Rhinocrisy

Everyone*’s favorite artist will be at the San Francisco Exploratorium this Saturday with her installation, SF in Jello. I’ll be there. I hope Jello Biafra can show up to close the loop.

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^*Everyone named Hedgehog, that is.

Today I got a spam e-mail with the following quote in it:

doesn’t exist?’

‘Calm down, calm down, calm down, professor,’ stammered Berlioz, frightened of exciting this lunatic. ‘ You stay here a minute with comrade Bezdomny while I run round the corner and make a ‘phone call and then we’ll take you where you want to go. You don’t know your way around town, [after] all…’ Berlioz’s plan was obviously right–to run to the nearest telephone box and tell the Aliens’ Bureau that there was a foreign professor sitting at Patriarch’s Ponds who was clearly insane. Something had to be done or there might be a nasty scene.

‘Telephone? Of course, go and telephone if you want to,’ agreed the lunatic sadly, and then suddenly begged with passion:

‘But please–as a farewell request–at least say you believe in the devil! I won’t ask anything more of you. Don’t forget that there’s still the seventh proof–the soundest! And it’s just about to be demonstrated to you!’

‘All right, all right,’ said Berlioz pretending to agree. With a wink to the wretched Bezdomny, who by no means relished the thought of keeping

If you don’t recognize this little tidbit, I order you to go forth and at once purchase for yourself a copy of The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, which is my favorite book of all time. Wow! How cool is that? Maybe I’ll receive the whole thing in little spam-snippets…

and I don’t mean it ironically. Three years ago, when the first case of bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE, or mad cow) was discovered in the U.S., the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture promptly created a rule forbidding individual farms and meatpackers from testing their cud-chompers’ cadavers for the communicable prion that turns cow, bull, steer, and probably human, brains into Swiss cheese. (The American variety is apparently more like Havarti, and may be a different illness. But that’s irrelevant for now.) The USDA has maintained all along that it instituted the rule as part of its eternal pursuit of consistency and high degrees of quality control. Those of us out here in war-on-science-landia suspected it had more to do with concealing for a longer time any evidence that the prion had become endemic in the herd, maintaining for a few years at least Americans’ overconsumption of bovine musclature.

At the time, I wondered why a meatpacker desiring to export flesh to Japan wouldn’t sue the USDA and demand the right to test its slaughter for prionic pollution. What happened to the constitutional “right to contract”? At last, someone has:

A Kansas meatpacker has sparked an industry fight by proposing testing all the company’s cattle for mad cow disease.

Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to look for the disease in every animal it processes. The Agriculture Department has said no. Creekstone says it intends to sue the department.

“Our customers, particularly our Asian customers, have requested it over and over again,” chief executive John Stewart^* said in an interview Wednesday. “We feel strongly that if customers are asking for tested beef, we should be allowed to provide that.”

To which I ask, what the hell took you people so long? It’s the kind of thing that makes me wish I had gone to law school after all, as maybe I could be spending my time suing the government for the right to conduct science that might protect the public. Jeez.

For my part, I’ve tried a couple portions of beef in the past 2 years. They were fine. Both times they were at Katz’ Delicatessen in New York. I have no idea how the animals were raised, but I know how the meat was prepared, and that was most excellently. It would have been comforting to consume the salty fibers with confidence that they were not deeply infused with self-replicating misfolded proteins.

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^* From Slaughterhouse Central world headquarters in Kansas, it’s the Deathly Show, with John Stewart. (Music up, applause, pan, zoom. Stewart gazes into camera, waves pen. Blood squirts from pen. Audience gasps in orgiastic horror and pleasure.)

This is deeply fucked up.^* A children’s book to teach little kids about “Democrat values”. OH MY GOD. OH MY GOD. I mean, look at this sample page:

Truly abominable. Instead of teaching kids that praxis of good values has merit in itself, these authors (and apparently their readers) will tell them that merit is derived from their association with the correct tribe.^†

I’m not some sort of shameless individualist, but herd mentalities give me the heebie-jeebies. An incisive observer of the world is one who appreciates nuance and does not cut the world into broad swathes. The opposite tendency is the hallmark of dullards. “You should all grow wheat,” Stalin says to the peasants in the USSR. “Oh, crap,” say all the Kyrgyzstanis, who have herded sheep for eons, and promptly starve to death.

I found this kind of shit-flinging tribalism especially offensive after the 2004 election, when plenty of Democrat associates of mine fulminated about those troglodytes in the “red states” and their lack of basic human decency. A message to you, Rudy: get over your need to draw battle lines over political allegiances. Baring your teeth and snarling at each other is what dogs do. Just be humans.

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^* Incidentally, is there any more powerful way to express condemnation than to say that “shit is fucked up”? I don’t think there is!

^† Especially when this particular tribe contains some notably virtue-less individuals.

Apparently, one of the leaders of the Oglala Sioux tribe in South Dakota has decided she’s not going to put up with this “banning abortion” shit. She says, “I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction.”

Check it out.

For some reason the New York Times feels like this story about extensive torture in a Special Ops prison called Camp Nama in Baghdad is newsworthy. I don’t know when the MSM is going to get it through its thick collective skull that we’ve already dealt with that whole torture issue. We punished the people responsible for Abu Ghraib; Americans have moved on. Why won’t the media?^*

I think it’s about time to get some t-shirts made. How about, “Don’t fuck with me - I’m a citizen of an evil torture state”?

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^* Also, why won’t the torturers?

I received this bit of Dadaist poetry from an anonymous open proxy friend. I threw in a few punctuation marks and line breaks here and there, but most of it is virgin.^*


Disservice Piggyback
Fishing rod, genuinely axis accuser!
Backside a compassionate, crummy but birch with fireside
the gooey of tune
third degree of love affair
cooperative, with spun to shabbily as self-respect calculated.
go-cart, medallion porter, and westernize!

to, in drinking fountain, northwesterly, the millennia labyrinth.
to chase, presently, spree flashback.

as in, the pair coercion and clear-cut.

by was boomerang airy, diploma-soulful, “jack-of-all-trades” babble-camera.
endow, as nuclei a of as self-pity:
dues, await of gold medalist
stumbling block umpire imbalanced off-color
double-cross compartment

moo the perfectionist buttercup! Ah, heirloom, amiably!
Delirium, the are an enrichment.

it illness.
it station.


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^* I am, of course, not the first to do this.

This article about sums it up. Civil war.^*

The mindless doublespeak being tossed around is amazing. You may marvel at these brilliant juxtapositions, by both Cheney and Rumsfeld:

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote an article for the Washington Post, in which he argued that Iraq is not in the midst of a civil war.

The defense secretary said: “The terrorists realized that they were losing the war. They are, therefore, trying to make the sectarian conflict in Iraq into a civil war. If the United States began to pull out from Iraq right now, it would be like giving Germany back to the Nazis after World War II.”

US Vice President Dick Cheney, disagreeing with Allawi, said Iraq is not under threat of a civil war.

Some are seriously determined to create a civil war in Iraq, Cheney claimed on CBS.

I.e., the terrorists WANT to create civil war, and are desperately trying to. But anything you see that might actually look like civil war is not the logical result of that impulsion; it’s actually the insurgency in its “final throes”.

Frankly this rhetoric is starting to bore me. Every statement that comes out of the mouths of these people is contorted to support the notion that every single thing they are doing is right. It’s right to stay there and fight the terrorists, because otherwise they will bring about destruction and chaos. And things are going well; after all, if they weren’t, that would suggest we’re doing something wrong.

Here’s something that they’ve done wrong from day one: doggedly insisted on “defeating the terrorists” through the application of violence, when what was really called for was finding ways to enfranchise all parties (especially the Sunni Arab minority, wealthy, powerful, threatened and willing to fight). The polarization of the country was the inevitable result. This mindset is not surprising from a group that only has two modes of operation: 1) Bombing the crap out of people, or 2) Threatening to bomb the crap out of people. But it’s also not really surprising that it didn’t work.

Hubris like this used to guarantee that the wrath of the gods would come down upon you. I’m waiting.

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^* This really is the correct time to say ‘I told you so.’

Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear screaming death and terror from the skies
Happy birthday to you

A lot of us thought it odd when a car reviewer won the Pulitzer for criticism a couple years ago. Today, Dan Neil shows us how it’s done:

THERE’S something peculiarly egregious, something antagonizing about the 2007 Mercedes-Benz GL, the company’s new full-size, 15-mpg sport-utility vehicle, which might be described as a Cadillac Escalade with a hankering for Czechoslovakia. For one thing, it goes to show that, even though the full-size SUV market has fallen off dramatically in the last year, there are still sufficient numbers of selfish rotters out there to constitute an appealing market segment.

Mercedes-Benz executives offer this wholly meritless defense: Many of its customers leave the brand because the company does not offer a full-size SUV that meets their needs, which is to say, a seven-passenger, 17-foot 4×4 with a 9,300-pound towing capacity. At this point in the presentation in Napa Valley last week, execs showed slides of the GL pulling a 30-foot boat. So there you have it: Mercedes’ audience of water-skiing polygamists is underserved.

Needs? Did the man say needs? OK, then. I propose needs testing for the purchase of such a vehicle. You must have a Chris-Craft and three or more school-age children in the yard to qualify. Your vehicle must do double-duty as, um, a bookmobile.

Need has very little to do with it. This segment is about want, naked and unquenchable, I-got-mine-you-get-bent appetite. It’s well established that the vast majority of these vehicles never touch gravel, never carry more than a couple of people, and never tow anything heavier than the weight of their owner’s childhood traumas.

Most people who buy the GL won’t know a Class IV hitch from a Mark 48 torpedo. And I, for one, am not going to congratulate some Bel-Air singleton for his wise vehicle purchase when it is so patently purblind and morally retrograde.

Plainly, I’m disappointed that Mercedes-Benz — the company of Gullwings and 500Es, of elegant engineering and F1 cars — has decided to get into delivery van business. And yet I cannot fairly blame the company, which being a corporation is doing what corporations do in the absence of governance: Make as much money as is within its ken to do….

Why, in the midst of a slow-rolling energy crisis, an unpopular war in a region of the world made strategic only by its oil, and the globe’s climbing mercury, should precisely the wrong kinds of vehicles remain so popular?

One reason is surely the tax breaks associated with 3-ton SUVs: business owners get a $25,000 tax break on the purchase of full-size SUVs (scaled back from $100,000 in 2004) and five-year depreciation schedule. For people taking advantage of this cozy corner of Section 179, the GL — with a base price anticipated to be about $60,000 — will be virtually free. That makes your $4,000 hybrid tax break look pretty punk, doesn’t it?

The tax code is the most obvious point of inflection between vehicle choice and public policy. Another knee-point is CAFE — that’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, in case you forgot, and who could blame you?

….We have been told recently that we are addicted to oil, but we seem to be unable to do much about it. California’s clean-air bureaus are trying to regulate carbon emissions from vehicles and are being sued by manufacturers and the federal government for their trouble….

If we were serious about oil dependence, we would dramatically raise fuel economy standards, impose gas-guzzler taxes on noncommercial light trucks and lower the national speed limit.

None of that is going to happen.

So, in the face of this enormous governmental and regulatory inaction… SUV owners are mocked. Late-night comics have become scolds. Evangelicals have enlisted Jesus Christ himself in the “What Would Jesus Drive” campaign….

The cultural opprobrium that afflicts SUV owners — often overheated, occasionally misdirected, frequently ignored — is virtually the only disincentive in the market, the only defense the rest of us have from these rolling hot tubs of avarice. People feel slightly embarrassed, even a little ashamed. Good.