Rainer Shea Is What's Wrong With The Left

Shea is the sort of puritanical Marxist I've been dealing with since long before he was born, the type whose only "accomplishment" is keeping the Left divided and powerless through incessant gatekeeping.  Many of those people were actually corporate shills sent to do just that, and given a couple of Shea's current positions, I have to wonder where all he's getting his cornpone.

First, he seems to think opposing Russia and China is just imperialism.  Please.  I knew more about both when he was still swimming around in his daddy's nutsack than he'll ever know, and I've kept up, so I'm not putting up with this bullshit.  Russia is a religio-fascist state Hells-bent on recovering Eastern Europe.  China is a pseudo-socialist hellscape that destroys its environment and ruthlessly exploits its workers so it can present the proper face to naive, Western damnfools.  Is there imperialism involved?  Of course.  Does that mean they shouldn't be opposed?  Give me a fucking break.

Second, he's suddenly cutting a lot of slack to a lot of right wingers who in no way support the Left.  He thinks libertarians opposing corporate government somehow makes them allies.  That is a bullshit tsunami.  They don't oppose corporate government; they oppose functioning government.  With very few exceptions, they're Ayn Rand Fascists with fully digested copies of Atlas Shrugged inhabiting their guts like tapeworms and visions of being John Galt dancing in their heads.  He also thinks the populist shift to isolationism is somehow anti-imperialist.  No, just no.  Isolationism and imperialism are facially strange bedfellows that have historically gotten on quite well together.  The populists are just using Israel's genocide of the Palestinians (And yes, we need to stop supporting Israel and start helping the Palestinians in ways that matter.  And no, opposing Israel is not anti-Semitic.  Israel is not Judaism.  Israel is not the prophesied Jewish state.  Unless the Messiah came back recently and took over, and I just missed the memo.) as a cover for their inherent anti-Semitism and America First policies, neither of which are or should be a part of Leftist policy.

The Left has long been plagued with the shallow and callow, people too immature to understand success is built from coalitions, coalitions of people who disagree on many things, who may not even like each other, but who are willing to tolerate each other to accomplish something.  Shea may one day grow up enough to understand this.  I'm not holding my breath.

Shite Site Is Differently Shitty

Several years ago, I made some remarks about a site named Hawkeye Lounge.  Politically it's changed quite a bit since then.  While there are still some fascists floating around there (Coff, NLP, Coff, Serge, Coff, Rolo, Coff, Serb, Coff...), the bulk of them are gone.  In fact the folks over there refer to those days as Old Halo, as opposed to the current version, New Halo.  Unfortunately it's managed to adopt a different form of toxicity.

As late as the late 80s, Iowa was a very different place than it is now.  Perpetually locked in a race with Minnesota for best public school system in the country.  Iowa and Michigan were in another race for best university hospital.  Iowa State had a vet program to die for.  You couldn't throw a rock without hitting a first tier liberal arts college.  It was a conservative place, but there was a deep respect for research, education, and innovation.

That was then.  But the religio-fascists had been infiltrating since the 70s, and by the 90s the train started going off the tracks.  Most of the state descended into MAGAt madness, becoming an ugly, ignorant cesspool indistinguishable from Nebraska.

An example of the rot is the Iowa football program.  Kirk Ferentz, the head coach, was once a golden boy, leading Iowa to amazing heights.  But, all too predictably, the athletic department grew complacent, stopped supervising Ferentz, let him run the show any damned way he saw fit.  One of the ways he saw fit was hiring his son Brian as offensive coordinator (For those who don't know American football, a coaching staff can be quite extensive, but a head coach typically has three immediate subordinates: offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator, and special teams coordinator.  So offensive coordinator is kind of a big deal.).  The problem is Brian has zero skills.  He's Tommy Boy without the redemption arc.  His offenses have never been good, and for the last several years they've been reduced to punchlines.  As a condition of his returning this year, he was supposed to average 25 points per game, which these days ain't that big a deal.  He hasn't come close.  My brain-damaged cat would be a better OC (And yes, I have a brain-damaged cat.  She was electrocuted as a kitten, and it fucked up her neurological system.).  If it weren't for Defensive Coordinator Phil Parker fielding a defense year after year that was forged in Asgard, Iowa's average record each season would have been 4-8.  Brian shouldn't have been hired in the first place, and he shouldn't have been allowed to keep his position.

But.  Everybody loves Kirk.  Kirk has given us SO much.  Kirk is going to be head coach only so much longer, and he deserves to have things happen the way he wants.  We OWE Kirk that.  Baa baa.  Wet cowflop hitting the pavement with a major splat.  And other evidence you have a Turdville brain.

By some miracle, Iowa recently hired a competent athletic director, Beth Goetz.  She has bigger swinging brass cajones than the rest of the university administration combined, because she sacked Brian.  She didn't have the political suck to chuck the fuck immediately, so he still gets to fuck up the rest of the season, but still, good on ya, Beth.

Which circles us back to Hawkeye Lounge.  A number of us have been saying for years that Brian needed to go.  Some of us have been saying it was time for Kirk to go as well.  Then came today's game against Illinois.  Home game.  Win this and you win the Big 10 Western Division and go to the conference championship game.  Lots of motivation to do a job here.  But once again the offense was a rancid raft of rat shit, and Iowa barely squeaked to a come-from-behind 15-13 victory.  And unfortunately there was much rejoicing by all, including Kirk and Brian.

And given all the fuckery of the last several years, and this year, and this game, I saw that as all sorts of wrong.  And I said so on Hawkeye Lounge.  And all those who so recently had been calling for Brian's and even Kirk's heads reared up on their self-righteous high horses and asked how I dared to say such things.  The defense was fantastic.  We'd just won the division championship and were heading for the conference championship (conveniently ignoring that if this offense sucked any harder, it would be a perfect vacuum, and that our opponent in the championship, either Michigan or Ohio State, is going to go in dry on us with a Husqvarna with a 72" titanium bar and a dull chain).

Jesus Titty-Fucking Christ.  Pro tip, kids: Any pustule on a warthog's ass can learn from losing; winners learn from winning.  What I'd learned was that we'd once again won by accident and in spite of ourselves, not a good thing, and we'd gotten away with it for the umpteenth time, also not a good thing.  But the fucktards at Hawkeye Lounge wanted to party rather than learn, something they probably had in common with everyone else attached to the Iowa football program.

So nothing will be learned.  And I shall now share my predictions for what happens next:

1) Nebraska played Wisconsin very tough in Madison tonight, so I expect Iowa to blow dead bears in Lincoln next week, although I really hope not because I FUCKING HATE Nebraska;

2) The conference championship will be a rape room with Iowa as the Catholic choir boy of honor;

3) Kirk will be allowed to coach until they take him out feet first because "he deserves to go out on his own terms" (fucking Turdville bullshit).  He may try to back door Brian back into the program, but I think that ship has already sailed.  He WILL hire an OC just as bad, so within two years it will be impossible to recruit offensive talent that has other opportunities more significant than Luther College (FYI: Luther is a Division III school and so has no scholarships, and it has a bad habit of going winless, such as this season.).

4) At some point in this one-star shit parade, Parker is going to say, "Fuck it, I'm tired of breaking my balls for nothing, I'm going to barbeque, golf, and play with my my grandkids."  And since by that point Kirk will be making the Crypt Keeper look like a beamish boy, he won't be able to get even remotely like a replacement and will have to settle for deli ham of the same brand as his OC.  Then the recruitment chain stops entirely, and Iowa football turns into what it was in the 1970s.

This was my threat'ning and my message.  But since the good brethren of the Lounge elected to be asses in the world, I bring this greeting too: scorn and defiance, slight regard, contempt, and any thing that may not misbecome those who fail to recognize the consequences of shitheadedness.

TERF Alert

The American Anthropological Association and Canadian Anthropology Society recently canceled a session from their joint annual meeting.  The title of the session was “Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology”.  It was canceled as being anti-trans and contrary to current research without being supported by countervailing research.  Of course the panel members immediately started screaming, "Help, help, we're being oppressed," and Reich Wing media jumped all over it.

Let's take a look at the panel and their topics.  Silvia Carrasco was going to talk about how violence against women can't be properly addressed without focusing on biological sex.   Kathleen Richardson was going to talk about how including trans women is erasing gender disparity in IT (Apparently arguing the number of trans women in IT is statistically significant.  Right.).  Michèle Sirois was going to talk about how the Canadian surrogacy industry exploits poor women (OK, trans women can't be included in this group, but a large number of cis women can't be included as well, whether biologically because they are not reproductive, or economically because they are not poor.  Frankly, the problem she is studying is far less biologically based than economically based.  Surrogacy is another of a broad range of mechanisms for exploiting disadvantaged groups.).  Also on the panel was Elizabeth Weiss of the Heterodox Academy, an "advocacy" group founded to combat the sham issue of conservatives being excluded from academe (It was cofounded by Jonathan Haidt and Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz.  Haidt co-authored The Coddling of the American Mind, a by-the-numbers rant decrying the "suppression" of free speech on college campuses and trotting out the usual Reich Wing straw men of "trigger words" and "safe spaces" while conveniently ignoring the real message of "You no longer get to shovel hate just because you're a cishet, white, Christian male, and if you try, you're going to get blowback."  Rosenkranz testified to Congress against the nominations of Loretta Lynch as AG and Sonia Sotomayor to SCOTUS and is regularly cited by Alito and Thomas.).  Carole Hooven of the American Enterprise Institute was supposed to speak but withdrew prior to the cancelation.

Organizing this panel was Kathleen Lowrey, whose recent publications include "Trans Ideology and the New Ptolemaism in the Academy", an extended whinge about her sacking as undergraduate programs chair in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta for her anti-trans views (or as she puts it, her "gender critical feminist views") masquerading as intellectual commentary, and "Gender Identity Ideology Conquers the World: Why Are Anthropologists Cheering?", an extended whinge about cancel culture.  She is routinely platformed on the anti-trans Canadian site Gender Dissent, and she was principal organizer of the anti-trans hate group Women's Declaration International (fka Women's Human Rights Campaign).

It is quite apparent, then, the panel was canceled because it was platforming political rants and not scholarly research.  This is a problem in the social "sciences" that is only getting worse (For nearly a half-century I've been of the firm opinion that "social science" is an oxymoron.  There is no meaningful way to apply the crux of the scientific method, control and variable experimentation, to any significant issue in any of the social studies.  Being degreed in two such fields [history and political science] and regularly called on to work in another [economics/finance], I have some idea.  One of the purposes of scientific research is to predict how things will behave.  Put X load on this material, it will break.  Combine these chemicals, and you will get a reaction producing Y.  While data in the social studies can be used successfully to create occurrence models ["This is what happened."], they are far less successful at creating causation models ["This is why this happened."] and abysmal at creating predictive models ["This is what is going to happen."].  For example an economist will say, "If price goes up, demand will go down.  Unless there are other, not terribly measurable factors at work such as elasticity, utility, oligopoly and collusion, logistic disruption, etc., etc., etc.").  "Scientists" in the social studies sound increasingly like "creation scientists" (speaking of oxymorons), decrying their research being "canceled" while conveniently omitting mention of their research ignoring or misrepresenting all current work while clinging to anachronistic theories, methods, and data (and nondata).  People like those on this panel push their political agendas while ignoring actual research by actual scientists.

Meanwhile, if you want a thorough takedown of Women's Declaration International, I suggest you check Susan Duffy's blog.  And if you want to see what real scientists are discovering in gender research, you might want to start here.

The Banking Scam

If you're wondering what's going on with the Fed jacking rates beyond the usual "crapitalism crushing normal folks", it's that banking is a rigged game that works only by socializing risk. Banks raise funds by assuming demand liabilities (deposits, investor funds). They invest that money in relatively long term financial products (loans, mortgages). Banks are required by law to hold a certain amount as cash or cash equivalents (typically Treasuries). Typically a bank can fund demand withdrawals out of its cash reserve. If too many withdrawals are made, the bank needs to sell some Treasuries. No problem normally, but if interest rates have risen, the bank's old Treasuries aren't worth as much as new Treasuries with higher rates, and it has to sell its old Treasuries at a discount. Which means it’s much more likely to be facing a cash crunch, become illiquid, and need the FDIC to step in. So when the Fed jacks up rates, it not only makes future loans cost more, it makes existing loans (such as government securities) worth less.

So why would banks, which in one form or another are the main holders of loans and government securities, put up with the Fed doing this? Now you get to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Think of the Too Big To Fails as sharks, except they don’t feed on smaller fish, they feed on smaller banks. Or more accurately, smaller banks’ balance sheets. Or more accurately still, smaller banks’ balance sheets after they’ve been purged of all “inconveniences” at public expense. Tons of assets flow onto the TBTF’s balance sheet to make it look like it actually, you know, balances, as opposed to being a Dumpster fire of catastrophic proportions. The 2008 Crash required the sacrificing of many balance sheets on the TBTF altar (Take a look at Jamie Dimon’s maneuvering to force Washington Mutual under so Chase could grab its balance sheet.) including what had been known as The Greatest Balance Sheet on Earth, AIG.

Hence the pump-and-dump cycle. The TBTFs and their allies pump the markets, soaking up obscene salaries, commissions, bonuses, and capital gains in the process. On their signal, the Fed jacks rates, and the dump begins, but the TBTFs and their allies don’t care because they have cash and new balance sheets, and they use those to snap up dumped assets on the cheap. Rinse, repeat.

So at the core of the financial industry is a system not only to privatize profit and socialize risk but to protect an oligopoly and enhance the wealth and power of its members. You knew it was bad. It’s actually worse. Much worse.

Another Response to all the Sons of the South and Their "Lost Cause"

Just posted on Tumblr:

The next time some cracker-assed Son of the South tells you the Civil War (or more accurately the Southern Insurrection) wasn't about slavery, it was about Lincoln's unfair tariffs, remember the following.

In 1860, there was no federal income tax.  The federal government paid its way with land sales and tariffs.  Tariffs on imported and exported goods.  Goods produced domestically for domestic consumption didn't involve tariffs.  Goods produced domestically for export did.  This included manufactured goods, but as the US was still very much an agrarian economy, manufacturing wasn't the tariff generator you might expect.  Most tariff revenue came from agriculture, especially the Big Three export crops: cotton, tobacco, and rice.  And cotton was the overwhelming export leader.

In the 1860 election Republicans campaigned on raising tariffs, which were about the lowest in the industrial world.  They had reasons ranging from protecting domestic industry to expanding federal projects.  And Southern legislatures and newspapers immediately started decrying these tariffs as being unfair to Southern farmers.  But wait, most people in the North were farmers.  Weren't the tariffs also unfair to them?  No.  And they weren't unfair to actual farmers in the South either.

As in the North, the vast majority of farms in the South were small.  And as in the North, these farms produced effectively nothing for export, so tariffs didn't affect them at all.  So what farms were being targeted?  The ones that were producing the Big Three.  The plantations.  Which were no more farms than a Monsanto factory cropping operation is now.  They were industrial sites, like coal mines and steel mills.

For most Northerners, and a number of Southerners, increasing the tariffs seemed eminently fair.  To their minds, this class of Southern industrialists, the plantation owners, were receiving preferential treatment.  They got to sell to British buyers at prices New England buyers couldn't match.  They got to pocket just about all that profit because tariffs were so low.  And oh yes, they got to pocket that profit because they owned their workforce.  Northern industrialists figured that, if Southern industrialists wanted to have slavery instead of paying their workers (however poorly), they should have to pay some sort of premium to even things up.

The plantation owners saw this as an attack on the economic viability of slavery and just another step in the Great Yankee Conspiracy to destroy their cherished and peculiar institution.  They saw it as an attack on owning slaves.  A "personal property tax", if you will.  And they went on the attack, careful to couch the debate as much as possible in terms of tariffs.

And Sons of the South (SOTS) go, "See, the South, slave owner and non, rose up over tariffs!"  Which of course ignores about every piece of evidence there is.  It ignores the actual rhetoric in legislative debates and newspaper opinions where slavery was expressly an issue.  It ignores that the plantation class controlled the legislatures and owned the newspapers.  It ignores that the plantation class owned or controlled most of the mechanisms and institutions Southern towns and small farmers depended on to survive.  And it ignores the actual language of the secession documents.  But "Lost Cause" proponents have never let facts and reality stand in the way of their moonlight and magnolias romanticism.  The problem is they're still given platforms to shovel this bullshit, when the only "platforms" they should have are the walls of the padded cells they've so thoroughly earned.

"Successful" Millennials

Just posted over on Tumblr about yet another article about a Millennial "making it on their own" when Mummy and Daddy are quite obviously propping them up.  It's ridiculously easy to demolish these propaganda puff pieces, and it's exasperating that no one bothers.

Today’s Episode of…

…Sorry Millennials, But There Are a Butt-Ton of us Boomers Who Know EXACTLY What You’re up Against.  I receive newsletters from a website called “Bon Appetit”.  It’s pretty chi-chi, but it has some fun recipes, and it’s free, so there it is.  “Bon Appetit” has a series called “The Receipt”, articles about what subscribers eat and how much it costs.  Today the newsletter contained an article titled “How a 24-year-old Waitress Eats on $18K/Yr”.  I thought, “Oh, this is going to be good.”  And by “good” I meant “ungood”.  It did not disappoint. Or it completely disappointed, depending on POV.  I’m not providing a link because: 1) the person who wrote this did so anonymously, so screw them; and 2) drivel like this does not deserve more of a platform than it already has.

The lady in question lives in Durham, North Carolina, and just received her masters in linguistics (Although she says she’s still working on her thesis.  There was a time when getting a masters before even finishing your thesis, let alone defending it, was a laughable proposition.  Further evidence of the crapification of US education, even at a place like Duke.). She is looking for a job in her field, and is supporting herself by waitressing and teaching pottery.

Then she lists her expenses, and the red flags become unmissable.  Her rent is $800.  In a college town.  How many people live in that apartment with her?  Or does she live with her parents, and this is the token rent they charge?  $76 for car insurance.  Which means she doesn’t have collision insurance, which means she doesn’t have a lender’s lien on her title, which means she paid cash for the car.  Or somebody did.  Or she’s just driving one of her parents’ cars, and she’s paying Daddy a little toward insurance.  I’m inclined toward this last option because her budget includes neither maintenance nor fuel.

Speaking of items omitted from her expenses, no health care.  No health insurance.  She’s 24 and just graduated.  Bets she’s still on Mummy and Daddy’s plan?  No student loan payments either, not even a projection for them when they kick in in a couple of months.  But she tips her hand here, admitting she has $15,000 in savings, the bulk of it being what’s left over from what her parents gave her for school.  JFC.  And let’s not forget her pottery teaching.  No expenses listed for that.  Not studio rental.  Not equipment and supplies.  Nothing.  Which in all probability means Mummy has a pottery hobby, and daughter is free-riding on it.

Which means she isn’t living on $18K.  She’s living on Mummy and Daddy, just like every other “successful” Millennial not engaged in overt criminal activity.

And now a message for my age cohort.  Just shut your pie holes with the “Well if she can make it, other Millennials should too” stuff.  Seriously, just STFU.  If you can’t see the parade of bullshit flags flying over articles like this, you don’t get to have an opinion.  You have no excuse.  You’re not as senile as the folks or as callow as the kids.  You should be seeing this propaganda for what it is.  Up your game.

Fascist Show Of Force

Chauvin was convicted today, and 30 seconds later there was a pile of cop cars cruising the streets here in Salt Lake City.  Why?  Because fear is these fucks' main weapon.  They NEED you to be afraid, and they want to remind you that, no matter what that jury did, you'd better STAY afraid.  DON'T GIVE IN!

And Unregulated Crapitalism is the Greatest Thing EVER!

For anyone who thinks fossil fuel pipelines are a good idea, you might want to look up what happened in Bellingham, WA, 21 years ago next Wednesday.  If you're intellectually honest, that is.  Which, if you support these pipelines, you can't be.  The rest of you, who aren't crapitalist whores and have two brain cells to rub together, should look it up as well, and since you probably have no idea what I'm talking about, here's a link.  Isn't it amazing how something like that can happen in a US city just two decades ago and it's like it never happened?  Come on people, boost the link.  People should know.  And OBTW, the assholes at Olympic Pipeline were an even bigger bunch of assholes than how they're presented in the documentary.  They were convinced they were untouchable (just as every pipeline fuck everywhere thinks he's untouchable).  They should have been lined up against a wall and had a flamethrower turned on them.

As for you Trumptard asswipes in Whatcom, Skagit, Island, Snohomish, etc. Counties (including the fascist buttplug who is the SnoCo Sheriff) who incessantly whine about how the gummint is takin' away yer rats, most of you were in the territory when the Bellingham explosion happened.  This is the inevitable consequence of your philosophy.  And yet you cling to it.  You aren't just stupid.  You aren't just selfish.  You're fucking evil.  You are a fundamental threat to the health and safety of all of us.  The funny thing is, though, by your philosophy the rest us don't have to give a shit about your health and safety.  And guess what?  We don't.  The time is coming when everyone realizes you're the threat, and it won't go well for you.  You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind.  I read that in a book none of you have ever read but you all like to thump on a lot.

If You Think King's Being Gone...

...is good news, stop celebrating.  Randy Feenstra, a state senator, has defeated nine-term congresscritter and proud Reichsfuehrer Steve King in the Rethuglican primary for the congressional seat in western Iowa (better known as Nebraska East).  In the words of Monty Python, "And there was much rejoicing."  Pump the brakes (unless of course you have ABS).  Feenstra is Dutch Reformed.  And not just Dutch Reformed.  He graduated from Western Christian High School.  And then Dordt College.  He's a fucking Boer.  His agenda is no different than King's, but he'll present it in a squeaky-clean way that will be oh so palatable to idiots everywhere.  And the idiot news media.  He's fucking dangerous.

When Fascism Comes to Murica...

...it will be brought by white, suburban, "thoughts-and-prayers" liberals.  Like Mayor Maggothaul.  More on that fucktard below (Keep reading.  It's a doozy and worth your time.)

Thanks to Herroner, we now have an overnight curfew through next Monday.  Because of the "riot."  GODDAMNIT PEOPLE, THERE WAS NO FUCKING RIOT!  A cop car got burned, and another car got trashed.  Boo fucking hoo.  One of the cardinal rules of riots is, "Fuck the rules."  But here were hundreds of people waiting for the traffic lights to change before they crossed the street.  OH, THE HUMANITY!  A number of cops claim they "felt threatened."  BULLSHIT, you motherfucking thugs!  You're more heavily armed and armored than the average Marine in Kandahar.  Threatened?  Fuck that.  That was a Sunday School picnic next to the real thing, you wienie, lying sacks of shit.  I was sucked into worse when I was 9.  I was actively involved in worse when I was 11.  And you big, brave heroes were afraid?  Suck it.  You weren't afraid when almost as big a crowd, armed to the teeth with semi-auto weapons, surrounded City Hall because their favorite bar was closed and they couldn't get a haircut.  But oh wait, those inbred Trumptards were political allies of yours, weren't they?  And memo to Maggothaul: Remind me again what curfew you imposed then?  Oh that's right, there wasn't one.  But there weren't any cops telling you to get your kneepads out and start servicing them that time, were there?  You are such a piece of...work.

You apologists out there are going, "Well yeah, but the anti-lockdown demonstrators weren't causing any damage."  First, morons, these were suburban whites who have a voice in what happens.  They like to whine about being ignored, but they aren't.  Second, the lockdown did not put them at risk for their lives, it just inconvenienced their lifestyles.  They aren't being murdered in their homes or on routine traffic stops.  Finally, if you and your gang are walking around packing Armalites and threatening violence up to and including civil war, THAT is damage.  You're damaging everyone else's security just because you're an overgrown brat throwing a temper tantrum.  Just like your Fearless Leader Der Drumpfenfuehrer.

One of the schmucks who torched the cop car has been charged .  Federally.  They went that way because the federal criminal justice system is criminal.  He's facing a mandatory five years and up to 20.  Because his arson "interfered with interstate commerce."  Again, bullshit.  This isn't about enforcing the law.  This is about intimidating.  This is about terrorizing.  And OBTW, fuck the Feddies for going along with this.  ATF are whores.  DAs are whores.  SEC, FTC, FBI, CBP, etc., etc., etc.  They don't give a SHIT about that guy.  They want an example.  They want to beat all the rest of us into line.  So watch out, guy with "Black Lives Matter" painted on your car.  You're on a road, you're "interfering with interstate commerce."  And the sign on the I-215 crossing saying "Black Lives Matter"?  Definitely "interfering with interstate commerce."  You see where this is going?  They want to CRUSH your ability to speak out.

Now on to Mayor Maggothaul.  My intel network has given me some intel.  I have been unable to determine whether it's gold dust or chicken feed, but I'm going to throw it out there at least as a heads up.  We knew in the mayor's race that Escamilla was the progressive candidate and Maggothaul was the DNC/DLC corporate whore.  I have learned that certain shit may have gone down in that race.  Namely that DNC/DLC corporate operatives engaged in a covert get-out-the-vote campaign with East Bench Rethuglican whites that basically said, "You'd better get out and vote because you don't want a brown West Sider as mayor, do you?"  Now, there is no way to verify that anyone received such a  pitch because no one will admit they received such a pitch, much less acted on it, so that is pretty much a dead end.  But such behavior is consistent with the thoroughly assholish behavior I saw from the DNC/DLC tools as Hilbots in 2016 and Anybody-But-Bernie-Bots in 2020.  "Erin is white/cute/white/pliant/white" (not necessarily in that order).  So while it would not surprise me if this happened, for obvious reasons, I can not tell you with certainty it happened.  But I can tell you that, even if they didn't, they wanted to, and that sentiment is what they're acting on now.

But hey, law and order, right?  Earlier this week some fascist asshat was pontificating down at the former protest site about how we need "law and order".  Let me tell you about the history of "law and order" in this country.  Farmers in western Massachusetts want more of a say in the government?  We need "law and order".  Natives want to keep their land?  We need "law and order".  Abolitionists want to end slavery?  We need "law and order".  Miners and railway workers want decent working conditions?  We need "law and order".  Women want to vote?  We need "law and order".  Veterans want their benefits?  We need "law and order".  Blacks want to vote?  We need "law and order".  People want to stop the draft and the invasion of Southeast Asia?  We need "law and order".  Hispanic farm workers try to organize?  We need "law and order".  Anyone advocating "law and order" is in fact advocating mob rule supporting the powers that be and needs his head turned into a canoe.

Maggothaul needs gone.  Even if this racist crap from the election isn't the case, she needs gone.  She, along with her DNC/DLC enablers, need removed.  Otherwise, we are headed for full on fascism.  And don't believe the narrative trying to demonize the protesters.  They aren't the problem, and it's pretty damned obvious exactly who actually is.  And fuck you if you insist on believing otherwise.

The Desert of the Real World

As I've been pounding home for some time (See here, here, here, and here.), we are under siege.  So I have to say we haven't really learned anything in the last couple of days, but we sure have had our noses rubbed in it.  In case you can't see it, let me lay a few things out.

1. We have yet another fraudulent autopsy.  Apparently the cops were in no way to blame for George Floyd's death.  At least that's what yet another cop-sucking fraud...er, excuse me..."coroner" says.  Now we'll see our "justice" system in all its glory.  The DA filed criminal charges.  True, they were slap-on-the-wrist level charges designed to placate the masses, not punish the offenders, but now we'll see what the DA actually intended.  If he actually intended to press those charges, and this wasn't just a sugar-off that was going to get slid out the back door from the start, he'll grab that body yesterday and get an independent examination.  Is anyone out there holding their breath?
2. We now have a curfew in Salt Lake City.  Because of the riot.  And I call big-league bullshit.  There was no riot.  I know, I was down there.  I was maintaining significant social distance, but I had a decent view.  I know riots because I've been around a few, and that was no riot.  Two cars burned and a few idiots roughed up is not a riot.  Rioters do not wait for crosswalk signals to change.  This curfew is just an excuse to oppress political activity.  Contrary to what Herroner Erin Mendenhall says, the people of SLC have nothing to be embarrassed about.  She, on the other hand, has plenty to be embarrassed about, and it isn't the phony "riot".  It's about allowing Guvnuh Available to chivvy her into turning SLC into an overt police state.  Is she embarrassed about that?  Are you kidding?  Mendenhall is exactly what we've known she was ever since the party hacks made sure she'd win out over Luz Escamilla:  a DNC whorebucket.  She is another sign the Democratic Party will never deliver anything resembling a progressive agenda.  She's another brick in the wall.
3. Speaking of the protests, we know there are a bunch of reich-wing counterprotesters showing up.  We also know the cops are planting "under cover" officers in the protests ("Nice cop shoes, asshole.  And I like that body armor I can see through your shirt.").  And we know the reich-wing groups are planting their own operatives to stir shit.  Now here are a few riddles for you.  How much of the violence was provoked if not outright committed by the plants?  That's exactly what the reich-wing operatives would be planted for.  As for the cops, well they wouldn't do anything like that, would they?  I mean the FBI hasn't been doing exactly that since J. Smeghead Pooper first took the reins, has it?  And do you think that question will actually get looked at?  Or will it just be swept under the rug as part of the narrative of demonizing the Left pushed by our oh-so-liberal media?
4. And so we have once again reached THAT point in our political cycle.  The various minorities in this country are in no way surprised by what is happening; this is just another day in paradise.  They aren't just pissed off that the cops murdered George Floyd; they're pissed off that this keeps happening and nothing ever changes.  What's different now is that us white people are being targeted.  Which is what has happened every time we have joined the fight against oppression.  The Ueberklass loves "white activists" who support them (You think armed, white thugs getting away with everything is new?  Check the Hard Hat Riots, the pro-Nixon construction worker counterprotests organized by Peter J. Brennan, whom Nixon richly rewarded for this effort by making him Secretary of Labor [and when will workers ever figure out they aren't doing themselves any favors by backing the power].  Check corporate use of the National Guard and private Pinkerton armies.  Hell, what do you think the KKK has always been?), but will crush whites who cross the aisle.  Whiskey and Shay's Rebellions.  Abolition and John Brown.  Draft Riots and Pullman Strikes.  Ludlow and Matewan.  Women's Suffrage and Bonus Army.  Civil Rights and Vietnam.  The response has always been the same, and it's coming again.

The last big targeting of white activists was 1967-72.  Ever hear of Kent State, kiddies?  Of course you have (Side note: How many of you noticed 4 May was the 50th Anniversary?  Yeah, I thought so.  It's all being erased from the collective memory.).  Now here are a few things you probably haven't heard about.  Nixon and his minions had been actively demonizing antiwar protesters for two years, calling them "bums" and "pawns of foreign communists" (Years later John Ehrlichman admitted the "War on Drugs" was created to demonize and criminalize civil rights and antiwar activists.), and they kept right on doing it afterward.  The FBI had illegal infil operations going on against the SDS, the Panthers, and just about everyone else who wasn't a card-carrying member of the US Chamber of Commerce.  And right after Kent State, Nixon's White House started a disinformation campaign that there were ballistic tests that showed the bullets that killed the students hadn't come from National Guard rifles (this was a big, fucking lie disseminated through the usual channels, i.e. John Birch Society, Phyllis Schlafly's network, etc.).  And perhaps worst of all was that Kent State wasn't even an isolated incident.  Yeah, you read that right.  Four days after Kent State, 8 May 1970, the New Mexico National Guard bayonetted 11 people in a protest at the University of New Mexico, but they all lived so it's all good.  On 14 May 1970 police opened fire on students at Jackson State University and killed two of them, along with wounding another dozen, but hey it was Jackson State, so those were all "colored folk" so it doesn't really matter, right?

It's coming again, people.  The cops don't even need the National Guard; they've been thoroughly militarized courtesy the "War on Drugs" and the "War on Terror".  Heavily armed private armies are a thing again.  The Ueberklass owns every institution from the federal government down through your local school, bank, and what's left of the newspaper.  Welcome to 1877.  It took us 60 years to half-way/half-ass sort things out that time.  We don't have that kind of luxury now.

Be Careful Out There

And I'm not talking about avoiding SARS-CoV-2.  I made the mistake of going downtown today without a tie and a briefcase.  Tieless and with a backpack.  And I got shaken down by two of the county's finest brownshirts.  Fortunately I was able to prove fairly readily that I actually have a home I live in and such things, so they gave up their thoroughly illegal harassment and let me go on my way.  But FFS, I'm an older white male and reasonably clean.  I can guess what these cheesedicks are doing to people without those advantages.

As if cops weren't already bad enough, they're using the virus to get worse.  And as always it's because they "feel threatened."  By what?  No one is restricting their movement.  No one is threatening their nice salaries, health benefits, and pensions.  And it isn't like they aren't equipped with better PPEs than most healthcare workers, let alone the poor cashier at you grocery store.  No, they're just engaging in one of the favorite cop pastimes,  whining to make everyone feel sorry for them and let them get away with even more murder.

Am I going to report it?  Are you shitting me?  Those two asswipes would just make up a lie about it, because lying is what cops do, and I don't need that trouble.  Just remember that the only people cops "protect and serve" are the Ueberklass and themselves.

Remember, Remember...

...the Fifth of November.  Yes, I know what Guy Fawkes was all about.  I think that was a deliberate irony Alan Moore put in V for Vendetta.  Nevertheless, anyone with two brain cells to rub together must agree with V that there is "something very wrong with this country."  And I do not think words will fix it.

Rock Critics are Worse than Useless

This is a long one.  If you're looking for the TL;DR version, sorry oh denizens of Short Attention Span Theatre, there isn't one.

My oldest (Thing 1) and I recently had a debate over the relative musical merits of Kate Bush: I think she has merit, Thing 1 thinks she does not.  It was one of those debates and ultimate disagreements that reasonable, educated people have that, far from being destructive, add the sort of spice to life to keep it from being an unrelieved death march.  I'm not a fanboy for anyone, including Kate Bush.  I long ago started thinking of her as the Charles Ives of pop music: a pile of interesting ideas that often deliver something significant but at least as often get in each other's way.  Like Ives, people tend to either love her or hate her and have legitimate reasons for both positions, but tend to simply entrench for "reasons."  And this sort of "debating" got me thinking (a dangerous prospect).

The whole discussion with Thing 1 started when I watched a 2014 BBC documentary on Kate Bush.  I thought it was pretty well done.  It showed a number of intelligent, talented people who find merit in Bush's work.  It interviewed Lindsay Kemp, who still had four years left in the tank at that point, and showed his influence on art rock at the time (basically everybody from Bowie on) (It also showed a couple of other things, perhaps without meaning to.  It showed through Kemp's gestures the extent of mime vocabulary's influence on what might be characterized as "gay mannerisms", Kemp being a dancer and choreographer with heavy mime influence, having studied with Marcel Marceau.  It also shows the difference between European artists and intellectuals and US pseudos.  In the interviews, several people casually remark on having seen Kemp's "Flowers", based on Jean Genet's "Notre Dame des Fleurs".  You would be hard-pressed to find any in the US to this day, outside of core LGBTQ+ culture, who have heard of Kemp, "Flowers", or even Jean Genet other than by reference.).  And then toward the end it shows why rock critics as a group are ignorant, vicious little parasites.  More on that below the fold, wherever the Hell that might be.

Once upon a time I was in newspapers, and one of the things I did was write music reviews.  It was a paycheck, and as I’ve noted elsewhere, I’ve always been closely involved with music.  I wrote by two rules: 1) Be consistent, and 2) make it about the music on its own terms.  On the first point, it doesn’t matter if the readers agree with you; they just need to know what to expect from you.  If they know you don’t like a particular artist or a particular type of music, they can read you through the appropriate filter.  The second point breaks in two.  First, it’s about the music, not the people.  I did not savage Van Halen because they were pricks who brutalized the little people who had to service their every whim.  I went after Eddie Van Halen (who let’s face it was the real core of the band) who went shredding up and down the fretboard at random with no regard for chordal or modal structures (In fairness to Mr. Van Halen, he no longer plays like that and is a far superior musician than when every blockhead with a K-Mart electric six-string thought Eddie was God and gave us a generation of speed monkeys with zero musicianship.) (The speed monkey syndrome unfortunately spread to other instruments.  It was the overwhelming norm among the Celtic fiddlers who followed Bonnie Rideout to Ann Arbor and insisted on playing faster than their talents, compensating by dropping notes out at random, and then blaming all the rest of us for all the ensemble issues.  To all of you, I give an eternal, “Fuck you and the banshee of an instrument you tuck under your hiply stubbled chins and rape with your bows.”).  Second, you have to put it in the music’s own frame of reference.  It makes no sense to pan a Metropolitan Opera performance of Cosi fan Tutte because it isn’t a Black Sabbath concert.  I realized early on that almost no rock music critics could grasp either of my rules (From this point on, you may assume that “Robert Christgau is a wanker” is flashing subliminally in the background.).

From the beginning of such things, Rolling Stone has been the center of rock criticism (I just damned near wrote “crock recidivism”.  I’m not a nice person.).  It has also been the center of what is wrong with rock criticism for just as long.  These guys were groupies.  They were wannabes who couldn’t cut it, so they hung out with the guys who could, basking in the limelight.  The reviews weren’t reviews, they were hagiographies.  “The music must be great because I party with these guys.”  “They must be significant because I party with these guys.”  Everything was on a chummy, first-name-only basis (“Mick and Keith were really rockin’ it Thursday night.”) that became the norm for roughly forever (Cam Crowe slipped a screamingly funny joke about The Rocket’s review style in his movie Singles.).  As tastes changed and their substance-abuse buddies died, faded away, or became arena bands (and now nostalgia bands playing the Peppermill in Wendover), Rolling Stone found itself unsuccessfully playing catch-up, jumping on every bandwagon that rolled down the street in a desperate attempt to get in front of The Next Big Thing and failing miserably.  If it weren’t for Matt Taibbi, that rag would have no reason to exist.

In the 70s other rags stepped into the breach, but they took the Stone’s style sheet and were all clones of one another.  They couldn’t comprehend my rules, either.  I remember one of these rags (probably Circus, but who honestly gives a shit at this point, they were fungible) going after every Harry Chapin recording because it “wasn’t rock.”  Well no shit, Sherlock.  Chapin wasn’t a rocker, he was a folkie, self-proclaimed, and condemning him for not being what he wasn’t was…well…not even wrong.  Congratulations, rock critics, you just earned Stephen Fry’s second-greatest insult, right after “I almost care.”

There was one exception to the Clone Wars: Creem.  But that didn’t make it good, just different.  Admittedly, Creem was covering a lot of things no one else was, including the early days of punk and all that was happening over at CBGB.  But my gods the pretension.  Memo to Lester Bangs: Just because you covered something doesn’t mean you invented it.  Just because you came up with the label “punk rock” doesn’t mean you created punk rock.  Punk rock was created by garage bands (US) and pub bands (UK) (I always envied the UK guys because no matter how, frankly, BAD you were, there was someone willing to book you.  Here in the US?  Not so much.  Although you could always get homecoming and prom gigs if you were just another shitty cover band.) (Punk was spawned by my half-generation, the Late Boomers.  The reason was simple: We were fucking sick and tired of the hypocrisy of the Early Boomers, our big brothers and sisters.  They were the 60s Children, the Flower People, and they were still peddling that bullshit even though the wheels had fallen off the wagon and there was a global recession.  They accused us of being self-centered for not “working for change” like them while they busily leveraged the huge advantage of having sucked up everything before we ever got on the scene.  They took their 60s, corporatized, commoditized, packaged, and slapped a smiley face on them, and expected us to swallow it all without question.  The problem was that we just didn’t believe hard enough in the dream.  Meanwhile we were saying, “The fuck?  Our dreams hit the wall at 110 per in Fall ’73!  The wreckage is everywhere, but you dicks and everybody else is just stepping over it like it isn’t there!”  We wanted to wave our private parts at them, so we did.  Which is a long way of telling you Millennials that, if you lump the Early and Late Boomers together, your ignorance is showing.  Yeah, there are plenty of Late Boomers who sold out [You hear me, Barry Obama?  You sold us all out, but history will always remember you fondly because you landed between the Texas Turd Tornado and Hitler 2.0.], but we were the first ones to face the New Normal you folks are now dealing with.  You need old wise men and women for your villages?  Trust me, we’re available in hordes.)

As yet another aside, there were garage bands, and there were garage bands.  None of us were very good, but most of us wanted to improve to something resembling competency.  The early punkers simply didn’t care (Hell, a lot of them, such as the New York Dolls, were so bad they made The Kingsmen sound like conservatory virtuosos.  And the Noo Yuck critics, apparently on permanent bad acid trips from frequent visits to Andy Whore-wall’s Fucktory, kept rubbing out one after another for them all.  “Daringly campy!”  “A raw, animal sound!”  Shit-shoveling by rapidly deteriorating white guys desperate to continue being perceived as bleeding edge.).  Fortunately, this only lasted a few years before a lot of the punkers decided it maybe would not be so inauthentic if they actually learned how to play their instruments.  I don’t care what John Lydon continues to blow out his ass, Black Flag was never boring.

But I really can’t leave the topic of pretension without a mention of The Village Voice, the self-proclaimed font of all things cool and hip for over six decades and running.  In reality The Village has been overrun with gentrifying yuppie scum straight off the set of Thirtynothing since before Rudy Giuliani parked his malignancy in the Mayor’s Office, and The Voice has followed suit.

And Robert Christgau was at the center of it all.  It has never ceased to amaze me how someone so admittedly ignorant could be such an expert on everything.  He admits he is “not at all well-schooled” (understatement) in 50s and 60s jazz, yet he has reviewed jazz artists such as Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Sonny Rollins without any of that context and has declared Frank Sinatra the greatest singer of the 20^th Century (A meaningless statement.  How can you compare Sinatra and, say, Pavarotti?  You can’t, and anyone with a lick of humility and two brain cells to rub together doesn’t even try.) while apparently ignorant of Nelson Riddle’s role in creating Sinatra’s best albums.  He was an early promoter of punk, right through all the “authentic vs. poseur” wars, blissfully unaware that this was not a rebellion unique to punk but rather was a recurring fight in music, most recently before that in the “this is jazz/this is not jazz” that started with the rise of bebop after the Second World War, that caused a butt-ton of damage to the genre, and that Miles Davis was a pivotal player in until he finally got over it and put on that shiny red leather suit and released Bitches Brew, which Christgau unironically nominated to Jazz & Pop as jazz album of the year in 1970.  He considers the New York Dolls one of the five greatest artists of all time.  Please.  The Dolls were influential, true, and for two reasons: 1) Their show was cheap and entertaining and so readily copiable and copied, and 2) their musicianship was so crude a half-trained baboon could cover it.  Not exactly reasons to put them in GOAT contention.  Finally, Christgau doesn’t like and is nearly completely ignorant of classical music.  This tells me so many things, but two bubble immediately to the surface: 1) He has neither the music history nor the music theory to hold 90% (at least) of the opinions he’s been paid for over the last half-century, and 2) he’s a shallow little shit who needs to sit in a corner and STFU.

And believe it or not, all that was just a warm-up to get around to John Harris.  Toward the end of the Kate Bush documentary is a roundtable discussion of her latest album (Aerial) by several UK rock critics, including Harris.  Harris makes the remark that the music sounds like something you’d hear in a department store and that it’s obvious Bush hadn’t been in a studio for 12 years.  I’ll start with the statements themselves and then turn to their wider ramifications.

Department store music?  I’d like to know where Harris hangs out that this is the ambient Muzak.  Let’s chalk this one up to hyperbole and move on to the “12 years” remark.  He doesn’t really elaborate on this (not entirely his fault, given the roundtable format) so we can only speculate on his actual point.  Do her pipes sound rusty?  Not really.  Does the technology sound dated?  No (And trust me, I keep up.  It’s not like I sit around listening to Sergeant Pepper’s going, “Oh wow, they played those tapes backwards!”), and even if it did, that would be one to lay on the producer and the engineer.  Is the music dated?  An ambiguous word, “dated”, but I’m afraid we’ve finally reached what Harris was driving at.  By “dated” do we mean it doesn’t sound like other music being produced now?  First, when has Kate Bush ever sounded like anyone else, and second when did sounding like everyone else become a standard of musical quality?  It hasn’t and it shouldn’t, but I’m afraid this is the point Harris is trying to make.  Perhaps, though, he meant this sounds like her old material.  Saying that an artist is repeating themself is a helpful criticism, especially if you explain why you think so.  Frankly that’s a point I can agree with; I find a certain sameness in her work since Hounds of Love.  But that isn’t even remotely what Harris says.  He says she sounds old-fashioned, which is never a useful comment, merely a pejorative one, and worse, a pejorative aimed not just at the artist but at the listener.  You are listening to old-fashioned music.  You are old-fashioned.  You are outdated.  Catch up!

Under the best of circumstances, this is unmitigated bullshit.  Coming from Harris, it is unmitigated bullshit that is part of a career full of it.  Harris’s cred as a “serious person” essentially rests on his 2003 book The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock (repackaged in 2004 as Britpop: Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock) and the follow-up BBC Four 2005 documentary The Britpop Story.  His thesis is that 90s Britpop was the last great shining moment for UK pop.  No, really.

At this point, let facts be placed before a candid world.  The UK has been a popular music powerhouse for quite awhile, and by “powerhouse” I mean a global influence.  Let’s start arbitrarily with Gilbert & Sullivan, pass the baton to Ivor Novello, and then to Noel Coward.  The Second World War made hash of it all, and the post-war generation found that the US had stolen the baton, but rather than going gentle into that not-so-good night, both the rockers and the mods invaded the US and stole much of the thunder back.  This continued into the 70s, whether you’re talking about arena bands, metal, prog rock, or punk, and on into the 80s, again whether you’re talking about power pop, synthpop, or New Wave.  Big influences that can still be heard around the world.

Compare Britpop.  The whole point of Britpop was to be a calculated foil for Grunge and as safe and marketable as possible, the perfect theme music for the Tony Blair years.  It has so little edge it couldn’t leave a mark on a piece of talc.  Its influence has been negligible except as a template for profitable pap.  In 1997 the whole sham came unraveled as Oasis released the bloated disappointment Be Here Now and Blur abandoned the field to join the US “lo-fi” movement (and, through Damon Albarn, generate Gorillaz, which is actually something that matters).  Their lasting influence is Coldplay, and let’s be honest, if Coldplay is your gold standard, I’m afraid you actually have a pyrite mine.

But Harris thinks Britpop was the shining end of UK rock.  There are a number of holes in this assertion; two are glaring.  First, there are still plenty of new bands in the UK churning out good stuff (That Harris seems blissfully ignorant of these bands makes me wonder just who is out-dated and needs to catch up.).  Look them up yourselves; I’m not falling into the trap of naming a few here.  Suffice it to say they’re diverse, and you’re likely to hit on several you consider acceptable regardless of your musical tastes.  They’ve even been having an influence in the EU, but we’ll see what Brexit brings (Influence in the US?  Not so much since we have reached a level of insularity here that rules out anything beyond our borders having merit, in spite of having access to it all on The Interwebz.).  And these bands have a Hell of a lot more to offer than the Britpop slag did.

Which brings us to glaring hole two.  As noted previously, Britpop didn’t really have an impact.  None outside of the UK, and damned little in the UK on any time scale longer than the life of a mayfly.  Britpop was a nothingburger with a side of flies and a So? Duh!  Harris, though, raises this localized, ephemeral phenomenon and turns it into the last scion of the UK pop tradition.  This should just be considered a bad case of the sillies, except that Harris’s new schtick is political commentary, especially for The Grauniad.  In keeping with The Graun’s policies, his position is “Support Remain but maintain that ‘both sides have merit’.”  Which raises his Britpop position from silly to ironic, because Harris’s thinking on Britpop (“It was important in the UK, ergo it was IMPORTANT!”) is just the sort of insular, UK=World mentality that made Brexit possible.  Brexit happened, for the most part, because of a bunch of people who believed that, whatever the puzzle was, the UK was the only piece that mattered.  Harris’s elevation of Britpop on so high a pedestal rests on the same belief, even though he’s a Remainer.  So it’s unintentionally ironic.  It’s symptomatic of a malignant mindset.  And it’s still silly.

And so I give you Christgau and Harris, Exhibits 1 and 2 in my case for the beyond-uselessness of rock critics.  And the former is still being allowed to write revisionist histories of the music of the last half-century while the latter is still being allowed to…well…write.  What a world.

And If You Wonder Why Everyone is Misinformed...

...it could because shit like this is what poses for in-depth coverage in Murican spews media.  Trump has done much to boost the economy?  No Ross, Trump has done much to boost YOUR economy, which is why you people put him in office, isn't it.  You don't want to admit we're already in a housing bubble?  Well I guess I can understand that since you still have properties you're trying to unload, and you don't want your marks to find out it's all a scam and the merry-go-round is about to break down yet again.  But this is all a bit much coming from a guy who has been at the hub of the bubble AND the growth in unaffordable housing (Hudson Yards gentrification, anyone?).  Fuck you, Stephen Ross.  And fuck you Andy Serwer for giving him just another PR platform.  And double fuck you Calder McHugh for promoting this flack flatulence.