A Mask of Civility

I've run into this a number of times over the last few days, and it's worth noting:

Simply because you believe something does not mean it isn't harmful.

A very good example of this is the argument over marriage equality. While the segment of the population opposed to it is clearly loosing the fight, there are still those Christians (and Muslims, and Jews, and whatever) out there who think that, as long as you're not being Fred Phelps, you're okay. Or that you can still be intolerant but at the same time be a loving human being.

No. No.

Intolerant =/= Tolerance. You cannot be a loving human begin if you're a jackass who condemns people for expressing love towards individuals of the same sex.

"But... it's intolerant not to be tolerant of my intolerance!"

Alternatively:

"Oh yeah, you're tolerant, but not towards Christians who stand up for what they believe in. God doesn't hate you, he just [insert theological theistic teleological rhetorical garbage here]."

You're just intolerant of my intolerance, so you're not tolerant at all. That's how it always goes, isn't it? I'm not as bad as them, clearly, because I believe that God loves you but doesn't support your "lifestyle" choice - but I'm not as bad as Fred Phelps. I'm better than that.

Let me spell this out. I'd rather deal with Fred Phelps than you. Why?

For the same reason I'd rather deal with an honest, uncivil brute than deal with a dishonest, civility-obsessed caitiff. You have a gilded tongue, my f(r)iend, and it forks rather clearly down the middle. You are not better because you're not vocally an asshole. You still vote for vocal assholes, you still support polices drafted by vocal assholes, and you still believe shit told to you by vocal assholes. Everything you do is designed by vocal assholes; every waking moment of your life is controlled by these people. You do what they tell you to, you believe what they say, and you claim that you're better than them.

You're not better. You're subservient to them. You're worse. The vocal assholes made up their minds, and they're not cowards about what they believe. You are. You hide behind civility, you whine when people call you out for what you are. You're both just as wrong, but because you're a coward about what you believe, you're doing more harm than the vocal asshole who dictates your every waking thought. If these vocal assholes are the ubermensch, you are the last man.

If you believe something, stand up and accept it. Make it yours, actually believe it. Own it. Don't sit there and ho-hum about it. Your belief is the same thing as Fred Phelp's belief. Own it, goddamn it. Be a responsible adult and own it.

And ultimately, it's the same thing. How are you any different?

Because you hide it behind the mask of "civility." That doesn't make you better. That makes you an intellectual coward.

I'm not tolerant of you. I will never be tolerant of you. Not only because I'm intolerant of things that hurt marginalized people or hold populations of people down, but because I'm also intolerant of cowards. And when you step up and own your hateful belief, we'll be able to deal on even terms.

More Christian Evil; Why Religion is Child Abuse Reason #1,340,230,000

• State authorities have responded to at least 165 allegations of abuse and neglect in the past decade, but homes have remained open even after the state found evidence of sex abuse and physical injury.
  
• The religious exemption has for decades allowed homes to avoid state restrictions on corporal punishment. Homes have pinned children to the ground for hours, confined them in seclusion for days, made them stand until they wet themselves and exercised them until they vomited.
  
• Children have been bruised, bloodied and choked to unconsciousness in the name of Christian discipline. A few barely escaped with their lives. In addition, in two settled lawsuits, a mother said her son was forced to hike on broken feet; a father said his son was handcuffed, bound at the feet, locked away for three days and struck by other boys at the instruction of the home.
  
• Adults have ordered children to participate in the punishment, requiring them to act as jailers, to bully troublemakers or to chase, tackle and sit on their peers.
  
• Teens have been denounced as sinners, called "faggots" and "whores," and humiliated in front of their peers for menstrual stains and suspicions of masturbation.
  
• Parents share the blame. Some sign away their children for a year or more without first visiting a home or checking credentials. But state officials bear some responsibility because they have not warned the public about programs they believe are abusive.
  
• Florida taxpayers have supported some unlicensed homes with hundreds of thousands of dollars in McKay scholarships — a government program to help special needs students pay tuition at private schools.

Smaller government; YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK! Christan Love! Can you feel it, or do we have to HIT YOU HARDER? Fucking monsters, every last one.

Politicized Facts, Politicized Language

I've got another rambling post today; somewhere in here is an idea, I'm almost sure of it. Maybe a couple ideas that might be related tangentially, if I'm lucky. I'm out of it today, for some reason, but I figure it better I post it here and drop it  all on my FB wall. More people can see my rambling here.

When It Comes To America...

1. Exuberant Nationalism
2. Enemies are Identified
3. Rights Disappear
4. Secrecy Demanded
5. Military Glorified
6. Corporations Shielded
7. Corruption Unchecked
8. Media Controlled
9. Rampant Sexism
10. Intellectual Bullying
11. Militarized Police
12. Elections Stolen

“The split in America, rather than simply economic, is between those who embrace reason, who function in the real world of cause and effect, and those who, numbed by isolation and despair, now seek meaning in a mythical world of intuition, a world that is no longer reality-based, a world of magic.”
Chris Hedges

“Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.”
Henry A. Wallace 

And, of course, no conversation is complete without this one:

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”
Sinclair Lewis

Toxic Memes and Poor People

I'm at home tonight with sinusitis, so I'm writing this while in pain. It doesn't make me a very happy individual at all, but compared to the pain this damn sinus infection has inflicted upon me before, what I'm feeling now is nothing.

It hurt worse earlier. So bad I had to admit myself into an emergency clinic and now I have to wall my wallet away inside of my tin can so it doesn't strangle me for it. There's a reason I've waited to treat it - I just recently paid for breaks, so I'm hurting financially enough as it is. I was just hoping that if I ignored it, it'd go away. It's been chronic for the last month or so, since the end of the last heatwave. Part of the problem, I'm sure, is the fact that my neighbor is an asshole. this guy hasn't mowed his lawn all summer (being in jail hasn't helped, but I have a right to be mad at the general situation because it's an eye sore and the city should, but won't, do anything about it) but the weeds - gawddamn. They're bigger than I am. And they've spent most of the summer flowering; kicking my allergies way into overdrive. Even my cat has been suffering from allergies this summer. So I'm sure that's what causing it; that and the fact that work they have something in the filters that just makes it utterly unbearable. I stayed at work as long as I could today - I had to clock out early so I could carry myself off to an emergency clinic because it hurt so bad I wanted to cry. I have quite sensitive teeth; any kind of pressure on that nerve makes it unbearable for me. My teeth were literally throbbing today. I could feel them; I can still feel them now. It felt like someone was trying pry my face apart. Motrin didn't even take the edge off. I kept my patience until I realized that I just couldn't do this anymore. It hurt to talk; someone drove a nail through my jaw and lit that nerve that runs along the chin on fire. That's when I left work early, losing 2 hours of pay. I'm on antibiotics now, so hopefully I'll see some improvement before I go back on Tuesday. I have a weekend off to get better, at least.

Anyway, this post stems from something I've seen too many times.

America is a culture of soundbites.

It's a culture that compresses complex ideologies and multifaceted problems into a few words that, at most, give only a cursory and biased glace at the problem itself. This is what happens when you have a culture of soundbites. As a result, people begin to think in soundbites and begin to expect immediate solutions to present themselves almost as easily as the soundbites are tossed out by our ignoble leaders.

This isn't the first one of these that I've seen, but it is the most recent. And I've commented on almost every one that I've seen, including several arguments with people who thought they supported this stuff. I can't say how many minds I've changed; I doubt the people who support measures and rhetoric like this want their mind changed (as Fred Clark calls it, the "Good Jackie/Bad Jackie test". To my understanding, it works like this: if you tell someone some wild and fanciful story they're repeating is a lie/wrong, how do they react? If they react with "oh, I didn't know that", then you're looking at Good Jackie. If they get mad because you're telling them the truth and they storm off, then you're looking at a Bad Jackie. Most importantly, I reserve the right to be wrong about this. I hurt, y'all. This is not fun).

So, America is a culture of easy and simple soundbites for complex and complicated problems. Here's a very simple solution approach to a problem so complex it has bedeviled people since society first began.

Superfascists?

I like the superhero genre.

On the surface, this is no surprise. After all, at a glance, superheroism and transhumanism have a lot in common. Superheroes are a cut above "the rest" of the population, and are stronger, faster, and smarter and have powers and abilities that we can only dream about. They can do things that no person today can do. Transhumanism has similar goals; future humans may be stronger, smarter, faster and healthier than humans today, and they have seeming superpowers - the ability to think faster, the ability to see through several wavelenghts of the electromagnetic spectrum unaided, the ability to communicate "telepathically" courtesy of computers and a wireless network that they are intimately wired into, the ability to smell like they want, perhaps change their facial features and look like things that aren't even really human. Some of the more popular superpowers exist in nature and can be replicated no problem; flight can be accomplished with wings (so long as you have suitable air pressure and gravity that's not too high), which can be attached or perhaps even grown. Seeing in the dark unaided may be one of the first superpowers that humans achieve naturally; growing up, infravision was a trait of the near-human races like Elves and Dwarves in AD&D, and that's something we may accomplish. Immunity to diseases, defeating cancer, and the ability to remain young and "pretty" (for a certain value of pretty; different people find different things attractive and there's no one uniform image of what "beauty" is, no matter how much the media wants to convince you otherwise) for longer periods of time and even biological and perhaps digital immortality - all of these things are possible, but they're further down the road and for now, exist only as "super powers" in comic books and spells inside of fantasy stories.

That's on the surface. Under the surface, there's something more insidious going on. And this is where we run into my major problem with the superhero genre in specific, but fantasy in general (fantasy less so, because I'm sure there are fantasy stories that deal with the democratization of magic and how common it is, and how much it changes lives for the better - the "steampunk" sub-genre in general seems to aim for this, if not always get there. However, urban fantasy is really bad for this, by virtue of the existence of a "masquerade".  People can't have these toys, because only an unelected few are 'mature' enough to use them. It plays into the same emotions that conspiracy theories, like 9/11, Oklahoma City, the JFK shootings, Atlantis, ONI, Roswell, and to a lesser degree, Birtherism, which is based more on militant ignorance and stupidity than the above emotions, among others, play into - regret, paranoia, fear and cynicism. A more practical reason is because it keeps up willing suspension of disbelief, but these are still emotions being tapped into at the cost of keeping up that suspension). 

Transhumanism is when you take all of the marvels I detailed above and make them available to everyone. The basics - smarter, faster, healthier, stronger, the ability to control your biological sex and reproduction cycles,  "prettier" (again, for a certain value of pretty), and biological immortality - should be made available to everyone with no cost, while the additional stuff treated, like night vision, wings (if possible, and I don't see why not) and others treated like cosmetic surgery. The thing is, transhumanism is us taking this technology and setting it up so that everyone has access to it, regardless of economic level, class, race or biological sex.

The Superhero novel does not do this. The genre does not propose taking these great powers that make superheroes strong and figuring out why it works, and then giving those powers to the common man. Nowhere do scientists try to figure out why Superman is like he is, and synthesize some sort of genetic treatment that can make everyone like that. The closest that I'm aware we come is when Lux Luthor does it, and as we all know, Luthor is a villain.

My personal philosophy is transhumanism. But I like the superhero genre; and because of this, there's a fair amount of cognitive dissonance that comes along with that. I recently made a post about my take on the Dark Knight Rises; it was made shortly after the movie, so I hadn't had long enough a time to let it sit. As I have, and I've gone back and looked at the genre, and read some comments surrounding it, it's only served to crystallize my opinion of the genre.

Superheroes are answerable to nobody. They go around and they exact their own law - sure, it's the law as we know it, but they only follow that because they chose too, not because someone makes them. Superman could tear down the entire United States government and conquer the world. The fact that he doesn't, though, doesn't make it any more possible. They have these powers, these smarts, this technology, that they continually tell the rest of the world that "[we're] not ready for" yet, making them the arbiters of this secret knowledge, not unlike the old wizard who sits in his tower all day and hordes knowledge, rather than sharing it. Pop quiz: dragons are villains because they horde treasure. So why aren't superheroes villains because they horde the knowledge of their power, and their own technology?

Why, oh why, can they get away with "you can have it because you're not ready yet"?

Why, oh why, can they get away with flying around and enforcing their law on little people who aren't half as powerful as they are, operating outside of the boundaries of the police?

Why can they do this stuff, and is there any way to change this genre - salvage it - so that it's not so anti-intellectual and anti-progress?

And.... I May Have Been Right

Nasty Robo-Calls may have occurred during the recall election.

Specifically, these robo-calls that may have occurred told people that "by signing the petition, their job was done and they didn't need to come and vote." These are unsubstantiated at the moment and this is a story that's coming out of Wisconsin in the days after the Walker won the election. It's likely that if they did occur, Walker had nothing to do with it. It was likely some rogue, criminal GOP (synonymous? We're getting that way) or sub-GOP organization that did it.

How sad is this? We're taking it seriously. I'd love to think that Walker won this legally. But I just don't believe anything that the GOP says anymore. They could tell me the sky was blue and I'd have to check for myself to make sure. They've lied to their pin-head congregation and the whole of America for years. Ever since Bush was in office, before that, with Regan and Nixon. I would not put this beyond the special interest groups involved in that recall elections; especially in the wake of the FB scandals of people saying they were destroying recall signatures, or trying to impede the signature effort by lying to people. The real election fraud in this country is not done by immigrants. It's not done by blacks, or Asians, or Muslims or any other group that's routinely persecuted. The only group that (acts like it's) carrying out voter fraud are white Christian men. Maybe we need to start gearing our voter suppression "anti-fraud" efforts in that direction. "I'm sorry, you belong to this church? It's our understanding that this church has possibly, at some point in the distant past, likely carried out something that resembles voter fraud, so we can't let you vote. What do you mean your church only goes back to the 1990s? Okay, fine, your church doctrine, then. I'm sure that goes back further."

Republicans are some of the least trustworthy people on the planet. And they're so fucking blatant about it; that's what makes this really bad.

And before you say "well, anyone stupid enough to believe that deserves to lose", remember this: our education system is shit. We're not teaching our children civics. We're not teaching them their basic rights; these uninformed children grow up to be uninformed adults. If this happened, it worked, it's very revealing just how deeply our society has failed its people. It's not they're fault they're misinformed. They live in a society where they're bombarded by misinformation all the time. There are likely tens of millions of Americans who don't even know what their basic rights are. They were never given the mental tools necessary to determine what's true and what's not and in some cases, told the exact opposite. Their epistemological methodology has less substance than aerogel. This is not their fault. It's society's fault, and its the fault of the people - who are almost uniformly right-wing - that perpetuate this in society. Democracy cannot work in this environment. It won't work in this environment.

And it doesn't work in the United States anymore, either. The mere fact that such voter fraud can be taken serious shows that. Democracy? I'm sorry, we're all out of that. We exported the last little bit we had to Iraq, and you see how well that's turned out. However, we're having a discount sale of fascism in this country, it's 50% off and we've got both kinds - country and western!

Yet Another Party Idea Finds a Home In The Real World

I can't take any credit at all for predicting this stuff, because anyone with a brain can look down the road and see what's coming. However, those who've read The Blue Pimpernel are aware that the school system is privatized, although the private company runs the schools out of the former, state-owned building. I don't go too in depth into how the system works; mostly because it's not entirely relevant and partially because I still want stories like this to echo it.

Ever since the idiots in Michigan voted Snyder into office, shit has only gotten worse. Snyder is a corporate crony; what can you expect from someone who takes his marching orders from the Koch brothers, in much the same way that Scott Walker, the former governor of Wisconsin and future convict (I'm being optimistic, I know), is. Snyder, however, has succeeded in undermining democracy far more successfully than anything Walker has been able to push through. Case in point is his Emergency Manager law; which basically allows the governor to appoint someone to come in and do whatever is necessary to fix local debts.

I can smell the democracy. Can you? I know King Snyder can. With this law, he can appoint any criminal, corporate capitalist* scumbag to come in and undermine the democratic elected process - and he was elected by the same people who whine, moan, and shove an oversized suppository of indignation up their ass over "how we should vote on the rights of minorities". This law has been in place for several years now; I want to say it's been in place for about three years. This story, however, is more recent: it shows exactly what happens when you let capitalist shitheads run things: Muskegon Heights has their entire school district on the chopping block.

Because Being Poor wasn't Humiliating Enough

The United States must have some kind of envy towards poor people. I'm not entirely sure what it is, but there's just something about being poor that means you become the envy of the middle class. Everyone goes out of their way to talk about multitude of different ways that they want to make your life miserable, and this fellow from The Daily Caller is no exception.

I'm not all that familiar with the Daily Caller, but because they let a publication like this on their webpage, I'm going to assume that they have a mild right-wing bias. Lately, it seems like we're seeing a furious attempt to reinstate the power of masculine authority - putting the father in the Fatherland, as it were. Attacks on POCs, attacks on trans and gays, attacks on women's rights, xenophobia, a strong nationalistic bend with a worship of men who were nothing like the people being worshiped, the merging of corporate interests and "heroic capitalism" with the "grassroots" movement... why, if I didn't know any better, I'd suggest that these folks were fascist. But they're not, clearly, because they say they're not. And that's all that matters, because you'll be damned before you can convince them that they're wrong about the historical truth about the positions that they hold.

I digress. This guy from the Daily Caller is a piece of work. He believes that poor people who have to survive on government assistance - who don't have it hard enough as is - should be punished even more. They should have a scarlet "P" stamped on their forehead. It's their fault for being Black Latino poor (don't you dare tell me that's what I'm thinking when I say "poor", you racist liberal). The Right has turned out a parade of monstrous, sociopathic clowns over the last 10 or so years - so much so that the Joker would feel right at home, if he hadn't made it clear that he was an "American villain" when he refused to join forces with the Red Skull. Brion McClanahan is little different, with the exception of the fact that he'd readily jump at a deal to work with the Red Skull.

The Third Position of Centrism

In the United States, there is this mythical existence called "centrism." If you listen to our media, or our political parties, there's always a call for bipartisanship. There's always this idea that, if you call the right out for being the frothy fucking liars they are, then you've got to be "balanced" and reassure the population that the leftists are just as bad. You have to appeal to this mythical centrist unicorn; this rare, neigh invisible creature that exists less as a corporeal entity and more as an idea that is aspired to.

It isn't an idea we need to aspire to reach. Centrism is not a good thing. Being middle of the road doesn't make you more "mature", and it doesn't mean you put anymore thought into your positions than someone on either extreme of the political spectrum. A centrist is someone who hasn't decided anything, doesn't believe in anything, and doesn't take a stand for anything. A fence-setter - that is, someone who always answers poll questions like "Do you think the sky is blue" with "undecided" - is a centrist. I'm not saying you need to be an extremist, I'm just saying that centrism is not a state to aspire to. In a way, centrism is every bit as dangerous as extremism.

Centrism is not revolutionary. Centrism is reactionary. Centrism is a toxic, destructive force - it is not "capitalism with a human face." It's "corporatism with a Citizen's United mask".

The Klan, Operation Rescue, and Al Qaeda

For those who don't know, Operation Rescue is a terrorist organization, just like Al Qaeda. They're a terrifying mix of violent extremism and anti-woman, anti-life, anti-human self-righteous blindness, run by a man who can only be described as a corrupted, soulless monster.

The right to not have to use a coat hanger for abortion in the United States has come under fire. Like all other third world countries, a patriarchy convinced of it's own conceited worldview has stepped up and deemed women as unacceptable human beings. No where is that more visible than in Operation Rescue, the Orwellian named group who's sole purpose seems to be bombing women's health clinics, killing gynecologists, and lying about how they didn't want any of the above to happen.

So yes, sort of like the Klan. But the Klan had the guts to stand up and say it was what they wanted. Like other Right-wing cowards, Operation Rescue can't do that.

And just like the Klan, I hope they become shunned really soon. Because these theocratic cryptofascists have adopted a new technique in their battle against female human rights: these radical clerics have started adopting a database with the names, pictures, work hours and work locations of all the doctors who preform abortions.

Does this scare you? Because it scares me. And we know exactly what it will be used for. It's getting a bit hot in here, and the law needs to step in. Now. Before someone else dies.




h/t the Slacktivist

Aha! I Knew It!

Obama balked and backed away from his veto threat.

Do I get a cookie? I knew this was going to happen. It doesn't come as a surprise to me anymore - the Democrats are the party without a spine and guts and the Republicans are the party without a brain or conscious.

What this means now is ... ominous.

Of course, for all the deal I made of this before, one thing needs to be stated clearly - this is the logical progression of how things were going to turn out. No, it wasn't the PATRIOT act's fault (although that sped it up). The problem was and always will be the ongoing "War on Drugs."

This is where our problem starts (I apologize ahead of time for the scattered nature of this post - I had thoughts that, like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, seemed like they would fit together. In retrospect, they might not have fit together as well as I thought).

The War on Christmas (Korean DMZ Edition)

It took me a good couple of seconds to realize what was being done here, and even though I think I got it, I'm not entirely sure I understand. All I can do is scream WHY!?

We all know the Right is deaf to hyperbole. They don't seem to understand it, nor do they seem to understand irony or hypocrisy. But there are time when they go so far over the time that it manages to boggle me.

Behold: the War on Christmas is the same as a the North Korean threat over South Korean due to a Church Group's display in the DMZ:

People Die In America Because People Die In America

File this one under "shaped like itself." (TVtropes link).

Frothy-mix Santorum (do not Google that man's last name) got an ear full from a young college student - two of them, in fact - and the results of the confrontation highlight the reaction that one gets when you expose a Republican to cold, hard reality.

I suppose I could go for the potassium/water analogy, as chemistry jokes aren't nearly as popular as they should be. However, I figure watching the chemical reaction unfold is more interesting than actually reading about it from a third person perspective. Behold - what happens when you expose a Republican to reality:

When Your Government Sells You Out...

What happens when the law becomes illegal? When the government, in an act that can only be described as a proto-fascist power-grab, way over steps it's bounds and, as an end result, threatens to imprison anyone, indefinitely?

The United States is the proto-typical police state. I know there's a lot of readers out there in the developing world who scoff at that, but the U.S. has always been this way, since it's very founding. Our police have been militarizing since the birth of the so-called "War on Drugs" - we have an almost military-like police, if not a military police system in place, accountable only to it's own and nobody else. The legal system is turning from a legal system against people because of their skin color to against people because of their economic class. On top of all this, theofascists have been trying since the beginning of the Civil War and even earlier to inject their pitiful little god into the government.

Well, today, the U.S. Senate sold us out.

An amendment that would limit military detentions to people captured overseas failed on Thursday afternoon. The Senate soundly defeated a measure to strip out all the detention provisions on Tuesday.

So despite the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a right to trial, the Senate bill would let the government lock up any citizen it swears is a terrorist, without the burden of proving its case to an independent judge, and for the lifespan of an amorphous war that conceivably will never end. And because the Senate is using the bill that authorizes funding for the military as its vehicle for this dramatic constitutional claim, it’s pretty likely to pass.
It would be one thing if the military was clamoring for the authority to become the nation’s jailer. But to the contrary: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta opposes the maneuver. So does CIA Director David Petraeus, who usually commands deference from senators in both parties. Pretty much every security official has lined up against the Senate detention provisions, from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to FBI Director Robert Mueller, who worry that they’ll get in the way of FBI investigations of domestic terrorists.

The World Is Upside Down

I don't have time for a full post because I have to get ready for work in a few minutes, but this needs to get out there. So I'll let the Business Insider speak for me (bolding original):

Fellow entrepreneurs, Americans, anyone who still cares about this country at all -- this is a must read: By the end of this week, the US government very likely will have the power to lock up US citizens for life at Guantanamo Bay or other military prisons -- without charge and without trial. This means that, in the near future, a controversial Twitter post, attending a peaceful protest, or publishing an anti-Congress critique or anti-TSA rant on Google+ could land you "indefinite detention" for life, in the wording of the bill. No access to a lawyer, no access to trial.

 It's called the National Defense Authorization bill. If this thing passes, that's it. America will be on par with countries like Saudi Arabia and China for civil liberties.

Part of the offensive language is section 1031 of the bill:

“Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force…includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons…Detention under the law of war without trial.”

And an amendment to remove the provisions that define "indefinite detention" has failed. I repeat, it's failed. Right now, there's only a handful of Republicans speaking out against this bill. Yes, that's right, Republicans.

It's set to pass. If it passes, it doesn't matter where you are. If you're on American, Canadian, or the soil of some other foreign nation: if you're an American citizen, and you piss off your own government, you're going to vanish down the rabbit hole into Gitmo or some other secret military prison. And there's nothing nobody can do about it. It passed the House already - it did so back in May.

Boy, I wish I was making this up. But I'm not. Obama has threatened a veto of the bill, but this is still scary. Have you heard anything about this on the media? No, of course not - just business about Michael Jackson's doctor or if Cybermonday made expected profits.

Meanwhile, your freedoms are being stripped away.

Contact your senators and representatives. This is beyond the pail unacceptable.

#Occupy: Bahrain

To the average American, the "Arab spring" is this thing we see on TV between reports about how loopy and spiteful our congress is being and what celebrities are dating who or going into rehab. We saw videos of Egypt, and we saw videos of Libya, and we got some info, but not much.

Of course, we're not seeing videos from Syria. We're getting the occasional new feed, but really, not much. Syria isn't an ally of the the United States, but neither was Libya, and Egypt was neutral at best. So, it's no surprise that we hear about that.

But what about the places that are the ally of the United States?

Let's take a look at what the "Arab spring" looks like in Bahrain, a close ally of the United States, and one generally considered a "liberal" Arab country (I suppose when your neighbor is Saudi Arabia, any morals more advanced than the stone age can be considered liberal). Keep in mind - the United States supports the regime in Bahrain.

WARNING: The video below the fold is extremely graphic; it contains graphic in images of death, mutilation, and general mercenary brutality. And even this disclaimer won't prepare you.

New Economic Policy

I remember back when the TEA Party started spreading this toxic and stupid meme (... one of them), and really, it shouldn't surprise me that some small business owners, especially in the Deep South, are picking up on it.

U.S. Cranes, L.L.C, has a new company policy. One that they picked up from the TEA Party more than likely. Owner William Looman has explicitly stated that "we are not hiring until Obama is gone."

Well, if I ever need a crane service, I know where I'm *not* looking.

The Polichicks

There are days when I feel like Hank Hill. The best I can manage is "Damn it, Bobby." There are other days when I wish I could muster that scream he does; because if I could, I'd certainly use it here.

Behold, the horror that is the Polichicks.

You Seem To Be Having Problems With This Notion...

So let me help.