Arrested, facing serious charges for beating down Nazis

This is so fucked up and backwards, but expected: pigs defending white power. Some people involved with a San Francisco protest against Arizona's new anti-immigration legislation got into a fight with Nazis who call themselves the Bay Area Nationalist Anarchists. "Nationalist anarchist" makes no sense, seeing as the fundamental tenet of anarchism opposes nation states. Anyway, they're Nazis. They talk some bullshit about "self determination" and their "tribes," describing themselves as "white separatists." Fucking Nazis. Unfortunately, two of the people who attacked them are up on felony charges. Even more unfortunately, the Nazis weren't hurt very badly.

Nazis have no rights. They surrendered them when they embraced an ideology of extermination and wanton violence. Their very existence is predicated on intimidation of anyone not like them. There should be no confusion about the fact that anyone involved with white power, however they try to rename it, favors the annihilation of all people of color, homosexuals and any other "deviants." See the Holocaust for reference.

Fuck them. And not just in principle. These people need to be kicked off the streets wherever and whenever they appear. They can use their "free speech" as much as they want, but the minute their speech turns to intimidating and wiping out people for being born, anyone threatened by such speech (which is always linked to action) has the right to respond in any way she or he sees fit. I do not give a fuck about what people say is in the Constitution or what the Supreme Court rules - NO ONE has a protected right to build movements that threaten the livelihood, well-being or existence of any ethnic, religious, sexual or racial group based purely on the fact that the people are of that ethnic, religious, sexual or racial group.

Their ideology has nothing to do with defense. In fact, it is extremely on the offensive - can anyone really deny that all people of color have always been oppressed here and that white people have ALWAYS been in charge in this country? Fucking idiots, the government has already done this work for you. YOU ARE THE MAN, WHITE MAN. But it's not enough for a lot of them. Assholes don't even realize there could not be an America without racial minorities. Black people were the fundamental labor force for centuries - they built the country, with their hands and labor. And now, "illegal" immigrants do all the dirty work so you can have cheap shit food at Olive Garden and get your lawn cut. Finally, and most important to people of this persuasion - THE ONLY REASON YOU HAVE THE BENEFITS OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE WHITE IS BECAUSE FOR FIVE HUNDRED YEARS, EUROPEANS AND EUROPEAN AMERICANS HAVE DILIGENTLY CONSTRUCTED AN OPPOSITIONAL, UNDESIRABLE DEFINITION OF BLACK. Fucking shit.

So anyway, yes, fuck these people, each and every one. Mace, tire irons, ice picks, shovels, knives, guns, pitchforks, letter openers, spoons, axes, rocks, whatever it takes.

As Aus Rotten so elegantly put it, "Don't sympathize with something that has no sympathy. Fuck Nazi sympathy."

Buckets for the Cure

Not fucking kidding. This is in line with a series of fictional, hopelessly misdirected/evil charitable organizations friends and I came up with, such as Dumpsters for Africa, which would send American dumpsters to impoverished African countries so that people there would be able to root through them and get something to eat and Wells for Children, which would be addressing the problem of overpopulation.

Anyway, Buckets for the Cure. It's real. It involves you buying a bucket (does anyone even think about the fact that the packaging of your "food" is a bucket?) of greasy fried death hormone torture chicken at Kentucky Fried Chicken, and them giving fifty cents to the Susan G. Komen foundation that does things with breast cancer, which isn't the leading cause of death among women in America, the leading cancer among women in America or the most deadly cancer among women in America. However, it does seem to be the only disease among women in America that deserves much interest, as evinced by pink everything. Breast cancer has been commodified to no end, and I cannot imagine how much money that foundation has made for corporations (like Proctor and Gamble, with their fucking pink Swiffer - does cancer stick to it?Who knows how many diseases that company has given people with its toxic everything.). Maybe some corporate megaboard controls it.

Fifty cent donation. Wow. WOW, Kentucky Fried Chicken (which is really owned by Yum! Brands, which is really owned by Pepsi), WOW. You are so giving. Wow.

Anyway, yeah, so it's offensive to the senses, but also offensive to any idea of health, in a very simple way: eating this shit will help you get breast cancer, as well as many other diseases. It will make your breast cancer worse. An anti-breast cancer foundation is telling you to go eat it, explicitly. Perhaps not as explicitly, they are telling you to eat as much of it as you can afford/stomach, so they can get money "for breast cancer." What ABOUT breast cancer? "Research."

Here is the result of a little bit of research I've done: stop eating garbage. It helps out with many ills. I promise.

They are encouraging you to eat some of the unhealthiest food available. To fund them. To help fix you. When you get sick from eating it. Insane. And bankrupt.

If anyone cares enough, why don't you just send money to the foundation itself? Probably cause you are fat, lazy and love an excuse to eat more trash. Pepsi is gonna make extra millions off of your stupid, thoughtless, gullible fat ass. They're the real charity.

More border war crap

Some pig got shot in Arizona when he played hero and confronted what the government/media says were five men smuggling "bales" of marijuana all by himself. Big surprise. Hope it was worth it, chief. Getting shot over weed.

Anyway, Arizona immigration shit aside, you can throw all the laws and deputies and whatever else at the border, but you will never stop drug smuggling. What the hell is the point of keep marijuana illegal? It causes so much stupid shit like this and helps to keep gangs thriving. I know it's a tired mantra, but the war on drugs really just is not working.

Also, for you people who take drugs, you support and make this shit, as well as twenty times worse in Mexico and Colombia and wherever else. Your pathetic habits kill people. Fact.

Empowerment

This is beautiful. From the 1966 Lowndes County Freedom Organization's election campaign in rural Alabama. People wore these in public demonstrations. Those were some strong people. That was such crazy shit to be saying to white people in the rural South at that time. Sometimes people can't take it anymore and you get moving moments like this.

Providing a larger amount of failed efforts will not create a successful one

THIS

IS

WHERE

A

REFERENCE

TO

1984

WOULD

GO

BUT

THAT

SHIT

IS

PLAYED

OUT.

YOU

GET

WHAT

I

MEAN

THOUGH.

Immigration reform. Try economic reform, of the international variety, the kind that doesn't impoverish people to the extreme and make them so desperate that they walk through the desert for days to reach a very tenuous better place.

Here's what the Democrats have to offer:

Broadly, the proposal includes:

1. More Border Patrol officers
2. More Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, worksite inspectors, document fraud investigators and drug-war agents
3. The "installation of high-tech ground sensors throughout the southern border and for equipping all border patrol officers with the technological capability to respond to activation of the ground sensors in the area they are patrolling."
4. More prosecution of drug smuggling, human trafficking and unauthorized border crossing
5. "[I]ncreases in the number of sport utility vehicles, helicopters, power boats, river boats, portable computers to track illegal immigrants and drug smugglers while inside of a border patrol vehicle, night vision equipment, Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), Remote Video Surveillance Systems (RVSS), scope trucks, and Mobile Surveillance Systems (MSS)."
6. All prisoners will be checked for immigration status and deported if found to lack documentation.
7. DHS will "identify, investigate, and initiate removal proceedings" against folks who came here legally but didn't leave.
8. The bill would create "a broad-based registration program that requires all illegal immigrants living in the U.S. to come forward to register, be screened, and, if eligible, complete other requirements to earn legal status, including paying taxes."

Every step is brilliant. It basically comes down to more enforcement, a bigger wall. That's some Iron Curtain shit right there.

The icing on the urinal cake is right here:

The crackdown on employers relies on the creation of national identity cards. "These cards will be fraud-resistant, tamper-resistant, wear resistant, and machine-readable social security cards containing a photograph and an electronically coded micro-processing chip which possesses a unique biometric identifier for the authorized card-bearer," reads the bill summary.

Yes, that's right, a national identification card. Wonderful. They placate us by saying that pigs can't touch it, among many others:

The bill would make it illegal for anyone other than an employer to ask to see the enhanced social security card: "Possession of a fraud-proof social security card will only serve as evidence of lawful work-authorization but will in no way be permitted to serve--or shall be required to be shown--as proof of citizenship or lawful immigration status. It will be unlawful for any person, corporation; organization local, state, or federal law enforcement officer; local or state government; or any other entity to require or even ask an individual cardholder to produce their social security card for any purpose other than electronic verification of employment eligibility and verification of identity for Social Security Administration purposes. No personal information will be stored on the electronic chip contained within the social security card other than the individual's name, date of birth, social security number, and unique biometric identifier."

In a variety of ways, laws don't matter. People ignore them. That's why they make new laws. All the time. Congress sits up on that hill and makes law after law, despite the fact that we already have quite a few. The other main point to this is that LAWS ARE NOT PERMANENT. Then can be changed at any time. This has happened many, many times over the course of American history. It happens all the time. Laws are never set in stone. They are overturned, they are augmented, they are rewritten.

Their assurances regarding the card's purpose do, and should the bill pass, would, mean nothing to me. I know that pigs don't give a FUCK about a law and do what they want. And anyway, these politicians will just write a law to get it through and then change it down the line.

Fuck every asshole who sits around and talks about stolen jobs. Yeah, I'm real fucking sad I can't be a dishwasher or landscaper. That's what I dreamt about my whole life, and now they've ruined my future. I may as well kill myself.

And welfare? Please. Try looking at all the millions the government gives to Archer Daniels Midland to grow GMO pesticide-laden soybeans to feed to miserable, confined cattle that are then turned into hamburgers for your fat, unhealthy ass, clogging your arteries but never soon enough.

You fucking stupid piece of shit. You are just a pawn of politicians who are way smarter than you and whip you up into some bullshit frenzy to distract you from real issues, like how much your job sucks and the fact that you are busting your ass to get by while your boss gets rich and you blow all your money on a piece of shit American truck and beer to try to silence the parts of your mind that somehow still know better.

Tradeoffs

All the "benefits" that people got from the oil that was pulled out of that hole in the ocean and refined, like driving to the mall, watching television, having plastic bags and making pointless shit at work, could never justify snuffing the life of even one bird.

Oil clumps seabirds' feathers, leaving them without insulation — and when they preen, they swallow it. Prolonged contact with the skin can cause burns, said Nils Warnock, a spill recovery supervisor with the California Oiled Wildlife Care Network at the University of California-Davis. Oil swallowed by animals can cause anemia, hemorrhaging and other problems, said Jay Holcomb, executive director of the International Bird Rescue Research Center in California.

The bird has no idea what's going on. It's trying to clean itself because it knows it's dirty, but it's killing itself through that cleaning.

This suffering is the saddest thing in the world to me right now.

We did that. We will keep doing it. It will happen again and again, until we have used all of the oil, we no longer have the means by which to extract it, or we are dead. Which will come first?

The good old days

Back when the oil catastrophe was only half the size of Rhode Island and the media told us it was blowing out 42,000 gallons of oil per day, as per the instruction of British Petroleum. Things are better when we don't question. The Coast Guard had to step in and point out that it's actually 210,000 gallons per day, and then the media had to say, "Well, yeah." Cause BP did. So you know, BP jumps, the corporate media jumps twice.

This was also back before BP basically jumped out of the way and let other people take care of it, like they are doing now:

BP - which is responsible under federal law for the clean-up - said it was using four submersible vehicles, equipped with cameras and remote-controlled arms, to try to activate a blow-out preventer - a series of pipes and valves that could stop the leak.

However, this was a "highly complex task" and "it may not be successful", said chief operating officer of BP's exploration and production unit, Doug Suttles.

If the blow-out preventer does not seal off the well, the company intends to place a large dome directly over the leaks to catch the oil and send it up to the surface, where it could be collected by ships.

A dome. That's their answer. Good one.

Also, in this case, the title of "expert" been conferred upon anyone who has access to basic thought processes:

Conservation experts say the oil has the potential to damage beaches, barrier islands, wetlands and wildlife reserves along hundreds of miles of coastline in four US states.

Fuck.

Fucking oil drilling disaster

What to say, huh? It's obviously a huge disaster, decidedly of the human variety. Nothing natural going on here. I'm sure it's already snuffed out many lives of the non-human variety, lives that had absolutely no chance. It will get worse, and it will stay bad. This is going to last for a long fucking time. British Petroleum (BP) this time.

Of course there is a whole lot of lying going on; it's quite morbidly entertaining to read early accounts of the catastrophe against those popping up today. Estimates as to how much oil is blowing out of that hole they made in the ocean floor keep going up and up. The rising estimates are tempered with that absolute bullshit that keeps people confused and doubtful, saying that you can't measure what's coming out of the hole. NO FUCKING SHIT. The Coast Guard is estimating five thousand barrels a day, which equates to two hundred and ten thousand gallons. Yes, 210,000 gallons. Per day. Since last Tuesday, April 20th. Nice. We're closing in on two million gallons. If only we could get some of that and do a nice uncontrolled burn on these fuckers' houses.

And they're doing all this crap to get rid of the mess they've made, from setting the ocean on fire (literally) and spraying dispersant on it to hoping that it will hit cold water that will cause the oil to harden and sink to the ocean floor. Not kidding. Great answers. Sink to the ocean floor. Yeah boy.

There seems to be some confusion as to the cause of this mess. I can clear it up - people drilled a hole in the floor of the ocean in order to extract crude oil.

Here is the highlight of the article:

Amid several of the thicker streaks, four gray whales could be seen swimming in the oil. It was not clear if the whales were in danger.

Not clear. Again, I can clear this up: yes. Yes, they are in grave danger. They are swimming in oil. Eating in oil. Breathing in oil. Would you feel that you were in danger if you were in similar circumstances?

It's fine though, we can just have a contest where Japan, Norway and Iceland race to come kill those four whales. You know, for humane purposes.

Some more good news:

BP says work will begin as early as Thursday to drill a relief well to relieve pressure at the blowout site, but that could take months.

Here is a scalable solution:

Another option is a dome-like device to cover oil rising to the surface and pump it to container vessels, but that will take two weeks to put in place, BP said.

I hate us. When will we die?

Not fucking kidding. Wow. Just made a joke about it, figured I'd google it, here it is, courtesy of the Idaho Potato Commission:

Potato Sorbet

Ingredients:

• 1 cup Heavy cream
• 4 cups Savory syrup
• 1 lb Riced potato
• 1 Tbsp Toasted ground corriander

Directions:

1. Combine ingredients and mix according to sorbet machine instructions

WHO WOULD EVER EAT THIS?

Wall Street

I saw a newspaper headline the other day about possible steps to "restore public confidence" in Wall Street. Did anyone really have any confidence in anything other than the fact that they are greedy vultures out for themselves? Anyway, I have one idea.

Additional thoughts on Dr. Gates' Op-Ed

His explanation runs unfortunately close to one of boys will be boys. "You know how those Europeans are. That's just what they do."

Assigning equal responsibility would require the people in Africa who sold other people to place conditions on their sale, i.e. "You must treat them lower than animals," "Please whip and rape them," "Do not allow them to practice their cultural traditions," "Do your best to keep them as uneducated as possible, and make sure that they die young." No, Europeans created that system all on their own. Ridiculous.

Were there not a single native slave trader in Africa, Europeans would have gotten their slaves anyway. It likely would have taken longer and perhaps the numbers would have been lower, but European kingdoms and nations and militaries, especially around that time, were not ones to take no for an answer. They simply found an easier way to do it - they got other people to do much of the dirty work. Taking all those people by force would have been such a messy venture and cost many European lives. They would have been facing the military resistance of whole societies. When they employed some African people to do it for them, they saved themselves a whole lot of work. Those are some cunning people, aren't they? And they promised riches, technology and power in return. Who could resist?

There was no equal footing here. The mere fact that Dr. Gates mentions European "military outposts" on African soil should tell us something about what was going on.

Also, the European slave trade in the Atlantic world was a streamlined, well-devised, state-run scheme. The profits from it were obscene. Those profits built up Europe and the settler societies in the Americas (both North and South) and Caribbean. Of course, slaves also literally built the settler societies in these places. And this slave trade and its effects, including the physical colonialism that eventually came to Africa from Europe fucked the African continent into right now. So many people stolen (well over ten million, perhaps upwards of thirty million, whether by Europeans or Africans) from their societies, systematically, over hundreds of years, will have an indefinite effect.

"Complicit alike," he says. How?

Irresponsible assigning of responsibility

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the esteemed and much accomplished literary analyst and pseudo-historian (see his several televisions specials centered on Oprah Winfrey), published a fucked-up Op-Ed piece in the New York Times today. He ostensibly wrote to discuss reparations related to slavery, but all he really did was provide a slightly more sophisticated recapitulation of the argument to which white people love to cling, "I never owned any slaves, and besides, they sold their own people into slavery." Fuck.

Reparations aside, this is just a bunch of bullshit. Whose work is he doing? I guess you gotta be of a particular mindset for Harvard to have you.

It's really hard to get into in a blog, but I really can't stress enough just how off-base he is with all of this. Did Africans sell other Africans into slavery? Yes.

Consider this - "African" is not an ethnicity. It is an identifier of the continent from which you come. It's like telling the Chinese and Indian governments that they should get along better, as they are the same people. No, no one would ever say that. But they both are countries in Asia. Also, Africa is not a country.

There are (were) so, so many ethnicities in the African continent. Gates mentions that "the victims of the slave trade were predominantly members of as few as 50 ethnic groups." If fifty is a few, then there were obviously a lot more. And, keep in mind, that African slaves in the Atlantic world tended to come from West Africa, leaving so many more ethnicities unaccounted for. So if there are presumably hundreds of ethnicities on the continent, there is no selling of "their" or "your" people into slavery. They were selling other people into slavery, people to whom they had no more connection than Germans do with the French. Did people say that Europeans were slaughtering each other during WWI and WWII? No, of course they distinguished between them. It was not viewed as a civil war, nor is it today.

Was selling people into slavery fucked? Yup. The people who did it were garbage.

At the same time, as much as Gates tries to stealthily scuttle these arguments, it is a fact that the people running this trade in Africa were not aware of what slavery in the New World looked like, as there was nothing resembling it in Africa. "Slaves" in Africa had rights, were allowed families, did not have their status permanently, hopelessly inscribed upon them and often times would be integrated into the family/clan that had enslaved them. They also tended to be part of the spoils of war, not a commodity purchased at an auction house. Finally, slaves in African societies did not form the basis for the social and economic structures of those societies, like they did here.

Gates talking about "elite Africans" visiting Europe is a complete distraction from the discussion at hand. Firstly, the slavery we are discussing did not take place in Europe. African slaves, primarily, went to Brazil, the Caribbean, and America. Any talk about reparations, the supposed base for his article, doesn't have a fucking thing to do with slavery in Europe. It's about here, in the United States. It's about African slaves building the country, for free. It's about providing an otherwise impossible agricultural foundation for the country that allowed it to grow and prosper in bounds. It's about all that plantation labor down south and sending all those raw materials up north to be processed in those factories and sent all over the place for immense profits. The slave trade was European, but slavery, primarily, was not. And the slavery that did exist in Europe was decidedly not on the scale, ever, that it was in America. It was not the same thing. There are no rice plantations in England. Portugal does not have a long history as a cotton producing wonder.

And even if his claim is true, that Africans had witnessed slavery first-hand, so what? So what if a few Africans saw slavery first-hand. We are talking about hundreds of years and a whole lot of people being in charge of selling to Europeans. A few Africans seeing it is a piss in the ocean. What were they going to do, put it on Facebook?

There are a bunch of other things, like how Europeans played off different ethnicities against one another and provided some with guns, which allowed them to easily overpower and dominate nearby peoples of different ethnicities. As a result, the people under attack then had to acquire guns, which were only realistically available through Europeans, who were only really interested in slaves, not whatever things those particular people may have valued. As you can see, this would create a quickly worsening state of affairs that is a combination arms race/ransom/extortion situation. Europeans are good at that, provoking wars. And then they made sure that there were people in power in these societies who were very amenable to selling them people.

Finally, this discussion on culpability is fucking absurd for one reason - it rests on the premise that Europeans had no choice but to buy people and force them to work for free. Think about that.

If the Europeans who showed up looking to take slaves away weren't so fucking greedy and heartless, then those people in Africa who wished to sell other people into slavery wouldn't have been able to sell off a single person across the ocean in that middle passage hell. As though they created a market. As if, for countless centuries, there was just this teeming slave market on the western shores of the African continent waiting for buyers, until one day, the magnanimous Europeans came and saved their failed economic dream. Like they flew planes over Europe towing banners that said "AFRICAN SLAVES 2NITE - ALL U CAN BUY." No, Europeans came to them. And came, and came, and came, and came. For fuck's sake, this position almost pities the Europeans, like they were naive heroin addicts or something, victims of the African pusher.

Yes, some African people had responsibility for selling other African people into slavery. That's obvious. To act like their blame is equitable to that of European traders and buyers is truly insane and is nothing but a lie.

Looks like whaling is making a comeback

I can't even be sarcastic about this one, it's just so fucked and saddening. We are going to need another Rod Coronado, and Sea Shepherd is going to need way more fucking money. Fuck these people. Fuck. Dirty, piece of shit humanity. I have no respect. At least Australia's trying to do something about it. They are pretty much the only country telling these people (Japan, Norway, Iceland) to go fuck themselves. Indignant assholes.

Here's an article about what's going on at the moment.

A fragile plan to resolve the global feud on whaling is coming under attack from all sides, with Australia seeking more concessions from whalers and Japan vowing never to end its hunt completely...

The plan would let Japan, Norway and Iceland hunt the ocean giants openly despite a 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling. In return, whaling nations would agree to reduce their catch "significantly" over 10 years...

But Japan and Australia, whose relations have been stained over Tokyo's annual whaling missions in the Antarctic Ocean, remained deeply at odds.

Japan, which says whaling is part of its culture, said it had been seeking a compromise despite "extremely difficult domestic coordination" and deplored that other nations sought an eventual end to whaling...

But Australia said the draft plan offered nothing from whaling nations.

"The draft 10-year compromise falls well short of a result that Australia could accept," wrote its commissioner to the IWC, Donna Petrachenko.

"To date there has been no tangible engagement from whaling nations to define 'significant reductions'" in their catch, she said.

This is so profoundly troubling. Lately, I haven't been able to help but feeling that pretty much everything is getting worse, that I am/we are living through a serious period of human decline on the way to the bottom, much more rapid that anything seen before, and this only serves to confirm it. Talk about a fucking step backwards. We're going from a whaling ban to "regulated" whaling. WHAT THE FUCK. But only for ten years, and then they'll stop. Except Japan says right now that it won't ever stop.

Do you know why? If you've read this far, yes, you do. They say it's part of their culture. FUCK YOUR CULTURE. As though any piece of any culture is immutable or necessarily good. Racism is a part of American culture. So is rape. So was slavery. So was women staying home and not being able to vote. Let's bring all those back, just for the fuck of it. It was part of American culture, so it must be good. It's culture, after all. It will be great. We'll have so much fucking culture that we won't know what to do. Maybe we'll choke on it. If only.

Yeah, so anyway, other governments are foaming at their filthy mouths to start their own whaling programs, like South Korea:

South Korea was unusually vocal in its comments, saying it "strongly" opposed language that would restrict whaling to those nations that currently catch the ocean giants.

"The draft is unfair and unduly restricts (countries') rights to sustainable use of whale resources without reasonable grounds," it said.

South Korea officially does not allow whaling. But whale meat is sold legally in South Korea if the mammals are accidentally caught in fishing nets, in what environmentalists say is an easily exploitable loophole.

"South Korea's position is a clear indication that this is a slippery slope," said Phil Kline, senior oceans campaigner for Greenpeace USA.

"If you restart commercial whaling, you know that others are going to be waiting in line," he said.

I wish there were an actual line. Cause then someone could do a drive-by on it.

And of course, that line would be leading to an office (which would be amenable to fire), which would be staffed, at least in part, by the wonderful government of Iceland, where I'm sure whaling is part of their "culture" too. Their bankrupt, penniless, produce-nothing fucking government is just so angry that anyone try to tell them that they cannot sell the butchered pieces of stolen whale lives abroad. They aren't satisfied with being able to murder and keep the bounty domestic. No, they want to try to dig themselves out of their massive, self-made financial greed hole with whale bones.

Read as one of them blames everyone else for Iceland's potentially unrestrained whaling:

“If US authorities won’t budge on this issue it is clear that we cannot reach an agreement and, if so, we will declare that they are responsible for it,” Tómas H. Heidar, Iceland’s main representative on the IWC, told Morgunbladid.

Yes, of course, it makes perfect sense. Everyone knows that Icelanders have a genetic predisposition to kill whales, and that it is patently unfair to hold them accountable for it in any way. We have to coddle them and be gentle. Arrogant fucks. What will they do when they've killed all the whales? Be broke again? Good. I hope you all fucking starve and watch your children suffer.

Fuck anyone who supports this, in any way, for any reason.

Obviously bad ideas

Man, so flights in/out/around Europe have basically been grounded since Wednesday, due to a massive ash cloud taking up about 20,000 vertical feet or so of airspace over most of the continent. The idea is that the ash will fuck up jet engines and cause them to stall out. It turns out, though, that business is much smarter than science. Who needs knowledge when you have/need money? Not people running airlines, that's for sure:

Several major airlines safely flew test flights without passengers over Europe on Sunday despite official warnings about the dangers of a volcanic ash plume, fueling a corporate push to end an economically devastating ban on commercial air traffic...

The announcement prompted some airline officials to wonder whether authorities had overreacted to concerns that the tiny particles of volcanic ash could jam up the engines of passenger jets. The possibility that the ash had thinned or dispersed over parts of Europe heightened pressure from airline officials losing hundreds of millions of dollars a day to end a flight stoppage that has thrown global travel into chaos and left millions stranded far from home.

Here we can see an excellent example of (I am about to hijack a phrase from Bad Religion and insert my own concept into it) the voracious march of capital. This is obviously a fucking dangerous situation, and the people running these companies are plainly declaring their will to chew up bodies in their relentless pursuit of money.

I don't really understand how the airline companies could spin this one. What could they possibly say, that the aviation authorities across the continent are too cautious? Like that's a bad thing? They don't want to send many thousands of people a day into conditions that are patently hazardous? If it were America, a bunch of right wing fucks would be crying about how the people in charge of aviation regulation are freedom-hating, socialists/communists who wish to stop capitalism. Maybe that's going on in places over there, too. Don't know.

Anyway, yeah, the people running these airlines don't really give much of a fuck. They want/need their money and are willing to risk just about anything for it. They are saying now that there is no danger, all because they flew a couple of planes around without crashing them. Assuming that they really did fly the planes and there really were no problems, a couple of flights is absolutely no indication of what would come if all flights were to resume.

How deliberately shortsighted. What a shitty, evil attempt to fool people into false comfort. You can't run an experiment ten times and accurately cite it as representative of the results of performing it thousands of times a day.

Bands who aren't afraid to tell it like it is, part 1

This is the first installment of a long series about bands who just say what's up. They don't give a fuck. They are the Howard Sterns of music - they say what everyone's thinking but no one wants to say. It's all about cutting through the bullshit. Clarity, you know?

So the inaugural honor goes to Godsmack and their new single, "Cryin' Like a Bitch." Man, who can't relate to that? I say that all the time. I hate when people cry like a bitch.

I find that the sexist-fueled attacking of masculinity is very effective. Here are a few examples:

1. Sometimes when I'm beating a dude's ass real hard and he's about to tap, he'll start cryin like a bitch. And I'll call him on it. I'll be like, "UR CRYIN LYK3 A BITCH!!!11!!" And he can't say anything, cause first of all he's crying (which brings me to my next point), but he's cryin like a bitch, so what is he gonna say, "NO, I'm not cryin like a bitch?" Cause he is, you know? So I'll jump up victoriously and run around the octagon and be like, "HEY EVRY1, HE IS CRYIN LIKE A BITCH, DO YOU SEE HIM? THERE ARE TEARS!" And it's true. Then everyone sees it. They see that I won, too.
2. It works well as a noun, too. When I'm out driving in my truck, and I see someone who either unintentionally makes me feel threatened or looks like an easy target, I'll say, "Hey cryin like a bitch!" And then when they look over, I'll be like "What the fuck are you looking at, cryin like a bitch?! I'll make you cry like a bitch if you keep it up, bitch." And then they stop, you know? Cause they don't want to make me make them cry like a bitch. No one wants to go anywhere cryin like a bitch. I would bitchslap them back into place, fuckin little bitches.

Fuck yeah. You feel it?

How to avoid getting redeployed to combat

This is fucking awesome:

[Army Spc. Marc A.] Hall has been jailed since Dec. 11, two days before his brigade with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division out of Ft. Stewart, Georgia, was scheduled to leave for Iraq. He was charged with the military offense of communicating a threat after telling his battalion commander that he might shoot or otherwise attack a fellow U.S. soldier, according to Army lawyers. He previously served in Iraq in 2007-08.

But it was a CD recording of a rap song that Hall wrote and sent to the Army's personnel office in July 2009 that gained notoriety for the case.

At that point, Army lawyers said, Hall knew his unit was scheduled to deploy — just two months before he was to finish his four-year enlistment contract. An unpopular Army policy known as "stop loss" requires that soldiers who are assigned to a unit at the time it deploys will be kept in the ranks for as long as the duration of the yearlong tour.

On the recording, Hall denounced the Army for the policy and rapped about opening fire with his military-issue M-4 rifle.

"I got a (expletive) magazine with 30 rounds, on a three-round burst, ready to fire down," Hall rapped. "Still against the wall, I grab my M-4, spray and watch all the bodies hit the floor. ... I bet you never stop-loss nobody no more, in your next lifetime of course. No remorse."

Pretty great. This guy seriously did not want to go back to war, and was willing to do just about anything. He fucking mailed a CD of the song to the Army! Man, that's gutsy. Good for him. It should really say something to people that he'd rather spend an indefinite period in jail that go back to combat. It probably won't though.

Fuck military service, at least in this country. You're just a tool of imperialism, suppression and oppression.

Kops on kamera are scary kops

So here we have an incident of a Chicago area police officer beating a man pretty seriously [concussion, extensive bruising and stitches in his right ear] and shooting another with a Tazer. He said the driver was drunk and resisted arrest. Yeah. Pretty common, right? You know how drunk people act.

There's a problem though - this pig taped all of it, and the only parts that happened were the beating and Tazing. It's pretty indisputable. Watch:

Whoops, pig. Whoops. You went off on a couple of people for the hell of it, and filmed yourself doing it. Fucking brilliant. It seems really stupid, right? Well, I would imagine that it happens all the time. The only reason he got caught - "The incident was discovered when a department official was reviewing the arrests from the previous night and saw a booking photo of Bell [the guy who caught the beating] with his head wrapped in a thick bandage..."

Here are the highlights, from a thorough article:

The seven-minute video released by prosecutors showed that Bell didn't appear to act in a threatening or aggressive manner toward the officer. Instead, he appeared compliant and calm even as the officer used a stun gun on Stalbaum [passenger], who collapsed in a heap on Bell's front porch.

As Bell and Stalbaum got out of the vehicle, Mandarino[pig] can be seen in the video -- which has no audio -- pointing his firearm at them. Bell almost immediately sat back down in the driver's seat, and the officer moved toward Stalbaum as he stood on the front porch of the residence.

Authorities said Mandarino then used a stun gun on Stalbaum. The video shows him collapse. At that point, Bell stood up from the car and placed his hands behind his head. For the next 90 seconds, Bell stood at the side of his vehicle with his hands either in the air or clasped behind his head.

The video showed Mandarino extend a collapsible metal baton as he ordered Bell to the ground. Bell immediately dropped to his knees with his hands behind his head and his face turned downward. Mandarino then pushed Bell forward to his hands and knees and began striking him repeatedly.

Man, he stepped to them right away at gunpoint. Cause the guy spun his tires and then went home. The pig says all he did was spin his tires. That's why he pulled him over.

It's rough watching him take that beating. What can you do though? If you aren't a pacifist, you'll become one real quick once a pig starts dealing on you. Otherwise, you're getting hospitalized at best, and definitely locked up on felony assault charges.

In this case, the filthy pig is getting charged with felonious assault. This is great. I hope they get him. The brother of the guy who really got beaten puts it well:

"We're elated," Stacey Bell said of Mandarino's arrest. The pavement outside the home remains stained from his brother's blood, he said. "We don't feel vindicated yet. If he loses his badge and loses his job and goes to jail, then I'll feel vindicated."

This guy must have done this a lot. I doubt that after fifteen years on the force he just goes haywire one day and starts handing out beatdowns left and right. Fuck these pigs. They're all a bunch of lying trash.

This brings me to another point - the police lie. "Lie" is a noun in this case, not a verb. Of course they do lie, but the police have a particular lie, a scheme to call their own. It is THE police lie. What is this police lie? I will quote extensively from civil liberties lawyer Paul Chevigny's brilliant 1969 work on NYPD police brutality, Police Power:

The worst problem in street-corner incidents is not that of police quarreling with citizens. Most such quarrels, while never admirable, are at least understandable; they are much like quarrels between private citizens. The worst abuse is not even the police hitting people in such quarrels; pugnacious citizens hit others in private disputes every day. The root problem is the abuse of power, the fact that the police not only hit a man but arrest him. Once they have arrested him, of course, lying becomes an inevitable part of the procedure of making the quarrel look like a crime, and thus the lie is the chief abuse with which we must come to grips. If the police simply hit a man and let him go, there would be an abuse of the authority conferred by the uniform and the stick, but not the compound abuse of hitting a man and then dragging him to court on criminal charges, really a more serious injury than a blow. One’s head heals up, after all, but a criminal record never goes away. There is no more embittering experience in the legal system than to be abused by the police and then to be tried and convicted on false evidence...

Despite these obvious repercussions upon community relations, it is rarely that anyone is abused without being criminally charged, not only because of the rationale for such abuses (“he was guilty anyhow”) but because the policeman is likely to get into trouble if he lets an abused person go free. There is nothing to cover a later accusation of abuse if an arrest has not been made...

The can be no doubt that police lying is the most pervasive of all abuses…In the police canon of ethics, the lie is justified in the same way as the arrest: as a vindication of police authority, by proving that defiance of the police is a crime in fact if not in law. A member of a pariah group, or anyone who defies the police, being guilty at heart and sometimes potentially guilty in fact, deserves to be punished out of hand. Besides, the police dislike such people so much that they consider them unworthy of the protection of the law. By lying, the police enforce these folkways of their own, while preserving the shell of due process of law...

…These charges – disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and felonious assault, or all three – together with a story to establish them, constitute the system for covering street abuses.

If you can ever get your hands on the book, or care to, the quotes appear on pages 141 through 143. Nothing I appreciate like someone who will just tell it like it is. Lots of people dislike the police to varying degrees, but precious few will tell it like it is, and it is a rare minority who can do so with such eloquence and measured rationality.

That was in 1969. Here we are today. Same shit, except we've got YouTube. This pig, as all learn to do if they didn't know already, counted on the police lie. It inexplicably failed him. He doesn't seem to have made any effort to cover anything. Why? Because he assumed (almost always correctly) that he didn't need to. Everyone else would do it for him, the rest of the pigs down at the slophouse would do it for him, with him, as that's part of the pig life, and the court almost always takes a pig's word over almost anyone.

This story is a pretty surprising example of someone breaking with that tradition. People very rarely cross that blue line. I'm not sure what persuaded this officer to do so. I wouldn't look at it as any kind of harbinger, but it's nice for now. Hopefully this pig will get fucked. Since the people on whom he went off are white, I believe it is much more likely. I also bet that pig who turned him in is going to catch hell from the rest of the force. They do not take kindly to "betrayal."

Wikileaks editor on the Colbert Report, discussing troops murdering people in Iraq

What a well-spoken man. He holds his ground quite well in the face of Colbert seemingly leaving his character for a bit and pushing him, trying to hit at him with charges of deception and incitement.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Julian Assange
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

If you aren't familiar with what they are discussing, it is an American military video that Wikileaks obtained and made available on its own site recently showing American troops killing a bunch of people in Iraq three years ago, including two men who worked for Reuters. Of course, the military fucking lied about what happened (and the press, including the much-maligned "liberal" wing covered for them and accepted their word as truth), and still is, although they've had to change their story significantly since this tape came out.

These pig troops really get off on it. Woo hoo. I guess Counterstrike is even more fun in real life.

Listen to them laugh.

Watch them cut down people who come to rescue the wounded Reuters driver, people who display no weapons or hostile intent.

This is a wonderfully vivid example of how America subdues and intimidates people across the globe. Train people to be killers, remove as much heart from them as you can, and let them loose. Most of what they do remains with them and in the places in which they operate. We'll never know.

Let us again remember that the American military is in Iraq for no stated purpose.

This is exactly why I don't support the troops. They ARE the war. Why can't people understand that? Stop with the "following orders" excuses. Try following fucking rationality and compassion.

It's nice to know there are people documenting this shit and hammering away at the insane assholes who run our lives.

How things work

Finally, "science" has been revealed, unequivocally, as the farcical conspiracy to dislodge god from our lives that it is.

See if you can tell what this is...

Give up? It's a dead whale and her child. They are being dragged into the asshole of a Japanese whale-killing ship. How about that. Those Japanese whale killers sure are family-oriented. I wonder which one of them had to watch the other get hit first.

They fucking killed the mother and her child.

They fucking killed the mother and her child.

That's it. The end.

Pigs on tape

Some pigs in College Park, Maryland, beat down this (presumably drunk) kid pretty badly. He assaulted them and their horses. Oh wait, no he didn't; in fact all he did was dance like a jerkoff after a basketball game. The whole thing got caught on tape and as usual, the pig fucks were completely lying. Three of them, in riot gear, straight rushed him and beat the shit out of him. Gotta release that pressure and make examples of people, you know? It's all about keeping the rest of us in line.

This won't result in any reform, but I do hope they lose their jobs. Maybe they'll develop drinking problems, if they don't have them already. Chances are whatever lawsuit money he gets will not come out of their pockets, which is a damn shame. I imagine the county will cover it, since they are county police. The kid's lawyer does a pretty good job of damning anyone involved with filing the bullshit report.

And yes, FBI, I would say that a felony was committed here. Holy shit do I hate the police.

Step Down

This makes me feel better about posting that last video.

Getting the Postal Service right

And all it took was long hair, v-neck shirts, autotune and a lot of Jesus. Everyone knows that the Postal Service was one of the worst bands of all time. They had no screaming, their guitars were not even distorted and not one song was about God. Thankfully, Confide has come along and righted every single wrong in the Postal Service's "Such Great Heights." The title of that song was ironic cause it sucked so bad and sounded like Satan, but the new one rules so much and is pretty much the aural equivalent of all-over print.

I was hanging out with them when they were dragging the song's lifeless body from the lake of fire, so I can provide you with a little exclusive insider information on its genesis:

"Bro, God be blessed, let's do it with super-distorted, shitty sounding guitars."

"You stupid fag, praise the Lord, of course we will do it like that."

"Hey bro, keeping in mind that I hate Satan, maybe we could also throw some autotune in there."

"Well yeah, we will slide that to the drummer, cause Christian mall-metalcore drummers always love autotune, which is God's gift to the world."

"Sikk bro, sikk, God is so great, I figure we should also insert a sick, sick, brutal breakdown in there."

"HEAVEN yeah bro, HEAVEN yeah."

"Man, we are gonna bang so many fourteen year olds with this one, God willing."

"I hope so bro, if it is God's divine providence."

New plans for offshore oil drilling

Ok. So there's quite a bit to say about this. Here is a brief summation of what the president has handed down:

The Obama administration is proposing to open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time, officials said Tuesday.

Concerns abound from virtually every conceivable method of analysis - environmental, political, social, financial. Mine are chiefly about the environmental impact of this and people's perceived right to do as they wish with land simply because they can, but I am not going to go into that. Instead, I will offer a bit of unsolicited advice on how to achieve one of the goals that this new petroleum extraction is supposed to secure.

Mr. Obama said several times during his presidential campaign that he supported expanded offshore drilling. He noted in his State of the Union address in January that weaning the country from imported oil would require “tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development.”

Mind you, I have no belief in the sustainability of industry, nor do I wish for it to be so, but if one were of that mindset (and all capitalists are), there is a crucial first step that they must take and push for:

Get off the oil industry's dick.

Again

National Republican Party drops $2000 in lesbian S&M bar

Look, I'm not one to play the partisan electoral game. Fuck them all, they ain't worth a shit, basically. But sometimes, things are just too good to pass up. Like this:

Once on the ground, FEC filings suggest, Steele [Michael Steele, Republican National Committee chairman] travels in style. A February RNC trip to California, for example, included a $9,099 stop at the Beverly Hills Hotel, $6,596 dropped at the nearby Four Seasons, and $1,620.71 spent [update: the amount is actually $1,946.25] at Voyeur West Hollywood, a bondage-themed nightclub featuring topless women dancers imitating lesbian sex.

Wow. I mean, that's cool if that's what you're into, but you're a Republican. The head of the party, no less. Conservatives always rail against that kind of thing. Aren't they going to hell for being gay? I guess it's fun to watch how they'll get there, huh? Sure, you would rather die than let them get married [can't let down the gee oh dee], but you really enjoy looking at what they would be doing on their wedding night. Makes sense.

The more I read the article, the more I started to think that the guy is a double agent. Take them down from the inside, you know?

A March 20 FEC filing shows the RNC has $9.5 million cash on hand. Steele began his tenure with $22.8 million, and has since raised $96.2 million. During the same period, however, the RNC has spent $109.6 million, for a deficit of $13.4 million. That spending included aid to the campaigns that elected Gov. Bob McDonnell in Virginia and Gov. Chris Christie in New Jersey.

Man, he can really blow some money. Good for him.

Have to be honest, don't really understand why everyone is up in arms about the plane. I'm actually surprised that they haven't had one for years already.

Well on our way to victory

And Neil thought we had Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s. Well look at THIS:

DOHA, Qatar – Japan and China on Tuesday torpedoed proposals to protect hammerhead and oceanic whitetip sharks — heavily sought for their prized fins — in the latest victory of fishing interests over global conservation efforts.

The defeat of the U.S.-backed measures was part of an aggressive campaign by the Asian nations to oppose all marine proposals at the 175-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. They also defeated an export ban on Atlantic bluefin tuna, a proposal to regulate the coral trade and a separate shark conservation plan.

YES, people, YES. WE ARE WINNING THE WAR. If we are able to use these victories to propel ourselves on further, surely only pure glory lies ahead.

If we play our cards right, we will succeed in being the only species left in less time than anyone ever thought before possible. With our strategic annihilation of certain species, we will be able (and have successfully done so in the past) to create a domino effect within the food chain, saving us the awful headache of having to take out species after species. Efficiency is the key word here.

Listen to what our filthy, tree fucking liberal communist enemies say to defame our great cause:

Critics accused the countries of putting business and politics ahead of efforts to protect the sharks, which are often fished only for their fins, with their carcasses discarded...

Rwanda's Fidele Ruzigandekwe, who supported the shark listing, said afterward that "science had been set aside for politics."

And here we see some granola (that he picked out of his beard) munching socialist revealing our far-reaching successes:

"Millions of sharks are killed each year to support the global fin trade, while a significant percentage of the world's sharks are threatened or near threatened with extinction," said Palau's Ministry of Natural Resources, Environment & Tourism Harry R. Fritz, adding that his country supports the protection of other shark species as well.

Read on as flower-licking, freedom-hating, Marx and Hitler worshipping superliberals cry (hopefully soon to be extinct) crocodile tears over our brilliant victories:

"Today is a huge loss for the oceans. This is a case of politics prevailing over science," Oceana's Fisheries Campaign Manager Elizabeth Griffin said. "The world failed to stand up today to protect some of the ocean's top predators."

Jupp Baron Kerckerinck zur Borg, president of the Shark Research Institute based in Millbrook, N.Y., acknowledged he was "very disappointed and frustrated right now."

"Japan has been voting the shark proposals down because they are catching them, Singapore voted them down because they make money selling the fins and China makes money because they eat them," he said. "How can we win?"

Cry on, you hippie racists, content to blame the Japanese for your woes. You probably all live in Vermont and genuflect at the altar of that arch-radical Slick Willie. WE WILL WIN.

MODERN FUCKING DAY GODDAMN ESCAPE

HELL YEAH BRO. This shit is the new SHIT. The fucking SHIT bro. BRO. Modern Day Escape rules so fucking hard up in here. They are like My Chemical Romance, Avenged Sevenfold (A FUCKING SEVEN X) and Poison all wrapped up into one haircut.

So yeah, they are SIKK. Everyone in the video is SO HOT. HOTTT. HAWT. Man, are they lucky. Guys like them get all the breaks, hanging out at that awesome party with all those hot people. If only we were willing to play enough battles of the bands and shows where you have to sell tickets to play, then we could be at THAT SAME PARTY. But we're not, and we'll never be there, cause we don't have that work ethic. They are like Black Flag and we are like some band you never heard of but was around when Black Flag was and the reason you never heard of them is cause they were lazy and never did anything but Black Flag did.

Man, el oh el, is that Michael Jackson shirt FUNNY. I love funny things.

Even though we suck and are a lazy band of do nothings, the fucking sikk azz crucial bros (ALWAYS before hos, I assure you) MODERN DAY IS WAR ESCAPE THE FATE are taking us under their wing. After we get back from touring with that band that sounds like Attack Attack, and then after we are done brutalizing Christian coffeehouses in the Midwest with I Seahorse Monsters, THEN we are gonna go out with these dudes. And not just out. We're gonna go OFF. Maybe we can get some of their old clothes. I guess they have motivation stitched into the seams or something.

"What if all coral reefs die? Experts are scared"

Principally scared of what will happen to people, of course. A "complete collapse of the marine ecosystem" only seems important to the writer, and I suspect many of those whose research contributed to these conclusions, in the ways that it will impact humans.

It doesn't matter.

It does not matter.

We are not the issue.

We are the problem.

Here is the main thrust of the article, and I assume any other article addressing this topic:

If reefs were to disappear, commonly consumed species of grouper and snapper could become just memories. Oysters, clams and other creatures that are vital to many people's diets would also suffer. And experts say commercial fisheries would fail miserably at meeting demand for seafood.

"Fish will become a luxury good," said Cassandra deYoung of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. "You already have a billion people who are facing hunger, and this is just going to aggravate the situation," she added. "We will not be able to maintain food security around the world."

The economic damage could be enormous. Ocean fisheries provide direct employment to at least 38 million people worldwide, with an additional 162 million people indirectly involved in the industry, according to the U.N.

Coral reefs draw scuba divers, snorkelers and other tourists to seaside resorts in Florida, Hawaii, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean and help maintain some of the world's finest sandy beaches by absorbing energy from waves. Without the reefs, hotels, restaurants and other businesses that cater to tourists could suffer financially.

Many Caribbean countries get nearly half their gross national product from visitors seeking tropical underwater experiences.

People all over the world could pay the price if reefs were to disappear, since some types of coral and marine species that rely on reefs are being used by the pharmaceutical industry to develop possible cures for cancer, arthritis and viruses.

"A world without coral reefs is unimaginable," said Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist who heads NOAA. "Reefs are precious sources of food, medicine and livelihoods for hundreds of thousands around the world. They are also special places of renewal and recreation for thousands more. Their exotic beauty and diverse bounty are global treasures."

It seems impossible for anyone, at least in this part of the world, to consider that animal and plant life, as well as non-living things like water and air, all have intrinsic value. Everything else has as much a right to live and thrive as we do, if not more, for we are the source of the catastrophes that threaten their existence.

But no. We worry about the price of fish, how tourism will do, where we will get medicine. What a sick pity party. Us us us, all that ever matters.

The Coconut Revolution

Fucking amazing. The people of the Bougainville, a small Pacific island nation (in waiting), defeated not just the people who run a major multinational corporation and their efforts to subjugate them into economic colonialism (it's really more plundering than colonialism), but the Papua New Guinea military and the Australian government's economic and military efforts to keep them silent and obedient. They started out with stones against helicopters and then went on to perform the fabled dismantling of the master's house with his tools. Literally. They fucking built guns out of the things the piece of shit mining people left when they were sent packing. Then they beat the shit out of the invading military forces and captured their machine guns.

All the while, they were busy improvising and making beautiful inventions to get by with what they had, being under a military blockade and all. Seriously incredible.

I don't know much about the society they have made, or the politics that govern it, but their environmental principles are incredible. What a wonderful vision of another world. This is pretty much the best-case post-collapse scenario. The people of Bougainville understand that everything around them is finite. They have a palpable respect for the land, not simply for economic value. Bougainvilleans aren't alienated from the land like we are. If only. I wish we still had the sense to say fuck off.

Next favorite band

Holy shit. This one is the biggest mess yet. What a fucking wreck. Pop punk autotuned christian mall metalcore. I honestly do not think I have ever seen a more heartless band (see the drummer/autotune guy at any point throughout the video, the string section attempting to go off, particularly at 2:19, 2:25 2:47, 2:53, 3:14 and 3:36, the singer at 2:45, when HE FUCKING THROWS CARDS). Holy crap does this shit suck.



LOOK AT THE DRUMMER'S FUCKING FILL AT 1:30. It does not even closely match the recording.

Matching white v-neck shirts (sorry keyboard player, I guess they didn't have any six packs of Hanes at Target). A bouncing camera. A card game with a one dollar bill (1:34).

Also, the singer has a carabiner that does not seem to be attached to anything, which can be viewed at 0:45. Wow.

We will tour all the way to Cornerstone with them this year, with a limited edition split seven inch, shaped like an iPhone, available in several neon colors as well as all-over print.

Some new favorite bands

We've made some new friends lately, and shit are we excited. Over the next week or so, I'll be putting up videos of some of them so you are all already into it by the time we go on tour with them or put that split out.

The first one is This Romantic Tragedy. They are probably Christian and they are DEFINITELY crabcore. Everyone who is anyone knows that crabcore rules and that's that. This band takes a lot of influence from the godfathers, Attack Attack, but there ain't a damn thing wrong with that. Crabcore 4 lyf3 man, crabcore 4 lyf3.

THEY ARE SO SICK. They all kind of have skunk hair to one degree or another and the singer has a brutal chinstrap that I don't think quite goes all the way around his jaw line. The keyboard player is just so crayzee that he can't stop himself from jumping up on it like Pepe the organ grinder monkey. They also ratchet the autotune up way higher. SO SICK.

They flip their guitars better than Attack Attack. THERE I SAID IT.

Environmental extremism

I was just reading this stupid article about how some people who fish are really pissed about their interpretations of potential new fishing regulations. One commentator refers to people who favor these regulations as "environmental extremists."

Wow.

Think about that.

I'm not talking about how fucking crazy right-wing people are, thinking that they live in their god's chosen land and shit like that, or how the country is on the verge of liberal martial law or whatever.

I'm talking about the notion that something like environmental extremism exists.

As though it's possible to take such a position.

The fact is, a concept like that only can exist in a profoundly anthropocentric, destructive culture. As though you can want to protect the environment - trees, air, water, wildlife, soil, mountains - too much. "Environmental extremist" says that the planet is fucking ours. We do what we want with it, what we see fit. It is a fundamentally individualist and arbitrary idea, one where anyone who thinks you need to rein in whatever it is that you are doing is in the extreme. And it's pervasive. I'm sure most people in America can give you some definition of environmental extremism that essentially says that no one should get in the way of human "progress." We think that we can do anything that we want, cause we're people and we are smart. We are advanced. We are the end of evolution.

People might be right about that last part, the end of evolution. Not in the way they intended, that we are perfection incarnate. No, we may be the end of evolution in that the way we've been living, the last few hundred years in particular, there won't be much left when we're done and gone. We've been partying so fucking hard that we're taking everything down with us and don't care. Too wasted on bullshit like iPods and huge televisions.

Lakes are really big toilets and sinks

If you've got anything laying around in the garage that they might give you a hard time about down at the county dump, maybe some old paint, a bit of antifreeze, tainted jet fuel, raw sewage from your factory farm or barrels of octosyllabic synthetic chemicals, just go ahead and toss it in some water that doesn't seem overly important - "navigable," if you will.

The New York Times shows that due to two Supreme Court decisions regarding the Clean Water Act over the last ten years, lots and lots of manufacturers, as well as the military, are doing just that with new found boldness. They've seen the EPA disarmed to an all-time low, unsuccessfully prosecuting cases or abandoning them with hanging heads:

Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years...

The Clean Water Act was intended to end dangerous water pollution by regulating every major polluter. But today, regulators may be unable to prosecute as many as half of the nation’s largest known polluters because officials lack jurisdiction or because proving jurisdiction would be overwhelmingly difficult or time consuming, according to midlevel officials.

“We are, in essence, shutting down our Clean Water programs in some states,” said Douglas F. Mundrick, an E.P.A. lawyer in Atlanta. “This is a huge step backward. When companies figure out the cops can’t operate, they start remembering how much cheaper it is to just dump stuff in a nearby creek.”...

About 117 million Americans get their drinking water from sources fed by waters that are vulnerable to exclusion from the Clean Water Act, according to E.P.A. reports...

[M]idlevel E.P.A. officials said that internal studies indicated that as many as 45 percent of major polluters might be either outside regulatory reach or in areas where proving jurisdiction is overwhelmingly difficult.

It seems that the director of that agency could issue some new regulations that address the new holes that the Supreme Court has blown in the law, but she is brilliantly passing it off to Congress, that bastion of efficiency and action. They seem to be sitting on the Clean Water Restoration Act that would help to fix this shit, but I guess it's not important or whatever.

Thankfully, there are the requisite conservative opponents of everything out there drumming up opposition to this addendum:

“If you can get Glenn Beck to say that government storm troopers are going to invade your property, farmers in the Midwest will light up their congressmen’s switchboards,” said the coalition member, who asked not to be identified because he thought his descriptions would anger other coalition participants. Mr. Beck, a conservative commentator on Fox News, spoke at length against the Clean Water Restoration Act in December.

The American Land Rights Association, another organization opposed to legislation, wrote last June that people should “Deluge your senators with calls, faxes and e-mails.” A news release the same month from the American Farm Bureau Federation warned that “even rainwater would be regulated.”

“If you erase the word ‘navigable’ from the law, it erases any limitation on the federal government’s reach,” said Mr. Parrish of the American Farm Bureau Federation. “It could be a gutter, a roadside ditch or a rain puddle. But under the new law, the government gets control over it.”

Great fucking news. When I would pee in the ocean, I used to get really worried that I was going to get arrested. But I had to go, you know? I'm sure it's the same for these people (after all, "company" is a term that tends to hide the fact that people are making all decisions) who dump lead and arsenic and whatever else they've got on hand in a lake, stream or river. They've just got to get rid of it all and the disposal center (what would be my bathroom, in the ocean situation) is so far away. What else could they do? That creek is RIGHT THERE. What the hell else is it good for? It just sits there. It's not like it grows money or produces Range Rovers.

So yes, here's to the Supreme Court for not being able to appreciate, or care, how pedantic semantics has the potential to fuck up the world just a little bit more. They're so fucking concerned with needling laws, and seem to have very little interest in the common good. Although, for a bunch of conservative assholes like they are, I'm sure things like this are the common good, as it lets their friends do whatever the fuck they want in order to maximize profits. And when stocks go up, who doesn't benefit, you know?