Category Archives: “funny”

Come on, “liberal media”

I’ve got a lot of bones to pick with the NY Times, though they do excellent and important investigative work from time to time.  Their default position seems to be that whatever benefits Wall Street is more or less good for our well-educated readers and there’s no point to seem one-sided in balancing the grim and desperate needs of the oppressed and the ongoing bright prospects of the perpetually challenged well-to-do. 

The Grey Lady often does this balancing in a somewhat subtle manner, which makes it look like cranky caviling to take issue with it much of the time, though once a while something obvious jumps out and punches me.  Like the headlines they post, amplifying right wing talking points, on the same day government reports come out highlighting the success of any one of Biden’s several major economic initiatives. On the same day the US economy reported another record month for job growth, the Grey Lady offered this on page one:

Nobody at the NY Times has access to google?   Five seconds with that arcane search engine and you discover that Biden, in spite of cheery jobs numbers, low unemployment numbers, infrastructure repair jobs booming and other good things he has done against determined, sometimes insane opposition, may not have all that much to do with Worldwide inflation.

Read the Times headline, against the backdrop of brutal anti-Biden propganda in the FOX infotainment universe and you come away thinking not only has Biden jeopardized the economy of the US with run away inflation, he’s fucked just about every other wealthy country too!   Check out the damage he’s done!

A few seconds on Google, and you have the beginning of a more nuanced, realistic picture of global inflation

Belgium 8.3%

Brazil 11.3%

Canada 6.7%

European Union 7.8%

Germany 7.4%

Hungary 8.5%

India 6.95%

Mexico 7.68%

Netherlands 9.7%

Poland 12.3%

Spain 8.4%

UK 7%

source

There are lower inflation numbers in Scandinavia and other places, Japan 1.2%, Afghanistan is doing fantastic (relative to inflation, that is), with only 1.56%, and higher ones, 16.7% in Russia, 13.7% in Ukraine, 69.97% in Turkey, but the US numbers are not out of line with inflation in other wealthy nations in the aftermath of a massive global disruption due to a deadly pandemic.   We are also aware of the unimaginably gigantic windfall profits the richest individuals and corporations raked in during that same deadly period.   Oh, well.  Biden may be doing some things right, against tremendous odds, but… look at that fucking record inflation he is causing!  Everywhere!!!

A Prayer

I am not a person who prays, though I have sometimes prayed to be able to pray.  Not really.   I suppose, on the good side, prayer is a kind of meditation, an act of surrender to a higher power, a display of humility and faith, to recite your deepest wishes and needs out loud to a deity that may or may not be listening.  Perhaps prayer is also an act of arrogance, to suppose your humble personal request to God, one of a billion the deity gets every minute, will be heard and acted upon by the Creator of the Universe.  I guess prayer is primarily an act of participation in a community, everyone in the hall reciting prayers in unison, rising, being seated, kneeling, bowing as one.  Whatever prayer is, I am not drawn to it.   If I did pray, my bedtime prayer last night might have gone like this:

O, Eternally busy one, please hear my humble prayer.   Grant me the serenity not to wake up with acid in my stomach thinking about harms done to me in the past by people I love and trusted.  Give me the strength to bear these inadvertent injuries in the spirit they were given, that is, without a second thought.  Grant me the ability never to think of these as burdens I must carry, let alone need to talk to anyone about.  Others hurt by the same things that lodge painfully in my own spirit, spare them these acidic ruminations too.  Let them dwell not on unfairness, thoughtlessness, unreasonable demands to get over hurtful things that can never be openly discussed.  Let them see there is nothing to be gained by imagining peaceful resolutions are possible in all interpersonal conflicts.

Also, Unfailingly Merciful One, let not today’s angry mobs continue to be directed by the inhuman forces of deadly fascist/religious nationalism.  These forces relentlessly inflame the passions of the aggrieved people they exploit and gain their violent allegiance — for their own mad ends. You know what happens every time You turn Your All-merciful Face away during such epochs.  Just sayin’, God.     

Amen. 

Lying for the truth is no lie!

The idiot chorus continues, the insistence that any lie told to protect the higher truth is made of God’s own breath.   It is like comparing a fart to the breath of an angel.  I’m sure there are bad breathed angels dancing on the heads of pins in some pious person’s imagination, but you get my point, I think.  A lie is not a lie, people tell themselves, if you actually believe it’s true and tell it with no intent to lie, since you honestly believe it is not a lie.  This is the madness we are up against as a species, as a planet.

Certainty, for many people, is preferable to the sometimes terrible challenge of uncertainty.   What is certain is only your eventual death, but let’s put that depressing one aside.   The world is a raging mess, give me THE REASON.   You want one?  I have a pretty good single cause theory: the incomprehensible greed and egotism of our “greatest citizens” and the way they use vast, often inherited, wealth to set up influential “think tanks” and hire genius advertisers to shape public opinion and buy the laws that help them indulge their mad greed and acquire a million times more than any hundred humans need while a third of humanity is hungry, living without sanitary facilities of any kind, dying in droves every day of poverty-related illness.  

More commonly the reason given to the masses is a devilish Other, all-powerful and supremely destructive.   In one African country an ethnic group was described as parasitic insects, rodents, scum.  You want to feel better?   Take machetes and hack them to little pieces, everything will be good when they are all dead.  To Nazis it’s Jews, and Blacks, and Poles, and Gypsies, and Communists, and Homosexuals, and all inhuman enemies of Nazism.   Explains everything, all our problems, you know, that we have these subhumans sabotaging everything we do!

How do you make people hate others that they’ve never met?  Make up the ugliest lies you can think of, things that would enrage anyone and repeat them on an endless loop.   Take a page from Mr. Putin, whose enemies are always publicly accused of being pedophiles.  Tom Hanks and his degenerate liberal friends?   Well, they have these parties, as reported by the anonymous Q, who cannot be doubted, since he/she/it, being a very well-connected insider (and possibly even Russian speaking), knows things we don’t know, where these fake, smiling, insanely rich, sick bastards have group sex with children and babies.  Disgusting and evil as that is, it gets worse, much worse, somehow.  They slash these babies and lap up their blood.  THEY DRINK THE BLOOD OF THE BABIES THEY RAPE — AND EAT THEM!   To get eternal youth and power, despicable and deserving of no less than the same in return.

The calculus, I suppose, goes like this: our party has been taken over by a compulsively lying opportunist who is also very charismatic to our base and our most amazing fundraiser– and who most of the base consider a very honest, no bullshit kind of guy. So, if we lie about a many armed attack on the results of an election whose result we hate, culminating in a riot to stop the certification of and overturn that election, that gouged out police eyes and sent 140 to the hospital with grievous injuries, while threatening the lives of the lawmakers inside, and the other side is doing everything possible to expose our obstruction of their investigation, we are only doing so because WE HONESTLY BELIEVE WE ARE NOT LYING!   If we believe we’re not lying, lawyers tell us, then we lack the intent to lie, no mens rea so therefore we are not lying.  And if we are, so what?!   We will lie to cover past lies, of course, because we now believe those lies are true, we honestly believe the lie we are telling now cancels out the other lie that we now know was a lie.  When I told you I was lying, cracked Elvis Costello, I might have been lying.

Look, clearly, there is no political price to be paid for lying your ass off.  Lindsey Graham defended McConnell blocking Obama’s Supreme Court nominee for almost a year, because of the upcoming presidential election, in order to preserve the right of the People to decide who serves on our highest court.   He said it was a righteous decision he would stand behind if Republicans controlled the White House and Senate and invited them to play the tape of him if he ever changed his mind.   He supported the confirmation of the last of three Federalist Society nominees as votes were being counted in the 2020 election.  The tape of him from 2016 was played.   Everyone on the right laughed, it was pretty funny, the brazenness of it, really triggered the damned libtards!   He announced from the floor of the Senate, after Trump’s January 6 riot, that it had been a wild ride but that he was done with Trump.  Very soon afterwards he realized the taste of Trump’s ass was too irresistible, and announced that Trump was, as always, the future of the Republican Party.  Who can really say which contradictory statement of the cagey single white male from South Carolina was the lie?  And those lies are harmless compared to more recently revealed ones.  That’s why Republicans as a party now refuse to take oaths to tell the truth, if there is no legally binding promise not to lie there is no perjury!

Lying in defense of lies is no vice, after all, if you’re on the side of the goddamned angels and you truly hate evil.   USA!   USA!!!

Remember, if you believe it’s true it can’t be a lie!

This foolish idea is more prevalent than it seems. You can tell a story in a way that leaves out a few important details, minimizes cause and effect, casts hero and villain in a dramatic light that makes each one the perfection of their type. If others believe the story, that’s what actually happened, for those who believe.

Examples are virtually endless. In the age of Trump, an ocean of steroids has been poured over this human trait until now any lie you like can be spun into the highest truth. Believe it. And if you believe it, it is no lie.

Nothing personal — my father’s deathbed Zen koan

Perhaps the most mysterious, profound and illuminating thing my father said to me the last night of his life was that none of the long war between us had been personal.   It took me a long time after he died to figure out what he meant by that.

“You have to understand, Elie,” my father told me in the strained voice of a dying man, “on a real level there was never anything personal about our battles.”   He explained that the hostilities had little to do with me, personally, though I was the one forced to fight.  He assured me he’d have acted the same way with any child, regardless of their temperament.  

Nothing personal.  When I fought you to the death every night, it was, strictly speaking, nothing personal.  My father was fighting his demons, the fears that tortured him all his life, those torments just took on my face when I sat across from him.  When he snarled at me it was difficult for me not to snarl back at him.   Nothing personal became intensely personal, though he told me that last night that I had to understand none of it had been personal, strictly speaking.

It reminds me of the moth joke Norm McDonald used to tell Conan O’Brien.   Norm took a ten second joke and milked it for seven minutes.   The set up is a moth walks into a podiatrist’s office and starts pouring out his heart to the doctor.  In Norm’s telling the moth is tortured by how much he hates himself, hates the reflection of himself in his son.   “When I look at my son,” Norm’s overwrought moth tells the podiatrist, “I am overcome with rage and self-loathing, it’s like looking at everything I hate in myself, and I hate that I hate my own son, which reminds me more how much I hate myself and how much I deserve to hate myself.  What kind of father feels revulsion when he looks at his own son’s face?  I tell you, doc, that kid, it’s like the worst in me condensed into a face I want to literally hit with a hammer.  I’m afraid one day I’m going to act on this rage, and I know it’s irrational, it has nothing to do with the poor kid, who I can see has some good qualities.  He’s actually a pretty good guy, my son, but I continue to stare at him with rage, I can’t help it, and I know how sick it is, doc, but I look at the kid’s face and I literally want to vomit, I’m afraid someday I’m going to murder him…” and Norm continues in this vein for several more minutes as Conan chides him and goads him on.

Finally the podiatrist says “listen, it sounds like you have some serious issues you need help with, but you really need a psychiatrist.  I’m a podiatrist, I treat problems of the feet and lower legs, I’m not the kind of doctor who can help you with what you just described to me.  Why did you walk into a podiatrist’s office?”

“The light was on,” says the moth.

Like the light that went on when I finally understood what my father meant by telling me I had to understand it was never anything personal, strictly speaking.  That he put it in context was helpful.   He told me he’d felt me reaching out many times over the years to make peace, but that he was always too fucked up to reach back.   He told me how much he regretted his lack of emotional maturity, imagination, moral courage.  He said he wished we could have had this kind of honest, back and forth conversation fifteen years ago, after only thirty-five years of constant, senseless warfare.

Nothing personal, like the universe itself had decreed it.  And we, hapless pawns that we are, blown like leaves in the wind, subject to forces too gigantic and terrifying to have any hope of overcoming.  Nothing personal, a great relief and a terrible curse, at once.  

From Heather

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-25-2022?r=74gv9&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

FOX, of course, focuses on Hunter Biden, because, you know, even though Volodymyr Zelensky wouldn’t admit it, or even pretend to, Hunter bin Biden is a much worse and more dangerous person than the Tea Party vote fraudster Mark Meadows who was promoted to replace South Carolina Tea Party star, Office of Budget Management director and chief of staff Ambassador Mick Mulvaney as Trump’s final White House body man and gunsel, and made a few small mistakes like anyone could have.