Category Archives: Uncategorized

“American society is conservative and economically capitalist. Here are the results…something on the scale of the Los Angeles riots could not happen here, mainly because France is a more humane, less racist place with a much stronger commitment to social welfare programs.”French President Francois Mitterrand, 1992 “Our biggest advantage, major, is that our Muslim populationsContinue reading “As the World Burns”

Work and PlayTo leave my place of work, where the kids have the radio tuned to the worst available pop station, with its aggressive, vocoder-strained, auto-tuned mediocrity (a fat butch, wearing a foot brace from a drunken accident, is explaining to a disinterested teenager how much better the song I Don’t Give a Fuck isContinue reading “My World”

   Of course it was always easy to satirize a guy with shiny boots. What’s hard is satirizing a guy who will saw your head off for doing it.

Newspapers have what they call the advanced obituary; prepared obits for the aging or ill figure of repute ready to go, once the subject does. This of course risks the embarrassment of a hoax or mistake causing a premature obituary, but remains a necessity. The practice has long been taken as comically ghoulish, but I see itContinue reading “As Certain as Death and Backlash”

The “No True Scotsman fallacy” goes like this: Smith: All Scotsmen are loyal and brave.  Jones: But McDougal over there is a Scotsman, and he was arrested by his commanding officer for running from the enemy.  Smith: Well, if that’s right, it just shows that McDougal wasn’t a TRUE Scotsman. This is idiocy Just asContinue reading “No True Muslim”

Nick Kristof is an earnest if clumsy defender of Islam, using one  example of barbarism to obscure another:“Some read the Quran and blow up girls’ schools, but more read the Quran and build girls’ schools.” Way more, even! Take that, Islamophobes! Islam, meanwhile, shifts nervously in its seat, wishing he had kept incinerated schoolchildren out ofContinue reading “Slick Nick”

Investigators, as a rule, have a respect for their own prejudices, and dislike to make known to others a knowledge which has brought pain to their own minds. Like the Brahman of the story, they will destroy a fine microscope rather than permit their co-religionists to know that they drink living creatures in their water,Continue reading “plus ça change”

Named after film director Ernst Lubitsch, a “Lubitsch moment” is when a film encapsulates its entire story or theme in a moment that can be as brief as a single line or pratfall. Hope and Change just had its Lubitsch moment: With his own complicity in the crisis and commitment to the myth of white racismContinue reading “President Ferguson’s Opus”

Via Reddit, the Ferguson police scanner live feed is chilling. Fires, shooting at police. One of the first things I heard was a cop calling for EMS for a “…twenty four year old white male with lacerations to the head related to ‘shots fired’ call….”

The New York Times discovers, like hipsters discovering something that’s always been there, a non-kitsch, adult approach to understanding the immigration question (kind of hard to keep up the act when gang-bangers are popping caps offstage): It would seem to be a worst case that opponents of the Obama administration on immigration had long forecast: AnContinue reading “Cuando los cerdos vuelan…”