Rangelife

What's your favorite outfit to wear when you’re feeling flirty and want to look your best?

Hi gaiz!

By now, I hope it's obvious to all that I've moved on.

This has been a fun, five-year creative outlet, but other outlets have replaced it. But I had a great time with this.

Thanks for the comments and emails. Signing off.

Seamus

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Five things I'm going to marry

Now that California will let anyone marry anything, leading to chaos and the inevitable destruction of our great Christian nation founded by Christians in Christ's glory just to spite the atheist socialist Kenya-born secret-Muslim King George III, I'm going to marry:

1. Philz Coffee

2. Comedy Death Ray radio

3. The poker scene from episode #2 of Louie

4. Sriracha

5. Six more clones of my wife

I guess that's really 10 things, if you count each clone individually. Whatever.

Eat Pray Buy Licensed Chick Schwag

Since Sex and the City 2 bombed disastrously, I suppose that Eat Pray Love, based on the uber-best-seller, is supposed to be the lady movie of the summer.

And yet why was it surprising to see this Cost Plus World Market flier in my mailbox today?

Maybe it's because licensed crap is usually the domain of men. Would you be surprised to see a Transformers towel set? A Terminator BBQ apron? A Star Wars coffin?

What we have here for sale at World Market are:

• Eat Pray Love tea
• Eat Pray Love yoga bag from India
• Eat Pray Love leather journal from India
• Eat Pray Love straw hat with grosgrain ribbon
• Eat Pray Love chianti or pinot grigio
• And other stuff.

How spiritual.

Coming back. This thing has been fallow for a while.

OMG! Stuff happening!

Sometimes the Wall Street Journal's "NEWS ALERT" just comes across sarcastically.

 

I'm expecting the next ALERT to involve gravity making things fall down.

Crickets

It's been awfully quiet around here lately. Those who know me will understand why.

It'll get better. I promise.

In the meantime, here's the best agrarian fight scene in film history.

All you need to know about the California Senate race

Carly was to Sili Valley CEOs what Sarah Palin was to Alaska governors.

Hey, look at this unholy headline-display ad combo!

America's Steel Menace, part 8

Six pounds of (reasonably priced) sword takes apart twenty pounds of beef, like "Flick flick flick."

Aren't you glad knowing that anyone can own this?

Vampire Weekend is the new Public Enemy

In hip-hop's adolescence, Public Enemy was the group for punk rock fans. Dense wall of sound, shocking political stances, gritty lyrics, black nationalism.

Their audience was white. Or at least it was when I saw them in 1990, 1992, and 1994.

It was one of those only-in-America stories -- at each venue, hundreds of white kids would pay up to watch black men bash white people. Rather than enjoying pop culture they could relate with, the audience almost literally had nothing to do with the performers. The problems of PE -- police harassment, oppression, economic devastation, the need for revolution -- were not of the people chanting along.

Fast forward a million years, to Vampire Weekend performing last week in Oakland.

Vampire Weekend are as unapologetically preppy as PE was unapologetically black nationalist. 

You couldn't fill the Fox Theater with the Bay Area's preppy-types. Instead, a thousand people showed up and listened to songs they couldn't relate to at all, ditties about Cape Cod vacations, Ivy League romances, and using seasons as verbs.

Yay for America!

Prop 16: The question that makes everyone lose

It's April, which in the real world generally means... screwing!

In California, it means political TV advertising. Poor, poor California.

In early June, Californians get to vote in two competitive Republican primaries and for (or against) several ballot propositions. The non-competitive nature of the Democratic primaries for governor and US Senate will assure higher GOP turnout for all the other junk on the ballot.

The highest-profile ballot initiatives is Prop 16. Why does it have the highest profile? Because it's a massively-funded, totally-obvious corporate action by Pacific Gas & Electric. And it's a big no-win situation for voters and good governance.

Here's the core of Prop 16: If passed, it would add another fucking page to the state constitution which would require a two-thirds vote before a local government could get into the energy business.

Now, I'm generally against "public power." Power is a 100% no-fail requirement for modern society, and PG&E does a pretty great job of it. The very idea of handing over the responsibility of producing power and maintaining the grid to a San Francisco city agency... um, no. In fact, Bay Guardian publisher Bruce Brugmann got public power on the SF ballot a few years ago, and it lost. We know better.

Prop 16 would effectively end new public power projects, which have had successes and not-successes in various municipalities and counties. So here's the deal with the Devil that a voter has to sign if she wants to put a stop to public power across the State.

1. Do the bidding of a corporation's shareholders, whom you already pay every month. PG&E is the sole contributor to Yes on 16, to the tune of $23M. You can't watch local TV or open your mailbox without being touched by this (and Meg Whitman's particularly steamy brand of bullshit).

2. Amend the state constitution again. State government is broken because the constitution is a zillion pages long, because special interests con voters at the ballot box over and over.

3. Take political power away from localities.

4. Endorse slimy gimmicks. Here are just a few examples of how PG&E is trying to fool all of the people.

a. They've branded this amendment... you ready for this?... The Taxpayers Right to Vote. Are you against taxpayers having the right to vote, Generalissimo?

b. Direct mail that's covered with solar panels and sunflowers. Oh look, it's a clean power initiative!

c. A core message that's couched as a quote from the California Taxpayers' Association and California Chamber of Commerce. (Who knew that two organizations of people could say one thing at the same time?)

"It's hard to believe but right now voters have no say when local governments spend billions of dollars to get into the business of providing electricity."

Yes, it's nearly inconceivable that people could elect representatives to decide how to spend their tax money. WHAT KIND OF SYSTEM IS THIS???

Prop 16 is, like "Do you think my best girlfriend is pretty?", a question that has no good answers. But NO seems slightly less terrible than YES.

Yan Yan: the most perfectly engineered hipster snackfood in the world

Say hello to Yan Yan.

Yan Yan should be huge.

Yan Yan is not just yummy, but it's just plain fun, because it has a kinesthetic aspect: You pull out the delicious, crunchy cookie sticks, and dip them in the chocolate muck. Although the packaging indicates a gooey, syrupy experience to the chocolate, it's much more akin to Duncan Hines frosting. This also allows you to customize each bite to your taste -- go heavy or light.

Second, each cookie stick bears an inexplicably bizarre message involving animals and... something else.

OK, I get "GIRAFFE TALLEST MAMMAL." I'm not so sure about "STAG BEETLE LOVE IT," nor do I want to be.

But isn't that awesome? Can't you imagine splitting a canister of this after a heavy night of weed and PBRs, and snickering at the all the strangeness? (Wikipedia, of course, has a catalog of all the different stick messages.)

Is Yan Yan Japanese? It must be Japanese, right? Yes and no, you moron!

 

Although manufactured by the Japanese Meiji Seika, Yan Yan is a product of the fascist city-state of Singapore.  And in order to serve the Malaysian and Indonesian markets (I assume), Yan Yan "does not contain pig fat," which makes its deliciousness all the more unlikely.

Go find this stuff!

The bogosity of the "Feds Can't Make Me Buy Something I Don't Want" argument

Now that Health Care Reform is the law of the land (well, almost), and the law contains neither death panels, nor suicide pills, nor mandatory abortions provided by SEIU thugs, Republican arguments are coalescing around the individual mandate to purchase insurance. Starting in 2014, if you don't have health insurance, you must come up with a $695 tax penalty per household member (up to a limit, depending on the size of your household and your income).

The argument against this mandate goes something like this:

This law forces people to buy something and penalizes them if they don't want to. The Constitution does not permit this sort of federal power.

Bullshit.

Our system is rife with wildly popular examples of tax policies to encourage specific behaviors. For example, if you don't want to buy and carry a mortgage on a house, you pay a substantial tax penalty. If you don't want to produce as many children as your body permits, you pay a substantial tax penalty. If you don't want to contribute to a 401(k) plan or health FSA, you pay a substantial tax penalty.

And then there's Medicare. Every paycheck, you buy Medicare insurance. You don't get to opt out.

Of course, you can also make the case that our tax code is a destructive source of friction upon our economy. I couldn't agree more. Now tell that to someone whose house is only affordable because they get to write off their mortgage interest.

In the meantime, let's stop pretending that the Marxocrats invented a new form of state slavery.

Every time I read anything about Saudi Arabia, I'm reminded that without its gift of oil it would be another Yemen or Somalia.

Worry, Part 3: Worry not?

Today's required reading: David Frum's Waterloo.

I started the "Worry" category because America hasn't seen this level of fear rhetoric in its politics since the Red Scare. Fox News, talk radio, and the right-wing blogosphere have become the sole source of truth for a large segment of the American population. This conservative entertainment industry has convinced its audience that all news media has been captured by the nefarious powers in charge.

Barack Hussein Obama is the very definition of "The Other." Foreign roots, dark skin, a strange name, and perhaps most importantly, a native culture (Ivy League education and faculty, black inner city community organizing) that baffles and infuriates Red State America. This massive segment is comprised of suburban and rural whites who don't know or trust people from those worlds, and words like "Ivy League" and "elite" are self-explanatory epithets.

The conservative entertainment industry's narratives on the Obama administration ranges from the benign ("elitist, arrogant, Ivy League technocrats want to tell you how to live") to the extremist ("Marxist, communist, foreign-born, Islamic, globalists adopting Nazi tactics to foment left-wing revolution").

But it's the latter narrative, which is literally unprecedented in its scope and virulence, that sends Tea Partiers into the streets and causes a run on ammunition. This is not a protest movement; it's a counter-revolution against a revolution that's not actually happening. This is the core of Worry.

And yet here we have Congress passing the most far-reaching reform of health care since Medicare, maybe ever. What happened to the counter-revolution? David Frum, who wrote speeches for Dubya, knows...

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination. When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

So, there you are. The flip side to the insanity. If the loudest voices in your party are those who are most appealing to the conservative entertainment industry, and everyone else is a Republican in Name Only, then you get shut out of actual policy creation.

Republicans simply cannot govern if any deal at all becomes a deal with the Devil.

Happy blogday to me!

Rangelife is five years old as of last Saturday, which makes me mature enough for kindergarten! Where's my Adderall?

Image source

How best to celebrate? Stats!

• Years: 5
• Posts: 981
• Comments: 1,956
• Pageviews: 655,991

Now, seriously. Where's my Adderall?