…That month

First tip-off that her story was bull occurred when police SAW her 

There is a strategy among intelligence agencies and political movements called “false flag” – committing some heinous act specifically to blame it on opponents. I’m convinced much of the “racist” graffiti so abhorred by our media is done by anti-racists needing a grindstone for their perennially dull axes.

We had such a case last week, when University of Wyoming something or other Meg Lanker-Simons was figuratively assaulted with a post from some conservative troglodyte stating that he’d like to “hatefuck” her until she turned political tail – so to speak – and became a god-fearing GOP woman who’d meet her man at the door with a stiff cocktail and cocked for his stiffy.

The poor, menaced woman is shown at right. Don’t know about you, but prospect of that hatenote coming true in all its lubricated glory traumatizes the fudge right outta me.

On Thursday, though, police arrested her for wasting their time, since they traced the offending post back to her own computer. This somewhat self-aggrandizing fantasy of sexual-politics torment appears to be the work of Ms. Lanker-Simons herself. This would be small potatoes except the would-be penile Joan of Arc is an award-winning contributor to Lefty site Think Progress – which is absent coverage of this story, to no one’s surprise.

No one puts the dot on this sad nonsense better than Jim Goad over at Takimag:

In all my douchey conversations with all the douchey guys I’ve known, never once has another man told me he fantasizes about raping women. But I’ve probably had at least two dozen women confide to me that they often fantasize about being raped. Mostly they explain that they are aroused by the idea of a man that finds them so desirable, he simply can’t help himself. And despite what feminists tell you, this is apparently a very common fantasy. According to one study, four in ten women fantasize about being forcibly ravished about once a month.

Nevertheless, due to constant media repetition of feminist garbage that all men are latent rapists – without one word in opposition or questions about validity if not sanity of this ripe horseshit – Lanker-Simons’ initial charge was believed. UW, far from condemning her little falsie flag, commended her for “starting a discussion” of rape – like it ever stops. Odd: That was the same “we among sanctified Progressiva must circle the wagons and cover our ass” reaction as the “racist” vandalism hoax down here at Claremont College a few years ago. There are teachable moments even when the teachers lie. Bring a fuckin’ apple to that class.

Actually, no discussion has been started, since that implies two-way dialogue. …Maybe even three-way for the adventurous. But this phony “crime” will be impetus for even more man-bashing indoctrination. If we know American academia, we can be sure of that.

Dang! Had great idea for Pizza Hut ad set in Jamestown eaterie

Back when I was in high school, National Lampoon came along and changed everything. Suddenly there was no ceiling on good taste. In fact, there simply was no good taste in its pages. I remember a takeoff on the Audubon Society quarterly showing “The Birds of Israel”, fine-feathered friends with huge beaks and habitating in manner of the very worst stereotypes about Jews. It was hilarious, and absolutely out of bounds today.

Over the years, for better or worse, we’ve become thin-skinned; weve gotten hyper-sensitized. Strangely, as officially racist America has receded into the past, a higher, stranger standard has emerged to bedevil its now-dubious victims. Virtually anything can be racist, from Little Debbie cupcakes to white picket fences. (Damn! Why can’t they be black?)

In the current kerfuffle over Mountain Dew’s horribly racist ads featuring rapper Tyler the Creator, we have this overheated appraisal from a Syracuse professor who’s a self-described cultural critic. Holding forth on one ad featuring a police lineup with a billy goat among the suspects, Boyce Watkins potentiates to NPR:

“The holocaust of mass incarceration and the glorification of violent prison culture has taken a tremendous toll on the black community. Corporations are making it cool for black men to murder one another, while gun manufacturers ensure that the streets are flooded with the weapons necessary for us to complete our own genocide.”

And you thought you had a bad day.

Pepsi, Mountain Dew’s parent company, yanked the ad faster that Danica Patrick shifts gears in a JR Motorsports stock. There have been some other advertising milestones of late, as wrapped up by USA Today:

The action comes days after Hyundai pulled an ad parodying suicide, and few weeks after McDonald’s yanked a regional subway poster that parodied depressed women. It comes several weeks after Ford killed an ad in India that depicted sexy women tied up in the back of a Ford Figo.

This just isn’t the era to wave a red flag at any bulls if you can’t handle the resulting bullshit.

~ APRIL ~

One problem: North Korea is nowhere near Israel, so we may pass

You know… this Kim Jong Won of North Korea needs to loosen up a little. He’s… Mr. Sourpuss. Something. I just don’t think the guy is much fun.

I’ve been out of the loop for the past week. First I came down with the flu, then my site was down for renovation (can’t see it, but it’s there). So all this has been cooking along without me.

The ‘North Korea – Again’ crisis must be catching fire. Now the Bomb Iran crowd is trying to piggy-back the mess. Some tenuous connection has been established (or patched together) between the demon dwarf of East Asia and All that Is Evil in the World…. I thought Wolf Blitzer might be very close to creaming his pants a few days ago. “We’ll be back with more about America’s two most dangerous nuclear threats… right after this.”

I can just hear the pitch somewhere in Washington: “Look… you gotta take out the crazy runt, anyway. Right? Why not kill two global threats with one stone?” Of course, Iran has no nuclear weapons program – according to our own intelligence estimate – and hasn’t launched a war against any neighbor in about 500 years. That they can’t be trusted to resist pushing the button – because the mullahs are suicidal fanatics – isn’t supported by any credible evidence. But… then… We don’t need evidence to attack other countries. That precedent was set in the shit hole just west of Iran, in another of our great crusades.

The war the US hawks want is in the Middle East, where the oil is. On Wednesday, CNN ran a piece that had the effect of linking Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program to North Korean nuclear warheads. The kicker? In the middle of the report, CNN admits that there is no evidence of nuclear weapons collaboration between Iran and North Korea.

I think good journalism would have put that admission right at the beginning, or maybe been discouraged by the lack of substance from doing the piece at all. As it is, Iran has deplored North Korea’s talk of nuclear war, and called for peace, and offered to help negotiate a peaceful settlement. [Juan Cole]

Our own Dear Leaders have a plan, as long on ambition as it is short-sighted. And we can be sure of only one thing: It will not benefit us lower-tier Americans one tiny, little bit.

~ MARCH ~

‘House of Lies’ fails to make grade as watchable anti-heroics

Of all Showtime’s middling-formidable Sunday night “soap nasties”, its newest, “House of Lies” is weakest both in audience and content. Despite the fact its got a talented cast headed up by Don Cheadle and Kristen Bell, it just doesn’t stir up any interest, certainly not as amusingly as Bill Macy’s Frank Gallagher. He’s our common dark side as drunken, no-‘count patriarch of the “Shameless” rainbow brood.

My living companion had a nice little “day-player” job in Sunday’s episode, so I ended up watching more than I had before. The biggest problem with the show is simply scripts and characters even the best actors can to little with. Everyone with lines is shallow, status-minded and concerned with who’s fucking who. This is high school with a 401k and firing bonus. Gossip and constant self aggrandizement undercut characters, not enhance them. And the sex is just too damn mechanical, cheesey and teen-age boy fantasy.

But the matter of it being set amid milieu of corporate consultants is the real killer. Most Americans work mid-level or lower on any corporate rung. They must deal with arrogant, gas-bagging assholes all day. Who could bring themselves to watch more of them in primetime – chattering about closing factories and outsourcing jobs? Please.

Yet another western star goes to that big round-up in the sky

In a strange, not particularly fascinating twist of fate, I was sweating a payroll-advance screw-over I suffered at hands of Wells Fargo Bank late last week, at about the same time “Tales of Wells Fargo” TV series star Dale Robertson rode into the sunset.

Robertson was 89 and died of lung-cancer complications; he was living in San Diego, journeying there for medical treatment from his Oklahoma ranch, where he raised horses – a lifelong dream. His last acting job was in 1994, and he’d quit show business because it had become too “sexual”.

Under those circumstances, I suppose he wasn’t too thrilled with dailies of his “Son of Sinbad”, a 1955 Arabian Nights tale memorable mostly for Vincent Price walking away with the show as Sinbad Jr.’s sidekick, Omar Khayyam. Howard Hughes allows a lot more skin than usual showing on harem girls and belly dancers; back in that day, these temptresses usually had granny panties and bras evidently designed to withstand blast effect from atom bombs. An atmosphere of prurience pervades the film, in a smarmy, middle-aged guy kind of wink-wink. But everyone looks like they’re having a good time, including Sally Forrest, providing orgy entertainment with a truly gigantic rhinestone jiggling in her navel. Hughes must have had a field day designing the bauble himself, as he did Jane Russell’s breast abutments in his infamous “The Outlaw”. Check out the gams on this dancer-actress: Forrest has legs like Rafer Johnson!

But checking out Robertson’s resume, I note a poster from the movie that’s gotta be one of the stupidest-looking pieces of shit I’ve ever seen. Our hero looks more like someone’s given him a hotfoot, or he’s jumping on fire through a window, than Sinbad the Younger leaping into scimitar action.

Oh, well. It all adds up to one more western star out on Boot Hill; this diminishing population should be federally protected as national treasure.

~ FEBRUARY ~

Unfortunately, this is not a ‘whatever’ that can stay in Las Vegas

Somehow, I knew the spectacularly catastrophic shooting/car crash in Las Vegas late last week wasn’t prompted by country-club Republicans bickering over budget sequestering.

Some jackass named Ammar Asim Faruq Harris has been tabbed prime suspect in the fiery incident on the Strip, in which a gunman in an SUV chased down and shot up a Maserati; that killed the driver of the expensive sports car, an aspiring Bay Area rapper. In case you haven’t already become bored by this, the Maserati, dead driver at the wheel, broadsided a taxicab, which then exploded in flames, killing the cabbie and his fare. Several other cars were hit and people in them treated for injuries.

Last year, Harris was arrested for pimping (actually, the charges were pandering, kidnapping, sexual assault and coercion – so we know he’s a peach), and his mug shot is the charming cheesecake we run here.

Most commenters on the Huffington Post story have noted the real tragedy here was the death of the taxicab victims, a 62-year-old driver and a business woman from Washington who was passenger. That’s true, although a relative of the cab driver pointed out he was an automotive afficionado, then popped out with the thoroughly idiotic,

“He would be tickled to death: `Damn, of all things, a Maserati hit me, took me out like that. I’m happy he didn’t suffer.”

Oh, what the hell. It was a Maserati. How can burning alive stack up against that?

There’s one more tragedy: Continuing degradation of what was once a multi-billion-dollar amusement park for adults. I hate to mention this – since misplaced adoration of all gangsters is foolish and counterproductive – but when the mob ran Las Vegas, armed halfwits killing innocent people wouldn’t be tolerated. The town kept its violence out of sight and within the “family”, for better or worse. But tourists were safe and unmolested because godfathers of old realized these amateur gamblers were the goldmine. Now preening, infantile retards are free to shoot up any public gathering place, not just Vegas, mostly to draw attention to their jughead machismo.

The dead rapper was local star of some subgenre of the form, but somehow, I bet “hyphy” – or whatever – doesn’t sound a bit different than any other thug chant we know as rap, or hip-hop, or whatever it’s called this week. The form is old and tired, it appeals to teenagers with brains not fully developed …and losers. Anytime any component in music business starts name-changing, it’s prelude to a saw cutting a circle in the floor beneath it. Whither Prince, or the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, or The Artist Known as Silly Hieroglyph? Now he’s the Artist Formerly Known as Having a Career.

G’bye.

Gee… Maybe a series on dangerous urban pixies is in the works?

It’s becoming more and more apparent that our proper, politically correct media makes up shit to justify its worldview – since obviously it’s not in response to anything tangible in the known cosmos. Take “hate”. Like racism, gun violence and eating baby-seal burgers, no great courage is required to make a stand against it. In fact, it’s a one-way campaign, since no one is going to defend “hate” or even freedom to express it, lest they themselves be accused of being a card-carrying hater.

This skewed logic controls debate on many American issues, in fact. This week I wrote about gun control, doubting its effectiveness. Of course, opposing gun control runs risk of being nailed with some idiocy like: “You’re against gun control?! So… You’re in favor of slaughtering children in their schoolrooms?! Murderer!”

Violence by skinhead gangs in the United States is on the rise because of splits in the extreme right movement, a U.S. watchdog group said on Friday. The Hammerskin Nation gang has long dominated the skinhead scene, but in the last two years other gangs like the Outlaw Hammerskins and the Vinlander Social Club have rebelled against them, said Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.

Now there’s your crisis – right? Skinhead violence is about to soak our streets in blood of innocents! Right? We should be frightened – especially with the SPLC’s usual, breathless reporting of this clear and present, exclamation-pointy danger.

Except… this little outburst is six and a half years old, and we have yet to see anything like a skinhead offensive in this country. This is grand-scale social inflation of the old “skinhead invasion” moral panic from the ’80s. Remember? Schools, Lefty theaters to which no one otherwise paid attention, and even hospitals were supposedly targets of neo-Nazi battalions truckin’ in from the boondocks to wreak far-Right havoc.

Line the Mayan Doomsday and Y2K… Never happened.

But media holds that Rightwing, honky violence ALWAYS is imminent danger, so SOME grounds must be found for this longstanding, very politically correct URBAN LEGEND.

What better vehicle to spread the word – however dubious – than through fiction? Robert De Niro and Showtime are planning a dramatic series set in the burgeoning dens of Boston’s neo-Nazi movement. And, of course, doubting such a project quickly would brand me as a Nazi Klansman skinhead looking for a noble nonwhite, gay or immigrant to pound. Correct?

If I were, I’d probably be one of very, very few ACTUAL neo-Nazis in Beantown.

I didn’t think “Boston neo-Nazis” were some festering problem that warranted a pricey, prestige television series with an Oscar-winning show-runner. So I Googled the phrase “Boston neo-Nazis” and got back a grand total of four results, two of them a call to action posted at anarchist websites to counter-protest an August 24, 2002 National Alliance march on Washington, DC. [Kathy Shaidle, Takimag]

Why don’t they reframe this opus and call it “The Little Minds Who Cried Wolf Waaaay Too Many Times”?

Here’s the process: To justify my corkscrewy beliefs, I must exaggerate and fabricate importance of the phantoms that plague my tiny brain and inflame my sense of self-importance. No wonder we can’t solve any of the real problems plaguing this country. We no longer can tell fable from fact.

He’s got the ‘power’ part down – where does ‘water’ figure in? 

If there’s anything I like about L.A., it’s quality of its public utilities staff. The water runs, relatively clean, when faucets are turned. Lights snap on when switches are flipped. Somehow, it’s distressing to learn under these usually positive circumstances that some members of the Department of Water and Power are… well… as corrupt and criminal as some of our law enforcement personnel. (Even some with unlikely moniker Deputy Sheriff Jermaine Jackson.)

The Los Angeles Police Department Bomb Squad evacuated a neighborhood in North Hollywood Friday as part of an investigation into stolen building materials by an employee of the Department of Water and Power, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Police discovered a box marked as containing explosives in the garage of a house on the 6600 block of Irvine Avenue where an employee of the DWP lives, prompting the cordoning off of the home and evacuation of nearby homes, according to the story. A large stash of weapons and ammunition was also reportedly discovered.

Seems the guy also was stealing “high-end” timber from around town, too. I suppose the DWP needs those high explosives to blast water from rocks, a’la Moses with his staff. …Doesn’t make sense, never will.

 

~ JANUARY ~

Tough to be ‘anti-American’ when it’s the only ‘homeland’ I got

Let me count the reasons why I suddenly don’t like “The Americans” – a new F/X show beginning around old sweeps-month time. This midwinter second season is designed primarily to rake in viewer shake-out from 1 – crummy network shows tanking out from fall premieres 2 – crummy cable shows premiering now or coming back for another earth-shattering season, like “Girls”-mania and other social embolisms, and, finally 3 – those TCM classics revived just one too many times. For those strikes alone, there’s generally little to hope for. That’s reason number one why I already hate this new spy “thriller”.

Maybe you’ve heard about “The Americans” – about a couple of Soviet “sleeper” agents posing as a Middle-American married couple in 1981′s Reagan Era, dodging bullets and briefcase daggers while braving temptations of American abundance, lack of internal passports, access to affordable deodorants, and… married life itself?!!

The female lead is Kerry Russell and one draw is that ‘The Americans” kicks off with Kerry, the ex-Mouseketeer, cute little “Felicity”… giving beej to a poor-man’s FBI agent. That’s right! Kerry Russell smokin’ the bone on American TV.

NOW what’s so fuckin’ bad about this country?!

Evidently, in real life, there was never much of a problem with “sleepers” – agents deeply burrowed in our society, coming to operational “life” when cloaks and daggers become de rigueur. Signal problem was that evil American lifestyle so assaulted in this show, but proving too alluring to actual Soviet agents; prime problem was defection TO the U.S., not enough purloining of secrets FROM it. For that, the USSR relied on paying off native Americans. Even the fabled Rosenbergs were rentals. That, too, had its problem: Corruption can work both ways, and sell-outs have nasty tendency to do so to the highest bidder… not necessarily the dope buying their ass.

But biggest reason I disdain “The Americans” is a fizzy review from Salon; it entranced a reviewer there because evidently “rooting against America has never been so much fun”. I’ve been alive in all the decades since the ’60s, and I can tell you if rooting against America wasn’t fun, a shitload of people in media and academia have been absolutely miserable these many years.

(Russell’s character Elizabeth) recoils when her kids talk about how “Russia cheats on nuclear armament” and fervently wishes they won’t  “grow up to be normal Americans.” (One of the nice resonances of “The Americans” is how Russian super-spies’ hopes for their children are not all that different from those of yuppies.)

Isn’t that bugaboo of American yuppies – normal Americans – waved in front of us by all media, as objects of derision, scorn and revulsion? How is this trifle different that any other brain marmalade served up in both entertainment and news? Good Gawd, to be labeled a “whitebread”  or normal American holds the kind of dread once province of leprosy, guillotines or the reviewer’s dinner-platter face. We’re bad. We’re as deep as a LeapFrog game. We’re selfish, racist, anti-Semitic… ooo… We’re WHITEBREAD! Blah, blah, blah.

Let’s admit it: Affluent soiree Lefties need to believe American peasants are murderous pigs to evade their own guilt about living high on the hog while the 99-percenters toil in thankless obscurity, burdened by loanshark business practices and government by stick-up. It’s set-up designed by these same yuppie freedom fighters. How many committed progressives sit on fat portfolios, profit from our endless wars and soaking hapless, “normal Americans” in programmed debt? THAT wealth isn’t for redistribution, we can be sure. Regardless whether it’s televised, the fabled revolution won’t begin at home.

You want some anti-American, Soviet-groupie jibberish? Try out hack Oliver Stone’s “Untold Story of America” over on Showtime. It’s full of logical fallacy, deception by omission and downright stuipidity that made “JFK” so “delicious”.

Hand him some Krylon cans and watch spray-on Sistine pop up

Whenever I want to feel old, I listen to metal or hip-hop. I just don’t get them, as genres. Obviously, I’m coming close to sounding like my parents when they ridiculed rock and roll (or tried to), so I want to be clear out front: It’s not that I despise the forms. …Almost. I just don’t understand them. A snatch of melody, I need. Just a bit. Without it, I hear noise – especially with metal. It’s just grinding noise. Besides, that’s the music running in movies when a sacrifice is about to be gutted on Satan’s altar, so I’m not the only one who thinks it creepy.

But whenever I want to feel old and be damn glad I of it, I read the L.A. Weekly. There’s something timeless about “alternative” urban weeklies – junior Village Voices. They’re always written by impressionable young folk who try everything to appear anything but impressionable. But they still think rock “matters”, that rap is “important”, that movies make statements. In brief, they buy all the horseshit I did when I was their age.

Amusingly there’s a story in last week’s that sums up this youthful know-it-all about nothing-at-all. It’s perfect meat for a funny, perceptive demolition by somebody over at VDare (some Rightwingers are smart – now you know). Profiled is a street artiste and oddly documented alien (with visa) who may or may not stay. …Can’t say, since I didn’t bother to finish this moving jump-page hagiography. Se llama Neto Velasco, and he finds some kinda meaning in his vandalism and his very numerous tats.

“Every time I have a broken heart, I need to get a tattoo, and I need to go out and do some stencils,” he explains. Tattoos and stencils — which he’s used to mark the streets of L.A. — are his therapy.

…Several months ago, he stenciled the word “libertad” — Spanish for “freedom” — on every telephone booth on Melrose between La Brea and La Cienega, some 40 total. It took all night. He did it for his fellow Mexican citizens who were protesting the country’s recent elections. “This is how I scream the name of my country,” he says.

…He did his first stencil in Los Angeles a month after he arrived. Riding his scooter around Westwood, Velasco picked a dark place on Wilshire Boulevard, pulled the black paint out of his backpack and sprayed “Love Kills” on a wall. He was petrified. “There’s a lot of cops. I did not want to get deported my first month here.”

Isn’t that just peachy? Now, when I stare at a shitty piece of scrawl obliterating my line of sight while making late-night crank calls, I’ll know it was work of a broken-hearted romantic whose own body is as much a canvas as any bare, modestly clean wall in town. And I’m glad to know he’s so comfortable here he feels at ease celebrating his homeland at expense (taxes scrape down this shit, you know) of his considerably burdened hosts. Venceremos, wannabe Che.

The Weekly writer, of course, is in awe. He’s so real. And TATTOOS! How UNIQUE! Some day she’ll look back and wonder how she ever could have been such a sucker for hand-me-down, faux rebellion and studied boheme. For a generation that just doesn’t care, her passion is every bit that of a five-year-old with a lump of clay and a crazy dream.

City of the Angels? Snooty? We SEE air. We don’t put it on

Well, Gadling has come out and called my town “snooty and smoggy”. C’mon. Fog and smoke have been mixing over Los Angeles for a long, long time. Comedians have been making smog jokes since at least he ’50s. But SNOOTY?! Maybe movie stars put us in that category. Saw a Disney star I couldn’t name at a shopping mall last week. Didn’t look snooty, though. Looked real, real, dangerously skinny. Camera adds 10 pounds, so these kids are told to go full-out Darfur at lunchtime. Stoopid!

I bet we’re less snooty here in L.A. than… what… London, maybe? I bet London is snooty, although closest I’ve been is a layover at Heathrow. Love to go there. I don’t mind if it’s snooty. It’s cool. ROYAL people live there. Aristocrats. If anyone has license to put on airs, it’s aristocrats – and I’ll bet most of them don’t.

Multiple California government agencies have been working to reduce smog. It’s still a major problem, but it’s not a reason to avoid the city’s numerous landmarks. Besides, the 25 million people who live there don’t seem to be too turned off by it. And that sheer number of people discredits the “snooty” point. Choose your company wisely and you can avoid self-important people with stars in their eyes – or at least learn to roll your own eyes and walk away.

Detroit topped the list, if Gadling is putting them in order. No surprise there. Detroit always tops any ‘shitty’ list you can find. Crime rate is falling all over America…

…’Cept in Detroit.

There’s a hole in daddy’s head where all the brains drain

In my time, I’ve known quite a few rich junkies – usually young trust-funders drawn to second-hand drama of the drug more than anything else. It’s loooong been fashionable among that crowd with too much time and dough on their hands. Witness William Burroughs, heir to the Burroughs Office Machines fortune, overpraised novelist of mostly indecipherable gibberish, denizen of supposedly cool fleshpots like North Africa, and heroin junkie from the ’30s ’til his death… whenever.

To a person, these slumming “street people” were some of the dumbest folks I’ve ever met.

Other than a couple of toots, I never got into the stuff. Hate needles, don’t want anything controlling me, and was never burdened with the kind of pain needed by or desire for what’s still THE most effective painkiller in the medical arsenal. But the action, it seems, never stops.

A Park Avenue-raised heroin addict who was last week charged with keeping high-powered explosives in her Greenwich Village apartment was already a suspect in a robbery. Morgan Gliedman, 27, was also already on probation for drug possession after a Washington Heights drug bust in February, when she was taken into police custody on Saturday where she gave birth to a daughter named Melody… Five days after the robbery, on February 22, she and her Harvard-graduate boyfriend, and father of her child, Aaron Greene were arrested for possession drugs and found with a .223-caliber rifle, The Post reported. [Daily Mail]

The real tragedy is that this silly fool apparently took drugs while pregnant, guaranteeing a baby already hooked right out of the womb. We can guess how much pull these two spoiled assholes have in the fact their February arrest is just now hitting the presses.

In the photos, Gliedman resembles Angelina Jolie. ‘Stupid’ doesn’t show on camera.

 THIS MONTH July – Dec. 2012 here