My poor little kitty has fleas pretty bad.



Okay, so he looks more like this now



He's still my little baby. Any other cat owners who've had to deal with fleas before?

It's going to be much easier to defend that claim if you know some of the history behind the parties. So, here's a quick history lesson:

Once upon a time, we became a nation, and got Madison to write down some rules for us. His scribblings are widely viewed as bad, but with disagreement over what would be better, everyone settled for adding ten caveats and calling it a day. Jefferson, who had penned a famous memo to King George a few years earlier, viewed this whole federation thing as a bad idea, and started a political party to prove it. That was the first Republican Party. They were founded on the ideals of no taxes, small government, and hating those bastards from the other party so hard (stupid Federalists), ideals which endure to this day. There was also a Whig party, but the Republicans were fairly explicitly about hating on the Federalists.

When the Federalist Party died, the Republicans split up. Kind of like when Operation Ivy split up, all of the members stayed in music/politics. Some of them formed Rancid (the Democrats) and went on to fame and fortune, and the rest got into groups you've never heard of.

The Democrats were pretty good for a long time, but then they ran into some internal troubles. They were really big on states rights (like Jefferson), but also not so big on slavery (like Jefferson). So, they kind of waffled about the South. Eventually, they went more pro-slavery, because a big enough chunk of them were from the South and kind of slavery-indifferent (at best), but very pro states rights. Around the same time, some of the cooler Democrats and Whigs decided that they liked states' rights and all, but what they really liked was Abolitionism. So they got together after school and made a new Republican party (that's the one) with pretty much the same goals as the old one: no taxes, no slavery, and hating on those bastards from the other party (stupid Democrats).

Later, there was Lincoln, uniquely remembered for being the first Republican to win. He's popular, so we can roll right by without commenting much. Republican policies after the war looked a lot like Clinton's policies during the 90s: generally hands-off with some high tariffs and paying people who served on the winning side. Republican campaign strategy then was about the same too: play up immorality, slight racism (stupid Irish) and anti-antiwar sentiment (try calling a modern day Democrat a copperhead and see what happens! Let me know if anyone picks up on it).

Teddy Roosevelt was kind of a bad thing for politics all around, kind of like a weird mix of McCain and Dean, with an extra helping of crazy. He pulled it off with personal charisma and trips to Africa. His policies jumped all over the place, but everyone loved him. So, that shook things up some.Then some other stuff happened. It was mostly kind of boring, and didn't change any policies until the stock market crashed. Hoover, not being the best thing to happen to Republicans, tried to make it better by basically mandating that there be no more depression. That kind of failed.

Franklin Roosevelt ushered in a whole new era for the Democrats with never before seen levels of blatant power politics. No really, he did (for example, the south was hit hardest by the depression, but was his secure power base, so all the new deal aid went out west to the swing states. Also, all his new hires were required to vote for him), but he was also really good at power politics, and as charismatic as his older cousin.

Roosevelt was so good that every Democrat has to follow his rules, even today. The next person to shape policy this way was Reagan. He was nearly as bad as Teddy Roosevelt at just being charismatic, though a little more predictable. He got elected then reelected for several reasons: Carter was an atrocity, he promised lower taxes and small government, and stuck to it, and he basically out-cowboyed the eeeeeeeevil USSR (not the obvious strategy, but it worked).

Unfortunately, Reagan destroyed the Republican Party in some ways. The South likes several things: racism (so does everyone else, but the South's flavor is unpopular), religion, Reagan, tax cuts, nationalism, being left alone. Reagan won them over by being Reagan, but the GOP has been trying to keep them with Racism and religion.So that's the background on why everyone sucks (except the libertarians. Clearly, they are without flaw. More on that another time).

A coupla months back I posted a link about how the Red Elvises were coming here to Austin two nights on one weekend. I resolved to go see them because I see, in their celebration of stupidity and hedonism, a kind of kindredness of spirit.

So I planned to go see them at an Austin bar named Jovita's.

A band with such serious Slavic Fratboy Cred can't be taken lightly for someone who fears what may happen in the afterlife, so I dressed for the occasion. I wore a silly embroidered red western shirt (one of those I call my "Brokeback Mountain shirts"), a black cowboy hat, and a gold lame tuxedo jacket I bought on impulse one day on eBay when I decided I had to have a gold Elvis tuxedo.

I got there before the band or the crowd did and was able to secure a table adjoining the stage on the right side. So while I was sitting there folks from the band started to show up - the red haired Russian babe who does the stripper moves while playing keyboards, the blond local Austin babe on the second guitar, and the younger Russian guy from the Dallas area. I sat at the table with my token one Lone Star (I'm not much of a beer person) and waited for things to develop.

Anyway, while I minded my own business this guy with sort of leaden gray curly hair stopped twenty feet from my table and was grinning like a lunatic and staring at me. He pointed at my jacket (folded over my arm at that point, since this was warm Austin weather) and said "What's that?" I told him it was a tuxedo jacket from an Elvis tuxedo I got on eBay. He smiled and said "I like anything shiny," then left.

He came back in carrying a softshell case with one of the most visible emblems of the Red Elvises, the huge red balalaika (or however the hell that's spelled), the big triangular three stringed bass guitar you see when the Red Elvises play on videos, movies, or pretty much in the United States. So the guy who had just spoken to me was not some drugged out local Austin stain in cargo shorts, it was Oleg Bernov of the Red Elvises in his civilian clothes.

They set up for a while. Oleg and Igor (the guitarist and primary singer) and the other Russian guy from north Texas discussed the lighting in Russian. I could conclude, therefore, that the whole Russian angle was not a put-on, though at lower volumes their accents are harder to notice (I didn't notice Oleg's when he spoke to me). Then Oleg went in the back and put on a suit that looked like leopardskin pajamas modified to form a suitlike performance costume, and on his way to the stage clinked his beer on my Lone Star bottle, saying "Drinking Lone Star, huh?"

So they started their set, not at all deprecating the size of the club (I'm sure they've played larger venues - check YouTube) and I sat there about four feet away from Oleg Bernov and his big red three string bass guitar. He smiled a lot at people in the audience - he had the look of someone delighted to be where he was doing what he was, unlike a lot of prima donna musicians I've known and/or played with over the last 25 years.

When it got to "Closet Disco Dancer," I felt I would be doing the Red Elvises as disservice if I did not put on my ridiculous gold lame Elvis tuxedo jacket, so I did during the stupid disco-pointing part of the song (the Red Elvises will make the audience participate - there is no escaping). And I noted at one point during the song Oleg turned back to look in my direction, saw me in the jacket, and smiled much more grandly than I had seen at any time in the night.

So the short version of the story is: I dressed so badly at a Red Elvises gig that it made at least one member of the band happy. It would please me to no end to see Oleg, now that he no longer dyes his hair red, appear on stage in just such a jacket; then I could make outrageous claims of lowering the tone of the Red Elvises and tempting them into greater heights of bad taste in clothing.

Oh yeah, they rocked. They were better than my favorite band. And unlike 90% of the acts I see (or try to avoid seeing) here in Austin, they did not launch into half an hour of left-wing diatribes. The closest thing to a political speech was Oleg pitching sales of their CD behind the stage. He said "Viva capitalismo."

Labels: America Rules, Red Elvises, Viva capitalismo

Right. So.
One of those election things is coming up vaguely sometime, and I've had a good nap the past year or so. I should probably wake up and look at the politics. So I'll start updating again. I'm not sure what the schedule will be, but I have some cool ideas.
See you all around!

It's 2007. Aren't we supposed to be

• riding in flying cars;
• speaking Esperanto;
• wearing silver jumpsuits;
• walking around with giant bald heads with veins showing;
• living in a socialist utopia that had banished all war and want;
• reproducing via a factory where fully grown adults emerge from big vats;
• eating food in pill form; and
• vacationing on the moons of Jupiter?

Labels: Missed benchmarks

I added and removed a post yesterday on this exact subject. At Frontpagemag.com Tom McClintock puts it more concisely than I had:

The irony is that this is the same movement that wraps itself in pseudo-science, and yet declares that those who challenge their theory on scientific grounds “are on a par with Holocaust deniers” (as Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman wrote in February) and now, traitors. The Left has taken science, which is founded on a rigorous and dispassionate evaluation of fact and an equally vigorous and open debate of theory, and perverted it into a shrill, self-righteous and utterly intolerant intellectual tyranny. And like all authoritarian movements, it doesn’t take long for a tyranny of the mind (“global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers”) to transform itself into a tyranny of brute force (“This is treason and we need to start treating them as traitors.”)

All I could add to that is that, in my experience, this has been the standard misuse of Science-with-a-capital-S. Set up science as something unquestionable, infallible, and holy; declare one's own opinions in tune with "Science;" then howl in outrage if anyone utters a syllable of contradiction.

Labels: Papal infallibility of science, Technology and stuff, The Stupidity of Lesser Mortals

Back in the seventies, after people stopped talking about consipracies involving the Birchers or The Phone Company(TM), one family of conspiracy lore drew on the theory of subliminal messages - that it was possible to embed and hide a message in a variety of media and that the message, because it was hidden, would somehow enter your mind and take control of your will by bypassing your rational processes.

One form of this was "subliminal advertising," where some clever-clever graphic artist would airbrush details into a glass of ice cubes so that the imperfections of the surfaces might spell the word "sex" - so people who saw the message would, therefore, see the product as a solution to their lust and buy it and buy it and buy it.

Another form involved "back masking," where evil rock groups put satanic messages in their music to control the minds of their listeners. Since recording artists were occasionally putting stuff in this way, that added credibility to the conspiracy theorists (to a point).

However, in both cases, it became easy to misinterpret threshold phenomena. If a picture of a mountain had a lot of details that someone with a pen could outline and "discover" the word "blowjob," this did not mean that someone had put that there; however, as our Age of the (Dis)Truther confirms, you can't keep people from finding what they want to find, whether it's there or not.

In the case of the embedded messages in audio, "reverse speech" theory suggests that people inadvertently speak things backwardly while speaking forwards (a nice trick), as described on this web site.

They list, elsewhere on their site, examples of reverse speech and back masking - what you might call the inadvertent and the deliberate embedding of corrupting messages, respectively, in audio; and the very best one is their YouTube example at the bottom of this page.

Popeye the Sailor Man indeed!

Labels: Cartoon pornography, Fascinating BS

Don Calogero Vizzini

Labels: oddball biographies

I tried to google "cowardly socialist anti-semitic drug-addicted sex offenders" and didn't get back a single link. I figured at least I'd get something about Hollywood.

Labels: Fiddling While Rome Burns, Snake oil, Technology and stuff, WTF

This man fell off the death tree and hit every branch on the way down. -PWoT

I am dead serious. I don't want my tombstone to say anything else except that, my name and dates of birth/death.

Labels: my death

I thought Murel might appreciate this bit of douchebaggery and self-professed elitism (thanks to Les in the Kallini forums for that one).

If that leaves a bad taste in your mouth, read this rather awesome essay that I think will be more to my readers' tastes (found at Kim du Toit's)

Labels: America Rules, anti-Americanism, Assembly-line McRadicalism, point/counter-point

This is so beautiful it's painful - Divine Dali is answering "yes" to almost everything, and pretty much he's telling the truth.

Labels: Following up Oddball Biographies

Need some help getting some hot lefty mama into your decadent capitalist waterbed? Why not decorate your purchased- with- the- ill- gotten- gains- of- robbing- the- Third- World condominium with a few of these killer radical graphix?

What 19-year-old Garofalo-in-training could say no to Socking it to the Man in your arms? Comrades, you have nothing to lose but your virginity!

Labels: Sex through dissimulation

Okay, I realize a lot of conservatives don't like Tina Fey, but I think her show is really good. Yes, she's a bit to the left, and you can tell from watching the show, but usually when it comes up it is self mocking (for example, Fey's character being racist or condescending while trying to be "progressive", or quoting completely over the top facts or conspiracy theories when making a "liberal" argument). The show has it's flaws, for one there's a lot of cast members that seem kind of useless, but what matters are the jokes, and the show is really funny. I think Tina Fey shows her cleverness way better with this story format than with news parody like she did on SNL. Also, a lot of conservatives don't like Alec Baldwin, but his character on this show (who is supposed to be a Republican) is totally awesome. I definitely recommend this show. After Veronica Mars, this is probably my favorite show currently airing new episodes on the network stations right now (I don't have cable, as most of you probably already know), since Simpsons doesn't count because it sucks now. Give it a shot.

Labels: tv party tonight

UPDATE: I'm taking out links that may potential get this site noticed, so I don't have to deal with a potential upswing in traffic, so just copy & paste the URLs if you want to check stuff out. I should probably just delete the whole post and just send JimK a supportive e-mail, but I don't know, some people may have liked it.

A couple of days ago I happened to catch this adoring interview with Michael Moore about his new movie, and was intrigued by the references to Moore paying medical bills for "the man who runs the biggest anti-Michael Moore Web site". Curious on the details, I decided to go to the only anti-Moore website I know of (http://www.moorewatch.com/), despite having not been there in probably over a year due to my intense loathing of one of the co-founders (if you're new to this blog, check out Angry Stick-figure Man episodes #1 and #9 for vague references as to why). Sure enough, MooreWatch was the site this was in reference to. The other co-founder, JimK, who managed to be a decent, cool guy back when myself and two of Kallini brothers had a huge, vitriolic, dispute across several websites with his close friend and MooreWatch co-blogger, at a time where many of Lee's Right-Thinking readers were just mindlessly attacking us as an issue of blog partisanship rather than on any sort of facts of the dispute.

Actually the event was obviously a mixed blessing for JimK, and you gotta give the guy credit for choosing to do what's best for his wife (who has been having very expensive health problems since before I stopped reading Lee's sites), even though he had serious reason to suspect that this charity came with a major string attached. If it had been his own health, I'd be willing to bet he wouldn't have stooped to playing Moore's game, but for his wife he didn't really have a choice in the matter. If you follow the link to MooreWatch you can get a lot, lot more details, including JimK's rather classy (I thought) responses. The whole situation has an unsettling, handshake-with-the-devil sort of vibe to it. You gotta congratulate JimK on putting compassion before pride, and showing that kind of humility to know full well he was walking into a "gotcha!" in front of millions of people, and going through with it anyway because no amount of saving face was worth watching his wife suffer. For Michael Moore to advertise these events in his movie to make it look as if he has a sense of compassion seems to me to just be insulting of the intelligence of everyone who watches his film. First of all, if even Michael Moore's fans out there genuinely go in for that hokey, disingenuous tone of reverence (http://www.moorewatch.com/index.php/weblog/jim_kenefick_and_moorewatch_as_presented_by_michael_moore_in_sicko/), well I happen to know of quite a few downtrodden Nigerian widows that could surely use your assistance in freeing up their husbands fortunes from tyrannical government forces. But ultimately, Moore's actions are morally equivalent to visiting a horrifically malnourished third-world community, and tossing scraps of food to gas-bloated children just to watch them fight over it for your amusement. It's a multi-millionaire reminding a regular shmoe that when his life is at it's lowest, the rich man can toss you a Scooby snack and then flaunt his charity to the world that we might admire his compassion, and he can rub the man's nose in it. If Moore had an ounce of compassion he would have just made the act of charity and left it out of his movie entirely, epspecially considering it is completely irrelevant to his thesis. I mean, how do you think you or anyone else would like it if it was broadcasted on TV every time you went down to the welfare office to pick up a check?

George Orwell chose to live in abject poverty for a period of time in London and Paris, so that he could actually experience the reality of poverty. In his book he wrote about the experience, he reflected that "I shall never again...expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny". Similarly, I don't think JimK owes Moore an ounce of gratitude, though I think it is to his credit that he has had the humility to show such gratitude. To Mr. Moore, fuck you for thinking your vast personal wealth can buy you the moral high ground when you sell a man reprieve from his wife's suffering at the price of his personal integrity. Mr. Moore, you have shown us, unintentionally, why we pro-capitalism types don't salivate at the thought of free goodies from the government. To quote P.J. O'Rourke, "Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights— the "right" to education, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery— hay and a barn for human cattle." Or, to quote Xerxes from 300, "Unlike the cruel Leonidas who demanded that you stand, I require only that you kneel." Just remember Mikey, it was to his wife, and not to you, to whom Jim kneeled.