silver surfer and the magic kingdom

isn't it fun? watching what those americans call their "elections"? funny, in a sad, yet ultimately deadly way. american elections are like watching groundhog day, where, every morning after, new votes pop up like a shadowless rodent, over and over again, and swing the election decisively in favour of ... the republican.  elections, as a term, is hardly applicable, but we are encumbered thusly by the strictures of tradition, myth, and jaw dropping ignorance about the electoral system of the united states.

what is fun about the american election is watching all those republican votes magically pop up in the night, like conservative turd-fertilized ballot shrooms, to be brought forth into the light of a new and ferociously democratic sun.  rejoice at these newly found votes. they shall nourish and sustain us. fret not their provenance, for we are with god.

okay, they don't actually say that last part, but that's what a lot of 'em think. one of the remarkable semi-buried truths of american politics is the control of the us electoral system by private corporations, Diebold cum Premier, ES&S, Sequoia, all owned and operated by avowed, if not near rabid christian fundamentalists who see it their duty to "save the babies" and run the country with the ten commandments and that's it.  and they really don't give a shit about democracy. and it ain't just the machine owners; the nutjobs and lackeys are drilled down and embedded at the county level, as this little episode in wisconsin so fruitfully demonstrated.

what? didn't hear about this? New York Chimes not telling you any of this? nope. spend what little time they do attacking anyone questioning the integrity of elections in the greatest democracy in the world! can't have that.  in the american media, well, what we have here is just adorable fuddled-up bungling. that's real, human democracy, fulla mistakes. all having to be corrected to the republican way.  two days after the election, a shady repub county hack squirts +norecount number of votes out of her ass and onto the guy she used to work for, and there's nate "the establishment date" silver, now in the hallowed pages of the new york times, showing everyone why this is entirely reasonable. what a fukkin buffoon.  silver bases all of this nuttin-funny-here "analysis" on turnout, and only turnout, on already jiggered election results -- never addressing the distribution of the votes -- and entirely ignoring the fact that there is literally no way to know where the votes came from.  for all we know, the dipshit clerk could have given prosser 100% of the vote, and nate silver's kindergarten analysis wouldn't have noticed a thing. from poker dope bluffs to election shenanigan cover-ups in the pages of the new york print fit times.  nate is trending establishment up, and with a statistical silver lining.

the us hasn't seen anything approaching a reasonable election since two grand. rube nate doesn't seem to understand this, or does and pretends otherwise.  it may have been that he has even argued against the fact that the electoral system is completely compromised. does he not know this? if not, why not?

oh fuck, who should care about the drip nate? what we out here in the real world want to know is, will the magical appearance of just the right amount of votes to give prosser the "win" without the annoyance and cost of a recount be enough to bring the whole gop-xtian electoral conspiracy to light?

doesn't appear so. magic votes count in the magic kingdom.

NAAFRITO

ol rozoff is pilin' up the shit about nato movin' in on africa, pulled there by the relentless us military monster via africom. i quite enjoy rick's fresh and assailing perspective. it's kinda like reading about the russians in american media, always up to some shifty eyed, vestigial commie plot, except, rozof's stories are actually true. nato and africom and monstercom are doing this shit, right in front us, and all day and every day long. wars and ops in central asia, occupations in the middle east, missile sites planned to encircle russia and china, reactivation of the fourth fleet, wars games with like minded fools all over the damn globe, and now it's time to stomp on a few uncooperative twerps in africa.  thank goodness for that revolutionary spirit!

there are, or soon to be were, only five nations in africa that have not signed nato alliance or cooperation deals. not oddly at all, two of those five nations are currently under nato attack.  for humanitarian reasons, of course. or to install a guy who used to work for the IMF as some internationally recognized leader, by the un security council no less! and humanitarian reasons. the three dawdlers, eritrea, sudan, and zimbabwe, well, as you can certainly tell by your own cynical chuckle, those dullards have already been pegged to the board. years long support for the spla has finally paid dividends with the look of session by south sudan. privatize is the oil play, forcing china into a mix of competitors. china gained by that in iraq, will loose a lot in sudan. mugabe has been on the skewer for awhile now, turning slowly. and eritriea? doubt anyone gives a fuck. china will certainly object to any fiddling in sudan, but then, that is one of the points.

rename?  anyone?

war dink.

"kinetic military action." this is what the word masters of the obama white house call military action. with the word kinetic on the front. one surmises that this is to distinguish it from "potential military action," which is not military action. two possible explanations for this redundancy impinge the noggin. obama does not see the word action as enough of an action word. needs to punch it up. or, obama is unable to distinguish between action and inaction, and needs a "special" word to tell him shit is gonna get movin' around. that particular dyslexia explains a lot, actually.

anyway, obama went n' complicated shit up here, "military action" or possibly "military police action" used to be the chosen pentospeak phrase for undeclared and usually illegal war. until that fuckin' obama had to add another, entirely redundant word. that is what he does best. but the obama administration has fixed the communication problem introduced by having to mention the word "war." bummer stigma. and frankly, there's the legal thing they'd rather not get into. "war" get's all heavy and serious, when, really, ya just wanna take out this one guy. one pain in the fukkin ass. that's it. can't be callin' that a war now, can we? nope.  KMA is what we got here folks.

on the plus side, and perhaps this will part of obama's legacy,  WAR --> KMA. and declarations of KMA are not addressed in the Constitution. so, yipee ki yay muthafuckaaaaaazz.

a court of little regard

well, i can scarcely believe it. did you know there was a civil action by a pentagon employee against dick cheney, rummy, myers seeking damages for harm done as a result of their personal actions on 9/11? it happened on april 5, 2011, and that said civil action did commence in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit? i didn't hear brian williams tell me about this interesting event. nor anyone else on the teevee for that matter.  not even amy. google alerted the trial. know what popped up? one story from that pr newswire. one. that was it. that was the sum total of what google delivered from news sources about this trial. 'cause ya know, she's crazy, that top secret pentagon person. fortunately, the court did not have to restrict the press, because there were none. small mercies.

the pr newswire story is pretty good, though obviously bent.  understandable. if you know anything about the ridiculous bullshit surrounding 9/11, then yeah, you're bent. and here's an even bendier part.  of the, good grief, how many of these fuckers are on this bench? gobs of them. anyway, what are the chances that george bush's first freakin' cousin gets assigned the 9/11 case? doesn't matter. because there are no chances. george bush's first cousin, john walker, will preside on the three seat bench to hear the case of Gallop v. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Myers. naturally, in the face of such blatant coi, the defense lawyer filed a motion to disqualify walker. fuck you, truther. let's get on with this farce!

the jurists seemed unfamiliar with certain high level us government testimony at the 9/11 Commission hearings, that dick cheney, chortling in is his evil bunker, let whatever the hell hit the pentagon, hit the pentagon.  nope, never heard that crazy talk.  jus' sounds crazy, don't it? one imagines these dipshits mulling it over. though they may play dumb, there cannot be complete ignorance on the bench.  after all, george w. bush's first cuz is watching over things with a dead soul and clear allies on the bench.

our monsters

that whole Bindloss thing kinda tossed me onto that rather unpleasant slash across the earth, the tar sands. never nice, whatever they find out about what is going on there. latest thing to pop up ugly was a big study done of the co2 and methane gas emissions caused by the destruction of peatlands.  terrible.  that's it. not only that, but the lassitude of even conventional operations in Alberta generate greenhouse gas emissions "5-10 times greater than that of California's conventional oil wells." wide open spaces up there in alberta.  no one buggin' ya.

the study doers come out all surprised  and alarmed by what they found.  because some of what they found was pretty fucking alarming, like a whole lotta methane gurgling out of the massive tailings ponds of extruded mining waste laced with toxic chemicals "due to explosive biological activity in the ponds." great. monster ponds.

there has been some remarkably silly shit flying around the minds of the petroleum industry in keeping the tar sands dream alive. already, a network of natural gas wells supply the energy to make crude oil. and nasty crude oil at that.  other grand tar sand thinkers imagined a network of nuclear power plants to supply energy to the tar sands operations. nuclear fission to deliver dirty, low grade fossil fuel. how's that for a Jetsons to Flintstones power delivery vector? such forward thinking in that petroleum crowd.  there's tell they are already working on using laser nuclear fusion and space warp technology to power all of their crude oil production operations. the green and super future.

so, why not add "explosive biological activity" into the mix?  seems only fitting, really. what with the clear cutting, the planing, the vast scouring, and backhoe fucking of the earth's crust, that "explosive biological" monsters would burst forth from the noxious offal could almost be expected.

speaking of, now that fukushima has unleashed the rads into the sea, who cannot help but wonder: since the dawn of the nuclear age, will the Japanese, and the world, finally get the Godzilla we have always longed for?

morass with the best of them

wallers comes down hard on the Saudis for the Libyan war, suckered the yanks right in. okay, maybe "suckered" isn't quite right.  yanks always want to go in, one damn phony reason or another. what's that? you got the arab league on board? un security council resolution? super.  okay, lads, it's tomahawk time! release the hounds!

can't say the i've seen wallerstein advocate revolt against a government before, but he did it here: "the best hope of everyone is that the second Arab revolt renews steam - perhaps a long shot now - and shakes first of all the Saudis."

afraid that pentagon plan for a new middle east, as engdahl credulously described, is being unwound on exigent autonomous interest vectors. doesn't seem, though, that wallers sees this revolutionary wave as the launch of some half-boiled pentagon scheme to remake the world.  i mean, look at them.  it doesn't look for long shitty minute like this white house could wipe it's ass with both hands.

liberal tar pitch

you know what it means to be an Alberta Liberal?  It means you want to sell bitumen tar sands oil to the Chinese, as well as the Americans.