Yesterday's doke

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Provided yesterday courtesy of John Cole's brother:

“Fox News. You know what that is? Nickelodeon for people with dementia.”

Please make a note of it.

Today's doke

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The Invisible Army has been ratfucking my DSL router for several weeks. Thank you for your attention in this matter.

Sunday after hours

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There is only one reason I'd ever post such a thing to this blog. See if you can guess what it is.



A Walk In The Black Forest, Horst Jankowski (1965, Mercury Records [catalog information unavailable]), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note: some wags might consider this tune 1965's answer to Kyu Sakamoto's 1963 hit, "Sukiyaki," and also to the eternal question "Who won World War II, you so smart?"

Friday Evening After Hours

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This balls-heavy power trio track from Frank Zappa's Apostrophe(') album has always been linked in my mind to the approach of a certain monstrous, torrential chain-lightning storm as heralded by gorgeously hideous thunderheads the color of lead and a curiously refreshing 20 mph wind out of the west.



I'm certain that this tune would make a terrific soundtrack for the approach of Hurricane Irene assuming that (1) you and yours are personally safe, (2) all irreplaceable valuables are secured in a watertight fortress, (3) you are fully insured, and (4) you don't live within reach of the storm surge. Lotta ifs, I know. But what else can a Simple Country Editor offer other than best wishes and exciting incidental music?

Seriously, this is one of the most interesting power trio jams I've ever heard, with Jack Bruce strangling a dramatic fuzz-bass fanfare-style solo from his instrument right out of the gate. Then, once Bruce's hyperactive "preliminaries" are concluded, Zappa slips in from rhythm to an aggressive, precision solo that reminds me of a serpent's tongue made out of piano wire. It slashes its way through or around all obstacles popping out of the rhythm bed, where Bruce is still strumming away like Oedipus plucking at his own optic nerves. This is one of those tracks (and albums) that you have to own on high-quality physical media and pump hard through a nice set of real headphones at 11. Even on a simple track like this one, Zappa had a lot of things going on deeper in the mix that are lost in MP3 files and computer headphones.

I hope anyone in the hurricane path who might be listening and reading along comes through it all with nothing worse than a wet bird, as Sinatra used to say.

Apostrophe', Frank Zappa (1974, from "Apostrophe(')," DiscReet DS 2175), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

The wealthy elites "smash and grab," too

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I know we're all supposed to dutifully wind down our attention to the Steve Jobs resignation and join around the national hearth to watch Hurricane Irene lash East Coast homosexuals and liberals with the beastly righteousness only nature can dispense. Also that our Federal Reserve chairman thinks our economy will continue to grow over time even though he sees some "clouds on the horizon" because unemployment is still over 9%.

But the fallout from global austerity economics has not abated just because the Brits have swept up the broken glass from their mid-month wave of rioting. In a comment from an August 13 post, Marginalia of London noted that the looting was a political act despite the fact that the rioters may not have realized it. I agree.

Everybody knows that rioting, looting, and arson are heinous acts that punish the innocent much more than any legitimate object of political opprobrium. Pundits on both sides of the Atlantic responded with scolding in high dudgeon: shame on the nihilistic children; shame on their useless parents; the problem is that nobody knows how good they really have it any more; et cetera.

But most of us are still waiting for celebrity pundits to tut-tut the misbehavior of the elite global financiers who have been "looting with the lights on" for a decade or more:

[England's] riots are not political, or so we keep hearing. They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn't theirs. And British society, Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behaviour.

This is said in all seriousness. As if the massive bank bailouts never happened, followed by the defiant record bonuses. Followed by the emergency G8 and G20 meetings, when the leaders decided, collectively, not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of this, nor to do anything serious to prevent a similar crisis from happening again. Instead they would all go home to their respective countries and force sacrifices on the most vulnerable.

Click through to read the entire Guardian piece by Naomi Klein---it's a pippin. I copped the link from Anne Laurie on Balloon Juice, who also notes that PM David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson were both members of the obscenely wealthy and destructive Bullingdon Club during college years.

Klein's most interesting point, in my opinion, is another one of those truths that are hidden right in front of our noses: that Western media are quick to laud the high political ideals of rioters, looters, and insurrectionists in Bad Countries like Iraq, for example, because

this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people. After watching for so long as Saddam Hussein and his sons helped themselves to whatever and whomever they wanted, many regular Iraqis felt they had earned the right to take a few things for themselves.

As the article says, though, London isn't Baghdad. Maybe not (fewer minarets, for one thing), but maybe turning London into Baghdad is part of Premier Cameron's and Chairman Murdoch's 10-year Great-Leap-Ahead Plan. It's almost as if Western nations are deliberately avoiding the tested, straightforward solutions to depression economics (i.e., stimulus and employment programs) in order to do some social engineering through the magic of Disaster Capitalism. If corporatists love anything more than tax cuts for themselves, it's political crackdowns.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Nothin' new, sound of breaking glass



A peppy little number about real anarchy, not the Disney version that Libertarians pretend can save the world. Our British cousins had an ugly taste of it last week. The conscious agenda of the rioters was "smash and grab"; nothing overtly political motivating it, and nothing sympathetic to say about it. But both of those remarks are beside the point, I think: riotous anarchy is an emergent phenomenon that explodes forth when a certain set of social, political, and economic conditions is satisfied. It has root causes that can either be mitigated or aggravated. In Western democracies we have sparks that are being fanned into flames by an international nest of motherfuckers. I wouldn't be one bit surprised if I have more to say on the subject sometime. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass, Nick Lowe (1978, from "Pure Pop For Now People," Columbia 35329), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note:  The UK release of this album was called "Jesus of Cool," but Lowe's US label wouldn't stand for such heretical cheekery in the title, so my original purchase of this music was called Pure Pop. But Lowe reissued "Jesus" on CD a few years ago, which I also own and highly recommend for the bonus tracks.

Meanwhile, under the radar

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I saw this post by David Dayen linked to Heather Digby Parton's Hullaballo blog. It illustrates the other major crime of professional malpractice committed by the corporation-directed media that provide most of what most Americans accept in good faith as news.

The gist of it is that Republican lawmakers are being confronted at their August "town hall meetings" by ordinary people who are firmly demanding to know why legislators (John McCain, for example) believe that reducing taxes on corporations or wealthy people will help the economy in the absence of evidence. But there's not a peep about it on CNN, Fox, or NPR. Dayen's point is that last summer the media were all eyes and ears as "tea partiers" disrupted these town hall meetings last August, even brandishing or carrying concealed weapons in some cases. And why not? I leave this question as an exercise for the reader.

Dayen highlights examples published in the hometown press of conservative strongholds such as North Dakota, Tucson, Wilkes-Barre, PA, and Lincoln, NE. Dayen also claims that someone has compiled more than 100 such stories from around the nation, but unfortunately he doesn't provide a link to document that. But that's what the New York Times and the CNN national news desks are for, I'd think. Not a peep, though.

To me, the interesting thing is that these appear to be examples of everyday people who, without any help from the national media or national political leaders of either party are piecing together the story for themselves... the story being that the conventional wisdom we're being force-fed about deficits, debt ceilings, and "job-creating" rich people may be starting to wear thin.

In front of their own noses, too

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Adding onto yesterday's observations on Krugman's blog post about media malpractice in reporting on the impact of the S&P downgrade, I'll point to another Krugman piece from today. This one addresses the same phenomenon---straightforward lying about the reality right in front of everybody's noses---but pertains to elite economists who lie about their data in very transparent ways.

So this one on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, a guy named "Narayana Kocherlakota," argues that the Fed should tighten the money supply---raise interest rates, that is---because he wants us to believe that taking money out of the economy will reduce unemployment. But, always the good-natured wag, Krugman points out that:

The Fed dissenters are obviously looking for excuses to pursue tight policies; they’re looking at the facts only in search of support for their prejudices. As the old line goes, they’re using evidence the way a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.

Economists do it as much as the media, whether famous neoliberal intellectuals or Federal Reserve policymakers (usually the same guys, anyway). I enjoy reading about Krugman peeing on their lamppost.

In front of our noses

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This Krugman blog post highlights a virtually unreported detail about the past week of financial-world turmoil on the heels of the S&P downgrade of US debt:

A week ago, before the S&P downgrade, the interest rate on US 10-year bonds was 2.56 percent. As I write this, it’s 2.24 percent, with the yield on inflation-protected bonds actually negative.

You would think this would amount to strong evidence that the downgrade totally failed to shake confidence in US debt.

Yet people who listen to radio and TV reporting tell me that most stories attribute the stock plunge to the downgrade, and are telling listeners that the case for immediate spending cuts has gotten even stronger.

Get it? This is how the corporate narrative works. The Situationists figured it out more than 40 years ago:

[They] argued in 1967 that spectacular features like mass media and advertising have a central role in an advanced capitalist society, which is to show a fake reality in order to mask the real capitalist degradation of human life.

Their term for the narrative and its associated creations and fabrications was The Spectacle. Sounds correct to me.

Be that as it may, I call it criminal malpractice by the news media. Ordinary people who consider themselves to be very well informed because they follow the "nice" media CNN, MSNBC, Newsweek, The New York Times, and NPR are being deliberately misled. I call it deliberate deception because I know what a fucking news editor is really supposed to do for a paycheck.

One might think that our very own President North Star would have been hammering this point home for the past day or two, or maybe that he'll get around to it next week. But in order to do that, he would have to be a leader of sorts, with a few guts inside his skin. Where have you gone, Huey Long? Our nation turns its longing eyes to you. Goo goo goo joob.

Lemme ask you this:

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What the fuck am I supposed to do with six cucumbers?!?

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Hey, whattaya know---we have an actual, bona fide prayer meeting tonight! Hurry: step right up!



Somewhat prescient, eh? The only somewhat false note is Zappa's use of the word "friendly" to describe Jesus Freaks. In my experience at a nominally Presbyterian college during most of the 1970s, that term was rarely applicable (mostly only in the early years of the decade). And today? They long ago joined a club that coheres solely by expressing its collective disapproval of, and superiority to, America's undesirables (i.e., everyone who doesn't belong to the club). This makes them feel so good about themselves, at least until they get home, that they give the preacher bales of money to run lucrative, tax-exempt business enterprises so he can live the lifestyle of a Renaissance-era Cardinal.

And, seriously, we ain't Number 3, either. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing, Frank Zappa (October 1978, Saturday Night Live, NBC), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Won't need to search in Pakistan this time

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So Vice President Biden made news today by telling House Democrats today that the teabaggers have "acted like terrorists" during the debt ceiling standoff. President North Star will probably give him a scolding for saying so, but what he really should be doing is setting up a secure conference call with SEAL Team 6. Maybe a nice black-helicopter tour of the Potomac for a few properly selected chiefs of think tanks and cable news operations would be just the thing to lower the temperature in the glistening swamp on a hill. JK LULZ!!!

Meanwhile,at the bottom of the TPM piece linked above, we learn that Republican National Committee (RNC) chair "Reince Priebus" has "tweeted" that VP Biden has "more than crossed a line today when he called fiscal conservatives 'terrorists'. I demand an apology." Haha! I hope Biden gives "Priebus" an apology by way of his posterior annular ring.

By the way, I never make fun of a person's name, but I'll make an exception here. What the fuck kind of name is "Reince Priebus" supposed to be? I mean, really? And I'll add to that rhetorical question the amusing discovery made awhile back by some unnamed wag: if you remove all the vowels from his name, you're left with RNC PR BS. If that's not evidence that witty time travelers from the future have modified our current timeline, then I'm a monkey's uncle and so are you.

Stockholm, DC

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Paul Krugman, paraphrasing Jonathan Chait in The New Republic (and himself on many other occasions), boils the so-called deficit crisis into its irreducible essence:

As Chait says, the first thing you need to understand is that modern Republicans don’t care about deficits. They only pretend to care when they believe that deficit hawkery can be used to dismantle social programs; as soon as the conversation turns to taxes, or anything else that would require them and their friends to make even the smallest sacrifice, deficits don’t matter at all.

In the Stockholm Syndrome world of Washington, DC, and the corporate media that sustain America's political withdrawal from consensual reality, this kind of talk from a liberal is condemned as "partisan bickering" or "uncivil."

Putting that childish, dishonest perspective aside for later discussion, preferably on someone else's blog, I simply suggest that a skeptical reader simply  at the evidence that has been right in front our our noses from the moment we learned about Grover Norquist's quest to drown the federal government in the bathtub. Use Occam's razor. Is there a simpler, more direct statement that explains the state of our political discourse today?