dick and Jane - I really wish it was. I don't recall any real laughs in this film. Back in like junior high I used to absolutely love Jim Carrey, so it's kind of sad to see him nowadays getting the comedy roles that were presumably turned down by Ben Stiller.

Clerks II - Mediocre, but not abhorrent as I had anticipated. A few laughs here and there, but the attempts to recapture the spirit of the (excellent) original were pretty lame. If you enjoyed Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back you'll probably enjoy it, but I personally can't recommend it. Oh, and the "joke" that the nerdy and earnest Christian kid didn't have sex with his girlfriend because he genuinely believed she had troll that lives in her vagina until her 21st birthday was just stupid and lame beyond words. But Rosaria Dawson looked quite hot throughout the film.

Over the last week we lost two of the greats, James Brown and Gerald Ford. With the passing of James Brown, our planet's funk levels have dropped to dangerous lows, and I urge anyone reading this to substantially increase your personal funk to the greatest extent possible. The loss of former president Gerald Ford is also a great tragedy, as he may very well be the only president in the history of this country who isn't viscerally hated by a substantial portion of the population. This is particularly noteworthy when one considers the fact that Gerald Ford was never actually elected to the office of president, which I would say is a pretty damning indictment of democracy.

Now, regarding Alchemy for Dummies, I realize that when the fall semester ended I promised an increase in posting, but I apparently forgot at the time that I'm a liar, and ridiculously lazy, and apathetic, and worthless, and retarded, and faggy, and self-loathing, and generally horrible.

The relentless advance of tech v. Jesus-stealing nativity scene thieves.

Disco and mad science collide.

LEFTARD: The reason communism has never failed is that it has never been tried.

YOU: Then let's take it to Nuremberg and try it.

This is part of a Flash cartoon I am working on. I offer no context, just that sneak preview.

Semester's done, so I'll probably post more regularly over the next few weeks.

But he has an alibi for when this was made.

I've had retarded test questions in college in the past. I remember an exam question for an Informations System class that asked, "If you could describe the Internet in one word, that word would be?" followed by some multiple choice answers. But my brother just told me about a test question he had on an exam that makes me never want to talk to a member of the human species again. He was telling me about his final exam for his Human Diversity class, which he took today. One of the questions, he says, was:

Which of these is sexism?
A. Men are superior to women
B. Men and women are equal
C. Woman are superior to men
D. None of the above

He went to the professor during the exam, and asked her about that question, since as he pointed out A & C are essentially the same thing with the roles reversed. He was told that A was the only right answer.

Wow. Just, wow. I think I broke my brain on that one.

You've probably heard by now that Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet has died. He also died, as is the case of damn near every brutal dictator (the only exception I can think of is Mussolini), without personally receiving some conception of the suffering he visited upon others. Here's a list of history's worth dictators, along with their fates (though you have to have killed at least 10,000 to be on there, so you won't find Pinochet on that list... kind of a sad testament to the 20th century that a guy who killed over 2,000 people is really a piker in historical context), for comparison.

One instering thing about Pinochet, which I'm sure there are exceptions I am missing, he is the only nasty dictator who immediately comes to mind who left office fairly peacefully through a democratic election (though the news of his death has apparently been met with violent protest). His eventual arrest actually had nothing to do with his crimes against Chileans, but actually with his regime's murder of several Spanish citizens. Because he suffered from dementia by the time he would have been tried, he was simply allowed to live the rest of his life under house arrest. That's a pretty benign punishment for any oppressive dictator, but I've actually known people with dementia so it's probably a safe bet that the guy who ran Chile for a decade and a half was for all intents and purposes dead at that point.

Now, Pinochet's value as a political icon extends well beyond the reach of his regime's past power. While he was indesputably authoritarian towards political opposition, he did a lot to liberalize Chile economically. This is something of an anomally, as most dictators regardless of whether they are popularly considered to be left-wing or right-wing, tend to be authoritarian on both economic issues as well as social and political issues (though Pinochet certainly isn't the only exception). The significance of this is that opponents of economic liberalism use Pinochet as a symbol through which to associate economic liberalism with totalitarianism (something that ought to be easily dismissed by the fact that socialist regimes of one type or another throughout history have murdered far more than the entire population of Chile several times over, whereas Pinochet is the only authoritarian dictator who heavily pursued economic liberalism). This image, sadly, has not been helped by the fact that many proponents of economic liberalism did at the time look eagerly to Chile as a model for free markets. The great Milton Friedman particularly was tarnished by being tarred as a Pinochet-supporter (though as Friedman liked to point out, the speech he delivered on free market reforms in Chile, that got him tarred with these accusations, was virtually the same speech he gave in countries with socialist dictatorships like China and Yugoslavia, of which his critics said nothing). I think the scary thing about this is that a vicious, authoritarian ruler is being used as a boogie-man to scare people away from the pursuit of liberal reforms. Pinochet's name is never invoked to tar other authoritarian regimes, but rather people who advocate liberty, and that is unbelievable to me.

UPDATE: The great Christopher Hitchens gives Pinochet an appropriate kiss-off, detailing some of his crimes both within and outside the borders of Chile. A point that seems to be implied in Hitchens writings, at least as I read into it, Pinochet's reforms were more cynical politicking than ideological (like a great many dictators), and apparently more of an attempt to disguise his kleptomania than anything else.

Then I have just the YouTube video for you!

If you're one of the former, then you may also enjoy this video. If you're one of the latter, then here are some abortion photos.

God I hate babies.

A Gun for Christmas
Oi to the World
both by The Vandals

Also, some music that isn't really Christmas related, but I feel like sharing it because it's that season, a YouTube video of the New Bomb Turks live, as well as another YouTube video promoting their DVD.

I got some Christmas music while out shopping for the four or five people I still buy Christmas gifts for and, out of sheer contempt for humanity, picked up Twisted Sister's "Twisted Christmas" and Billy Idol's "Happy Holidays". And I have to say, though Billy is relentlessly cheesy in an idiom no one can truly imitate - compounded by his temporary confusion of himself as an avuncular holiday figure (you might say, here, as his generation's Bing Crosby) - there's no way he can compete with a band led by a hideous Jewish guy in makeup presenting Christmas songs in a cheese-metal fashion.

On the other hand, I doubt if either can touch Afroman's "A Colt 45 Christmas," which even now I leave my computer to try to find. If Afroman's tracks like "Deck My Balls" can't drive a stake through the heart of Christmas then it will survive forever. I buy this disk because I have to know who survives.

Courtesy of Slate.

To the Asian guy I find doing his dishes in our bathroom at work at least once a week: Really, we love you, man, but if you think about it does it really make sense to go to the room where people leave turds floating in unflushed toilets and where people spray walls, floor, toilet seat, and urinal with their liquid wastes in order to put your dishes in a condition where you're more willing to eat out of them? I'd trust my dishes more with yesterday's crud dried in them than after someone washed them several feat from someone's leftover floating log.

It's speculation, sure, but I think this column from Slate is onto something. Basically, the author suggests that it's because it's only okay to advocate intervention so long as nobody (as far as Americans and Europeans are aware) is profitting from helping people, and it's apolitical (and thus, safe) so far as Westerners are concerned. So, if President Bush has gone on record saying a country needs regime change or is part of the Axis of Evil, it's political, and any concern for their oppressed citizenry is apparently selfish and impure, and thus they get taken down a notch on the humanitarian intervention priorities list. Isn't altruism such a wonderful basis for morality?