Louisiana-Gate: Follow the Money

Here's my post about this (I'm still informing myself so I'll probably post another one).

Here's a Media Matters editorial. Follow the links from there.

M.O. pod Episode 3 at Vimeo

Modus Operandi Podcast Episode 3 1/28/2010 (redux) from alan evil on Vimeo.

Howard Zinn 1922-2010

At [an] event in Madison, Wisconsin, Howard issued a challenge to the audience. He said, "Our job as citizens is to honestly assess what Obama is doing. Not measured just against Bush, because against Bush, everybody looks good. But look honestly at what Obama's doing and act as engaged and vigorous citizens."

via

Doing the Wrong Thing

"There is no rest, really, there is no rest, there is just a joyous torment all your life of doing the wrong thing." -Derek Walcott

America Is Lucy

MODUS OPERANDI BLOGPOST2

Dr. Overbey, 27 January 2010

Since I’m not feeling well today and I am even more pissed off than I usually am all the time, I’m going to keep going.

America is Lucy.

What the hell am I talking about? You know damn well what I’m talking about. I’m talking about Lucy, the Peanuts character. There’s this on-going episode where Lucy is holding a football for Charlie Brown (I should write a short story about Charlie Brown trying to get a medical marijuana script in Los Angeles). And what does Lucy do right when Charlie Brown is about to kick the ball, his momentum irreversibly as his kicking foot flies upward? That’s right! She lifts the ball up so Charlie Brown is denied the satisfaction of completing his goal, and, to add injury to insult, loses his balance and falls on his ass.

Now, why does Lucy do this? Because she’s afraid?

No, because she gets off on it. She loves it!

It is simple sadistic joy that motivates Lucy to do this over and over (CB’s gullibility doesn’t make Lucy’s pathology any less pathetic). She loves it and cannot help herself. It is this same disposition that reflects the majority of Americans. I do not believe for a second that Americans behave as they do because of fear. Americans’ problem is not fear, but its Aristotelian opposite: foolhardiness. Americans are not afraid of what they should fear. You ought to be afraid of a totalitarian, corporate government that refuses to give its citizens health care and instead corrals the largest prison population in the history of civilization; but most Americans love it. You ought to be afraid of spending half your waking life in a four-ton piece of medal travelling upwards of 75 mph at close distance to 18 wheelers going even faster; but for most Americans, their love affair with the automobile is an American birthright more sacred than the First Amendment or even life itself (which is why so many Americans die in cars!).

And war. This idea that America has to always be at war because we’re so afraid is a joke. The only reason not to be in a war is that you are afraid. You fear the inevitable widespread death (often of young adults and children, which is especially a waste), relentless misery (but at least diverse, ranging from emotional anguish to malnutrition or even starvation), torture, mutilation, and destruction that comes with war, that is war. If these conditions do not inspire fear, there never has been or will be any justification for not being at war all the time (not that Americans need a justification for anything they do or don’t do; they are, after all, Americans). September 11 didn’t horrify people and turn them off of war and violence; it energized the entire nation and gave the whole country a machine-gun sized hard-on. “Navy seals rock!” exclaimed CBS journalist Katie Couric to the nation in the immediate aftermath, her vagina juice gushing with ovulating glee. Never in my life have I seen this country more motivated and galvanized than in the early Bush-Christ years following the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon. Never will I or any living human see the day when efforts at improving health care or education remotely approach that level of focus and togetherness.

But the majority of Americans never seem to tire of war or the relentless fear that it ought to induce in a sane human being who was not raised by baboons. Instead, war is the power of pride, the fight for freedom, and other abstract nonsense. The last thing it is is the obliteration of the human body and soul. The last thing it is is what it really is, in other words.

Fools rush into situations that are obviously dangerous, pose great risk, and offer no meaningful reward should the fool be lucky and avoid the probable death or injury looming over them. Fools entrust greedy pigs who are complete strangers with their life savings—then continue to believe in the same people and the same system even after they have wrecked the economy and put the fool out of work. After all, there is always someone out there who has it even worse, and when times are tough, Americans can rub one out watching on TV while the next Charlie Brown gets fucked over. “Better you than me!”

Just as Americans don’t live in fear, they are also not stupid, at least in an epistemological sense. Most Americans have jobs (or they did until the collapse of 2008), know how to get what they want, make money, get their W2s filed, and conform in typical compliant American fashion. They know how to manipulate the media and sabotage anything or anyone they don’t like. What motivates Americans is not fear and their flaw is not ignorance but the puerile obsession of having to be better than the other person. And since intuitively most Americans know they are not going to make it rich, they are not going to live the American Dream (which is repugnant as much as it is illusory), but the one thing that can get them through the day is to see the other person punished, humiliated, and shut down. Night after night I see the reflection of blue lights on the walls of my apartment; yes—praise the Fox—another person is off to jail! Hallelujah!

It is also foolhardiness—not fear—that sustains Americans’ appetites for the utterly banal and quotidian—gossip about celebrities, sports games, what people wore to church last week, the latest bullshit digital gadgets that they can finger themselves with. Don’t we have it so great that in America we can just push the enter button after typing in the first three letters of the current month instead of having to spend all that time just typing out the date itself! Wow! Just when you thought life couldn’t get any better! So no one gathers in public space—only fools are not afraid of overlords who want to stamp out public space and make the infrastructure sterile and completely out of proportion to the human body—and makes the time to have an intelligent conversation with one’s neighbors and fellow citizens about the fact that war is a complete waste and an obvious sign of a nation in crisis that has deliberately destroyed its own imagination, that war is bankrupting the country, that our schools are a joke, that our whole way of life sucks. Instead the topic turns to how teachers don’t do real work, anyone can get rich if they work hard enough, liberals sympathize with terrorists, scientists hate America, the planet is bogging down our already-collapsed economy, and Tiger Woods is a fuckaholic . . . which is OK as long as he hits that golf ball good. Bottom line: the majority of Americans are assholes, and they can suck my cunt.

There. I still don’t feel better.

Until next time . . . remember, “nothing good is ever going to happen again.”

Here we go again . . . Idiots Continue War on Drugs

MODUS OPERANDI BLOGPOST
Dr. Overbey, 27 January 2010

Here we go again . . .

Today’s NY Times reports that the L.A. City Council voted 9 to 3 to eliminate 80% of the city’s medical marijuana dispensaries and make it illegal to use marijuana in the remaining ones. This is a state that is bankrupt (the government has been paying employees in IOUs and will soon be on the receiving end of the next round of bailouts) and ought to go ahead and just flat-out legalize it (you know, generate revenue, a radical free market concept)—which, of course, will never happen. According to the council members who voted in favor of the measure, the dispensaries are “out of control.” Did you get that? A bunch of people sitting in a building smoking weed to alleviate chronic pain and discomfort are out of control!!! Not the bankers, not the military-industrial complex, not the never-ending and insanely expensive forlorn carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan, not the privatized, overcrowded prisons, not the endless sprawl of highways and cars doing 90mph leading to daily fatalities—no, let’s shut down people doin’ dope!!! That’s what we need! Now we can finally have our country back!

Apparently, people bitch and complain that the dispensaries are too close to schools and parks and residential areas. These same devil-worshipping shitasses have no problem strolling their precious suckshit offspring up and down the aisles of groceries where in the back there is a pharmacy holding tons of drugs way more potent and dangerous than marijuana. If you’re not paranoid about junior gobbling up a handful of xanax while his chubby, obese digits masturbate Playstation all day, why bitch about the weed? Because these people are miserable conservative assholes whose sole purpose on earth is to spread their misery. Boy, it’s great to live in a free country, isn’t it?

Despite that fact the marijuana has been quasi-legal in California for nearly fourteen years and none of the end-of-the-world anti-dope myths have become reality, cold-hearted and brain-dead America insists on holding on to their same vapid and cruel perspectives. If the gateway-drug theory and attendant lies about marijuana had any merit, the whole state of California would be in the midst of a collective heroin overdose by now and their lips would be falling off from too much meth. No one would work, everyone would be sitting around all day eating potato chips and waiting around for a government check. There wouldn’t be newspapers anymore because all the reporters would forget what they were writing down in the middle of their sentences, and everybody would be gay and butt fucking puddles. California’s problems are just like the rest of America’s: people are lethargic because they have poor education streamlined toward lucrative professions and attend increasingly expensive universities where the liberal arts are marginalized more than the needs of poor people in need of health care.

Speaking of, let’s remember this is medical marijuana, and efforts to shut it down are yet another example of how Americans hate the idea of other people feeling good instead of like shit. No one has the right to tell another person what it’s like to live in their body, and if people testify before Congress that using marijuana makes them feel much better than if they don’t, that is as legitimate as health care can get. Not feeling well and being prohibited from feeling better is a horrible life, a perpetual punishment, and testament to how sadistic and hateful the majority of Americans are that they get pissed off at people because they want therapeutic release from depression, anxiety, spasticity, nausea, headaches, insomnia, glaucoma, and other ailments that literally ruin people’s lives. So let’s hear it for the City Council of Los Angeles, determined to make life unenjoyable and escape from unhappiness impossible. After all, if people actually felt good and were happy, then the corporations couldn’t sell happiness. The first step to selling people happiness is to systematically make them unhappy and use force and intimidation to stop them from doing the things on their own without making the corporations richer that make them feel good and happy. Figure it out, fuckheads: there is nothing wrong with smoking weed, it’s a stupid and baseless law to make it a crime, marijuana has indisputable medicinal value, and as a recreational drug it is much better and safer for both the user and society than alcohol. To cling to a prohibitionist stance is worse than thinking a woman’s place is in the kitchen, Blacks are two-thirds human, but not quite as bad as thinking the earth is the center of the universe (not that any organization, like the Vatican, for example, clung to that view . . . just as an example, of course).

In typical I-want-to-be-spoonfed-what-to-think-and-how-to-live-and-constantly-be-smothered-by-authority-so-I-can-defend-my-freedom American fashion, the never-ending line from brain-washed Americans who grew up going to schools meeting drug dogs and cops instead of learning geography and knowing why the year 1776 is somewhat significant is, “I don’t mind you doing something to make yourself feel better, but I object to you using drugs to do so. Why do you have to use a substance?” In other words, these people don’t mind if you do something to make yourself feel better as long as you don’t do something to make yourself feel better. That’s why people use medical marijuana, assholes: it works. Then there’s the frenetic, psychotic, fundamentalist Christians, everywhere teeming like bad bacteria: “If you’re not feeling well, it’s your fault! You need to let Christ in your heart!” Like Christ would give a shit about people smoking weed. Like these angry, foolhardy, zealots care about or emulate Christ in any recognizable way. If you’re angry because people want to do something completely harmless and unobtrusive to your off-the-charts dull and boring conformist lives just so they can feel better and enjoy their limited human existence on the earth, then all I can say is you’re the one who’s sick and needs to smoke a joint. But you won’t do that of course, less you experience what it’s like to actually feel pleasure, and at the same time confront the possibility that sometimes you’re wrong.

Until next time . . . remember, “nothing good is ever going to happen again.”

[posted by Alan because apparently Dave is too retarded to figure out how to post to a format designed for retards. Hopefully he will add some hotlinks in the next few days. -Ed.]

First Two Episodes of M.O.pod at Vimeo

Modus Operandi Podcast episode 1 1/7/2010 from alan evil on Vimeo.

Modus Operandi Podcast episode 2 1/21/2010 from alan evil on Vimeo.

E-mail Tidbit

From: David Overbey

To: Alan Miller

Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2009 1:43 PM

Subject: Americans love war

A Bellarmine student's response to peace activist Cindy Sheehan:

"But Cindy, if we fight wars for oil, don't we need oil?"

Harper's Magazine: The Guantánamo “Suicides”

The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

By Scott Horton

...Late on the evening of June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.

As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners’ families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion...

read all

Partial E-mail Exchange

O -
the Massachusetts election epitomizes everything wrong with the country. How twisted that it only came about because one of the most enduring advocates of health care reform passed away. If Ted Kennedy were still alive and kicking, it wouldn't even be an issue. But this one is on the people of Mass., they have shown themselves to be as backward, gullible, miserable and narrow-minded as any part of the country. They should have enough sense to know that the current problems of the country are the complete fault of the prior president who was in office only a year ago. They were suckers for every Republican trope: the opponent is soft on terror, taxing the banks is bad because "they'll just pass it on the public" and don't let those liberals get out of control with their overreaching agenda--as though the Republicans don't do drastic, unprecedented things.

Obama is clearly at fault for at least two things: he should be savvy enough to know he cannot make allies out of his enemies, and he should have been much more aggressive about his own agenda, seizing on the huge momentum he had a year ago, and the historic unpopularity of his predecessor. He has allowed the Republicans and the talk show con-artists to control the discourse on health care reform, bogging the whole debate down with obsessing our minutae rather than hammering one clear, indisputable message: everyone should have health care, period. Instead, Obama and the chronically complacent Democrats have been on the defense and even making arguments in favor of reform that are beside the point: the current system is unsustainable, reform will save money in the long run, make it easier for business owners, etc. They are using their opponents' points to defend their own position, which is nonsensical. If you want to change a policy, you have to take control of the discourse that defines that policy. You must on the offensive and make the other side accountable for their position: why do you want to sit there and let people die when we have the money and technology to give them the health care that will save them? How can you turn your backs on America's families and children? Instead the Democrats passively argue against positions that have no credibility in the first place and thus are not worthy of debate. The question "How are we going to pay for it?" is really a statement: "I don't want to pay for it," and thus, dishonest. The American people have betrayed their own selfishness: they want health care not because it is vital and civilized; they want it because it is one more thing to have that someone else doesn't have; and if everyone were to have what they have, they couldn't go on believeing themselves to be better than everyone else, which is an ignornant and miserable mentality that is really hurting this country. As always, whenever they get into office, Democrats' main priority is just to stay there by convincing people that they are the better conservative party. Dems want to cater to this imaginary "middle" and the same cycle repeats itself: they alienate their liberal base, and allow their opponent to regain momentum and once again become the political aggressor. The health care debate exposes the folly of this imaginary "middle." There is no middle in the health care debate. Either you believe everyone should have health care and be able to get medical treatment when they need it or you do not. In the end, the never-ending so-called debate on health care is really not a debate at all--it is a way to forestall, delay, and eventually sabotage any effort to change the status quo. The administration and the people are to blame. Birds of a feather, as they say. I can only imagine how bad it will get when Sarah Palin--author of the #1 nonfiction bestseller in the nation and TV superstar--takes office in 2012. It really will be the end of the world. Meows!

M -

What do we do if we stay here? We have no party to represent us. The Democrat party is a fraud. Just as with the GOP, their social "policies" are nothing but lip service to the people that vote based on those issues. There is no actual commitment to equality and justice for all. They are bought and paid for shills of big industry, just like the GOP. Everything they do is for the benefit of the ultra-wealthy and corporations. There's one big party in this country that wears two masks, fooling most of the people all of the time.

Over 60% of Americans supported a single payer system. What did our "representatives" do? They took it completely off the table. What was the parliamentary maneuver that GWB used to ram through his massive tax cuts for the rich (which helped ruin our economy and balloon our deficit)? It was called reconciliation. They used it all the fucking time with their weak majority in the Congress to ram through every last one of Shrub's policies and now they're going to claim it's a bad thing and has never been done before. And not one major Democrat will call them liars. Democrats don't have the balls to use it to get this shit done by any means at their disposal. They'll going to pretend they have to be polite and genial and bipartisan when they could ram it through. They should have used reconciliation to pass a really good health bill months ago but they had to bow to their corporate overlords on every single issue and here we are, no longer with a super majority, staring at no change in this fucked up mess we've got.

I sure wish we had 10 or more lobbyists for every Congressperson working for us like the insurance companies but we have no one. Our voices are absent from our government and there is no way for them to be heard. How do a bunch of poor people living hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck compete with a corporation that can afford to spend millions to counter them legally.

If they weren't so utterly ignorant I'd almost throw in with the teabaggers just to force change (and for the ironic pleasure of labeling myself with a slightly odd sexual practice). But they're compromised by the GOP and Fox Noise and tend towards the nationalist, fascist, and stupid. If I wanted to be really funny I'd suggest we vote for the Green party but our elections are bought and paid for by advertisements which are bought and paid for by the ultra wealthy and corporations on both sides. No second party will ever be able to compete against the entrenched masters as Nader's attempts to be included in the debates proved. The rest of us have no voice, including the bullet and the people who have taken our representation from us live in gated communities with armed guards and ride in bullet-proof limousines or over our heads in private jets and helicopters. Sure, we could kill a few politicians but they're not the ones in power. It's like cutting a puppet's strings. The puppet master only needs another puppet.

O -

Amen, dawg. I can't help but out though, that your observations that the corporation ARE the government and use the government to drive their agenda, and the fact there is no competition within society and only one political party are totally consistent with the tenants of American Communism.

Obviously, the choice we must make is NOT to stay here.

Ed Dauterich -
Dear Supreme Court-

Thank you for a wise and enlightened decision in the defense of free speech. For years, corporations have been denied this right, but now, patriotic Americans can rejoice in equality and justice for all. Now that corporations have achieved all of the rights of human beings (not to mention hundreds of times the money and power), I hope to see them around more in public. Will Nabisco come to my church? Will GE split a PBR with me at the corner bar? Maybe Clear Channel will come over to my house and play piano in front of a roaring fire while we all sing traditional folk songs. That would be awesome.

Still, I do have a suggestion: In the interests of transparency, could we make sure that any candidate for political office who is sponsored by a corporation is clearly labeled as such? This has worked well for NASCAR and would be equally effective on Capitol Hill. Just imagine Harry Reid emblazoned with the Bank of America logo or Hillary Clinton wearing a skirt with GoDaddy.com plastered on the back of it. This would help us to know who owns our politicians. In addition, politicians should have to announce their affiliations with corporations at the beginning of every speech:

“Hi, I’m Barack Obama, brought to you today by Hostess Cupcakes.”

This would help everyday Americans, many of whom are underemployed and uninsured, to see that our corporate brothers are with us and our freely elected representatives in the struggle for human equality and decency. So thanks again, Supreme Court, and if Wal-Mart comes over to watch the AFC championship game with me this weekend, I’ll be sure to give you a call.

Yours truly,

Ed Dauterich