A despicable article on Salon, along with its asinine and credulous responses, reminds me again that ‘well’ is quite possibly the most dangerous word in the English language. Medicine belongs to a special category of human sciences in that it is an area of extreme complexity requiring an enormous amount of intellectual investment to understand which everyone nonetheless presumes to hold an opinion on; thankfully, if you observe long enough you learn how to weed out the two more malicious categories of fakers from people who actually know what they’re talking about.

In general, one can divide promoters of pseudomedical woo into two categories - hucksters and dupes. The dupes are, like all dupes, the right mixture of ignorant and arrogant to buy into whatever stupid idea the closest guy with a loud voice is pitching; the hucksters, on the other hand, are experienced frauds whose MO involves obfuscatory language tailored to pitch a useless product. Some hucksters might actually fall into the category of dupes themselves, but - as the Rotten Library observed of Pat Robertson - in general, when they or their loved ones come down with dangerous afflictions, they usually seek out aggressive medical treatment rather than trusting in God, nature, or inscrutable Oriental secrets.

My purpose today is not to take on the hucksters in general; it is to specifically shine a destroying light on the idea of wellness - for in addition to being a stupid replacement for ‘good’ with which you can respond to ‘how are you?’ to indicate you have been to college, ‘well’ is an often-abused power word in pop medicine. In fact, it might just be the most dangerous scientific delusion of our times - there are more audacious ones, after all, but creationism hasn’t exactly killed anyone. Read more »

This one actually isn’t too big, but it is something I’d like to comment on.

Going after McCain on Czechoslovakia is kind of uncharitable, considering that as the would-be oldest President in American history he imprinted pretty heavily on a world that no longer exists.

Things have changed a great deal since he was a young man; for instance, not only does Czechoslovakia no longer exist, but if it did it would not be ruled indirectly by Adolf Hitler.
Also newly defunct: the Comintern, the Anti-Comintern, the Anti-Anti Comintern (we call those last two the Axis and Allies nowadays, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves), the Grange Party, the Cominform, the League of Nations, Tannu Tuva, most notable Kennedies, the Empire of India, political machines, Upper Volta, the Japanese Imperial Navy, effective laws against or controversy over sodomy and interracial marriage, Step’n'Fetchit, the Gold Standard, the Portuguese Empire, dogsledding, mercantilism, caesaropapism, an innumerable number of living species, nuclear recoilless rifles, any reasonable use for a battleship, the political respectability of the Ku Klux Klan, pneumatic post, the nuclear stockpile of South Africa, German invasion thrillers, Amos ‘n’ Andy, the smoldering ruins of Hiroshima, prop fighters, Latin mass, the Irish Free State, the Philippines’ legal and later semilegal colonial subordination to the United States, chicken-heated nuclear landmines, powder toothpaste, widespread use of either kind of LSD, homeownership, the territories of Hawaii and Alaska and the very Canal Zone on which he was born, the innocence of mankind, Orson Welles, radioactive patent medicine and for the most part patent medicine in general, New Criticism, torpedo bombers, the Big Bopper, Josef Stalin, Flash Gordon serials, rent control, South Yemen, musical cinema, the Transcontinental Railroad, Levittowns, Herbert Hoover, East Germany, the lethality of syphillis, an alarmingly large number of black men wantlessly left infected by a government body with the same, the Communist Party USA, Jim Crow, widespread belief in intelligent extraterrestrial life within the Solar System, Eurocommunism, the Marshall Plan, mainstream anti-Semitism, belief in the healthfulness of tobacco, French Indochina, the Empire of Vietnam, South Vietnam, light and heavy tanks, military ballooning, most of Europe’s Jews, soda jerks, blackface, the Comecon, racial quotas, automobile starter cranks, hundreds and hundreds of fashions, Social Credit, the Hughes fortune, potable groundwater in southern Nevada and Utah, vaudeville, Manchukuo, Elvis, HUAC, American industry, habeas corpus, ODESSA holdouts, the Russo-BerwickuponTweedian war, the USSR, Leon Trotsky, nuclear non-proliferation, apartheid, Church Slavonic, Noel Coward, the German aristocracy, the State of France, doggerel verse, widespread legal and social acceptability of almost every hard drug, Red spies, the Chongyalate of Sikkim, the American left, pan-Arabism, Charles Lindbergh, fidelity-exclusive divorce, most buildings in Dresden and Tokyo older than himself, the independence of the judicary, sock hops, hippies, smallpox, penny seignorage, anti-Hibernism, Cuba’s political dependence on the US, the American frontier, Ian Fleming, the widespread use of breadbaskets, flooding on the Colorado and Columbia river systems, marital spanking, bootblacks, Francoism, Burma, Burma Shave, the Sino-Soviet split, old money, the sound barrier, efforts at English spelling reform, the Cold War, the Shahanshah, the Australian pound, the eight-hour workday, most racist dog-whistles aimed at the hard left, rabbit and organ meat in the First World diet, several hundred languages, shotgun marriage, Yugoslavia (monarchist, fascist, and communist), newsreels, Charles Atlas, Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, plausible deniability for J. Edgar Hoover, and spats.

On the plus side, at least Zsa Zsa Gabor is still around.

The phrase ‘axis of evil’ is stupid for so many reasons it’s difficult to get into all of them, but this one is my favorite:

It directly invites a comparison between three tinpot dictatorships and two of the most vicious regimes ever spawned by man - and, by seeing it fit to append ‘of evil’, adds just a little bit extra.

Long story short: Saddam Hussein’s aluminum tube purchase was a second Holocaust - but this time, it’s personal.

h/t some guy on Sadly: Numbers racket: Why the economy is worse than we know—By Kevin P. Phillips (Harper’s Magazine)

The interesting thing is that, when you look at the Bush years in the aggregate, for most people the sense that the economy was bullish never came into play. What we had was a deep, painful recession followed by a paper recovery - with new jobs worth half of the ones gone forever, booming numbers principally attributable to tiny economic outliers, and increasing general misery in spite of outward prosperity.

The current numbers are difficult to come to terms with at first - if one accepts the U5/6 figures, for instance, our unemployment rates look typical of West Africa - but we’ve been hit with a number of nagging, terrifying reminders that the worst is yet to come.

The Invisible Famine

It is popular among wingnuts to harp on the one statistic they have to back up their irrational belief in a universally rosy economy - that is, the major obesity problem currently stalking the American underclass. The thing is, they’re wrong by way of being right: the increasing obesity of the poor is an alarming sign, and as everyday goods surge uncontrollably in price it may well grow worse. This is because America is suffering from an invisible famine.

The invisible famine is, like any other famine, purely distributional - while it has been (and will be even further) aggravated by increasing demand for staples and increasing expense for food and freight trucking, the basic issues are economic and social. When one hears that a majority of Americans are overweight - and the number is growing by staggering amounts - it is worth remembering the importance of the binging cycle in weight gain.

The fastest way to gain weight is by a binge cycle; in a binge cycle, a person will go long amounts of time without eating sufficiently and, when food becomes available, will gorge themselves with what presents itself. The reason that we are seeing it become important now is simple - the American wage-earner has seen her or his income rise at a rate beggared by inflation, especially of everyday goods. We work longer hours for less pay than our parents. Alone, this would not by itself produce a binge cycle; but along with losing decent, regular pay, we find ourselves shopping at large, hostile stores in fortified compounds dozens of miles from home. Where food purchases were once a semi-regular event, the act of buying food is now a behavior limited to one or two times a month - if that. Buying food more regularly has, especially with the rise of gas prices and the enormous social and economic push out to the exurbs, become a luxury most Americans cannot afford.

The kicker? This is a national version of a previously local phenomenon. In the Deep South and rural West especially, the supermarket was a much earlier and more tenacious development; communities latched to the poison teat of Safeway and Piggly Wiggly enjoyed the horrible dietary and bodily health the entire country does now, and their local governments - often dominated by Pollyannaish neolibs - openly encouraged the slump in labor standards, employment regularity, and pay that would turn the weekly shop into the half-monthly, the monthly, and bi-monthly. America is under the same masters that lashed the backs of rural California and Georgia now, and suffers from the same disease.

In short, the anatomy of the invisible famine is this: due to increasing homogeneity, poor service, and rising cost from local restaurants - and the increasing reluctance by employers to offer regular breaks or reliable catering - most calories are consumed in a single set of meals late in the day, and there is only a decent amount of wet, fibrous, and ash-rich food in the first week of the month. The fruit rot, and we start eating principally protein, simple sugars, and fat; then the meat goes hard and we’re subsiding on old bread and ice cream for half a month - until the next paycheck comes in, for credit is nowhere near as free as would allow us to actually live on siege shopping. When we are able to buy food again, we eat well and rich; and the bitter irony of the binge cycle is that we can consume enough calories to gain several pounds in a week mostly spent starving. And there, as well, is the horrible irony of the invisible famine: we are growing fat - obese, even - while our lives grow worse than ever before, and the demons who inflict it all on us are praised for it by their hand-fed running-dogs.

We have all of the misery of the rich life, all of the aches and pains of fatness, without the joys of achieving it. We have grown morbidly obese on gruel. Never say that the Man never learns - in this famine, at least, there are no poking ribs to draw the moralist’s camera as the masses starve all the same.

Bears on Fremont Street

The phrase ‘recession-proof’ is a little silly, but it does have a logic all its own. There are in fact several places that can draw business reliably no matter how bad the economy gets - that is, if there’s any hope of it recovering. Las Vegas is supposed to be one of them - after all, we receive tourism from all over the world, and the rich account for a disproportionate amount of our tourist traffic. So no short-term downturn in the US should affect us, right?

Wrong: to the bitter delight of those of us who chose to seek a degree, the local Craigslist is flooded with complaints and terrified mendicants cast out of the casinos’ trough. A truism in Vegas or anywhere else that profits from addiction is this: if you let your kids take a job out of school, they’ll make $70,000 starting out - and they’ll never go back - and they’ll make that for the rest of their life. It’s at least some consolation to the people who are low enough on the ladder that $70,000 is a decent aspiration - while Las Vegas might be all ‘burb, at least we don’t have an inner city. (Well, we do, but it’s well hidden.) The casino jobs are vanishing - under an increasing suspicion that the money isn’t there to offer $60,000 salaries to starting-level valets, that the economy has been too bad for too long to justify taking more people on at more than minimum wage.

I don’t know how well it works as an economic indicator, but I’m inclined to say that nothing good can come from the bear economy stalking even Fremont Street - and nothing good can come of unemployment in the Disneyland of the world.

The main problem I can see with ‘hard’ as a political descriptor is that it conflates two seriously different phenomena. Especially when paired with ‘left’ or ‘right’, there’s a subtle tendency to confuse people with hardline political beliefs from people with a firm commitment to one party or cause or the other.

As a solution, I propose that we use ‘hard’ only to describe the politics, and as for the partisanship we use ‘firm’. It’s a distinction whose time has come, especially with the Republicans dissolving into firm holdouts, with both the hard and soft Right seeming to lose faith in the party organization after Bush and McCain.

Similarly, when the Obama knuckle-under on FISA happened, we saw an interesting divide along the same lines play itself out: firm Democrats generally accepted it, and even rationalized the idea. This includes commentators to the left of Obama himself - Olbermann, say - and excludes even commentators roughly in the political center.

Our tendency to mistake hardline politics for ideological fervor is one of many unfortunate products of domination by one party whose candidates can’t be hard-right enough and one party whose leadership treats hard politics as a sort of demonic possession. The American electoral system accepts the firm right and left, but only the hard right - the hard left shuffles from third party to third party, and it takes us threatening to riot to get the DNC to actually pay attention to us like they do the right-wing Southron idiots voting Democratic out of tribal allegiance.

Incidentally, and speaking only for myself, I endorse what Jeff Rowland said on the subject - that is, Obama pissed me off pretty bad, but he’s still a damned sight better than anyone else currently running. Here’s hoping it’s just an electoral gimmick.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you’re like me - and face it, you probably will be some day - you came from the 90s, but still have no idea exactly what the fuck it was on about. And for good reason: every time you encounter the decade, it’s through a weird haze of triumphalism, a story in which Zizek and Fukuyama (deservingly, but unrealistically) are reversed in relative respect and influence - and, importantly, the left conducted itself with a sort of flagging dignity, the bearers of a failing torch at last cruelly snuffed out in Seattle; the right chafed at the bit after the oppressive sleaziness of that terrible white Negro Slick Willy and his dancing Jewess Reno - and were time and time again let down by his refusal to carry the Big Stick they so dream of today - his neglect of our national drive to build great nations in the Middle East that would maintain our proud military presence in the world for years to come.

We forget that in those days we - not just the West generally but the left specifically - still indulged people like Stoppard when they put on big, lavish productions in which they pretended that the horrific rapine of Eastern Europe by a mixture of mob bosses and capitalist factota was somehow related to rock-and-roll and youth rebellion; we forget that the bug-fuck idiots who joyfully accept the dominion of Terra-Fightin’ Daddy in exchange for the odd glorious codpiece shots on carrier decks once honestly thought of themselves as some kind of revolutionaries. We remember Nirvana, not the utterly impenetrable and horribly related Rat Pack revival. And with the eXile evidently gone, we need more than ever a clear reminder of what the 90s were - before, like every decade before the development of a continuous news cycle to stamp down any deviations from the treacly Narrative, history itself is fully hijacked by nostalgia-peddlers and cod-Münchhausens.

In service to that high goal, when I have the time and the inclination I am going to share a few gems of the 1990s with you; the venal creatures that put our current regime in office strut about, gleefully exchanging favorite Heinlein quotes and meditating thoughtfully on whether the right side really won at Stalingrad. I will be fully honest with you: piercing the lefty idolatry of the day isn’t really my bailiwick - I’ll leave it to Djur, who has always been dissatisfied with their inexplicable hostility against triangulating a vital center between small-business, large-business, and shell-business interests.

The two particular gems I’ve collected in advance are representative of the whole. One is a trio of pulp book ads - two books with equal titles and evidently similar content about divorce, written from that horrible masculist perspective that we continue to hear paraded through high political and social circles as radical, politically-incorrect acts, set in an exciting alternative world where telling lies to the meek is a bold enterprise - and the weaker of the lot, one packed with idiot name-checking and evidently a bog-standard 90s gun-wank.

The better of the two, and one that I’ve been parading around for my personal amusement for some time now, is a suite of mods for Civilization II (of all the games I play for admittedly sentimental value, hands-down the best (that is Civ II itself, not the mod, which can’t be described unless there is in fact a set of words actual shit uses to refer to itself, in which case it’s whatever word refers to the kind of shit most other shit hates, a kind of intra-fecal ethnic slur, and in skywriting)) designed to portray the wild, hi-tech world of the distant future, 2010. No doubt used principally for this by most people who used it, it ever-so-subtly betrayed a certain Weltanschuung, if I may use the original National Socialist, with a clever system in which Monarchy became Klintonism (or, in one interesting case, KKKlintonism) and various no-doubt vital sound files were used in which some idiot used a horribly fake Southern accent to sound, I don’t know, gallant.

I generally hold kitsch in contempt - it’s usually a classic study in reactionary fuckwads with expensive and deeply ridiculous educations tittering at the common mistakes of the hilariously low-born, and has all the humor value of Nietzsche screaming at the no-good priest-crafting Jews for having a slave mentality spurned by the noble Apollonians. But these are a couple of instructive examples, which is the best kitsch-mongering can aspire to. I present to you the world that actually existed in the 1990s: one dominated by the shrill, second-hand sloganry of America’s simultaneously pitiful and contemptible white underclass - and the smug, wealthy pricks who fed them their preposterous jargon and stage-managed their canned Bunker rage for political and economic gain.

We live in a world where Larry the Cable Guy is supposed to be the contemptibly crass one. I’m simply trying to remind you that there was a time in some distant Camelot where you were allowed to think this of Jeff Foxworthy. Join me later this week as I continue the ambitious project I call I Love The [. . .] The 90s, and we’ll look over the book reviews - and, sooner or later, over that fucking majestic mod-pack. And we’ll win this time, John Rambo, or my name isn’t Bo Gritz.

Either of us can pretty much blanket vouch anything Sadly, No! does (in my case, the only exceptions have mostly to do with China), but this is a particularly magnificent study in presidential shitheadedry and worth reading and savoring, like a fine wine - woody, with a faint savor of maize.

(An addendum to Der Ewige Türke.) Read more »

The following, to believe Wikipedia, is an ‘oft-quoted excerpt’ illustrating the ‘rhetorical strength’ of its source: Read more »

When the sun rises again today, it’s certain to shine a little bit less brightly - for we have lost not just its worthiest follower but a man who pierced the darkness of vanity and self-righteousness like no other. A world without him to balance out the evil, self-important assholes - the ones who took ‘politically incorrect’ from him, back when it meant something noble, and twisted it into a badge to crown their shameful, petty tribal hate - is going to be just a little bit darker for it.

Parker and Stone and every other dour fascist who TV execs who still don’t get you signed to ride on your coattails are still around, metastasizing, bound for the Medal of Freedom and old-age home that eluded you, punishing us all for our horrible taste while you rot. I like to think you’d find it funny. You always were a motherfucker.

Rest in peace - and here’s to hoping if there’s anything after this life you’ll figure out how to freak ‘em out there, too.