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.

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.

You just had to go and die on the Fourth of July.

After all that time you spent making America a shittier place, it’s only fitting you’d go and ruin its founding holiday; to clog our papers with obituaries - like the arteries the tobacco lobby (which, hand firmly in ass, darkened North Carolina with your rotting frame for generations) helps to clog all over this green Earth; that you would find some way to make your death as disgusting as your life. That anyone ever mistook you for a human being is a damning indictment on our species; that you were white makes me wish the Irish weren’t these days, or at least that black-face were socially acceptable. I would that Hell existed if only to place you in it, and would more strongly than I do now that Heaven did not just to keep you out of it.

You shat up my country for just shy of eighty-seven years, and if there is any justice in this universe your corpse will just keep on expanding until it bursts, and no coffin ever made will keep the smell of rancid shit from the human waste who come to mourn you.

I’d call you a son of a bitch, Jesse Helms, but Josef Mengele wouldn’t have deserved to give birth to you and Pol Pot wouldn’t deserve to have called you a son. If your mother had the dignity evolution bequeathed to the scarab, she’d have spent every year from 1921 to her all-too-late death suppressing the urge to tear out her own ovaries. God willing, some day we’ll figure out what we can excise to atone ourselves of you.

Via Sadly, No - and, inexplicably, the fucking White House.

Recently Hitchens, who I generally consider a mercantile cretin, wrote a credible enough article on the water torture*, and specified at one point that he was not asthmatic.

As a severe asthmatic with various severe allergies causing anaphylaxis, I’ve got one major thing to add to the discussion - something that has yet to come from anyone who has undergone simulated water torture, and rightly so, because the simulation leaves the boundaries of safety if lung conditions are involved. It is the experience of air hunger.

Just like most allergies take a second encounter to fully kick in - and just like most moral depravities (whether universal (e.g. murder) or cultural (e.g. porcophagy) seem only to produce memorable sensation the second time around, it takes us a few goes with air hunger to understand it well. The set of sensations surrounding air hunger are difficult to describe regardless - because they operate at a level well beneath human consciousness. Air hunger produces a sensation of morbidity, the feeling from something beneath your brain, your nerves, and even your organs that you are going to die.

The basic problem behind air hunger precedes sapience, precedes sentience, precedes sex, precedes organs and tissues and even eukaryota. It is the closest anything about the human experience ever gets to primal - and, I can say from experience, rages on all the worse after fine motor control, touch, hearing, taste, and the sensation of temperature - even consciousness - have evaporated.

The reason water torture is so uniquely terrifying is that it involves showing the very cells of the body their own mortality, and responding to it takes such a high priority that the conscious mind labors against its aftershocks in futility. This is something that someone who has been through a single water torture, or a fairly brief series of them, does not have necessarily to deal with.

In psychological and psychiatric terms, the water torture is a barbaric, violent, and permanent abuse - worse than beatings, dismemberment, or rape. Even watching - to say nothing of making - a man drown is grotesque enough; that people anywhere close to power would bless in clean conscience the repeated infliction of air hunger for some horrific parody of interrogation is one of the more demoralizing revelations of my lifetime.

-

*While ‘waterboarding’ is now well-understood enough that its euphemistic power is fleeing, and ‘the water cure’ has been used in a purely pejorative sense for the last half century, it seems glib to the point of blasphemy to use either.

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.

A monograph on the exciting new directions to be taken by prodding boners in the new American century.
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Dear whatever the fuck you Clinton holdouts call yourselves now:

What the fuck are you thinking?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that we agree on a number of crucial points - which might well not be true at all, but I feel like being charitable. You agree that the craven effort to slash public services and progressive taxation to the bone are horrific and irresponsible; you agree that the mainstream policy establishment within both parties are essentially an interchangeable set of imperial apologists, and you agree that both the ‘culture war’ and for the most part the war on terror has been a protracted excuse for rolling back the 20th century. (To say nothing of, say, the war on drugs - which seems to be aiming for the 17th.)

Why in the fuck are you expecting this out of Hillary Clinton? Clinton was a life-long conservative until she got into the Oval Office and, as part of the notional role of the First Lady, became a political cipher. The one assignment she was given to fulfill the least ambitious of the fairly few progressive promises her husband made was a miserable failure. (And, for the record, she left the race with a more insurance-oriented healthcare plan than Obama’s.) Her career can be summed up as ‘typical corporate lawyer’ until the point at which she became a Democratic politico out of tribal alignment.

If you’re new to Democratic electoral politics, this is kind of how it happens - unlike the Republicans, open pandering to the hard left is treated mercilessly by the national media and as a result Democrats are pretty reasonably expected to run to the right of how they govern. If you’re not, and you supported Clinton for the same reason I did Obama - that is, looking for a charismatic and effective President to repair the unprecedented damage done to the American government, reputation, and very national psyche by Bush (and avert the possibility of further such damage by McCain) - well, it’s exactly why most of us are voting for him, and I really can’t imagine you falling permanently away from the man over a simple electoral defeat.

And if you supported Clinton in spite of all of that, if you supported a woman whose campaign was run by reactionary FUD-mongers - the same horrible, race-baiting bunch who ran Clinton’s stable in ‘92 - and Mark fucking Penn, don’t lecture us about Zbignew Brzezinski. I’m not prepared to say that Obama accepting the man’s support makes me comfortable, but if you actually read Obama’s (admittedly slim, but fairly consistent) policy output, in focusing pretty heavily on promotion of the general welfare of man rather than the narrow interests of American capital, it alienates him completely from the people you’ve been insisting he’s gonna put in power.

Clinton was a mediocre candidate, she ran a horrible race (contrast Edwards, who was a generally middling candidate whose excellent race forced the campaign, however briefly, to focus on crucial issues rather than idiot scandals and probably saved the entire primary from complete political irrelevance), and now she’s finished. If you really wanted what you’re freaking out on Obama for lacking, you’d have backed Kucinich. The very fact that people out there have somehow decided that it’s useful to have opinions farther to the right during the primary than during the general election is fucking infuriating. If you ever believed in any of this, and I really doubt you do, you’d have done better to, you know, fucking put it out there while everyone else in your campaign was speculating on whether Obama was an inexperienced, unelectable secret Muslim.

Jesus Christ.

On the June 18 edition of Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, co-host of ABC’s The View, asserted of Sen. Barack Obama: “[I]t bothered me that he seemed for a while more willing to give the fist bump to [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad than our own General [David] Petraeus.” Hasselbeck continued: “It bothers me. It bothers me as a mom. It bothers me as a working woman. It bothers me as a citizen of this country.”

(Via MMFA.)

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