Had enough of the jive-turkey nonsense that passes for music these days? Crank this:
Don’t bring me down, Bruce. (Whoever Bruce is.)
And if you thought that was kick-ass, try this:
Nothing like a boogie-woogie bassline at full tilt to get the room shaking and make you forget just what shit is currently trendy, eh?
Crappy weekend, everybody! Doesn’t that video just say it all? I figured it was the perfect lead-in to this week’s wankapedia…which, of course, though still in no particular order, is led by you-know who…because this is about all the leadership quality he’s got left:
1. Stephen Fucking Harper. Oh lordy, where to start with this one? There is so much wank here, just this week alone. His whiny performance at the Tuesday evening leadership debate was a wank, as is the SupposiTories’ parliamentary obstruction manual—all 200 pages of it. And how about that “plan” to move the media to a shoe store in the Sparks Street Mall in downtown Ottawa, safely away from Parliament Hill, so they can’t ask hard questions and ambush MPs at the doors of the Commons or in the parliamentary press gallery, as of old? Yeah, that’s a wank, too. And then there’s Internet espionage, and a big smelly fib about health transfer payments to the provinces. But wait! There’s even MORE despicable: The Auditor General, Sheila Fraser, is righteously pissed off at them. And why not? This is the most unaccountable government we’ve ever had, bar none–they even make Brian Mulroney look honest.
2. Donald Fucking Trump. No, nobody sees him as a serious presidential threat. His hair, on the other hand, looks like it could eat small children alive. PS: Oh, FUCK. It’s eaten his brain already! PPS: And can we honestly say we’re surprised to learn that he’s quite the racist, too?
3. Joseph Fucking Farah. Finally, FINALLY he admits it: WingNutDaily publishes misinformation! Now, what’s this “some” business? I haven’t seen a single story on there that wasn’t wall-to-wall crapaganda!
4. Sam Fucking Brownback. Awwww, so touching how concerned he is about the (largely imagined, and totally unproven) pain of the fetus during an abortion. How about the suffering of the woman during a forced pregnancy? Or how she suffers giving birth to a child that’s fatally deformed? Oh that’s right…she’s not human; her life only matters insofar as she can be kept around to serve as an incubator. Doesn’t matter if she’s practically a cadaver, as long as she’s still circulating blood to the placenta. Only the fetus truly counts. And whether it’s healthy isn’t the real issue, either. As long as the far-right fetus fetishists are appeased, shit–who cares?
5. Bill Fucking Donohue. Yup, the biggest apologist for the Roman Catholic Church’s pedophiles is up and whining and blaming the victims…again. His line this time? Still the same old same old: Teh Ghey! Willing participants! Strangely absent: any mention of the fact that abusive priests–or “willing participants in cassocks”, if you will–were breaking their vows of celibacy. Awwwwkward.
6. PJ Fucking McDowell. Or whatever his real name is; that’s the pseudonym of a coward who blames everyone but himself (and his dim-witted penis) for the fact that he married the wrong woman for the wrong reasons, then had an affair (and got that woman pregnant as well) and ruined everything for not one but two families. And who’s the really selfish one? His poor cheated-on wife…for putting her injured feelings and sense of betrayal ahead of “won’t somebody think of the children”. How dare she, the hussy! Jezebel has the perfect takedown, if you’d care to read it.
7. Sarah Fucking Palin. Enabling Wanker #2 in his birtherism isn’t going to improve your (already shitty) chances at the White House next year, dear.
8. Fucking Arifinto. If you’re gonna make something illegal in Indonesia, don’t do it with something you like to watch during slow times in parliament. Like, oh, say, PORN. Unless, of course, you’re just kinky that way.
9. Jack Fucking Schaap. So, this whited sepulchre is unrepentant about the shitty way he treated his parishioners, even after being exposed on national teevee? Well, all righty then. Maybe a mass walkout would teach him the error of his ways. Or better still, some jail time for mental cruelty.
10. Michael Fucking Sona. Looks like the SupposiTories up here are taking notes on vote-challenging from their Repug counterpigs in the US. This one, and a band of his fellow campus Conservative thugs, tried to hold up the democratic process in Guelph, Ontario, by claiming an advance polling station at the city’s eponymous university was illegal. It wasn’t. But I bet what the campus conservatards tried to do…WAS!
PS: Special dishonorable mention to the fool who, first crack out of the comment box, claims it couldn’t have been an actual advance poll because those aren’t supposed to start until April 22. But since this was at a university, and the majority of the students would have cleared out by then as it was the end of their semester, the university got a special advance poll set up, as noted in the local newspaper. So, not only was Sona clearly in the wrong, but his would-be defender, too. One has to wonder if this troll got paid to spout such inanities–remember, the Calgary Craigslist site had a brief ad up calling for hirelings to do just that!
PPS: Looks like the Tory effort to make sure university votes didn’t stand…didn’t stand. Ha, ha.
11. The Fucking Lingerie Football League. It’s an inane enough idea, this demeaning concept of chicks in skimpy underwear and minimal padding running around after a pigskin, but talk about adding injury to insult–the league won’t pay for the medical treatments needed by injured ex-players, and league boss Mitchell Fucking Mortaza threatens legal action against anyone who tries to fight for it. And just think, people, Toronto is about to get its own franchise! Well, at least THOSE girls will have free medicare…for whatever that’s worth. Personally, I won’t watch football until they get guys in tiny Speedos doing what these girls are doing right now. And hell, I can just turn on competitive swimming and diving for the part of it that really interests me.
12. Amin Fucking Kassim. Talk about fucking chutzpah: He guns down his former common-law wife because he doesn’t want their young son’s mind “spoiled”–a dumbass move for any single father. Then, at the ensuing murder trial, he represents himself–a dumbass move for anyone other than a trained lawyer. But what really takes the biscuit is when he gets Juror #5, himself quite the sexist wanker, involved–a dumbass move, period. Clicky the linky, people, you really have to read it for yourselves.
13. The Fucking Government of Japan. That’s right, the government. Rather than taking proper measures to protect the people, whom does it protect? TEPCO–the company running the nuclear reactor that blew at Fukushima, contaminating land, air and sea with radioactive particles. The people are not being adequately warned or evacuated, according to Greenpeace’s monitors at the scene. They’re receiving a year’s worth of radiation in the space of just a few weeks. While that may not be enough to kill them in the short term, it does mean a greatly elevated risk of dying from cancer over the long term. Shouldn’t the people’s needs be placed ahead of TEPCO’s reputation, such as it is? Or, more to the point, TEPCO’s cash?
14. Zeljko Fucking Zidaric. Oh, the things a single careless e-mail can reveal! For all those wondering if the SupposiTories really care about new (“ethnic”) Canadians beyond using them for self-aggrandizing photo ops, we now have a definitive answer: They don’t.
15. Orrin Fucking Hatch. This one joins Wanker #8 in the porn-disgrace corner. Only, alas, he has yet to be caught consuming it on the job; instead, his wank is that he’s claiming it to be responsible for a rise in crimes and other assorted social disgraces which have all actually fallen in the last several years. Boner.
16. David Fucking Cameron. Xenophobe much? I know it’s hard to believe, but new immigrants DO make an effort to learn the language of their new country, and to integrate into society. It’s not their fault if others don’t understand that. Or the difference between integration and assimilation. But it’s absolutely inexcusable when those who don’t understand are running the country…into the fucking ground. And one of the ways they’re doing it is to blame the victims of good old English racism by suggesting, not so subtly, that they are bringing it onto themselves.
17. Dalton Fucking McGuinty. He’s in a league with Wanker #13 for not disclosing the fact that Ontario’s radiation levels are up since the TEPCO disaster in Japan. What’s he so afraid of–having to do his job, which entails informing the public and enabling them to protect themselves? Remember, he got elected in the wake of Walkerton–another big scandal involving contaminated water. He made environmental protection a major plank in his platform, and how he’s reneging? I think from now on, I may have to call him McWimpy.
18. Scott Fucking Walker. Finally, the inevitable happens: a criminal probe! Can a recall vote be far behind? The people of Wisconsin surely deserve better than this blatantly crooked, cross-eyed teabag. Let’s hope they get a real governor, and soon.
Quod erat demonstrandum, baby.
19. Tim Fucking Hudak. Oh surprise! Ontario’s SupposiTory leader is an exact replica, in miniature, of Wanker #1. Which actually doesn’t surprise Ontarians a bit…we all knew he would turn out like this. After all, he’s a Mike Harris SupposiTory…and a lot of THOSE epic failures fell up to land straight in Harpo’s cabinet.
20. Roger Fucking Vangheluwe. How’s this for chutzpah? He’s a two-time incestuous child abuser, AND he has no intentions of leaving the priesthood. Stands to reason: Why leave the biggest pedophile-shielding closet on Earth, which also guarantees a steady stream of prospective victims to the abuser?
21. Chris Fucking Christie. I believe the words “gross misogynist fuck” just about cover it, no?
22. Rick Fucking Santorum. Ass sploodge says WHAT? He’s running for president? Ha, ha–oozing might be more like it. Or creeping.
23. and 24. Phyllis Fucking Schlafly and Suzanne Fucking Venker. Isn’t it funny how those very same women who say the rest of us should go home, stay in the kitchen, and make babies, don’t take their own advice–and make a very lucrative cottage industry of being utter fucking hypocrites? If their shit didn’t do massive damage to women’s well-being in real life, it would be funny. But remember, Phyllis Fucking Schlafly is practically THE woman who got the Equal Rights Amendment scrapped, and has kept a second one from being tabled since. I guess it’s easy to fight tooth and nail against social justice if it deprives you of credibility and moolah–eh?
25. Scott Fucking Adams. In the entry that got eaten a couple of weeks ago, I slammed his balls to the wall for being a friggin’ misogynist AND, when called on it, dropping a string of comments (scroll down!) belittling the intelligence of his feminist critics (thus proving, backhandedly and cackhandedly, that the ladies had a damn good point). Now he’s back in the news again, for yet another egomaniacal, loserish wank: pretending to be someone else, a rabid superfan of–you guessed it–Scott Fucking Adams. Sock puppet on hand (or cock?), he trolled the Internets, using at least one fake identity to prove that dang, that Scott Fucking Adams is a damn good cartoonist. And a sooooooper-genius. Unfortunately, that was none too bright of him, since someone whose IQ probably didn’t test so high easily sussed him out…and now all the subgenii of the world are laughing at him. Me? Well, as a former Mensan with a 99th-percentile IQ of mine own, I just roll my big, brown eyes at the notion that a guy who does crude doodles of talking Machiavellian dogs and “Elbonians” could fancy himself so terribly, terribly much.
26. Linda Fucking Szczepanski. Driving drunk is a wank in and of itself, but when arrested for it, to tell the officer to go arrest pedophiles–and MEXICANS? That’s some triple-distilled industrial strength wankitude right there!
And finally, a special shout-out and Bronx cheer to these guys:
How do you suck? Let me count the ways…no, wait, on second thought, I don’t have all fucking night. Let’s just say that’s the most unhip hip-hop I’ve heard all week. And if you’re gonna get down on taxing and spending, better attack your own military-industrial complex first. You missed them in your word-salad of bad unrhyming verse. Kind of a major oversight, that.
Good night, and get fucked!
I’ve been getting a huge uptick in traffic lately. Good thing, right? I thought so, until my brother asked if I had ads on my blog. “You could make money off it”, was his rationalization.
But here’s my problem: I don’t want to do that.
Not that I couldn’t use the cash, of course. Who couldn’t use cash, in this world that eats so goddamned much of it? But here’s the thing: I don’t want to make money off this blog. I do not want this blog to get eaten.
Radical notion? Well, I am a radical, and I don’t see why I should apologize for that. In fact, I’m downright anti-capitalist, and the notion of taking capitalist ad-cash for my dissident musings makes me laugh at the crazy irony of it. It also makes me throw up in my mouth a little.
The idea that the Internet should be a tool of crapitalism in the first place is inimical to me. I’m here to represent the underrepresented side that takes issue with all that. If this is a “marketplace of ideas”, then my idea is that the “market” mentality should be the first thing to go. Ideas should stand or fall on their own merits, not their purported cash value. You want to talk about freedom? Fine–here’s another idea: Your mind is not truly free if your blog is for sale. Discuss!
And speaking of ideas, let’s talk about the psychological reasons for my choice, which underpin the political/ideological ones to a large extent.
We are already inundated with advertising; it’s everywhere we go. You can’t turn on a TV or a radio without being hit with it; you can’t open a newspaper or magazine, either. It pulls your eyes and ears away from what you really wanted to see and hear, in whatever medium it exists. Do we need it all over the Internets, too? Every last little crummy website, it seems, has advertising slapped all over it. It’s a terrible spoiler; it leads to a dumbing down of the blog, and its readers, both. You can’t take away many meaningful messages from the black-and-white text when colorful animated ads are dancing on the sidelines, demanding that you forget what you really came for, and just click through and buy something you really don’t need or want. Is this what’s called “freeing your mind”? Advertisers would love us to think so. To them, the news, like our musings, is just filler for in between the ads, and not vice versa.
I never click through, BTW. I do my damnedest to ignore the ads. On Facebook, I routinely X them out, especially the dating ads (blecch!). I even have ad-blocking software installed on my browser, and whenever some banner or sidebar ad crosses my annoyance threshold, I click the little “block” tab, and presto! One more ad-server thwarted in its purpose. But still, the distractions are there, and they irritate me. They make me feel that I’m being propositioned by a pimp, instead of receiving information or insights from another person.
Also, the whole idea that ideas, insights, information, etc., can be monetized–and often for just a pittance, really, barely enough to keep the stuff hosted on a half-decent server–makes the whole thing pathetic somehow. Do people sweat over the right words to draw lots of eyes to their blogs, just for that? And would anyone who does that cop to it openly?
I’m not here to sell anything on behalf of third parties. I’m here to get you to read me, to take my ideas seriously, to exchange ideas with me too. That’s all. The idea that I’d tailor or slant my writing so some faceless third party can sell you something you don’t want, or worse, promote something or somebody I don’t want to promote, just so that I could make a few crummy cents off your clickage, goes against my grain in every way. I take my readers seriously; how can I ask them to take me seriously when the word-detecting adware on the side is pimping the very things and corporations and people that I rail against here? In the end their eyes will be drawn to the ad-words, not MY words. What self-respecting blogger wants that?
And finally there are the esthetic reasons. Which may appear to be less important than the political and psychological ones, but are not to be dismissed either.
Ads clutter the landscape; they crowd it; they cloud it. They break up a continuous space, and they do so deliberately to call your attention to themselves. This runs counter to the purpose of what you’re doing, and it spoils the experience, too. Do you enjoy driving in the countryside very much if there are billboards all over the roadside, blocking your view of the trees? Because that’s what ads on blogs do. They detract from my enjoyment of what I’m reading. They make me feel like I, and the rest of the world, has come down with a massive case of adult ADD. In fact, we have–our attention spans have been artificially shortened by advertisers who only need 10, 15 or at most 30 seconds to hook you on their junk.
And they do so by cultivating in you a subtle dissatisfaction with your own existence. Life would be so cool (you are meant to think) if only I had this gadget, that gizmo, those shoes, that outfit (that I need to lose X number of pounds to fit into, on the Y diet and Z exercise plan, of course)! And the fact that you don’t have those things and don’t fit into those clothes comes home to you forcefully when you look at yourself again after looking away from the dancing, jingle-jangling, colorful ads. You come away feeling dirtied, diminished, faded, scattered to the winds, and most of all, desperately unhappy.
I don’t want my readers to come away joyless and scatterbrained, diminished or faded. I want them to come away from here feeling nourished, understood, supported, satisfied. (Or, in the case of right-wing nutjob trolls, schooled, stung and butt-hurt. That’s edification, too, albeit probably not the kind they’re looking for.)
Satisfaction is the one commodity our society is desperately short on, and ads are a big part of the reason why. They’re not the whole of the reason–uh, that would be capitalism–but they’re a key part nonetheless. Without artificial distractibility and manufactured discontent (as well as manufactured consent), consumerism can’t function–and by logical extension, neither can capitalism. If people are happy with their old cars that still work fine for all intents and purposes, those trying to sell them spiffy, pricey new ones are out of luck. And so are the bankers and loan sharks who make big bucks financing those sweet car deals. If you are happy with your current life, those trying to sell you the various bits and pieces of a trendy “lifestyle” won’t make their money off you. As long as that pound of flesh stays on you, the vultures starve. If the economy doesn’t grow and the rich don’t get richer off of you, runs the flawed reasoning, catastrophe looms and the whole trickle-down machine will grind to a halt!
Of course, if the machine is forcibly brought to a halt, or if we simply refuse to be cogs in it wherever we can, there is the still, small hope of dismantling it–or at least, shrinking it down to a manageable size. Or building something better, somewhere beyond its reach. That’s not catastrophe; that’s the very opposite of it. We desperately need new ideas for a new society; the existing one is threatening to lay waste our entire Earth. And we are running out of time against it.
I don’t know what the New Society will look like, but I know we will never see it if we don’t work on it diligently. Each of us must contribute, in good Marxian fashion, to the best of our abilities, and according to our needs. And for me, this blog seems like the logical place to start. If I see a cause (like the Seize BP campaign) that I consider worth cluttering up my sidebar for, or if I have something of my own (or my friends’!) to advertise here, I might well change my no-ad stance…a little. But no way in hell will you see me diminishing the quality of this place with anything I don’t believe in. Unless, of course, I’m starving and can’t keep my blog in server space anymore. In which case, I would prefer to set out a tip jar for everyone to chip in to, just to pay for my own funeral.
Let’s hope it never comes to that!
…there’s a little something that happened in Venezuela this past week. Commemorating something that happened (and failed) nine years ago:
Oh yeah, and Chavecito showed up to give a little speech. With flu and all. What a trooper! No wonder the putschists failed in April 2002. Even if they’d succeeded in killing him, his ghost would still have gotten up and kicked their asses. Just like Che, no?
PS: For a good chuckle, if you know Spanish, clicky here and watch this video. Seems that the fake attorney general appointed by the fake self-proclaimed president did something telling and cowardly when the palace guards arrested him and stashed him along with several other putschists in the basement as a prisoner. What was it? Well, let’s just say this: His eyes weren’t the only part of him that was wet.
A 36-year-old Italian blogger and ISM journalist, Vittorio Arrigoni, was kidnapped and murdered two days ago in Gaza. In the video above, he talks about how he and a group of fellow activists broke the Gaza siege, which had begun in 1967 and continued uninterrupted until that moment. His motivation? An antifascism that ran in the family (his maternal grandparents were partigiani and died in World War II, fighting against Mussolini’s thugs).
Here’s a song that I’m sure his grandparents knew and probably sang themselves as they prepared to fight for Italy’s freedom:
Addio, Vittorio. Peaceful fighter for Gaza’s freedom. Your struggle will not be in vain.
Do NOT try this at home, kiddies. Or anywhere else, for that matter:
A man was hospitalized Wednesday evening with life-threatening, third-degree burns after catching fire inside a San Francisco porn store, authorities told CBS 5.
The fire occurred at an adult arcade at Sixth and Mission streets just after 6 p.m.
Police officers across the street from the porn shop saw a man run out the front door of the store “engulfed in flames,” an SFPD spokesman said.
Some firefighters who happened to be about a block away at the time were immediately summoned and extinguished the flames.
Arson investigators said it was not exactly clear how the man caught fire. Police indicated he had apparently been watching videos in a private booth when the fire ignited.
It being San Francisco, the odds are good that the shop in question specialized in gay porn. A friend of mine says the fire was most likely caused by the guy using poppers and smoking at the same time; the drug in the capsules is meant to be inhaled and is very volatile–and flammable. It’s also illegal. And in combination with indoor smoking, downright stupid and potentially lethal.
An idle wank can’t be worth burning yourself half to death for.
Désolée, tout le monde (des maudits anglais), but this one’s in français, for all the francophones:
And no, it’s not about sex. It’s about avoiding getting screwed…by VOTING.
“Finally, one of the major historical themes of the modern world, the destruction and assimilation by western industrialism of every culture it comes in contact with, has been represented in science fiction for a long time. In the pulps it mostly appeared in march tempo with tubas: the Triumph of Science over Stupid Superstition, Man’s Conquest of the Universe, Anglo Hero vs. Alien Slime, Dick White and his Ray-Gun against the Mongloobian Hordes. Leukocentrism was no worse in science fiction than anywhere else, but no better, either. I remember, not too clearly, a story about some aliens who came to look humanity over to see if we would make good slaves; the smart-American-white-male-hero presented some Eskimos to the aliens as typical humans. The Eskimos did nothing but grunt illiterately and smell fishy and chew blubber–we all know Eskimos are incapable of anything else–and so the aliens went away to wait a few millennia till humans got civilized enough to be worth enslaving. I believe that story was published in the sixties. We’ve come a long way, Baby. Some of us.”
–Ursula K. Le Guin, “Finding the Patterns”, from the introduction to The Norton Book of Science Fiction
…we’re through:
It’s not me. It’s YOU. And all those anti-woman things you did. What the hell were you thinking, man? You think women voters don’t notice these things? Well, we do.
And we’re kicking you to the curb.
So long, Stephen.
Or one of Rita McNeil’s backup dancers. But I totally endorse this:
“That’s Shit, like the poop. Harper, like the poop. And Did, like what Harper does with shit. Dot com, like what you do on the Internet.”
Also, please consider visiting this fine establishment.
Thank you, and remember: Friends don’t let friends vote for this robotic, psychotic piece of shit.
PS: If the original link still isn’t working, try this one. It seems this campaign has gone viral!
