Big Bad He-Man Cops

Officer Jerad Wheeler of the De Kalb County (Georgia) Police: you are a sick and despicable piece of shit, and we are all coming into a time when it will very likely catch up with you, sooner or later and one way or another.

Good luck with that, woman-kicker. How bad are you?

Dear Lilia Luciano...

...please enjoy your new gig with the pencil-cup. Here's hoping you find a decent street-corner, you lying piece of shit.

"If I Want America To Fail..."

...I would prohibit production.

Requiem For America

"I know. I am bad. But as deb and I say often, why not enjoy it while we have it and while we can. Aint going to last forever." (Jeff Neely -- General Services Administration)

From the spelling and grammar to the implicit philosophy, you should burn this into your minds and understand everything about it, because this is why it's over.

The Whip Of The Week

"At least the Gilded Age was, well, gilded...instead of brazen."

(Jeffrey Quick -- Facebook)

The Needle And The Damage Done

"Some criminologists replace statistics with High Theory in their search for racism. The criminal-justice system does treat individual suspects and criminals equally, they concede. But the problem is how society defines crime and criminals. Crime is a social construction designed to marginalize minorities, these theorists argue. A liberal use of scare quotes is virtually mandatory in such discussions, to signal one's distance from primitive notions like 'law-abiding' and 'dangerous.' Arguably, vice crimes are partly definitional (though even there, the law enforcement system focuses on them to the extent that they harm communities). But the social constructivists are talking about all crime, and it's hard to see how one could 'socially reconstruct' assault or robbery so as to convince victims that they haven't been injured."

~~~~~
Go read this article by Heather Mac Donald. I say it's courageous.

Here's the real hooker in the whole thing: almost no analysis of this matter -- and certainly no mere statistical outlook -- is ever going to account for the moral destruction wrought by the War on Drugs, which reaches far, far beyond its ostensible sphere. We could start with the ethical decay of the police in this country. Right off the bat, it's obvious that if you have a racist in blue and he's got a legal device with which to rack everyday citizens for their private conduct, you therefore have a recipe-made disaster. (The words "private conduct" here are chosen for their radical philosophical precision. That means that there will be no discussion of "related crimes" in this context.)

It is impossible to maintain a system of coercion like this over so individual a moral choice without destroying morality itself: reality simply will not stand that contradiction. The Prohibition of the 1920's should have taught this immutable lesson to everyone thinking about it, but now we're faced with a far more forceful effort, far better equipped and motivated (not least with its own employment: witness the rise of "assets seizure") and attempting to control a far deeper culture of resistance and insistence.

I know that this is not all there is to the matter that Mac Donald addresses. It has to be an enormous element, however, and I really don't think that anyone will ever know what it will finally add up to.

Spleen Shares Roundup

Spleenco Vice-President for Biocommerce Operations Splice Ripman was non-committal today on news of underground commodities trading. "We haven't seen inroads on the stock price, and industrial demand for small ductless gland products indicates that street-gouging is a negligible consideration on the scale of a market like ours."

Dear Soledad O'Brien

What's wrong with this picture?

{tap-tap} No glass...
No frame...

You're in it.

Comes The Dawn

You know, I watch Sandra Fluke and it becomes clear to me: it might be something of a mystery why Hollywood no longer produces great working scripts, but there can be no question where they've gone, now.

"We Are All Andrew Breitbart Now"

Not me.

I'm getting bloody sick and tired of seeing and hearing that. I understand that most of you still value electoral politics, just like he did. He thought we could vote our way out of this.

That was his unforgivable foolishness, and yours too, if that's what you believe. You would do better to face facts.

National Security Theater

I hope you losers are enjoying the show.

Just keep writing those checks, kids.

Gone West

Lex ran a good blog for many years, and I really enjoyed it.

Andrew Breitbart

Ideologically, he was a child or a goddamned twit. That (yes) fool still believed in democracy: he thought that we were going to vote our way out of this.

I kept him in the same bag with most conservatives. His heart was in the right place, but he was blind and didn't know shit.

Two Small Street Vignettes

Tokyo, Japan
February 4, 2012


Walking along no other purpose than to see this city, I came across an interesting building, which I concluded must be a theater. Walking around it for different angles on its modernism, I heard young male voices nearby. Down a small street, behind a net-fence barrier, I observed a uniformed baseball team, and quickly surmised that this was a local high school, and this was its team.

They were out in a courtyard which included a space little bigger than a tennis-court. I watched them for a while before one noticed me and gave a shout. They all looked and began what must have been salutations, in their own language but universal in tone and tenor. In a trice, I snapped them a crisp salute off the brim of my hat, stepped back and gave them a mime of my best right-handed power-swing, recalled from long ago, and then a Hawaiian "hang-loose" wave as I disappeared around the corner. They all cheered lustily and waved their caps.

I am fifty-five years old, now. I never feel old, but this is the first time in my whole life's recall that I began to see myself as different from youth. These guys were stretching and pushing each other around in that violent camaraderie which is essential to a sports team, their voices husky and ruthless, swinging bats and posing unself-conciously in forms which have fired the hearts and minds of artists for millennia. I wish I could paint: I still see them, and I might always. They are what I must have been once, and they were magnificent.

~~~~~

Down the small street, I came across a park, tucked into the shadow of the Tokyo Tower. It was circled around a soccer-pitch bordered with a few park benches. On two of them, apart, sat two teen-aged girls, practicing their French horns. Walking across this round space, I was approaching one of them obliquely, about thirty degrees off my course to the left. Hoping to soothe any apprehension of her nerves on the approach of this six-foot-three white man in a cowboy hat and mis-matched Nikes, I gave her an eye-contact moment of quiet applause. She nodded at me, never stopping her work.

The sounds of their horns next to this indescribably lovely little park impeccably kept, were exquisite counterpoint to the humanly-artifactual nature of the place: the trees were majestic and I wish you could have whiffed their fragrance in the springing air. This was human life at some of its most delicate beauty and purpose, in a place diligently kept for reminder of our stewardship of beauty in its original manifestation: mankind, in nature.

~~~~~

My heart swells and I get teary on recalling these scenes, which I hope I always will.

It is at moments like this that I love you, all, for what you could and should be.

My Dear Ann Coulter

You are now exposed as a stupid cow, and it's all over.

You're done.