'Helter Skelter': When Ringo Starr Screamed "I've Got MS-13 On My Fingers!"

 

In my last post, I marveled that Trump wasn't drunk or high, and, last night, John Oliver did the same – see above. Watching Trump, a former Democrat, in that clip, also reminded me of so many previous conversations I've had with members of the party, over, say, the 2012 Mayan predictions of the apocalypse, whether or not Jenny McCarthy was a trusted source for information about vaccines; whether or not homeopathic concoctions are "medicine," or whether or not AI is "god-like," or even whether or not the people who insisted on these things ever defended those positions.

Those conversations, which - like Terry Moran - I never wanted to have, all went exactly like Trump's. And I present Oprah Winfrey's invitation, and appearance, at every Democratic Party Convention, as evidence those insane debates were just as real, instructive, and destructive, as the one just seen on ABC News. The Democrats want to forget about them, or wish we would, because that's how we got to this place: Americans, being as looney - and as intolerable in their lunacy - as Donald Trump.

 

BTW - if you want to know the difference between Trump's two administrations - as you can see above, after his first election win, Rachel Maddow assured viewers we're "not in Hell." But, here, at the start of his second administration, John Oliver just assured Terry Moran he not only made the trip "Downtown" but even got a personal tour.

Which should answer The Atlantic's question "Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?" pretty decisively. I mean, Trump was a "celebrity" before he was a "politician," so we're straddling the fence now, or combining the two, but - whatever you call it - Taylor Swift's Palestinian Genocide Tour definitely greased the wheels for America, finally, scraping the bottom of the cultural barrel. Somebody make a casserole. We've arrived. 

 

Tuesday: Bluesday

 

Like the crew in The Matrix arriving waaaay too late, Tom Nichols and the rest of the good folks over at The Atlantic are sounding an alarm that "Americans Are Sleepwalking Through a National Emergency" in the form of "a sometimes violent cult". But, now that Morpheus & Co. have made us aware of the danger we're in, but before they can give us any details, they demand we register an account - with The Atlantic - or be forever damned to keep on "sleepwalking" through this tragedy.

 

To which TMR says, been there, done that: Register yourselves.

Conor Friedersdorf Needs More Subversive Monuments

A statue to The Civil Rights Struggle in Birmingham, Alabama - clearly showing American whites playing a leading role in the over-100-year fight for equality in this country - because they cared so much, about the meaning of the constitution, before uneducated blacks even knew to start marching.

No, yes, no - here's your cultural proof right here - there's been no Nazi tendencies roiling through our history (Rolls Eyes) and no Apartheid, and never has been. Black American life has just been a darker-skinned version of Leave It To Beaver and, if we still can't get ahead with that, it's been our own fault. We should've packed treats for the dogs. Boy-howdy.

Oops - it's in my brain now

TMR's liking the way Conor's New American Vision's shaping up:

"The J. Edgar Hoover Building could feature a statue of its namesake trying to foist a suicide note and a gun into the hands of Martin Luther King."

Not exactly DEVO but we'll take it

It'll confuse the liberals-are-the-cause-of-black's-problems types for a while (Hoover was a liberal?) but - like their racism - that, too, will pass,...

Dallas County Unwittingly Backs Slavery Reparations

Corn rows, glasses, and a bow tie? This is not a man to be fucked with.

Dallas, Texas' John Wiley Price caught the white boys sleeping: 

 The 'Juneteenth Resolution,' commemorating the day slaves in Texas learned of freedom, seemed to be another routine proclamation,....

But Price’s resolution included injustices endured by blacks, from slavery to Jim Crow to predatory lending practices. Then, in its final paragraph, it declared that the suffering of African-Americans should be 'satisfied with monetary and substantial reparations.'

Price read the entire document aloud at the meeting,...the commissioners didn’t seem to be listening with a critical ear. With no discussion, Price’s resolution was approved by voice vote.

...He said he wrote the resolution after reading an article in The Atlantic making the case for reparations.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Baby! While whites are already telling me the movement's over - before it's even really begun!!! 

(Of course, believing them would violate the whole purpose of listening to them, for this exercise.) Hat's off to Mr. Price:

The apocalyptic white folks have to stay on their toes now - because we're coming with American ethics - or, as they've liked to say in front of all who'd listen, "by hook or by crook":

It's the end of the world!!!

 

U.S. Blacks Need To Get Ben Stein High On "See" Weed

"Tears came to my eyes as I thought of how magnificently the South has risen to meet and defeat the challenges of racism." 

 - Ben Stein, in the latest issue of The American Spectator

"America was built on the preferential treatment of white people—395 years of it. Vaguely endorsing a cuddly, feel-good diversity does very little to redress this." 

 - Ta-Nehisi Coates, in the latest issue of The Atlantic

Mr. Magoo's Kid Finally Is A Man No Black Will Vote For

Since the Tea Party has now thrown away another winning hand,  The Atlantic takes a look at our politics - from the Right side:

  "So, if Christie is no longer the candidate to beat in the 2016 Republican race, who is? Believe it or not, it’s Rand Paul.” 

 Thank God, after Romney, The Atlantic included the admonition "don't laugh" because, it's pretty obvious, I needed it:

They're going up against Hillary.

Behind a guy who's charisma rivals a garden snake's.

This is political death - preceded by advanced insanity….

 

Lem's Comment Home Is Now Full Of White People Who "Just Don't Give A Fuck" Just Like The Blacks They Hate

Re Crack's demand for a Grand Strategy, anyone who understood the first damn thing about US politics would know that the "impasse" will be resolved on the basis of [poll] numbers like these. 

 

Nope - first you have to make [Obama] care. You didn't understand his comment, during Syria, about "style points", did you? Like most black people, Obama has the ability to completely ignore the expectations of whites, so I wouldn't hold my breath that not being liked will make much of an impression.

Yes, I tried explaining reality to the extreme Right over at Lem's yesterday, but since I'm black like Obama - which means I'm not a real Republican - they didn't buy it. The Atlantic's mainly white folks so maybe, just maybe, they'll understand if they explain it:

  Why Obama Doesn't Care If He's Winning or Losing the PR Battle

Lem keeps a nice Mark Twain quote as his blog's sub-heading:

"A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way"

It's bizarre because the people I encounter over there are against everything Twain stood for.

Today, it's Indians - again.

They're more like Obama than they think,...

 

If You Got A Measure, You Got A Ruler, And If You,...

According to The Atlantic magazine, "Walter Johnson takes the measure" of slavery:

As those people passed through the trade, representing something close to half a billion dollars in property, they spread wealth wherever they went. Much of the capital that funded the traders' speculations had been borrowed from banks and had to be repaid with interest, and all of it had to be moved through commission-taking factorage houses and bills of exchange back and forth between the eastern seaboard and the emerging Southwest.

And the slaves in whose bodies that money congealed as it moved south had to be transported, housed, clothed, fed, and cared for during the one to three months it took to sell them. Some of them were insured in transit, some few others covered by life insurance. Their sales had to be notarized and their sellers taxed. Those hundreds of thousands of people were revenue to the cities and states where they were sold, and profits in the pockets of landlords, provisioners, physicians, and insurance agents long before they were sold. The most recent estimate of the size of this ancillary economy is 13.5 percent of the price per person-tens of millions of dollars over the course of the antebellum period.

There's a point in there, though I can't imagine what.

Not "whether you're red, green, blue, or purple, we're all the same."

But the opposite of that.

Something about economics making us different.

Taboo topic - no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

Some say to take it up with the people who freed the slaves.

They'll understand.

Word is they've been wondering what's going on lately.

We're like "You tell me."

Still no answer back yet,...

"Whizzing And Pasting And Pooting Through The Day"

We're NEVER going to get out of this NewAge Hell hole, as long as journalists keep throwing silly beliefs into stories:

“For James 'Whitey' Bulger, a Lifetime of Bad Karma Comes Back Around”

So THAT'S what they go to journalism school for - learning how to reveal NewAge propaganda:

“Karma serves to explain why good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. The injustices of the world, the seeming random distribution of good and evil, are only apparent. In reality, everybody is getting what he or she deserves. Even the child brutalized by drugged adults deserves the horror. The mentally ill, the retarded, the homosexuals, and the millions of Jews killed by the Nazis deserved it for evil they must have done in the past. The slave beaten to within a breath of death deserved it, if not for what he did today, then for what he did in some previous lifetime. Likewise for the rape victim. She is just getting what she deserves. All suffering is deserved, according to the law of karma. 

Despite the fact that there could be no evidence for a metaphysical belief in karma, the idea of karma is popular among many in western cultures where it has become detached from its Hindu roots. The theosophists, for example, believe in karma and reincarnation. So does James Van Praagh, who claims to be a psychic conduit for all the billions of people who have died over the centuries.”

So, the printing of this psychologically harmfully nonsense for me to read, is my fault? Thanks. BTW - the NewAge loons who printed the Whitey Bulger/Bad Karma exclusive? 

The Atlantic Magazine:

Another strong Glenn Reynolds favorite - next to Twitter,...

This Is Not A House On Fire (It's Exercise,...)

 O.K., this is good. A friend called me at work today to tell me about it. (Here, you have to picture me talking cultism on a construction site - with everyone listening in,...) Check it out - first, a quote from Virginia lieutenant gubernatorial candidate and pastor E.W. Jackson:

"When one hears the word meditation, it conjures an image of Maharishi Yoga talking about finding a mantra and striving for nirvana. . . . The purpose of such meditation is to empty oneself. . . . [Satan] is happy to invade the empty vacuum of your soul and possess it. That is why people serve Satan without ever knowing it or deciding to, but no one can be a child of God without making a decision to surrender to him. Beware of systems of spirituality which tell you to empty yourself. You will end up filled with something you probably do not want."

 

 Seems pretty clear to me, and I'm an atheist. An atheist who understands the Christian dialect. Here's what The Atlantic's Garance Franke-Ruta has to say in response:

"Yoga has become so normalized in American life that this seems an extreme position (no pun intended). And yet Jackson's warning about on the spiritual dangers of yoga are not uncommon among Christian conservatives representing a variety of denominations."

 

 Isn't it nice to know something completely alien to the American people and culture (except for the oikaphobes) is normal? And, of course, the preacher is nutty because,...well, he's a preacher. America's apparently unfamiliar with them. Unfortunately, Carl Jung wasn't a preacher (he was just kind-of a preacher) and he said something pretty close to what E.W. Jackson said as well, calling yoga's torments "Hellish":

Funny how these American yogi's pumping this crap within the "yoga-industrial complex" never mention that - or studies showing a negative effect from yoga - in their yoga classes ("What you're doing can drive you crazy. O.K., let's go!").

Or articles supporting yoga (which is normal in America) by people who hate Christians (which is obviously some new faddish import from India or something,...).

 

 It's just Rah-Rah-Rah, join the cult of stretching, and the other "ancient teachings" (that make you hate anything normal) that comes with it. 

   

 That indoctrination process is something else they don't mention, BTW. They "just do it" and then, you know what? "Going Green" and abortion and gays throwing shit in churches, and thinking the greatest country on Earth is it's ultimate problem - and just everything un-American - somehow makes as much sense, as "America", as stupid "spiritual" American tourists getting gang raped overseas says "India" and "spirituality". 

  Actually any sex says "yoga" (yogi's all over this country are being busted for it) but don't tell Glenn Reynolds, who both promotes and chooses to laugh about it all, the fuck faced idiot.

   

 Here's another juicy morsel from The Atlantic article:

Anyone who has experience with what I think of as the American yoga-industrial complex knows that the pope's warning gets at an underlying tension in the way yoga is taught in the West. Either it's presented as an ancient spiritual practice conducted through the body -- and as such one that can conflict with the religious tenets of other faiths, especially their fundamentalist strains -- or it is assimilated into the competitive athletic cult of the body, shorn of its spiritual underpinnings and significance and turned into something like Indian pilates.

 

The "Cult of the body". Kinda has a nice ring to it, no?

Yeah, even if it does mean you're a self-interested jack-ass. And why do so many women take pictures that make them look like Satan's baby killers?

Anyway, at least somebody's admitting A) there's a "yoga-industrial complex", B) it's a "spiritual practice" that's "presented" as what it's not, C) yoga "can conflict with" the outside world (what's outside the practitioner's narcicissim), D) it's a cult - "of the body" or whatever else (as the preacher said) they want to "fill" it with, and E) it's definitely Indian - and definitely not American.

   

 Wow - if The Atlantic was ever tortured for information, they wouldn't last a minute,...