Continue reading »]]> This Monday, Rush Limbaugh took a vacation from his daily radio show, having a golem constructed from congealed pig diarrhea take over his hosting duties (few noticed he was gone), to attend a ceremony in Jefferson City, Missouri, in which he was inducted into the Hall of Famous Missourians. Limbaugh joins a select group of 39 of the most famous Missourians, including luminaries such as Mark Twain, Edwin Hubble, Harry Truman, and a wide assortment of people I suspect most people have never heard of, the latter of which is sure to include Limbaugh as a member in a mere 25 years once his daily throwaway radio show is long forgotten in favor of more lasting literary and oratory adventures.

As a result of his induction, a bronze bust of the inflammatory talk show host is to be placed in the Missouri Capitol rotunda. The placement of the bust in the rotunda, however, has fueled controversy given Limbaugh’s controversial nature. Limbaugh’s most recent controversy involved him calling Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown student, a “slut” and a “prostitute” when she testified before congress about why employers should offer health insurance coverage of birth control, seeming to think that she guzzles birth control pills before each sex act, unaware that the birth control pill only needs to be taken once a month to be effective, which is an understandable mistake for a man who takes his own pills with reckless, frenzied guzzling, so long as those pills are OxyContins. Given Limbaugh’s derision of prostitutes and sluts, of course, you’d think he’d consider showing his bust “slutty,” like the kind of thing a Georgetown student advocating for health insurance coverage would do.

The situation is more complex than it seems, however. In reality, Limbaugh is a forgettable stain upon history and the real motives for putting his bust into the Capitol rotunda have nothing to do with his fame. Under condition of anonymity, a Capitol insider agreed to speak to me and reveal the true, ominous purpose for putting his bust in the rotunda, which I’ve paraphrased below:

A few weeks back, five workers were drilling as part of routine construction in the basement. However, one evening, three of the five workers came running out of the basement, their eyes wide with terror. They did not stop to ask anyone for help, and indeed their faces betrayed that what they had witnessed was something beyond the help anyone could possibly offer. A member of the legislature grabbed one of them and asked what happened. He was unable to speak, and not simply because he was an illegal being paid $3 an hour for construction work, but because of sheer, unspeakable dread. The other two workers continued to run out of the building and were never seen nor heard from again, probably self-deporting themselves out of fear of the mystical power they’d unlocked and also Mitt Romney’s potential presidency.

The accosted worker was taken to a local hospital against his will–he thrashed and screamed and tried to escape the whole time (ambulance personnel were unphased; they see this behavior among many people who consider the insurance copays for their ER visit). After a few hours, he finally calmed, or at least was calmed relative to his previous abject terror (he still shook and shivered in the manner of one who just now realized Sarah Palin was serious the whole time), and he could finally focus enough to tell his story through quavering lips.

In the basement of the Capitol rotunda, the workers had been jackhammering the foundation, and a dark, unending fissure formed in a blinking instant–in a flash, out of nowhere–swallowing up one of the workers immediately as if it were Sandra Fluke’s vagina and it were truly as slutty as Limbaugh made it out to be. Black, inky smoke poured out of the deep crack as the others fell backwards in fright, and a loud dreadful rumbling issued from the yawning chasm, as if some terrible beast growling somewhere deep within were listening to Rush Limbaugh’s radio program. The workers could see nothing aside from the fissure, seemingly pulsating and growing in size like a living organism, and the terrible smoke. But they could sense a great power lurking all around them, feeding on their fear, producing awful thoughts in them, thoughts of such horror and shame they could never have imagined such things prior to seeing the smoking, unending chasm, because these men had never been to a Tea Party rally, obviously. At this point, three workers ran from the basement, managing to muster all of their willpower to escape the void’s mystical hold on them. The fourth worker, the other worker they left behind, could only look back at his retreating compatriots, stuck in his position like a Republican legislator being given a bent-over-backwards compromise by Obama. The worker telling this story said that he looked back once at that man as they fled, and the only thing he’s ever seen that was more horrifying than the sheer terror in the man’s eyes was the jagged, inhuman grin he wore on his lips before he was swallowed by the darkness. He then bluntly muttered that he’d seen at least five minutes of all the episodes of $h!t My Dad Says, as if to emphasize that he’s seen his share of horror. He then proceeded to watch an episode in full, a feat no living human has ever accomplished, as observing medical personnel gasped.

After hearing this story, a survey crew was sent into the Capitol rotunda’s depths to investigate. They descended but never returned. Historical documents revealed that the rotunda had been built on an Indian burial ground, which had been built atop a sacred dark forest, which in turn had grown over the ancient stone ruins of some mystical cult preceding even the Indians and the forest, filled with ancient daggers, ashes, stone artifacts, and badly preserved pierced skulls of children lying in fragments in a deep sacrificial pit. Whatever power lurked beneath the building, it was ancient and it was to be reckoned with, like Judge Judy except ten times worse but somehow less annoying.

A withered scholar of these arcane matters was consulted, and he confirmed the ancient evil, and his eyes seemed sad and without all hope as he spoke. But he did speak of one way to ward off the terrible evil, of one hideous object that held the foreboding power to constrain even the pure evil generated by Indian burial grounds atop mystical cults. And he laughed maniacally for a full minute (they timed him for some reason) before he revealed the nature of the ward.

The Limbaugh bust was thus immediately ordered to be sculpted. Some said the bust wasn’t even sculpted, but instead flung from the dark recesses of the universe, burning into our atmosphere as a dark meteor of unknowable composition, never touched by mortals. Others said it had been constructed by subterranean goblins using unicorn-bone chisels, for no human could touch the bust without being flung into the dark outer void, into a realm beyond knowing, beyond terror. When the bust was received, borne to the Capitol on horseback by a masked, cackling figure, those who looked into the bust’s hideous, bleak eyes wondered if perhaps they were merely replacing one evil with a greater evil. Inside Rush’s sculpted eyes, they could see a horrible future, a dreary apocalyptic wasteland with no signs of life, all goodness crushed, the Limbaugh bust standing as the lone guardian over a ruined plane of existence. But they had no choice, for the elder gods had been roused in the cavernous labyrinths beneath the Capitol. And the legislators swore a blood oath, to seal up the terrifying forces in the basement physically with cement and iron, and to seal it metaphysically with Rush Limbaugh’s bronze bust, under the pretense of him being inducted into the Hall of Famous Missourians, for his hideous, bronze visage, full of uncomprehending evil, was the only known mystical ward against the vile elder gods–or some say demons, imps, or Kardashians–lurking beneath the Capitol in their vile, mystical lair.

This, of course, is the more believable of the explanations for Rush Limbaugh’s bust being placed in the Capitol rotunda. Otherwise, we’re forced to believe the highly implausible “official” account: That Rush Limbaugh is considered famous enough to have a statue made and placed within our most cherished, highest offices. And that’s just crazy talk.

Continue reading »]]> Tonight, North Carolinians overwhelmingly voted for an amendment that would ban gay marriage. North Carolina had outlawed gay marriage previously, but this vote codified the ban into the state’s constitution, making the law harder to repeal. Now, when the next, more enlightened generation tries to overturn the gay marriage ban—because in AD 2032 they’re frankly more worried about robot weddings and Scientologist suicide-bombers than what the gays do—the task won’t be so easy.

Even with gay marriage already outlawed and this newest victory in an amended constitution, conservatives in the state are planning future bans on gay marriage that would require codification of the law into mandatory bumper stickers on trucks and neck tattoos depicting Calvin peeing on gay marriage, seeing as how North Carolinians are more likely to read neck tattoos and bumper stickers than the state constitution.

The new amendment not only bans gay marriage, but also same-sex civil unions and domestic partnerships. With all the attention on the gay marriage ban, however, other amendments that have passed have been overlooked. Corporations are now only allowed to merge if they are able to prove that they are a boy and a girl corporation. Homophones have been banned in favor of distinct pronunciation. Homo sapiens have been reclassified as “Sapiens, No Homo.” And North Carolina has changed its name to North Bob because having two Carolinas touching each other seemed to be bordering on lesbianism.

Predictably, pedantic and desperate liberals, mathematicians, and grammar teachers are mounting a legal challenge to the ban on gay marriage, noting that because it has been banned twice, the laws cancel each other out because they constitute a double negative, which is a no-no, or a yes (when the double-negative is factored), for gay marriage.

Continue reading »]]> Several thousand Christians have taken their own lives after a recent lecture given to journalism students by prominent sex columnist and gay rights supporter Dan Savage. During the lecture, Savage viciously bullied Christians by calling the Bible “bullshit”. When several Christians huffed repeatedly and said “Well, I never!” while walking out on his talk, Savage compounded the problem by referring to those in the walk-out as “pansy-assed”. His remarks have drawn condemnation from conservative bloggers and befuddled “who-gives-a-shits” from reasonable people without an incentive to foment retarded outrage in the form of a blog.

Ironically, Dan Savage is also a creator of the It Gets Better Campaign, whose goal is to advocate against the bullying of gay teens and whose creation was in response to a rash of suicides among gay teens. One conservative commented on Savage’s hypocrisy: “This is a man who advocates fighting back against the bullying of gay teenagers. And yet here he is, savagely bullying Christians by implying their faith was once ingested by bulls and passed through their digestive tracts! Now Savage is the one being the bully, and he’s oppressing Christianity—the largest religion in the world, with its totalic and hegemonic influence on American culture—by challenging it to a fight in the schoolyard at 4 PM.”

After the remarks, Christians found themselves with nowhere to turn for help from this bullying attack. There was some sort of swim-meet at the YMCA, the local churches were all busy hosting bake sales, the megachurch was temporarily closed after a kerfuffle involving a gay prostitute and methamphetamines, and the thousands of other outlets for Christian self-expression and community were also busy that night with various things. Thus, for thousands upon thousands of Christian teens, who looked around and found themselves surrounded by tens of tens of gay teens who think their religion is bullshit in a society in which gays still can’t get married, the only option was suicide.

Before jumping off a bridge, one Christian student shouted to onlookers below “I was deeply hurt by Dan Savage’s bullying attacks on my faith! When he called my faith bullshit, I immediately went online, looking for Youtube videos of strong, Christian men telling me that it would ‘get better’ once my pubes came in and I started shaving. But there were no such videos. All I found were videos of people telling sinful gays and sodomites that their lives would get better. But that means my life will get worse, because then I’ll have to watch all the gays holding hands and making out in parks and licking each other in the butt and such.” He then threw himself into the river below to the delight of all the godless homosexuals who read Dan Savage’s sex column.

Many Christians who committed suicide left behind notes saying they felt like society would no longer accept them, even though all they wanted to do was worship Christ and horribly curtail the rights of those who are different from them based on a book that also outlaws eating shrimp and suggests the death penalty for picking up sticks on Sunday.

The rash of Christian suicides has prompted church groups to create a Youtube campaign, called the “It Gets Better—You Become Legislators and CEOs in a Heteronormative Society and Will Cripple Gay Rights With Your Outmoded Views When You Grow Up—Campaign”. The videos are meant to assure Christian teens that it is totally natural to be Christian and there’s nothing to be ashamed of. “I know you have it tough,” says a pastor in one video recently uploaded to Youtube, “with that one gay kid you know probably thinking silently to himself that you’re stupid for worshiping a being for which there is no evidence and then relying on this blind faith to advocate for removing that gay kid’s rights. But it’s okay to be Christian. You aren’t abnormal. Your Christianity isn’t a disease. You were born-again this way.”

Continue reading »]]> When you hear the word slime, you probably think of a fresh sneeze, or green goop, or, if you’re weird and really into Freud, that your mother didn’t wipe your ass nearly to your satisfaction as a baby. What you most certainly do not think is “That sounds like something that belongs in my mouth!” (Unless you’re that weird guy stuck in Freud’s anal stage. Then who knows what the fuck you think is appropriate for your mouth.) However, despite this general rule concerning mouth/slime avoidance, beef processors have been introducing slime into your ground beef for years. It’s called pink slime. Because, as you’ve already no doubt figured out, it is pink and it is slimy.

The beef industry, of course, does not call it pink slime. They decided to go with the more palatable name lean finely textured beef, or LFTB for short. Lean finely textured beef, unlike pink slime, sounds downright delicious—even healthy! But it’s not as if the beef industry is going to give a product that looks like pink slime a more obviously descriptive name like pink slime. It’s in a business’s best interests to not name things descriptively, which is why, for example, a McDonalds Big Mac is not called Your Mother’s Vagina, even though it’s greasy and full of protein and something you definitely would not want near your mouth—just like your mother’s vagina—and, let’s face it, if you scrunch up a Big Mac in just the right way…it kinda looks like your mother’s vagina. In fact, the beef industry would go much further than just the nondescript name of lean finely textured beef if they could get away with it. Were it not for laws, morals, and the survival of society as a whole, the beef industry probably would have called their pink slime orgasm beef that gives you orgasms when you eat it, tit-pussy! (exclamation point included), or OBTGYOWYEI,TP! for short (to pronounce that acronym, just fill your mouth with pink slime and then try to say “objective yawp”—yep, you got it!).

What is pink slime, though? It’s a meat additive made from beef scraps and connective tissue that have been mechanically removed from the animal’s fat. Pink slime is what’s left after the meat for hamburgers and steaks is gone, basically. Because this meat tends to be laden with bacteria (from being so close to the cow’s germ metropolis and brown slime depository, otherwise called its anus), it must be processed with antibacterial ammonia to prevent the spread of bacteria, and surprisingly it has not been linked to any health problems despite this. Before the process for ridding this meat with bacteria was developed, though, the meat could only legally be used in pet food or given to homeless people in big, slimy gobs so they’ll squeegee your window better.

In short, pink slime is a gross-looking product that to date hasn’t been implicated in any sort of health problems. However, gross looks are enough to spawn outrage among ridiculous meat-eating consumers. But pink slime in meat isn’t the problem. The problem is the pink slime in your brain that grabs hold of your emotional response of disgust and tries to justify it and rationalize it at any cost. Even more problematic is that pink slime doesn’t even look that gross. It looks like soft-serve ice cream, for crying out loud, the most delicious thing there is! It only becomes gross when you learn that it’s made from meat. (But guess what! Soft-serve ice cream is made from a substance squeezed out of a cow’s tit! Ewww, tit-cream! Barf! Let’s boycott it!)

When this pink slime product was first revealed to the public a few years ago, people reacted with fear, calling for boycotts and demanding it be removed from meat. People who would gladly gnaw on the gristle and sinew of what was once a live chicken’s leg for some reason thought pink slime was too much. The same hipsters who decry this pink slime will gladly eat at an ethnic Vietnamese restaurant and dine on “authentic” meals like soup filled with tripe, hearts, and parts of animals they’ve never even heard of. Indeed, the classic hot dog that so many people will gladly shove down their gullets to such a degree that it is the pre-eminent food of choice for competitive eating, is also made from leftover meat. Pink slime may be gross, but it’s also gross when you cut open a cow and guts and shit spill out of it. It’s easy to think of a cheeseburger as some nostalgic, all-American food, but on a more descriptive level it’s an animal’s ground-up carcass covered with a congealed, gooey yellow substance produced by that same animal’s boobs wedged between pesticide-ridden lettuce with no caloric value and massive loads of sugary and starchy carbohydrates that make your kidneys do a workout the equivalent of running the New York marathon. Or you could just call it a cheeseburger. Needless to say, there are plenty of slimy and pink parts of a cow for you to worry about other than this lean finely textured beef additive.

Despite the overblown hype about pink slime, many restaurants and grocery stores have decided not to use or carry products that contain it. McDonalds, famous for golden arches, “healthy” salads that contain more calories than its burgers, and diabetes, no longer uses the product. Taco Bell, which was in the news recently for using a meat mixture that was only 35% beef and practically vegan, also no longer uses pink slime in its products. The beef industry itself has succumbed to consumer hysteria and will now start labeling its meat products that contain the pink slime. Presumably, the stickers will have little frowny faces and text that reads “This ground up cow with trace amounts of cow shit and E. coli also contains pink slime. It was also produced within a five mile radius of a factory that uses peanuts, because OMG NUTS!”

People have become obsessive over food and it’s time to stop. Approximately 5% of the population suffers from gluten sensitivity and yet Whole Foods has entire aisles of gluten-free products, because idiotic people assume that if a product is “something-free” that “something” must be horrible and should be ostracized and beaten with sticks. (Marketers, here’s an idea: Market your product as “free” of something it never contained to begin with! Put “Now with NO baby monkey testicles!” stickers on your graham crackers and consumers will immediately assume the other graham crackers MUST contain baby monkey testicles!) At grade schools you can’t open a jar of peanut butter without having the bomb squad called in. The craze of “organic” food has also become mainstream, despite all food being “organic” in the chemical sense (unless you’ve been eating spatulas and detergent), launched to popularity by its embrace of the naturalistic fallacy (i.e., whatever is more “natural” is “better”—even though a bear attack is also natural). However, I can accept organic foods (sometimes they emphasize good farming practices and ethical treatment of animals) and nut allergies (these allergies can be fatal) and even gluten-free products (whatever). But this outcry against pink slime is just stupid. If pink slime grosses you out, then don’t eat meat. Drink a fruit smoothie instead. Just don’t mix any strawberries in because the result may look like PINK SLIME!

Continue reading »]]> The Supreme Court heard arguments last week over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise known as Obamacare, Abominationcare, Get-the-Government-Out-of-My-Underwear-and-Doctor’s-Office-care, and several other pseudonyms that cannot be repeated because they sprinkle around the N-word liberally before appending the hyphenated monstrosity with the suffix “-care”. Perhaps in an effort to legitimate its adjectival description, the Supreme Court now holds the healthcare possibilities of millions in its craggy hands (Is this metaphor of the court as a person okay? Or does that only apply to corporations?), like some sort of fragile chicken egg that they could either choose to crush, getting salmonella-infused yolk all over the American people who then can no longer afford to treat such problems, or to nurture, letting the egg hatch into a chicken that somehow symbolizes healthy Americans (imagine the chicken draped in an American flag and doing push-ups or something), and now let’s just end this metaphor early because it’s not making sense and the meaning is being lost in over-the-top poultry metaphors and a syntactical maze of digressions, but suffice it to say the Supreme Court’s decision on the ACA will be momentous and warrant plenty of news coverage riddled with metaphors involving flightless birds in the months to come.

Not too long ago, people viewed a serious Supreme Court challenge to the legislation as some sort of jocular foray into an alternate dimension wherein dogs could talk and Obama really was a Muslim socialist. However, somehow the ACA is now being debated by the judges, and a corporation embodied in physical form with personhood is petting a talking dog somewhere. And even worse, the once preposterous-seeming event of the Supreme Court taking on the case against the ACA, let alone overturning this viable solution to our healthcare woes, is now entirely probable, and the whoosh sound you heard at the start of these hearings was the collective sound of every Democrat’s anus clenching up in fear at the prospect of going through the whole healthcare debate for a second time, knowing that the Republican health plan basically consists of digging a giant pit and telling sick poor people to jump in and bury themselves with this tiny, toy beach shovel that you’ll have to pay for out-of-pocket.

But despite the hullabaloo and the hoopla and other h-word alliterative synonyms, the first day of arguments was pretty boring by all accounts, with even veteran Supreme Court reporters who exhibit Pavlovian drool responses to obscure legal terminology like “affadavit”, “de jure”, and “pro se” describing the day’s events as “pretty fucking boring”, even noting that Clarence Thomas seemed to have been asleep the whole time and probably dreaming of something pretty raunchy given his constant REM-state mutterings of phrases like “hamster vagina” and “give it a good one-two in the knicker box”.

At any rate, the arguments on this first day possessed such somnolescent properties owing to the fact that the debate was very meta-, centering on whether the Supreme Court could even rule on the ACA’s constitutionality now or whether they had to wait until the individual mandate was actually implemented in 2014, and this subtle and boring departure was further injected with a lack-of-excitement serum when both sides agreed that the case could indeed continue unimpeded by such concerns.

The second day, however, is where the real red meat hit home, splattering domiciles with fatty beef metaphors of excitement, as intriguing oral arguments about the individual mandate’s constitutionality began. The individual mandate, of course, is the provision that requires Americans to buy their own health insurance or else face government-imposed penalties. The defender of the ACA, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, stammered and stumbled his way through the day, giving the impression to observers that he has never actually spoken out loud before in court, much like Clarence Thomas. In one memorable scene, Verrilli is asked a pointed question by one of the Justices, and he sputters and flails his lips like a cartoon character running in place in midair, spit flying everywhere like he’s using Morse Code composed of sequences of long and short strands of saliva, until he eventually gives up and takes a long series of gulps from his glass of water. It was like watching a car wreck, only unlike a car wreck the speaker would not suffer a probable fatality—just millions of uninsured Americans. Fortunately, Supreme Court reporters know that presentation does not matter to much to the Justices, as they care only for cold, hard facts—not presentation and rhetoric—and are probably only listening as a formality anyway and decided how they were going to vote eons ago before the law was even formulated or they were even glimmers in their pappys’ eyes.

Perhaps the most prominent question of the day involved Justice Scalia’s inordinate fear of being forced to buy broccoli. He asked whether allowing the government to force people to purchase health insurance would create a slippery slope where eventually the government would force terrified Americans to buy broccoli and/or other terrifying foods like eggplant or kale. Indeed, Scalia’s inability to tell the difference between health insurance and broccoli is frightening, and conjures up images of the Justice pouring hot velveeta cheese all over an insurance rep’s head or trying to weigh his doctor bills in the scale at his local grocery store’s produce section. The difference is obvious: Broccoli is not a market that has interstate ramifications the way healthcare does. If I travel to Florida and the light shining off Governor Rick Scott’s head blinds me, I will go to an Emergency Room in Florida and be treated whether I have money or not. Scalia, however, cannot go into a grocery store and expect to be given free broccoli, especially given that he has no broccoli insurance. Besides, not everyone is implicitly in the broccoli market, whereas virtually everyone is already in the market for healthcare, in the sense that, should a rabid marmoset attack and mangle our penises, we will be taken to a local hospital and cared for by physicians who say, “Really? A marmoset did this? Just admit it, you were fucking the pool pump.” By virtue of being a living organism that resides in America, we are participating in the healthcare market, whether we like it or not. Essentially, the law is not forcing people to buy a product they don’t want to use. It is forcing people to buy a product that they are using and will be using, whether from a sudden heart problem, a marmoset attack, or amorous pool pump activities. This is not so much the case with broccoli, as scary as its greenery may be to Scalia.

The other Justices also asked questions and offered defenses and criticisms of the ACA.  Sotomayor and Ginsburg seemed to offer defenses of the ACA to help out the apparently beleaguered Verrilli. The only Justice that did not speak was Clarence Thomas, which was unsurprising given that he has not spoken from the bench in six years, though some women have said he speaks with his eyes and they seem to be saying “Open wide”. Occasionally he will press his hands to an invisible wall, as if he is trapped in some sort of transparent box, or will pull unseen handkerchiefs from his nose and ears, but he has never spoken, prompting many to assume that Thomas takes his miming hobby very seriously, and that he’s not about to let a case affecting the health of 40 million Americans get in the way of his devotion to the lost art of clowning. He doesn’t need to find out how the healthcare market works by asking questions; all he needs to know is how to make a child uncomfortable at his own birthday party and how to make balloon animals other than a daschund.

The scariest part of the day, however, came from the apparently skeptical questions coming from Justice Kennedy that were aimed at Verrilli. Kennedy, like a teenage girl in her first year of college, can go either way. (Teenage co-eds are renowned for being swing votes in the Supreme Court.) Unlike the conservative bloc of Justices and the liberal bloc of Justices, his decision in the case isn’t a foregone conclusion. But Justices tend to direct more questions at the side they oppose, and thus the ACA seems to be in peril based solely on Kennedy’s peppering of questions in the Solicitor General’s direction. Of course, trying to figure out how the Justices will rule is often an exercise in futility, and we won’t know for sure until someone finally figures out how to read minds (for real this time, though) or until the decision is rendered sometime in the coming months.

There was also a third day of hearings, concerned with whether the healthcare law as a whole would have to be struck down or only the parts that are dependent on the individual mandate, if the mandate were ruled unconstitutional. Most of the good things in the law, of course, are fully dependent on the mandate. The rule against prohibiting discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, the rule against prohibiting age discrimination, and the rules prohibiting insurance companies from being heartless dicks would all be put in peril if the mandate is struck down. In the end, though, we have to abide by the Supreme Court’s ruling, knowing that their great wisdom—backed as it is by a great government healthcare plan—perhaps can see why it is indeed plausible to strike down a law that finally offers a solution to our nation’s healthcare woes, all the while it is perfectly acceptable for our country to collect our tax revenues and use them to purchase bombs that blow up people in wars most of us don’t support, because, god dang it, while this law may not open a Pandora’s box to the murder of innocent children in Afghanistan, it sure does open up the possibility of a frightening dystopian future where we’re forced to buy broccoli and—horror of horrors—kids with holes in their hearts will be guaranteed adequate health insurance while they eat this government greenery!

Continue reading »]]> Michelle Malkin’s website Twitchy recently posted the following picture, purporting to address the “media bias” present in the reporting on Trayvon Martin’s death:

The only problem, of course, is that the image on the right is not a picture of Trayvon Martin. In fact, the image seems to derive from Stormfront, a well-known Internet haunt for white supremacists. Malkin quickly apologized for the error and corrected the post, though, of course, actually the image is still quite accurate. This is indeed a fine example of media bias. Where other news sources might use the older, fresh-faced picture of a deceased boy that his family provided to the media, Malkin went with the intrepid reporting of skinheads and neonazis and used a more threatening picture of a completely different kid.

Indeed, media sources are intentionally using images that portray Trayvon in a more positive light. Typically, Zimmerman is depicted in a mugshot next to a picture of a fresh-faced Trayvon when he was younger. This “bias” is a counterweight to the bias that already exists: the bias against African Americans.

Believe it or not, people tend to view African Americans with suspicion, and to associate African American styles of dress and culture with crime and violence. Trayvon looks more “innocent” in the photo typically used because he looks more white. It is helpful to use a photo where Trayvon is made to look more white because African Americans are already subject to a whole host of biases and prejudices—some of which could, for example, cause a guy with a gun to stalk a black man suspiciously around his own neighborhood! Still, it is nice to see that Michelle Malkin is trying to rouse up these irrational biases that make African Americans more likely to receive the death penalty over white people convicted of the same crime, that make African Americans serve longer sentences, etc, because, let’s face it, showing a picture where Trayvon looks white and isn’t in a hoodie or baggy pants with a gold grill won’t conjure up irrational prejudices and associations of crime in latently racist white people!

And that’s the point: It shouldn’t fucking matter that Trayvon wore hoodies and had gold teeth. But it does matter in an implicitly and sometimes explicitly racist society. These outward displays of African American culture are misinterpreted by white people as indicators of crime in just the same way a black kid walking home can be misinterpreted as someone scouting a neighborhood for a burglary. Displaying a picture of Trayvon with gold teeth, a picture that anyone with a rudimentary understanding of psychology knows will incite racist biases, doesn’t “correct” media bias; it enflames pre-existing prejudices. Meanwhile, displaying a picture of Trayvon when he was younger—without a hoodie, or a sideways hat, or gold teeth, or any other fashion accessory popular among black youth—isn’t creating bias; it’s correcting the likely bias against an African American male by a culture that demonizes black men. A culture where even those black men that reach the highest levels of prestige and acclaim are accused of being secretly Muslim and met with constant demands to produce a valid birth certificate.

Michelle Malkin had to apologize for the picture, even though it correctly states that it is an example of media bias, because she recognized that her version of media bias, which used a fake image of Trayvon, was not equivalent in degree to the media bias she was purporting to critique. It was orders of magnitude more biased. And this point shows why, even if she had shown actual pictures of Trayvon, using an image emphasizing his “blackness” is also orders of magnitude more biased: because this sort of bias is helped along and bolstered by ages of prejudice and racism (creating stronger bias), whereas the original “bias” she critiques is fighting desperately against this historical tide (weakening the bias).

So let’s make a deal, Michelle Malkin (pictured to the left), you can accuse the “liberal” media of bias by showing pictures of Trayvon looking “innocent” (i.e., “white”), but recognize that this bias is fighting against ages of racism, and doesn’t need your “corrections” to make things fair, because any of your attempted “corrections” will only be sucked into the powerful wake of racial biases and pushed far out into the sea of racism. Let the media have its “liberal bias” of portraying Trayvon as innocent in pictures, and I’ll let you take solace in the disproportionate incarceration, death penalty judgments, and false accusations of African Americans that more than make up for this tiny fucking bias.

Correction: I made a mistake. Earlier I posted a picture of a turd and said it was a picture of Michelle Malkin. That is actually a picture of a completely different piece of shit. I regret the error.

Continue reading »]]> Geraldo, the man best known for mustache, ‘stache, moustache, and the hair on his upper lip, has been in the news lately for his suggestion that Trayvon Martin’s tragic death is largely the fault of his hooded outerwear. The comment was briskly torn apart by several rabid wolverwines, followed by 90% of Twitter, everyone who posted that Kony video on Facebook, and that one guy who still uses LinkedIn for some reason. In response, Geraldo’s own son told him that he was ashamed of him (presumably because of his hoodie comment, although I suspect the mustache also slightly adds to the sense of shame), and thousands have worn hoodies in protest of the remarks, causing a 10% rise in hoodie stock prices and a massive 67% decrease in the sales of those large novelty mustaches they sell in places like Spencer’s Gifts or abandoned alleyways behind Geraldo’s summer home where drifters collect his hair clippings.

What everyone is ignoring, of course, is the element of truth in Geraldo’s words, seeing as how this truth has been distorted by the mainstream media and Geraldo’s own long, flowing mustache hairs. According to polls of increasingly frightened white folk, black men in hoodies are over 34% scarier than black men in Christmas sweaters, meaning that white people’s fear of black men increases from 100% to 134% when a hoodie is introduced, which is especially compelling because this is mathematically impossible – but math has never stopped the irrational fears of white people before.

The problem with Geraldo’s statements isn’t that he went too far in attributing problems best explained by systemic racism to outerwear that is worn by virtually everyone, from teenage girls to 40-year-old men in mustaches who pretend to be journalists, without any resulting gunshot wounds. No, the problem is that he didn’t go far enough.

Hoodies are frightening, to be sure, but what about all the other things that are threatening when black people wear them? What about tanktops, sneakers, baggy jeans, clothes worn completely backwards, FUBU, those puffy winter coats, those skull caps that Common wears all the time, white tuxedos, sideways hats, backwards hats, slightly off-center hats, a hat facing any direction if it has an NBA logo on it, large chains with a mohawk and beard, etc? These articles of clothing, like hoodies, also frighten innocent white people and cause their trigger fingers to twitch as their lives flash before their eyes.

What Geraldo should have done is advised black people to stop wearing any sort of clothing that is, or ever was, associated with African American culture. Not only should black youth dispose of their hoodies—they should dispose of all their normal clothing and stock up on sweater vests, tight-fitting khaki pants, flannel, sweaters featuring prominent images of chihuahuas or dalmatians, short-shorts, mom jeans, tye-dye, black hipster glasses, crocs, those weird fucking shoes that have toes and make you look like some sort of crazy person, suspenders, and ties and/or bow ties. They’d also have to do a sort of crop-rotation of fashion every few years, because once white people begin to associate sweater vests and suspenders with black people and hence with crime, black people would be forced to adopt again whatever it is in this counterfactual future white people are currently wearing (for example, hypothetically, leisure suits and Snuggies).

And that’s only the fashion. In order to truly achieve the non-threatening, white-friendly appearance of someone like Urkel, other visual cues must also be accounted for, including behavioral cues. Do not limp, swagger, strut; instead, pretend you have been pulled over by a cop for no reason and are being forced to say your ABCs backward while being made to walk a straight line and touching your finger to your nose. This reassures white people not only that you are straight-laced, but also that you are not drunk given your ability to say your ABCs and touch your nose. Instead of listening to rap music, listen to Justin Bieber (or, if you miss all the misogyny, opt for country music). Black youth should also avoid using slang. Don’t even use slang that is common among white teenagers, because the old white people with guns don’t know the difference. When dancing, do something resembling the Carlton dance, or if that fails, country line dancing. When in public, pre-emptively put your arms behind your head and shout out “I’m unarmed!” every five seconds or so, to put any white people at ease and also to make it easier for when the police inevitably try to arrest you for no apparent reason.

Most importantly, though: stay out of the sun and constantly cover yourself in flour, the whiter the better.

Geraldo was on the right track, but he clearly didn’t go far enough. Requiring a 48-hour waiting period and a transvaginal ultrasound before the purchase of a hoodie is a good idea, but hoodies are only part of the problem. By doing all the other things mentioned above, black people, you will probably never be shot again. Racism will cease to exist if you’d just use your common sense and get totally subsumed by white-person culture and rid yourselves of silly things like tradition, ethnic identity, and your natural skin color (go on, pull your skin off completely if you have to). Because, as we all know, the real problem in this country isn’t that privileged white people are shooting black people after racially profiling them and stalking them while stroking their guns so as to make the black people incredibly afraid and uncomfortable. No, the real problem is that black people look scary!

Next week, I’ll address how Geraldo’s brilliant insights apply to women, and why wearing a sexy, revealing dress, or easy-to-remove sweatpants, or threateningly sexy hoodies are various ways women “ask” to be raped, and how the only way to avoid asking for a man’s penis inside of your hoo-ha is to wear a full suit of armor at all times (but not a SEXY suit of armor) and/or grow a penis.

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In this episode, Dustin addresses the important topics of the day, including Gallagher’s heart attack, the horrible atrocities happening in Afghanistan (and the screwed up priorities of the people there), Dick Cheney’s new heart, the Reason Rally, and Romney’s metamorphosis into a childhood toy. The main stories covered are:

1. The Kony2012 campaign brought a lot of awareness to a horrible warlord, but does the group that brought this to light deserve to be criticized? What are the merits of slacktivism and posting crap about Africa to your Facebook feed? Why is this guy outside naked and jizzing all over my car?
2. Trayvon Martin was shot by George Zimmerman, the captain of a Neighborhood Watch program in Florida, and more and more details seem to incriminate Zimmerman as needlessly targeting Martin based only on race and then unjustifiably shooting Martin (although sadly he may have been “justified” based on Florida’s interpretation of when it is justifiable to shoot someone). I’ll take you through the facts of the case and also discuss the demerits of lax gun regulation and how it emphasizes social norms that contribute to a more violent society.

Enjoy the show! Remember to rate this crap on iTunes or wherever the hell you manage to find this thing so that people will see your rating and be like, “Oh, maybe I should try listening to this” before they scream in terror at what they are hearing and decide never again to listen to something just because someone reviewed it on iTunes.

Continue reading »]]> You’re severely drunk and conservative. You’re driving down the highway at 90 miles per hour in your Hummer, dangerously weaving in and out of lanes while popping Oxycontin into your mouth like Pez. Suddenly, you’re being pulled over by a police officer. As you drunkenly stumble out of your car, the first thing you say is, “Hey! You can’t pull me over! Look at that guy over there! He’s driving at least 70 miles per hour!”

This is essentially the strategy of conservatives defending Rush Limbaugh. After he made several untrue personal attacks against Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke when she spoke out on contraception healthcare coverage, Limbaugh was soon embroiled in controversy. The response by his defenders is mostly not to say his remarks were correct, but merely to redirect criticism onto popular liberal comedian Bill Maher, pointing out that he has called Sarah Palin a “twat”. Or, to use the original metaphor, they are defending a drunk driver weaving through lanes at 90 miles per hour by saying, “Look at this guy driving 70 miles per hour over there!”

To be fair, Maher and Limbaugh do have a lot in common. Both host popular political shows. Both are older, white men. Both like to make jokes (though Limbaugh’s are often unintentional). Both have hair and teeth. And both have said disparaging things about women. However, there are big differences between Limbaugh’s attacks against Sandra Fluke and Maher’s mockery of Sarah Palin.

The main criticism of Maher, in fact, hinges on the same mistake made in Limbaugh’s public apology to Fluke: emphasizing that the problem was the use of “bad words” over what was actually meant. Limbaugh’s apology, for example, makes it clear that he was only apologizing for using the two words “slut” and “prostitute”. Presumably, he meant to use more family-friendly words like “woman of the night” or perhaps “person who puts hee-hees in her hoo-ha in exchange for money”, but which nevertheless still mean that Sandra Fluke wants to be paid to have sex. Limbaugh seems to think his remarks were problematic not because he falsely accused Fluke of being a whore, but because he specifically used naughty words like “slut” and “prostitute”. This is confused for two reasons:

1. “Prostitute” is not a bad word, you fucking idiot.
2. The actual problem isn’t with your word choice, but with the fact that you falsely accused a woman of being a whore—based on ridiculous misunderstandings about birth control.

Rush could have called her any other synonym or synonymous phrase for “prostitute”, and there’d be just as much outrage, because no one cares that he used any particular language. His remarks were mostly made public because they were in the context of an idiotic blowhard who clearly didn’t understand how female birth control works. Essentially, he argued that Fluke wanted to be paid by the government to have sex, which made her a slut and a prostitute. That she was having so much sex that she couldn’t afford all the birth control. That this was a world-class floozy who couldn’t keep her legs shut because she kept taking all those birth controls to have all that sex!

The problem with these remarks is that they are completely false and his only evidence for Fluke being a “slut” is a ridiculous misunderstanding about how female birth control works. Most women do not use the female condom, and hence do not have to use more birth control the more they have sex. Limbaugh’s ridiculous naivety on this point only underscored the need for more women’s voices to be heard during the contraception hearings. In short, the problem wasn’t the specific language he used, but that the things he said were deliberate attempts to falsely malign Fluke’s character and do harm to women’s healthcare.

Is this at all comparable to Maher’s descriptions of Sarah Palin as a “twat”? Not really. Maher’s critics are going after him specifically because he used “bad words”. That is, in the context of Maher’s statement, if you removed the word “twat”, then there’s nothing that bad being said. Basically, Maher was making a joke about how Palin could confuse “tsunami” as the name of a country and want to invade it, and then said “Speaking of dumb twats…” as a transition. In this context, the function of “twat” is meant to convey dislike, disgust, and disapproval of her as a stupid person. If he had said, “Speaking of dumb people”, presumably there would be little offense, yet this is essentially what is meant by “dumb twat”—the word “twat” just emphasizes his dislike of Palin as a person. You could even argue that “twat” is meant to convey womanhood in some sense, so he essentially means “dumb woman that I dislike,” but that hardly means he thinks all women are as dumb as Palin.

Furthermore, Palin is a public figure, and well-known for gaffes that make her appear stupid or uneducated (for example, when asked in an interview what specific newspapers she read, a flustered Palin finally said she read them all). There is plenty of evidence to suggest she is a bit dim. Palin is also a well-known enemy of feminism, and hence of women’s rights in general. If anyone deserves to be called a twat or a cunt, it’s a public figure who constantly says stupid things and does not support women’s rights. In fact, Maher presumably calls her names like cunt and twat specifically because of her anti-woman positions when it comes to abortion and equality, so it is disingenuous to portray these remarks as attacks on all women. (Some feminists, I realize, may disagree that you can use these words in pro-women contexts, but I disagree with these criticisms that see words like “cunt” as unchanging platonic forms that cannot possibly be used in the ways we typically use other words—sarcastically, ironically, etc.—but let’s not get into that sinkhole of time and energy.)

So the problem with Maher is that he used naughty bad language against a well-known, demonstrably incompetent public figure because she stood against women’s rights and other reasonable causes. The problem with Limbaugh is different. He called a relatively unknown woman a whore without any good reason, in the context of an anti-women’s rights rant. He said she wants to be paid to have sex. When Maher called Palin a twat, he didn’t also describe her as a vagina, because he wasn’t trying to impugn her as a woman. Or in other words, Maher said a naughty word but didn’t mean anything offensive by it; Limbaugh didn’t say as naughty a word but meant something highly offensive by it.

And yes, Maher was not being anti-woman when he called Palin a twat. When I’m cut-off by someone while driving, I’ll frequently have an outburst like “Cocksucker!” This is not because I think sucking cocks is a terrible thing (in fact I think it is a wonderful gift). Nor is it meant to imply that only gay men or women who use their mouths for sexual pleasure are the types that would drive a car so badly. It’s simply an insult I blurt out at assholes who cut me off. It essentially means, “YOU ARE A HORRIBLE PERSON AND I HOPE CALAMITIES BEFALL YOU”, but is much easier to say than all that and has those nice, hard consonant sounds that make most insults sound so impressive and feel so good to say. This is the sense in which Maher is using a word like “twat”. This is NOT the sense in which Limbaugh was using the word “slut”, though, as he literally described Sandra Fluke as wanting to be paid to have sex, and he used other literal descriptors of her so-called sluttiness to malign this woman.

There’s nothing wrong with being a woman. In fact, there’s nothing wrong with being a slutty woman, or even with being a prostitute. However, Limbaugh’s remarks were meant to falsely tar a woman’s credibility by implying she had a lot of sex for money as she spoke out in favor of women’s rights. Maher was essentially just calling a politician with demonstrable ineptitude an idiot. Now, ask yourself, do you really want to say these are really examples of the same thing? Do you still want to point at the guy going 10 miles over the speed limit after you’ve been pulled over for drunk driving at 30 miles over the limit?

Continue reading »]]> Review of Unedited Video Reveals He Was Just in a Deep Sleep

No, Wait – Okay, Yeah, He’s Actually Dead

No, Seriously

Andrew Breitbart—perhaps best known for unveiling Anthony Weiner’s penis to the world, helping to bring down ACORN, and for drunkenly shouting obscenities at you from a random podium that he’d brazenly overtaken—passed away yesterday, March 1, 2012, reportedly of natural causes.

Aside from his family, friends, and various sociopaths waving Ron Paul placards, it is hard to imagine many mourning his death. He was crude, crass, and willing to lie and deceive to further his vile agendas. He could be called the Libertarian version of Christopher Hitchens, except without Hitchens’ charm and wit and tolerance for alcohol. A small part of his legacy was his contribution to the development of the so-called “new media” of online news aggregators and blogs, but his larger legacy will no doubt be his role in the mainstreaming of deception in the media. That and his incoherent shouting.

Perhaps Breitbart’s greatest media accomplishment was helping to chop down ACORN before it could grow into an oak. He did so by publicizing heavily edited hidden video recordings of ACORN employees seemingly giving a prostitute (played by an actress) illegal financial and tax advice. Many of these videos, of course, show employees who are merely being sympathetic to an actress claiming to be an abused prostitute. At least one of the employees was saying deliberately absurd and verifiably untrue things because she realized she was being hoaxed by actors. (I believe she said she had killed her husband, chopped down a cherry tree, and laid golden eggs.) Another employee gave advice, but as soon as they left she immediately reported them to the police. Most importantly, ACORN as an institution did not help these actors in any way. Some of their individual employees only SEEMED to be doing so (often only because the videos were edited)—and ALL of these employees were fired, including the ones who probably didn’t deserve to be fired (like the woman who called the police). However, Breitbart released these heavily edited versions of these videos to the public and used them as examples of ACORN’s problems as an institution, rather than as the more truthful potential problems of a few employees. Funding for ACORN began to dry up as they gained negative media attention and the public began to believe the acronym stood for Accomplished Corrupt Orangutans Reading Newspapers—and there’s nothing the public hates more than educated orangutans—because, hey, it seemed like the public would believe anything Breitbart said about ACORN at this point. So what had started with an idiotic actor in a garish Halloween-style pimp suit and an actress pretending to be a prostitute secretly filming people without their permission turned into a video edited and disseminated by Breitbart to destroy ACORN.  Breitbart had harnessed his powers of deception to destroy an organization whose only fault was a few bad employee decisions among an organization that did overwhelming good to help the poor in matters of predatory lending, housing, disaster relief, and voter registration. So let’s check that scoreboard again: Asshole who deceives the media with edited videos and is essentially a worthless wart on the side of humanity: 1, Community organization that actually helped poor people and did way more good for society than Breitbart: 0.

With the success of his attack on ACORN, Breitbart naturally sought out other Left-leaning targets to destroy, as well as giving James O’Keefe, the idiot who secretly filmed ACORN employees, a larger national platform for more highly misleading secret videos in which he may or may not be wearing a ridiculous pimp hat. Breitbart’s next biggest conflict came with his allegations against Shirley Sherrod, though by this time the mainstream media had caught on to his deceptive tactics and unraveled his lies much more quickly. Sherrod worked for the USDA, and Breitbart had uncovered a video of her in which she appeared to be practicing the age-old conservative bugaboo of “reverse racism”—she appeared to be saying she would deny her services to a white farmer specifically because he was white. Once news of the scandal was revealed, Sherrod was forced to resign. However, after full, unedited versions of the video were released, it was quickly discovered that Sherrod was not being a reverse-racist or even a forward- or sideways-racist. In the rest of her talk on the video, she goes on to describe how it was wrong to feel that way, that it is her duty to help everyone in need—and indeed, the white farmers mentioned in the video even came forward to defend Sherrod and describe how she helped them.

With the Sherrod story blowing up in his face and his deceptive tactics being revealed so quickly on top of a defamation suit filed by Sherrod against him, Breitbart seemed to be quickly heading toward a future of obscurity inside the far-Right echo chamber, where only the most rabid and schizotypal of paranoid conservatives imagining attacking socialist Muslims everywhere would ever listen to him. That is, until Breitbart finally broke a story that actually turned out to be true, through some miraculous work of an improbable deity, no doubt.

Yes, Breitbart actually broke a “significant” (the story itself was not significant, but its results were) true story, and perhaps this is the one, barely legitimate reason you could ever call him a “journalist.” His one true story, of course, was about a topic of much more magnitude than a community organization aiding child prostitution or a government employee being reverse-racist. It was about the most important topic of them all: A congressman’s penis. Yes, Breitbart had reserved the one truthful bone in his body not for a story with actual real-world repurcussions, but to reveal a story that belonged right up there on the supermarket newsstands next to the article about celebrity cellulite pictures on the beach. The long story made short is that congressman Anthony Weiner had been sending pictures of his penis to various young women on Twitter. So far as we know, he did not have sex with any of them. He did not pay any of them to have sex with him. Unlike most Breitbart stories, this one seemed to be only a minor infraction, so one would think this would not result in any significant outcome—yet as with all Breitbart’s stories, the victim was destroyed, and Weiner ultimately decided to resign amidst the uproar that had spread even to his own party leaders.

In short, Breitbart’s political legacy has been the destruction of an overall force for good with trumped-up charges, the firing of a good USDA employee over out-of-context video, and the revelation that, yes, congressmen have penises, too, which somehow led to said congressman losing his job even though, technically, taking a picture of your junk is not a crime (whereas continually peddling lies to destroy organizations’ and people’s reputations IS a crime). He was a Libertarian whose main claims to fame involved hideous distortions to the news media.

But, seeing as how Breitbart just died, and for some reason it is a cultural norm to try to think of nice things to say about overall despicable people when this natural occurrence happens upon them, I suppose I will take this time to say one good thing about the man. He DID, after all, help to develop the Huffington Post and Drudge Report, which helped usher in the era of the new media. At least, this is the typical thing for which Breitbart is lauded amidst all of his disreputable credits elsewhere.

However, let us reflect on this influence in the new media. Earlier, I chastised Breitbart for promoting deception and lies in the media—but isn’t his involvement in the creation of things like the Huffington Post just as problematic on these grounds? The Huffington Post, after all, is not known for its objectivity or stellar reporting. In fact, one could see the rise of the Huffington Post, which was recently sold to AOL, as further promulgating the lack of objectivity and lack of rigorous reporting that has caused the prevalence of biased, deceptive media coverage at the expense of real journalism. While Arianna Huffington is collecting $315 million from AOL, her network of unpaid slave laborers write SEO-optimized nonsense without the means or incentives to do any investigative journalism aside from copying and pasting a New York Times article and changing a few verbs. And when it’s not rehashing news uncovered by actual reporters, the Huffington Post is giving a pedestal to New-Age cranks selling woo and alternative medicines that don’t work. In this new media, when news is broken, it is frequently the result of hidden cameras in a fake hooker’s cone-shaped brassiere whose footage is edited to make the story “pop.” So yes, let us reflect on the one “good” thing Breitbart did: and then suddenly realize it’s only one further link in the chain of his ultimate legacy of deception journalism.

So let’s not think too fondly of Breitbart, even in his death. He tried to destroy people who do good and he has proven to be a malign influence on the media. I’m not happy he collapsed this morning in Brentwood, California, yet I’m not quite sad, either.

Perhaps the biggest irony is that Breitbart, a self-described “Reagan Conservative” and critic of Obamacare, would be pronounced dead at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. What a fitting, symbolic end.