The Parody: Reggie Watts Doing "Sorry, Thom Yorke"

Just like black poverty "is not white poverty,” white angst can look pretty damned shallow, too,...

Dear White People: We're Not Slaves (But Here To Help)

This is my favorite of the new "Dear White People" PSAs, but there's even more worthy of note:

Go see them all and then tell me what YOU think,...

Slavery: The Game (Sure To Be A Huge Hit In America)

Forget Grand Theft Auto V - white guys can now say "Nigger" for real again this time,….

John Oliver's Show Makes Fun Of Republican's Hipster

This is a party willing to betray everything it stands for, in an attempt to prove it stands for something, which it doesn't.

A New Black Web Series: Tales from the Kraka Tower

A black woman skewers college diversity departments:

Conservatives could find *some* of it of interest,...

South Park Figured Out How To Solve Race Problems

We can discuss reparations afterwards,...

The Menstrual Show

“She was right all along. Affirmative action hurts minorities the most. And to think—we needed a black woman to teach us this.”

If not, call Lorde or Macklemore and see if they're available,...

White Guy Writes Letter To Blacks From "The Industry"

Dear black artists,

We regret to inform you that the need for your services will soon come to an end as we enter a critical restructuring period. Fortunately, after having spent nearly a century meticulously studying your art, language, fashion, and lifestyle, we have learned enough to confidently move forward without your assistance.

We thank you for your contributions but have decided to make some necessary changes as a result of your decreasing value,...

"You Gotta Tell People You're Here, Sometimes, Right?"

Joshua Black, a Republican politician who hopes that President Obama will be hanged for treason, said in an interview with Renew America’s Sher Zieve today that all Democratic politicians should be prepared for such a fate after the second American Revolution. Black said that Democrats hope to “make us their slaves”...

The American road trip is a rite of passage. Sadly, that road is filled with sweaty preachers, Jesus camps and aggressive bean pie salesmen (if you're lucky). So what if you'd rather avoid your fellow Americans' wacky religious views? You're in luck: This colorful map visualizes which states are the most and least religious.

- Watch More Funny VideosLi'l Pulp Fiction

The backlash against [Seattle Seahawks' Richard Sherman's] NFC Championship postgame interview spurred comparisons to Ali; the backlash against the backlash accused Sherman's critics of being uncomfortable with a successful, black athlete not easily categorized into mainstream tropes and who refuses to simply keep his head down to ease the audience. Like Sherman, newspapers in Ali's time characterized him as a "loudmouth" and other euphemisms for "uppity" -- and, like the recent Super Bowl champion, Ali always answered with a win.

I'm Starting To Think Getting With The Program Suits Me

Comedy Is Not Pretty And Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

SATIRE

 So we were smoking this joint of Jamaican over in that corner and [NYT columnist David Brooks] got the bright idea to blow the smoke into the register. “That’ll make everyone up there one of us!” he said. And sure enough when we went up to class the whole floor stank and the vice-principal was hustling up and down the hallway, wrinkling his nose like a bloodhound trying to figure out where the smell was coming from, and then he went into the boys’ room and dragged out one of the only two black boys at Radnor High, yelling at him for smoking pot in school.

I remember the guilty look on Dave’s face when he saw Mr. Santangelo with the kid by the collar. Later on, he told me that he was tempted to confess, but he also happened to know that that boy did smoke pot, that he was a full-on stoner, so if he got in a little trouble, it might be good for him.  When I read today that Dave thinks that “not smoking, or only smoking sporadically gave you a better shot at becoming a little more integrated and interesting,” while “smoking all the time seemed likely to cumulatively fragment a person’s deep center,” I thought about that boy and wondered if getting kicked out of school had helped him hold together his deep center, and if his going to juvy was the kind of subtle discouragement that Dave thinks governments should engage in when it comes to the “lesser pleasures.” I suppose he thought he was doing the kid a favor by letting him take the rap.

THE JOKE

  In “Weed — Been There. Done That” [David] Brooks makes a case for a “moral ecology” that curbs individual freedom for the collective betterment of potheads that would be better served devoting their energies to higher aspirations like running track. If you think I’m minimizing his argument to be glib, I dare you to read it. That is his argument.

...The ACLU released a report, based on federal arrest data and self-reported crime reports, that,...found that over half of all drug arrests in 2010 were for marijuana possession,...that whites use marijuana more than blacks, yet blacks are over 3.5 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana use.

…The ACLU makes a passing mention of federal student aid and drug convictions in its report. African Americans, particularly African American men, are more likely to be arrested for recreational drug use and consequently barred from receiving financial aid to pay for college AFTER paying their debt to society.

We can thank Bill Clinton for that.

…Brooks’ rumination on his stoner days is kind of funny. It’s certainly elitist. But it is also an example of the two Americas we’ve fomented through legislative, cultural, and organizational boundaries that disrupt every single path for opportunity available for those not born to wealth and privilege.

No one need make a black code anymore. They need only embed moral ecologies in laws that have nothing to do with morality and wait for systemic disadvantages in neighborhoods, schools, and racist policing to do the rest.

I Am He As You Are He And You Are She And We Are,...

You know what? You guys are right:

I'm just a racist - seeing things,...

The Circle: In Or Out Somebody's Going To Be A Target

Cults, cultism, "cultish thinking" throughout American society? That Crack Emcee has been out of his fucking mind - for years. You hear me? He's obviously seeing things:

The Circle occupies an awkward place of satire and self-importance. What it does very well is create a catalogue of awful techno-cum-Landmark Forum-cum-HR-cum-feelings-speak. Uncle Eamon is legitimately avuncular and creepy. When Mae is chastised for failing to Zing about her hobbies, a colleague says “‘Just kayaking? Do you realize that kayaking is a three-billion-dollar industry? And you say it’s ‘just kayaking’! Mae, don’t you see that it’s all connected? You play your part. You have to part-icipate.’” And this stuff is often very funny. (These days, though, it’s hard to write a novel that can rival the comedy gold of reality. This week, Nathan Heller has a piece in The New Yorker about San Francisco’s startup culture: “The company had needed to figure out whether to spend its limited budget on beef jerky to keep around the office or 401k plans for the staff. ‘We put it to a vote: ‘Do you want a 401k or jerky?…The vote was unanimously for jerky. The thought was that well-fed developers could create value better than the stock market.’” Or this gem: “Serge was a software professional who, in his spare time, led people into deeply meditative states from which they could reëxperience earlier lives. Some people found that passing through past lives eased their fears of death, Serge told me that evening.”)

Crack better give it up or else the group's not going to like him,...

 

Everything That They Don't Know Is Equal - To What I Do Know - And Even I Know I Need Help In Knowing Things

I've never heard of Karl Kraus, but he sounds, as the saying goes, like "a kindred spirit":

He wasn't in the business of denigrating the masses or lowbrow culture; the calculated difficulty of his writing wasn't a barricade against the barbarians. It was aimed, instead, at bright and well-educated cultural authorities who embraced a phony kind of individuality – people Kraus believed ought to have known better.

You can guess who all they'd be, today, I'm sure.

The political results - with blacks and the poor clamoring to join their cause - speak for themselves.

And, if not, here's a "ought to have known better" hint.

ADDED:

Can you imagine what things would look like, if Putin had written his Op-Ed, but started referencing the "teachings" of Joseph Smith?

We'd be far beyond just "embarrassed" on the world stage,...

 

The Onion's Butler: Significant, Historic, And Important

2013: When Miley Bombed And The Onion Became News

A Racial Chuckle Factory

Reggie Watts And The Intellectual Scorched Earth Policy

"It's a song about people - and sasquatches,...other fringe science stuff. 

That's French science,..."

 

Oh Hell Yeah - Now THAT's A Step In The Right Direction

Crouch: He Looks Funny - And He's Hilarious!

Stanley Crouch, who (since winning a "genius" grant) thinks of himself as some kind of all-seeing, all-thinking,...well - fuck all that, the man's a blowhard - anyway, Stanley had just given us a column on how fucking brilliant and honest that man, Rachel Maddow, is, when the very next day - what do you know? - Rachel Maddow gets busted for lying and not even knowing how to use Google:

The Internet's finest satirists hooked a big fish in the media world last night. In an embarrassing segment on her MSNBC show, Rachel Maddow slammed conservatives for attacking President Obama's Egypt policies. Her targets included Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, former ambassador to the UN John Bolton and Stephenson Billings at ChristWire.org. Only problem is Stephenson Billings is not a real person. He's a fictional byproduct of a website that also warns readers that the Xbox Kinect is a terrorist training tool and the Japanese have created scary robot babies which "threaten humanity."



The article that caught Maddow's eye called for an "American-led invasion" into Egypt and begged former Alaska governor Sarah Palin to lead the war cry."The escalating crisis in Egypt could become a defining moment for Sarah Palin," Billings wrote. "Governor Palin needs to speak out publicly and forcibly for an American-led invasion to protect our interests in North Africa."

The fact that ChristWire isn't a sincere Christian web forum has been a difficult lesson for the mainstream media to learn—especially NBC and its affiliates. The Atlantic Wire first outed ChristWire last July, when NBC's New York and Los Angeles affiliates published an article about the Christian right boycotting actor Bill Murray. NBC's Drew Magary linked to a ChristWire article calling Murray a "murderer of lambs" and a "fatal disease" to America's children. The article's author? Stephenson Billings. Maybe the company should flag this guy in its employee handbook.

Now to Maddow's credit, her blog acknowledged the mistake quickly after the broadcast aired.

Maddow's humility sparkles in comparison to The Huffington Post's, which upon being duped by ChristWire last August, simply erased parts of the article that showed they weren't in on the joke. In that instance, ChristWire had published an advice guide for women on how to tell if their husbands are gay. The mistake caught the attention of The New York Times which pressed the website on the issue and finally elicited a concession. “We did get hoodwinked,” Huffington Post spokesperson Mario Ruiz admitted.

C'mon people. Google searches! They're not that hard.

Gawd - Sarah Palin - again? The woman is a one-woman Liberal wrecking crew! She's catnip to idiots - and to their supporters - who, in this case, includes Stanley Crouch.

We suggest he'd better stick to Jazz criticism - or stay in a permanent crouch for now on:

Politics ain't his thing.