Dogmatics and Demagogic Studies in the Kingdom of Florida: All Hail the Power of Ronnie DeSantis's Name...

 

Hey Ronnie baby. I am writing to you in order to offer my services to your majesty. I can, should you deign to hire me, develop programmes in uncritical dogmatic studies to be taught in your majesty's colleges and universities in the Kingdom of Florida. I can also teach, face-to-face or online, these courses to the millions in your majesty's college and university students who are anxiously awaiting them with sweaty alms and baited forked tongue breath.

As part of my application for this position I have drawn up for your consideration, your majesty, a few tentative courses that might be offered in the faculty of Dogmatic and Demagogic Studies. The only prerequisite for Uncritical Dogmatics courses, of course, will be membership, as evidenced by a membership card, in one of the Kingdom's White right-wing evangelical churches, the beloved official Church of the Kingdom. It is assumed that virtually all students in the Kingdom's halls of higher education will have one of these just as many in the USSR joined the Communist Party. 

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 1001: Boris and Natasha: Introduction to the Evils of Commieism (4)

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 1002: She's Got the Devil in Her Heart: Satan is the Author of Critical Race Theory (3)

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 1003: Beelzebub's Fibs: The Social Sciences Are the Spawn of Satan (3)

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 1004: God's History: America the Good (3)
 

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 2001: All Hail the Power of Jeezus's Name: The Sanctity and Holiness of the Free Market (3)
 

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 3001: God's Holy Men: Capitalist Saints from Adam Smith to Donnie "Tangholio" Drumpf (4)

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 3002: Onward White Christian Soldiers: There is Only One Religion, One Christianity, and One TANGHOLIO in God's Chosen Land (3)

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 3003: The Meek Shall Inherit the House: Women in God's Chosen Land (3)

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 3004: The Eye of the Trumpeedle: Being a Man in God's Kingdom (3)

 

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 4001: Abel was White: The Goodness and Holiness of the White Man's Burden (4)

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 4002: Royal Guns and Royal Butter: America is God's Chosen Nation (3)

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 4003: Here's Jeezus: Christian Zionism, The Only Good Jews, and the End Times (3)

 

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 4003: Hail Caesar (3)

This class will focus on saintly Dogmatist/Demagogue political and economic leaders such as Donnie Boy Trump and Ronnie Goy Boy DeSantis

 

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 4004: Any Means For God's End: Lying for the Lord (3)

Dogmatics and Demagoguery 4999: Capstone Proseminar in Uncritical Dogmatics (4)
All undergraduate students majoring in D&D will be required to take this course before graduation. Students taking this proseminar will be required to read that classic of systematic dogmatism, the Capitalist Catechism. Before students can pass this class, they must demonstrate mastery of this holy catechism by writing the holy mantras on the blackboard one hundred times. Proctors, of course, will assure that the phrases of the holy catechism are written on the board in selectively literalist fashion.

Students majoring in Dogmatics on the undergraduate level can earn a BS degree. At some point in the future, we should consider offering a master's course in uncritical dogmatics. Master's students, should this programme be initiated, can earn a Master of BS.

Hail Caesar.

Contact Information:
The Royal Department of Dogmatic and Demagogic Studies

61666 Royal Court

Tallahassee, Kingdom of Florida, CSA
by appointment of His Royal Majesty, Ron XXXIII
Freiheit in Ordnung und Konformität

An American Right Wing Bestiary

Antifeminazis: right wing misogynists.

Antilects: those made moronic by anti-intellectual flats demagogues.

BahHumbugers, bahs: Republican heirs of Ebenezer Scrooge before he saw the light who get all orgasmic about tax breaks for the wealthy and cuts in welfare for the needy poor.

Bastiloids: right wingers who believe that the masses should eat straw.

Becrats: those who work in mass bureaucracies, the organisational form that dominated modernity and, at least for the moment, dominates postmodernity. Modern bureaucracies, as Weber noted, dominate the economic, political, and cultural domains of the modern world because they are or the masses believe they are, efficient, effective, and based on merit. In reality, as later social scientists have noted, bureaucracies not only have formal rules but also informal rules. Bureaucracies, as Weber and Michels noted, are inherently hierarchical, inegalitarian, and inconsistent with real democracy.

Biff: a right wing bully boy with anti-intellectual tendencies.

Birchbarkers: devotees of the now widespread John Birch Society brand of small government and anti-whoever happens to be the "enemy" flavour of the month "Americanism".

Blue Meanies: the evil others of right wingers of all types. Humans have a long history of scapegoating imagined enemies. The blue meanies are simply the latest in a long line of imagined scapegoats.

Brownbacks: flats who think, despite evidence to the contrary, that cutting taxes on the wealthy, cutting corporate taxes, and cutting welfare and education, will lead to economic recovery and growth.

Bucks: William F. Buckley ish right wingers. As Gore Vidal showed in 1968 beneath the Bucklerian intellectual and Downton Abbey Anglophilic exterior lurks a narrow minded ethnocent.

CakeHoles: those who eat up right wing smak as though it was desert.

CareCaps: those who genuinely believe or who manipulate those who genuinely believe through branding that there is a form of mass capitalism that is genuinely humane and democratic. There isn't, of course. Many contemporary "coops" are examples of the fiction or the delusion that caring mass capitalism exists. Carecaps are a latter day version of welfare capitalists.

CathCon: a conservative Roman Catholic up for an American Supreme Court position who doesn't have the balls or ovaries to tell the public the "courage" of their convictions.

Cokes: red and white powder right wing loonies who live their sleepy mental lives in BaaBaaLand.

Corpkakes: bureaucrats who work in that most dominant economic institution in the modern and postmodern worlds, the corporation. It is, of course, to corporations that most politicians in the modern and postmodern world kowtow to and give obeisance to. Those who control corporations are members of the modern and postmodern aristocratic feudal estate.

Couch Patriots: a right winger who screams and yells about how much they love the US. Are they therefore the first in line to volunteer for the military in times of war? You must be joking.

Covfefer: 1. a right winger who makes a mistake and refuses to fess up to it but who pays no cost for his bullshitting. 2. someone who has an ideological driven lack of comprehension skills.

Cult of the Orange One: the simple minded xenophobic, nativist, and anti-intellectual faith associated with Donald Trump, the Tangholio, and his groupies.

Dedheads: Neoliberals of the Democratic Party variety.

DicieSpicies: right wingers whose rhetoric, like that of the Spice Girls, is all empty demagoguery and no substance.

Dimbos: neoliberal Democrats. Increasingly the noun dimbo is being applied to Democrats in general since most Democrats seemed to think that in a change election year in which outsiders like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were doing well in the primaries they should run an establishment capitalist chicken hawk like Hillary Clinton.

Draks: capitalists who figuratively drink the blood of those they exploit. Exploitation, of course, is the raison d'etre of mass capitalism. It is at the heart of the constructed being (ontology) of mass capitalists.

Dreptards: Drumpf Reptards or Republicans.

Droogies: right wing ethnocent thugs.

Drumpfs: right wingers who can just barely put together two coherent Twitter sentences in a row.

Duals: those who, as a result of cultural constructions, think in either/or, dualistic, or binary ways. Right wingers, in particular, are prone to this kind of thinking.

DuckandCovers: flats who believe it is possible to win a nuclear war.

Dwits: Moronic English rightwingers of Tory and even fruitier right wing persuasion.

Eskies: right wing Christians who think the world is going to end. Eskies have been waiting for the second coming for a couple of thousand years but that hasn't deterred them from predicting that it will happen soon every ten years of so.

Ethnocents: those afflicted with a cultural disorder and who believe that their group (class group, status group, clique, race, ethnicity, tribe, clan) is god's or nature's gift to the universe. Ethnocentrism is a type of smak common among many right wing groups. Ethnocents generally think in either/or, binary, or dualistic ways.

Excepts: those who think, as a result of a cultural disorder, that they or their group, however it is defined, are god's or nature's chosen people or group and that nobody else or nothing else is like them. Excepts, of course, are drugged up on smak. In reality humans are humans everywhere and in every time and in every place because it is the powerful, who, thanks to the rise of agriculture, modernity, and postmodernity, who have constructed economic, political, and cultural realities for the rest of us.

FetishFreaks: Humans are the ultimate fetishisers. In fact, they are the only known species in the animal world that engages in fetishisation. So what is fetishisation? Fetishisation is making the particular, the historical, universal or transcendental. There are several types of FetishFreaks. There are FetishFreaks who fetishise their own language. There are FetishFreaks who fetishise a particular style of writing. There are FetishFreaks who universalise their own Victorian (mis)understanding of a stone age meaning system or religion. There are FetishFreaks who universalise Victorian notions of the family, sexuality, gender, and childhood. There are FetishFreaks who transcendentalise a particular economic system, modern mass capitalism.

Flats: Those afflicted with a cultural disorder who deny realities like climate change and evolution. Flatism is a form of anti-intellectual, because it rejects reality, intellectual, because it is a form of logic, smak.

Fuks: Those afflicted with a cultural disorder who think that the government has no right to own land. This variety of smak, of course, is simply ideological cover for crass human greed and the need for power.

Goaters: those afflicted with the cultural disorder of blaming everyone but themselves for their own problems. Generally scapegoaters blame the wrong people or forces for their problems. Goating is a type of smak.

Gobshites: those who spout smak.

Groupies: devotees of right wing gobshites such as Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, and Glenn Beck.

Headdeads: anti-Semites.

homophobsters: those who fear anything other than a Father Knows Best version of gender.

Hoosiers: poor White trash from Kentucky and Tennessee who couldn't and can't compete with slave labour.

KochSuckers, Kokes: devotees of the Koch Brothers and their libertarian ideology. Kochism is a variety of smak.

Krakbabies: groupies of Ayn Rand.

Krakheads: devotees of Randianism of whatever sectarian variety. Krakheadism is a variety of smak.

Krochs: those who knowingly spout smak for manipulative purposes but who don't believe the shite that comes out of their gobs

LiBetards: Libertarians who don't realise something Max Weber recognised a hundred or so years ago, namely, that mass bureaucracies dominate the modern world. General Electric is a bureaucracy. Ohio University is a bureaucracy. The US government is a bureaucracy. Honest Weight Food "Cooperative" is a bureaucracy. The Methodist Church is a bureaucracy. The Republican Party is a bureaucracy.

Libs: devotees of an ideology that arose during the Renaissance in city-states like Florence and during the Enlightenment in geographies including Scotland, England, and France. Libs come in various stripes though those liberals who call themselves conservatives these days have either forgotten this or don't want to be reminded of this. There are nationalist libs. There are bah humbug libs. There are compassionate libs. There are social insurance or progressive libs. There are libertarian libs. There are Habermasian can't we just talk to each other civilly libs.

Menteeles: those, secular and religious, who, thanks to a cultural disorder, think in literal, selectively literal that is, misognyst, nationalist, and ethnocentric ways.

Messiahnists: those dudes and dudettes afflicted with the cultural disorder of believing that they are on a mission to save their universe, however they define it, from evil blue meanies.

Misogies: dudes and dudettes who think that males are god's or nature's gift to the world. Misogyny is a form of smak.

Mopeds: young sophomoric right wingers of all varieties with a case of arrested development.

Nannycons and Nannyconnies: Conservatives, generally of a conservative religious sort, who want to use the state to regulate behaviour. Nannycons and Nannyconies want to use the state to make others into spitting images of themselves. Needless to see both Nannycons and Nannyconnies don't always live up to the claims of their rhetoric proving the ethnographers point that one cannot always believe what people say they do.

Nazoids: White supremacists. Such racism, of course, is a form of culturally constructed smak. Synonyms: Skinheads, OyGoys.

NeoDicks: the new Republican Party that arose in the wake of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and desegragation. Neodicks are the contemporary heirs of the Dixiecrats, the Southern wing of the Democratic Party.

Noids: those with a cultural disorder and who believe that someone, for example, "foreigners", some "ethnic" group, some "racial" group, "liberals", "communists", "anarchists", another "nation", "atheists", or "staff" at a local faux cooperative, are dangerous and out to get them.

Nouveaus: those vulgar elites who are part of the 1%. Nouveaus are known for their conspicuous consumption of expensive things they know very little about. They buy Picassos not for arts sake but because they are expensive. They live in places that, for them, mimic the palaces of the Ancien Régime or the great English manor houses. In reality the domiciles of the nouveau rich and famous are vulgar simulations of Ancien Régime palaces and English manor houses. Donald Trump and his New York City Trump Tower are exemplary of nouveau vulgar conspicuous consumption.

Olies: those who rule the United States and much of the rest of the world. The 1%.

PiedPipes: demagogues.

Ponces: those mass capitalists who inherit their wealth and who live off their inheritances. Many confuse this with working for a living. Ponces are a variety of whores.

Poshies: the old blue blood economic elite who are part of the 1%

Pragereggers: intellectual devotees or groupies of the Buckleyish Prager U site.

PragerKeggers: those at the Prager U site who slur those with whom they disagree.

Pussy Grabbers: right wing misogies like Bill O'Reilly, Roger Ailes, and Donald Trump.

Putinistas: right wingers who go all orgasmic over and want their leader to emulate tsars like Vladimir Putin.

Qballs: the science fiction and fantasy right.

Racists: those filled to the brim with that variety of ethocentrism which maintains that one "race" is better than other "races". Such fictions are common amongst right wingers and particularly those of the Republikrat and Nazoid persuasion. Note the binary thinking here.

Raindrops: right wing whingers and whiners.

Rebot: a fake online right wing demagogue and missionary.

Reptards: Republicans.

Retreads: the alt right. The alt right thinks it is something new but in reality it is just another iteration of the old Christian anti-Semitic and anti-leftie right, Buckley style fascism, and red faced libertarianism.

Rigbot: a right winger who is so drugged up on the propaganda that comes out of the right wing propaganda machine that he or she is unable to think critically.

Rimbo: all those blond women who populate the right wing propaganda media landscape.

Rizombs: the right wing masses

Sheep: those addicted to smak.

Skitzoiddroids: Right wingers who whinge and whine about liberal and left wing whinging and whining while doing nothing but whinging and whining themselves. A form of political and ideological correctness. Synonym: hypocrites.

Slaggs: Right wing libertarians.

Slots: casino capitalists.

Sluts: devotees or groupies of the god Mammon.

Smak: the hallucinatory opiate of the right wing masses spread by demagogues of the right wing variety.

Smakalists: right wing media workers like those connected to the Daily Mail, the Sun, and Fox News who purvey smak. The smak that smakalists purvey is often meant to manipulate the already believing moronic red faced masses.

Smakheads: Neoliberals of the Bah Humbug Republican variety.

SoDars: those who believe a form of ethnocentrism that maintains that rich people are god's or nature's gift to the universe. Like the notion that monarchs were made monarchs by god, Social Darwinism, which rationalises and justifies rule by the rich, is a form of smak.

Sweeneys: right wing family values demagogues who get caught in compromising positions with someone other than their wives or husbands.

Tangholio: the autocratic leader and cultic figure associated with the Cult of the Orange One.

Theologs: economists drugged up on smak who justify, rationalise, and fetishise, through their apologetics and polemics, market based and libertarian economic theories. Dogmatism is a type of smak.

Trumpettes: Trump groupies.

Utopes: purveyors of the notion that mass capitalism and its mass global markets will bring heaven on earth. That which utopianists purvey, utopianism, is a variety of smak. Synonyms: Fantasists, Fabulists.

Whores: those vampyre capitalists who make money off of other peoples' money. Many confuse this with working for a living.

Xenos: those drugged up on smak and as a result believe that "foreigners", however they are defined, are threats to their very existence.

Xhuks (pronounced chucks with a hard ch): White evangelical Christian right wingers who worship the false idol of a whitewashed United States of America.

Zionators: Christians who support the contemporary state of Israel because they believe the Temple in Jerusalem must be rebuilt before Jesus comes again. For them the only good post apocalyptic Jew is a converted Jew or a apocalypticised Jew.

Zombies, zombs: those uncritical devotees of right wing smak.

The Same Old Clichés: Musings on the Boston Marathon Bombings...

According to news reports the cops and the FBI have finally got their man in Boston, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who along with his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in a shootout in Cambridge, Mass, are accused of the bombings that killed three and maimed one hundred during the Boston Marathon this April. Dzokhar Tsarnaev was finally captured after the lock down that had shut down Boston and suburbs like Watertown, where the authorities thought Dzokhar was hiding and they were almost right, was lifted. According to NPR with the lock down lifted a man living on the edge of Watertown went outside to his back yard and found blood on a boat he apparently had stored there. He immediately called the authorities and long story short, Dzokhar was found and eventually captured. The moral of this tale: despite turning much of Boston into a kind of a war zone to find and capture this nineteen year old American who had never, according to news reports, had training in guerrilla tactics it was a bloke going into his backyard, something he was asked not to do by police for almost twenty hours, that led to the capture of America's most famous fugitive. Lo-fi, in other words, is often the best fi.

Also according to reports the younger Tsarnaev wasn't read his Miranda rights. The authorities are going to use the public safety exception clause in the law, if reports are accurate, so they can interrogate the "suspect". The "suspect" is an American citizen so one wonders whether those who, for instance, worry about the slippery slope a national gun registry might bring--too much government power and too much 1984--are going to raise concerned voices about the authorities not reading this now much hated "perp" his Miranda rights or Republican calls for Dzokhar to be treated as an "enemy combatant", that wonderfully bizarre term that gives new meaning to the surrealism of government speak. Personally, I doubt that they will. The anti-government ditto heads love to whinge about govenment tyranny accept when it comes to law enforcement and the military. I don't hear them, for instance, arguing that there is a slippery slope from the police practise of taking DNA samples from those taken into police custody even if they are not guilty to what potentially amounts to a national registry of potentially every American's biology.

On another matter related to the Boston Marathon bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and Dzokhar Tsarnaev, as everyone knows rumours, often unsubstantiated rumours, often inaccurate rumours, unsubstantiated and inaccurate rumours sometimes spread by "news" organisations--see the cover of Rupert Murdoch's wretched New York Post above which is practising its usual brand of semi-factual shock and awe tabloid journalism--who want to be the first to get the story or who want to milk the story for all it is worth, and online social media sites, the lynch mobs of the digital age, rumours which play into emotional nationalisms or ethnocentrisms and which have spread like wildfire across the United States and even the world thanks, in particular, to the brave new worlds of the 24-7 cable news channels and the World Wide Web. One of the most fascinating of these crazy rumours spreading through the populace I have run across is the apparent confusion of the Czech Republic with Chechnya by many geographically and historically illiterate Americans.

This unfortunate confusion of the Czech Republic with Chechnya has gone so far that the Czech Republic's Ambassador to the United States, Petr Gandalovič, has been forced to issue an official statement relating to this inaccurate conflation:

"As many I was deeply shocked by the tragedy that occurred in Boston earlier this month. It was a stark reminder of the fact that any of us could be a victim of senseless violence anywhere at any moment.

As more information on the origin of the alleged perpetrators is coming to light, I am concerned to note in the social media a most unfortunate misunderstanding in this respect. The Czech Republic and Chechnya are two very different entities - the Czech Republic is a Central European country; Chechnya is a part of the Russian Federation.

As the President of the Czech Republic Miloš Zeman noted in his message to President Obama, the Czech Republic is an active and reliable partner of the United States in the fight against terrorism. We are determined to stand side by side with our allies in this respect, there is no doubt about that."

In order to clear up this confusion and misunderstanding I am going to do something I have never done on my blog before. I am going to ask those of you out there in cyberspace for your help in clearing up this unfortunate confusion of the Czech Republic and Chechnya. It will be brought to you by the letter C. I urge all of you in the geographical and historical know out there in cyberspace to explain to the poor poor pitiful thees who don't know the difference between the Czech Republic and Chechnya that they can google these two nouns and find an article which explains that these two nations are distinct and different and have different histories. Most articles on the Czech Republic and Chechnya, a Muslim dominated region of Russia which the Russian Empire took control of in the nineteenth century (the great Russian novelist Lev Tolstoy wrote about this at the time), the second great age of European and the first great age of Western colonialism, will even have maps which show the geographical and spatial differences between the two nations. Don't forget after you have helped these poor braindead souls (Gogol pun intended) to welcome them to the brave new digital and online revolution. And don't forget to explain to these intellectually challenged numbskulls that the Czech Republic is the one that builds walls around Gypsy communities to keep pure-blood (hopefully that doesn't mean German blood) Czechs safe, that Chechnya is the region that Russia has been fighting a war, a brutal, viscous, and repressive war, in since the 1990s, and that a Sikh is not a Muslim.

I want to end this blog with a question: Is American life even more clichéd and formulaic than your standard genre operating kiddie korn Hollywood film? I am beginning to think it is.

Postscript:
So the charges filed in federal court against the Boston Bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, after he was finally Mirandised while he lay in his hospital bed, include, according to the Guardian, "one count of using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction – an improvised explosive device or IED – against persons and property within the United States resulting in death, and one count of malicious destruction of property by means of an explosive device, resulting in death". So, in the increasingly bizarre and surreal world of Americangovernmentese, the same Yankgovspeak that gave us the seemingly innocuous "collateral damage" as a synonym for mass murder, is now saying that an IED constitutes a "weapon of mass destruction". Does this mean that fertiliser plants , like the one that blew up in West, Texas, killed 14, injured some 200, and destroyed significant amounts of sacred property can now be classified as a "weapon of mass destruction"? Does it mean that the US can now invade any country with IED's, those weapon of mass destruction" that constitute a "threat" to the US, that other Orwelian terms so beloved by the US government, one that turns a country like Iraq with non-nuclear missiles that could at the time barely hit Israel, into a "threat" to the United States and, to top the surreal absurdity of it all off, millions of Americans believed such tripe? Does this mean that anyone who uses an IED against that most holy of holies, American property, and American citizens, of course we can't forget them, even if they are American, might potentially end up being categorised and treated as an "enemy combatant" under a governmental regime that is even less sympathetic to the rule of law than the Obama administration? Whatever it means it is clear that all of us now live in the world of big bureaucracyspeak and most Americans don't seem to care.

Speaking of surreal speak, aren't corporations in the US "people"? Aren't many fertiliser plants owned by corporations? Can't we try these corporations as people when their fertiliser plants explode, when their fertiliser plant "weapons of mass destruction" kill, maim, and destroy property causing "terror" in the process? Oops, I forgot that corporations have "limited liability" thanks, at least in part, to the influence of business and business ideology on the US government and legal system. Can I as a real biological human get me some of that limited liability? I doubt it.

Update:
It turns out that I was a bit hasty in comparing and contrasting the Bush administration the and Obama administration in terms of their commitment to the rule of law. According to recent news reports it was a federal magistrate who apparently interrupted the FBI's interrogation of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and read Dzokhar his rights. And the FBI apparently was not happy he did, a manipulation of the "public safety exception" since the FBI did not Mirandise Dzohkar even after it became clear that public safety was no longer an issue according to authorities. Additionally at least one newspaper is reporting that Dzhokhar, who is an American citizen remember, was not given provided a lawyer despite repeatedly asking for one. So much for the rule of law. Welcome back my friends to the Big Brother state war always brings in its wake.

Bush is Better Than Obama, or the Idiotification of America

So a bunch of dead heads are engaging in their most recent ponzi scheme. They are passing a picture around on facebook which asks facebookers to like a photo if they think that Bush the younger, Bush the second, was a better president than Obama. Well, Obama may not be perfect. And historically speaking he will probably not be a particularly significant president, the only true measure of presidential significance. His health care plan is probably his only truly significant accomplishment as I type.

Obama's lack of significant achievements, by the way, is not entirely of his own doing. There is no doubt that the Republicans in Congress have done virtually everything in the power to block anything Obama might want to do and thanks to the filibuster in the Senate and their control of the House of Representatives since 2010, a control of the House made possible, in part, thanks to Republican ability to gerrymander House districts in the states, they have been largely able to do just this. Obama, of course, aided and abetted the Republicans in their just strategy of just say no by trying to be the nonpartisan president.

But compare Obama's accomplishments to Bush's. Bush, he who gave us two dismal wars that will not end well and which were not paid for. Bush, he who gave us a government prescription plan for seniors not paid for and which did nothing to lower prescription costs and which was passed simply for cynical political reasons to try to get more of Florida's seniors to vote for him in 2004. Bush, he who presided over and helped give us the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. Bush, he who gave us tax cuts which made all of the above worse.

The moral of this tale: anyone who thinks that Bush is a "better" president than Obama are ideologues and demagogues, have been taking too many drugs (opiates of the masses) and that has had a negative impact on their ability to think rationally and coherently, or they are a bunch of bah bahing dittohead driven by emotion made idiots in the first place. Better to judge both Bush and Obama rationally, on the basis of their accomplishments or lack thereof, in other words. And by that standard Bush will likely be regarded as more significant or important than Obama by posterity, not for his positive accomplishments, but for the negative things he did or the negative things that happened on his watch and over which he did have some control.

I talked about the idoitification of America in the title of this brief blog post but I don't really mean it. I think that stupidity has pretty much been at the same levels it is today since demagoguery and demagogues triumphed and became the dominant force in American society with the rise of mass propaganda and its various bread and circuses arms, advertising, television, and the Web amongst them. And I don't think this idiocy is going to decline in the near future despite the utopian dreams of intellectuals and academics that education will provide a means of intellectual liberation for the masses. Welcome to a world where utopian pipe dreams are dead. Welcome to the dismal brave not so new world of emotionally driven mass idiocy.

We Have Met the Enemy and it Is the Emotional Us...

I'm just a "deviant" I am afraid. I know most people are driven by their emotions. Emotion, the place where most child abuse comes from. Emotion, the place where most spousal abuse comes from. Emotion, the place where most jealousy comes from. Emotion, the place where most wars come from. Emotion, the place where most hatred comes from, irrational hatred of nations, irrational hatred of ethnic groups, irrational hatred of women, irrational hatred of gays and lesbians. Emotion, that which makes some walk into a church on Sunday to kill "liberals". Emotion, that which makes some assassinate abortion providers. Emotion, that which makes some people plant a bomb intended to kill others. I am a "deviant" because I prefer reason to emotion. And while I have probably lost something in choosing reason over emotion I will take the loss because I know what emotion has done over the course of human life and over the course of my human life thus far.

I prefer the reason of reasoned analysis to emotion. I know that violence in its many forms has been around almost as long as humankind. I know that violence and war is the real world's oldest profession. I know that war has beget more war, not less. I know that violence has beget more violence, not less. I know that Israel's policy for forty years or more has been to hit the Palestinians harder than Palestinian "terrorists" hit them. I know that Israel's policy has not led to a diminution of violence in Israel and Palestine over the forty years of Israel's twenty eyes for an eye policy. I know that when demagogues and ideologues counterpoint the peaceful and civilised West with the barbarian and "terrorist" Middle East that the US and Europe they are speaking emotionally and living in a fairy tale world. They are not speaking rationally, factually, historically. I know that so-called peaceful Christians and their secular Western descendents have given us the Crusades (with admittedly a little help from the Muslims; mirror mirror on the wall, who are really alike after all?), the Inquisition, the war of Corporate Bosses on labour and the left, World War I, World War II, the Holocaust, the firebombings of civilians in Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo, and the atomic bombing of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I know that Christians and Westerners have raped the so-called Third World of much of its natural resources since the 1800s. I know that the US like the city state empires of Mesopotamia, the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the British Empire before it is an empire. And I know that as an empire we are, understandably, going to alienate a hell of a lot of people out there around the globe because we are an economic, political, and military power with an economic, political, cultural, and military presence around the globe. I know that this comes with the territory people so put away the childish emotional drug like fairy tales you were brought up on, fairy tales that are akin to hallucinations because they imagine, contrary to the empirical evidence, that we Westerners are a peaceful and people who love people people (as long as they look, act, and think like us, of course) who have brought peace, love, and understanding (not to mention LSD) to the world.

Violence, of course, is the same everywhere in every time and in every place. But the violence of blood vengeance never works, whether it is the blood vengeance of violence in Iraq, the blood vengeance violence in Gaza, the blood vengeance violence in Tel Aviv, or the blood vengeance violence in Boston. All the wars and violence of the last thousand years have done nothing to bring about peace on earth, hell peace in the United States. But hey, don't let me stop you from your twenty eyes for an eye blood vengeance fest. The violent blood vengeance that grips the United States in times of national crisis is a lot like what I sometimes see in the Muslim Middle East. "So it goes..."

Speaking of lynch mobs, I think I can just hear the love it or leave it red faced angry emotional bah bahing at the top of the lungs crowd coming after me as I type. What can I say I am a "deviant" who prefers empirical facts over emotion, dispassionate analysis over anger, and hard evidence before I convict anyone of a crime over the loud mouthed vigilante world of a manipulated public screaming for arse kicking and castration. So crucify me. Force me to drink hemlock. Send me to DisneyLand. No, no, please not DisneyLand. In the meantime, excuse me while I get out of Denver. "So it goes..."

The Iron Lady and the Cult of Hypocrisy...

"There should be no dancing on her [Thatcher's] grave but it is right there is no state funeral either. Her legacy is of public division, private selfishness and a cult of greed, which together shackle far more of the human spirit than they ever set free." "Margaret Thatcher: The Lady and the Land She Leaves Behind", the Guardian, 8 April 2013.

So Margaret Thatcher, TBW, Ebenezera Scrooge, she who was the prime minister of Great Britain from 1979 to 1990, she who led the neo-liberal reaction to the post WWII welfare state into austerity and pain, at least for those who weren't part of the one percent to whom she was devoted, is dead.

It has been fascinating to see and hear, as the day has gone on and the media have tried to come to grip with Thatcher's passing, some of the whitewashed praise of Thatcher flooding through the media today. BBC America World News has devoted most of its half hour to heartwarming stories of Mrs. Thatcher particularly those having to do with her and her American disciple President Ronald Reagan thanks in part to Michael Deaver, Reagan's former deputy chief of staff. Damn that left wing socialist BBC. Republican political oldies but not so goodies George Schultz and James Baker are engaging in a Thatcher love fest and former Canadian prime minister Kim Campbell is talking about how the lovely but tough Thatcher gave women around the globe hope that they too could dream of achieving political power and how the middle class born Thatcher, shook the class based British political world on PBS's News Hour as I type. The gaggle of commentators on PBS's Charlie Rose--Tina Brown, Martin Amis, Henry Kissinger, Harold Evans, Amanda Foreman--seem, with the exception of Amis, to be in a contest to see who can sing the praises of the "Iron Lady" the most. Damn that Eastern Establishment Liberal Media PBS. One of the most alice in wonderlandish of them all is that which has come from the mouth of Tory babe, David Cameron. Thatcher, said Cameron, didn't just lead Great Britain, she saved it.

I guess one shouldn't be surprised and taken aback by such messianic and Christian language, language some might find heretical or near heretical. Thatcher, after all, sometimes threaded Christian themes, in an utterly hypocritical way, like this one from St. Francis of Assisi, into her messianic, self-righteous, and ultimately narcissistic public speeches. Nevertheless, I for one, still find this messianic language of Cameron shocking. I guess I shouldn't for by now I should know just how ideologies of self-righteousness undergirds so much that politicians say and provide them with the ideological justification for and rationalisation of the nastiness they oftentimes do particularly to the most vulnerable and most "common" in our society.

I realise that Thatcher was a complicated person. She was born into a middle class family of grocers while being educated at posh Oxford, thanks, no doubt, to the expansion of that university after World War II in part due to governmental actions. She broke the class ceiling in British politics and preached the gospel of opportunity and meritocracy while being aided in her pursuit of political power by the wealth of her millionaire husband and her policies helped maintain inequalities of privilege in the UK grounded in what is finally a gospel of wealth or social Darwinist, the secular version of the gospel of wealth, conceptualisation of merit. She supported the legalisation of abortion, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and a ban on hare coursing (hey, perhaps she was influenced by St. Francis here) while supporting capital punishment, birching, and keeping divorce laws strict. She preached the gospel of democracy while waging a war on unions and democracy in the workplace speaking often about the tyranny of workers unions but never once, that I can recall, speaking out about the authoritarian tyranny of the bosses that unions reacted against. She claimed that she wanted to give everyone a voice in British politics but, thanks particularly to her defeat of the unions, she left Britain, or at least England, once a society with a healthy degree of public square activism, a largely acquiescent mass society. She said she wanted to bring hope to the many while what she actually did was enable the one percent to increase their wealth and income. She decried and derided socialism and communism for taking away human freedom while she created a paternalistic conservative nanny state to teach the masses the right way to act and behave according to her gospel of middle class moral and sociological superiority in the brave old new world of Margaret Ebenezera Scroogism. So I, in the end, come not to praise Thatcher. I come to see what she actually did. And what she left us as her legacy, as the Guardian editorial that I posted at the beginning of this brief essay rightly notes, is a Britain and an America that magnified public division, lionised private selfishness, and created a sacred cult of economic greed. Margaret Thatcher, in other words, resurrected the Ebenezer Scrooge society.

So Goodbye Margaret Thatcher. I hope that in death you will be as you were in life and that your state funeral, should you have one, will be paid for with private funds, including your own and those of your well heeled disciples, and not with citizen taxpayer pounds. I realise, of course, that in reality, you, the "Iron Lady", were like virtually all right wing leave it to the private sector types, you, like they, drank quite heavilly from the public trough over the years. And I suppose that makes you despite your background, and the posh populists who followed in your footsteps the right wing equivalent of those champagne socialists right wingers so love to condemn for their hypocrisy. Perhaps we should call toff neocons who take public wealthfare and welfare beer sipping bah humbugers even if the beer sipping they mimic is largely only for publicity purposes. If being wealthy and socialist is hypocritical than surely decrying the size of government and its welfare programmes while serving in government, lobbying government for favours, and taking handouts from government for personal benefit (including taxpayer funded ceremonial funerals) is also hypocrisy of the highest order. So again, goodbye Mrs. Thatcher and thanks for all the fish.

Up the NCAA

March used to be one of my favourite parts of the American sacred ritual calendar because of March Madness (now March and April Madness). I was a big Indiana Hoosiers basketball fan before I even went there--basketball was the civil religion of Indiana--so was my Dad. I was a student when IU won the national championship in 1981. Needless to say I was very much part of the Bloomington March madness after the victory over North Carolina and it was, I can confirm from experience, incredibly mad whether at Showalter Fountain, Nick's, Crazy Horse, or the Bloomington town square.

In recent years, however, it has become almost impossible for me to watch college basketball anymore despite my love (its emotion baby just like nationalism and racism and ethnocentrism) for my alma mater, Indiana University, and its basketball team. The players no longer really know or do the fundamentals. Defence is almost non-existent. Free throws are missed far too often particularly in critical situations. There is way too much hot dogging. And to top it off the officiating may be even worse than the play itself.

Much of this, on the players side anyway, probably has a lot to do with the horrible NCAA/NBA one and done rule which undermines not only the continuity on the basketball court but the notion that the "kids" go to school to get an education. Kentucky and John Calipari I am particularly thinking of you here. On the officiating side at least some of the problem, probably most of it, with officiating is a product of the fact that the NCAA is too cheap to hire its officials and give them what any humane corporation, even a cartel like the NCAA would, benefits, good working conditions, and standardised rules and practises. College basketball referees are independent contractors and as such are often used, exploited, abused, and overworked, by the NCAA and its member schools.

All of this makes it even more necessary than it already is to do to college basketball what should have been done years ago: take college basketball away from colleges and turn it into what it already essentially is, a semi-professional sports league. Professionalising already professionalised college athletics like football and basketball would have the added advantage of allowing us to get rid of what is even worse than college basketball play and its officiating problems, the NCAA, the "governing" body of college sports including basketball, and its fiction of "student-athletes", a category created by the NCAA and colleges so they didn't have to pay "students" injured on fields, courts, pitches workman's compensation. Then we could do what should have been done years ago: pay the players with some of the millions the pathetic NCAA exploits from them. It is simply criminal that today the players aren't paid while elite coaches earn hundreds of thousands in salaries and millions in contracts from private sports oriented conglomerates like Adidas and Nike and colleges and universities and the NCAA earn millions by exploiting the "student-athletes" they claim to serve and protect. Getting rid of the NCAA, I suspect, would not only improve the plight of the athlete but would also improve the product and the officiating. And it might also improve the view for those who actually attend the event. Big TV monies along with NCAA greed for more and more monies necessitates that March and April Madness basketball games be held in cavernous football arenas where you may be able to see, on a clear day, ant sized humans on the court playing what looks like basketball from the cheap seats.

In this severe form of exploitation the United States may be "exceptional" and I don't mean that in a good way, among the cabal that makes up the rich and powerful nations of the Western World. The US, in other words, it can be argued, is the home of the worst form of skank capitalism and skank capitalist exploitation in the Western world. Britain runs a close second. But even in Britain the media don't, as of yet at least, determine the shape sporting events take as in the US where interminable media time outs turn sixty minute games into two or three or four hour affairs so that the real powers that be, corporations, can shove advertising down our American throats and pay the NCAA millions of dollars for the privilege of doing it. It's as if sports has become a means and an excuse by which corporations can peddle their wares, real or ideological, to a captive audience for, what in the case of March Madness, is a sporting event in which non-profit academic institutions, academic institutions often corrupted by the monies and mania associated with college sports madness--UConn, North Carolina, North Carolina State, Miami, Florida State, Georgia Tech, Rutgers, Michigan, Michigan State, Indiana, Penn State, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio State, Nebraska, Baylor, Oklahoma, Kansas, USC, Kentucky, Auburn, LSU, Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, Texas A&M, Memphis State and Memphis, SMU, UNLV, UMass, Ball State, Cal Tech, SUNY Potsdam, Notre Dame...I am talking to you--are participating in. So I say to the NCAA and its college and university administrative flunkies, up yours. You have been aiding and abetting the destruction of the American liberal arts college and university for years.

Further Reading:
Dave Zirin's Edge of Sports
Joe Nocera on the NCAA
Taylor Branch, "The Shame of College Sports", the Atlantic, 7 September 2011

I Love the NRA...

You know, if the NRA wants to foot the entire bill for putting dudes and dudettes with guns in schools for "safety reasons" in this time of austerity when social programmes are going to be cut I might get on board with it. The NRA as one of the thousand points of light, imagine that.

On a related matter when is the NRA going to start holding press conferences to tell us that North Korea having more weapons, regardless of their type, is good because it makes the Korean peninsula a safer place? NRA plus Kim Jong Un equals world peace. Uber Cool. And always remember dear unreaders, God is a Bullet have mercy on us everyone...

Let's get real for a moment: Unfortunately, many of those on the so-called pro-gun side of the gun issue are, and not surprisingly, intellectually confused if not intellectually challenged. Banning assault weapons is not a blanket ban on guns. It is a ban on certain kinds of guns. Banning magazines that allow one to turn a gun that is not an automatic into a semi-automatic and murder on a scale not possible with a non-automatic gun is not a ban on guns. It is a ban on certain types of magazines or clips. The argument that any of these is a ban on guns is either demagoguery or bad, really bad, logic. It is not rational thinking, something that is not surprising since most modern humans do not think in rational terms. They generally think in ideological terms.

Perhaps their biggest confusion of the pro-gunnies has to do with the Constitution. Taken literally, as I am sure the pro-gun polemicists and apologists do on other constitutional issues, the Constitution allows militias or, broadly interpreted, citizens, to own a musket. Automatic weapons, semi-automatic weapons, multiple bullet magazines, hell all contemporary guns and rifles, etc., did not exist in the late eighteenth century therefore they do not come under a Constitutional guarantee (assuming the Constitution does not refer ONLY to militias). Right?

And here is the conundrum, a conundrum I doubt if many on the right even recognise. Most contemporary gun owners, I imagine, are constitutional literalists, those who proclaim that the original intent of the founding fathers should be the hermeneutic basis for interpreting the Constitution. The problem is that they aren't, when it comes to the second amendment, interpreting the Constitution literally. Instead they are engaging in a bit of extreme liberal if not radical hermeneutics when they maintain that the second amendment allows Americans to obtain and own any modern gun or rifle. And this makes them interpretive hypocrites. This, of course, is not surprising since hypocrisy, "interpretation" driven by emotional attachments and fetishistation, is the human condition.

Postscript:
I have to add a link to David Simon's prophet like condemnation of the recent irrational vote on gun control in the US Senate and his condemnation of the partisan way elections are run in the US. Check it out.

Oh Lord Won't You Buy Me an Atomic Bomb???

So someone posted the photo on your left on Facebook. Now it is making its way across Facebook like one of those ponzi scheme letters of yore. Instead of asking those you sent it to to send it to others and to send you a dollar for each other they send it, this photo asks you to--this is what the brave world new world of narcissism and the world of cyberspace has come to--to like it. But let's get real. The Bill of Rights, read literally, interpreted according to the "holy" canons of original intent, guarantees, at best, that members of militias have access to eighteenth century muskets.

This photo and the click like key is in my mind the FB equivalent of those adolescents who when asked why they liked something couldn't give a reason for liking something beyond "because". Most of those who clicked I like the idea of keeping this gun legal did so for, as far as I could tell, purely emotional reasons. They offered no intellectual justification for keeping the pictured weapon of mass destruction legal and accessible to consumers. Taking such an emotional approach, stretching the intent of the authors of the Bill of Rights to include modern weapons of mass destruction and taking the second amendment argument to its logical endpoint, why should I be hindered from buying a machine gun? Why should I be hindered from having a flame thrower and using it anywhere I want? Why should I have to get a permit to use a bazooka? Why can't I have an atomic bomb? After all it isn't a machine gun, a flame thrower, a bazooka, or an atomic bomb that kills. It is the humans who choose to use them. Right?

One of the points I am making here, of course, is that we in the United States have long had reasonable and rational limits on weapons. And we should.

If it's British it Must Be the BBC...

In the did he really just say that category, I just love it when someone posts a statement with a howler of a mistake on the World Wide Web. In the replies that follow an article written by Willa Paskin about on an episode of Downton Abbey, "Downton Abbey Recap: The Lady Edith Problem" one Mr. Operation Enduring Boredom, claims that Paskin must have seen the episode months before "via a cable connection that has BBC". The problem with this statement is that Downton Abbey, as Boredom could easily have found out if he had simply let his fingers do some typing on Google is that Downton Abbey is on ITV, one of Britain's commercial networks, not the BBC, the British non-commercial public network. What is enduringly boring here is the cliché which attributes everything British and television to the BBC. Mr. Boredom sadly is not the only person to make this silly and totally unnecessary mistake. And that is a sad commentary on our times.

An Irony for Yet Another Mass American Murder...

I just can't help reflecting on the fact that while people in Newtown and Sandy Hook Connecticut are praising teachers as heroes, Michigan's and Wisconsin's Republican's are taking the right of collective bargaining and benefits from their teachers. Ebenezer Scrooge lives.

On that thought I wish you all Happy bah humbug Holidays...

The Return of the Not So Repressed Snarky Ron...

So the New York Times has an essay on the increasing interest in the groves of academe in Mormon Studies these days and how Mormon Studies can help us understand American history(Jennifer Schuessler, "The Mormon Lens on American History", 2 July 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/books/mormon-studies-attract-more-scholars-and-attention.html?_r=2). Well duh.

My academic mentor once hoped that the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney and the increased interest in the LDS that his candidacy he might generate might get me a full-time academic job. No such luck. I have, in fact, given up the academic job search ghost. I can only hope now that an Albany State degree will help me get me a retail or office job despite my age. LOL.

To be honest, I have for several years, not really been sure I actually want to work in academia beyond the part-time adjuncting I do now. I long ago realised that I am not a bureaucratic sort of guy and there is so much more of a bureaucratic nature one has to do if one has a full-time academic job. Moreover, I really dislike the soap opera, aristocratic wanna be, faux meritocratic, hobnob as if we are in an academic version of a New Yorker we’re at a party cartoon, and get ahead mentality one finds in academe just as one finds at IBM or on Wall Street. I have long thought and I continue to think that I just don't have the zen like patience to put up with such silly human social and cultural construct games.

I find myself, however, increasingly, even as an adjunct, unable to escape some of the bureaucracy that is knee deep behind the ivy halls. At RPI this year, for example, I had to do Digital Measure rubrics and measures, those naïve and reductive things that, in all their hubris, think that education can be reduced to numbers and from me to you simple minded communication models (or should I say logistics?). It took me four or five hours to do them and needless to say I didn't receive any more compensation than before though Digital Measures added three hours to my adjunct work life.

As for my interest in Mormonism, I have long feared being typecast or stereotyped and caricatured as a Historian of Mormonism despite the fact that I really am not a Mormon historian or even an American historian. If I had to paint myself into a box, as is academia's wont, I would say that I am a Comparative sociologist or historian.

There is, despite what the article says, and has long been a healthy discrimination in some quarters in academe against Mormons because they are Mormons, And then there is that religion thing. Many social scientists and practitioners of the humanities have long seen religion in epiphenomenal terms, as do I given that I an humanist. But I am an atheist who takes ideology and belief and the worlds they create very seriously. I have long feared that I would get caught up in some of this prejudice simply because of my interest in the culture of Mormonism. Put this on top of where I got my degree from, that I find History, as commonly practised--vanity, vanity most history is vanity history--even more dismal than abstract economics, my age, my misanthropy, a misanthropy that developed because I have experienced life as it really is, and well you get the picture.

I happen to be one of those rare birds in History. Most Jewish historians, in a wonderfully tautological fashion, do Jewish history because they are Jewish. Most Mennonite historians do Mennonite and Amish history because they are Mennonites and Anabaptists. Most labour historians do labour history because they are enamoured of labour and the working class in some way, shape, or form. I, on the other hand, am interested in Mormon Studies primarily because I am interested in the sociology of knowledge and I am interested in the sociology of knowledge because I want to understand human beings, how they think, how they act, and what they socially and culturally construct.

Forgive me holy priesthood father guardians of History…I have sinned….

More Snarky Ron...

In response to Romney's claim that he is the victim of a vast left wing conspiracy: "LOL. Romney is Hillary in reverse. Anyone else want to hear the Hollies King Midas in reverse?"

In response to ABC's inability to title "The B in Apartment 23" "The Bitch in Apartment 23" and "GCB" "Good Christian Bitches": What is it with ABC and bitch, bitches? I mean they have two shows with bitch, bitches in the title but they can't bring themselves to publicly utter the words? One would think that we would have moved beyond the fear of uttering the b word by now. But apparently not. Has the b word and its variants become the new Y or J word for the guardians of public morality?"

In response to comments about the Breivik trial by commentators on Yahoo: "You have to feel a bit of sympathy for those humans who simply can't understand how culture, in Breivik's case the culture of right wing Islamophobia, White Supremacy, and Christianity, creates reality for him and others like him. I suspect that behind the attempt by many to turn Breivik and other right wing mass murderers like Hitler (who was the product of Christian and scientific racist culture) into psychopaths is that Breivik's ideology hits way too close to the bone. Clearly there are similarities between the ideology Breivik mouths and the ideology, rhetoric, and demagogeury of American Islamophobes and British hypernationalists and what comes out of the mouth of many a right wing dixiefied Republican.

Interestingly, while right wingers blame communism and socialism for every "evil" under the sun they fail to use the same methodological logic to explore the mote in their own ideological eyes of the past including the mass murder of leftists at the end of World War I, the mass imprisonment of leftists by Hitler, the deportation of leftists during the Wilson administration in the US, the mass murder of leftists in Indonesia, and Breivik's mass murder of leftists recently."

In response to a report on Yahoo that T-Mobile is sexing up the T-Mobile Woman: "If they were smart they'd have her talking on her phone while cooking in the buff. Sex, as we all know, sells, and it can apparently even sell drek like "The B in Apartment 23".

A Thimble Full of Snarky Ron...

Forgive me but as you will see I am in a really snarky mood today. It happens sometimes, perhaps too often...

*In response to a Globe and Mail question on facebook (23 November 2011) as to whether Occupy Toronto should have been evicted from a "public" park Snarky Ron wrote: Oh god yes. Nothing is more dangerous than tents in parks in the morning, evening, or afternoon. It is more dangerous than the avian flu, mustard gas, anthrax, and sexually transmitted diseases. We must protect our law abiding citizens from such health hazards.

And of course while a wonderful democracy like Canada allows public displays of political and economic non-affection we simply can't allow people in tents to threaten our national bodily fluids just like fluoridation once did.

Bravo, virtuous police men and women of Toronto for protecting us from such menaces. But could you use a bit more pepper spray and beat a few more heads the next time? I mean we must keep up unhumanitarian appearances and we can't look wussier than our American cousins. And remember where they lead we will follow.

Ah, country love. Do I hear a Captain and Tennille song coming? Everybody sing.

By the way, can we evict these mother nature loving granola eating and starbucks slurping hippie types from Jasper and Banff too? I mean who do they think owns this country? Citizens? And what do they think parks are for? Camping?

*The muse hit Snarky Ron again about this subject and he wrote,
Obligations of class, culture, and civilisation mandate that I ask what is happening to this country. Who is this rabble that thinks it can occupy and set up tents in our parks? Who do they think parks are for? The rabble? Certainly not. Our parks are, or should be for, proper Canadians. For proper Canadians to stroll in. For proper Canadians to acknowledge with that civilised tip of the head to other proper Canadians of an equal social station that we are indeed civilised. That this long-haired and ill-washed rabble thinks they can take over these parks to protest against the economic system God and nature put in place for time and eternity is what happens when a civilisation has fallen into a state of decay and decline. We need to return, fellow proper Canadians, to those days when kings were kings and H.R.H. Victoria ruled the waves and she and Prince Albert modeled for us how proper English gentlewomen and gentlemen should behave even in the dominions.

Ah the joys of mythic and simple minded nostalgia...

*And it hit him again thanks to Ken Harper comment: "Of course they [the Occupy Toronto protestors camping in a St. James Park] should be evicted. They are encroaching on public park space and their point is ridiculous at best. They'd be better off to pool their resources and hire a communications consultant." Snarky Ron replied with, ah yes indeed mr. harper all proper Canadians should behave like good little economic and political bureaucrats since god and nature has indeed ordained that the PROPER Canadian way is his and nature's way and the only way. When will citizens learn that all proper Canadians should defer all of their decisions to those elect economic and political elites god and nature in their infinite wisdom have put in place like the stars in the heavens.

*Upon learning that Fox's Bill O'Reilly had recently, but not surprisingly, defended the actions of the University of California, Davis police who pepper sprayed non-violent student protestors, and I quote "I don’t think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police. Particularly at a place like U.C. Davis, which is, you know, a fairly liberal campus, and they’re not running around. They camp to the point where … the Chancellor said “Look, you gotta get them out of there. We can’t operate a college like this”--Snarky Ron said, Casablanca Moment 5,987,897,775: I'm shocked, shocked, that Bill O'Reilly and Fox news would defend police brutality in the US. I didn't realise the F in Fox stood for fascism and fabrication. Does anyone know whether the knee jerk ideologically correct demagogues at Fox are bashing the attempts by the police to restore order in Cairo? God don't you just love the smell of dayglo orange doublespeak in the morning?

*Learning that some 40 plus Hoosiers are suing the country folk band Sugarland after the collapse of a stage at the Indiana State Fair in August of 2011, a collapse that killed several Hoosiers and Hoosierettes, Snarky Ron wrote, hmm, I would think that Hoosiers would sue god instead. But hey, you can't potentially roll in the dough if you sue god can you? This suit leaves Snarky Ron wondering, why Hoosiers, well known for their love of small government and promoters of good old boy Southern states rights, aren't suing the state of Indiana? Does it not own the State Fair Grounds in Indianapolis? Or has it rented out the State Fair to Australians who raise the entrance fees significantly from what they had been when the state ran?

*Learning that David Cameron, the prime minister of Great Britain, wanted parents to take their children to work during public sector strikes in the UK, Snarky Ron wrote: Question, can the western world get any more looney??? Answer: yes. Cameron now wants children to help break strikes. Got to teach those younguns about the joys of casino capitalism and its distaste for, eww, dare I say it, worker organisations early on.

Of course, we also have to teach the young that workers acting to protect pensions are acting irresponsibly while those political and economic elites who spend trillions of taxpayers dollars and pounds on wars that kill civilian workers, leave countries crippled and destroyed, and enrich the killing "privately owned" industries of the western world act in totally responsible ways. Yeah right.

See we don't live in a surreal world turned upside down.

*In a post on a friend of mine's Facebook page Linda Gee, speaking of Republican plans to force everyone in the state of Wisconsin to have a photo ID with them when they vote said, "Why don't they simply require a Republican voter registration card? You can keep it in your pocket next to your gun. (Of course your gun doesn't need to be hidden in your pocket.)" I responded with this: Hey Linda they can also stick it next to their Obamacare Death Panel card. I am hoping that the death panel cards will have a image of a Dalek on them. Card technologists can, I am sure, develop a chip which can be embedded within the credit card like Death Panel card which, when pressed in just the right place, proclaims, in Dalekese, "exterminate...exterminate...exterminate". And hey perhaps the Republicans, when they regain control of corporate imperial America, can figure out a Death Panel card that when pressed will automatically exterminate liberals. I know our government will have to pay that evil socialist BBC significant sums of money to use the Dalek image but hey wouldn't it be cool?

*On reading about a woman in who pepper sprayed her competition at a Los Angeles area WalMart during the annual fun for consumer goods on Black Friday (25 November 2011),http://news.yahoo.com/woman-pepper-sprays-other-black-friday-shoppers-110009506.html, Snarky Ron wrote, hey if the cops can do it even to nonviolent protestors why can't we use it on "competitors" on one of the most important days of America's civil religious calendar in order to get those much sought after and sacred consumer goods? I mean if the the divine corporation didn't want us to fight over consumer goods why would they give us Black Friday and pepper spray anyway?

*On reading a post about the joys of Blu Ray Snarky Ron wrote: Some time ago Dave Kehr wrote a piece on the DVD and Blu Ray formats which appeared in the NY Times. He raised, I thought, several valid questions about the supposed superiority of Blu Ray to the DVD.

Personally, I am not that taken with Blu-Ray yet. I don't think that newer technologies (digital, cd) are better than earlier technologies (film, vinyl). In fact I think the old way of blowing up cars done in the era before CGI, the era when they blew up real cars, is more "realistic" than CGI big bang car explosions. Moreover, I am skeptical of industries which sometimes seem to pimp "newer and better" remasters/masters/restorations/technologies to sell you the same stuff you already bought. Ah, modern consumer capitalism.

As to the quality of Blu Ray transfers, I have read a goodly number of reviews of poor quality Blu-Ray transfers particularly from corporations like MGM, Universal recently. These companies, after all, are the same corporations that produce very poor quality DVD transfers and I wouldn't expect anything more than mediocrity from them.

Criterion and MoC, clearly, don't fall into this category. Those companies still have a sense that quality matters and that a not every consumer is an opiated semi-automaton that will buy anything regardless of the quality because they have to have it.

Have you seen some of these DVD sets that corporations release? Sets where DVDs are stuck into cardboard slats and ruined in the process. "Consumers" still buy this crap and corporations take this as votes of consumer confidence. And that is exactly what they want. On that note, happy Black Friday (I wrote this on 25 November 2011).

By the way, I find it interesting that so many reviews rarely talk about the packaging or even the quality of DVD or Blu-Ray packages and transfers. They tend to concentrate exclusively on the film or TV programme assuming, I guess, that nothing else matters. This a rather weird kind of fetishisation that occurs far too often in a consumer society.