Pigs yokking it up

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The heading of this post obviously represents a slander of pork-based members of the animal kingdom, but it serves the purpose of providing a comparison that most people immediately understand.



The motive for this vandalism is impossible for me to understand. The motive for the perpetrators to record a video of it is simple for anyone to understand: stupidity, ignorance,  profound disrespect for the planet, and probably a sense of immunity from accountability for transgressions that they "didn't really mean." If this clip actually shows what it seems to show, then perhaps these smirking clots of phlegm should spend about a year residing in a federal penitentiary to reminisce about the jolly time they had. Also, let's fine the motherfuckers about $250K apiece, which is the same amount of reparations that a person pays for, say, pirating a copyrighted movie.

Birthday Girl Fish Fry!

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Little Oscar, my favorite geezer lady, is having a birthday for a few more hours, so here's a treat for her from the days when "Doug Stephenson" roamed the earth and Columbia Record Club would send you five---FIVE!---free LPs as long as you'd buy one a month for the rest of your life or send it back within 7 days at your own expense.



Whatever Gary Lewis album this was on, we heard the damn thing about five times a day for the entire summer of 1965 in heavy rotation with Jay & The Americans and Jan & Dean. Probably no one is more responsible for me taking up leaded gasoline for recreational use than Little Oscar and Gary Lewis' goddam Playboys!

I embedded this particular version of the selected tune, however, for reasons that have much to do with me and nothing to do with Little Oscar. See if you can guess what they are. Unfortunately, LO did not have any hot friends like the ones tearing it up above, with the possible exception of Terri W. who I was still slightly too young to "appreciate." But she and her bra-stuffing girlfriends were all nice girls, with no vices other than Pepsi. They were never a pain to be around. And that's about the nicest thing any kid can be expected to say about his big sister.

Happy Birthday, Little Oscar!

Little Miss Go-Go, Gary Lewis & the Playboys (1965, Liberty 55778 [45 rpm single; can't track down the album catalog number]), via YouTube, embedded with a claim of fair use because it's Little Oscar's birthday!!!

Editor's note: I read in the liner notes of my CD greatest hits collection that this recording was Take 27! Can you imagine that? I think Brian Wilson must have put together "Good Vibrations" in fewer takes than that.

Origins of the Opt Out movement

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Apropos of this, my "product rollout" of the Opt Out movement is behind schedule. That is OK with me, and it also serves as a demonstration of opting out. In this case, I have opted out of rushing myself. Opting out of self-imposed, imaginary urgency generally has been my first major success with applying the concept. I believe the contagion of phony urgency is a blight on the life of most people; the quality of my own life has greatly improved in direct relation to my success of opting out of this unasked-for, nonconstructive stress.

See? Opting out is easy. Here's how it works: you identify a condition imposed on your life that thwarts the authentic aims of human life---your own in particular---and opt out of it. Opting out is just a simple, elemental exercise of free will. It's one of the two acts of will an individual can exercise: the deliberate choice not to do something. (Since visitors to this blog are all in the fast reading group, they can infer the other way to exercise will.)

The origins of the Opt Out movement, for me, go back to an undated entry in an electronic notebook file midway through the Stupor Mundi phase of this blog during the Bush Junior administration. In thinking about Republican demolition of New Deal institutions and demonization of its ideals, I came upon the Wikipedia article about Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms:

1. Freedom of speech 
2. Freedom of worship 
3. Freedom from want 
4. Freedom from fear

My intent was to promulgate a set of post-Reagan freedoms that could be exercised beneath the radar of the surveillance state. (Let's ignore the unwarranted arrogance that would allow Stupor Mundi to express such a conceit.) My problem with the Four Freedoms (4F---just like FDR!) was that they're really not freedoms, and two of them are different than the other two.

The first two are constitutional rights in the United States, and they're understood by all except the most reactionary to be universal human rights. By definition, a right is inalienable, but the freedom to exercise the right can be abridged by any actor that has coercive power.

The third and fourth are aspirational sentiments, one dealing with material sustenance and the other with psychological wellbeing. Whether they are rights is debatable. Whether they're universally achievable by the will of every human under the sky is not debatable: they aren't.

Beyond the general woolliness of FDR's Four Freedoms is that use of the term freedoms (versus rights) carries the unstated assumption that these laudable aspirations are something to be dispensed by governments instead of asserted by regular people. Stupor Mundi's Four Freedoms would have to be liberties that can be exercised without the permission of any government or corporate authority. As a personal historical footnote of trivial significance, I present an early draft of the SM 4F:

1. Freedom to spend your discretionary income wherever you want to, or to save it.
2. Freedom to change the TV or radio station, or to turn it off.
3. Freedom to not answer your telephone, or not to own one.
4. Freedom to vote for or against whomever you wish.

I do feel these are useful, liberating ideas that everyone should keep in mind. And in fact, they're behind a lot of the opting out that a person can do. But they're obviously not universal or encompassing enough to form the basis of a philosophy or social movement. So the SM 4F lay fallow in my notebook, but not forgotten. Then, later, the following things happened:

• People who call themselves liberal and moderate took nominal control of the executive and legislative branches and yet permitted a neo-Confederate federal nullification clique to push the nation further into authoritarianism than it was under Bush.
• The Occupy Movement scared the living cocoa wheats out of everyone from Glenn Beck to Hillary Rodham Clinton. 
• I read Havel's Power of the Powerless, which introduced me to the concept of parallel structures.
• It finally dawned on me that the concept of opting out of various terms and conditions of web-based services was the only meaningful way to push back against forces that want to fully monetize every human transaction.

So, about a year ago, I realized that an inherent property unifying the SM 4F might be the negative half of each expression. The liberty not to spend money, for example, or the freedom to deny access to intrusive communications media. These are acts of opting out.

Opting out is inseparable from individual responsibility, and it implies the intentional acceptance of consequences. But so does opting in. In the world that has grown up around us, I think opting out has much more potential as a tool of self-actualization, mutual support, and greater personal tranquility.

Totally impersonal special deliveries

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Special deliveries of cryptic messages to persons known and unknown because I'm too damn busy to catch up with you individually right now:

Beer-D: upon reacquainting myself with a Shostakovich favorite this evening for the first time in over 40 years, I discovered that this composer was the father of Klingon opera.

Anna: I didn't recognize your voice in comments at first, but if you know of Fonzo Serbo then contact me through regular channels. I would be happy to hear from you.

Helm**6: started writing you a note, but thanks first for the one you sent. The story sounds fairly normal to me, actually.

Gurlitzer: I know the blog has sucked and been neglected for a long time, but I was getting concerned that you hadn't shown up in comments lately. Guess everything is OK and I just need to write something interesting once in a while.

Mr. Summers, Class of 1970: good to meet you last month. Somewhat startlingly, I can't find a single hit on Google or Duck with the name of our college and "ACME" or "hundt". Two decades of our alma mater seems destined to swirl down the memory hole.

Little Oscar: Happy birthday! "Take an Indian to lunch this week!" (It's not the precise Stan Freberg reference for the occasion, but it's an appropriate one.)

Free advice for a miserabler hurensohn with a pink tie

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My best guess about the Tea Party nullify-Obama movement and its activities has been that their period of useful idiocy to their paymasters will lapse when corporate oligarchs begin losing money or, alternately, when the political environment becomes too unpredictable to assure a constant and growing return on investment. There have been signs that the day is approaching, with outfits like Fox, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chamber of Commerce making moderate-sounding noises with respect especially to Tea Party intentions to interfere with raising the US debt ceiling. TPM ran the first direct story on the topic today, which I think is significant.

To be clear, I don't think anyone mentioned above is becoming more "moderate." But I do think that there is a growing demand for things to return to post-Reagan normal, meaning that Republicans play conventional bad cop to the Democrat good cop in the march toward globalization and its manifold "benefits" (such as destruction of national sovereignty in the areas of labor law, environmental protection, consumer rights, finance, etc.). So given my pessimistic view of things, I'm not sure there's any benefit to sweeping the Tea Party aside. But I have a plan for Herr John Boehner, galaxy-class sack of chickenshit and all-around SOB, that could exile them to the wilderness in short order.

Although there would be some scheming and logistics involved, not to mention more guts than Boehner ever had at his disposal, it's pretty simple: expel every one of them from the Republican Party.

I don't know the pertinent law, but I'm reasonably sure that nobody can run as a Republican (or Democrat) without sanction by the controlling party committee. For the sake of argument, let's just say that's true. So here's how it would work. If there really is a "silent majority" of Republicans who would vote for a clean CR if there were no danger of being primaried by a TP goon, then simply bring the clean CR to the floor to pass with Republicans and Democrats. But first make it clear to everyone in the caucus that a vote against it will mean that you may no longer promote yourself as a Republican. No more campaign funds or other party support. Most importantly: no rebellious TP'er will be slated as a Republican House candidate in 2014, whether as an incumbent or as a primary challenger.

US election laws make it very difficult for a third-party candidate to make the ballot. And with an irritated donor base consisting of corporate chieftains who don't like being ignored by peckerwoods and no-nothings, one would expect to see campaign money backing GOP party regulars in a majority of the cases.

The risks are self-evident, including a split of the right-wing vote to an extent that could lose a significant amount of GOP seats in swing-type districts. But in gerrymandered "safe" districts, I can't think of any reason why a new "moderate" Republican couldn't win the seat of an incumbent Tea Partier.

Republicans would surely lose the House. But let's face it, they've rarely controlled the House since the Great Depression. Yet the GOP has marched the whole country toward the end of the plank of representative democracy since Ronald Reagan smirked his way into the hearts of disillusioned Baby Boomers (i.e., dudes who couldn't tag enough pussy in the 1970s). Business as usual could return, and we could resume the lurch toward rule by transnational corporations---Republicans dragging regular people there kicking and screaming, alternating with the silky persuasive stylings of hip hierarchs like Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Mr. Boehner: feel free to take my advice, but not that you owe me one jumbo Swiss bank safe deposit box stuffed with stocks, bonds, and lots of green stuff from Lloyd Blankfein's wallet.