Sadly, No!

Don’t know how many of you have been enjoy-a-cringing the current season of Newsroom, Aaron Sorkins latest vehicle about Aaron Sorkin, but I promised to stop watching at least four times (halfway through the first episode I was like “not only is this bad, but where exactly is it going, and can we get a fucking continuity cop on site, stat”.) Now I was only made aware of the return of Newsroom by a post that Spocko had made at Digby’s place.

I enjoyed the first two seasons (first most) and was happy that it was on again. Now it is like watching a slow motion thing wherein somehow a clown-car (the VW bug with 20 clowns within) managed to take over the controls of a train (don’t ask me how, it just works as an image in my mind) that finds itself out of control and headed in the direction of a baby animal farm.

The most recent episode has been panned far and wide as an example of horrible television, primarily due to the way it deals with a storyline involving a rape victim, wherein Sorkin (sole writing credits) Sorksplains™ why the rape victim should not have set up a website naming her assailants. The analysis of that particular fail has been taken care of far better than I could. Jezebel, AV Club, The Guardian, Vox, The Atlantic, and many others did just that.

What seems to keep drawing me back into the show is a fascination at one, a complete lack of self awareness by the show creator, and two, just what the fuck are they trying to accomplish. The show is all over the place and I only found out yesterday (after vowing to watch only one more episode, that there was only one left.

It was clear that most of the cast was well aware of the fact before I was, because it seemed like someone migh have set up a phone bank and comfy chairs and trays of bon bons on set. The only way they are gonna be able to wrap up the series in one episode is going to require the unpacking of every treacle laden cliche that has ever entered anything resembling a story in hollywood at its worst, and someone with more powers of giving a shit about it than I should really come up with a drinking game and prepare to take the following two days off.

On to other shit, much cooler shit, in fact, this:

Of course the Usual Suspects were up in arms. Post comes to screeching halt because while trying to catch up with some of the Usual Suspects I was caught in this web cast by VDH:

Some of the public may think that the lessons of Michael Brown — and Trayvon Martin — are that it is unwise to commit a crime and then assault an officer, or confront a stranger in the rain and slug him in the head and get into a tussle, given that such targets may be armed and may respond with deadly force. But I think critics would privately respond that in Al Sharpton’s America both cases instead advise to take the beating and do not dare use a firearm for self-protection from assault on the chance the attacker is unarmed. In retrospect, Zimmerman might have preferred to have been “whoop-assed,” or Wilson preferred being slugged than to become lifelong targeted pariahs…

h/t Roy

One of the things I love about the Aliens shows on the History Channel aside from the guy with the hair, so crazy and earnest, that it makes you want to become a believer, is the reliance on “Some say’s” and “May’s” to support the most tenuous of argument, and here Victor comes galloping right out of the gate using the same formula.

I’m not sure exactly what you get when you mix slippery slopes with argumentum ad absurdum, and a healthy dollop of terrified white privilege, but i am thinking that it looks alot like that paragraph or pretty much everything Hanson has written.

Yesterday I went traipsing through the wayback machine to see what if anything of the old SadlyVerse I might be able to recover and I found some stuff:

From his latest, a bit about Landrieu’s chances today, this is dropped into an od graph about halfway through the piece.

An analogous situation arose last month over the Keystone XL pipeline, which billionaire global warmists oppose and the Obama administration has delayed. The House had approved multiple bills that would authorize construction, but despite bipartisan support, as Fox Butterfield might say, soon-to-be-former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid refused to allow a vote.

On second thought I should have gone with this picture instead:

I think if we launch an exhaustive search, we will find that all of these “billionaire global warmists” are hiding behind polyps in Taranto’s colon. And who the fuck is Fox Butterfield anyway?

And while this article is a bit older, the fact that it was written during Ferguson where people were being harassed and beaten by cops for daring to be upset that their children were being casually murdered with little to no repercussions is just the icing on the fucking cake for how myopic this shit is.

Bobo* Brooks, The Old Grey Corpse:
Why Partyism is Wrong

Hey everyone, listen up!

Bobo has a very important problem he wants to share, one deathly important to humanity at large and a huge swath of ill-done and oft-oppressed people. Yes, our brave narcissist is stretching himself for once, showing great empathy for what is truly a national tragedy. One whose pain is all but ignored by even the most fierce social justice paladin.

You may wonder what group has so tragically slipped through the cracks of even the most conscious parts of our society? Well…

It’s right wing think tank hacks.

Well, not right-wing think tank hacks who are happily employed, receiving huge buckets of money to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. No, no, what breaks Bobo’s heart is that there may be no place left for the next generation of talentless blowhards and sociopaths who trusted the wingnut welfare system to be there when they graduated college with zero information learned and nothing but an extensive trust fund and a VP chair in their daddy’s company to support them. And now, they are forced to get real jobs, one’s that may even look askance on a collegiate career of being a constant bigot and doing nothing but wingnut welfare “work”.

Truly, no other group has been so betrayed and disempowered!

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• Snff. It’s just not fair that companies and academic institutions aren’t overrating complete hacks anymore simply because they’ve spent their time waging war against actual work and academic endeavor! Sob. And like that’s literally the worst oppression like ever. People shouldn’t judge people by qualifications, because that’s discrimination. Oh no, that sounded too close to being something almost sane, so let me expand on that to note that people shouldn’t judge people by their politics in everyday life and interpersonal relationships, because it’s all a game anyways and doesn’t have any real impact on anyone’s life… well, not anyone that matters, anyways. Like that’s the worst bigotry that ever bigoted!

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~Shall I stand as a total stranger? On this day in this stone chamber?~

Counting the dead… nay, counting the dead who have been murdered… no, counting the dead who have been murdered because of who they fundamentally were is sadly a yearly tradition for trans* people. It shouldn’t be. I mean, given how small of a community we are and how specific that situation is, it shouldn’t really be a thing, much less an annual thing. Much less an annual thing that involves a list of dozens and often hundreds of names, all snuffed out in hate crime after hate crime, striking home like the deaths of unarmed black men and boys by cops. The Transgender Day of Remembrance that we hold vigil for every year in the trans* community shouldn’t exist. In an ideal world, it wouldn’t. But instead, we live here, so we gather and refuse to let those so casually erased be forgotten.

You can see part of the list of names for this last year on the TDOR website and see the appalling truncation of so many men, women, and non-binary individuals lives (especially in Brazil. WTF Brazil. W. T. F.) for the dumbest and most senseless of reasons. And what makes this year strange is that the name I’m mourning most is not a name that’s even on that list. In fact, it’s probably the closest to an antithesis of the usual end for trans* individuals you can get (dying in old age, after a long disease, cared for in final days by a long-term romantic partner, and fondly eulogized).
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The thing is this has always been a fait accompli, the shit was woven into our founding document. Right there in paragraph three of section two:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Which in essence means that if a southern state had 50,000 “other Persons” which would add at least one representative to the state in question. Still in paragraph three:

The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative;and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New-York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three.

One might wonder if Virginia in this case had enough slaves to grant it an extra representative or two. In any event, from the get go the South has had us by the balls. They were able to count slaves toward the amount of Representation they would hav in congress an after a very brief respite during the era of reconstruction were able to count “free” black persons while denying those very souls the right to vote.

Last night someone asked why they waited so long to deliver the findings. I would say that there are several reasons: One. Cover of darkness to make it more difficult to determine what was happening and where, when the tear gas started flying. Two. To provide opportunities for the collection of images of Blacks on Rampage to ensure that the media had plenty of “they had it coming” fodder to the drooling masses that directly benefit from White Supremacy. Three. So the drooling minions of mammon, among others we have Jonah Goldberg can “wingsplain” the reason that it is the season to get the heathens.

I believe the grand jury operated in good faith and from what I can tell Officer Wilson had the facts and evidence on his side. Given the eagerness of some parties to exploit Brown’s death, it’s tempting to see this as a partisan victory against the forces of Sharptonism. And while I can’t muster sympathy for the looters, car-burners, the dress-up Bolsheviks and that ilk, I am trying to see this through the eyes of those I disagree with.

The last bit being possibly the most disingenuous thing this particular shartiste has allowed to pass from his pressure release valve. Following that nothingburger in his inimitable style I’ll leave the parsing for those whose skulls have not been softened by a constant pounding into a hard surface.

If McCulloch wanted an indictment, I think he could have gotten one (prosecutors and ham sandwiches and all that). Whether he should have gotten one is open to debate. I certainly think you could make the case that the country would be better off in the long run if there was an open and transparent public trial. On the other hand, we don’t have trials of innocent men simply for appearances’ sake. Having a trial just for show is too close to a show trial as far as I’m concerned.

The last sentence is too clever by half of half.

They didn’t fuck around back in the day. They knew how to string up a man so he wouldn’t die right away, so they could extend the show. I am sure that a flaming corpse will tickle the nethers for awhile, but a full-on-medieval, live flaming body, has got to fill an observers pants with all kinds of moisture.

“Bennie Simmons, or Dennis Simmons, accused of the murder of sixteen-year old Susie Church, was taken from prison guards in Anadarko, Oklahoma. His killers led him to a nearby bridge and hanged him from the limb of a cottonwood tree flourishing by a stream. ”

The Negro prayed and shrieked in agony as the flames reached his flesh,” reported a local newspaper, “but his cries were drowned out by yells and jeers of the mob.” As Simmons began to lose consciousness the mob fired at the body, cutting it to pieces. ” The mobsters made no attempt to conceal their identity,” remarked the Enfaula Democrat, “but there were no prosecutions.” Purchased in Oklahoma.

I think we can add a new definition to “Call and Response.”

“…flourishing by a stream”…Nice touch, because I was concerned with the health of that tree.

Now in 1913 there was no internet to get the LynchPorn™ delivered, but they had you covered; should you have missed out, they sold Post Cards: “Gelatin silver print. Real photo postcard. 31/4 x 5 in.”

Etched into negative, “Edies Photo Anadarko Oklo””

Which means that they didn’t just print off ten or fifteen . As Without Sanctuary makes clear there was a market, and these were collectables.

Now we have often gagged about the tendency of the Projectithoritarians™, Tories by any other name, to drag us into a new gilded age, it has become clear that they want the full monty, and fortunately in the early part of the 21st century they can enjoy their Lynching Hard-ons by proxy.

Like, for instance, leaving a dead man in the street for four hours so a thorough investigation can take place or so as many might get the “message” as possible. Undoubtedly Mr Simmons remains were left up in the cottonwood tree to give those the chance what missed the party and who could not wait for the Post Card an opportunity to take part ex-facto and anyone else for whom a message might be delivered, to receive it.

Take note of the left arm in the Photo above, what you see is some high tech, top of the line, pocket investigation equipment, (one wonders if it plays pool.)

That the stream of blood running from Michael Brown’s lifeless body resembles a rope, is simply a side effect of slope, but it does resemble a rope and this was a lynching.

Near as anyone can tell this will be an awesome thanksgiving week for African Americans as it has been intimated that the results of the Grand Jury deliberations shall be released this week. We shall see.

[Edited for clarity]

A number of things have conspired in any number of attempts to conjure up a Sadly worthy jeremiad over about the last four or five months. and there were many things that came like a flood of fodder during that time, starting near-abouts with Ferguson and the dead kid left in the street for four hours.

Some shit just knocks the wind out of you and being hit by a fusillade of hatred, naked racism and bullshit can on the right days get to even the most tightly girded of us.

Personally, there was the job I had to get out of lest I appear before a judge on assault charges, some rather uncomfortable issues with my health which stole time, vim and vigor. The laptop went down (more accurately the power supply went down and with a battery life measured in minutes…we are in brick territory.) Thank the FSM that I know how to use a soldering iron.

So the good news is that Lappie™ is back in business after a six week hiatus. My body seems to be gaining strength after a month of pain. While I am not sure where next months rent is going to come I figure I can manage a patron. The return of JP is of great solace as well.

Yesterday, I was cleaning/straightening up my room and ran across my beloved Nexus 7 which I had given up for a brick over a year ago. For shits and grins I thought I might plug it in and attempt to charge the beast. I honestly had no hope whatsoever given previous attempts, but 20 minutes later I caught the google bootup screen out of the corner of my eye and was like “You’re fucking kidding me.” I had to make sure that I left it alone for at least an hour as I went about my business (this was hard).

Happy to say that after 5 software updates the Nexus is humming along with the latest version of Android and I am a happy camper. I am going to take this as a sign that things are beginning to turn in this holler. If the Opinel and Swedish fire steel make an appearance all the better.

Sometimes it is the little things…

I’ll admit I reeked of booze on election night. To be fair, it was because my girlfriend placed a poorly sealed glass of scotch in a really precarious place and it spilled all over me, but fuck it, I’m counting it.

Ugh… I had a sinking suspicion this would be the result and by sinking suspicion, I mean Nate Silver foretold it in the exacting way he has done every other election, and so knew this was a given and so began drinking early just to be ready.

And it makes sense for it to go this way this time. Yes, Republicans are still more crazed than a wolverine on meth and are still dedicated to getting petty revenge on the filthy “others” who dare pretend they are people by burning everything to the ground. But they also managed something this election cycle they haven’t in previous years. Which is not letting their reptilian masks slip too much before they were put in seats of real damage. There was not an exorbitant amount of candidates ranting about witches or the Trilateral Commission. Heck, they’ve even managed to keep their talking points relatively bland and most importantly of all, seem to have mostly cut out the right-wing noise machine entirely, letting them focus almost exclusively on demonizing individual Democrats than doing much defending of their worst offenders.

Mix that in with a bunch of battleground states that were mostly carried through on Obama’s tidal wave back in 2008 and the fact that most of the supposed liberal candidates were too afraid of being called commies or “liberals” to actually defend super popular ideas like the increase in minimum wage and our slightly expanded health care and of course the wonderful help provided by our Supreme Court in rubber-stamping the modern “literacy tests” and well, it’d make sense that the Reptilians would be able to claw and scrape themselves into a position where they can at least more effectively derail not only legislation, but even congressional debate that isn’t about one of their endless hobby horses.

It’s understandable, but still shitty, seeing as how nothing has really changed and conservative ideas have only become more insane, disconnected from reality, and pettily abusive to see the usual groups of morons forget that the election cycle it isn’t shoved in their face repeatedly. And I can draw comfort in the continued social victories, that minimum wage increases are succeeding even in glibertarian hellholes and that there is continued peel-back at least in my state of the entrenched and vile prison-industrial complex and drug war. Not to mention the utter failure of the professional homophobes to even really get much in the way of anti-gay legislation to the ballot, much less win.

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I think I got this! No is the answer, right? Yeah, I’m definitely going to go with “no”

Cliff Kincaid, Stream of Consciousness America:
Can Marijuana Fuel Jihad

I think unhinged wingnuttery can sometimes be viewed almost like musical pieces…. not good music mind you. After all that requires craftsmanship and effort, two things most wingnuts are tragically fatally allergic to (or at least I’d assume that’s the case given their bowel-movement like regular posts). But certainly the type of music produced by a bunch of kids entering into their first Battle of the Bands without practicing because their “natural talent” is going to make them “megastars”.

And given that lens, we can see the evolution of genres like the worst radio station on the planet.

I mean, you’ve got the throat-scratching primal screams of hate, the ham-fisted metal-like noise of people who think simple loudness equates to technical proficiency and sweeping baroque like illustrations. And you’ve got the insufferable version of an emo self-pitying cry apeing the alienation of the genre to instead wax poetically on the immeasurable and seemingly invisible slings and arrows suffered by the overfed and powerful at the hands of such nebulous concepts as “gubmint” and “social justice warrriorrrs (come out to play-ay)”. And let us not forget the insufferably pompous attempts at deep intellectual and complex work farted out by the equivalent of a talentless boy band, hoping that overwrought swoops and nonsensical metaphors will somehow equate to having anything of worth to sing about. And all manner of paycheck songs, album filler to round out the set and keep the crowd awake as one wonders on the wisdom of quitting one’s day job.

And of course, today’s output: the genre mashup. Now, I generally love genre mashup pieces, as one might expect from an old-school techno fan. When well-done, they can give new life to multiple styles of music and produce a much-needed fresh sound.

But sometimes, you get messes like these. Discordant noise made out of ill-stitched standbys of the genre in order to create a horrifying Frankensteinian monstrosity from still rotting tissue.

And unlike The Monster, there is no saving this tragic beast.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• In the course of human affairs, it appears that right-wing myths about mary-jew-juan-a can explain why the sand-monkeys and niggers are violent and dangerous forces needing only the most exacting elimination. To demonstrate this, I will casually assume, yes, a handful of right-wing muslims in the news used this shit, but such pedestrian concerns tire me greatly, so instead allow me to devote the majority of my time to the smearing of those darkies slaughtered by our brave and certainly not high at all cops, lest any forget that the whole mary-jane panic is about (and has always been about) demonizing the faggots, the niggers, and the assorted commie scum.

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Oh hey, when Matt Barber was last relevant.

So it turns out exiting a giant tangle of part-time work actually takes a bit of time and a lot of work training my replacements. Not to mention the effort of finding a rhythm with my new job. Even worse, I’ve been happy. All of this has added up to the fact that I’ve fallen off my game and hard.

So I need something to get me back in the harvesting mood. Something ignorant as fuck, obviously. Something willingly deluded to any reality you or me might call home, duh. And of course, something hateful and blindingly reasserting of a narrow subset of white sexist douchebag supremacy, because yeah. But that’s something I can get at any nickel and dime conservative post on the internet.

If I truly want to get the old flame burning again, I need to find something special. Something…

Matt “I can’t stop looking at gay porn for… research, yeah research honest…” Barber, Scream ‘Murica:
’LGBT’: The ’T’ is for Tyranny

Boom! There it is.

So apparently even the dedicated dead-enders of the professional homophobe movement have begun seeing the writing on the walls and are getting mighty nervous about how many victories gay rights have had recently and how much fewer and fewer people there are every year who can be relied on to send him their life savings in exchange for ranting pronouncements of just how dirty and sinful those half-naked gay men are.

And as such, just like the leaves turn in fall, so must bigots turn to the latest flavor to further delay the day when they would have to get a real job. And luckily for them (and unluckily for those of us given the short straw in the genetic lottery) there is a convenient oppressed group close enough related to mostly rely on a quick find and replace on the standard newsletter. That of course being people with pronounced dimples…

Wait, I read that wrong. I meant to say trans* people, because of course it is. I mean, wingnuts have already been shifting that way since the writing first popped up on the walls and trans* people are entering into that stage of the rights struggle where they are visible enough to be a fundraising topic, while hated enough and politically unrepresented enough to be a reliable and safe group to publicly despise.

…yay…

ROLL THE SHORTER, DAN-O!
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I wonder, can you purchase friends at the Applebee’s Salad Bar?

Bobo* Brooks, Washington Faust:
There Are Social and Political Benefits to Having Friends

You know what I hate?

Moochers.

Yeah, you heard me, dirty filthy moochers stealing up my hard-earned tax dollars what with their unamerican whines of “but I need to eat” or “I don’t want to die here on the streets”. Oh boy fucking hoo, what about my stock portfolio, that’s what I say.

You know, I used to mock overprivileged assholes on this blog who seemed to think that everyone would become just as sociopathic, bigoted, egocentric, and short-sighted as them if only they were able to tug hard on their bootstraps and magic their way into that full-time middle-class employment that is totally on every street corner just waiting for someone white go-getting enough to seize it.

But now that I’ve caught that elusive golden snitch and just now seized a full-time teaching job with nothing but hard work, moxie, and good-ol’ inherent worthiness, I realize the folly of my former socialist ways. Sure, this random conflux of events is somewhat… clouded by the desperation that preceded it and the grim knowledge that a bit of crucially timed luck is the only thing that separates me now from the homeless woman hiding under a blanket in a street alcove or the tragedy of Kate von Roeder. I mean, it’s not like I can erase the way I had to casually discard an important dream and retreat to a dangerous self-loathing head-space to try and put together some form of panicked short-term survival. Nor can I avoid catching a glimpse of the still-healing scar all up and down my left arm from a recent wake-up-warning suicide attempt only foiled by gross incompetence and skin apparently as hard as Emma Frost’s.

Or the fact that this random bit of luck on my part does not change the terrifying reality that faces many more my age who are barred from full participation in the economy or the fact that I’m only one bad boss or broken closet door away from being right back in a capitalism-fueled mess that very nearly took away the last of my sanity and self-preservation. Having to forego food and basic necessities out of stubborn pride and refusal to deny my being for a chance at life.
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