Corporate Americans are People Too!

Don’t let Nancy Pelosi’s vag destroy beautiful unions like this!

A Corporate American, National Review:
Keep the First Amendment

  • Corporations are too people. If you cut them, do they not bleed? Oh… right, um… SMOKESCREEN! Clever escape!

Today’s outing is a particularly special treat. A National Review article that no one wanted to put their name to. Think about that for a second. The National Review regularly pushes out articles proudly claimed by their authors on the topics of how one’s word processing software kicked their ass in an argument. Not to mention the unending stream of J-Load posts that are just asking the readers to write his next post for him.

But this outing? Nope, no one wanted to touch it with a ten-foot pole.

And honestly, it’s not hard to see why. It’s pretty obviously just a mandate sent on down from the Koch Brothers worrying that the century and a half gravy train that has been “corporate personhood” may slowly be being stopped by Denzel Washington and Chris Pine acting in a terrible movie.

And despite trying its darndest, it still can’t escape the basic problem that whenever you try and claim that amorphous megacorporations are people, it just comes off sounding dumb as fuck. In fact so much that I’m surprised more comedies and satires haven’t run with it as a concept (I mean, imagine Taco Bell walking down the altar, the jokes write themselves).

But I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s let them start the train wreck of fail themselves:

The phrase “stunning development” is used far too often in our politics, but here is an item that can be described in no other way: Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats, frustrated by the fact that the Bill of Rights interferes with their desire to muzzle their political opponents, have proposed to repeal the First Amendment.

Holy shit balls Batman! Complete 100% repeal of the First Amendment?!? That’s like Nick Cage crazy, peoples, and the liberal media is like totes covering it up even though their entire livelihood is at stake…

Course, they haven’t really done anything about the various slow rollbacks of the first amendment that have happened over the decades, severely limiting when and where we can exercise rights like the freedom of assembly, and…

I suddenly forgot my point.

That is precisely what the so-called People’s Rights Amendment would do.

People’s Rights Amendment? I think I was reading something about that not long ag-

If this amendment were to be enacted, the cardinal rights protected by the First Amendment — free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances — would be redefined and reduced to the point of unrecognizability.

Internet Slang for “Oh my God” peoples, this is like the Founding Fathers being anally violated by Space Yetis! SPACE YETIS, people!

I mean, I’m sure this isn’t just overblown and desperate hyperbole designed to short-circuit my critical analysis. You know, like all those Churches who rant about how not letting them violate the First Amendment is the worst violation of the First Amendment the world has ever known, because it’s being violated by Satan Cock?

The amendment would hold that the rights protected by the Constitution are enjoyed only by individuals acting individually; individuals acting in collaboration with others would be stripped of those rights.

Wait… weren’t we just talking about how the First Amendment was being repealed entirely? So, now, our individual rights are secure, but it’s just our rights as organizations?

Let me just check what the People’s Right Amendment is, unless you have something really fucking compelling.

The Supreme Court and U.S. law have long held that Americans do not surrender the rights they enjoy individually when they act in association with one another. This has been a fundamental feature of U.S. law since the very beginning, and even before that, inasmuch as the notion that collective action does not deprive us of our rights goes back into the Common Law as well. U.S. court cases going back to the 18th century recognize that fact, as does federal statute: 1 U.S.C. §1 reads in part: “the words ‘person’ and ‘whoever’ include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals.”

Well that’s extremely…

(New tab, google search)

Shock and consternation! It turns out that the offending anal rapist of the constitution is just a new proposed amendment (which will unfortunately probably never be passed) removing the personhood from corporations, because you know, they aren’t. At all. And the exploitation of that Supreme Court temper tantrum over the North giving former slaves personhood is getting to the point of potentially ending even the pretense of democracy in America.

And Mecha-Globo-Super-Robot Surprise! It turns out the corporate whores at the National Review are doing their best to try and spin that as Satan’s Dong penetrating the Ur-Freedom in case it actually does get traction and corporations have to go back to buying elections the old-fashioned way.

Strange things give the Left the heebie-jeebies, and “corporate personhood” seems like a strange thing.

Two things:

1. Yes, “strange things” give the Left the heebie-jeebies. As strongly demonstrated by the Left’s slow acceptance of gay people, trans people, different racial and ethnic cultures, multicultural food experiences, artistic experimentation, etc… while the Right has been all over it. I mean, I know IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION, but can you disguise it a LITTLE bit for us?!?

2. Yes.

Yes. A thousand times yes. Corporate personhood is a “strange thing” by which I mean it is by itself satire. Imagine a corporation doing anything a person would do. Fall in love, eat an ice cream, watch a movie, fuck someone’s mother. You can’t. And most of us can pretty much imagine some pretty messed up stuff doing all those things. Robots, Zombies, Unicorns, Lovecraftian horrors. But corporations aren’t people. They aren’t even remotely people.

And frankly, that was kind of the point when the Supreme Court made them people back in the 19th century. It was the most ludicrous group they could think to grant personhood in protest of the “unthinkable” granting of personhood to what was in their mind property.

But “corporate personhood” is simply the notion that incorporated groups — businesses, political parties, unions, nonprofits, etc. — are single entities under the law.

Nooooooo.

That would be called incorporation, i.e. BEING A CORPORATION.

Corporate personhood is the notion that said incorporated groups are not only single entities, but single people.

That Bil is a person. And Ted is a person. And if Bill and Ted form Bill and Ted’s Excellent Corporation, then that corporation becomes a third human being with the additional rights a person is granted by society.

And that tends to be a problem when Bill and Ted’s Excellent Corporation kills a person and Bill and Ted claim no responsibility, because it’s on the corporation not them. There’s no way to do anything meaningful to said corporation and if you “kill it” then it’ll just be replaced the next day with Bill and Ted’s Bogus Corporation with the same basic structure.

And its even more problematic when Bill and Ted’s Excellent/Bogus Corporation wants the additional rights given individual people despite having no way to be held liable to the same responsibilities.

But then, you already know that, you’re just hoping the mouth breathers that read the National Review will just assume that the very notion of corporations are under attack so they’ll continue to vote for themselves to be ground into meat-byproducts for Bill and Ted’s Excellent Soylent Green Corporation.

One would think that the Left would find this convenient: If Monsanto is not a “person” under the law, it cannot be regulated, taxed, sued, or fined, because for the purposes of the law it does not exist.

Um, no, because it’d still be a “corporate entity”, which would be subject to regulations and taxations as part of its fucking corporate charter. All it would lose is the air of protection that being a potentially immortal shape-shifting person immune to most forms of legal reprisal give it.

And now that I think about it, a Corporation would make a great late-level encounter in a D&D campaign. (I swing my sword at it. Great, it misses as the Corporation doesn’t really exist as an entity. Bogus, but at least it doesn’t get to attack. …I didn’t say that.)

Without the ability to treat enterprises as a single legal entity, there would be no redress for damages caused by a defective GM vehicle except to file claims against each individual owner of the 1.57 billion shares of GM stock outstanding.

I know this is supposed to be a poor attempt at snark and a complete fail at understanding how corporate charters work, but I can’t stop fantasizing about a world where it worked like that.

The major stockholders or owners of a corporation being personally liable for all the murderous/disastrous “cost-cutting” schemes they pass entirely because they expect not to be holding the bag when or if the check comes due? And an end to offensively low fines that ignore how much corporations make from those exact “calculated risks”?

Maybe even jail time for the particularly criminal enterprises like car designs that kill people or the Gulf Oil Spill?

Can you imagine how great a society that would be?

Fuck you’d only have to do it to the people who owned over a thousand shares and the effects would be so overwhelmingly positive I’m getting wet just thinking about it.

Why must wingnuts tantalize us so with their ideas of nightmare scenarios?

But if GM and Monsanto can be sued, then they can defend themselves from suits. If they can be taxed on their property, then they can own property. If they have liabilities under contracts, then they have rights under contracts, too. If they have liabilities under the law, then they have rights under the law.

Yes, this is all outlined in the corporate charter. In what a corporation is. They don’t need to be physically, legally human beings to do all that. I mean, contract law is largely based on that. Taking complex negotiations between what are in essence, large groups of people and translating it into something more basic and legally sound.

And it’s particularly offensive to have the Koch Bros. robot who wrote this to whine about rights and liabilities when the main reason that the PRA is getting traction is the major abuse of the “rights” of corporations by corporations who know they will never be held to heel on the supposed “liabilities” because they can’t be reasonably applied to something that is in the end not a human being.

Especially since they are so often used by 1 or 2 actual human beings to give their own rights a super boost that no one else could ever hope to match.

But then, some pigs being more equal than others has kinda always been the point for our Aristocratic Democracy-hating Overlords.

On that note, man have they been stepping up their attempts to essentially refight the American Revolution. No, we should have a King and an Aristocracy dictating all the policy, rather than letting the rabble decide.

I’m not sure that’s going to work any better for them the second time around.

Also, IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION, Founding Fathers Edition.

But the Occupy Left and the Democrats who sympathize with those ignorant misfits resent the fact that some business enterprises oppose their political agenda and support their opponents.

Yes, liberals are just motivated by a desire to undermine their opponents and not at all worried about some rich fucker’s personal corporation being able to single-handedly finance a candidate’s campaign or something having all the rights of a human without anyway to throw them in jail if they decide to fuck us to death for shits and giggles.

I know, it’s always IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION day on the right, but yeah, not all of us are dicks like you.

Some of us can have principles without checking to make sure a corporation’s dick is up their ass first.

(And some don’t: Wall Street gave generously to the Democratic party, and to Barack Obama particularly, in the 2008 election cycle.)

Democrats are just as bad false equivalence. Take a shot!

The Left controls the unions, the government bureaucracies, most of the media, and the educational establishments

And one day, believing this is true will MAKE it true! You just need to believe harder. Remember if you make it happen by continuing to demonize said groups and threatening to destroy them, it still counts!

but its dreams of taxation and regulation do not sit particularly well with many who have to pay those taxes and suffer the regulation.

Yes, and said individuals can use their single individual rights to vote, argue on their own behalf, peacefully assemble, and so on to convince other individual voters to vote alongside them.

Even by your weak ass sauce, those said rights are still intact. You’re just sad because you can’t tip the scale when it’s just 3 whiny fuckers taking home the bank and feeling mopey that they have to give some back so everyone else can still get enough to FUCKING EAT.

Allow me to just say, BOO FUCKING HOO!

The answer, in the mind of Pelosi et al., is to strip those opponents of their political rights.

Indeed, which is why the right-wing is no longer allowed to vote in federal elections.

Hmm no.

Ooh, maybe they are doing back-ended voting laws that just happen to disproportionately disenfranchise voters that tend to be right-wing.

Nope, still nada.

Ah, I get it, they’re using edited footage and manufactured outrages that feed on the media’s obsession with “equality in scandals” in order to unfairly tar an innocent conservative vote-mobilization organizations and thus defund and disband them to try and prevent people from being able to use their legal rights to protest what they view as bad policy!

… Hmm, what is this red flashing light that says IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION mean and why has it been on this entire time?

The so-called People’s Rights Amendment would have some strange consequences: Newspapers, television networks, magazines, and online journalism operations typically are incorporated.

Yes, and when you marry one and submit a joint tax return, then maybe we can talk about why they shouldn’t be stripped of individual personhood.

Actually, I think this needs to be an interesting protest. Someone forms a corporation, someone else legally marries it using the corporation’s rights as an individual, they submit a federal joint tax return and someone else challenges it because as a corporation doesn’t have a gender, how can we tell if it’s a gay marriage or not.

Tell me that wouldn’t be awesome! C’mon performance artists, time to do something really cool for once in your lives.

So are political parties and campaign committees, to say nothing of nonprofits, business associations, and the like. Under the People’s Rights Amendment, Thomas Friedman would still enjoy putative First Amendment protection, but it would not do him much good inasmuch as the New York Times Company, being a corporation, would no longer be protected by the First Amendment.

Um, no, because Thomas Friedman would still enjoy First Amendment protection. His employer the New York Times being a guy named Newwy wouldn’t really fucking affect him.

Wait.

Do… do you think people lose their first amendment right’s to their employer when they start working for them?!?

That they only retain them as part of their organization rather than an individual right?

… Cause, that’s a bit more radical than even you’ve been spinning for awhile. I mean, I know the corporations have really been stepping up the whole “we own our employees and their personal lives” thing, but wow…

I’m actually running out of snark with that one. That’s legitimately worrisome.

In short, any political speech more complex than standing on a soapbox at an intersection would be subject to the whims of Nancy Pelosi.

And I’m back.

See, Nancy Pelosi will personally use her Vagina Dentata to fucking end anyone who tries and make a political speech. You’d be like, I don’t like gays and then from the bushes, Nancy Pelosi’s bush just jumps out and ends you. Body parts everywhere. You’ll be like GYARGH and all the bystanders will be like AIEEE and the National Review will be like “I told you” and it’ll be freaky as shit.

Don’t believe me?

You will.

Scariest fucking thing you’ll ever see, believe you me.

Representative Donna Edwards, a Maryland Democrat, nonchalantly concluded that the amendment would of course strip even political campaigns of the First Amendment rights: “All of the speech which, whether it’s corporations of campaign committees and others engage in, would be able to be fully regulated under the authority of the Congress.”

Couple of responses:

A) I love how for wingnuts and corporate-whore Democrats, “regulation” is constantly being forced to mean “elimination”. Um, let’s say things were “regulated”. I mean, they’re not, but let’s say it were. That would just mean that it was regulated. That it couldn’t be used to injure someone physically, that it couldn’t be illegal, or it couldn’t use, say, loopholes to openly buy congresspersons and use them as your personal mouthpieces to spout out inane drivel like this. So even in this nightmare universe where campaign speech was regulated, it wouldn’t really affect balls all or be worrisome in the least.

B) Seriously, when did “regulate” become a catch all word of pure Satanic malevolence. Regulations are good. Regulations keep us from needing to have a fully working forensics laboratory so we can individually check every single food item we purchase and source of water. Not to mention allowing us to have any of the infrastructure that allows a complex capitalist economy to even remotely function on anything over an extremely local level.

C) Holy Shitballs Rubbing Inappropriately Against a Religious Figure is this entire section complete and utter bullshit. And not bothering to do even a passable job of hiding it.

The entire point of having a Bill of Rights is that there are some things Congress may not do. “Congress shall make no law” is a phrase that Democrats cannot abide, apparently.

Yeah, that section that goes before “establish a national religion”… ooh, right. Well, at least the rest… oh right, “free speech zones”, the extralegal elimination of the assembly rights of the Occupy movement because they were worrying the people who apparently fucking own our police forces now, not to mention the various violations of too many individuals’ right to vote or practice their religion in peace.

Damn, that blinking IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION button, keeps distracting me when I feel so close to an epiphany.

One of the great dangers of such efforts to regulate political speech is that it puts incumbents in charge of setting the rules of the game under which their power and their position may be challenged. That is a recipe for abuse and corruption, and for smothering those critics who would draw attention to abuse and corruption.

Trying to stop our attempted abuse and corruption of the political process is itself abuse and corruption.

It’d be novel if it wasn’t the fucking norm for the right-wing since pretty much this country was first founded.

Nancy Pelosi proposes to amend the Constitution the way the iceberg amended the Titanic.

By creating an easily avoided disaster whose main tragedy was caused by a ship who foolishly disregarded all safety protocols and only viewed the rich as fully human meaningful members?

Metaphors that don’t prove the opposition’s case. Find some.

The First Amendment has served us well.

LEAVE THE FIRST AMENDMENT ALONE!

Nancy Pelosi has not,

SHE HAS LADYBITS AND THAT TERRIFIES US MORE THAN YOU COULD EVER IMAGINE!

but she has led her Democrats to a disturbing place in their quest to secure power,

Yes! See what mild attempts to alleviate the worst of the suffering by advocating mild reforms that are mostly slightly less bad ideas the Republicans advocated ten years ago have wrought! Truly in their quest for the power to be repeatedly trounced whenever they propose even the mildest of reforms they have trampled over our very FREEDOMS! Repent liberals at what your mealy-mouthed almost resistance has caused! REPENT!

And seriously, what’s with this IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION light? It’s now setting off buzzers and alarms and seems to be smoking a bit… Is it entirely safe to be standing here?

even at the cost of cashing in the Bill of Rights.

Aw, shit, now even the BULLSHIT alarm is overheating! The room is now covered in flames and I think I can hear the roar of some form of Elder God.

Save me my noble husband! Bill and Ted’s Excellent Corporation Incorporated, my hero, dash me away from here!

What? You don’t have hands or any physical presence?!?

NOOOOOOO! Why did the liberals have to revoke your personhood?!? My death will surely be on their-

What? They didn’t? You’re just…

I… see.

Fuck you too, BTECI. Fuck you to death.

Yes, I know, you can’t. Either of them. It was just… oh just fuck off and let me burn you useless pile of donkey piss.


‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. Sadly, No Industries Incorporated wonders why you won’t return our calls. We can change, baby. Don’t leave us. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™


 

Comments: 501

 
 
 

I think my business, a corporation, is a person. I also think it is jealous of me and plans to take over my life and then kill me, Single White Female style.

Or it may be the pseudonephrine talking.

 
 

I’ll believe corporations are people the day Texas executes one.

 
 

A corporation stole my bike.

 
 

If you cut them, do they not bleed?

…if you tickle them, do they not laugh? I think NOT.

 
 

a Corporation would make a great late-level encounter in a D&D campaign. (I swing my sword at it. Great, it misses as the Corporation doesn’t really exist as an entity. Bogus, but at least it doesn’t get to attack. …I didn’t say that.)
——————————–
PEER I can say what I will; and my sword can smite! Mind yourself! Hu, hei, now the blow falls crushing! King Saul slew hundreds; Peer Gynt slew thousands! [Cutting and slashing.] Who are you?

THE VOICE Myself.

PEER That stupid reply you may spare; it doesn’t clear up the matter. What are you?

THE VOICE The great Boyg.

PEER Ah, indeed! The riddle was black; now I’d call it grey. Clear the way then, Boyg!

THE VOICE Go roundabout, Peer!

PEER No, through! [Cuts and slashes.] There he fell! [Tries to advance, but strikes against something.] Ho ho, are there more here?

THE VOICE The Boyg, Peer Gynt! the one only one. It’s the Boyg that’s unwounded, and the Boyg that was hurt, it’s the Boyg that is dead, and the Boyg that’s alive.

PEER [throws away the branch]. The weapon is troll-smeared; but I have my fists! [Fights his way forward.]

THE VOICE Ay, trust to your fists, lad, trust to your body. Hee-hee, Peer Gynt, so you’ll reach the summit.

PEER [falling back again]. Forward or back, and it’s just as far;- out or in, and it’s just as strait! He is there! And there! And he’s round the bend! No sooner I’m out than I’m back in the ring.- Name who you are! Let me see you! What are you?

THE VOICE The Boyg.

PEER [groping around]. Not dead, not living; all slimy; misty. Not so much as a shape! It’s as bad as to battle in a cluster of snarling, half-wakened bears! [Screams.] Strike back at me, can’t you!

THE VOICE The Boyg isn’t mad.

PEER Strike!

THE VOICE The Boyg strikes not.

PEER Fight! You shall

THE VOICE The great Boyg conquers, but does not fight.

 
 

a Corporation would make a great late-level encounter in a D&D campaign

You’re attacked by a 20th-level Senior Partner.

He wields the Briefcase of Power (+10 to hostile takeover) and once per turn can summon a 10th-level Contract Attorney (saving throw versus lawsuit).

 
 

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

–Ambrose Bierce

 
 

You have been eaten by a grue from HR.

 
Just Alison, with a heigh and a ho and a tra la la
 

There’s a corporation around the corner with a great arse, but I’m told it’s a real slut and probably has herpes.

 
 

I tried kicking Exxon-Mobil in the shin, but I broke my toe.

 
St. Trotsky, Pope-in-Avignon
 

Nationalization of industry is the Human Centipede of capitalism.

 
 

My god . . . the projection is coming from inside the ideological movement!

This FJMing was excellent, by the way. I wish it had personhood and corporeal form so I could fuck it.

 
 

With this and the “you’re a person from before conception” thing, I think wingnuts whole problem might be in a misunderstanding of the Pathetic Fallacy.

 
 

by which I mean it is by itself satire. Imagine a corporation doing anything a person would do. Fall in love, eat an ice cream, watch a movie, fuck someone’s mother.

As I recall, Enron fucked a lot of mothers.

 
 

Posting my reply here so you don’t have to read it there (& because I didn’t get any “in teh queue” confirmation text after posting it):

Little wonder the author declined to put their name to this post. The underlying theses it defends are absurd. Corporations are not persons. Money is not speech. To argue otherwise is to invite the ridicule of adults & the lucid. That the law in the US holds otherwise is proof positive that lawyers will argue anything for money, no matter how societally toxic or insane.

The author conspicuously failed to include a link to the horrible fascistic Amendment in question, so here it is in full:

“Section 1. We the people who ordain and establish this Constitution intend the rights protected by this Constitution to be the rights of natural persons.

Section 2. People, person, or persons as used in this Constitution does not include corporations, limited liability companies or other corporate entities established by the laws of any state, the United States, or any foreign state, and such corporate entities are subject to such regulation as the people, through their elected state and federal representatives, deem reasonable and are otherwise consistent with the powers of Congress and the States under this Constitution.

Section 3. Nothing contained herein shall be construed to limit the people’s rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free exercise of religion, and such other rights of the people, which rights are inalienable.”

Compare this to what the author posits as its content & implications.

PS: I have my own reservations as to Pelosi, but floating an Amendment that will lead Republicans to defend toxic absurdities like corporate personhood & Citizens United is smart politics … & this move on her part demonstrates yet again that the contrast between her & Boehner is night & day, as even some GOP Congressional insiders have ruefully noted.

… also because I’m just a big mean poopyhead.

 
 

I’m a little leery on the idea that corporate personhood is easily or productively dissolvable, and I think it’s a rhetorical bagatelle by pwogwessives looking for an easy target / fun new way of saying “the Man” and looking like they mean it.

The problem is not the corporations. It’s the rich autocratic fucks running them who are literally above every law and subject to no authority on Earth. The Kochs don’t need a corporation-person to piss acid down American society’s leg.

 
 

Nice work, jim.

 
 

Except a.) yeah, they kinda do …and b.) so what, we should just shoot them instead?*
*Don’t get me wrong, in the case of the Koch bros et al this is a perfectly sound idea, I think.

 
 

“The Kochs don’t need a corporation-person to piss acid down American society’s leg.”–alec

Ah, but it doesn’t hurt, does it? Benefits granted in a spirit that’d not piss on a human citizen if he/she was on fire. More important than suffrage or civil rights. Corporate personhood, if attacked, would be better defended.

You seem like a very smart guy, but to be leery of leeriness of corporate personhood … well I dunno how to characterize that. What am I missing here.

Of course the problem is the people. The corporations are just legalese. When private persons are subject to no authority, it’s partly because they tamed it? I can’t see how undoing their control and capture is just a cute game. If transparent lawlessness was equally or less troublesome for them, would they no have done it uninterruptedly?

Goodnight.

 
 

Except a.) yeah, they kinda do …

They have billions of dollars in private assets which they use to harangue anyone to the left of Hitler. If personal rights include the right to spend unlimited cash on political influence – the actual result of Citizens United – why does removing them from corporations help?

It’s also worth noting that the worst abuses come from conglomerates largely run by one figure (Murdoch, the Kochs, the Waltons) where the interests of individual corporations – i.e. the stockholders of each separate company – are subsumed to the personal whims of the plutocrats in power.

It’s a noble sentiment, but unsuitable to the problems actually facing America as a polity. To whatever limited extent corporate personhood enables abuse of the political system, it’s because the combination of personhood and scads and scads of money is currently one with limitless potential for abuse.

and b.) so what, we should just shoot them instead?*

An excellent start, but perhaps too radical a programme to get people to sign on to.

We need a federal department of career bureaucrats – the Federal Lobbying Monitor, maybe – dedicated to haranguing and punishing violators of the spirit of campaign finance and election law; in effect this already exists, but because it’s subsumed under the FBI there’s a great deal of power to redirect it to partisan ends.

An open database on all people who donate more than some small amount a year. If nothing else, a desk in the FLM should publicize developments in the donor list.

A law or amendment limiting the function of money as protected speech to some token amount – $5, or $50 – over which it becomes lobbying attended to by the public interest.

FLM monitoring of any charitable foundation, as well as continuously open books and public monitoring of charitable activities.

In short, this is a systemic problem not dealt with by campaign finance reform laws and which won’t be dealt with by a change to who counts as a person.

And in the most reductive legal sense, the answer is – yes, just shoot them. What the Koch brothers do should be a crime; they’re waging a private war on the republic and the fact they haven’t fired a shot doesn’t make it any less treasonable.

 
 

The problem is not the corporations. It’s the rich autocratic fucks running them who are literally above every law and subject to no authority on Earth. The Kochs don’t need a corporation-person to piss acid down American society’s leg.

From my fanatically democratic point of view, the problem is that unlike unions, which are basically republics, corporations are basically dictatorships. Run either on a hereditary monarchic model where the rich fucks in question were given the company with absolutely no qualifications other than birth (which is how the Kochs got where they are), or a dictatorship-by-committee model in which that falls to the corporate version of a Politburo.

I’d be curious to see what would happen if the people who ran the company were picked by their employees, rather than by the boardroom or Mommy/Daddy.

 
 

Hello, my lovelies.

I’m still lovin’ the job. Back Saturday with deets.
.

 
 

See, it’s weird to me that this article is so terrible, because my knee-jerk response to reading the People’s Rights Amendment is that it’s a terrible piece of shit and I don’t want it mucking up our perfectly acceptable constitution.

Keeping in mind that my entire knowledge of corporate law is based on that scene in Robocop where ED-209 shoots the executive, this amendment raises a lot of questions for me, and the official website doesn’t do much to answer them.

For example, NRO claims that the New York Times, being a corporation, would no longer have a right to free speech. As you can read in, you know, the actual amendment, there’s a specific clause that says “Nothing contained herein shall be construed to limit the people’s rights of… freedom of the press”.

What, in practice, does that actually mean? Is the New York Times completely unaffected by the amendment, being that it’s part of “the press”? This is what the website for the amendment argues, but the actual language of the amendment says “the people’s rights… of freedom of the press” and corporations are expressly not people if this amendment passes. Is the people’s right to free press the right of the people to have access to a free press made up of corporations, or is it merely the right of the people to run a non-corporate free press?

What about, say, Fox Searchlight Pictures? Are their movies speech made by Fox Searchlight Pictures, or are they speech made by the individual writers, directors and actors that work for Fox? Do all subsidiaries of News Corporation get its protection as members of the press, even if those subsidiaries aren’t themselves members of the press?

The People’s Rights Amendment website reassures us that, “The American people, legislatures and the Court all are perfectly capable of distinguishing between corporate-funded campaign electioneering communications and the content, whether political or not, of the press and media.”

To which, two things:

1. There’s no language in the amendment preserving “the media’s” right to free speech.

and more importantly

2. If that were even remotely true we wouldn’t need the People’s Rights Amendment in the first place.

tl;dr: This seems like a legitimately terribly amendment, which makes it baffling to me that the NRO would choose to blatantly lie about what it says.

 
 

The problem, as simply as I can put it, is that “corporations = people” is a statement about America on two levels.

It’s legally true because it is, right there, in black and white.
It’s spiritually true because of historical constituency, and because American society is diseased.

Changing the law wouldn’t change the contingencies that make corporate interests more important than human interests; if rescinding corporate personhood happened tomorrow each constituent member of the RIAA would still have more power to alter the political process and the meaning of American citizenship than Esso at its bloated height.

And the worst abuses of corporate personhood would still take place; the swirling multifaceted empires of the Koch Brothers or Rupert Murdoch would still be run by a single person, because a fundamental part of incorporation is the corporate veil and piercing it – i.e. treating a corporation only as its constituent members, considered separately – is an extraordinary step at common law.

I can’t get behind the idea of repealing corporate personhood because it’s a panacea. It’s not only a band-aid over a sucking wound, it’s a band-aid people have been talking up and eagerly anticipating for generations.

I’m not against it, but I honestly don’t see the point. It’s a symbolic gesture, like the Yippies trying to transcendental-meditate away the Vietnam War. This is where I would say that symbolic gestures have some meaning, but as the analogy suggests, they do not. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg, but then it doesn’t the Kochs’ either.

 
 

Apparently, a memo has been sent and marching orders have been signed.
Does Comedy Central Have a Right to Freedom of Speech?
http://patriotpost.us/opinion/terence-jeffrey/2012/04/25/does-comedy-central-have-a-right-to-freedom-of-speech/

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/pelosi-amend-first-amendment

 
 

From my fanatically democratic point of view, the problem is that unlike unions, which are basically republics, corporations are basically dictatorships. Run either on a hereditary monarchic model where the rich fucks in question were given the company with absolutely no qualifications other than birth (which is how the Kochs got where they are), or a dictatorship-by-committee model in which that falls to the corporate version of a Politburo.

This would be less of a problem if society weren’t in the habit of treating the worlds of society and money as equivalent. Corporations have their own purposes and play by their own rules, and you would neither want a parliamentary joint-stock company nor a shareholder-owned country. Certainly if I had to sacrifice one or the other, it’d be the former without question.

I’d be curious to see what would happen if the people who ran the company were picked by their employees, rather than by the boardroom or Mommy/Daddy.

Unfortunately, this kind of thing requires the employees’ work to be so productive that it can produce enough credit to use capital at capacity. There are all kinds of economic reasons why limiting commercial activity to co-ops is a waste of productivity, and while they should be encouraged as much as possible by government and society they’re not the only answer.

For-profit stockholder-run corporations have to answer to stockholders – or else they’re literally what Bierce described them as – and they have to be completely and absolutely subject to the will of government, or else they become a parallel source of prestige and power for people uninterested in or hostile to democracy.

A lot of the problem is the cultural corrosion of deregulation, a climate in which companies engage in rent-seeking behavior in the public sphere with the reasonable expectation that elected representatives will trade their constituents’ quality of living for corporate profits. Corporations have to go back to playing by the rules instead of expecting to be able to pitch the table over and sulk off when they don’t win.

 
 

TL, DR: “Corporate personhood” as a legal reality is relatively inoffensive and “corporate personhood” as a social reality is the beating heart of what is dark and wrong with America, and most efforts to remove the legal reality do nothing to the social reality.

That the anti-personhood movement has piggybacked on genuine outrages like Citizens United makes me deeply suspicious of it; it seems like not only the wrong answer, but a Trojan horse – like the attempts to privatize the TSA over outrage about invasive searches, or the disgustingly successful eminent domain initiatives that failed to solve the problem of buying land for private use but did successfully make buying land for public use insanely expensive if the land was owned by someone with connections.

It feels too pat, and too obvious, and most of the time when something in politics feels that way it is that way.

 
 

““Nothing contained herein shall be construed to limit the people’s rights of… freedom of the press”.

What, in practice, does that actually mean?

It’s just put in there to assuage the the panty pissers and sreaming monkeys. (didn’t work in some cases) The only thing the ammendment does is overturn Citizen’s United. Money/speech can be regulated but speech/speech stays the same.

 
 

The only thing the ammendment does is overturn Citizen’s United. Money/speech can be regulated but speech/speech stays the same.

Uh… why?

That’s not what the amendment says; it explicitly says that all rights given to “persons” do not apply to corporations. I believe the constitution enumerates many more rights than citizen’s united.

I’m not trying to be snarky here; I legitimately don’t understand why the amendment would be interpreted that narrowly.

There may well be lots of good reasons that it would be interpreted that way, but the website seems to be hanging a lot of its hopes on “the good judgement of all involved,” which is not terribly reassuring to me.

 
 

“…try TO…” “…try TO…” “…try TO…” Think infinitive.

 
 

Corporations don’t have rights, only people do. Corporations also can’t vote, sit on a jury, get gay married or run for political office although they try to. Unfortunetely, they also can’t be arrested, strip searched, imprisoned or put in the electric chair.

I think you are over thinking it.

 
 

For over a hundred years, case law and statutes have treated corporations as singular entities. This means the corporation itself can be taxed, sued, own property, enter into contracts, declare bankruptcy, be held liable for misconduct, etc. The appropriate text of the US Code is 1 U.S.C. §1: “In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context indicates otherwise– the words “person” and “whoever” include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals;”

Does this mean that corporations had Constitutional rights? Not sadly, no! They didn’t have free speech rights, didn’t have fifth amendment rights, etc. And “didn’t have” means “attempted to claim but got explicitly smacked down by the courts”.

This is simplified, obviously (see the end for a paper which complicates the ins and outs but not the overall gist). But the important thing to notice is that corporations don’t get Constitutional rights. In many ways they’re protected by Constitutional rights, because the way the legal apparatus is set up corporations are governed by the same laws that citizens are, and those laws can’t violate Constitutional rights. But, the aforementioned smackings down illustrated that Constitutional rights don’t automatically apply to corporations.

Citizens United comes along, and the majority opinion says “fuck everything, we’re granting first amendment speech rights to corporations.”

Well, shit. Ignore the fact that it overruled a hundred years of jurisprudence and that it went well beyond deciding the issues of the case. The more troubling legal issue, bad as those are, is: where does this stop?

The majority ruled “corporations are groups of people acting as a single legal entity; groups of people don’t give up their individual rights; groups that act as one should have free speech rights.” What doesn’t this extend to? Why wouldn’t this make the fifth amendment apply, preventing the self-incrimination of corporations when they’re in court? What is the, to coin a phrase, limiting principle here? Hard to tell, especially once an even more conservative court gets to start playing around with it.

So what the People’s Rights Amendment tries to do is to reverse CU and prevent future Court shenanigans of this nature. Do corporations have free speech rights? No. Do they have fifth amendment rights? No. Do they have some sort of twisted right against zoning laws based off of the freedom to peaceably assemble? No. Etc.

Now the important part: does this overturn the legal apparatus which treats corporations as singular entities, making it easier for them to enter into contracts, get taxed, sued, etc? NO. Look at Section 2 of the PRA again: “People, person, or persons as used in this Constitution does not include corporations, limited liability companies or other corporate entities established by the laws of any state, the United States, or any foreign state, and such corporate entities are subject to such regulation as the people, through their elected state and federal representatives, deem reasonable and are otherwise consistent with the powers of Congress and the States under this Constitution.”

Does this overrule the section of the US code which establishes corporations as a singular entity? No, because it’s “regulation. . . consistent with the powers of Congress and the States under this Constitution.” It just says “we be making laws and we want these laws to apply to corporations too.” Nothing about that is prohibited by the PRA. What’s a little confusing is that the amendment is referred to as “ending corporate personhood”, and since it leaves most of the legal apparatus in place that can be kind of confusing. But before PRA, corporations were deemed to be “persons” under the Constitution, and we are heading towards giving them full Constitutional protections. After PRA, we would just treat corporations as persons in some respects while explicitly denying them Constitutional protections.

So I think that’s it. The only other thing I can think to address is “How will media corporations function?”

The way they always have. We didn’t have this ridiculous “corporations get free speech rights” horseshit for the length of the country’s existence, and we did pretty ok. The PRA just returns things to the pre-CU status quo in this regard.

Finally, as promised: there’s a pretty in-depth exploration of the silent role of corporate personhood in the last hundred years of campaign finance jurisprudence. I won’t link to it to try and avoid moderation, but just search “The Silent Role of Corporate Theory in the Supreme Court’s Campaign Finance Cases” on SSRN.

 
 

I think you are over thinking it.

We’re talking about a constitutional amendment; I don’t think that’s possible.

More than that, though, you can’t on the one hand say “Citizen’s United is a perverse reading of the constitution that can’t possibly be what the document was meant to protect” and then turn right around and say, “We don’t have to be too careful about the wording here… I mean, everybody knows what we meant, so what are the odds that the Supreme Court would misinterpret what we wrote?”

 
 

The problem is not the corporations. It’s the rich autocratic fucks running them who are literally above every law and subject to no authority on Earth. The Kochs don’t need a corporation-person to piss acid down American society’s leg.

Sounds like a familiar argument.

“Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. If you take away Gawdgivengunrights, people will just use knives (or rocks).”

 
 

Guns don’t kill people; hemorrhaging and organ trauma kills people.

 
 

I’ll believe that corporations are people when Arizona deports all the corporations in that state that cannot produce a birth certificate or passport.

 
 

OT: I received my 6th DD (Daily Deviation) from deviantArt today. For funzies, click here and watch my “Favorite” totals go up and up.

Awesome way to start the day. 😀

 
 

The fact is, if you take away corprorations rights they will simply leave and take their assets, jobs, tax revenues and great ideas with them. America will not do well when all productive citizens — individual or corporate — are replaced by government and moochers and looters.

 
 

Also, the fact is, I think it is perfectly acceptable that corporations have free speech and voting rights and more power than individuals. They are composed of individuals and they are working together and cannot be silenced or freedom is gone. However, governments and unions and mobs like Occupy are different creatures — they are ususless and unproductive and classwar, and hate USA and freedom. This is why they need to be eliminated to return prosperity. Real Americans and on my side not yours, liberal haters.

 
 

Musing on memories : Did the Real Gary Ruppert ever exist or was he a figment of our collective liberal-hysterical imaginations?

 
 

Did the Real Gary Ruppert ever exist or was he a figment of our collective liberal-hysterical imaginations?

Or Rugged in Montana? More recently, Da Cool Cooch, whatsisname, Austin Powers or Kricfalusi, from Florida. Tebow’s creator…

 
bughunter, now with more sleep,
 

It’s not just the idea of corporate personhood that got us to the plutocratic police-state we’re trying to correct before it becomes permanent.

It’s the toxic cocktail of: 1) conflation of political donations and political speech, 2) assumption of 1st amendment rights by corporate entities, and 3) elimination of the social contract portion of the corporate license.

1) SCOTUS ruled that a political donation is political speech and cannot be regulated. But money has more of an effect than words. The application of money is a deed, not a word, and can far often have as much of an impact as a fist, or even a bullet.

2) Corporate personhood. Simply stated, Ambrose Bierce’s definition tells you all you need to know about corporations and why they shouldn’t be legal persons. I really like Cerb’s Bill & Ted’s excellent example, too.

3) It used to be that in order to receive a corporate charter, the corporation agreed to perform some socially redeeming function, because it was understood that the effect of a corporation on society had a net negative effect otherwise. Letting corporations weasel out of this requirement was our first step towards a corporate state.

I’d be happy with letting corps keep any one of the above, but I can’t get past the camel’s nose metaphor. The greedy bastards who run them are never happy with enough… they have to have more than everyone else… combined.

 
 

Nationalization of industry is the Human Centipede of capitalism.

Funny, I’ve got this tattooed across my back (small font)

 
 

I’m waiting for someone to fess up and say “I meant to say, Corporations are purple too, my friend.”

 
 

Funny, I’ve got this tattooed across my back (small font)

Funny, I thought you were Leicester?

 
 

OT: I received my 6th DD (Daily Deviation) from deviantArt today. For funzies, click here and watch my “Favorite” totals go up and up.

Awesome way to start the day. 😀

BOOYAH!

You fucking rule.

 
 

Comments: 32
Favourites: 408 [who?]
Views: 3,268 (2,565 today)
Downloads: 57 (43 today)

I checked 10 minutes ago, favs were 404 (lol).

Went to copy, they were at 408.

 
 

I wonder if “corporations are people” can be used against “employers can demand your passwords” in some way.

 
 

Who has two thumbs, 6 DD’s and loves tsam said,

 
 

Um, that’s weird.

Anyway, hugs for you, tsam. I thought I had written my post in invisible e-ink or something.

 
 

A cørpøratiøn once bit my sister…

 
 

434

It’ll start to build on itself now, like a snowball rolling downhill. Yay!

 
 

And whitey’s on the moon…

 
 

Who has two thumbs, DD’s and loves tsam said,

How I read it…

I’m a bad boy.

 
 

they are ususless and unproductive and classwar, and hate USA and freedom. This is why they need to be eliminated to return prosperity.

Now where have I heard this sort of bullshit before….?

 
 

For the originalists

When American colonists declared independence from England in 1776, they also freed themselves from control by English corporations that extracted their wealth and dominated trade. After fighting a revolution to end this exploitation, our country’s founders retained a healthy fear of corporate power and wisely limited corporations exclusively to a business role. Corporations were forbidden from attempting to influence elections, public policy, and other realms of civic society.

 
 

Watch out, tsam, you can shoot your eye out with a six-gun firing DDs.

 
 

“My fellow Americans: This evening I come to you with a message
of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with
you, my countrymen. We have been compelled to create a permanent
armaments industry of vast proportions. Three and a half million men
and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment.
The total influence, economic, political, even spiritual, is felt in every
city, every state-house, every office of the federal government. We
recognize the imperative need for this development yet we must not fail
to comprehend its grave implications. … In the councils of government
we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether
sought of unsought by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the
disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let
the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” —

Dwight Eisenhower
President, General-Supreme Allied Commander

 
 

Watch out, tsam, you can shoot your eye out with a six-gun firing DDs.

I suppose that’s marginally better than the way I’m currently blinding myself.

 
 

It’s bugged me for years that money is considered protected political speech while actual political speech is usually considered something you can be fired for using.

 
 

I suppose that’s marginally better than the way I’m currently blinding myself.

Revved up like a duece? Another runner in the night?

 
 

Money is not speech. That’s not a particularly difficult concept to comprehend. But then “Liberty and Justice for ALL” seems like a bygone ideal as well. The fact that there was ever so much as an argument about gay marriage is unsettling, to say the least. It proves that a large portion of this country has no idea what freedom really means. They fight tooth and nail for their own perceived liberty, yet fight with equal vigor to deprive others of freedoms they themselves take for granted.

 
 

Heh–deuce.

I SWEAR they say douche in that song. Perhaps a reference to their fans?

 
 

1. There’s no language in the amendment preserving “the media’s” right to free speech.

There’s no need for it as the first amendment explicitly says Congref shall make no law …. or of the press

 
 

Manfred Mann sez douche in his version for some reason. I think I heard Springsteen gently correct him on that in concert before.

 
 

. It proves that a large portion of this country has no idea what freedom really means.

it’s just another word for nothing left to lose…

 
St. Trotsky, Pope-in-Avignon
 

Musing on memories : Did the Real Gary Ruppert ever exist or was he a figment of our collective liberal-hysterical imaginations?

I believe that there was once a Gary Ruppert. However, I also believe that Gary Ruppert has not been to Sadly, No! in a very, very long time. Since then, “Gary Ruppert” has been a succession of people amongst us, testing us, prodding at our defenses, sneaking up upon us and shouting “THE FACT IS, THERE’S A SPIDER ON YOUR NECK!”

But I’m known to have trust issues.

 
 

But I’m known to have trust issues.

Is this really Gary?

 
 

“Indeed, which is why the right-wing is no longer allowed to vote in federal elections.”

Not quite the same, but you can see why they’re concerned – I see you’ve heard that the GOP can no longer have candidates on the ballot in Harford County elections here in Maryland. They can put up write-in candidates if they want, but no more automatic spot. That’s just the start, too; soon Republicans won’t be able to vote at all!

What’s that, Mr. Bimbo? [holds finger to ear] You say it’s the Democrats, not the GOP? That they were dropped because of a new rule that says any party getting less than 15% of the vote can’t be automatically on the ballot? And the Democrats didn’t bother to put up a candidate in the last election? So they got even fewer votes than usual? Oh, well that’s OK, then – carry on!

 
 

But I’m known to have trust issues.

well, we know for sure it’s not n_b because he has ‘truss’ issues…

 
 

Funny, I’ve got this tattooed across my back (small font)

Funny, I thought you were Leicester?

No, that would have been on the back of his neck.

/very obscure Monty Python reference

 
 

The fact is, I’m a real person, just like a corporation.

 
 

Money is not speech. That’s not a particularly difficult concept to comprehend.

Unless you’re a Supreme Court justice.

 
 

well, we know for sure it’s not n_b because he has ‘truss’ issues…

He is known to lash out sometimes…

 
 

He is known to lash out sometimes…

indeed…columns could be written!

 
 

indeed…columns could be written!

stories could be told.

 
 

You’re all on the list!

 
 

You’re all on the list!

ooooooh…that’s not the big scary door list, is it?!?!?

 
 

…Lovecraftian horrors…

Hmm, now that you mention it, it very well could have been that K. Lo. wrote that NRO article.

 
 

indeed…columns could be written!

It’s all deflection over his seismic issues.

 
 

ooooooh…that’s not the big scary door list, is it?!?!?

Hey! Work your own side of the street, sister!

 
 

And it’s called a SCHEDULE for your goddamn information.

Hmmpf!1!!

 
 

I, alas, am listless.

 
 

A door schedules very important. How else could one time a departure so as to not get hit in the ass?

 
 

N_B is a known CAD

 
 

Hey–why don’t you architects switch to metric? You could be a trendsetter, N_B. A forward thinking pillar of the industry…

 
 

sometimes he says things that are a crocket of shite…what a doric!

 
 

but perhaps it’s just a facade…

 
 

although you can count on him in a jamb…

 
 

Hey–why don’t you architects switch to metric? You could be a trendsetter, N_B.

This is a grave insult. Not the metric, the other thing.

 
 

But seriously, a couple of things:

1) This PRA thing is a first step at perhaps beginning to talk about fixing this shit. So, perhaps — perhaps — it will get people talking about it. I’m personally not particularly hopeful on that point because of our delightful free corporate press, but whatevs. It’s a little better than nothing.

2) If not this, what?

Because of the Citizens United ruling, corporations have new rights they’re just starting to figure out how to use. These are entities whose sole purpose is to create wealth for their owners, with no regard for anything else, no sense of good or evil, just a bottom line. And they are currently on a path that will certainly take them beyond just the “free speech” of throwing money around. When will Corporation X’s clever lawyer assert that they truly are a “corporate person” and that the right to trial by a jury of its peers means that only other “corporate persons” should be allowed to be jurors in its trial? Or when will one “take the fifth” in a whistleblower case, where the blower is a stockholder?

So, what do we do? Because this was a Supreme Court decision, I think an amendment is the only thing that can really be done to fix it. I have a really hard time imagining any amendment getting passed these days, let alone this one.

What’s the end game?

 
 

Hey bbkf; Nobody uses that classical doric business anymore. Mmkay?

 
 

This is a grave insult. Not the metric, the other thing.

Hipster bait!

 
 

If you read the archives of ENR and its predecessors, the Engineering News and the Engineering Record, asshole proto-teatard engineers have been arguing against metrication since the 1890s.

 
 

asshole proto-teatard engineers have been arguing against metrication since the 1890s

I haven’t read those archives, but they are in my Nook queue. (They’re not, but for the purposes of this discussion, let’s say they are)

Anyway, I did a Fairchild AFB project about the time the feds decided they were going metric. I loved it–NO FRACTIONS. However, the rest of the subs and suppliers cried their eyes out over the whole thing. It made me sad.

 
 

hey tsam–ionic you are but what am i?!?!?

 
 

okay, i am going to put a frieze on the architectural puns for a mo…i just found out that i could go over and ask this dude any questions i want on Monday morning at 10…any suggestions?

 
 

TRIGGER WARNING: I don’t consider myself a “purity troll”, but YMMV.

What’s the end game?

See, here’s teh thing. Corporations are legal entites as defined by laws which are things that teh danged gubmint has control of. There are already laws and regulations that specifically target corporations. And since corporations exist specifically for the purposes of commerce, teh feds have all sorts of power to regulate corporations. They just don’t.

 
 

hey tsam–ionic you are but what am i?!?!?

Top of my list for a junkpunch.

 
 

There are already laws and regulations that specifically target corporations. And since corporations exist specifically for the purposes of commerce, teh feds have all sorts of power to regulate corporations

So what do you do when the Supreme Kangaroo overturns the Commerce Clause? Execute them?

 
 

Top of my list for a junkpunch.

awesome! i finally made it to the top of a list!!!

 
 

Does a good, spicy Bloody Mary sound like heaven right now to anyone else? I think I’ll have a couple at for lunch.

 
 

So what do you do when the Supreme Kangaroo overturns the Commerce Clause? Execute them?

Yes*. Teh SCOTUS is still a public body, in existence due to teh will of teh People. If they overturn teh Commerce Clause, teh backlash ought to be of such magnitude that impeachment would be on the table. But then again, I am an optimist.

* Figuratively. In teh non-literal “heads will roll” sense.

 
 

Does a good, spicy Bloody Mary sound like heaven right now to anyone else? I think I’ll have a couple at for lunch.

Yeah. Maybe later. I do feel like partying ‘cuz of my DD. You and bbkf can join me.

 
 

Yeah. Maybe later. I do feel like partying ‘cuz of my DD. You and bbkf can join me.

Got a hot tub**?

**Stank troll trigger

 
 

**Stank troll trigger

Dude. Don’t even…I don’t want troll poo in my bath hot tub.

 
 

Where’s the Clamato?

 
 

speaking of assholey corporations, hubbkf’s appeal to health partners has been denied…surprise, surprise…they have two other doctors at health partner clinics who, and i quote, ‘may be able to help him.’

i get that they can’t just let everyone go out of network, but goddamn! when two neurologists and the u of mn neuorolgy department tell you you should be going to the mayo, then maybe that’s what should happen…which of course we could on our own, but unfortunately we do not have a gazillion dollars and likely wouldn’t qualify as a charity case…

it’s just that they are willing to spend money on ‘may’ and not on a pretty tittyfucking good possibility that a diagnosis can be reached…plus they were sooooooooooooooo dismissive in the letter they sent back with the denial…

/rant over

 
 

Where’s the Clamato?

You know what? I still want to try that. And I have clam juice and V-8 here. Hey, close enough.

 
 

You and bbkf can join me.

i’m in, but i’m bringing martinis…

 
 

Dear Ms. bbkf;

Bomb mailing services available at bargain prices. 2 for 1 specials throughout the month of May. Act now!

 
 

Where’s the Clamato?

srsly…things with clam juice in them are just WRONG! not to mention tomatoes…eck…

 
 

it’s just that they are willing to spend money on ‘may’ and not on a pretty tittyfucking good possibility that a diagnosis can be reached…plus they were sooooooooooooooo dismissive in the letter they sent back with the denial…

Things like this make me see red. It’s just infuriating.

 
 

Bomb mailing services available at bargain prices. 2 for 1 specials throughout the month of May. Act now!

do. not. tempt. me.

 
 

Clamato is good in beer. I don’t think I’ve had a Bloody Mary with it, though. I imagine it’s at least somewhat awesome.

 
 

srsly…things with clam juice in them are just WRONG! not to mention tomatoes…eck…

It’s like I don’t even KNOW you anymore…

 
 

i believe i have stated these facts numerous times…as usual, you WEREN’T LISTENING…

 
 

really…sometimes i don’t know why i even bother…

 
 

Clamato is good in beer.

You did not just say that, did you?

I’ll accept it in the bloody mary — ‘specially if there are lots of yummy pickled vegetables as garnish. I already have lunch plans, but otherwise a couple bloody marys for lunch sounds awesome. They’re such a great meal substitute, I mean how can you go wrong with tomatoes, veggies, and spices?

 
 

Things like this make me see red. It’s just infuriating.

word…but our healthcare system doesn’t need to be changed or anything!

 
 

The problem is not the corporations. It’s the rich autocratic fucks running them who are literally above every law and subject to no authority on Earth. The Kochs don’t need a corporation-person to piss acid down American society’s leg.

False.

The best functional analogies for private corporations are fascism & cancer. Such tropes do not exactly warm the human heart to a rosy glow, with very good reason.

The problems that global corporations have created exponentially dwarf the scope of volition (& in some cases even imagination) available to their managers or owners. The KochBrah’s greed & malice sure do SEEM awfully scary … but compare their political Calvinball to the epic lethal folly of Fukushima or Bhopal. That deadliness is the inherent endgame of an economic cancer – & it isn’t likely to be negated if you put someone really nice in the CEO’s chair. The folks running it at the time were probably quite ordinary enough fellows, but Nestlé had no problem with killing more than a million African infants by discouraging breastfeeding while selling their baby-formula to places they knew damn well had contaminated water – in fact the demands of their multinational business model made that (perfectly legal) atrocity mandatory. Privately held corporations don’t all have to fall into that model, & a few go beyond it, but the dominant paradigm is both rewarding & compulsive for those who serve & obey it.

One of corporate culture’s most profound (& subtle) effects has been the largely bloodless genocide of hundreds of indigenous folk cultures, some of them many thousands of years old. What it took Attila The Hun decades & legions of lost warriors to do, Disney, Apple, PepsiCo & McDonalds can do almost overnight. Note that this effect is becoming ever less signifigant as the world becomes more & more of a monoculture. Bhopal is one of the final holdouts, & as of right now its resistance is crumbling fast.

As vehicles for oppression go, corporations are at least as successful as armies or churches were before them – & their generic nature makes them potentially much more dangerous than either. Corporations aren’t just getting ever more powerful: they’re becoming steadily harder to identify or isolate. Their ability to reify & commodify dissent against them with lightning speed & success is already itself a cultural cliche. The idea of corporations as rigid top-down ziggurats is decades out of date now: corporations are whatever they need to be this week to make more money than they did last week, full stop.

Hiding at the fountainhead (hah) of modern corporate culture is a lovely orchid of pure gallows irony.

Corporate personhood began as A FUCKING BOGUS HEADNOTE BY A CLERK. That gobshite clerk should’ve been canned … instead he solidified perhaps the single most lethal fiction since animism.

The real topper? The dumb pud made a typo to boot:

” The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen (sic)* Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. “
__________________________________________________
* Contrary viewpoint well presented here.

 
 

Yes*. Teh SCOTUS is still a public body, in existence due to teh will of teh People. If they overturn teh Commerce Clause, teh backlash ought to be of such magnitude that impeachment would be on the table. But then again, I am an optimist.

See, I’m not an optimist at all, and I have about 0.001% confidence that a completely apathetic public and complicit corporate press would allow anything approaching this. So, basically, my take on this would be: Yep, we’re fucked.

 
 

Christopher said,
April 27, 2012 at 9:27

“I think you are over thinking it.”

We’re talking about a constitutional amendment; I don’t think that’s possible.

More than that, though, you can’t on the one hand say “Citizen’s United is a perverse reading of the constitution that can’t possibly be what the document was meant to protect” and then turn right around and say, “We don’t have to be too careful about the wording here… I mean, everybody knows what we meant, so what are the odds that the Supreme Court would misinterpret what we wrote?”

That’s not what I meant by “over thinking it”. What I meant, and I thought this was obvious, was that you are making the issue more difficult than it needs to be and that it is. You are thinking up all sorts of potential problems and hypothetical confusions about the language of the ammendment which in actuallity don’t exist.
I do think you are being sincere though unlike NRO and others who are just engaging in propaganda and making shit up for political reasons. It reminds me of when Schafly said that the ERA ammendment would mandate co-ed bathrooms. She actually argued that horseshit.

 
 

This are far to seriuz thred. What we need is moar PENIS.

 
 

The Perfect Combination™

Gah! It’s worse than goatse!

 
 

Rhinocerose!

 
 

Let’s put it simply:

If you want the corporate veil, your corporation is not a person but a disembodied entity. That entity therefore has no constitutional rights, or rights at all, except as prescribed by law. So Koch whores, lose the veil and put yourselves in the way of legal liability and you can be people. As it stands, their “holdings” can act in any manner they wish and hide behind the 1st Amendment. Even supporters of the philosophy of personhood know this .999% pure 14 karat squirrel shit.

 
 

The Perfect Combination™

you will not beLIEVE how pissy people can be in a place that does not stock this particular evil…

 
 

If corporations are people, shouldn’t Worldnet Daily, Inc. be involuntarily committed to an insane asylum?

 
 

So, basically, my take on this would be: Yep, we’re fucked.

Well, you’re probably right. Expecting people to have any foresight or understanding about teh dangers of granting powers to entites that exist solely for teh purpose of profit,,,

Anyways, my point is that theoretically there’s a way of addressing corporate infiltration in politics. Example, a massive fine of 100,000% of total political donations. Defended with the same argument used in teh current official defenses of teh Individual Mandate – it’s a choice of paying teh fine or refraining from prohibited behaviour. Then again, we also don’t know how teh “choice to pay a fine” argument is going to turn out.

 
 

You say poe-tay-toe and I say poe-tah-toe. You say Clah-may-toe and I say YUCK!!!

 
 

The Perfect Combination™

This is exactly why God put that line in Leviticus about shellfish.

 
 

Where is the Crimson Permanent Assurance when we need them?

 
 

The problem DKW is that under the conserva-constitution that would be punishing corporate free speech.

 
 

I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not just teh conserva-constitution that venerates corporate human rights over human human rights. It’s teh constitution of all lawmakers with significant corporate donations to their campaign coffers. Which is just about all of them.

 
 

i just found out that i could go over and ask this dude any questions i want on Monday morning at 10…any suggestions?

Ask why his support for infrastructure spending is so inconsistent.

Then:

“As a lobbyist in 2003 and 2004, Mr. Thune earned $220,000 from the Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern Railroad, a small but ambitious company in South Dakota. The railroad hopes to rebuild and rehabilitate 1,300 miles of track, the nation’s largest proposed railroad expansion in more than a century.”

“Last year (2005), his first in the Senate, Mr. Thune wrote language into a transportation bill expanding the pot of federal loan money for small railroads, enabling his former client to apply for $2.5 billion in government financing for its project. The loan has yet to be approved; Mr. Thune said he was trying to promote economic development in his home state.”

Now:

“In a brief interview, just above the Senate chamber, Sen. John Thune (R-SC) rejected President Obama’s State of the Union call for broad infrastructure upgrades, citing his opposition to new spending projects and claiming that existing mechanisms for funding current transportation infrastructure projects are basically adequate.”

 
 

Favoring his clients’ interests and filling his own coffers is one of the main “existing mechanisms for funding current transportation infrastructure.”

 
 

Listen, I know you’re all pissed off about Citizens United, and I am too, but I wasn’t just using the Kochs or the Waltons for rhetorical purposes. The Waltons weren’t grinding American commerce between their teeth because their firm is a person with free speech rights and the Kochs didn’t start tugging at the country from the right of the Birch Society on January 21, 2010.

Even if removing corporate personhood as a doctrine from our law wasn’t liable to be a catastrophe in a dozen different ways, it’s not like money hasn’t done a fine job abusing power without it. No one’s going to put the Kochs in jail for voter suppression, corporate personhood or no corporate personhood, Citizens United or no Citizens United.

See, here’s teh thing. Corporations are legal entites as defined by laws which are things that teh danged gubmint has control of. There are already laws and regulations that specifically target corporations. And since corporations exist specifically for the purposes of commerce, teh feds have all sorts of power to regulate corporations. They just don’t.

This.

It’s not like America is the only country where corporate personhood is a legal reality, overtly or covertly. It’s just that we’re exceptionally bad at accepting that there are any limits to what business is allowed to get away with.

“Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. If you take away Gawdgivengunrights, people will just use knives (or rocks).”

Well, if you were to propose that we deal with the endemic problem of serial killers by repealing the 2nd Amendment – let’s posit, for analogy, a culture that successfully memed the idea that the 2nd Amendment represents a ‘license to kill’ – I’m afraid I would have to respond with a version of that statement, yes.

 
 

Listen, I know you’re all pissed off about Citizens United, and I am too, but I wasn’t just using the Kochs or the Waltons for rhetorical purposes. The Waltons weren’t grinding American commerce between their teeth because their firm is a person with free speech rights and the Kochs didn’t start tugging at the country from the right of the Birch Society on January 21, 2010.

No, but it sure got a lot easier for them to do so more effectively on that date. This is the veritable slippery slope. Since the inception of this country people with money have been using it to influence politicians. The politicians under that influence then pass laws or judgements that make it easier for the people with money to influence politicians. And so it goes. Occasionally, the people without money can raise enough cain to slow or even temporarily reverse the process.

 
 

Since the inception of this country people with money have been using it to influence politicians. The politicians under that influence then pass laws or judgements that make it easier for the people with money to influence politicians.

Well, that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? The last President to make any kind of political move not directly militated for by capital was Carter, and as a society we’ve come to reject that there’s anything to politics besides influence – you can’t just do things because they’re the right thing to do.

It’s not that Johnson and FDR weren’t corrupt as the day is long, it’s that that wasn’t the only thing about them. They had beliefs and they had desires. They didn’t just figure their legacy was secure because they made it to the top. Hell, even Nixon tried to acquit himself to history with his actions, in between being a thief and a liar.

Politics is now seem both by the public and the political class as a game in which you become a celebrity in exchange for occasionally holding a presser and changing the law for your donors.

I don’t know what to do about that, honestly.

 
 

basically adequate

that could be the south dakota state motto…

 
 

Well, if we want to talk about the broader question about why we’re fucked, then I’d agree that corporate personhood is not the most grievous sin going on now. That award would simply go to the “being owned by stockholders” problem.

Making any business entity responsible to nothing other than the short-term profit of their company is pretty much what makes good companies bad and bad companies worse. When a corporate entity is required to not just make a profit every year, but increase their profits every year, and really more like every quarter or every day or every minute or they will be held legally liable, you have all sorts of incentive to bullshit short-term decisions that mean really bad effects in the long-term for the business, its employees, the customers, the world in general, and so on.

And it allows a great means by which to promote our most sociopathic of citizens to either positions of high power or as “necessary consultants” to well-meaning people just trying to appease their angry stockholders.

That’s not to say that corporate personhood isn’t a giant kick in the pants. It is, and the way that corporations have used their selective personhood to grant themselves some bizarre rights like speech (and because they don’t have vocal chords, this must mean money, hey look, an end-run around campaign finance reform).

And not to knock rich vindictive assholes.

Though I would argue they’re the least offensive of the bunch. Yeah, they can do a lot of damage and they are the ones pulling the strings in a lot of these bad acting corporations.

But see, society has a defense mechanism against rich assholes when they are forced to stand on their own two feet and argue their cases as themselves. It’s called the French or Russian Revolutions. When rich assholes are rich assholes, they become focal points for populist rage at how they are being fucked by rich assholes. Look at how much more focused critiques against the 1% became after the Koch Brothers were revealed as “those assholes behind everything you hate”. Sure, they still have a lot of power, but now every one of their actions just stirs another big pot of simmering resentment against them personally and eventually that will boil over and something regrettable will happen to them unless they back off from being as assholic as they were when they could hide behind a ever expanding number of shell companies and organizations.

But yeah, at the end of the day there are a lot of reasons we are fucked. Corporate personhood, the abuses of corporate charters, the formation of megacorporations that have no real home country or real people and employ too many people for most to feel comfortable taking them down when they do wrong, sociopathic rich fuckers willing to do anything to become richer, and of course the wildly expanding income gap which exacerbates all these problems to so much worse as the rich get even more of the monetary power and the poor have less and less legal recourse.

In short, shit sucks these days and only time will tell if we can solve it legally with the few tools we have left or if future generations will talk of the Second American Revolution.

 
 

quote from my mother at lunch* today:

‘it’s amazing how many people are dead!’

*turkey, bacon and avocado on grilled focaccia…freaking awesome…

 
 

In short, shit sucks these days and only time will tell if we can solve it legally with the few tools we have left or if future generations will talk of the Second American Revolution.

Or a second Delian League?

Our great-grandchildren are going to give tours around our freedom holes to foreign princelings and our great works of culture are going to disappear into the bowels of foreign museums, under the theory we’re not competent to safeguard them, on account of we aren’t.

That’s the joke.

 
 

alec-

I didn’t necessarily say it’d be taught by our schools.

 
 

‘it’s amazing how many people are dead!’

Death is media myth. Smoke pot every day 420 never die.

 
 

DON’T BELIEVE THE LIE, MILLIONS LIVING NOW WILL EVENTUALLY DIE

 
Helmut Monotreme
 

perhaps the single most lethal fiction since animism

I may have come to the discussion late, but how is animism a lethal fiction?

 
 

If corporations are people, shouldn’t Worldnet Daily, Inc. be involuntarily committed to an insane asylum?

And Rmoney’s Bain Capital would be a confessed abortionist.

 
 

“Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. If you take away Gawdgivengunrights, people will just use knives (or rocks).”

Yeah, but guns sure make it easy and efficient. There’s a reason you don’t see many drive-by stabbings.

 
 

MILLIONS LIVING NOW WILL EVENTUALLY DIE

For alec : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMBTckcbUZs

 
 

This is really fucking depressing.

Fuckit.

It’s Friday. The weather is halfway decent. I went out to lunch and had yummy nachos and a delicious HUB Secession CDA, and I am wearing socks with cute cartoon martinis on them. So there.

 
 

Hey, OBS, Nick Floyd had an interesting critique of the brewing scene in PNW. Any thoughts? (not meant to antagonize, I’m not a brewer)

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-04-25/features/chi-three-floyds-three-floyds-brewing-looking-to-open-a-chicago-brewpub-20120425_1_pale-ale-three-floyds-chicago-brewpub

 
Helmut Monotreme
 

There’s a reason you don’t see many drive-by stabbings.

The British media is currently freaking out over an alleged increase in stabbings referred to as “Knife crime”. I assume that since they now have their gun situation under control and there isn’t much “gun crime” left, they have moved on to the next item on the list. Once sharp objects are banned they will move on to “club crime”, “random blunt object crime”, “garrote crime” and so on, until they have banned solid and liquid* matter from British shores.

*drowning attacks will rise in the wake of the ban on solid matter.

 
 

The British cops don’t even carry guns, so it’s pretty much “Halt! Or……..I’ll say Halt again!”

 
 

But see, society has a defense mechanism against rich assholes when they are forced to stand on their own two feet and argue their cases as themselves. It’s called the French or Russian Revolutions.

Which is why American foreign and domestic policy, in the wake of both those revolutions (especially the Russian), was characterized by hysterical overreaction.

The Alien and Sedition Acts. Sacco and Vanzetti. HUAC. Joe McCarthy. The Rosenbergs. Various FBI and local police Red Squads. The list goes on and on. Many people suffered, and more than a few died, to assure paranoid rich people and their enablers/lackeys that their fortunes were safe from the slightest hint of insurrection.

Soviet Communism is a receding memory and the Chinese are our biggest trading partners/debt holders, so the paranoia has quieted down. But if certain people ever imagine that they get a whiff of anything that even approaches revolution…

 
 

Looks like 815 to me.

 
 

The British media is currently freaking out over an alleged increase in stabbings referred to as “Knife crime”.

It’s part of an obsession with the criminality of those damn kids. I think the issue is that, after all that trouble they went to to crucify pedophiles, those innocent virginal children grew up into teenagers and started having sex anyway, and the media/culture just feel super betrayed.

The British cops don’t even carry guns, so it’s pretty much “Halt! Or……..I’ll say Halt again!”

Try telling that to Jean Charles de Menezes, hoss.

 
 

Sorry, “paedophiles”. The difference is that the British way is you pronounce it as if you are one.

 
 

Excuse me. I mean 835.

 
 

HEY

GIVE VS HER LUVS YA BUNCHA MOTHERFUCKERS

 
 

She’s a mom…where’s DKW?

 
 

OK VS, I just favorited (is that a word) it.

 
 

All this talk of moms is HAWT.

 
 

OK VS, I just favorited (is that a word) it.

Favorite is a verb now, and a word. Write that word down, say it out loud, that ain’t a crime.

 
 

Hey, OBS, Nick Floyd had an interesting critique of the brewing scene in PNW. Any thoughts? (not meant to antagonize, I’m not a brewer)

Thoughts? About beer? Of course I have thoughts!

1) there’s this:

“If you’re not traveling and learning new stuff, you’re sort of stuck,” he said. “Look at Portland. It’s still based on Willamette and Cluster (hops). It’s the same (bleeping) beer you were drinking 30 years ago!”

Same beer it was 30 years ago? W. T. F.?

That’s complete and utter bullshit. I don’t know where the fuck he was drinking beer, but Oregon breweries are making incredibly complex beers in a vast array of differing, often new styles. Did he stop by Cascade, or Upright? Shit, maybe he just tried IPAs from Deschutes and Full Sail or something, but I really don’t know what the fuck he’s on about. It just has no basis whatsoever in reality.

B) He’s into New Zealand hops, great. Seems like a helluva long way for hops to travel when you can grow them much closer to home — that’s much more economical and better for the environment, but whatevs. This article explains a bit about why commercial hops are currently the way they are (hint: fucking Budweiser!), and explains how Oregon and Washington, like New Zealand, are trying to change that. Why does he hate America? Heh.

III) So anyway, not hugely impressed. But, then there’s this:

Floyd said he also plans to open a pub in Western Europe with Mikkel Borg Bjergso, the Dane behind Mikkeller beer. Floyd mentioned Copenhagen, London and Amsterdam as possibilities.

I respect Mikkeller, so if that guy is willing to work with Floyd, maybe there’s more going on here than is clear from this article… Then again maybe he’s just trying to make money.

 
 

Beer ain’t shit and Oregon ain’t shit. I’m gonna move to Seattle and I’m gonna drink bourbon whiskey and I’m gonna join a jam band and I’m gonna wear a pork pie hat and I’m never coming back!

 
 

Here’s some beer that’s shit.

On a related note, Blue Velvet is way better when you regard it as an autobiographical project about David Lynch’s youth.

 
 

thanks obs. kinda seems like he was talking out his ass. we’re still pretty excited that he’s opening something in chicago though

 
 

On a related note, Blue Velvet is way better when you regard it as an autobiographical project about David Lynch’s youth. ignore everything about it except Isabella Rossellini and Laura Dern.

Fixxorinated for how I watched it as a 17 year old in 1986.

 
 

GIVE VS HER LUVS YA BUNCHA MOTHERFUCKERS

Yer da best, tsam. I was gonna give up at 1000. But I’ll give up at…hold up…914. It shouldn’t be this hard, ya know?

Thanks, Major.

 
 

Fixxorinated for how I watched it as a 17 year old in 1986.

Come for the 80s sexy, stay for the Kwisatz Haderach being raped by a gang of middle-aged men.

 
 

Also, Jesus, I wasn’t even alive in 1986. I will concede it’s better than what I was into in 2004 – you know, that horrible generic post-goth thing – but only just.

 
 

Also, Jesus, I wasn’t even alive in 1986.

Yes, I know I’m old. Thanks.

I will concede it’s better than what I was into in 2004 – you know, that horrible generic post-goth thing – but only just.

I can’t really make fun of the whole goth thing, ’cause you should’ve seen the FUCKING EPIC mullet I had in 1986. It was a thing of beauty utterly ridiculous in hindsight.

But hey, 1986 did have not-quite-zombie-but-close Reagan, so, y’know, yay?

 
 

I can’t really make fun of the whole goth thing, ’cause you should’ve seen the FUCKING EPIC mullet I had in 1986. It was a thing of beauty utterly ridiculous in hindsight.

I had a rat-tail well into my teens, and my parents both had big, feathered Farah Fawcett hair until around the time they were my age (and had me). Men’s hair just does not age well.

I’m sure when I’m actually old instead of just feeling old I’m going to run into a passel of younglings with strong opinions on “rimpcore” and “bonk bags” and Skrillex hair and so on. And then I’m going to order them off of my lawn.

 
 

Yer da best, tsam. I was gonna give up at 1000. But I’ll give up at…hold up…914.

It’s at 950 and the day is still young.

It shouldn’t be this hard, ya know?

That doesn’t really work all that well as a “that’s what she said!”…

 
 

I had hair down to my shoulders when I was in high school.

Had to cut it short for ROTC when I went to college. It’s pretty much been that way ever since.

 
 

My hair was beautiful.

WAAAAAAHHHHHH.

 
 

Had to cut it short for ROTC when I went to college. It’s pretty much been that way ever since.

I kept mine long (as in down to my waist at one point) — not as a mullet though — until I started going bald in the late 90s. Then I shaved it off. Now I can’t stand it if the still-diminishing-remainder gets longer than about 1/4 inch.

 
 

My hair was beautiful.

Me too. Strawberry blond with gentle natural curls. It’s what initially attracted my wife to me. Thankfully she stuck around after I went bald.

Can’t really say I miss it all that much though, in hindsight. Kind of a pain in the ass really.

 
 

That doesn’t really work all that well as a “that’s what she said!”…

Yeah its not a complaint one often hears.

I did a decent amount of damage to my hair dying and re-dying it. I swear by this stuff:http://m.wenhaircare.com/?uci=ous116&s_kwcid=TC%7C1026589%7Cwen%7C%7CSM%7Ce%7C10625561296#container

 
 

Re: Citizens United, I am concerned that what appears to be nonsense is codified into law. Wikipedia:

“The majority argued that the First Amendment must protect speakers with equal vigor [and that] the First Amendment does not tolerate prohibitions of speech based on the identity of the speaker. Because corporations are groups of individuals, the corporate form must receive the same free speech privileges as individual citizens. Likewise, the majority argued that independent expenditures are a form of speech, and limiting a corporation’s ability to spend money also limits its ability to speak.”

It is within our power to define corporations as being able to own stuff, for example. Ownership does not necessarily require the ability to DO things. We then draw up documents specifying who (or what) owns what, and behave as if such language is meaningful. We can declare that we are acting as agents of various abstract entities — ones having only those attributes we can reasonably ascribe to them, like ownership of assets.

But we cannot meaningfully declare that abstract entities can perform speech acts or their analogues. Documents and declarations cannot make it so. To say that corporations speak is only to say that their human agents will be acknowledged as such. In our capacities as human agents of abstract entities, we continue to have 1st amendment rights (though our speech might violate the terms of our employment).

Abstract entities cannot exercise agency (whether to speak or spend), and their agents are already protected under the 1st amendment, so Citizens United is a nonsensical answer in search of a problem. I’d say this is true whether or not spending is a form of speech. I don’t think it is. Spending related to speech (enabling its amplification, suppression, dissemination, etc.) ought not be conflated with speech itself. I’m sure distinctions like these are made very assiduously when moneyed interests have something to gain by it.

 
 

Don’t click on this link

http://www.rumproast.com/index.php/site/comments/requiem_for_a_wingnut/

Whaddaya mean, clicking on the link is fine. Just don’t watch the video once you get there.

 
 

I apologize if anyone posted this before but…

Yes. A thousand times yes. Corporate personhood is a “strange thing” by which I mean it is by itself satire. Imagine a corporation doing anything a person would do. Fall in love, eat an ice cream, watch a movie, fuck someone’s mother. You can’t.

Corporations have fucked lots of people’s mothers, just not in a good way.

 
 

Thin wispy cowlick hair here. Going bald was the best thing that could have happened.. poor lil’g, its not looking great for him either

 
 

Geez, you can’t tell at that age, can you?

 
 

Geez, you can’t tell at that age, can you?

The child is father to the man.

 
 

Projection all the way! Hope he gets some of mommy’s locks and looks

 
 

I have no idea why I like that show. It’s like an endearing car wreck.

 
 

This is going to sound pretty ridiculous, but on the merits I think there’s a strong case to be made in support of Citizens United. Freedom of speech and Freedom of Assembly, why can’t teh two go together?

I’m not saying that it was necessarily decided correctly, just that teh argument isn’t completely baseless.

 
 

I kept mine long (as in down to my waist at one point) — not as a mullet though — until I started going bald in the late 90s. Then I shaved it off.

Big blond ‘fro here- I once went a year without a haircut. It was very curly, so it never got past my shoulders. When it started going, I switched to the razor cut, usually every other day.

 
 

That’s assuming the whole money equals speech argument

 
 

Also too, will be in DC for a couple days next week, provided they don’t figure out that I’m some sort of crazy deranged soshulast. My only experience with teh place is breakfast sammies at 5 Guys in National Airport and playing Fallout 3. Is there anything I should try to catch, since I might not be able to slip past teh border too many times?

 
 

re: money = speech

Yeah, that’s definitely one of teh flaws in teh argument. Plus also too, teh whole “shall pass no law” thing has always been caveated by reasonable exceptions. Even if you grant money = speech, there’s still a good argument that teh case was decided wrnog.

But teh whole extending Freedom of Speech to collectives isn’t something I am particularly opposed to.

 
 

DK-W I’m sorry you couldn’t have made it down a couple weeks earlier, for the cherry blossoms on The Mall.

You might wanna check out the new MLK memorial.

 
 

“I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness,”

 
 

You think you had hair? 1974 hair.>/a>

 
 

And I didn’t cut it until 1976!

 
 

When we lived down there we went to these as often as possible.

 
 

Hey, just a heads up for sadly admin: Spear is being blocked and indentified as a spammer. Can you let him in, please?

 
 

But teh whole extending Freedom of Speech to collectives isn’t something I am particularly opposed to.

It’s like the Eminent Domain thing or the TSA thing. There’s always some public outrage, and the answer everyone’s supposed to get behind is a power grab for asshole rich men.

Like, supposing we establish collectives have no speech rights… that stops the teachers’ union officially backing a candidate, but doesn’t stop David Koch spending millions of dollars paying glibbie nerds to pound out weird copy-and-paste laws.

And supposing we establish that money isn’t protected speech. That stops the AFL-CIO raising money for candidates … but doesn’t stop David Koch spending millions of dollars paying glibbie nerds to pound out weird copy-and-paste laws.

There’s an outrage, and then there’s a “solution” that narrowly tailors the outrage to what makes it best for rich assholes.

The outrage is eminent domain abuse; the “solution” makes the proper use of eminent domain an economic improbability. (Taxpayers can’t afford to buy land at market rates for things like schools and roads – for-profit companies can.)

The outrage is barely-accountable public employees being driven by security paranoia to invasively search travellers; the “solution” is to pay a private security firm without direct bureaucratic accountability to invasively search travellers.

And now the outrage is a decision that allows collective organizations speech rights and confirms the idea that political money is a speech right … and the “solution” is to strip speech rights from collective organizations, and unlimited political money from collective organizations.

Say what you will about liberals, but they’ll always be a ready mark.

 
 

very obscure Monty Python reference
There’s a dead bishop on the landing, dad

 
 

Is there anything I should try to catch,

Just avoid Dupont Square – oh, the things you could catch around there.

The Udvard-hazi or whatever the fuck it is, is worthwhile but it’s kind of a pain to get to. The Smithsonian Science and Industry and also Aerospace museons are seriously worth a visit, though you should plan more time an you can plan. The holocaust museum was pretty powerful even though we had been to Auschwitz /Birkenau. Architecturally and aspirationaly I think the Jefferson Memorial is the best of the lot. Haven’t been to the MLK monument. The FDR monument is also interesting but then, yer a one ‘o them fucking Caninies or Canadaians or whatever so piss off furriner.

 
 

You think you had hair? 1974 hair.>/a>

You looked a lot like Dee Dee Ramone, old chum.

Is there anything I should try to catch, since I might not be able to slip past teh border too many times?

Check out the various incarnations of the Smithsonian.

 
 

Pup, you were a cutie pie. Kinda David Cassidy hair yer workin there.

 
 

I must confess, at the big pride march of 93(?) the Canuck contingent was chanting “we’re here, we’re queer, we’re cross border shopping.” Those cute little hoseheads just stole our hearts, yes they did.

 
 

When I posted that at reddit as a sort of joke the top comment was “Luke! Don’t kiss Leia – she’s your sister!”

 
 

Oh shit, I was ready for a Luke and LAURA joke.

 
 

There’s a login that used to work: choose an identity and the spam thingie wouldn’t eat you. Dunno if that still applies.

 
 

A friend once said that I would like long hair on a basketball. Of course, this person was someone I referred to as the strangest person I know who could pass for normal.

 
 

I was about as attractive as a basketball.

 
jim, sponsored by Economoronomicon™
 

That OTHER jim is full of shit!

Corporations are people too, comrades … & THANK GOD that court clerk back in the 1800s made it the law!

Face it – individual freedoms are a pain in the ass!
You’re either with Team Economoronomicon™ or you’re under its boot-heel, folks.
Get with the pogrom!

 
 

April 28, 2012 at 3:36

I was about as attractive as a basketball.

Stop! Wait. In ned’s picture your head is rather ball-shaped.

 
 

Hey, DK-W, if you come back to read this, you gotta go to Elephant and Castle to get the curry fries. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm, curry fries.

 
 

Is there anything I should try to catch?

Ah, the brave new world of disease tourism.

 
 

Oh crap. Why did my brain have to immediately go to Rule 34?

 
 

you gotta go to Elephant and Castle to get the curry fries

Must be a chain – there’s one in Winnipeg at the hotel we stay at.

 
 

Don Surber blogs no more. Still does a column so I’m not sure what the difference is, crap-distribution-wise…

 
 

And I was just cackling because I’d made a little hole in the space between his front teeth that would expand with audio input.

 
 

Don Surber blogs no more.

So that’s what Comcast was getting at! I thought the dead piglet wrapped in this month’s statement was just an over-balance payment.

 
 

Hmm, this site seems to have tons of animated gifs of characters who beat people up.

http://www.fightersgeneration.com/characters/hulk-a4.html

 
 

Don Surber blogs no more.

The very Internet itself rejected him as being antithetical to progress and technology. The “Singularity” may never occur, but the “Surberality” isreal.

 
 

Substance McGravitas said,
April 27, 2012 at 20:17

The Perfect Combination™

Right here.
~

 
 

You call that hair?

tsam

circa

1993

That’s HAIR

 
 

perhaps the single most lethal fiction since animism

I may have come to the discussion late, but how is animism a lethal fiction?

One assumes he misspelled ‘anime’.

I saw a question about our beloved Gary Ruppert. Yes, there was once a real Gary — or at least an original impersonator. Every subsequent pretender can be distinguished easily from the genuine article.

The Cool Coach was always a gag. I donned those clown shoes myself on occasion. Rugged In Montana has similarly always been a parody troll.

This has been A Trip Through Sadly, No History.

 
 

The Cool Coach was always a gag. I donned those clown shoes myself on occasion.

Who among us has never donned the cleats? The Cool Coach is a nifty writing exercise… it involves a bunch of verbal tics- the salutation (Wazza wuzzup loony libs? A characteristic shared by Saul “shalom!”) the weird interjections (Badoodle Boo-Ya!), the weird verb use (Serving up a spread of truth). The weird part was the original identification with a real person (Urban out!). I think there was an original troll using the Cool Coach Urban Meyer persona, and a bunch of other commenters found it too hard to resist using it.

 
 

jim said,

DO WANT!

Well, that will fill in the empty hours and provide valuable watermelons to the home larder!

 
 

Update, responding to a lazy-ass story about Russian punks by some kind of punk chauvinist.

 
 

The money shot, because I love you people:

This is not to disparage punk rock. But punk rock – especially the derivative, commercialized punk rock aesthetic – is an insufficient platform from which to engage in revolution. When Emma Goldman said “If I can’t dance I don’t want to be in your revolution”, that didn’t mean her idea of a revolutionary cell was a fucking mosh pit.

Russia might have serious problems, but it also has the tools to solve them in its own political culture. You’re not going to see the people who save Russia from Putin at CGBG, and you’re not going to see a nation liberated by the guitar.

 
 

Doh, CBGB. Didn’t catch that until the last minute.

 
 

Fuck you poseurs(j/k). I may only be half Ojibwe but I still got hair I can swing to Metallica.

 
 

And indeed, the history of punk is, on balance, more reactionary than revolutionary.

Well, he got that right anyway. By the time Joey et.al. came around, the nation- lotsa nations, in fact-
had already been “liberated by a guitar”. Lotsa guitars, in fact.

BTW, I knew Joey pretty well. He never ever would’ve claimed to have “liberated” shit.

 
 

I’m only this far into it:
Fall in love, eat an ice cream, watch a movie, fuck someone’s mother. You can’t. And most of us can pretty much imagine some pretty messed up stuff doing all those things. Robots, Zombies, Unicorns, Lovecraftian horrors.

Fuck you, Cerberus, fuck you with Satan cock. Now I’m stuck imagining Bender falling in love in Zombie Reagan (who is eating ice cream) in a film* Twilight Sparkle is watching, and she’s cranking up the volume to drown out the sound of Cthulhu fucking my friend’s mom in the next apartment. WHHHYYYYYY?!

* Spellcheck keeps saying “movie” is wrong, I can’t figure out how to make it right, and I’m too fucking drunk to question it. Apparently, I’m illiterate.

 
 

BTW, I knew Joey pretty well. He never ever would’ve claimed to have “liberated” shit.

He was the most unlikely of rock stars. Have you read Mickey Leigh’s I Slept with Joey Ramone?

 
 

* Spellcheck keeps saying “movie” is wrong, I can’t figure out how to make it right, and I’m too fucking drunk to question it. Apparently, I’m illiterate.

But Cthulhu is kosher? Fascinating…

 
 

to Alec, clutching a copy of Infinite Jest, “You are David Foster Wallace, and I claim my five pounds.”

 
 

No, I just ignore the red underline on words I assume won’t be in the dictionary.

It’s fucking with me too much, have to check…

Yup, illiterate.

 
 

Oh my, life in a battleground state

 
 

Now I’m stuck imagining Bender falling in love in Zombie Reagan (who is eating ice cream) in a film* Twilight Sparkle is watching, and she’s cranking up the volume to drown out the sound of Cthulhu fucking my friend’s mom in the next apartment. WHHHYYYYYY?!

I’m pretty sure I had that dream once, with the addition of Humphrey Bogart and a team of dancing unicorns. Yeah, my dreams can get pretty weird.

 
St. Trotsky, Pope-in-Avignon
 

Is this really Gary?

Me? No. God no. The closest I’ve come to be a troll is involvement in circular executions in the comments. But I’ve never once worn the traditional masks of the community trolls.

 
 

Corporations also have second amendment rights.

So watch what you say about “pink slime’, libs.

Me and my buddies down at the meat packing plant are watching you.

 
Helmut Monotreme
 

Chris, it is obvious the Washington Post has never talked to an actual conservative before they wrote that article.

 
 

By Frank I. Luntz

 
 

how is animism a lethal fiction?

Compare & contrast with the germ theory of disease, just for starters.

Holy icons & oracular rivers sure tended to have, er, very interesting timing in revealing the need to slaughter one’s neighbors, too … always getting rambunctious at just the moment when the local peasantry grew restive.

On the bright side, animism has often been an excellent motivator for exciting social get-togethers … if you’re down with a little human sacrifice to propitiate the angry weather spirits. Just try to avoid being the guest of honor.

Me and my buddies down at the meat packing plant are watching you.

*is grateful for being skinny, stringy & bitter*

 
 

Yet another Top Five article from the Post, the punchline being that it’s selling a book entitled “The Tyranny of Clichés”.

 
Lurking Canadian
 

alec said,
April 27, 2012 at 22:01

DON’T BELIEVE THE LIE, MILLIONS LIVING NOW WILL EVENTUALLY DIE

That is not dead which doth eternal lie.

On topic…I think the issue is absolutism. You can make a case that money is speech. You can make a case that corporations need free speech rights. But when you combine those with a legal culture that doesn’t do nuance…well, you get what you have now: corporate interests with bottomless purses legally entitled to bribe legislators.

If the courts could carve out a “fire in a crowded theatre” exception to the First Ammendment, they could probably also carve out an “Exxon can’t buy Senators” exception, but that is very hard to do in the era of “anti-pollution laws are theft and also Hitler!” in which we live.

 
 

When Hustler magazine was deemed obscene, it was Larry Flynt who went to jail, not a piece of paper. It was also Larry Flynt who fought and won the court battles affirming HIS free speech rights, not those of a corporation. I’m not worried about NY Times Incorporated’s supposed free speech rights being infringed by repeal of corporate personhood because the human publisher, reporters, editors and columnists have individual free speech rights unaffected by such a repeal. I don’t expect Pelosi’s proposal to cure all the ills caused to society by corporations and if there are other cures like not equating cash with speech, then let’s bring it on, but this Peoples Rights Amendment is a great start and I’m all for it.

 
 

The Washington Post, in its wisdom, believes that conservative voters are really good guys deep inside.

Sweet tittyfucking Jesus, there’s so much wrong packed in that article:

Today, conservatives don’t want a reduced government so much as one that works better and wastes less.

Heckuva job, Luntzie!

 
Shell Goddamnit
 

Really, the problem with corporate personhood is the multi-national, immortal nature of the beasts. No entity on this planet is large enough to hold them. No idea is so bad that it can’t remain in the memory of the corporation to be tried again and again until finally the regulators weaken or forget or look away…and the power endlessly accrues, it never errodes, or if it does it is only till next go-round.

Originally corporate charters were granted for a limited time, for specific purposes, usually to the benefit of society (at least in theory). I think it should be so once more.

 
 

“You are David Foster Wallace, and I claim my five pounds.”

Ugh, that irony-hating prig? I hope you’re as good a shot as you are a slanderer.

 
 

I’m frustrated beyond belief that I decide to resort to some kind of anodyne dribbling on punk rock and then Salon serves up a Doig article:

A JETSONS FUTURE ARRIVES
Cities as technologically precise as a Formula One race car are being built now. Do we really want to live in them?

(I just now learned about Brasilia, guys! It totally looks like an airplane!)

and the headline-writer continues his or her yeoman work being the worst on the Internet:

“The Cove”: A mysterious skull

BITCH TOOK MY SKULL

 
 

BITCH TOOK MY SKULL

It’s all good fun until someone loses their skull.

 
 

Hi B^4- I haven’t read the Joey Ramone book………………title kinda put me off, I think.
Then again, I suppose it’s meant “ironically”.

(Note ironic quotes around “ironically”. This boy can get “meta” wiv the best of ’em.)

Ooo! I “did it” again!!

 
 

Prig spelled backwards is Girp.

 
 

title kinda put me off, I think.
Then again, I suppose it’s meant “ironically”.

Some chickenhead wrote a book about being a chickenhead to the stars, and the stars included Shaq (a very nice man with a smaller-than-average penis) and Fred Durst.

Now, I’m on the wrong end of the Kinsey scale to say for sure, but I’ve been around the block a few times, and I have to wonder: how could a human being be completely enraptured with Fred Durst, such that they treat giving Fred Durst a blowjob a spiritual experience? He was wasting food, and that was erotic somehow.

 
 

Hi B^4- I haven’t read the Joey Ramone book………………title kinda put me off, I think.
Then again, I suppose it’s meant “ironically”.

Nah, it’s literal- they shared a room as children. I excerpted a couple of passages from the book in a couple of posts– the anecdotes about “53rd and 3rd” and “Carbona, Not Glue” are hilarious.

He was wasting food, and that was erotic somehow.

You mean he didn’t consume his own semen?

 
 

You mean he didn’t consume his own semen?

To look at him, you’d think, wouldn’t you? But no, I think it was something to do with throwing out fresh PF Changs.

Here is how I imagined it: he followed up on a sex boast by throwing a dozen ballgame-grade footlongs down a corridor; he was so strong one of them cracked a window. When he was finished, he wiped himself clean with bologna – Kroger-brand, but carefully imprinted with a bootleg Oscar Mayer logo – and let them fall one-by-one on his travertine marble floor, with a sound like gelatin being struck with a tiny mallet.

Also, he was blown so hard his baseball cap inverted, but was still somehow on sideways.

 
 

It’s funny, it’s melancholy.

Well, that was Joey. At the end of the day (literally) Joey was a sad guy. Dee Dee too for that matter. And I don’t like to think about it too much…………then again, I guess I do.

I need a nap.

 
 

So much going on here today that I do not understand! Oh tittyfuckin’-well!
.

 
 

So anyway, this is what a goodly portion of my near-future workday will look like. You’re not getting the full glory, since this unit failed the first part of the test. But this is my supervisor, explaining the testing procedure.
.

 
 

So much going on here today that I do not understand!

That’s common the first few days at any new job or project.

I think there’s even a name for it “Imposter Syndrome” when you start thinking “How did I get here? There’s no way I can learn this!”

 
 

I think there’s even a name for it “Imposter Syndrome” when you start thinking “How did I get here? There’s no way I can learn this!”

It gets way worse when you kill someone and steal their face/identity/job.

 
 

That hair thread is still going?

You’re all amateurs

 
 

That’s common the first few days at any new job or project.

I don’t mean at work — I meant here, today, at S,N! 🙂
.

 
 

The backflow testing has a lot of sequential steps, sure, but I expec t to have that mastered before I go to the class on 5/9-5/11. I’m getting to see it several times a day, and with my supervisor’s direction, have completed several tests already.
.

 
 

After that class two weeks from now, I will pass the test and have the certification, and will be able to perform backflow tests unsupervised. Then, we will have increased our local testing capacity by 100%.
.

 
 

Failing the backflow test.

 
 

I think there’s even a name for it “Imposter Syndrome” when you start thinking “How did I get here? There’s no way I can learn this!”

I think my business, a corporation, is a person. I also think it is jealous of me and plans to take over my life and then kill me, Single White Female style.

(ETERNAL RETURN)

 
 

Chris, it is obvious the Washington Post has never talked to an actual conservative before they wrote that article.

Actually, I’m fairly sure they have.

The trouble is that what conservatives say they want has absolutely nothing to do with what they end up deciding they really want once their media’s done putting everything in the proper (e.g. tribal) context for them. If you actually sit down with an Average Conservative Voter, stop arguing and simply ask them “okay, what do YOU think should happen?” it’s not hard to get them to start suggesting very liberal ideas. But the minute they find out that those are in fact liberal ideas, their brains will hit the “reset” button and that’ll be the end of it.

(And that’s NOT a case of “well, I disagree with the party on these issues, but I’ll still vote for it because I think the other party’s worse;” it’s a case of actually changing your opinion on the issues for no better reason than because you found out that you were, basically, committing thoughtcrime).

It’s not that conservatives never have thoughts of their own, but as long as they let their gurus’ thoughts rather than theirs guide them through elections, “what conservatives really think” is irrelevant.

 
 

CODE 000 “ETERNAL RETURN”
Class: Metastable
Variant locks history into cyclical path. Impact Class C – corrosion of local spacetime / continuity bug. Guru Meditation, variant erasure / counseling.

 
 

I hate it when they do that kind of shit in cooking videos. “We’ll just check to see …. and it’s perfect. Moving on … ” WELL WHAT IF IT ISN’T RIGHT?!?! HUH?!?!? THEN WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOUS SUPPOSED TO DO?

*I don’t much mind it actually because *I* know what to do. It’s for the benfit of all the newbs that it pisses me off.

 
 

I useta like to watch Graham Kerr back in the dawn of TV cookshows. He would occasionally screw up and have to throw something away.

Lawn! Off!!

 
 

I remember watching Julia Child when I was about 10. She was making croissants, and all I can remember is this unbelievably complex process with a jillion steps that went on forever. It probably took less effort to build the kitchen.

 
 

Nuggets from Sub’s link.

But that argument has been abandoned in recent years and replaced with a far less plausible and far more ideological claim: that enforced diversity is a permanent necessity. Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, famously declared: “Diversity is not merely a desirable addition to a well-run education. It is as essential as the study of the Middle Ages, of international politics and of Shakespeare.”

Oh, it’s FAR more essential than Shakespeare. You can get along just fine in most areas of life without remembering Hamlet’s soliloquy or knowing what the hell he meant by it. But it’s getting increasingly difficult, as America inches towards minority-majority status and non-Western cultures like China and India become dominant world powers, to find anywhere where you aren’t interacting with cultures other than your own. And it’s not “enforced” – if you want to go to Liberty University and bury yourself in like-minded people, you can totally do that. It’s just that you’ll be even less prepared for the world at your doors than you might have been before.

And that, Jonah, is an example of how liberals bow to the facts of life while conservatives cling to an ideology. That’s a tip. Write it down.

If diversity is essential to education, let us get to work dismantling historically black and women’s colleges.

I suspect black people wouldn’t mind doing away with HBCUs if you could guarantee them a fair shot at getting into the “mainstream,” white-dominated college campuses.

Similarly, we’re constantly told that communities are strengthened by diversity, but liberal Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam has found the opposite. In a survey that included interviews with more than 30,000people, Putnam discovered that as a community becomes more ethnically and socially varied, social trust and civic engagement plummet. Perhaps forced diversity makes sense, but liberals make little effort to prove it.

I for one am curious to see how that study was made. How did they define an “ethnically and socially varied” community? Because by the standards of our history, even most White Suburban Safehavens are strikingly diverse – WASP, German, Irish, Italian and Jewish Americans all live together without caring much about their differences (which is remarkable compared to how things would’ve been in 1900 or even 1950). It’s not because those communities have abandoned their sense of ethnic identity either. Oktoberfests and Saint Paddy’s Days still happen, German/Irish/Italian Pride still exists, and the flags of those nationalities are still waved and worn all over the place – they just aren’t treated with the stigma that Black Pride shirts and Mexican flags on Cinco de Mayo generate.

Build a community where people can live together without caring about their differences, and diversity’ll work just fine – even America’s white suburbs are proof positive of that. Resist the “different” people, refuse to have anything to do with them, stick to your own kind, raise your children to do the same, and quite obviously, it won’t. That’s not an indictment of diversity, that’s an indictment of racism.

Would type more, but g2g4now. (And besides, every damn line in that article is worth a jaw-dropping facepalm all of its own. It’s Jonah, after all).

 
 

And Putnam’s findings might show the need for “enforced diversity” at schools etc: if people grew up working and living together they wouldn’t BE less comfortable in mixed environments later in life.

 
 

I remember watching Julia Child when I was about 10. She was making croissants, and all I can remember is this unbelievably complex process with a jillion steps that went on forever. It probably took less effort to build the kitchen.

They’re not really that hard to make, but they are time-consuming. The recipe I use takes 3 days(!), but very little of that time is actually hands-on. Most of it is just the dough sitting in the fridge waiting for the next step.

 
 

Having some friends over for dinner tonight. Dinner is all over the map.

Various charcuterie, lox with capers and sour cream, blinis Demidoff, some various greek olives, cheeses, crackers. Champagne.

Sort of asian inspired baby back ribs. Dry rub with all sorts of wonderful spices then baked, covered, in the oven until tender. They’re done now and will be finished on the grill with a mix of soy sauce, peanut oil, cider vinegar, thyme, sesame oil and honey. It’s also a dipping sauce.

The beans are basically done, they can simmer until they’re served. Inspired by Ninfa’s charra beans. Bacon in 1″ slices gets cooked but not to a crisp. Add a bunch of onions and garlic and cook that shit up. Chopped tomato too – this time of year I just use good quality canned. Let’s see, … cumin, a mashed up chipotle chili, cooked pinto beans, a bit of Mexican oregano and some beef broth. Oh, a big handul of torn / ripped apart cilantro. Use the stems – unlike parsley, cilantro stems have lots of flavor. Again, it’s done, all I have to do at dinner is serve it.

The dinner beverage is diner’s choice of Full Sail IPA or Widmer Amber. Or a nice Oregon Pinot from the wine rack if they prefer.

Roasted some golden beets. Salad of mixed greens with herbs, sliced red onion, candied pecans, supremes of orange and crumbled bleu cheese. Sherry wine vinegar vinaigrette. All made up except for the vinaigrette so once again, I can spend time with our guests instead of cooking while they’re here.

I think I’ll make some cast iron skillet cornbread, that has to be done at the last minute but is very easy. The key is to get the skillt motherfucking hot and throw in LOTS of butter then pour the batter as soon as it’s melted.

The dessert I bought. There’s a dessert food cart out on SE 82nd, the woman makes an excelllent bienenstich. I’ve got a good Auslese in the “cellar” that will be perfect with Bienenstich.

 
 

Um, the beets go in the salad, you got that right?

 
 

Having some friends over for dinner tonight. Dinner is all over the map.
{snip}

For lunch it is prosciutto aged to perfection on the sidewalk (7 weeks) cut into little anuses, with a side of capers and black sand whipped reverently into lukewarm lime mayo.
Wine pairing: ???????????????. ??????????????. ???????????? ?. Penetration is not mandatory, but will improve the experience for all involved.

 
 

For tea-time make a nectar of semolina and salt water by microwaving at 100 watts for 1h22, and chug lest the frat discover you are a vadge. For midmeal snuff it is black powder and pasteurized Turk’s urine. For tea it is stale Starbucks-brand vanilla coffee. For apéritif it is ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ?COCK? ?LIEGE? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? ???????? .

 
 

I could go for the COCK, indeed I often do. Not tempted by anything else there, I have to say.

 
 

Putnam discovered that as a community becomes more ethnically and socially varied, social trust and civic engagement plummet.

Things were so much smoother back when the Jews and the Irish and the episcopalians all kept to their own separate ghettos neighbourhoods.
No, wait, they’re Our People now, so it doesn’t count as ‘diversity’.

 
 

I could go for the COCK, indeed I often do.

Enjoy 3 Penis Wine, a fine dessert wine.

 
 

Enjoy 3 Penis Wine, a fine dessert wine.

LOLWUT?!
.

 
 

If diversity is essential to education, let us get to work dismantling historically black and women’s colleges.

Watch me while I slowly, sexily put my cute little face into my tight hot palm.
Is he serious with this shit?

 
 

Sounds excellent PM. Does epazote grow there? I was surprised to find it everywhere wild here and it is the perfect authentic touch for frijolitos. The locals call it Jerusalem weed.

 
 

Pup, your menu is awe-inspiring as usual.

I just made chicken sausage and fennel sauce and served it ovah pasta.

 
 

BTW, I have decided that I am madly in love with brothy, pan-Asian soups and hubby doesn’t enjoy them at all…so on nights I make those things I am just going to grill up whatever protein I use (assuming its not tofu) and make him some garlic bread and let him do his thang and I’ll do mine. Easy peasy.

 
 

Things were so much smoother back when the Jews and the Irish and the episcopalians all kept to their own separate ghettos neighbourhoods.

My father does not paint a pretty picture of growing Lebanese in the 1950s. It sounds like they were maybe one notch above blacks in the pecking order.

 
 

I for one am curious to see how that study was made.

I’m sure his interpretation of the study is completely accurate – who could be more trustworthy than Jonah Goldberg?

 
 

I’ve tried growing Lebanese before but they’re kind of like roses; fussy and prone to blackspot and starring in silly comedies.

 
 

Oops! That was supposed to be “growing up”.

 
 

Arent croissants basically twisted puff pastry? The very idea of making puff pastry makes me break out in hives.

 
 

Sounds excellent PM. Does epazote grow there? I was surprised to find it everywhere wild here and it is the perfect authentic touch for frijolitos. The locals call it Jerusalem weed.

For soup it is horse sweat, and for tapas it is horse chops w/ real horsehair. Wine pairing: a cruet of O’Doull’s non-alcoholic beer.

I just made chicken sausage and fennel sauce and served it ovah pasta.

For main course it is a football, eaten raw with garden greens and aspic. Wine pairing: Capri Sun.

BTW, I have decided that I am madly in love with brothy, pan-Asian soups and hubby doesn’t enjoy them at all…so on nights I make those things I am just going to grill up whatever protein I use (assuming its not tofu) and make him some garlic bread and let him do his thang and I’ll do mine. Easy peasy.

For dessert it is the remainder of the football, cut very thin and served under a generous dollop of heavy cream. Wine pairing: 7 parts extra virgin olive oil to 1 part 191-proof grain alcohol (a “Sober Greek”).

 
 

break out in hives

For after-dinner tea it is skin. Eat your skin! Slough it off under your fingernails and just eat that skin! Delicioso! Delicioso!! Raw food, best food! Delicioso!!!

Wine pairing: Arbor Mist.

 
 

The great thing about your drink, alec, is that I bet nearly everyone benifits from Sober Greek goggles.

Btw, I typed “benitits” before I corrected to “benefits”

 
 

The great thing about your drink, alec, is that I bet nearly everyone benifits from Sober Greek goggles.

The world just seems like a better place with a couple of Sober Greeks inside you.

 
 

The world just seems like a better place with a couple of Sober Greeks inside you.

Yes. I learned this from “Zorba the Greek Who Fucked Me Raw and Had a Friend.”

 
 

Yes. I learned this from “Zorba the Greek Who Fucked Me Raw and Had a Friend.”

Beware of Greeks bearing bare-assed friends.
.

 
 

Beware of Greeks bearing bare-assed friends.
.

Hey, I thought they were just two nice guys trying to deliver my plumbing and fix my pizza

 
 

Hey, I thought they were just two nice guys trying to deliver my plumbing and fix my pizza

They sure sound friendly enough…!
.

 
 

Just to catch up, here’s where I work, and this lovely creature is the one what got me a foot in the door.
.

 
 

And, I’m also here to kick ass and chew bubblegum say that ‘Merika DOES still make stuff.
.

 
 

Can I just say how sorry I am that IKEA has discontinued the Smedvik? I don’t even remember what it was, but that was a name for a piece of furniture that a man could believe in.

 
 

New line-by-line piece on yet another goddamn liberal who refuses to understand what “the Patriarchy” means.

 
 

First they came for the psionic giant moles, and I did not speak out because I was not a psionic giant mole;
Then they came for the hags, and I did not speak out because I was not a hag;
Then they came for the true ghouls, and I did not speak out because I was not a true ghoul;
Then they came for the Smedviks, and I did not speak out because I was not a Smedvik;
Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak out for me.

 
 

i am going to make this script you speak of cerberus. i will make it funny. i will pay people to write it and get a great director and it will FUCKING RULE because, yes, it is begging to be done.

that is all.

 
 

Arent croissants basically twisted puff pastry? The very idea of making puff pastry makes me break out in hives.

Yep, that’s about right. Many iterations of rolling it flat and then folding it like an envelope. That’s how it gets all those layers.

The finished product, however, is divine. And to take it up one more level, put a piece of dark chocolate in the middle before you roll them up.

 
Lurking Canadian
 

The making of puff pastry sounds to me very like the process Japanese smiths used to make sword steel.

Only less forgiving of errors. Tenderflake FTW.

 
 

The only worthwhile thing I’ve ever done with a bread is to make bread rolls with heavy cream such that they were nice and buttery, and then roll them in a towel or a bag to trap moisture with them after they were done.

Delicious.

 
 

JP- so if I read this right, you’re working with the Ivytron 2000 and yet you’re out humping coyotes before lunch?

WTF is IN that water??

 
 

Also too,you know what I love?

Moran survivalists who think they’re gonna hold off the authorities “when the deal goes down”.

Obama’s thugs win again!!1!!!11

 
 

Moran survivalists who think they’re gonna hold off the authorities “when the deal goes down”.

That’s why you avoid adamantium until you’ve got proper defenses set up.

 
 

Whoops, adamantine.

Man, I cannot avoid the thinkos today.

 
 

Can I just say how sorry I am that IKEA has discontinued the Smedvik?

Sounds like a Soviet missile with a smegma payload.

 
 

So corporations aren’t motherfuckers?

 
 

Whoo! Technocrats, concentration camps, and goddamn Will Doig!

I’m on a roll today, in spite of the fucking brutal migraine.

 
 

Here you go JP. Once you’ve got a few paychecks under your belt:

Naw; I’m one of those practical scooter guys. Vintage Vespas are like boats and swimming pools: If you’re not rich enough to pay someone tons of cash to maintain them, they’re not really worth the trouble.
.

 
 

WTF is IN that water??

Sodium permanganate is all I’ve put in it… so far!
.

 
 

Jeffraham, your blog commenting system scares me, so I just want to tell you here how very happy I am for you. It’s great that you and the job found each other. I know how horrible it is to have to worry about rent and food and catfood money and I am so glad that is over for you.

 
 

Jeffraham, your blog commenting system scares me, so I just want to tell you here how very happy I am for you. It’s great that you and the job found each other. I know how horrible it is to have to worry about rent and food and catfood money and I am so glad that is over for you.

Thanks! Yes, it’s a great relief, and a long time in coming.

FortyToo: If you can ignore the Win3.1 icons off to the left, it works just like this one does. You probably want to check the “remember me” box if you’ll be coming back for more commenting.
.

 
 

I’ve been a lazy asshole and have not congratulated you on your job, Jeffraham. CONGRATS. I’m really happy for you.

 
 

Moran survivalists who think they’re gonna hold off the authorities “when the deal goes down”.

A bunker? Seriously? A freakin’ bunker? He really thought that was going to work? I think the Army/Marines have had plenty of practice taking out bunkers since, oh sometime around the 1940s.

 
 

I’ve been a lazy asshole and have not congratulated you on your job, Jeffraham. CONGRATS. I’m really happy for you.

Thank you! No worries. Congrats to you on your Deviance. 🙂 I hired a guy from there, once, to do up a logo for me. He was local, and pretty cool… cheap, too. Just cost me some beers and a few bucks.
.

 
 

Yay! I changed my IP address and am no longer flagged as spam.

That said, who wants some boner pills?

 
 

Are you trying to pass off fakes on us or are they made with real boners?

 
 

100% pure tiger boners

 
 

I think the Army/Marines have had plenty of practice taking out bunkers since, oh sometime around the 1940s.

But those bunkers were occupied by lily-livered girly-men like the Wehrmacht, the Imperial Japanese Army, and the North Vietnamese. We’re talking about bunkers defended by two-fisted American Wingnuts, stocked with ample supplies of Cheez Whiz and Premium Saltine Crackers.

 
 

Urg. Smarfflurf. I think the party was a great success. The house looks like it was anyway. Might have had tee many martoonis.

 
 

Might have had tee many martoonis.

Take a big POOP. It’ll make everything feel better, even your PENIS.
.

 
 

It’ll make everything feel better, even your PENIS.

At least until your PENIS is ground up to make boehner pills.

 
 

Boy, this had such promise:

Is Progressive Rock Conservative?
By Jonah Goldberg

It’s only a link out to this:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/04/is-there-any-worthwhile-progressive-thing-yes.php?ModPagespeed=off

 
 

Wait until Jonah gets around to structural engineering: Is Progressive Collapse Conservative?

 
 

He is the Russell Kirk Professor of History at Hillsdale College, so you know right off that he’s not some post-modernist poser.

I suppose it does tell you all you need to know.

 
 

Is Progressive Rock Consevative?

5000 on the newcomer.

 
 

He is the Russell Kirk Professor of History at Hillsdale College

As such, it’s his job to make sure the past does not repeat should another music man or monorail salesman come to town.

 
 

YOU KIN HAVE MY CHEEZ WHIZ WHEN YOU SUCK IT OFF MY COLD DEAD FINGERZZ

 
 

Not PENIS:

A dentist pulled out all her ex-boyfriend’s teeth after he dumped her for another woman – who has now left him because he is toothless.

 
 

A dentist pulled out all her ex-boyfriend’s teeth after he dumped her for another woman – who has now left him because he is toothless.

I am amazed to see that they are Polish, as this story is so very, very Russian. Also, I may be going to Wroclaw this fall for unrelated reasons.

 
 

A dentist pulled out all her ex-boyfriend’s teeth after he dumped her for another woman – who has now left him because he is toothless.

Once you’ve had your PENIS gummed, you’ll never go back!
.

 
 

Okay, time to go get beer.

 
 

So all the things you guys have been saying about that Choo-Choo Tuttle person is true!

 
 

A dentist pulled out all her ex-boyfriend’s teeth after he dumped her for another woman…

Something similar happened to Tom Conti after he messed around with a dentist’s wife in Reuben, Reuben.

 
 

If only Howlin’ Wolf had songs with Roman-numeralled sub-parts he could have been Conservative too, also.

 
 

My piranha parts are restless.
.

 
 

Does epazote grow there?

I know some folks who have it in their gardens so i know it can be grown here. I can’t recall offhand seeing it at the marmers farket so i dont think anyone grows it commercially. The high volume discount supermarkets stock it, along with other Mexican stuffs.

 
 

I didn’t know it grew here until I hit it with the lawnmower. It doesn’t have much value dry but when fresh it gives a minty goodness to messican flavors. Green moles and chilis particularly benefit.

 
 

Dudeskull seems to be challenging Mini__B for the “small boy with a very large round head” crown, but we will prevail!

 
 

Dude. You can’t win this. His father has the the biggest melon I’ve ever seen.

 
 

Dude. You can’t win this. His father has the the biggest melon I’ve ever seen.

But all babies have big, fat heads. It’s a natural feature of babies; they need all that extra meat to limply flop their useless toothless jaws, and loll their eyes stupidly to and fro under their beetling neanderthal brows.

 
 

His father has the the biggest melon I’ve ever seen.

You’re not supposed to blab the secrets of marital success on the intertubes.

 
 

You’re not supposed to blab the secrets of marital success on the intertubes.

It’s no secret that giving good melon will lead to marital success.

 
 

It’s no secret that giving good melon will lead to marital success.

Nor that it’s the main way to get ahead on the webs.

 
Lurking Canadian
 

But all babies have big, fat heads. It’s a natural feature of babies; they need all that extra meat to limply flop their useless toothless jaws, and loll their eyes stupidly to and fro under their beetling neanderthal brows.

My child has always had a properly proportioned head that is the right size for his body.

Naturally, this means that the health care professionals are very concerned that there is something wrong with him. Not enough room for a brain, you see, means he might actually be a chimp or something.

 
 

My child has always had a properly proportioned head that is the right size for his body.

Naturally, this means that the health care professionals are very concerned that there is something wrong with him. Not enough room for a brain, you see, means he might actually be a chimp or something.

These are the dangers of letting a child choose its own head.

 
 

But all babies have big, fat heads

That’s true. Honestly, given who his father is, I expected Dudeskull to have an even bigger, rounder head. I think my somewhat long, somewhat narrow face tempered things.

 
 

Verily ’tis a head most large.

 
 

Verily ’tis a head most large.

That had me cracking up, Major!

“Is this a melon which I see before me,
The piehole toward my hand?”

I guess I just can’t let the Shakespearean wanking thread go…

 
 

Speaking of baby unpleasantness, my mother once had a semi-nightmare where my baby brother (then a few months old) was secretly a kitten. She was saddened, but willing to love him anyway; most of the problem was that everyone was very disappointed in her over it.

 
 

Speaking of baby unpleasantness, my mother once had a semi-nightmare where my baby brother (then a few months old) was secretly a kitten. She was saddened, but willing to love him anyway; most of the problem was that everyone was very disappointed in her over it.

They were upset that he wasn’t secretly a kitten? I’d be upset about that!

 
 

I dry-fired a real, full-auto AK-47, tonight.
.

 
 

I dry-fired a real, full-auto AK-47, tonight.

Were you hanging out with the Nugents?

 
 

I think the batteries were bad, ’cause it just went “click,” and not “click-click-click-click-click.”

😉
.

 
 

Were you hanging out with the Nugents?

Neighbor, downstairs. He’s done a few tours in Afghanistan.
.

 
 

I’ve shot an M-16 and various submachine guns full auto. It’s fun as long as you’re not paying for the ammo.

 
 

I’ve shot an M-16 and various submachine guns full auto. It’s fun as long as you’re not paying for the ammo.

I’m pretty sure this is the first full-auto weapon I’ve ever touched, let alone held and dry-fired.
.

 
 

These are the dangers of letting a child choose its own head.

If the kid picks one that’s too big, he can overwhelm the turbines.

 
 

This question was brought to my attention in 2000, when I realized that none of my liberal friends, not one, knew about the persecution of homosexuals in the Middle East, even thought all my liberal friends knew about the death of Matthew Shepard. The Islamists throw gays off rooftops, whip, stone, and murder gays. The Naughts (as we may call the decade now ending) came after the information revolution, so all my liberal friends, by typing into Google the words “Islamic persecution of Gays” could get about 23,200,000 results in 0.50 seconds. But apparently half a second of research is too much to ask.
Oddly enough, none of my liberal friends are afraid of any Islamic terror-masters, who will both announce that he wants t to torture and kill them and theirs, and also boasts when he and his accomplish the same; but my liberal friends are all afraid of the Catholic Church, the 700 Club, or President Bush (who neither say they will perform, nor perform such atrocities).
My liberal friends are terrified, for they think the Inquisition and the CIA are poised to swoop down on them like enormous, blood-drinking, black-winged bats.

Again, the reason why the self-righteousness of the allegedly outraged is always directed at the authorities here to protect us, and never against the enemies those authorities protect us against, flows from the same cause as the anger itself: guilt. The guilty flee when none pursue: the guilt-ridden flinch when no hand is raised against them; the guilt-haunted are paranoid, and see a sinister conspiracy against life and liberty in trivial or symbolic things.

I still recall with a Vulcan crook of my supercilious eyebrow the ear-splitting shrillness of the shrieking hysteria surrounding the idea that the PATRIOT Act and only that act would be allowed sinister government agents to subpoena your library records to see what books you might have read (a misstatement of the law—any pertinent records are vulnerable to subpoena upon the signature of a magistrate). The hysteria was purely symbolic and purely trivial, having no relation to reality, prompted by no examples of misuse, and possessing no application to real law enforcement, and hence was meaningful only to those who cannot distinguish between symbolic gestures and reality: a group that, without breaking a smile, calls itself the “reality-based community.”

The mental disease of paranoia has the added feature that it urges the persecuted to make a common cause with everyone and anyone else it sees as persecuted, even enemies. Hence, the totalitarian regimes in the Middle East and Far East, who stand for nothing the Moderns say they stand for, and who oppose with fire and firearm and pulpit and rack and gallows everything the Moderns say they want to promote, somehow become the mascots and allies of the Moderns.
Some moderns are willing to expose their own persons to discomfort, danger and death to protect their own ruthless foes, willing to act as human shields to stop air raids, willing to lie down in front of bulldozers.

A similar selfless love, nay, adoration was paid by Moderns of the previous generation to the Soviets and Maoists: the Moderns did everything in their power to aid their destroyers and hinder their defenders.

Question: Why? Why such paranoia? Answer: Because the Modern men are more afraid of the Theocracy, that all-powerful and utterly imaginary world-girdling conspiracy of Jews and Capitalists and White Christians, than they are of either international Communism or international Terrorism, which were and are very real world-girdling and highly effective conspiracies.

No one is actually afraid of McCarthyism, whose very shadow sends the modern rhetorician into epileptic paroxysms of self-righteous terror. The number of people jailed, tortured and killed by the attempt in the 1950’s of the American government to find and expel paid enemy agents in the State Department or among airheaded Hollywood entertainers still hovers at around zero. Had McCarthyism been a real persecution, it would be ranked as the least effective and least noticeable in history: the drunk driving of Senator Kennedy is responsible for more deaths than the anti-Communism of the McCarthy era.
Likewise, no one is actually afraid of the Theocracy. The concept is ridiculous. Any who were actually afraid of the Church would not dare insult her, any more than they insult the Mohammedans. When folk such as this are actually afraid, they flatter, apologize, and self-righteously defend the people that frighten them: see the Danish Cartoon Riots and their humiliating aftermath for details.

If their fear is make-believe, what do they truly fear?

They are afraid of their conscience and the persecution of their conscience, and so anyone who says the same kinds of things their conscience says, even trivial or symbolic things, instill in the paranoiac an exaggerated overreaction of fear and hatred.
Civilization is the art of quelling factional dissent and calming natural the lusts and avarice of Man, and replacing those wild passions with the institutions and traditions, the social mechanisms, whose operation maintains peace and order. These institutions include deliberative bodies (from councils of tribal elders to moots to parliaments), include leaders in war and peace, such as veterans or sages, worthy of the loyalty of their followers, and include a sufficient respect for law and custom that the duties, rights and liberties of subjects or citizens are sufficiently clear and fair to allow for the preservation of order and the encouragement of private and civic virtue. Civilization is civility; civilization is trust.

In contrast, anger and paranoia combine to dismantle civilization.

Paranoia requires a mistrust of public institutions, whose operations can always be interpreted as sinister, and a trust of enemy factions, who are regarded as allies against the danger posed by sinister public institutions.

Anger halts deliberation, and overthrows both loyalty to leaders and piety toward ancestors. Paranoia is innately factional, and dismembers the society into non-reunifiable and hostile camps. Anger does not seek to preserve the peace: it seeks short-term advantage over enemies with an eye toward the long term goal of their humiliation, their damage, their defeat, their extermination.

Anger feeds paranoia; paranoia feeds anger. Both discourage civic virtue and encourage the return of barbarism.

 
 

I would say that there is a considerable amount of unacknowledged racism about this attitude. For a start, they not only regard the Muslims and other third-world characters as victims, they also can’t conceive that they could ever get in a situation where they could command and threaten Western countries. It is the West that is omnipotent – that is a given of their world – just as the Global South is naturally powerless. Therefore they can’t be bothered to worry about the misdeeds of Muslims (or for that matter of the far-less-than-cuddly Hindus and Buddhists of a number of countries) because it does not occur to them that it could ever threaten them. Conversely, because Whitey is omnipotent and nothing can stand in Whitey’s conquering way, anything that Whitey does must be regarded with extra keen scrutiny, lest one of Whitey’s omnipotent fingers might move in the wrong direction and crush a hundred million powerless non-Whiteys to death. Is this or is this not ignorant racism?

 
 

Oh look, everybody, somebody’s copied and pasted a long article that has nothing to do with the topic(s) of the thread. I’m going to read it all because I’m sure it will contain nothing but interesting and edifying information.

 
 

Party in the WND comments and y’all is invited.
http://www.wnd.com/2012/04/breitbarts-coroner-poisoned-to-death/?cat_orig=us
Clue: the main suspect is a black male who lives in a white house.

Also, related, I found this link in a mango
http://www.nachumlist.com/deadpool.htm
It’s the Obama death list that we have all been waiting for. What took them so long?

 
 

This question was brought to my attention in 2000, when I realized that none of my liberal friends, not one, knew about the persecution of homosexuals in the Middle East, even thought all my liberal friends knew about the death of Matthew Shepard.

This is one of the most popular tropes of the last decade, and as usual, it’s 110% projection.

Fact is that all throughout the nineties, the only people anywhere in America who agitated for the rights of gays and women in the Middle East were those faggotty liberal “special interest advocate” women’s rights and gay rights groups. (The women’s rights groups were successful enough, if memory serves, that they actually managed to torpedo an oil pipeline deal through Afghanistan supported by the Clinton administration, on account of the Taliban’s abysmal human rights record).

Republicans discovered the existence of any kind of human rights abuses, gay, women or otherwise on 09/11/2001, but they’ve been beating the dead horse ever since about how much they care about these poor brutalized victims of eebil Muslims, and why don’t you faggoty liberals care as much as we do [read – want to bomb the shit out of all of them]?

 
 

“Is this or is this not ignorant racism?”

Were you trying for the ignorant/racist rant thing? If so, kudos.

 
 

Ted “chewy peanut cluster” Nugent

 
 

Seriously, weisenheimers are infiltrating WND. This is a job for the Sadly, Noughts. Whose got the bat (badger?) signal?

 
 

none of my liberal friends, not one,

all my liberal friends knew about

IOW, the same number of liberal friends

 
 

PS 4-freakin’-hundrith also

 
 

gocart, that’s pure wingnut carayzee there at WND! Not the everyday, “Voices, voices” stuff but “Whoopsadaisy Mr. Wengle, can ye help me with me moon bicycle” industrial strength whackdoodle.
Who knows when the trail of DEATH will lead? DAH DAH DAH DAAAAH!!!

 
 

Apropos of nothing:

1) Not exactly disappointed by the latest Mad Men episode, but “Signal 30” and “Far Away Places” were pretty intense and there had to be at least one placid slow-boiler to keep the show going off the rails.

2) If you haven’t read Ursula K. Le Guin’s blog, do, because it’s fantastic.

 
 

FYWP!

Once more with feeling.

POOP!

Really? Someone thought that was a good idea?

 
 

Really? Someone thought that was a good idea?

Let me tell ya, first thang in the morning before coffee, I nearly hacked up a lung seeing that.
.

 
 

You finished with that lung?

 
 

Time to test the backflow preventers.
.

 
 

You finished with that lung?

If I see that wallpaper in someone’s house, I will make them put vacuum breakers on their inside faucets, too.
.

 
 

My liberal friends are terrified, for they think the Inquisition and the CIA are poised to swoop down on them like enormous, blood-drinking, black-winged bats.

P.S. Look out, I think I saw an evil government black helicopter coming to oppress us!

 
 

Time to test the backflow preventers.

Don’t cross the streams!

 
 

Backflow preventer should be installed at National Review.

 
 

I have nothing to add other than “fuck” was used 62 times (63 now!) on this page.

Bra-vo!

 
 

If you haven’t read Ursula K. Le Guin’s blog,,,

I just did and am sadly disappointed that ancestor worship and unconditional reverence for those long dead is set firmly even in progressive feminist sci-fi/fantasy authors. Post 10., the first from 2011:

Fair or unfair, I question the wisdom of radically changing a Shakespeare play just as I’d question the wisdom of chipping at the Venus of Milo to make her thinner so as to suit modern ideas of beauty, or repainting the Sistine Ceiling to brighten it up, or performing the Halleluiah Chorus in waltz time.

OMG! Someone messed with Shakespeare! And they did it very well and very competently and in a respectful manner! ONOES IT IS TEH END OF TEH WORLDS!!!!

FFS, Willy Shakespeare is daid. Daid daid daid. And immortal as his words are, they aren’t – you know – immortal*. You know why Shakespeare is dying and kids these days loathe reading him with a passion? This is why.

Observe that Mirren’s Prospera did teh following:
1. Solicited praise from someone who fundamentally disagreed with it. Le Guin acknowledges a fine and worthy performance.
2. Made her think. Made her wrestle with her own ideas and preconceived notions about gender. Fucking Ursula K. Le Guin was challenged on her prejudice about gender roles.
3. Got her to blog about it. IOW, have a conversation about it (42 comments long).

Teh only sad I haz is that despite all that, in Le Guin’s opinion a woman playing a male Shakespearean role is still some sort of crime against literature and culture because OMG SHAKESPEARE!

* Something she acknowledges. FFS, she even points out that teh ORIGINAL (IOW, what Shakespeare actually intended) is NOT what she’s defending – rather it’s teh bloated baggage laden bullshit that we now attribute to “Teh Bard”. Don’t believe me?

Yes, I do know Shakespeare’s women’s roles were played by young men, the convention of the time. It hasn’t been the convention for several hundred years.

 
Privatize the Profits! Socialize the Costs!
 
 

“Game of American Thrones”

I do not want to watch the nude scenes.

 
 

in Le Guin’s opinion a woman playing a male Shakespearean role is still some sort of crime against literature and culture because OMG SHAKESPEARE!

Considering her own convention-bending science fiction writings…

 
 

I have nothing to add other than “fuck” was used 62 times (63 now!) on this page.

Bra-vo!

Sorted by commenter nym, please…I have GOT to be close the fucking lead.

 
 

My liberal friends, my liberal friends….

Sounds like Colbert and his personal ads for a “black friend”.

Friendless troll is friendless.

 
 

You call that hair?

dayum! i would kill for tsam’s 1993 hair…

 
 

Fair or unfair, I question the wisdom of radically changing a Shakespeare play just as I’d question the wisdom of chipping at the Venus of Milo to make her thinner so as to suit modern ideas of beauty, or repainting the Sistine Ceiling to brighten it up, or performing the Halleluiah Chorus in waltz time.

It’s completely unfair. And nonsense also too. No one would think of chipping at THE Venus de Milo nor of repainting THE Sistine chapel. As for Handel, doing that wouldn’t be so much an adaptation as doing shit while completely lacking any understanding of the original.

See, no one is changing a Shaespeare play. The millions of instances are written down pretty much exactly the same way. Too people have been adapting teh Bard’s works pretty much since they were first performed. Wait, I’ll go on record saying that every performance is an adaptation.

Ursula Le Guin, of whom I am a big fan (she lives in PDX, got to see her at an event that was her and Maragaret Atwood! discussing shit) seems to exercising her crotchety old woman rights in this case.

 
 

dayum! i would kill for tsam’s 1993 hair…

I didn’t do a fantastic job of taking care of it, though. It was pretty long, however. That was my post-military rebellion at work. My mom still occasionally gives me hell about my wedding photos with that long mop tied back into a pony tail. (((shudder)))

I’m glad short hair is fashionable now.

 
 

Party in the WND comments and y’all is invited.

I’ll bet the coroner died from a contact OD resulting from handling Breitbart’s corpse. At the risk of hooring, I have to say that the Freeper commenters were hilarious when they discussed Breitbart’s death.

 
 

OK, after seeing some of the TPM pics of the Political-Media Circle Jerk White House Correspondents Dinner, all I can say is: some people need to see a dentist, STAT!

 
 

i would kill for tsam’s 1993 hair…

If you travel back in time, kill tsam’s grandfather and convince your grandfather to impregnate tsam’s grandmother, this may be possible.

 
 

Wait, I’ll go on record saying that every performance is an adaptation.

Many people, including myself, think that the works were intended to have some ambiguity and open to adaptation/interpretation.

I enjoy the modernized versions of them too, something that invites death threats and sneery condescension from purists. I hate purists. They suck at EVERYTHING.

 
 

As many as 100 high school students walked out of a national journalism conference after an anti-bullying speaker began cursing, attacked the Bible and reportedly called those who refused to listen to his rant “pansy assed.”

The speaker was Dan Savage, founder of the “It Gets Better” project, an anti-bullying campaign that has reached more than 40 million viewers with contributors ranging from President Obama to Hollywood stars. Savage also writes a sex advice column called “Savage Love.”

Savage, and his husband, were also guests at the White House for President Obama’s 2011 LGBT Pride Month reception. He was also invited to a White House anti-bullying conference.

Savage was supposed to be delivering a speech about anti-bullying at the National High School Journalism Conference sponsored by the Journalism Education Association and the National Scholastic Press Association. But it turned into an episode of Christian-bashing.

Rick Tuttle, the journalism advisor for Sutter Union High School in California, was among several thousand people in the audience. He said they thought the speech was one thing – but it turned into something else.

“I thought this would be about anti-bullying,” Tuttle told Fox news. “It turned into a pointed attack on Christian beliefs.”

Tuttle said a number of his students were offended by Savage’s remarks – and some decided to leave the auditorium.
“It became hostile,” he said. “It felt hostile as we were sitting in the audience – especially towards Christians who espouse beliefs that he was literally taking on.”

Tuttle said the speech was laced with vulgarities and “sexual innuendo not appropriate for this age group.” At one point, he said Savage told the teenagers about how good his partner looked in a speedo.

The conservative website CitizenLink was the first to report about the controversy. They interviewed a 17-year-old girl who was one of students who walked out of the auditorium.
“The first thing he told the audience was, ‘I hope you’re all using birth control,’” she told CitizenLink. “he said there are people using the Bible as an excuse for gay bullying, because it says in Leviticus and Romans that being gay is wrong. Right after that, he said we can ignore all the (expletive deleted) in the Bible.”
As the teenagers were walking out, Tuttle said that Savage heckled them and called them pansy-assed.

“You can tell the Bible guys in the hall they can come back now because I’m done beating up the Bible,” Savage said as other students hollered and cheered. “It’s funny as someone who is on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible how pansy-assed people react when you push back.”
The executive director of the National Scholastic Press Association provided Fox News with joint statement from the Journalism Education Association that was sent to members – after a number of people complained about Savage’s remarks.
“We appreciate the level of thoughtfulness and deliberation regarding Dan Savage’s keynote address,” the NSPA wrote. “some audience members who felt hurt by his words and tone decided to leave in the middle of his speech, and to this, we want to make our point very clear: While as a journalist it’s important to be able to listen to speech that offends you, these students and advisers had simply reached their tolerance level for what they were willing to hear.”

The NSPA said they did not have a prior transcript of Savage’s speech and that wish “he had stayed more on target for the audience of teen journalists.” They also said it provided a “teachable moment” for students.

As for Savage’s attack on people of faith?

“While some of his earlier comments were so strongly worded that they shook some of our audience members, it is never the intent of JEA or NSPA to let students get hurt during their time at our conventions,” they wrote.

However, not once did the NSPA or the JEA offer any apologies to the students or faculty advisors or anyone else in attendance.
Savage did offer a sarcastic apology “if I hurt anyone’s feelings.”

“But I have a right to defend myself and to point out the hypocrisy of people who justify anti-gay bigotry by pointing to the Bible and insisting we must live by the code of Leviticus on this one issue and no other.”

Tuttle said that he “felt duped” by the event. “There were Christian schools who went to the conference. To have this happen was disappointing and shocking.”

The NSPA said they should have done a better job preparing schools for what to expect.

For his part, Tuttle said that he will definitely be more cautious about the speakers at future conventions.Tuttle related how Savage told students that for a number of years he was not allowed in schools. He told the students that because it’s gained national acceptance “he’s reveling in the fact that it’s basically a middle finger to all those teachers and administrators who wouldn’t let him have access to those students before.”

But for some of Tuttle’s students – they felt like the anti-bullying activist was in fact – the bully.

 
 

Aroun’ here we link to stories and posts, pardner!

 
 

Stop the presses! Dan Savage offended the conservatives!

 
 

Aroun’ here we link to stories and posts, pardner!

Oh, sorry. This better?

 
 

Stop the presses! Dan Savage offended the conservatives!

Sure took them a while to crank up the wingnut whiner wurlitzer. They’re slipping (must be all that santorum on the floor).

 
 

Those Bible-beatin’ kids didn’t walk out on Dan Savage’s talk because they were offended, they walked out because Dan’s saucytalk made them all hot and bothered and they needed time for some NSA hookups in the men’s bathroom.

 
 

Stop the presses! Dan Savage offended the conservatives!

If only Dan Savage would learn the value of rational discourse like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have, this world would be a much better place.

 
 

Next year, the group should have a non-controversial speaker, such as George Takei.

 
 

When did Dan Savage*:

Get elected to public office?

Become the Left’s equivalent to Rush Limbaugh?

Garner public praise from prominent Democratic lawmakers?

(* = if the answer to any of these is, “Never fucking ever” then it’s not news)

 
 

Am I the only one who thinks thE Dan Savage story is awesome?

 
 

Am I the only one who thinks thE Dan Savage story is awesome?

It would seem that he is using the “taste of their own medicine” approach. Although the wingnuts seem to be upset because they feel he used the “stoop to their level” technique.

 
 

Am I the only one who thinks thE Dan Savage story is awesome?

Alex, I’ll take “People who can dish it out but can’t take it” for $500……

 
 

Sorted by commenter nym, please…I have GOT to be close the fucking lead.

I fucking know that I fucking did my fucking part!

Fuck. Also. Too & etc.

 
 

But more to the point, what did Dan say that was wrong? Hmmmmm?

 
 

¡ʞɔnɟ ʞɔnɟ ʞɔnɟ ʞɔnɟ ʞɔnɟ

 
 

He was a grown man bullying kids less than half his age.

Odd, he doesn’t look like a Catholic priest….

 
 

He was a grown man bullying kids less than half his age.

The George Zimmerman thread was a couple of posts ago, dude.

 
 

I think Subby just flipped us off.

 
 

Dude. You can’t win this. His father has the the biggest melon I’ve ever seen.

no, you haven’t…we have an entire family with gigantic skulls…the brother with the biggest is nicknamed ‘fathead’ (he married a woman with a sizeable jug and i believe she gave birth to only two children because ouch!) and hubbkf went to school with a guy known as ‘mel’ which is short for melonhead…and everybody has to struggle really hard to remember what mel’s real name is…

 
 

Odd, he doesn’t look like a Catholic priest….

He said “bullying” not “buggering” — I bet the recipients would’ve been happier with the buggering.

 
 

everybody has to struggle really hard to remember what mel’s real name is…

And then he goes home to cry himself to sleep on his huuuuuuuuuuuge pillow.

 
 

Oh my how those pearls have been clutched! So it turns out what got their panties in knots was Dan Savage pointing out that the bible is demonstrably, factually, literally, considerably more pro-slavery than anti-gay. HE USED THEIR OWN WORDS AGAINST THEM! HATEFUL!

 
 

Telling people their beliefs are wrong is bullying therefore the true conservative never does this.

 
 

Dude. You can’t win this. His father has the the biggest melon I’ve ever seen.

I have a picture of one of my softball teamates standing next to the Goodyear blimp and his head is larger than the blimp. There is a bit of a perspective thing happening in the photo, but not much.

 
 

He was a grown man bullying kids less than half his age.

So telling the truth is bullying now. Yikes.

 
 

And then he goes home to cry himself to sleep on his huuuuuuuuuuuge pillow

right? can you imagine going through life being called ‘mel’ because of your humongous head? plus he has a bit of a walleye, so there’s that as well…oddly enough, he’s over 50 and has never been married…

 
 

“I have a picture of one of my softball teamates standing next to the Goodyear blimp and his head is larger than the blimp. There is a bit of a perspective thing happening in the photo, but not much.”

Did he go on to play for the Reds?

 
 

no, you haven’t…we have an entire family with gigantic skulls…the brother with the biggest is nicknamed ‘fathead’ (he married a woman with a sizeable jug and i believe she gave birth to only two children because ouch!) and hubbkf went to school with a guy known as ‘mel’ which is short for melonhead…and everybody has to struggle really hard to remember what mel’s real name is…

I’ll have to send you a picture of hubby. Handsome man. FREAKISHLY LARGE HEAD.

 
 

I have a picture of one of my softball teamates standing next to the Goodyear blimp and his head is larger than the blimp. There is a bit of a perspective thing happening in the photo, but not much.

LOL.

 
 

the brother with the biggest is nicknamed ‘fathead’ (he married a woman with a sizeable jug and i believe she gave birth to only two children because ouch!) and hubbkf went to school with a guy known as ‘mel’ which is short for melonhead…and everybody has to struggle really hard to remember what mel’s real name is…

My brother Vincenzo had a classmate who was tall and skinny, with a giant noggin- his nickname was “watertower”.

 
 

Did he go on to play for the Reds?

No, he’s a Brewer.

 
 

He was a grown man bullying kids less than half his age.

Bullying? Maybe your idea of bullying is different from that of people who are not morons.

After all of the right wing “pointed attacks” on gays and everyone else who isn’t a well-to-do white protestant, you might consider shutting the fuck up when someone returns fire. The problem, see, is that you’re wrong and we’re right. Stop being wrong and this sort of shit won’t happen anymore.

That’s some free advice for you, troll. You’re welcome.

 
 

laughing up their sleeves.

The WORST kind of insult!

 
 

The WORST kind of insult!

Nuh-uh! Laughing up their pantlegs is.

 
 

right? can you imagine going through life being called ‘mel’ because of your humongous head? plus he has a bit of a walleye, so there’s that as well…oddly enough, he’s over 50 and has never been married…

That’s actually sad. I feel bad for the guy.

 
 

Yes, ya’ll haven’t smeared Romney near enough to re-elect your favcrite house negro President.

2 posted on Friday, April 27, 2012 7:15:58 AM by Peter from Rutland

This is what reminds me that I’m the real racist.

 
 

I had both walleye and beaver.

 
 

I had both walleye and beaver.

Dinner AND dessert!

 
 

can you imagine going through life being called ‘mel’ because of your humongous head? plus he has a bit of a walleye, so there’s that as well…oddly enough, he’s over 50 and has never been married…

Sounds like one of the Deep Ones – does he live in Innsmouth?

 
 

Substance McGravitas said,

April 30, 2012 at 20:13 (kill)

Huh? Will AK or SC or possibly Snail Joust translate that for me?

 
 

Maybe this will show what’s up, though preview says it won’t:¡ʞɔnɟ ʞɔnɟ ʞɔnɟ ʞɔnɟ ʞɔnɟ

 
 

He was a grown man bullying kids less than half his age.

Bullying? Maybe your idea of bullying is different from that of people who are not morons.

I was going to post, “Get back to us when you read about a gay person who ties up and beats a Christian minister”, but I realized it’s probably not that uncommon.

 
 

Minus ampersands: #161;#670;#596;#110;#607; #670;#596;#110;#607; #670;#596;#110;#607; #670;#596;#110;#607; #670;#596;#110;#607;

Fuck upside down.

 
 

Fucking upside down sounds hard. UNLESS I MOVE TO AUSTRALIA!

 
 

Fucking upside down – How does it work?

(somebody had to say it)

 
 

That’s actually sad. I feel bad for the guy

awww, mel’s a pretty good guy (his real name is dan btw) and seems to accept that he has not been blessed with the good looks…he’s had a couple of longterm girlfriends, so i’m guessing it’s something with him that he’s not married…it’s kind of typical around here…young guy’s whose dad’s buy the farm and leave them the farm and the widow…they just kinda…go on with the farming and living with mom…

 
 

I had both walleye and beaver.

this made me snort most unattractively…

 
 

HE USED THEIR OWN WORDS AGAINST THEM! HATEFUL!

Plus he said “shit.” In reference to the BIBLE! Blasphemy!

 
 

I flew with a student pilot once who had a really huge head. He was a pretty big guy in general (played football in college).

With his flight-helmet on his big head on top of his really wide shoulders, my forward view out the back seat of the T-38 as pretty much nil.

Try to imagine me doing the Stevie Wonder head-nod as I was trying to see enough to land the thing (tough enough to do on a good day).

“Let’s see, the runway isn’t on my right, and it isn’t on my left, so there’s a pretty good chance it’s in front of me”.

 
 

“Let’s see, the runway isn’t on my right, and it isn’t on my left, so there’s a pretty good chance it’s in front of me”.

major, i did not know you wrote songs for stealer’s wheel…

 
 

So it turns out what got their panties in knots was Dan Savage pointing out that the bible is demonstrably, factually, literally, considerably more pro-slavery than anti-gay.

It’s the anti-shellfish bias that gets me. How is man supposed to live without lobster?

 
 

“Let’s see, the runway isn’t on my right, and it isn’t on my left, so there’s a pretty good chance it’s in front of me”.

I’d say it’s 50/50 that it’s behind you, but I’m a pessimist.

 
 

major, i did not know you wrote songs for stealer’s wheel…

Relevant:

 
 

the runway isn’t on my right, and it isn’t on my left,
I’m stuck with a middle linbacker in my view.

 
 

Fine sirs and madams a most pleasant new thread has begun in the sitting room, please do join in after you’re done with the BUTTSEX.

 
 

after you’re done with the BUTTSEX.

NEVER!

 
 

It’s the anti-shellfish bias that gets me. How is man supposed to live without lobster?

I’ve heard that lobstermen have to check the pots pretty frequently because otherwise they will find only one very full lobster. In other words, even lobsters can’t resist eating lobster. I haven’t had one in a long while, but even as a vegetarian it would be hard to feel too guilty eating something that would eat itself if given the chance.

 
 

lobsters can’t resist eating lobster.

This is true even as larvae. It is what has made lobster farming difficult: to raise them from eggs it has to be done in a continuous whirlpool fast enough to keep them from muckling on to each other yet still able to find other food.

 
 

You think lobsters are difficult, you should try farming trilobites.

 
 

you should try farming trilobites.

But Captain Kirk told me they breed quite freely.

 
 

When I was living in the West Indies, we found a pumicey tidal cave infested by spiny lobsters. We’d go down there every once in a while and shoot two or three with a speargun.

There was a period of a month or so when this was literally all the meat we ate. I got extremely sick of lobster.

 
 

Spiny lobster =/= Atlantic lobster.

 
 

But Captain Kirk told me they breed quite freely.

Hmmmm, tribble-onna-stick.

 
 

Spiny lobster =/= Atlantic lobster.

They’re very dissimilar-looking, but I’m not enough of a gourmand to tell the difference w.r.t. taste. One sea spider is as good as any other.

It doesn’t help that I’m not huge on seafood to begin with, although I did have the best fish I’ve ever eaten there – extremely fresh tuna, like a fishy version of prime rib.

 
 

Not much meat on a sea spider.

 
 

Sheesh, Smut, RIGHT when I sit on my sea tuffet.

 
 

Not much meat on a sea spider.

But find the meat and mm-mmm, that’s good eatin’.

 
 

[…] So VS thinks her son has a big head? […]

 
Lexicon Devil
 

Cause everyone wants a 500-comment thread, surely.

 
 

Not sure if I’ve told this story here before – Google sez no, but is a whore – but we also encountered two guys on a flatbed truck trying to sell the biggest Goddamn lobster I have ever seen, and not inconceivably the biggest Goddamn lobster anyone has ever seen, for (the EC$ equivalent of) under 100 USD. It was still alive, and you’d have had to boil it in a modular container – easily four and a half feet long or longer.

Lobsters don’t die of old age, so I like to think now that this animal that was alive for Tupac Amaru II and Bunker Hill, that could well have been alive when Columbus arrived in the Americas, was boiled up in a huge pot and tasted like history: terrible.

 
 

Does your site have a contact page? I’m having problems locating it but, I’d like to shoot you an email.
I’ve got some recommendations for your blog you might be interested in hearing. Either way, great website and I look forward to seeing it develop over time.

 
 

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