Ogre-oids, 16 September 2010

Christine O'Donnell: The Tea Bag's victory in the Delaware Republican primary illustrates America's imminent descent into a right-wing dystopia, not to mention the obsolete and futile efforts of Obama to find "common ground" and "work with" the other party. As the Democrats continue to insist on compromise and moderate views in the name of denouncing extremism, right wing America becomes extreme to the point of surreal. O'Donnell's rants against masturbation and funding for AIDS are a perfect example of how bad things get when people don't jack off and use condoms: pieces of shit like her are born and rise to power.

Another example of how pointless compromise is in today's America: G.O.P. campaign spending far exceeds Democrats'. Unequal media access results in one party's views dominating public discourse. How's that for common ground! Of course, Obama's appeals to compromise and common ground are nothing more than disguises for his own conservative views. Two years in, Obama has shown himself to be just another Democratic convinced that his only chance at political success is to mimic Republicans:  the Afghan "surge," bashing teachers, coddling investment banks, letting big oil kill people, destroy local economies, and flood the Gulf with oil.

Speaking of, scientists have discovered through continued empirical research that the oil in the Gulf hasn't "dispersed" or been gobbled up by angelic microbes out of a Pixar film, but has sunk to the ocean's bottom. Reports show that as much as two inches of oil cover the bottom of the Gulf--and the dead plants and animals that once lived there (for free, which means it's good they're dead. The only good socialist is a dead one!)

Since there are more dead crustaceans, that means less of a burden on taxpayers, who have had to foot the bill for these freeloaders (hey, at least they didn't need swimming lessons). Fortunately, Mitch McConnell is doing everything he can to make sure there will be no compromise, a la Obama's closet conservatism, when it comes to ending Bush-era tax cuts for the rich. "Only in Washington could someone think it's a good idea to raise taxes during a recession." As always, Republican economics is perfect and unquestionable, the word of God. Now that I think about it, how can you argue with the party that started two decade-long wars that have cost billions of dollars, and supported financial and regulatory policies that led to the worst economic collapse in a century. But Americans love it: Republicans are rich, and in the land of freedom and equality, one does not dare to question big-money, make-money. That would be extreme!

Following Republican's sound and rational example, Steve May of Arizona decided to drop out of the race for State Senate after the criticism he received for recruiting several homeless drifters to run as Green party candidates. Truthfully, homeless dudes would probably have more guts and resourcefulness than today's Democrats.

Fortunately, the future looks bright, as today's college students will be tomorrow's leaders, that is, those who are not among the 238,000 students who defaulted on their student loans last year alone. This must be another sign of how corrupting liberal arts education into ideological conditioning for the business and finance world makes people savvier about money than whacked-out liberal academics who understand basic math.

But who cares? As long as the American university sports culture keeps roaring along, we can all bask in the glory of victory! And who would know better how to be a winner than the sports teams of American universities! Take the University of Kentucky, for example, who last week beat Western Kentucky 63-28, sending the Hilltopers to their 22nd consecutive loss since their "competitive" move to be a Division I football power! Beating up on scarecrow opponents like WKU has become part of the Big Blue winning tradition, whose non-conference opponents over the last decade have a blazing cumulative record of 78-124! How's that for being a winner! The unbridled triumph will continue this weekend when powerhouse Akron comes to Lexington, another winless UK opponent who last week lost to Gardner-Webb -- yes, the same school that beat UK basketball 84-68 in Rupp Arean in Billy Gillespie's first season, not to be confused with the Virginia Military Institute team that beat them 111-103 to kick off his second, and final, NIT year.

Of course, there is a new day in Big Blue world, thanks to Coach John Calipari and recruits like Eric Bledsoe, who, the NY Times reports, received an "A" in Algebra III despite never taking Algebra II. What's the big deal? I mean, in basketball you can hit a three-pointer without having to make a two-pointer first, right? The actual grade Bledsoe got in the course was a "C" which would have made him ineligible to play last year. Cheating, lying . . . all trademarks of being a winner.

But you can always find somewhere where it's worse: like up in Bloomington, IN, where IU inducted former coach Lee Corso into its Hall of Fame. Corso's career record: 41-68-2. Hey--if he weren't such a winner, he would have lost those two games he tied and wound up with 70 losses!

Winners have character too, like Saints Reggie Bush, who forfeited his 2005 Heisman over the scandals of improper payments and benefits to USC jocks (who, like all college jocks, don't default on their student loans, because they're winners! not losers!).

And just to show that the winning American spirit is catching on internationally, a couple of Ogre-oids from overseas: French president Nicolas Sarkozy is under investigation by the EU for targeting and discriminating against Roma during his summer campaign to purge them from France. Nothing says "liberté,

égalité, fraternité" like ethnic cleansing. Not to be outdone, the notorious hard-ass Swedes are mounting in support of right-wing anti-immigration parties, sick of coddling non-whites! 

Europeans are jumping on anti-immigrant right-wing parties like walruses are jumping on Alaskan islands' shores since the ice they used to live on has melted. But since there is no climate change, as the right-wingers tell us, there's nothing to worry about! 

Next thing you know, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio can jail these walruses for immigrating without proper documentation! In the plea bargain deal, the walruses can do jail time, or agree to run as candidates for the Green Party.

Ogre-oids, 3 September 2010

Denial about Iraq: Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote yesterday that "only one thing is clear about the outcome (from the Iraq war): we didn't win." Then he goes on to say, "We didn't lose either, in the sense of being defeated." This is classical Orwellian nonsense. If the objective of a war is to win and you don't win--you lost. Get over it. This chronic denial is exactly why nothing good is ever going to happen again. If you can't ever take an honest look at yourself, your country, and your culture and admit to abject failure when it occurs on a horrifyingly gruesome scale, you have no chance of improvement and will continue to fail and to lose.

This obsession with winning drives the relentless jock culture conquest of the American university, as today's NY Times reports that universities all over the country are tripling investments in all sports, even marginal ones that annually lose money, at a time when the crippled economy is forcing universities make severe budget cuts, which means letting go teachers, getting rid of tenure, rising the cost of tuition. In other words, education has become so obsolete to the American university the college professors aren't even as good as sports programs that lose money year after year. The rationale is that by making sports high profile, places like the University of Florida send a message that it is a place for winners and thus keep rich alumni connected to the university community. Listen: any university that puts sports ahead of education is a haven for losers. The goal of a university is to produce enlightened citizens, not "winners," and anyone grown up who goes through life thinking they are a "winner" in this day and age is more delusional than a Tea Party rally on the anniversary of MLK "I have a dream" speech.

It makes sense, then, that a society that pridefully sabotages its educational system into jock hubs will be a place that can't produce its most basic needs without chronic failure and destruction to both its own land and its people. Just this past week reports surfaced that Hillandale Farms and Wright Co. Egg cut so many corners in its industrial egg operations that there were piles of manure four to eight feet high. Gee, if only the eight foot manure piles could master the "Dribble Drive" offense, UK coach John Calipari would have another number one class locked up. The result of this maggot factory was countless salmonella-tainted eggs being transported to 17 states. Omelettes anyone?

Worry not, though, for the youth of tomorrow have the benefit of being on anti-psychotic medication by the time they are six months old! Yes, another breakthrough. Yesterday's NY Times reports that pharmaceuticals have been pumping toddlers with combinations of psychotropic drugs resulting in major weight gain and zombie three year olds more brain dead than today's college students, who, according to a piece from today's NY Times are leaning Republican for November elections! This shift occurs less than two years after the same demographic flocked to Obama like young British females did The Beatles. Where do I begin to explain how absurd and depressing this is? Obama's determination to alienate every demographic that supported him in 2008 by reaching out to right-wing zealots who would still hate his guts if he personally resurrected the Christ-child? Or could it be the miserable digital-age, where the complete obliteration of focus and sustained thought means wild ideological swings among today's young adults who, because they are so well "informed" in this "information age" equate the current economic malaise with Obama and not the traitors who ran the country into the ground the previous decade? How's this for inspiration: Philip Stricker, a biology major at Colorado State University who voted for Obama reportedly explained to the Times, "There's a vibe," he said while lifting weights in the gym, "the Republicans just seem to care a lot more than the Democrats." This take is doubly sad: He's right, and he's stating his political perceptions from the most important facility on today's college campuses: the gym. The Democrats persistently come across like they just don't care once they get elected, no matter how much momentum they seem to have going for them. What's idiotic is that these college students are leaning to the right because they concerned about the lack of career opportunities ahead of them. Yet another vicious spiral at work: the university turns into a jock complex where jock culture overtakes education as the university's primary purpose, thus the only reason for attending class and getting a degree is get a job, but because the country is run by hot-head psychopaths obsessed with "winning" rather than learning, there aren't any fucking jobs out there, so the credentialed college graduate of tomorrow, in between another set of reps, thinks the wise thing to do is either not vote--not live as a citizen--or vote Republican--and either way perpetuate the vicious spiral by reinforcing the power of the very uneducated, anti-intellectual relevant social groups that have brought about the decline of the university and collapse of the economy since the turn of the century. Oh well. I guess it will get worse before it gets worse.

One last thing: since my blogpost from two weeks ago in which I said "Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa is a fucking idiot" St. Louis has fallen eight games behind the Cincinnati Reds in the NL Central, turning a neck-and-neck division race into a runaway. The Cardinals' main problem? They can't hit or score runs. Guess that affirms LaRussa's decision to bring close buddy Mark McGwire of steroid 70 home run fame out of the shameful shadows by hiring him as the team's hitting coach. Just a guess here, but if the team can't hit, the hitting coach sucks. Maybe you should hire the best person for the job instead of your best buddy for personal reasons. Then again I'm working with a set of principles whereby performance corresponds to investment, and as today's university jock culture shows, the more a sports program loses money, the more money it gets. I guess nothing makes you a winner like being a complete fucking loser.

Ogre-oids, 20 Aug 2010

Maastricht coffeeshops: In its latest obsession with cultural amnesia and xenophobic fundamentalism, the Dutch are taking legal steps to deny access to the 13 coffeeshops (which sell marijuana products) in the border town to any non-Dutch citizen. Since European borders are porous, and Maastricht sits at the boundary of Germany, France, and Belgium, local government frowns on the heavy traffic and loud music of young foreigners who come into town to smoke weed. I've been to Maastricht and have gone out of my way to find the traffic jams and trouble makers ruining life for the locals. There are no problems in Maastricht that don't exist in any other city in the world. How stupid is all of this going to get? You can't de facto legalize weed and then suddenly say, "That's it, no more."  If the people of Maastricht think they have problems now, wait until they start telling everyone who is not Dutch that they can't go into a shop that is still open for locals to blaze up. Like that will work. "Hey man, here's 50 euro if you'll go into that shop over there and score me some hash." Locals will simply stock up and find bars, clubs, or other outlets to sell to tourists.

Stopping people from smoking weed will not stop Islamic fundamentalists from trying to wreck Western culture and it will not bring Theo van Gogh back to life. The next time some xenophobic Dutch jackass scapegoats the coffeeshops, someone should remind them of Ciudad Juarez, Exhibit A for the dystopia that the forlorn and miserable war on drugs creates:  Car bombings. Random murders and kidnappings. Sounds like a fun place to visit, doesn't it? Drug use is not out of control; it's the war on drugs that's out of control. In the name of order and public safety, the war on drugs turns places like Ciudad Juarez into a cauldron of bloodshed and anarchy. Yet we live in such hopeless and visionless times that no one ever gets tired of the violence and chaos that somehow are equated with morality and order. Mayors of Mexican cities get kidnapped by their own police force. Cartels set up roadblocks by car-jacking people in broad daylight and paralysing the traffic. Everyone is killing everyone else, the flow of drugs does not stop, the money and the weapons remain there for the taking.

Meanwhile, rather than indict the CEO of BP and the other psychopaths who blew up an oil rig and killed eleven people last April, a federal grand jury has indicted former pitching great Roger Clemens on charges of perjury for allegedly lying to Congress about steroid use. As usual, the mentality that justifies the indictment is fundamentalist: he lied to Congress, he must be indicted. If I lie to congress about eating donuts at Sunday school when I was eight years old, I guess I get indicted too, right? Clemens, like many pro athletes, probably used some performing-enhancing drugs, but maybe not. My question is: who gives a shit? If you think American society will fall apart because a jock lied about taking steroids then you probably also think pubic hair will soak up all the oil still in the Gulf. Speaking of, predictably mainstream media are now telling us that the Gulf is safe, the oil is all gone, it's OK to eat the shrimp, and that the environmental nightmare forecast by wacko-paranoid America-hating scientists has not happened. As always, the qualifier is we still don't know what the "long term effect" of the so-called "spill" will be. That's just it: scientists understand the importance of a forensic grasp of the long-term consequences of human interaction with the planet.

The same thing goes for climate change. Russia has record heat and burning wheat fields, an ice island four times the size of Manhatten (yet only a tenth of the size of Michael Bloomberg's ego) has broken off from Greenland (that happened because Greenland is melting, e.g. global warming, climate change, get it?), Iowa and Pakistan are underwater, and many parts of the U.S. have experienced record-breaking heat waves. The typical American response: "well, it's summer, it's supposed to get hot! When summer's over, it'll cool down! These academics don't know anything about the real world! What do they think happens in the summer? Is it supposed to snow? They say all that conspiracy stuff so they can get grant money from tax payers so that they don't have to get a real job and do real work in the real world!" Climate change is real. That giant chunk of ice on a collision course with the eastern coast of Canada is real. It's not an ice cube in a cocktail and it's not a videogame.

But I'm sure as long as we keep paying sports coaches 50 million times what we pay college professors, there's nothing to worry about. Why? Because we have people like Nick Saban and John Calipari who can remind us of how important a player's "basketball IQ" is or how critical it is for a player "to read" the defense. Calipari just got done guiding his latest collection of one-and-dones through a three-game exhibition against Canadian teams. The games were a joke, a bore, and a waste of time. If I want to take my students to Prague so they can learn more about Czech literature and culture, what will the taxpayers say to that? Yet a three-day jock tour of Canada to play against teams that couldn't beat a parapalegic wellchair team if they were playing five against three is apparently a great investment of time and money. These coaches are ego-manical con artists who have less integrity than pimps and the whole enterprise of "university" sports is a complete fraud.

UK football coach Joker Phillips dressed up in an Army uniform to look tough and remind us that playing football is a lot like war. It isn't. Children don't get blown up when the running back fumbles. People don't get their arms and legs blown off because the quarterback throws an interception. Yet the brilliant minds of the coaches keep making the parallels, as Saban did three years ago when he equated losing a home game to some nobody team to the attacks on the World Trade Center. Yes, he apologized for his "inappopriate remarks" but that's not the point. For a country that has zero respect for college professors to worship sports coaches who make such blatantly vapid comments illustrates how determined we are as a nation to sabatoge anything of virtue or vital importance to keeping our culture and our minds alive.

Finally, America's obsession with the mutilated body continues, as the Aug. 9 cover of Time features a picture of an Afghan woman who had her nose cut off by the Taliban, with the question, "What happens if we leave Afghanistan?" as though if we stay and continue the war no one will get mutilated or killed. Please help me out here: who wants to look at a picture of someone with their nose cut off? who wants to look at Iraq vets who have no arms or legs? It's some kind of sick obsession that reinforces and normalizes a world where humanity is so alienated from itself that it takes pride in circulating the image of its own bodily mutilation.

Hey, at least it's not as bad as LeBron James ruining the lives of everyone in NE Ohio by signing with the Miami Heat, or the prospect that one day Brett Favre actually will retire from football. In the meantime, Joker Phillips can hunt down Osama bin Ladin. Should be an easy job for the coach of a football program so pathetic it hasn't beaten Tennessee in a quarter-century. Here's a wacked-out abstract theory from a dreaded liberal geek: football coaches are supposed to win football games (which UK coaches chronically cannot do), not pose as military heros. I'm against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but I do respect the people in the military. People who put their lives on the line even if it's for a cause I don't agree with have a better chance of beating Tennessee in football than any sports coach has of contributing anything of any worth to society.

Oh yeah, one last thing: Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa is a fucking idiot.

Ogre-oid: The rapid decline of American sports culture (and sports in general)

When UK coach John Calipari announced that all five UK players in the draft going in the first round was the greatest moment in the history of UK basketball, he formalized what any remotely realistic and honest person already knew: UK basketball is a professional organization, and the university itself is a sports complex, not an academic institution. Details, details: once any player, from UK or elsewhere, declares for the draft, they are no longer part of the university team! Those players taken in the draft are pro players, not UK players. They stopped being UK players when the disgraceful regional final against West Virginia mercifully ended. Worse still, his comment betrays that in basketball and all American sports, the games themselves are now secondary! Not a final four or national championship, but a complete non-athletic moment--a draft for God's sake--is the greatest moment in the program's history. Yeah, sure, whatever. The promotional sideshow, Twitter gossip, and endless blather from so-called analysts like Jay Bilas--who is a compete fraud, an ex-jock from Duke who tries to pull off the ethos of an intellectual when all he does is speculate about meaningless sports issues, like which player will get drafted by which team and when--have overtaken the fun and excitement of watching a game. There is only one good thing about sports--if there is anything good about them--and that is enjoying the games. Shut the fuck up and put a fucking game on!

America's pseudo-love of soccer, which the rest of the world calls football, because that is what it is. Shots of Americans as people who actually enjoy life and community, getting together at the pub during the workday to celebrate the World Cup and cheer on the team are as fradulent as John Calipari or Jay Bilas. Americans don't care about soccer, and as soon as the U.S. lost to Ghana--a country that doesn't quite have the standard of living America does--appreciation for a truly great game vanished quicker than unemployment benefits. Now, predictably, the image of Landon Donvon's goal against Algeria will be played over and over and over to sell worthless crap that has nothing to do with the game itself.

Game 7 of the 2010 NBA Finals was the worst game of basketball I've ever seen in my life. Neither team scored in the hundreds--unlike the final scores of the previous four Game 7 finals meeting between the league's most storied franchises. While I appreciate a hard-nosed defensive effort, if you can't score the ball, you can't play. The only thing more pathetic than the performance of the two teams was the referrees' taking control of the game in the fourth quarter by calling a foul on the Celtics every time Kobe Bryant crashed into the lane or flailed his arms in Ray Allen's face. Kobe got his hardware but at the expense of any plausible comparison to the game's greats. Great players don't have off-nights in Game 7 of the finals, and watching Kobe--and the game itself--was painful. There simply should have been no champion this year. Hey, I've got an idea: let's start drafting eighth graders, expand the league to 67 teams, let each player have ten fouls per game, and put more money into marketing. Just let me and my dead grandmother know when tryouts are. Only 21st century America could turn baseball into a high scoring game and basketball into a low scoring one.

Uruguay's deliberate handball at the goal line in the final moments of their match with Ghana exposed a major flaw in the game. If a player uses his hand to bat down what obviously will be a goal--and in this case would have been the winning one--it should be goaltending, just like in basketball, and the goal should count, no free kick necessary. Granted, Ghana missed a free kick to win the game they should have made, but Uruguay's victory is cheap because they shouldn't be rewarded for a skill-less move in the game's most pivotal moment.