Psychopolitik 2.0

LOL…Remember that fence they were talking about building on the Mexican border?

Texas mayors and business leaders filed a class-action lawsuit Friday alleging Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff hoodwinked landowners into waiving their property rights for construction of a fence along the Mexican border.

Members of the Texas Border Coalition said Chertoff did not fairly negotiate compensation with landowners for access to their land for six-month surveys to choose fence sites. The coalition of mayors and business and community leaders is seeking an injunction to block work on the fence.

They also want a federal judge to rescind all the agreements with landowners and to order Chertoff to start again. The department has sought and won access from hundreds of landowners to determine where to build the fence and other barriers to illegal border crossings.

I don’t think this type of info spreads enough. People outside of border states act as if there’s some kind of buffer zone between the US & Mexico where there’s nothing, when in fact there’s a lot of cultural and economic straddle there — which the US government is promising to hack at with an ax. Hence the following:

Brownsville Mayor Pat Ahumada said the mayors are willing to work with Homeland Security to devise alternatives to the border fence.

“They are determined to build a wall to appease mid-America,” Ahumada said. “This is a political problem that’s being addressed at the expense of all the border communities.” (emphasis mine)

For another angle on this, check out the bonuses the Brits added to their coverage:

The border group echoed questions that Democrats have raised about Texas oil magnate Ray Hunt, whose land the fence is scheduled to bypass. Hunt recently gave $35m to help his friend George Bush build a presidential library at a Texas university. […]

About half of the planned border fence will be made of reinforced concrete, with vehicle barriers comprising the rest of its length. The Berlin wall, by contrast, was 96 miles long, while the security fence on the border between Israel and Palestine will measure about 430 miles when completed.

Note that the Berlin Wall was meant to keep people IN, and was protected by people ordered to shoot even if women and children were involved. Also, commerce wasn’t expected to still go back and forth over such a border, for obvious reason.

-Watched “Jim Rome is burning” a lil bit ago. While talking to David Stern in reference to the ongoing O.J. Mayo saga over alleged NCAA violations, Jim suggested the one-year-and-out players triggered by the rule banning straight out of high school players from future NBA drafts was to blame. Attempting to make a point, Stern says, roughly, “We’ve already had that kind of question with one year players. Allen Iverson, for example…”. Problem is, Allen played two years at Georgetown, not one. Paging Matt Yglesias…

-Speaking of basketball players & controversy: since when did Charles Barkley need to borrow money?

-Closest thing to Just Say No you will ever hear me say here: If you’re ever in a situation where you’re going to a doctor’s appointment, they’re running behind schedule, and the building their office is located in has a coffee shop, skip the large espresso-infused iced latte. That shit makes you paranoid, and in the wrong environment too.

-The Roots’ “Rising Down” is the first album in the past few years I’ve heard that is actually consistently dope enough to where it deserves to be bought. Knowing my views on the RIAA, that’s more of a compliment than it sounds.

-Further on music: The split second Snoop dropped “Sexual Eruption”, T-Pain’s career should’ve been declared over. C’mon, dude that did “Deep Cover” is capable of making a better Robo-Humping song than him, throw the flag already.

-Whatever wild drug parties the black dude from CSI was allegedly involved in, I woulda loved to be a fly on the wall there. Not because of the wild achieving of Fuckedupness, but because of the shock at who it’s being connected to: nobody with a life cares what the obvious celebs are doing, it’s all about the element of surprise.

-Anyone else out there have as a pet peeve watching their parents or other relatives older than them use a new-ish piece of electronic equipment, no matter how simple the operation, in the most tedious and long-winded way possible? For example: those digital cable boxes w/ the onscreen guide complete with page & day controls on the remote, and the lack of the old-school instant channel-surf capability (or need) w/ the up/down buttons. No matter how many times I explain the range of much easier possibilities for use, my mother insists on just mashing the channel direction buttons until something interests her, two-second per-channel delays & stops on channels she never watches be damned. Due to the scarcity of programming, the rare times when I’m actually watching the TV instead of having it as background noise I plan out in blocks (I’m not kidding: the reason I have the TV on ESPN now is that the Hornets-Spurs game 6 comes on there, and nothing else between now & the game appeals to me enough to bother flipping elsewhere for the duration).

-Three words: Too. Much. Work. Amusing, but I agree with Kenji here. Besides, if I ever find a butcher that has 24-day aged ribeye at a non-extortionist price, I’m not having a burger*, I’m having a fucking steak. Specifically, one marinated Tex-Mex style and fire-grilled to medium-rare, w/ nacho cheesed potato skins & a Negra Modelo — because the Modelo that isn’t dark sucks ass, and I’m sick of Corona.

-Why does Carlos Mencia still have a show? Dude blatantly steals jokes, and isn’t even all that funny anyway whether it’s his or not. The only time I caught a glimpse of the show and laughed was that skit “Why are you afraid of a black president?”.

-Speaking of comedians, a couple more: Dane Cook is funny, but not Give That Guy Movie Roles funny. Also, I find Tina Fey surprisingly bang-worthy. Good thing I’m not from the ghetto, otherwise my pass would be revoked for that.

(* - Bonus food bloggery (!!!) edit:

Here’s what I would do to make The Ultimate Burger. Get ground steak, but don’t go overboard like the Blumenburger: your basic ribeye or sirloin from the local grocery will do. If they have some already ground at the meat counter, that’s even better because some of them get assholish and charge extra to grind it for you. Either way, make sure there’s enough meat to where one patty would be 1/3 to 1/2 pound (the pre-ground patty packs usually have between 2 & 4). If yours lean towards 1/3, then opt for a double if you’re that hungry, fuck it.

Get some bread, to be butter-toasted in the skillet before the meat goes in, bacon (thick-sliced, don’t cheap out here…), an onion, and either any kind of cheese paired with spicy mustard and mayo, or pepper jack cheese & barbecue sauce. Also, if you don’t have it, get one of those shakers of cajun seasoning, some Worcestershire sauce & some coarse black pepper.

Use some of the cajun seasoning, coarse pepper, & Worcestershire sauce to season the meat. While the meat is marinating for a bit, butter-toast the bread. Sauté some of the onion, seasoning it slightly w/ pepper & some garlic powder in the process. Cook the bacon.

Time for the meat. Throw a TINY bit of oil in the pan (I recommend corn oil). This helps lock in the juices during the first two flips, trust me. If you formed the patties yourself, only at this time can you press down on them at all, once each side has started to cook DO NOT PRESS IT ANY FURTHER. If it’s good beef then the juices should be enough to move aside the oil & keep it from sticking or burning. Try to flip it as little as possible.

Once it gets to medium-rare, put a piece of cheese on top and immediately turn the skillet off, but leave it on the burner so the cheese has a chance to melt some. Put the condiments on the bread, then another piece of cheese on one of the pieces (if it’s not the BBQ combination, use two different kinds of cheese for this). Put the meat on top, and then the onion & bacon. If the bacon hangs a substantial distance past the bread, break each piece in half and set em next to each other on it — accidentally dragging out a piece of bacon on the first bite sucks. Chow down, and enjoy the idea that somewhere, with each bite, a vegetarian sheds a tear…)

Shorter Bush: “Don’t take after my Grandpa.”

Sometimes I wonder if we’re in an alternate reality because of crap like this. Seriously, Bush comparing someone to Nazi appeasers passed the laugh test for his speech writers?

Not Surprised: some idiot, after having seen someone win 200 bucks, decides to assault and rob them.

Surprised: the victim won that money in a freestyle battle rap contest in Atlanta.

Of all the problems with the State as an institution, the most obvious one could be argued as the true root of all the others: by definition, it has to assume unanimity. As a monopoly of “legitimate” force, tolerating secession is suicidal to government, it must at the end of the day operate as if there is no dissent. Otherwise, it ends up just another gang, competing for power.

This kind of force, even taken out of context, is already dangerous. Now factor in human beings and our various conflicting values. Since power corrupts, the inevitable fear is that whoever holds that power will not hesitate to use it for their own benefit: wealth, satiating their personal fears, maybe revenge on some political “tribe” they feel has wronged them. When Joe Average says that they want someone in charge that they can have a beer with, or that “understands”, they’re attempting to articulate this fear — “I want someone just like ME in charge! If some ‘other’ has control they’re going to screw me over!”. Misguided, but all too understandable, in a way they have a point.

So…why do I say this? Consider the following:

For all the hope and excitement Obama’s candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed — and unreported — this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They’ve been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they’ve endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can’t fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.

The contrast between the large, adoring crowds Obama draws at public events and the gritty street-level work to win votes is stark. The candidate is largely insulated from the mean-spiritedness that some of his foot soldiers deal with away from the media spotlight.

Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: “It wasn’t pretty.” She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn’t possibly vote for Obama and concluded: “Hang that darky from a tree!”

Documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, the daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy, said she, too, came across “a lot of racism” when campaigning for Obama in Pennsylvania. One Pittsburgh union organizer told her he would not vote for Obama because he is black, and a white voter, she said, offered this frank reason for not backing Obama: “White people look out for white people, and black people look out for black people.” (emphasis mine)

^^^^Exhibit A, as far as the uglier side of this problem goes. Plain and simple, this person distrusts anyone not like them in power, and a black man with a Harvard law degree is about as “other” as it gets for them. I’m sure there are black people that support him for the same reason, though — like with whites who oppose him for this reason — it is not the norm. Some blacks simply believe that “it’s our turn now”.

I’d be inclined to say to the above sentiment “what do you mean ‘our’?”, explain my displeasure at us continuing to place new asses in the throne instead of dismantling the castle, and point out that the sole thing me & him have in common other than skin color is that we both think invading Iraq was a dumb idea — and by extension, thinking melanin content overrides ones personal interests is also rather dumb. However, despite that fantasy of racial unity ironically playing into the paranoia of Anonymous Bigoted Whitey quoted above, they’d never listen. The simplest answers tend to be the most satisfying, them being wrong is an afterthought.

Libertarian Public Service Announcement:

-When we talk about state failure in terms of “who regulates the regulators?”, this would be an example of what we mean:

The funds that pay pension and health benefits to police officers, teachers and millions of other public government employees across the country are facing a shortfall that could soon run into trillions of dollars.

But the accounting techniques used by state and local governments to balance their pension books disguise the extent of the crisis facing these retirees and the taxpayers who may ultimately be called on to pay the freight, according to a growing number of leading financial analysts.

State governments alone have reported they are already confronting a deficit of at least $750 billion to cover the cost of the retirement benefits they have promised. But that figure likely underestimates the actual shortfall because of the range of methods they use to make their calculations, including practices that have been barred in the private sector for decades.

Local governments use these same techniques for their pension funds and face deficits that further contribute to what some investors and analysts say may be shaping up to be a massive breach of faith with a generation of public government employees. (emphasis mine)

On the bright side, those rules aren’t even serving the purpose people thought in the “private” sector either, so you could rationalize this as the State for once avoiding something that doesn’t help. If you’re desperate, that is.

Sometimes there are moments where, even when you know much of the information already, seeing it nakedly laid out in chronological order really pushes your buttons.  I know we generally bash Bush as dumb, yet the worst part isn’t his own lack of intelligence, but how that trait made him so easy to convince to go along with dumb and/or evil ideas.  I doubt there’d be such emphasis on his brain if it didn’t drag us into committing rampant war crimes.

This needs to end, at all costs, as soon as possible.   If  we keep going down this road, eventually some other country will start discussing invading us for “liberation”…

Another no-knock.  Another innocent man given the Tony Montana treatment.  This time he didn’t even have a gun that WORKED, it was just for looks to scare off intruders.  The cops mistook jewelry making supplies for drug paraphernalia, and saw fit to knock down the door & damn near murder this guy, and then had the NERVE to charge him with assault when he didn’t fire a single shot, meanwhile the cops left an irretrievable bullet near his heart.  Radley has the whole story, try not to throw your monitor in a fit of rage while reading it.

Radical times forge radical people.  This goes on long enough, there won’t be enough handcuffs for them to lock up everyone that ends up Cory Maye instead of Kathryn Johnson.  This is clearly thanks to the War on Drugs, and would cease with its peaceful end.  Sadly, it looks like that conclusion will not be realized until after more bodies needlessly pile up.  If this is what it takes, then so much for civil society, interesting times for all…

For some reason, USA Today did an interview with Hillary.  During that interview, she said this (all emphasis mine):

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

Let’s count the possible insinuations here, shall we?

1. A college education means you don’t do “hard work”.
2. “hard-working” minorities are irrelevant.
3. Whites that have been to college are somehow corrupted.
4. Only poor whites do “hard work”; blacks are either on welfare or uppity college-educated fancy car drivin’ Dilbert-with-a-tan negros.
5. Non-college educated whites are automatically racist, and should be pandered to.
6. Everyone that votes does so on the basis of race when there’s that option, and there’s more whites than non-whites, ESPECIALLY blue-collar whites, so…’nuff said.

Unlike much tamer comments by Obama, this will not be called out in the media as a WTF moment.  Why?  Because they go by narratives that are imprinted on the coverage from day one, and a rule of their narrative is that an establishment candidate always gets the benefit of the doubt, whereas an “outsider” can barely breathe without saying something stupid.  Besides, she’s white and Bill’s Wife, he’s some skinny nigra that knows how to talk.

This isn’t about being for or against either of them: the only reason I register to vote anymore is so they know that I chose not to though I could, as a silent protest against legitimizing a system that I reject.  It’s about how the media’s definition of fairness is to give equal time to obviously dumb ideas, and not to treat similar conduct with the same response when different people engage in it.  It’s about my amusement at how when someone of the majority plays to race as a factor it’s seen as OK, while the slightest whiff of it from anyone else signals Panic Time.  Most importantly, it’s about being absolutely SICK and TIRED of hearing people who by definition don’t care spewing “blue-collar” this and “regular folks” that & not being questioned about it, when in the long run the best outcome for “regular folks” involves these empty suits taking a 7 foot walk off a 6 foot ledge.

-I just got back from an event where they had beer and all you can eat chicken wings. An’ it was for CHARITY! That’s my kind of givin’, hells yeah!

-Um…oh yeah, Microsoft can suck my dick. What someone plays on their portable video/audio player should be none of their damn business. What’s the deal with this gradual overriding of the proper concept of what it means to buy something? I pay you for a product, from then on it is mine, I can do whatever I feel like with it, if you have any power over me whatsoever then I am merely renting, which means you lied to me in the process of buying it. THAT, folks, is why I bought a no-name mp3 player, it was cheaper and they understood their role, which was to give me the ability to play mp3s on it, and stay out of my way.

-Remember that book about Cocaine I mentioned here before? Lately I’ve been rereading it, and I notice a curious undercurrent behind the history of yayo that says a lot about class, race & the true nature of international trade. That it all started with incas chewing a leaf and getting a buzz akin to some really good coffee, then went on to being exploited to keep them in what might as well have been slave labor by the imperialist invaders of the time, only to be distilled to its purest state and used for medical purposes w/ a wink and nod towards the global corporations that were dealing the shit, only for the world to freak once the people where coca actually grew started getting paid off of it, really says a lot. It’s fast becoming a cliche here, but I gotta say it in reference to how people south of the border took up demand of such a popular product: what the fuck did you expect? It’s highly ironic that the easiest way of dealing with the street crime in the US due to the drug trade — calling off this retarded-ass “War on Drugs” — would, if one seriously thought about it, actually make it much less lucrative. The status quo, functionally speaking, is no different from simply subsidizing the production of Young Jeezy’s Favorite Subject.

-Irony is…the office responsible for enforcing whistleblower protections & anti-discrimination meansures within the gov’t being investigated for violating whistleblower protections & anti-discrimination measures.

-Associated Press: “Borrowing is higher than expected“. Gee, ya think?!?

-Last but definitely not least, some good news for the ladies with Backtion: a recent study suggests that a certain type of hip and butt fat actually helps prevent diabetes.