OK, it's Christmas, and although we are taught that at Christmas our thoughts should turn to peace, love and brotherhood among men (and presumably sisterhood among women, and siblinghood amongst those of differing genders), mine tend to turn pretty quickly from all that lovely and uplifting feel-good window-dressing to righteous anger, antagonism towards hypocrisy, and a big boat of greasy schadenfreude gravy.

Traditionally, it has always been America that has given me the greatest educational opportunities to compare and contrast, seasonal or otherwise. These days Korea can be nearly as amusing, but it's still the good ol' US of A that always comes through; it never disappoints in the mindboggling bullshit department.

So in that spirit of angry Xmas wonderchickens past, present and future, I offer you this uplifting publication (pdf, 4Mb) from The National Rifle Association, which I just found today courtesy of a Site That Cannot Be Named. Freedom, they say, is in Peril.

I agree, if not for the reasons these people suggest.

Peace, friends. Sleep well.

Update: This is all over the place today, which is yesterday my time, or something like that. That's what I get for trying to be timely. Also, one year ago on Metafilter.

7:49 PM | 1 Comment

I remember when the shit was clearly going to impact directly on the fan, at least to anyone with a couple of f--king braincells to rub together, as the last particles of dust from the World Trade Centre settled onto the homeless folks and the masters of the universe there in New York.

I remember that. And I remember how I thought 'Oh, that Billy Bragg, much as I've loved him and his ethical stances and musico-politicking all these years, he's gonna bounce off the marshmallow mindset with this' when he released his song "The Price of Oil".

It came up on my random-ass playlist tonight, and I misted up as I sang along. Remembering the fury I felt as the news outlets told us idiot fables about 'shock and awe', and realizing how I've tamped down my outrage into a little impotent packet of irony these days. I thought about the past couple of years, and all the people whose people died.

Here, you: download it. Or just listen right here.

Voices on the radio
tell us that we're going to war
those brave men and women in uniform
they want to know what they're fighting for.

The generals want to hear the end game
the allies won't approve the plan
but the oil men in the white house
they just don't give a damn.

'Cause it's all about the price of oil
it's all about the price of oil
don't give me no shit
about blood, sweat, tears and toil
it's all about the price of oil.

Now I ain't no fan of Saddam Hussein
oh, please don't get me wrong
if it's freeing the Iraqi people you're after
then why have we waited so long.

Why didn't we sort this out last time
was he less evil than he is now
the stock market holds the answer
to why him, why here, why now.

'Cause it's all about the price of oil
it's all about the price of oil
don't give me no shit
about blood, sweat, tears and toil
it's all about the price of oil.

Saddam killed his own people
just like general Pinochet
and once upon a time both these evil men
were supported by the U.S.A.
And whisper it, even Bin Laden
once drank from America's cup
just like that election down in Florida
this shit doesn't all add up.

'Cause it's all about the price of oil
it's all about the price of oil
don't give me no shit
about blood, sweat, tears and toil
it's all about the price of oil.

Download it, if you haven't before.

I am no better than them because there are people I would be happier to see dead. There is no honor in this.

11:04 PM

Nigeria: Christians massacre Muslims

Iraq: Muslims massacre Muslims

Online: Koreans massacre Chinese

So it goes.

9:13 AM

I said the other day that the daily news is my number one source of the Big Laughs. The Big Laughs are the therapeutic ones, the ones that blow out the cobwebs and release those endorphins, that make you fart uncontrollably, which in turn starts you (well, me) laughing even harder. For this reason alone, I enjoy watching and reading the news these days.

To expand my endorphin and flatulence release program, I have invented a new game. My wife believes me to be moderately deranged as a result, but that's not really anything new. You can play along at home, too, dear reader, and I guarantee it'll be even better for your mental health and general well-being than constricting your anus 100 times a day. Malarkey? Or effective way? You get to decide.

It's simple, really, and in its simplicity resides its demonic cleverness. Merely add the phrase '...which is, of course, completely idiotic' to all news items, preferably political, that hove into your view. Fun for the whole family!

Here are some examples that I've prepared earlier in the clean and well-lit kitchens of wonderchicken Industries™:

• Mr. Gonzales claimed that the warrantless surveillance program is consistent with protection of civil liberties, which is, of course, completely idiotic.
• Iran's best-selling newspaper has launched a competition to find the best cartoon about the Holocaust in retaliation for the publication in many European countries of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad, which is, of course, completely idiotic.
• President Bush explained that the new budget, which cuts funding to health care, environmental protection and education while increasing defense and homeland security spending, will help to protect the American people, which is, of course, completely idiotic.
• Telecom companies, "including AT&T, MCI and Sprint," are allowing the NSA to spy on calls, "on the basis of oral requests from senior government officials" which is, of course, completely idiotic.
• 'Merkel likens Iranian president to Hitler' and 'Chavez says Bush worse than Hitler,' after 'Rumsfeld compares Venezuela's Chavez to Hitler' and 'Likens bin Laden to Hitler' which is, of course, completely idiotic.
• Most state and local health departments reportedly "expect to be unprepared" for a bird flu epidemic "for at least a year," during which time, says one expert, social distancing "is likely to be all we're going to have as a strategy" which is, of course, completely idiotic.
• The president reportedly "didn't mean it literally," when he vowed to cut Middle East oil imports by 75 percent: "This was purely an example," explained Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, formerly known as 'One of Texas' Top Five Worst Polluters' which is, of course, completely idiotic.
• The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator" which is, of course, completely idiotic.

(some items lifted from Cursor.org, because I'm exhausted from all the farting)

Share and enjoy.

10:59 AM | 3 comments and 1 trackback

Weblog people love to jerk off into the Google Kleenex™ (still in beta), rub the resultant mess all over their faces, then post about it on their sites. They're putting the Goo into Google at thousands of litres per second. They'd pile on and collectively hump it into a smoking hole in the ground if they could find enough holes to plug with their techno-weiners (or grind its G-pelvis to dust, if they're she-geeks, I suppose).

Investors love the Goo as well. If they got in on the ground floor, they've made enough money that they just don't give a shit what's going on in the dungeons beneath the Googleplex. "Hell, the cafeteria lunches are legendary, and the corporate motto is "Don't be evil", right? Look at that stock price! We're too busy running around naked with bouquets of rolled-up dollar bills sticking out of our asses to worry about details!"

Advertisers, the whoring undead scum that take everything they touch and convert it to shit, they're nuts-deep in the Goo. After all, Google is an advertising company first and foremost, now. If it's not the world's biggest trader of weapons of shit conversion, it's certainly the most exciting. "The eyeballs! The delicious sweet tangy eyeballs, filled with goo! Let a thousand text-ads bloom!"

Hell, I use its services a hundred times a day, literally. There's wonderchicken goo in the bucket, too.

We live in a world where the country that calls itself the Champion of Freedom and Democracy tortures prisoners in an archipelago of secret prisons. Where the evil dimwit homunculus known inexplicably as the Leader of The Free World unapologetically claims the right to spy on the communications of his own citizens. A squinting faux-cowboy weasel who launches his hobbyhorse war in Iraq on lies, grudges, and incompetence one day, sells it as crusade for Freedom, then turns around, drops and mouths the potent rhinohorn-stiffened economic cock of the Chinese the next. Don't get the wrong idea, though. It's manly, Texas-style dong-wrangling. It's realpolitik.

And it's enough to make your head spin. Rather than green vomit, though, words fountain out, splash and drip down the walls.

But hang on: the plot -- convoluted and far-fetched as it already is -- thickens. The Freedom Through Torture (Liberty Through Surveillance Department) gang wants Google to disclose information about its users. Google says "No way, we're like totally not evil!" Almost the very next day, as they used to say in the fairy tales, Google then turns around and says "Hey, we're totally going to censor search results in China, though! It's not all that evil, right?" Are you seeing a pattern here, too?

Google is full of shit. The fact that they're not the only ones does not excuse them.

And though there are a few weblog people out there saying "My little revenue-goo stream is not worth throwing in with this kind of thing," the river of Goo shows little sign of drying up. Same thing goes for the investors, not surprisingly, and the marketing shit-alchemists know there's no such thing as bad publicity.

So Andrew McLaughlin, who is Google's Senior Policy Counsel, whatever that means, says:

Noted Large and Smart weblogger David Weinberger, who is indeed Smart, and Large in the sense that he is one of the brighter sources of light in our in our texty netherworld, and casts a long shadow in the cashosphere that has attached itself limpetlike to us over the past couple of years, well, he gives Google a bit of a pass, though he admits to 'being torn' in face of McLaughlin's justification. Well, OK. It's true that nothing is black and white. Grey is the new black.

In classic wonderchicken style, I'm entirely untorn, though.

Andrew McLaughlin is also full of shit. That's no surprise -- he's a lawyer, right? But his artless waffle tastes a lot like Bush's pet lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, helping to justify torture. But you know, only some torture. "Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, 'stress positions', psychological cruelty? Evil? Well, less evil than thumbscrews, castration, disemboweling, stuff like that, right? We're totally all about the freedom and the democracy!"

Again:

What's inconsistent with Google's corporate motto -- remember, it's "Don't be evil!" -- is being evil, you asshole. Remember #6, from the 'ten things': "You can make money without doing evil." This isn't rocket science, and David Weinberger notwithstanding, it's not complicated.

Google is a company, and more significantly an advertising company, and that means that the truth is that nothing can come in the way of whoring itself out for a sleazy but necessary buck or two. You have to keep your investors happy. It's evil to get down on your knees in the filth and suck that cock in the back alley, then stab the guy and steal his wallet. It's less evil to just drain the goo and let him stagger away. Yay! Everyone's a winner, and you can rest easy, at least after you've scored some smack to keep the demon at bay. You have to keep your dealer happy. Not to mention your pimp.

Google doesn't need to be in China. There are other search engines, domestic and international. The absence of Google is not going to suddenly deprive those poor Chinese citizens -- the ones looking over their shoulder to see if the government is watching -- of the ability to find information about washing machines and condoms. The only reason Google 'needs' to be there is the money. The sweet, filthy, repressive, execution-happy, police state money. Google wants growth, because that's what investors want. Growth. Not the metastatic cancer cauliflower kind of growth either -- they want those graphs pointing skyward, proud and erectile. They want to get in to China, build a foothold. And they'll do evil to get that market share.

But there's no actual need. No need to get down in the filthy alley in front of the Chinese government. Let Baidu have the money. Let someone else do it. You can make money without doing evil.

"Removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission."

Let there be no confusion. Google's mission is to make money. And holy crap, those Chinese have got some money these days.

Words have meanings. We've never been at war with Oceania. f--k you, Google.

[Update, long long after the fact (June 07 2006)] : 'We were evil, Google founder admits.' The 'it's only business' apologists can commence to sucking my balls..... now.

11:13 AM | 20 comments and 2 trackbacks.

I'll have more to say when I sober up, but for now, a blast from the past.

You f--kers.

7:08 PM | 2 comments and 1 trackback

I said this over there.

Hindsight will show how much this (and all the other American campaign related program activities on the internets) have made an impact on the vote for World Leader #1 this year, but I have no doubt that whatever happens next week (and probably in the weeks following, if it's anything like 2000), that if the elections aren't cancelled in 2008, the power of freed-up culture, rumours on the internets, the resurgence of an engaged wired citizenry and the decline of old media and yes, even the self-obsessed wankery of the blogotroposphere are going to kick some political ass.

Gives me hope.

For the moment, though, spread the word, link the link, and take those bastards in the White House down.

Update : When asked for his opinion about these rumours on the internets, Mr Bush had this response for the American people.

5:05 PM | 7 comments

A few times in my life, I've felt the Fear. When terror -- long drawn-out exhausting fear -- works itself to such a pitch inside you that you end up punching right through it, and a calm resignation takes over. You understand at a time like that that there's absolutely nothing you can think of doing that might change the flow, to alter events in any way, and you become an observer. Whether it's the cornered herbivore going limp as the predator's teeth close around its throat or a detached zen calm is a matter of debate. Either way, it's an instructive place to sit, in the eye of the storm, wrapped in a mental silence, utterly still.

I feel that way at the moment with regard to the American election. As anyone who's ever subjected themselves to the Comedy Ranting of the wonderchicken is amply aware, I've made clear my feelings about the criminal scum who've left their snail tracks of glistening goo all over the remnants of a once-great nation. Although I've been accused of trying to sway people with my screeds and polemics, that has never been the case, at least not consciously. I was just playing. Writing for me is a ludic thing. I don't want to change your mind, I just enjoy speaking mine, and playing with words while I do it. Maybe even having a conversation.

The rage, of course, was always genuine. It still is. But the fire's banked at the moment. Not a flame to be seen, even if the carbon-black belly of the stove is glowing fiercely. It's not about me, though.

It's about you, my American friends. Much as I've castigated you as collectively stupid, hopelessly parochial, misguided and misled, lazy, fat and terrifyingly unaware of the great evils wrought in your name all around the world, well, I still love you. In the particular, if not the abstract. I was just poking fun. Serious jokes. You always hurt the ones you love, right?

Just like Jon Stewart, I want it both ways, you see. I want to be the funny monkey, and I want to tell hard truths. Serious jokes. I do believe it's possible to have it both ways, and dangerously simpleminded to expect otherwise.

But this time, I'm going to speak plainly, from this terrified pocket of calm, not because it will make a difference to what's going to happen, but because I would be betraying myself if I remained silent. We're begging you, our American friends, our American enemies, our American taskmasters and landlords, our American occupiers and our American pimps, our American sisters and brothers, to do the right thing next week. We're depending on you, all of us out here in the Outlands. We know you don't give a flying f--k about us, really, all us furriners. We know you want what's best for your country, your people, your families. You don't want to hear our opinions about your politics. We understand that.

But do you remember when the whole world wept along with you and averred 'We are all Americans' after that terrible day 3 years ago? It was true, then. It is hard, my friends, to find many who feel that way today.

Many of us believe that what's best for America need not also be what's worst for the rest of the world.

So please. Please. Vote next week. Think, read, put aside your tribal affiliations, and vote. I don't even care who you vote for, because, much as I've abused you all in fun, I trust that most of you are good people, and that if more than the customary 40% 55% [thanks, Dan] or so of you do your duty as citizens and go to the polls, nothing can result but a landslide for the Other Guy.

I'm begging you. We're all begging you. Do the right thing.

9:05 AM | 5 comments

Man, I love them Americans. They feel so strongly about entertaining the rest of us with their comedic stylings, and we are all in their debt for keeping us laughing. The chutzpah, the testicular fortitude that they collectively show, out there on the world stage, walking the tightrope between hilarious self-parody and a collapse into a light-gobbling singularity whose gravitational gradient is so steep that even irony cannot escape. Bravo, I say!

The tension they so skillfully build in all the rest of us who hang on every faux-drunken swerve and stumble of their political machine is breathtaking. Those rapscallions. Teetering up there on the democracy highwire, introducing ramshackle, insecure electronic voting systems built on Microsoft™ Access© while they so nobly and selflessly impose American freedom and democracy on the Afghanis and Iraqis? Oh, eek, I can't watch! Putting their dear leader up there on stage to praise the 10 million voters registered in Afghanistan, when only 9 million are eligible? The showmanship is breathtaking, and The Funny is debilitating.

Trotting out a frothing villain like Zell Miller to inflame the stupid, while retaining the option of distancing yourself ('He's not a Republican!') should the spin from the assembled stenographers of the press turn ugly? Pure comedy gold! Did you see the look on that old bastard's face when he felt the carpet being pulled out from under him? Classic, backslappin' American pie hijinks!

Oh, you wacky yank bastards, how I love that you'd totter so close to the abyss to entertain us all. I wake up each morning frothing in my urgency to fire up my old PC and find out what new japery you might have unleashed.

The subtleties of the ways your leaders use words, my friends, while merely appearing to wield them like a simpleton's club, claiming that they 'don't do nuance'... simply magnificent. The way that you can collectively turn on an ironic dime, and allow a man whose family connections excused him from serving his country to shine the character assassination jocularity spotlight on a man who actually did. And the way that that fellow and his supporters let their foes just do it. Oh, it's belly-laughin' time, right there!

You Americans kill me. No really, you do. Not as dead as the 10,000 (30,000?) Iraqis, or the 3000 Afghanis, or the 1000 Americans, or the 100 'coalition of the willing' (oh, dear, that's a nugget of comedy pyrite there, too) members. (And never mind those 50,000 Komedy Korpses in the Darfur. They're not dead from the hilarity apoplexy!)

A pretend cowboy President whose horses are rented? A constitutional amendment to protect the sanctity of marriage in a nation where half of all marriages end in divorce? An inner powerbroker circle of oil company gassholes and oil prices at all-time highs? A leader who claims to receive instructions from his god (or from 'beyond the stars', whatever that means), making offhand remarks about crusades? Invading a country that posed no threat, while the Norks built more nukes and threaten to turn Seoul into a lake of fire? Talking about corporate responsibility and pumping a few billion into your vice-president's old company? Contracting out your warfare needs to the lowest (or best-connected) bidder? Running a gulag in Cuba, of all places? Torturing children in Iraq while proudly (if spuriously) proclaiming 'no child left behind' back home? Reducing the taxes of the richest, then making populist proclamations like 'there's no point taxing the rich because they just dodge their tax bill anyway'? Osama bin who?

Your A-material kills, my friends. You rock.

You gotta take your show on the road.

5:15 PM | 9 comments and 1 trackback

Rudy Giuliani. Rudy f--kin' Giuliani. I caught the last 10 minutes or so of his horrifying public deep-throat of his paymasters in the Fellato-drome as I was shovelling down my lunchtime bibimbap this afternoon. In the way of a good journalist -- which of course we know all bloggers aspire to be, with 'blog is to journalism as waffle iron is to pita bread' our battle cry -- I'm going to pretend that I watched the whole thing with rapt attention, rather than with one eye while I mixed a big dollop of gochu-jang into my rice.

What kind of man could this unhinged bastard be? That he actually believes the kinds of things he said, up there with his naked face hanging out, boggles the mind. It would seem, unlike the president whose steaming sidewalk turds he unhinged his jaw to gobble up -- whether in the name of tribal solidarity, or clean streets, or merely because we live in a world where public fabrication in the name of self-preservation trumps the lives of thousands, I don't know -- that he's not merely a stupid man. How could he possibly justify the audacity of the warispeace platitudes and outright howlers he lobbed out over the heads of the assembled herd animals in the pit? Most of the assembled groundlings, interestingly, appeared to be a little bemused and confused as they milled and mooed that there was a distinct absence onstage of naked Iraqis chained to the pillars or homos cruficied and bloody in front of the stars-and-stripes. Is it possible that the fog of bullsh-t that was emanating from this opportunist f--k up on stage was choking them, too? Perhaps not, but I'm eternally the optimist.

Really? Did you really do that, Rudy? And how, for the rest of your life, will be you able to live it down, if you actually did?

To Giuliani's credit, perhaps, was the look in his piggy little eyes as he limped his way through his clumsy litany of weasel-sh-t doubletalk. You could see it, if you looked closely: 'Help me!' his eyes seemed to be saying, while his mouth continued to force words out around the mechanically-reclaimed Republican meat that was occluding it. 'Let me the hell out of here! I've sold my soul and made a foul, demonic joke of my integrity, and the price wasn't high enough! There's no way back from this, and I'm nuts-deep in the toothy maw of the beast!'

But f--k him. He made his choice. He's a force for evil now, whether or not he ever was anything but. He's on the side of America! The! Great! America! Mom and apple pie! America! Freedom and equality for some! America! Commerce is honour! America! Hurry up and get those ovens finished, so we can get this Final Solution thing underway! America the proud torturers! America! With us or against us!

I have mentioned before that I'm against you, right, America?

Just so we're clear.

3:49 PM | 9 comments

Is it anti-communitarian of me to say that I'm wryly amused by all the 'bloggers' jostling like wee piggies for a nipple at the Democratic convention? That jockeying for pole position in the anecdote-race to be the first to fellate the rich and powerful is a teeny bit distasteful to me?

Will I get in trouble (again) with all those otherwise good and smart people who are all a-twitter about the fact that they really really matter now? Now that they're inside the chalk borders of the pentagram? I mean, it's cute, all right. Sure. Like the wallflower become belle of the ball. And having them tell themselves, and us, in public, how it's a sign that the heavy elements of democracy are sinking through the clouds of the blogosphere, like the glittering dusty fallout from the Blog Bomb, back onto the heads of the Common People? That a change is a-comin? That's precious, and may even have a kernel of truth to it. More power to 'em. But.

But I'm still waiting, and still looking, for one -- just one! -- who has the bravery and the cockeyed gonzo ballsiness to rip a few new assholes in the purveyors of all that sanctimonious 'America The Great' autowankery, and, say, fling an empty Royal Reserve bottle at the stage while Joe Lieberman does his coattail ride into obscurity. Metaphorically or otherwise. And then write about it. In realtime.

How I wish that there were a few writers there splashing their talent (and cocktails) all over the web. Not just permalink patriots and also-ran digerati, but mad bloggy bastards who'd give me some stank, some snark, a few laughs. How I wish Rageboy could've gone and kicked out the motherf--king jams, or dong_resin, or Golby the crazed. Whoever. Just somebody whose panties don't go all damp at the idea of getting spattered with John Edwards' sweat.

I don't want to see digital snapshots of you posing with some other blogerati dildo or fawning over some Real Celebrity, framed with a bit of Commentary Lite, damn it. I want you to write something that will make me laugh and weep and want to go and break a bottle over someone's head (or laugh and weep and give somebody an equally random big ol' kiss on the lips), then dance like a tarantula-bitten gypsy. Something to fire me up a bit! I want a Hunter S Thompson, by god, a Mencken, somebody with a bit of rage and a bit of juice in 'em, with too many damn words and a talent for juggling them. Someone who sees the opening, seizes it, then drives a juggernaut of text right through the quivering greasy middle of it, while lesser mortals scatter in fear for their lives.

Hell, maybe there are bloggers out there doing that at this convention. If so, point me to them. If not, well, get me a plane ticket and a pass to the Republican Clusterf--k, and I'll do the damn job myself.

Never send a blogger to do a wonderchicken's job.

[Update : Well, OK, this is pretty damn cool. But I'm stickin' to my knee-jerk contrarian guns, damn it!]

[Update 2: Well, besides the Mighty Fafblog, even if I do have my suspicions that Fafnir and Giblets aren't actually there. Still: fafferrific or faffelicious? You decide!]

[Update 3: Oh, crap. Me and John Freakin' Dvorak. I'm turning in my decoder ring.]

[Update 4: f--kin' A, Tutor, my old nemesis.]

4:21 PM | 12 comments and 5 trackbacks.

Anal rape of children is bad. This is a sentence that, in the normal course of things, one would think that it would be unnecessary to write. I'm pretty sure -- much as I loathe humanity, most of the damn time -- that the majority of humans on this planet, obsessed as they tend to be with their progeny, would agree with me that raping children is a bad thing. One of the worst things that you can do, they'd probably say, short of maybe genocide.

Or rather, cleansing. Ethnic cleansing, to wash away those pesky ethnic underarm stains that are so embarrassing in polite society.

'Rape's a part of war, though, stav!' I hear you cry, as I cup quivering-with-rage hand to shell-like ear. 'To the victor the spoils, and the orifices. The plunder, the glory! It's part of our common human heritage! It's tradition, damn it!'

Well, sure. But butt-f--king kids while their mothers look on? While videotaping it? I'm not sure that's really in line with the 'rape, loot and pillage' modus operandi so loved and respected throughout human history. Pushing the envelope a little, that. It may not be specifically forbidden by the letter of Geneva Convention, for example, but I'm pretty sure it goes against the spirit of it.

Which is why the Bush administration spent so much time and effort trying to ensure that their troops would not be bound by international law, of course.

Because that's what the Americans were doing, it seems, at least until they got caught.

Raping children. With Soldiers Gone Wild spring-break videography.

I wrote an deliberately, egregiously offensive piece called 'Neocon Allegory' many months back, in which Dick Cheney anally rapes and murders an Iraqi boy. It was the most over-the-top offensive thing I could come up with, that little piece, after the unwelcome images of that tableau had gotten their claws into me, and I knew I had to write it down to get it out of my head. I wrote it down alright, and I've thought about deleting it many times since. I'm glad now that I didn't.

How horrifying is it that the central metaphors of that post -- the rape of children by Dick and George, the rape of two nations, of the whole f--king planet -- would seem to have come true, in as literal a way as one could imagine in the worst mescaline-driven nightmare? How awful that the worst metaphorical flight of nasty invention I could come up with is now a reality in fact, and it's being hidden by the powerful and ignored by the hypnotized?

Pretty awful. And they ask why I seem to hate America so. They keep asking.

7:02 PM | 13 comments and 7 trackbacks.

I had a dream last night. A glorious technicolour dream. A political dream.

In my dream, Candidates Kerry and Edwards realized that Dim George and Snarling Dick were going to pull Osama Bin Laden out of their asses at some opportune moment before the election, and crucify him on the White House lawn. Plant the cross in a pool of scented oil to keep the saudi cooties from spreading, invite the bloodclan and Fox News and Dad, and rouse the tribes to a tumescent, frantic headline-crawl apogee of Republican vote-lust. But in a tasteful way, with very little mention of anyone having to go and f--k themselves.

My dream-representation of the light dawning in the Johns' minds was a tableau of them making cute anime 'O's with their mouths while rolling their eyes upwards toward a shared thought balloon in which Dick Cheney was holding the severed head of Osama up by its hair, letting the blood drip onto a Diebold voting machine. It was way cool.

So Franken-John and Pretty-John decided to go proactive. Winning, Kerry declared in his endearingly halting, tone-deaf way, is as much about kicking... some... mother...f--king ass as it is about proactively leveraging mission-critical paradigms in a time-sensitive fashion. Edwards popped up in front of him to declare that the only way to make America strong, to unite America again, and to preempt an October Suprise that would make America unstrong and disunited, was if the two of them were to hunt down that bastard OBL themselves, and beat the chickenhawks at their own game.

Yeah! said the crowd. Woo!

And so, enlisting the aid of a bionic monkey named Limbaugh (because robots and monkeys are funny, and a robot monkey wins by default (until the bionic monkey pirate shows up, at least)), the two boarded a Black Hawk helicopter and departed from an undisclosed location into the free and democratic mountains of America's Newest Ally, Afghanistan. This wasn't just any helicopter, mind you. This was way better than the Campaign Bus they figured on using off the get-go. Yes, this was a stealth chopper, and its shiny new Kerry/Edwards vinyl appliqués were replaced with other shiny new ones, ones shouting stuff like 'Death To America!' and 'Jihad or Bust!' (but with barely-legible disclaimers underneath in tiny little print, just in case somebody got the wrong idea). These guys were clever, canny combatants, and they had good media advisors!

With Lurch resplendant in Ramboriffic headband and shiny plastic nippleless muscley-torso, and co-John working his best assets and looking simply stunning in his floor-length silk gown, they combed the arid hills of the Afghan-Pakistan border in their OsamaChopper, setting down each evening as Allah's sun sank into the dusty haze to lay traps for the Bad Guys. Candidate Breck Girl strutted his silky stuff while bandolero-strapped Candidate Kerry lurked in the shadows with Limbaugh and waited, guns akimbo, frowning for the film-school interns with the digital video cameras. Waiting for their quarry to strike the bait.

Waiting, and drinking whiskey, because that's what men do when they're hunting outlaws with a bionic monkey at their side.

That's when I woke up with a start, all sweaty and disoriented. I hope I never have to see that look on my wife's face again.

3:30 PM | 6 comments

If you've landed in the 'bottle looking for some invective-laced wonderchicken perspective on the impeachment of Noh Moo Hyun here in Korea today, well, you're outta luck, my friends. At least for the moment.

I will opine that the sh-t is quite possibly going to hit the fan, though. Will it be a tipping point, where the resentment and anger at how badly this country is governed by the wrinkly old chaebol rent-boys finally spills out of the confucian cup? I don't know, and I've got beer to drink, but in the meantime you could do a lot worse than going here.

Interesting.

4:28 PM | 1 Comment

This hilariously unfair but nonetheless revealing image comes from the always amusing uggabugga :

Share and enjoy.

12:31 PM

Here's George Bush's recent speech.

Here's the same speech, with the following substitutions :

• "Marriage" becomes "whiteness"


• "the same gender" becomes "a brownish color"


• "the union of a man and a woman" or "the legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife" or "a union of a man and woman as husband and wife" becomes "racially superior"


• "a husband and wife" becomes "white people"

Please note upfront that I am about as far from being a racist as one can get, and I am astonished that anyone could think that gay marriages are in any way a bad thing, for anyone. Bigotry in any form is repulsive. This thing is meant to shine a light on Mr Bush and his puppeteers, and that's all.

I hope this little search-and-replace exercise helps put things in a historical context for you, dear reader. It did for me.

[Credit where due : I stole this idea from half of these people here (but I'm not going to tell you which half - ha!), via a certain not-to-be-mentioned kitty-loving community website, but I think I improved on it a bit.]

[Update : There are those who would protest (even though I'm not seriously equating them) that racial and sexual-orientation discrimination are apples and oranges. Perhaps, but they are more interrelated in American law than I had thought.

10:35 PM | 10 comments and 4 trackbacks.

I'm sorry†.

Continue reading "Call and Response" »

9:00 PM | 13 comments

Posted this to MeFi a few days ago. Crossposting here, 'cause I can.

Article 98. From 1995 through 2000, the U.S. government supported the establishment of an International Criminal Court. In 2001, the Bush Administration ended US participation in ICC meetings and, on 6 May 2002, officially nullified the previous signature of the Rome Statute.

Since then, the Bush administration has been actively pursuing agreements -- with such human-rights aware nations as Kazakhstan, Bahrain, Botswana and Bhutan[pdf], and through coercion in the case of destitute Nauru -- which would provide immunity for Americans in the ICC. Human Rights watch, amongst other organizations, is appalled. Echoing the sentiment of most who have not agreed to US demands, Foreign Minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner of Austria (who has not signed an agreement on Article 98 with the US) spoke out in 2002 about the need for a common position. "There is a fundamental need for everyone to be open to prosecution. It is important that there is no immunity."


Sensible or sinister?
You decide.

9:33 AM | 3 comments

If you're not reading Billmon already, you should be. He delivers another bang-on-target essay here.

11:26 AM | 1 Comment

Some fun-time sing-along flash movie entertainment, courtesy of NOFX. Everybody now!

'Don't hate us because we're Americans, just hate our government!'

And while we're doing flash, I like this guy's photos a lot.

Oh, and this is amusing. Well, amusing to me, anyway.

2:36 AM | 2 comments

Though most people know of them already, I'm sure : like The Memory Hole, the deliberately unbloglike UnderReported is a good way to try and keep track of the sh-tstorm of lies and propaganda howling around our heads, as of course is the excellent and more weblogesque cursor.org. These sites invite you to draw your own conclusions, an invitation we too rarely receive these days.

Though undeniably entertaining, reading the ranting of bloggers is less rewarding, perhaps. Your mileage, as they say, may vary. Which is not to say that I'm going to stop ranting any time soon, but rather to note that you, dear reader, should most assuredly take it for what it is worth, which is bugger-all other than a bit of (hopefully) amusing wordplay.

It must be said, too, that there are times when one has to stand back and point, with some small measure of humility, at some of the diamond-bullet stuff bloggers are pulling out of their hats, ranty or otherwise, like this little juxtapotato from a certain maniacal South African down the block :

5:09 PM | 3 comments

Compare and contrast.

Edit : From MWO, this is even better.

Also : Happy Loyalty Day, Patriots! Bask in the glory that is America!

11:36 PM | 5 comments

You are being lied to, clumsily. Redux.

My seething hatred of the American Junta still, you know, seethes. Occasionally it froths a bit, and it is known occasionally to erupt, after which it drips slowly down my leg. Most of the time, it merely simmers, on a low boil, until I see something like this, and, well, then I'm off and seething again.

"We were not lying," a Bush administration official told ABC News. "But it was just a matter of emphasis."

I might be lying to you too, of course, and in fact I probably am : but at least it's moderately more artful than the cheesedick trailerpark celebrity faux-cathexis that serves for discourse on the tee-vee.

You have been lied to, and it's a lovely feeling, that they should still care enough to try, isn't it? But they're clearly not trying very hard. Or they're trying their damnedest, but they are so ham-handed, half-witted, blinded by hubris, too busy slapping each other on the back while carefully wiping the faeces off each other's dicks after the latest washingtonian clusterf--k that they actually think the dog-and-pony show is fooling people.

Of course, inside the borders of their mighty nation, they'd be right, to a surprising extent. Pity, that.

You are being lied to, clumsily.

But you knew that already, didn't you?

OK, I'm done. That should hold me for week or so.

Edit : No, I was wrong. One more thing.

2:01 AM and 1 trackback

One word : sh-tmittens.

10:39 PM | 5 comments and 1 trackback

Gary Hart, as everyone knows by now, has his very own weblog thingy. This in and of itself is moderately interesting, I suppose. An indication to the starry-eyed that Blogging Really Does Matter (*cough*bullsh-t*cough*), a sign to the less credulous that political PR fluffsters are working every damn angle they can (possibly having studied the RagingCow Episode and powerpointed up a clever way to avoid the halfwit faux-hip clankers that fell like blue-ice jet-toilet turdmeteors in the wake of that one). I stopped by Gary's site for the first time today, and was...uh, underwhelmed.

If this is the kind of rhetoric we can expect from the defanged and image-managed yawnocrats that roam free-range across the political landscape in America these days, we may well be in deeper sh-t than we think. Ten out of ten for linking to Metafilter on the blogroll, Gary, but minus several million for meaningless, pandering empty-talk like this :

Yeah, right, that's it. And, as a wise man once said, monkeys will fly out of my butt.

That said, though, this entry is somewhat less tepid, and briefly fans aglow that deeply buried spark of hope I still carry around in the skull of a goat (wait, no, that was Quest For Fire, wasn't it?) that all is not lost.

12:54 AM | 4 comments and 2 trackbacks.

I'm sure everyone's already seen this, as it's been on that there newfangled Daypop thingy all the kids are talkin' about for a couple of days, but it is pure brilliance, and I'm a sharing, caring kinda guy :

7:26 PM | 3 comments

A little Iraquiz, nicely footnoted, just to help you keep your eye on the ball as more Americans die, and the evil wobbly old f--ks in Washington start casting about for ways to clean the poop out of their drawers :

1:56 AM

Not a worst case scenario, actually. Not at all. I can think of worse, but if I concentrate on it too much, I feel like ripping the throat out of the next person who annoys me. Especially if they're American.

Chicken little (but not inaccurate) quotable quote :

Also : a powerful odor of mendacity.

Also also : not that it matters, but goddamn right.

[found at the site that must not be named]

3:56 PM

My friend John has made something very good. A way, one hopes, to make a statement of some kind, a statement like 'Ahhhhhh, sh-t,' for example. An easy, lazy way, sure, but better than whipping up bad photoshops and typing out apoplectic rants, which have been the main thrust of my statementation so far. And easy, lazy stuff is the way of the future, people keep telling me. So get on the bus! Next stop - somewhere else. Hopefully.

2:32 PM | 1 Comment and 1 trackback

An open letter to George W, purporting to be from Brazilian writer Paul Coelho, translated from the Portuguese here :

9:54 PM | 2 comments and 1 trackback

Shelley speaks, in pellucid and evocative language, of the tensions between the individual and community, conflicts between the strength of uncompromising individuality and the sense of responsibility to others, which are often expressed in ways contrarian and discordant. If you read her words often, you know that she cherishes this part of herself, and is proud to be the one who pushes back, who questions, about matters political and gender-related, about issues social and relating to the blogosphere, and this is one of the things many other people cherish about her too. I'm glad - more than glad, I'm indebted in a multitude of ways and even if I disagree with her on the details deeply grateful - that she is around to kick against the pricks, as exhausting and demoralizing an avocation as that is.

One of the many reasons I feel indebted to her (and to others around the ever-more-loosely-joined virtual neighbourhood of which I feel a part) is that she kickstarts thoughts in me, and if I'm at the precise juncture where the caffeine has overcome my natural lethargy (like right now), I'm liable to write about them. The exercise of deciding whether this is a Good Thing or not is left to the reader.

The following is long and personal, and no doubt philosophically suspect. So sue me!

Particularly in these difficult days, people accuse me of being anti-American, and I invariably admit that I am, although perhaps not in the sense in which they mean it. The phrase anti-American almost certainly means different things to different people, and in different languages (long ramble about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis excised - I'll leave that for another day). Occasionally I'm even asked why, although this is rare, and like dg here, it's usually as part of a low-intensity injoke that bounces around Metafilter occasionally : 'Why do you hate America so much?'

I wish I were able to trace back to the beginning my first stirrings of anti-American sentiment, way up there in my Northern BC village. That sort of thing is a fool's game, though, particularly when your long-term memory is as wildly inaccurate as mine. We only got two television channels up there - CTV and CBC - and so there was no nose-upturned pseudo-intellectual pooh-poohing of American entertainment, though you can be sure I affected a whole range of other arrogant smartboy behaviours, feeling as I did a lone island of brilliance in a sea of millworkers and fetal alcohol syndrome genetic sports.

The second album I remember buying was The Clash's London Calling - perhaps that was the trigger.

With lyrics like

it fired me up in a way that I still feel, bowel-deep and still burning decades later. But really that album, political as it was, had very little in the way of attacks on America itself - it chose broader targets, and knocked them over with rakish, snarling aplomb.

Like Shelley, I read Ayn Rand as a teen too, and everything else I could get my hands on, which, thanks to a mother visibly relieved that I was more interested in books than cars, was almost everything I could think of, but it didn't leave much of a mark on me, I don't think. Similar expressions of libertarian ideals in Heinlein's juvenilia and other SF novels did leave their mark, though. I remember quoting him, sneeringly, over the years : 'specialization is for insects.' But I was too interested in individuals (which I mentioned in another context, in a post of which I'm particularly proud, here) to care much about -isms. This decision, this disdain of politics, has stayed with me to this day.

So how does a disdain of politics and a Clash song jibe with a repeatedly-reiterated anti-Americanism? I'm getting to that, honest.

One of the things that Shelley's piece today started me contemplating was how my feelings on individuality differ from the ones she expresses so well, and how imagining myself as a contrarian (if people-loving) curmudgeon all these years has molded my life. When I think about it, lyrics from another song bubble up into my mind, and I suppose they express the root of my feeling as well as anything else :

All my life, I've fashioned myself as the Outsider, the exile, the individual, rugged or otherwise. I feel little to no obligation to any sense of community, other than that which is mandated by my own sense of what is right. It has roots, no doubt, in childhood bereavements, and first saw the light when a psychologist diagnosed me as a kindergarten sociopath. It matured with the fingernails-ripped-out clawing at the well-walls of my hometown - let me out! - and has evolved slowly since. It's led to me to live as an expatriate all over the planet for most of the last 15 years, complaining about my new hosts, wherever they have been, and equally kept me from returning home. It's made me unwilling to consider myself part of any group larger than a self-selected circle of close friends, virtual and otherwise. It's led me inexorably to spending a significant portion of my waking hours in front of a computer, typing my life out for people I have never met.

But it's also made me a better man, in many ways, I think, if a somewhat solipsistic one. I do believe that all you have is your soul, and that, absurd as it seems, is true even if there is no such thing as a soul. That's an argument I'm not interested in, as it simply doesn't matter. But I believe that once you have done your best to detach, in best buddhist fashion (though I hasten to add that I am no more a buddhist than I am an evangelical christian) - detach from political or religious affiliation, from outmoded and useless labels like 'left' and 'right', from exhortations to patriotism and considerations of race, from fretting about whether this group or that is disadvantaged or exploited - and tried to live according to the dictates of your conscience and love and do what good you can for those you know....well, we all want that, in one way or another, don't we?

At the end of the day, ignoring the clamoring of the crowds to join in and be a part of something is the strategy of the hermit, and I am no hermit. I partake, joyfully or furiously, depending on the provenance of the brain chemicals circulating intraskull, with as much enthusiasm as someone might who defined themselves by their job, or their religion, or their gender, or their sexual preference, or their nationality, or their political affiliation, or their race.

So why do I hate America so much, though I've said over and over again that I love many American people? Because America does evil, and I cannot help but hate that which does evil, all the while knowing that it is evil. There's no need for me to recite the litany of Terrible Wrongs that America has done - no matter how you sit on the love/hate/fear/security map, you know those things of which I speak.

This is not to say that other nations, other governments, other groups political or otherwise, today and in the past (and no doubt far into the future) have not done great evil. Cambodia, Germany, Japan, Rwanda, Russia, El Salvador, Guatemala.... any of us could go on, endlessly, and point to massive evils that, in sheer scale if nothing else, dwarf the worst that anyone could accuse America of.

For me, though, disappointment is the key to my dislike of America. Deep, weary, beaten-down disappointment. Disappointment at the massive disconnect between the way that America portrays itself, and the way that many Americans who are ignorant of both history and geography perceive America. Regardless of how shocked people may have been at the million corpses littering the ground in Rwanda a decade ago, I believe that were the blood of those multitudes on American hands through action rather than inaction, the shock and outrage would be many times more powerful. When I was young I expected - and many people, American and otherwise feel the same - that America would always be a force for good in the world. Americans are supposed to be heros, damn it! That's what their movies tell us, and their television, and their news agencies and their government. That's what their duplicitous sold-out scumbag of a president keeps repeating in halting tones when they trot him out to read another script about 'smoking out the evil-doers.' And nothing, we all know, is as disappointing as a fallen hero.

(Of course, you can probably guess that I directly blame George W Bush and his administration for the death of one of my best friends, as much as I blame the sack of sh-t who set and detonated that bomb in Bali. They loaded and cocked the gun - that little Indonesian just pulled the trigger. Their bumbling PR-driven war in Afghanistan drove al Qaeda members to Indonesia, the nation with the largest Muslim population on the planet, where those escappes were no doubt instrumental in the murder of all those people in Kuta. My resentment of the abject stupidity of the conduct of the little Bush-te revenge-war has only honed my anger and resentment and disappointment to a fine edge.)

But to people not dependent on their politics or their nationality to define themselves, to someone for whom identity is not built on ideas and groups outside of him or herself, the words of Official America are at so far a remove from the realities that anger and disappointment are the only responses that seem rational. Anger that wrong is being portrayed as right, to the apparent unquestioning satisfaction of many who would fight evil if they recognized it. Disappointment because America, the great power of our world, could do so much good, and instead has been locked into a path that will bear bitter fruit for everyone for as far as the mind can see into the cratered, smoke-shrouded wasteland of the future.

I love Americans, many of them. I hate America because through those who lead that powerful nation, it seems to be hellbent on making a world that is worse in every way that's important for most of the people in it. And I feel this way not because I am Canadian, or 'lefty', or religious, or anything else other than who I am. I hate America because I want so desperately to love it.

7:22 PM | 33 comments and 2 trackbacks.

From Kim Dae-shik, a physics professor at Seoul National University to the head of the US Forces Korea :

5:33 PM | 6 comments and 1 trackback

You are being lied to, clumsily.

Pass it on.

Also : Douglas Ord is having his synchronicity fuses blown, and expands on a boggling series of odd coincidences some of which were also noticed by the Bearman recently. The mind can take any set of events, or numbers, or words, and automagically see a serendipitous pattern in them - pattern recognition is what intelligence is, I think, at least in part - but sometimes the random patterns end up looking like the face of the Virgin Mary, and all synaptic hell breaks loose.

[both via wood s lot]

Also, while I'm at it : this is an interesting and quite plausible argument (to me, admittedly undereducated as I am on these matters) that the real reasons behind many of the decisions being made by the Bush administration with regard to throwing their geopolitical weight around is the "goal of preventing further Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) momentum towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard."

Not entirely free of spin, by any means, but worth a look. A lot of the dots seem to link up pretty damn well.

12:16 AM | 4 comments and 1 trackback

I was thinking of sharing my fascinating thoughts on the North Korean Thing with you, but I find [via Tim Bishop] that Josh Marshall pretty much has it in hand (Edit : As does friend Matt, here), except he doesn't use nearly as many obscenities as I do. A forgiveable offense.

I am quite confident that this too shall pass, but don't quote me on that.

4:30 AM | 2 comments

I asked a couple of days ago, in high dudgeon :

"How much more of this are Americans willing to take? How many more clear signals can there be that the principles for which their nation is claimed to stand are being dismantled and subverted by their almost-elected officials? What will it take to get them to wake the f--k up and throw these weasels out?"

and this was one of the answers left in the comments...

Vote to Impeach

Thanks, Sarah. If I were American, I'd be a little scared of being branded an Enemy of the State for adding my name to the list, and being imprisoned without that old-fashioned habeus corpus to get in the way. But if I were American, you can damn well bet I would sign, anyway. At least someone's trying to do something.

1:48 AM and 1 trackback

Via MeFi and OW™, something else to be really pissed about, you know, after you're finished with all the other things on your list.

How much more of this are Americans willing to take? How many more clear signals can there be that the principles for which their nation is claimed to stand are being dismantled and subverted by their almost-elected officials? What will it take to get them to wake the f--k up and throw these weasels out?

See, now I'm all grumpy again.

11:17 PM | 9 comments and 1 trackback

Say what you will about his recent fictional output (or his older fictional output, for that matter), I still have a soft spot for Kurt Vonnegut. At the age of 80, he's still saying things worth listening to.

And he's not an asshole, which still counts for something, I hope.

While we're talking authors here, another writer whose work I've always enjoyed reading, Gunter Grass, is also speaking out against those murderous C students and psychopaths in Washington.

Edit : This is as good a time as any to share some statistics about Korea with you. I ran across these numbers a few days ago, and they would seem to explain much on first glance. Whether that is actually the case or not is up for debate.

There are a total of 450 public libraries in Korea. In the whole country.

These facilities serve a population of approximately 47 million people : it works out to about 110,000 people for each library, the lowest in the OECD. The ratio is actually worse here in Seoul - which is home to the equivalent of about a third of the population of Canada, a fact that never ceases to boggle me a bit - there's one library for every 330,000 people.

The comparable figure in Europe is about 1:10,000 and in America it's 1:20,000 or so.

Some ad-hocratic systems have arisen to compensate, as is always the case here. There are privately run shops, even in the nasty little suburb where I live, that rent a few books (mostly home-grown manga for the schoolkids) alongside the standard racks of action movies. There's a bookmobile that comes around the human beehives once a week, too, with a couple of hundred Korean novels onboard. Small compensation for the few who have the time or energy to read anything.

As for me, even if any of these few libraries were near enough for me to visit, I'd be out of luck. None carry books in English, of course.

If any webblogger should have an Amazon wishlist and wheedle and beg for books, it's me, by crikey. Maybe I should get a webcam, start peddling my wonderchicken pulchritude, and demand payments ("Put it on! Put it all back on! Please!") in literature....

Nah.

1:23 AM | 5 comments

What quonsar said(*). Or, in a little more length and detail - "America, oui! Bush, non!"

7:49 PM | 2 comments and 1 trackback

Following in Bb's footsteps, here is my state of the union address :

4:45 AM and 1 trackback

It's cliché already to invoke 1984 when talking about these worthless turdfellaters in Washington, but it's hard not to do so these days.

Watching CNN from a hotel at Narita airport in Japan last week, I was amused by the response to their 'question of the day'.

'Which country poses the greatest threat to world peace?' they asked, and invited phone calls and emails in response. Hours afterwards, the proportion of respondants nominating 'The United States' was still running around 70%, they told us, falling over each other in their efforts to tell us again that this result 'did not necessarily reflect our opinions.'

f--k you, George. Your empire is a-gonna fall.

3:40 PM | 5 comments

A number of friends and neighbours have expressed some concern about my proximity to the Bouffant Brigades across the DMZ, and asked me for my take on the latest developments here in Korealand™. I am happy to oblige.

First, some background, which tends to be glossed over by the shiny-toothed automata reading the news, and seems to be missed by most of the print media I've seen too, unsurprisingly.

In 1994, the Clinton administration established an "Agreed Framework" with the well-fed wackjobs in Pyongyang. One of the drivers of the agreement was the desire on the part of the Americans to prevent North Korea from operating a weapons-grade reactor. The Agreed Framework promised North Korea progress toward "full normalization of political and economic relations." It also promised shipments of heavy fuel oil, and two light-water reactors by 2003 to replace the weapons-grade facility Pyongyang was to shut down.

Several months ago (November 14 2002), the Bush administration decided to punitively cut off fuel oil supplies in response to Kim Jong Il's latest hijinks (admitting to a secret nuclear program), just as winter was approaching and famine looming again. This is significant because these fuel supplies were basically the only thing that America actually delivered on to fulfill their part of the 1994 agreement, and given the poverty of the country, the only way that any fuel could be had for electrical generation and so on. Ironic, actually, because it is fairly clear that, at least in part, the reason for the nuclear program in the first place was to generate electricity (and make filthy bombs to sell off and/or kill people with, of course). Construction on the promised lightwater reactors began in August of 2002, 8 years after the agreement, and 4 months before they were meant to begin operation.

Not only had America in fact ignored almost entirely their commitment to the requirements of the Agreed Framework, and eventually by the end of the Clinton administration delivered solely (and then partially) on their commitment to supply heavy fuel oil, but as soon as Bush and his cadre of demonic sh-tweasels took over, North Korea was declared part of the laughable "Axis of Evil." How's that for "full normalization of political and economic relations," huh? It may be worth noting that during the last few years of the last decade, during the time we're talking about, North Korea was experiencing a famine that killed, by some estimates, more than 10% of its population, or about 2 million people.

In fact, the Americans can't really even claim with anything like a straight face (although they try, naturally, and get away with it) that the secret uranium-enrichment program revealed by Pyongyang a couple of months ago puts it in "material breach" of the 1994 agreement, anyway : uranium enrichment is one of the things simply not covered in the Agreed Framework.

This is typical of the bullsh-t-spinning that these lying scum engage in (on both sides of the fence, of course. The North Korean mouthpieces do it so badly that it's more comedy than tragedy, though.) :

The truth, as usual, is approxiately 180 degrees away from what is quoted above, for reasons I've discussed here at the 'bottle many times before. What has been happening is what would seem to be a concerted effort by America, and particularly by the Arbusto Administration, to subvert and obstruct South Korea's efforts towards productive engagement with the North. Not much wonder that the 'sunshine policy' of Kim Dae Jung has seen limited success in areas other than domestic.

The Bush administration's policy of 'tailored containment', so remniscent of Reagan-era cold-war-speak (and not surprisingly given the array of Reaganite criminals and courtiers re-elevated to positions of power), displays a lack of any real understanding and responsiveness to the realities of the situation, and is counterproductive at best and a reckless endangerment of millions of lives at worst.

The wisdom of Kim Dae Jung's sunshine policy, a strategy which the new president-elect Noh Moo Hyun (usually romanized as 'Roh Moo Hyun' for some reason) has pledged to continue, is more sensible given the context I describe above, I think, and is one which is supported by Japan, China and other states in the region. North Korea has always been responsive to chances for improved relations with the outside world, and its current attitude can be seen as defensive, and as with other bluffs and brinkmanship in the past intended primarily to bring America to the bargaining table.

Not to say that Kim Jong Il, the Stalinist Bouffant Butterball, is anything other than pure evil. But he's not a madman. American media is always quick to demonize their so-called enemies : Saddam Hussein, of course, being only the latest in a long string of 'madmen' and 'new Hitlers'. Kim JI is canny, and continues to respond with the only tools at his disposal - threats - to the posturing, lies, bad-faith negotiation and arrogance of the Americans.

This from the Guardian today echoes my point : "The North Korean nuclear standoff moved a step closer to a peaceful resolution yesterday as Pyongyang set a date for negotiations, amid reports that it was prepared to scrap its weapons programme in return for a security guarantee from the United States."

There is a lot of talk recently, as well, about the idea of America pulling its 37,000 troops out of Korea. It's difficult to say where they'd be withdrawn to : maybe they could share bunks with the 40,000 in Japan. The strong anti-American sentiment in South Korea in recent times, which I recently discussed here, has finally percolated through to North America, and of course the yanks are shocked and bemused. How could they hate us so? We're the good guys, aren't we?

It's generally acknowledged that the 37,000 American troops here would make little to no difference were the North to invade again. The third largest standing army in the world - over 1,000,000-strong - is just across the DMZ. South Korea, with about 600,000 soldiers at any given time, a large segment of which is composed of university-age young men doing their two years of compulsory military service, would bear the brunt of any invasion. The reason that those troops are important is the psychological effect. The idea of those American soldiers being a tripwire of sorts is an outdated one : the US could just as effectively defend South Korea against attack from bases in Japan or even Hawaii. But to withdraw the troops, after 54 years, would raise questions about the role America wishes to play in Asia, how committed it is to maintaining stability, and make goverments in Beijing, Tokyo, Taipei and elsewhere very nervous indeed. It might even, given the apparent nuclear ambitions of Pyongyang, force Japan to 'go nuclear.' The role of the 37,000 American troops in Korea is mainly symbolic, and both the Koreans and the Americans calling recently for their withdrawal are swayed too much by emotion and too little by the ravages of intelligence to consider what the consequences of a withdrawal might be.

It's generally accepted that North Korea already has one or possible two nuclear weapons, and they clearly have the technology to deliver them. Seoul is about 55 km south of the DMZ, and I live about 30 km south of downtown Seoul. I recently asked my wife if she knew what to do if she were to see a sudden bright flash in the sky outside our kitchen window, which looks north : drop, stay away from the windows, move to the bathroom at the center of the apartment, and wait for the shockwave and its backlash to pass.

My guess is that we'd probably survive an airburst, if it were to happen. But I don't really think it's going to, unless the criminals in Washington decide to turn their gun barrels this way after they raze Iraq (or are denied the opportunity to do so).

Related wonderchicken rantings : here, here, here and elsewhere.

Reading things like "North Korea Withdraws From Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty" is not as scary, hopefully, when one is aware of the game being played. That said, one hopes that mom stops them before someone loses an eye.

Also : this. [via provenanceunkown]

8:57 PM | 18 comments and 6 trackbacks.

Worth reading, perhaps.

Seems like a long time since I've done it, so I'd better add that the Shrub and his minions can go f--k themselves over an open fire. Or in the recent and exquisite phrasing of a certain Portuguese friend : I would request that they "slowly and gently f--k the f--k off."

That is all.

OK, not quite all : not that it will make much difference to the murderous hardons in the White House, but apparently you can make your voice heard (although you might want to don the tinfoil hat first) [via the metafilter thread]

12:46 AM | 5 comments

Politicians and their honkers. Bifurcation and duality and a damn fine cup of java. Oh friends, if we could identify evil, if we could point out those who bear the Mark Of The Beast so easily, if we could pinpoint the cheery monetarized f--kweasels that push the envelope down into the dirt, what would we do? String 'em up? Knot and pull and bellow 'Woo-hoo, look at him swayng!', lynch-mobilize with foam-rubber fingers pointed skyward, dripping oily sweat and reeking of sweet hormonal bourbon? Crucify the bastards, maybe, thieves and saviors alike, nail 'em up, stand back, point and laugh as they writhe and beg, and f--k the moral equivalence with a stainless-steel strap-on? Kill 'em all and let God sort them out, vengeful but eminently fair bitch that she is?

Not clear as an unmuddied pool under skies of deepest azure, no, more like clear as paper rubbed with the labial edge of Big Mac™. Translucent, but tasty.

What would we do if we could scent the evil on these f--kers, if we could see it like a sh-t-brown aura? What would we do?

Me, I got me a clue. Gimme a silver bullet, friend, and I'll kill the werewolves. Drop the predators in their tracks. But be aware : another waits to take the Big Bad Wolf's place, and the new one is without fail even worse, dollars to damned donuts. It doesn't get better, it gets sillier. And even though nature apparently abhors a vacuum, the identical cheese-hostesses keep sucking harder.

Clog, pony boy, clog!

5:46 AM | 9 comments

This online petition for the "Immediate and Total Repeal of the USA/Patriot ACT " has about 6000 signatures as I write this. It is open to all US residents.

6:38 AM | 7 comments and 1 trackback

There's this and then there's this. I'm too tired to care anymore. How stupid do they think we are?

1:08 AM | 3 comments

Mike points me to Douglas Ord's piece 'It Weren't Just Hockey', a timely link indeed for me, coming as it does hard on the heels of the recent Daypop-fueled kafuffle over Canuck Robert MacDougall's rant about America. I think it illuminates quite ably some of the anger and resentment many Canadians feel towards America, by dwelling on the specifics of some events of which I was only vaguely aware. Much as the "Canada sux, d00d!" meme has taken over among the Youth Of America, fueled mostly, I think, by the Blame Canada! silliness in the South Park movie, lifted out of context and taken at face value, there seems to be little awareness in America of the reciprocal strength of real ill-will in many parts of Canadian society towards the 800-pound gorilla to the south. And if conjoined siblings are at odds, to a degree where some sort of ritualized catharsis is necessary, what of the rest of the world?

But the Toronto - New York series had an especially nasty edge, with the question widely asked as to whether hockey had reached a new low.

The series went a full seven games, & was ultimately won by the Maple Leafs on home ice, four games to three.

It also featured bizarre anomalies.

Among them was persistent booing of the Canadian national anthem in New York, even as the US national anthem was cheered in Toronto.

The booing in New York only got louder as the series went on, notwithstanding that the night before the series began on April 18th, four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan had been killed, & eight wounded, by a laser-guided bomb dropped by a US F-16 fighter plane.

[image found at the 'pile]

In fact the entire period of the series, from April 18th to 30th, was one of confused national mourning in Canada, on account of the killing of the four soldiers, who were the first Canadian combat casualties in nearly fifty years, & who were victims of the US Air Force.

Nevertheless, it has now emerged that for the sixth game of the series, & the last in New York, the audience there did more than just loudly boo the Canadian national anthem.

According to Bruce Arthur in the May 2nd National Post, a paper I don't much like but that sometimes has interesting tidbits, the opera student who had sung both national anthems in Toronto for an earlier game got a surprise when he arrived in New York for the sixth one:

"Days after being cheered as he sang the Canadian and American anthems before an NHL playoff game in Toronto, Robert Pomakov watched, horrified, as unruly New York hockey fans burned his Canadian flag in the parking lot of Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum.

"Mr. Pomakov, an opera singer, saw both his Canadian and his Toronto Maple Leaf flags torn from his car and set on fire by a crowd chanting 'USA! USA!' in the moments before Sunday's Game 6 between the Leafs and the New York Islanders.

"'We lost four of our soldiers and they were basically defending these idiots,' an outraged Mr. Pomakov said. "If patriotism is what drives these people and their ignorance, then I am ashamed to have our soldiers defending them... There's a line that needs to be drawn, and this was just so far across."

What Pomakov did not mention, of course, was that the Canadian soldiers were not just killed while implicitly defending American citizens from "terrorist attack." They were killed by an American fighter pilot, and are the only Canadians to be killed, or even wounded, in the war in Afghanistan.

Nor, it should be noted, did the American mob shout "New York! New York!" or "Islanders! Islanders!" while burning the Canadian flag.

Instead they chanted "USA! USA!".

This being the chant which accompanied George W. Bush's first visit to the ruins of the World Trade Centre in that same New York City, & which has become the semi-official vocal accompaniment to the "war on terror."

[more...]

8:35 PM | 6 comments

If you haven't had enough of America bashing, peruse this and this, and get back to me. For the record, I'm in almost complete agreement with the authors of these pieces, and wonder how much longer it can go on before the American people wake up and rise up.

6:52 PM | 10 comments

Japanese researchers have found film footage in Pyongyang indicating the United States conducted germ warfare against China and North Korea during the Korean War.

Pretzelboy, of course, would never mention America's role in the proliferation of this kind of evil while stumbling over the phonetically-spelled gradeschool-bully scripts his handlers have him mouth.

The wiggly lines emanating from my eyes indicate rage, contempt and hatred.

Edit : Now let me get this straight. Iraq's use of gas has been repeatedly cited by President Bush and by his national security advisor as justification for ''regime change'' in Iraq. But the New York Times is quoting 'senior military officers' as saying that "there was a covert U.S. program during the Reagan administration to provide Iraq with battle planning assistance at a time when intelligence agencies knew Iraqi commanders would use chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war".

That's funny, isn't it? Speaking of "regime change"....

9:08 PM | 8 comments

Inspired by Shelley and Jonathan, who said :

I did about 3 minutes worth of research to bring you some lists of those prominent Americans who avoided military service but are now, unsurprisingly, waggling their thanato-erotic weenies around with the most vigor.

Here's a good list, and here, a more partisan one, but still informative.

A sampler :

I also noticed that one of the warbloggers with whom Bb has been debating (in an admirably reasonable, evenhanded fashion, I must admit), has said that the epithet 'warblogger' is no longer fashionable.

In light of this, and my strong suspicion that most if not all of these armchair wannabe warriors would detumesce and piss their pants the first time they saw a human corpse up close and personal, I'd like to submit for your consideration some possible new names for them :

Item 1 : An international human rights group files a lawsuit against the ExxonMobil oil company, accusing it of actively abetting human rights abuses in Indonesia, and complicity in the murder, torture and sexual abuse of the local population, including supplying the Indonesian military with equipment to dig mass graves, as well as building interrogation and torture centres.

Item 2 : The US State Department urges the federal court to dismiss the lawsuit and declares that pursuit of the case would hinder Washington's war on terror.

Item 3 : Top industry contributors to Bush/Cheney election campaign :

Item 4 : The Financial Times doesn't even attempt embroidery : "Washington says, the lawsuit could discourage foreign investment in Indonesia, particularly in the energy and mining industries. "

I am moved, as I have been at other times, to say f--k the Bush administration, f--k them in the eye with a dead donkey's wasabi-dipped dick. They are pure evil. I am daily more and more of the opinion that it is the responsibility of every ethical person, American or otherwise, to oppose these filthy bastards to the full extent of their powers, by every legal means at your disposal.

And as for you bloodthirsty little father-figure worshipping lickspittles collectively known as 'warbloggers'? Well, we all know the root cause of your infantile needs to invade, overwhelm and subjugate, don't we?

How's that for debate?

1:27 AM

She's dirty all right, but no more so than the rest of the corrupt scumbags who run this circle-jerk cesspool of privilege.

She was rejected because she's a woman, pure and simple.

f--kwits. Asshats. Crapclowns. I f--king loathe these self-satisfied, centre-of-everyone's universe Korean men, and I loathe Korean politicians, who are not coincidentally almost without exception male, with a special nauseated red-eyed hatred that makes my head hum like a generator. Line these wrinkly old upper-caste cocksuckers up against a wall and mow them down, say I. The greedy old boys' networks in this country will guarantee that it remains the sh-thole that it is for anyone who's not part of their cadre. Slaves and their overlords, right down the line. The threadbare whip of Confucianism coupled with the half-understood yoke of transplanted Christianity keeping the poor poor and the rich rich, and anyone who's not a high-born male in a position of eternal subservience.

f--k 'em.

5:25 AM | 8 comments

This + This = This

1:16 AM | 12 comments

This is from a US government website. This is not a parody. Time to get the hell out of there, folks. Things are beginning to get weird scary.
[via boingboing]

8:47 PM | 4 comments

via Metafilter, some marvellously ironic TIPS-related info :

6:32 PM

John Pilger argues that 'war on terror' is a smokescreen created by the ultimate terrorist ... America itself.

[via wood_s_lot]

8:49 PM | 1 Comment

Hey, my American friends, why not take the sage advice of my friend here...

...and tell the bastards to go f--k themselves!

[Edit : Thanks to the random google-surfing psychos who crapped here, but I've closed the thread and deleted the bile, pathetically amusing as it was. Sue me.]

3:50 AM

It boggles my mind the things the American people are allowing Shrubya and his cohort of ratbastards to do to their once-great nation. It's sad, and somehow seems inevitable. Decades ago, when I gleefully predicted the implosion of America as a result of the rot at its very core, I never actually thought my predictions would come true!

Steve invites you to strap on the armband, don the brown shirt, and join in the Happy Fun Fascism Parade. Can I dob myself in for my UnAmerican activities? Will they have McDonalds at the labour camps?

[Background here, and here (thanks, Bb) if you're lost. The Sydney Morning Herald notes, mildly : "Historically, informant systems have been the tools of non-democratic states." Now that's comedy gold.]

Edit : Eeksy-Peeksy spoke recently, in his elegant way, about something tangentially related in Poland, which I was going to mention. Now seems like a good opportunity.

5:38 PM | 11 comments

What is happening in Cro-Magnon Territory and the Neanderthal territories?

Cro-Magnon forces moved into key Neanderthal towns in the Big River Caves at the end of cold season to try to halt a series of suicide attacks on its citizens.

There were many casualties in the military operation which also sparked a wave of protests in the Neanderthal world and led Cro-Magnon Territory's main ally, That Other Tribe, to call for killmaker withdrawals.

The action caused much hardship among Neanderthals and the militant rock-throwing campaign against Cro-Magnon Territory has continued since.

So how did the violence begin?

The Neanderthal intifada, or uprising, broke out at the end of The Long Cold Season When The Mammoths Died.

Analysts say the atmosphere at the time was ripe for an explosion. Neanderthal frustration that years of the peace process had failed to deliver their political aspirations was intensified by the failure of the Deep Cave summit in Hot Season.

Then Cro-Magnon hard-liner Arshon visited a site in Shared Hunting Grounds known to Neanderthal Shamen as the Noble Sanctuary and to Cro Magnon Ghost Talkers as Happy Killing Floor.

The Neanderthals viewed the visit as provocative because the hunting ground lies on territory captured by Cro-Magnons in the Grandfather war and is at the centre of the fierce dispute over the sovereignty of Shared Hunting Grounds. It ended in bloody clashes at the Shamen tents, which quickly spread through the occupied Neanderthal territories.

Correspondents say the visit was intended to underline the Cro Mag claim to the hunting ground and its holy sites.

What has happened to the peace process?

One of the weaknesses of the Father Times peace process was that it deliberately left the most difficult issues - the status of Shared Hunting Grounds, refugees and borders - until last, in the belief that this would make them easier to resolve.

These issues were finally discussed when the former Other Tribe Chief Clon made an all-out attempt to bring then Cro Mag Ghost Talker Ehurak and the Neanderthal leader Yasafat together at The Other Tribe's long house.

An agreement was in sight, but talks broke down over failure to agree on the future of Shared Hunting Grounds and - to a lesser extent - the fate of Neanderthal refugees.

Cro-Magnon leaders believed they had been generous to the Neanderthals, while Neanderthal negotiators rejected the proposals as inadequate.

The two sides came even closer to agreement when they met during The Long Cold Season When The Mammoths Died. But this, too, ended in failure.

There has been very little progress on the diplomatic front since Arshon took possession of the Leader Bone more than a year ago.

He has accused his predecessor of offering the Neanderthals unacceptable concessions and that all Cro-Magnon Territory got in return was violence.

One of the biggest obstacles to final status agreement is the issue of Cro Mag settlements, and Arshon has long been seen as a champion of the settlers' cause.

The Neanderthal Authority currently controls most of The Big River but less than 40% of the Big River Caves, in non-contiguous chunks that are dotted with Cro-Magnon settlements. The Neanderthals believe there can only be a purely Neanderthal state if the settlements are dismantled.

Why are both sides locked in this violence?

Arshon says there is no room for dialogue as long as violence continues. He said the Ehurak Government tried to negotiate under hails of rocks for several months but to no avail.

The Cro-Magnon leader has shown a resolutely tough paw in his dealings with the Neanderthals - but commentators say his policies have support among most Cro-Magnons.

They support the government's view that Cro-Magnon Territory is exercising its right to self-defence in the face of attacks from Neanderthal militants on Cro-Magnon civilians and defence forces.

The government accuses Yasafat of failing to contain militant groups like Big Stones Brotherhood and Neanderthal Ghost Eaters which carry out many of the attacks. But analysts are now increasingly arguing that Yasafat is in no position to control them.

The Neanderthals say militant attacks on Cro-Magnon Territory are inevitable as long as there is no satisfactory Neanderthal state.

The militant group BSB has pledged to escalate its activities and intensify the armed struggle against Cro-Magnon Territory. The group's popularity has soared recently, following the demise of the peace process and general sense of despair.

Could the peace process be revived?

Any common ground that appeared to exist at the Other Tribe's long house has been all but extinguished by more than a hundred thousand years of fighting.

The only thing that could make the two sides move is outside pressure.

There is hope that proposals put forward by more evolved branches of the species for peace and normalisation between Cro-Magnon Territory and its neanderthal neighbours could provide the much-needed momentum.

Under the terms of the proposal which was debated after The Long Cold Season When The Mammoths Died, Cro-Magnon Territory would withdraw from territory occupied in Grandfather Times and a Neanderthal state would be created with its capital in East Shared Hunting Grounds.

In return, Neanderthal nations would give Cro-Magnon Territory full diplomatic relations, including security guarantees, trade relations, animal skins, and some women.

But this plan will only be taken seriously by Arshon if it is actively promoted by the Other Tribes Big Chief Geush.

So far, the homo sapiens proposal has not led to any moves to halt the violence and revive the peace process.

[Search and replace liberties taken with this article.]