For Whom It May Concern

It May Concern You Thy qualling toad-spotted miscreant hath a beef-witted pignut. Thy spleeny hasty-witted skainsmate hath a pox-marked hedge-pig. Thou art a mammering pox-marked malt-worm. Thou art a spongy motley-minded baggage. Thou art a fawning dizzy-eyed whey-face. Enter your name to be insulted: 1 insult2 insults3 insults4 insults5 insults6 insults7 insults8 insults9 insults10 insults Mode: CombinedClassicEvil Fortune CookiePiratePsychiatricRedneckShakespeareanSimpleYo momma One of 325 million Shakespearean insults by Insult-O-Matic

The Cure For “TL;DR”

STFU and pay attention.

I Also Prefer Dogs To People

A dog obviously has a Buddha Nature, but what about a cockroach?

Thinksgiving

and Be thankful for what you've got
 

  LBJ and the Conspiracy to Kill Kennedy: A Coalescence of Interests
By Joseph P. Farrell

http://ocd.xojane.seduction.net Dude-Bro Cycle

I'm not sure if it's a hat tip, an assist, or an exprobation that Ms Filopovic gets here, but ...

---

Dude or dude-bro: ten ways to tell by Jill Filipovic [The Guardian]

Best Of The Worst Of Online Dating Pickup Artists In The Wild [buzzfeed]

A(n)nals of Online Dating

I Am Going to Dropkick the Next Dudebro Who Tells Me Coercive Sex is Consensual Sex [xoJane]

Apocalypse When?

Detroiters often react testily to this kind of attention (as I do), even when it is done skillfully and with good intentions, as much of it is. Some of the criticism of negative publicity is just boosterism, as when the City Council denounced the producers of the ABC crime drama Detroit 187 for peddling the idea that there are criminals in Detroit. Others, weary of condescending criticism from outsiders, will defend Detroit’s reputation, or at least their privileged right to defame it, something like defending a bad parent: I can say anything I want about the old man, but don’t you dare. Ruin photography, in particular, has been criticized for its “pornographic” sensationalism, and my bookseller friend won’t sell much of it for that reason. And others roll their eyes at all the positive attention heaped on the young, mostly white “creatives,” which glosses over the city’s deep structural problems and the diversity of ideas to help fix them. So much ruin photography and ruin film aestheticizes poverty without inquiring of its origins, dramatizes spaces but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them, and romanticizes isolated acts of resistance without acknowledging the massive political and social forces aligned against the real transformation, and not just stubborn survival, of the city. And to see oneself portrayed in this way, as a curiosity to be lamented or studied, is jarring for any Detroiter, who is of course also an American, with all the sense of self-confidence and native-born privilege that we’re taught to associate with the United States.

Detroitism by John Patrick Leary @ Guernica

h/t Erik Loomis @ Lawyers, Guns & Money

Signal To Noise At The BBC

Perhaps this explains why American television is constantly ramming British affectations down our ...er um ... throats. [ie: Piers ... and Simon ... and Stuart ... unbelievable]

And so you open Pandora’s box to find the seedy ingredients of British populism. It’s not just names, or performers and acts, it’s an ethos. Why is British light entertainment so often based on the sexualisation of people too young to cope? And why is it that we have a press so keen to feed off it? Is it to cover the fact, via some kind of willed outrage, that the culture itself is largely paedophile in its commercial and entertainment excitements? Milly Dowler’s phone was hacked by journalists cynically feeding the ravenous appetites of three million people who love that stuff, and that’s just the ones who actually bought the News of the World. When Leveson’s findings are duly buried, will we realise that it was the nation’s populist appetites that were on trial all along?

Really? That's The Image You Want to Go With, Huh?

If there was any discussion, it might have gone something like this:

Are you sure this is the look you want for your training program? I realize that the on-line market for students is - well ... distinct from shall we say traditional avenues of appeal, but --

No, no. I don't mean to suggest that there's anything necessarily wrong with this young woman's appearance ... it's just ... the leopard print seems a bit suggestive ... on at least a few levels. Along with the hoop earrings and the general exotic and fairly erotic over-the-shoulder come-hither ...

Yes, of course I realize advertising is all about seduction but ... my problem?

Well, sir. I'm not sure if we're targeting young, middle-eastern women or sexually adventurous western males ... no. Of course there's no reason we can't market to a variety of potential demographics at the same time. I see your point, sir. Yes. Of course.

We'll have it on-line in our next ad-buy. Thank you, sir.

The Only Man Harsher Than Moi

...Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the ‘bankstatocracy’ that has led to what the mainstream financial media calls an ‘unintended’ wealth gap in the consumer sector – between those who recovered from the recession, and those still struggling. Any suggestions that this wealth gap might be intentional is ‘suspicious’ behavior, according to the US government.

Political Speech Recognition

That makes the entire Inside Baseball discourse a giant time sink, a cancer, an exercise in “Look! Over there!” After all, when everybody’s talking about how Eastwood hosed the Romney campaign because he misused a prime time slot, nobody’s talking about Gitmo, Afghanistan, or 23 million unemployed, are they? (There are entire lists of what we’re not talking about.)

And wasn’t that the real story? That, for one brief moment, a speaker turned human asked some questions that both candidates, and both parties, find very unpleasant?

Two Cheers For Clint Eastwood - Lambert Strether - 09/02/2012

Political Scientology

Just Another “Oral” Fixation

You should not consume "Laura Meets Jeffrey" in one go. It feels a little like eating an entire pizza in a single sitting, except instead of pizza, it's an ass.

Julieanne @ xojane

"Penis Rampage stands erect for Pussy Riot"

Via Adam Kokesh

Confused? See this and this.

Read Juan Cole and this Piercing analysis.


Listen up, then Free Pussy Riot !

“Cleaning Up” America Por los Touristas

Priam Rosenberg

Cops only have Tasers for children, the unarmed, the physically or mentally handicapped, and the elderly ... but if you bring a knife to a gun fight ...

In Times Square ... well then it's obviously right and proper that you get sprayed with (twelve!) bullets instead. America: FUCK YEAH!

Kill-shots are so manly. N'est-ce pas?

solicitous and naomi$@?*$

Friday, Aug 10, actually in NYC

naomi$@?*$ 02:44	Hi how you doin?,, I'm naomi and im so wet and horny and looking for some fun. Wanna see me naked on my webcam? I just got out of the shower and still have my towel on with no undies <3
solicitous 02:53	well of course i do!
naomi$@?*$ 02:54	cool ..

McGoohan's Mandala

deconstruction of metaphor embedded in parable, wrapped by surrealism

Environs Prometheus

“He Received Every New Idea as Perfectly Beautiful”

American Prometheus, p. 12

So Sprach Der Amerikanische Prometheus

h/t Messrs Bird & Sherwin

...Now, this is not an easy thing, and the point I want to make, the one point I want to hammer home, is what an enormous change in spirit is involved. There are things which we hold very dear, and I think rightly hold very dear; I would say that the word democracy perhaps stood for some of them as well as any other word. There are many parts of the world in which there is no democracy. There are other things which we hold dear, and which we rightly should. And when I speak of a new spirit in international affairs I mean that even to these deepest of things which we cherish, and for which Americans have been willing to die -- and certainly most of us would be willing to die -- even in these deepest things, we realize that there is something more profound than that; namely, the common bond with other men everywhere. It is only if you do that that this makes sense; because if you approach the problem and say, "We know what is right and we would like to use the atomic bomb to persuade you to agree with us," then you are in a very weak position and you will not succeed, because under those conditions you will not succeed in delegating responsibility for the survival of men. It is a purely unilateral statement; you will find yourselves attempting by force of arms to prevent a disaster.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
SPEECH TO THE ASSOCIATION OF LOS ALAMOS SCIENTISTS
Los Alamos, November 2, 1945

Punctuating Garry Wills' ...

... Henry Adams and the Making of America

7	James T. Callender,
7	William J. Duane
8	Pierre Beaumarchais
27	Grimke on the Equality of the Sexes (PDF)
36	Thomas Babington Macaulay
40	Walter Bagehot
43	Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams
46	Historical Essays by Henry Adams
81	Carl Schurz
81	Samuel J. Tilden
99	Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey
103	Manuel de Godoy, Prince of the Peace
113	The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
116	The Rise of Silas Lapham
123	A History of the British People

Just Another Day in the House of the Dead

Depends on what you mean by “dead”

So exposing classified national security information is an act of criminal evil when done by a whistleblower to expose high-level error or abuse, or to a court trying to assess the legality of the President’s actions. But it is an act of great nobility when done to venerate the President as a strong and tough warrior. That’s the manipulative, propagandistic game-playing this administration exploits with its secrecy powers and whistleblower prosecutions.