New Apocalypse: 2010 Election “After-math” Edition
Boehner Cries Like a Bitch Again
In other words — by the numbers — what has been lost for the Democrats this week? Other than a little dignity, that is. Well, they’ve definitely lost the fucking House of Representatives. There’s no doubt about that. The Democrats have lost all but the slimmest majority in the Senate since their soaring heights at 60 seats earlier in this past term. At least its a slim majority, and not a split or a Republican majority… Great Magnet forbid.
The New York Times is even painting this on their front page November 3rd edition as “A REBUKE FOR OBAMA.” But honestly, is it really? Not even the same voting pools showed up this year as in 2008. The Democratic base that elected Obama totally failed to show up and support Obama’s minions in Congress. I blame young voters and ethnic voters, all of whom are always terrible at turning out in midterm elections. It’s the same reason that Clinton not only lost the House but also the Senate in 1994………… wait. What? Holy shit. I just remembered! Clinton lost both houses of Congress in 1994 and he went on to be a two term President widely remembered as one of the most competent of the late 20th century. Do you think…. could that mean… that this is totally fucking normal and that it didn’t even end up as badly as it could have?!?!?!? FUCK YES!!! But the 24-hour news media or a blubbering John Boehner (soon to be the new Speaker of the House; pictured above) would never let the explanation be that simple… To them, this is so significant they could either fill a room with 33 commentators to shout over each other or just fake human emotions, respectively.
I might even go on to remind the Dear Constant Reader that sudden House shifts are routine in our nation’s history after traumatic economic crises. Democrats lost more than 100 House seats in 1894 after an economic collapse in the U.S. brought about sudden voter outrage. In 1932 — oh yeah, after the Great Depression began — Republicans lost 97 seats in the House at the same time F.D.R. assumed power. And, in the second of Franklin Roosevelt’s unprecedented four terms, Democrats lost 72 of the 97 seats they had just gained in 1938 (midterm backlash, just like Clinton and Obama’s).
What I’m saying is, F.D.R. rallied from the aftermath of the worst financial crisis in U.S. history to lose and win again the support of Congress during the greatest war in our nation’s history — all accomplished during a decade and a half of his Presidency. Clinton managed to win re-election handily in 1996 after losing both houses of Congress in 1994. He went on to be one of the few Presidents in recent history to leave office with a national budget surplus rather than a tremendous deficit. Obama will do the same (okay, perhaps minus the budget surplus — we’ll see).
Seriously: consider his possible opponents. Romney? Palin? Pawlenty? Gingrich? Come on, people. Do you really think those young and ethnic voters that didn’t care to show up for Russ Feingold are going to forgo Obama and allow Sarah Palin to assume power? If you think that… not only should you think again, you should eat a gun and relieve us of your miserable company.
This is a typical midterm election backlash which typically comes from impatient and stupid voters who have spent the last two years doing what they do best: stoking their own ignorance and anger. Ask yourself: who showed up to vote? CNN and any other news network with 3D holographic data-points can tell you: angry and/or old Republicans showed up to vote! The same angry and/or old conservatives who showed up to vote in the midterms after F.D.R. and Clinton were elected! In 2010, the Democrats that lost their seats got thrown out by pieces of shit like the guy pictured at right. I’m not too worried about Obama’s base being outnumbered by their kind in 2012.
Not only is the 2010 midterm backlash normal, its not even as severe as the last few cycles. This time, we didn’t lose 100 or 70-some House seats. We only lost 50-60 House seats, and Democrats still retained the Senate! Jesus, it’s not all doom and gloom! This way, there is no risk of an impeachment hunt and the grim political kabuki theater that inevitably ensues. The kind of kabuki theater Clinton faced. This time, there is no chance in hell of repealing Health Care with Democrats retaining the Senate and Obama holding the veto pen. This time, the people will quickly realize — as they have in all precious backlash cycles — that the new President’s policies aren’t to blame.
In other words, people: you have to give a guy more than two years to fix an economic crisis that took the previous President eight years to create.
Anyway, by the numbers things went badly this week for Democrats but not as badly as it could have gone and not as badly as many would have you believe. It’s true we’ll face some gridlock in Washington D.C. for a while and the compromises we get will probably be bitter ones where Democrats and Republicans smile shaking hands for the cameras but spit venom behind closed doors. But the important point is that people will soon find out these Republicans they’ve elected can’t accomplish anything they’ve promised and they aren’t who they said they were. I mean, how can you repeal Healthcare when you don’t control the Senate and the President still holds the veto pen? A promise like that is broken the second it’s made. It’s just a sad commentary on how stupid this year’s voters were that it will take them months to realize that. Therefore, the backlash will subside just as all waves break and roll back.
On the more immediate bright side, my home state of Oregon has gone blue again. Peter DeFazio (D – House) and Ron Wyden (D – Senate) both won re-election in Oregon this week. Best of all, in a narrow race John Kitzhaber won election to his third term as Oregon’s governor after being forced out by term limits while still relatively popular just a few years ago. He is the first governor in Oregon’s history to win election to a third term this way. I’m not all that optimistic that he’ll be able to achieve much until the next election cycle for the Oregon state legislature, since it looks like both chambers of the Oregon state legislature will be evenly split for now and unable to do much of significance. Nevertheless, I’m counting my blessings since I can’t imagine this state in the maniacal hands of a crazy-asshole-former-Portland-Blazer-who-couldn’t-shoot-free-throws-to-save-his-fucking-life-turned-dick-bag-Republican Chris Dudley. The terror would be unfathomable. Not to mention, I’m much more liable to sleep at night with Kitzhaber holding the veto pen should any crazy ass budget proposals come out of the legislative chambers.
"A crowd of parents and teachers watch as Eugene School District Superintendent George Russell reveals proposed budget reductions." (Source: The Register-Guard; Thursday, Nov 4, 2010)
Which brings me to my next — and much more local and personal — point of interest. At the same moment races across the country were being decided, the Eugene, Oregon Public School Board was hearing a new budget proposal from Superintendent George Russell. This proposal is intended to bridge an expected 30 million dollar budget shortfall coming in the next school year. The proposal — among other things — would layoff over 100 teachers (virtually every teacher hired within the last three years) and increase average class sizes to over forty.
It would close six elementary schools and fold their kindergarten through third grades into neighboring elementary schools while the empty husks left behind are to be sold for disposable funds. Where do the fourth through fifth graders go, you might ask? They will be folded into programs heretofore — and by George Russell’s own admission and to our collective best knowledge — never tried anywhere in the country: fourth through eighth grade middle schools.
That’s right: your innocent little cherub fourth graders will be wandering the same halls as sinister drug dealing eighth graders.
The best part is that all of the actual sustainable cuts to the budget proposed above (and others not even mentioned) only account for about two thirds of the 30 million dollars Russell needs to cut to break even (which is required of school budgets every year in Oregon law). The last third comes from one-time-only-funds like selling properties the district owns — luckily, there will be six more of those this coming year — and using up every last dime of reserve funds the district has left.
Wait. It gets better still.
After spending every last spare dime the Eugene school district has in its piggy bank, Russell is retiring at the end of the year and leaving the next year’s inevitable mess of a budget gap in the hands of some other poor asshole. Not only that, Russell’s budget calls for that very same replacement asshole to get a raise of some $70,000 per year.
That’s right: the new superintendent of Eugene schools will get a $70,000 raise at the same moment over 100 of Eugene’s teachers are packing their bags and heading for the unemployment lines.
Having worked in public schools elsewhere in the past, having many friends among Eugene teachers as I do now, and valuing the futures of children everywhere as I do, I can only conclude that this budget proposal is disgraceful and un-American. How can this motherfucker Russell ask those teachers left after cutting 100 to take a 20 to 25% salary cut for the coming year with the same straight face he’s using to reassure Eugene parents that these new class sizes of 40 to 45 and six fewer instructional days won’t adversely affect their children’s education?
If you live in Eugene, Oregon, you need to get in touch with George Russell and let him know his budget proposal for Eugene schools is an unacceptable, unimaginative and un-American piece of shit. You need to tell him that he can’t leave one third of the problem for the next asshole to fix as long as he leaves a $70,000 tip. You need to tell George Russell that the children of Eugene are more important than his bottom line.
More importantly still, you need to tell your Oregon state legislature that public schools cannot survive another catastrophe like this. Nor can its teachers. They are already at the breaking point, though their brave smiling faces would never show it to their students or to a callous and unsympathetic public which expects so much of them.
Bottom line: schools can’t fix the problem by cutting budgets from the bottom up. They need new income from above. Eighty-seven percent of Eugene’s operating budget is in its personnel. You can’t make cuts without firing teachers. Cutting 20% of Eugene’s budget every year means cutting 12 or 13% of its teachers every year.
Fact: schools cannot operate without teachers, and the students aren’t fucking going anywhere.
Conclusion: this entire process is completely unsustainable and the biggest losers are your children.
Only possible solution: new money from the state or the federal governments.
Your job if you want to help: write your fucking local, state and national representatives (Eugene is just one of hundreds of districts across the country having the same problems, after all) and demand action. Before its too late. Even better, vote Democrat across the board — local and national — in the next election. H.J. Herrick and his friends — the teachers of Eugene, Oregon — would thank you.
Hell, we’d even buy you a beer.
A Quick Dispatch from the Road
While I’ve been focusing a lot of energy on poetry lately — you can see some at The New Apocalypse‘s cousin site: 365 — I promise you, dear constant reader that I haven’t neglected my petty drug habits and inane rambling essays on the esoteric. In between tormented poetic introspections, I’ve been working all summer on catching up on movies, TV series and documentaries I’ve missed over the past few years with a brand spanking new Netflix account. This deal is sweet as a virgin’s honey pot; for basically ten bucks a month, you can watch hundreds of hours of this crap streaming online right at your TV or laptop computer. Or — failing that — you can watch a scratched-up-but-somehow-always-still-functional disc delivered right to your home mailbox. Amidst all that rampant upper-fueled viewing, I’ve been developing a few movie reviews. In today’s post, I offer you reviews of two recent documentaries which offer differing views on the present human condition and the roads we are building into our collective future: Collapse and The Cove. In each of today’s reviews, I’m looking at a documentary which centers around a powerful figure whose life is wrapped up in his own obsessions. Those obsessions are created by each man’s past experiences and informed by their present outlook on what they think will become or could become the future.
Collapse
In our first film — Collapse (2009) — we are introduced in the opening sequence to a man named Michael Rupert. He is a former Los Angeles police officer turned investigative reporter and radical thinker. After working on the force for a while and marrying a C.I.A. agent, he discovered what he still believes to be the assassination by the C.I.A. of several U.S. soldiers who discovered too much about a secret C.I.A. program being operated on domestic soil to distribute and test illicit substances. He quit the force then only to find himself the victim of several mysterious near fatal accidents after his wife divorced him without explanation. He then became an investigative reporter an worked to expose that incident and others in journals, newspapers and eventually his own publication: From the Wilderness. His investigations turned into obsession. What he uncovered and the theories he devised based on that information led him to conclude that modern society was on a collision course with self-destruction. The rest of the film consists of a 82 minute monologue in which he explains how he publicly predicted the 2008 financial crisis well in advance (as well as other systemic disasters), then goes on to predict and explain how modern industrialized society will collapse under its own weight within the next fifty years — if not the next ten.
The film is very atmospheric and plays on the viewer’s desire to buy into Rupert’s anti-establishment and conspiratorial views throughout. It’s filmed — as Rupert incessantly chain smokes — in a dark-meat-locker-looking basement somewhere in Los Angeles by the director and interviewer: Chris Smith. During the monologue, the director intersperses footage of Rupert in his earlier exploits, photos of his publications, and archival footage which illustrates Rupert’s points. Throughout the film the viewer is easily drawn in as Rupert convincingly explains his predictions about the coming collapse of society.
Rupert explains that “peak oil” — the time at which the world’s oil supply peaks and then begins to decline — has already occurred within the last decade. Declassified government documents confirm this. Therefor, he explains, the global economy which is based on this resource — which we only began extracting from the ground a little over a hundred years ago by the way — has already begun to decline. Imagine: all of the fossilized energy which has been stored inside this planet since its creation/formation has been strip-mined by human beings in less than two hundred years. Rupert also debunks all the popular fixes for oil dependence: nuclear, clean coal, wind, solar, hydroelectric, wave power, zero-point energy, biodiesel, etc. Because in the future the only means of generating power will at best be wind and solar — and because those forms of energy cannot be transmitted over long distances via power lines — all future civilization will be local and decentralized. And it will not be industrialized. In other words, because nothing can replace the edifice created by fossil fuels — and because at least five billion of the people who exist on this planet exist only because of the modern conveniences invented in the last century — civilization will collapse as soon as a sustainable supply of oil disappears and billions of people will starve to death and be swept aside by the global chaos that ensues as slowly collapsing governments fight over what resources are left. In the end, Rupert believes — as I tend to believe — that five hundred years from now the historians of humanity’s survivors will look back and write that the twenty-first century gave birth to the Dark Ages.
Now, the filmmaker tries to paint this very convincing picture and then pull the rug out from under the viewer at the very end by de-legitimizing Rupert. Because Rupert is a man obsessed and emotionally wrecked by his obsession, Smith tries to show how — in his own words — “… that [Rupert’s] obsession with the collapse of industrial civilization has led to the collapse of his life.” At the end we see how Rupert is avoiding eviction after the failure of his most recent book and the director transposes several quotes (published in the 80’s) from Rupert’s critics which claim he is a paranoid delusional. Here I think the director falls short.
While Rupert’s obsession is certainly destroying his life, the director unfairly debunked and dismissed Rupert’s theories when he pointed only to Rupert’s personal problems as evidence of his theories’ illegitimacy. Yes; Rupert is an unhealthy and obsessive individual, but he also happens to be a genius. His logic is sound. His theories about the edifice of fossil fuel and its collapse are inscrutable. His facts and figures can’t be argued with. But that’s just my opinion. You can watch and judge for yourself. Are you like the director — too eager to dismiss Rupert because you are afraid he might be right and your children will never be able to watch Netflix on some thing called a laptop — or are you like me?
The Cove
In our second film — The Cove (2009) — the director (Louie Psihoyos) creates a fascinating narrative of the life and exploits of dolphin-trainer-turned-dolphin-liberator Ric O’Barry. The subject of this film got his start as a dolphin trainer for the show Flipper. Before that show came along the general public didn’t know much about dolphins and didn’t adore them overmuch. But the show was green-lit by its studio decades back and O’Barry was hired to capture and train several dolphins which could then all be used as rotating stand-ins for the character of Flipper. You’ll learn that O’Barry actually lived year round in the house by the Flippers’ dock which was supposed to be the family house in the show. There, in that enclosed bay, he lived with those dolphins for the entire TV series’ run and befriended them. He would even drag his TV out to the end of the dock with an extension cord so his dolphin friends could watch themselves on TV. Then the show was cancelled and the dolphins were taken away from him. He said he still visited them for a time after the dolphins were sold off to a theme park and performed shows for the public. Of course, he learned right away as dolphins for the first time because theme park animals that they cannot survive happily in such a place. They are acoustic animals and aquatic theme parks are basically like giant noise sinks for aquatic animals. It would be like capturing a human being, taping their eyes open and making them watch war-crime footage for years on end.
So, O’Barry dedicated his life to freeing captive dolphins even as their success at that first theme park caused dolphin captures to increase exponentially worldwide for the next forty years. Now there is a booming industry — which O’Barry blames himself for starting with the show Flipper — that captures and puts on display hundreds of dolphins every year.
However, that is merely prologue. The subject of the film is mainly O’Barry’s time in the coastal Japanese town of Taijii. That town — which seems pleasant enough on the surface — is actually the world’s number one supplier of captive dolphins and of dolphin meat.
Yes, that’s right. Dolphin meat.
As it turns out, the International Whaling Commission — the only body in the world dedicated to anti-whaling practices — doesn’t consider dolphins to be a type of whale. Therefor, Japanese fisherman can round-up hundreds of dolphins near their breeding waters in Taijii, sell the prime females to collectors from aquariums around the world, then herd the rest into Taijii’s secluded and infamous cove (hence the name of the film). There they are slaughtered for their meat. The fishermen of the town have kept the cove off-limits to journalists and cameramen for decades because of what goes on there and the Japanese government assists them financially in doing so. In other words: they know how negatively the rest of the world looks at this practice.
Furthermore, the film proved that these fishermen are selling this dolphin meat the Japanese government, which is then repackaging it and selling it with labels claiming it is exotic and expensive fish of various other kinds. If that wasn’t enough, the reason dolphin meat shouldn’t be sold at all — much less advertised as other meats to artificially inflate its value — is because its got over 500% more mercury content than any other animals in the sea. This is because dolphins and whales occupy the same level of their food chain that we do on land. In other words, all the mercury we are dumping into the ocean (the mercury content of the ocean has gone up 1 to 3 percent every year since the mercury content of the ocean began being measured) is collecting in dolphins and whales and sharks: the ultimate end of the oceanic food chain. What will the end result of this be? Mercury poisoning at mass levels in the Japanese public if this continues.
The filmmakers — and Ric O’Barry — also do a pretty good job of convincing the viewer that this practice will probably continue since Japan an other countries are desperate to satisfy their public’s demand for seafood. At our current rates of ocean fishing, scientists say, there will be no more fish in the oceans within the next fifty years. While Ric O’Barry doesn’t seem to have a long-term solution to the problem, he is more optimistic than Michael Rupert that action can actually be taken to solve some or all of the problem. To that end O’Barry contacted the filmmakers, who in turn assembled a veritable secret agent team of experts. Their goal was to expose what was going on inside the cove in Taijii.
They came up with a plan — detailed in the movie — to infiltrate the cove by cover of darkness and install hidden cameras underwater and under false rocks along the shore to capture evidence of what happens there. Much of The Cove details how that operation was executed and the footage and evidence that they uncovered in the process.
I warn you, dear Constant Reader… If you don’t want to see dozens of Japanese fisherman impaling the hearts of hundreds of crying dolphins as an entire mile long cove turns from ocean blue to blood-red… don’t watch this film.
O’Barry, at the film’s conclusion, seems optimistic that this evidence will give him what he needs to affect some kind of change in the globe’s attitude about whaling and dolphin protection (maybe even amongst the general public of Japan itself, which is still largely ignorant of the mercury-choked dolphin meat they’re being fed). That is the difference between him and Michael Rupert of Collapse: optimism.
In the end, I’ll let the viewer decide if there is any hope of shaking people out of their apathy. But I think you can guess how I feel about that, dear Constant Reader.
In any case, The Cove is an excellent film insofar as it exposes a global problem which most people don’t even know is a problem (because no institution exists to expose it). However, while Collapse unfairly dismisses Rupert, I feel The Cove unfairly glorifies O’Barry. Yes, O’Barry and the film crew succeeds in their goal of exposing dolphin fishing, but they utterly fail to convince me that anything will change as a result. The one thing the film overlooked is that the revulsion of the general public whenever they are outraged by something is always outweighed by the greed of the corporations and governments they work for.
So, to sum up, I felt like both of these films presented fascinating portraits of fascinating characters and exposed massive problems in society which can’t be escaped. However, both films were skewed in their perceptions by their creators and presented — in both cases — what I felt to be an incomplete or short-sighted view. In other words, both films barely had time to scratch the surface even as fascinating and scathing as they were.
Digital Media: to Dip and Dab or to Chase the Dragon?
That is the question, dear constant reader. But first…
You’re probably wondering where I’ve been for the past year and change if you’ve been a dear constant reader in the past. The truth — because I don’t believe in giving a true friend the run-around — is that I’ve been in a drug-induced comatose state for thirteen months, and have only recently just awoken (Please note: never take someone named L-Train at their word; it is not just an innocent hit of high-powered blotter acid).
Jesus, I’ve missed a lot! For two days I’ve been alternately chugging black coffee and smoking hash while camped in front of the computer and buried amongst newspapers, trying to absorb the backlog of raw data. I can only come to the conclusion that in my absence the world has spiraled even further into total madness: The Gulf of Mexico is choking on black bile. Health care and financial reform has passed Congress. Racism has been institutionalized in Arizona. Russia and the U.S. are swapping spies left and right a week after our Presidents grab burgers and fries together. In North Korea, people have apparently been paying in cigarettes for amputations without anesthesia since the 1990’s, only we didn’t know about it till just now. The Middle East is in chaos (oh, wait… that’s always been the case; only the details change). Terrorists are doing a really terrible job of blowing us up at home in the U.S. — despite their best efforts — but over in Afghanistan things are going just swimmingly for them. Speaking of Afghanistan, we mysteriously just discovered a massive vein of raw lithium beneath it (Bolivia currently has the monopoly on that, and you need it to make lithium batteries, on which everything seems to run nowadays) which could yield over a trillion dollars. I’m sure that has nothing to do with why we’ve just decided to stay there indefinitely, making it our nation’s longest war. Buried on page ten, you can find reports of British Petroleum lobbying the British government to release the Lockerbie Bomber last year to protect a $900 million oil-and-gas exploration deal off the Libyan coast. I always wondered about the worth of the lives of the 270 people (189 of them Americans) who died on that 1988 Lockerbie airliner flight over Scotland; apparently, those people were worth exactly $3,333,333.33 a head to B.P. I hope they’re happy about the money they made off that deal, since they’ve hemorrhaged billions in cleaning up the spill already and they will continue to for decades hence. Small comfort to the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve had their whole way of life destroyed all around the Gulf.
I feel like with all these crazy things happening — some tragic, some terrific — there should be some amount of celebration or mourning or at least a panicked call to action going on amongst our generation. But when I go outside to get more orange juice, grapefruit, take-and-bake pizzas and drugs, I only see tired and emotionless zombies walking around. These creatures couldn’t be motivated to organize their fucking DVD collection, much less drive down to the Gulf and wash oil out of a dolphin’s blowhole with dish soap. On top of that, most of these zombie-people don’t know how happy they should be that some (admittedly watered down and not-as-great-as-it-should-be) of the most historic legislation in our American story has been passed in the last year. Presidents have fought for health care reform for decades and when and if it works out as planned, we’ll be the last first world country to have universal health care. To boot, we haven’t had any new financial regulation (thanks to Reagan and his cronies, we’ve only had the opposite) between the end of the Great Depression and this week. All of this and yet, as I said, not that many people seem to care much. Why is that? I’m forced to wonder…
What is dominating our generation’s attention so much more effectively than the social movements of the 1960’s and other decades dominated their young generations’ attention? What dominates all of our time so much so that we can’t pay attention to the triumphs and tragedies all around us? What is it that could seduce us away from progress, from success? Well, its interesting you should ask; take a look at this fucking graph:
(Credit: Forrester via North American Technographics Benchmark Surveys)
In just the past five years, the amount of time people spend online has doubled, while the amount of time they spend watching TV has stayed exactly the same. Meanwhile, we are all reading fewer magazines and even fewer newspapers. The radio? Fucking forget about it. That’s boring because those are just voices, right? Only boring people don’t have faces. If you do the math, the average person spent a total of about 32 hours a week in 2004 doing all five of the activities above. In 2009, the average person spends 37 hours a week doing the same things. On top of that, while it seems like there’s no time left in the day for us to use the internet any more than we already do, researchers are now finding that we spend 15% more of our time online with social networking like Facebook or Twitter than we did five years ago. So, not only are we online all fucking day, we’re spending more time doing useless and unimportant shit online. Why read the news online when you could read this lovely tweet from @GBusey (yes, that’s Gary Busey): “Here’s a good way to never make any friends: Smell your palm after every time you shake someone’s hand.”
Keep in mind, these averages are thrown way off by old people, who we all know never use the internet. Many of you are probably wondering how much worse these numbers are when they’re focused only on people under — lets say — eighteen years old. Take a look at this data published first in the New York Times (in the article, “If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online”):
The numbers really speak for themselves, but I’ll speak for them too, just in case you missed something while checking a tweet in the other window… Young people spend only 38 minutes a day with print media of some kind (that includes books, newspapers, magazines, cereal boxes and fucking baseball trading cards: anything printed in ink on paper after being checked for spelling and grammar). Apart from those 38 minutes, the same young people are spending ten hours a day staring at some kind of screen or another, whether its their iPod, their laptop, their TV or their Playstation 3.
Let me repeat that: ten hours per day. That’s seventy hours every calendar week. That’s twenty more hours per week than I spend at work, and after that many hours at work every week I want to go postal and kill everyone around me. If you allow for eight hours of sleep a night, that leaves only four or five hours a day to take care of eating food, going to school and doing homework (if you’re noticing the totals don’t add up, it’s because these youth spend about two to four hours of their days on average secretly online through some portable device while they’re either supposed to be at school or in bed asleep), basic hygiene and face-to-face human interactions. That isn’t much time.
In 1999, when I was sixteen years old, we spent on average seven hours per day staring at those same screens doing the same things (okay, we didn’t have iPods yet, but we did have fucking portable electronic devices which drained our time). That’s still pretty bad, but at least it only added up to just under 50 hours per week (when you do that math, that’s about 11 years of your life if you keep it up till you croak at 78). Think about it: if the youth of today continues their habits, spending 70 hours per week online or in front of a TV, that adds up to 300 hours per month (or 12 days a month) that this generation has wasted on Twitter. That adds up to about 150 days per year. That’s about 10,500 days, or 28.75 years of your life that you will spend staring at the TV or computer.
This could be you at age 40 if you're not careful...
That means that even if I continue using these technologies at the same rate I did when I was 16 for my whole life (which I admit to increasing for several years before dramatically and self-consciously tapering their use off), I will be able to say on my deathbed I’ve used them for approximately 18 years less than someone who was born just ten years after me.
Eighteen years. Eighteen years today’s teens just might spend staring at screens and checking Facebook status updates, cyber-harassing each other, posting tweets, sexting, browsing “shooped” pictures on the /b/ section of 4chan, posting 12 gigs of sexually suggestive pictures of themselves to photobucket.com, watching pirated episodes of reality television shows online and jerking off to broadband porn. Will this generation’s lives be any better for those extra 18 years? Will they be more educated, or less educated? Will they be more tuned into reality, or less? Will they do great things with their lives, or will they be distracted and confounded into oblivion? What do you think, dear constant reader? Do the math yourself:
Eighteen years — plainly and simply — is 23% of the average person’s total lifespan.
Twenty-three percent, and the modern person spends about 28% of their lives just sleeping. You guessed it: filling our lives up with all this electronic crap has left today’s generation with just 49% of their own lives left to themselves. 49% left to spend on the things that really count. For someone born just ten years earlier like me, that percentage will probably be something more like 72% (even if we keep up the same nasty habits we had at 16 forever). Given that, don’t you think you’re short-changing yourselves a little bit wasting so much time on this crap? Wouldn’t you rather spend a little more than half your life on the things that really matter?
So, if you’re under the age of 18, or if you just happen to have way too much free time on your hands and no fucking idea how to spend it doing anything productive, listen to this:
In eighteen years, a person could write ten best-selling books, travel around the world multiple times, get married and divorced more than once, raise a child through adolescence, begin a career and start another one after second thoughts. In eighteen years, you could fight a revolution (or drag out the longest war in a nation’s history till it sinks the empire, for that matter). But instead of doing any of those things, this generation will spend eighteen years tweeting and retweeting wisdom-nuggets such as “When using a toilet plunger, always remember to keep your mouth shut.” If you’re not careful, you hopeless internet addicts out there will ruin your own lives and turn your brains to soup before you realize what the fuck is happening.
People will tell you they can multitask. People will tell you that even though they’re online, they’re staying in touch with their friends through Facebook so it’s not really anti-social. People will tell you that they’re educating themselves by looking up random facts on Wikipedia as their curiosity strikes. People will tell you that sites like Twitter can make a real and positive difference in the world and point to events like the demonstrations in Iran after their last election (protesters used Twitter to keep in touch with each other and get the word out about new demonstrations when the government had shut down all other forms of communication; but do you really think those same protests wouldn’t have happened if Twitter didn’t exist? Iranians seemed to have no trouble throwing themselves a full-blown Revolution back in ’79 and they didn’t need no Twitter for that). Finally, people will tell you that things are just changing and we need to change with them.
To that I say, Bullshit!
This rampant multitasking, overexposure to stimuli and dependence on the internet — and especially on sites like Twitter and Facebook — is melting our brains. Scientists have for several years now been studying the ability to multitask and the effects of prolonged multitasking. They’ve found that people who think they can multitask well actually can’t at all, and that when they do it for too long, their brains become overstimulated and actually start to crave distractions later. When we surf the net with ten different browser windows open at once — Twitter and Facebook on the first two Firefox tabs of course — and the TV on in the background, trying to pay attention to all of them at once for hours on end, we’re actually training our brains to expect this much stimuli all the time. Then, when we try to sit down and read a book for an hour or go to sleep at night, we find that our minds won’t slow down and we get bored within minutes or lay wide awake for hours tossing and turning. Our brains won’t slow down, won’t shut off, because we just spent the whole day overloading them. And we wonder why….
We wonder why during the same years internet use among adults shot up 117% insomnia rates among adults suddenly ballooned? Is it any wonder why Americans sleep an entire hours less per night on average today than they did fifty years ago? If you want me to do that extrapolating the math trick from before, skipping all the babbling along the way, that means the following: a person born in the last ten years will probably be asleep for 21.75 years of their life. However, that same person’s grandparents will have spent a much greater portion of their life asleep: 24.7 years.
Do you really think, dear constant reader, that losing several years of sleep and gaining over twenty years of useless times spent on collegehumor.com and the like has benefited us? I think, rather, that its run this generation a deficit. As for future generations, lets just say I’m terrified if these trends continue. We are already at a point in human history where the global population has doubled up to 7 billion in one human lifetime, after remaining below two billion for all of human history up until 1927. The atmosphere is already boiling off the globe right above our heads. In other words, with very real problems like that to deal with, I don’t think we need to add to the mix tampering with humanity’s neurological evolution. Especially since these nasty habits we’re developing tend to make us slowly more idiotic, which doesn’t help us solve complicated problems.
I know what you’re thinking: I’m just a bitter asshole without friends. This may even be true after my yearlong coma. But rest assured, I’m not saying things like Twitter, Facebook, TV and the internet in general are bad. I’m well aware that these things can be useful tools for communication and even education. However, when it comes to anything other than traditional narcotic drugs, I’m a fan of the old saying, “All things in moderation.” If people these days used the internet and the like for half as many hours per day, I think we would all be happier and healthier for it. Perhaps then we could reap some of the benefits of these modern inventions without becoming their slaves.
Make no mistake: in massive doses, social networking and multimedia entertainment is every bit as addictive as crack cocaine or heroin. If you don’t believe me, just try taking away the cellphone or iPod of anyone under the age of 15 today. I guarantee you: they will either burst into tears or literally physically attack you. Now, call me crazy, but I haven’t seen that same behavior in anyone else besides a meth addict. That’s addiction.
So, if you’re an addict, take a look in the mirror today. Ask yourself if you really want to be dependent on a machine for entertainment and happiness. At least things like weed and sex are all-natural. Machines were made by human hands, and how many good things were ever made by those?
Postscript
If you’re worried you might be an internet addict — or perhaps especially if you’re certain you’re not — click here to take a test and find out. It’s for real; developed by a genuine PhD and everything. You might be surprised or relieved by the results you get.
Global Economy No Longer Circling Drain; Now In Septic Tank
No, really. The International Monetary Fund said so this week (well… not in so many words, but the spirit of the language is really the same). The news actually came to me as something of an unnecessary bummer Thursday when I was trying to enjoy my print edition of the New York Times on my lunch break after being told hours earlier that a personal acquaintance of mine had eaten a gun Wednesday night…
So what had already become a shitty day got a lot worse when I read this headline on page two of the Business section: “Global Economy Called Worst Since 1945” (click here to see the electronic edition of that article). Thank the Great Magnet for sweet chiba. If it wasn’t for that shit, getting two doses of such bad news in the space of just a few hours might stress me out more than I could stand. But even a few safety meetings later I must admit I’m still a bit unnerved by the implications of both situations.
Olivier Blanchard, pictured as his skull is about to erupt from his face.
Never mind my private dramas though, dear Constant Reader. Just worry about the half of my shitty day that effects you too: we have managed to fuck up the global economic system so badly that it may not recover fully for years and we don’t even have a global war on which we can place the blame.
Olivier Blanchard of the I.M.F. said Wednesday that the global economy would likely contract by about 1.3 percent in 2009, which was down from their more optimistic projection (issued just this past January) of 0.5 percent growth. While 1.3 percent contraction in an economy as big as our planet’s might not seem like a big fucking deal, it actually is a big fucking deal… a really big fucking deal… because this would be the first year since 1945 that the global economy has contracted at all.
I’ll let that sink in for a minute…
Freaked out yet? Well if so just hold your horses… there’s more… Those numbers above encompass the global economy. Here at home in the United States, generally agreed upon as the center of the whole sad mess, economic contraction is predicted to be even worse: about 2.8 percent contraction in 2009 with no growth whatsoever predicted for the whole of 2010.
In the unemployment department, Blanchard of the I.M.F. predicted that world unemployment would peak at 7 percent this year, while the U.S. unemployment rate would likely rise to at least 10 percent before ever falling again.
Now, with all of these terrible numbers flying at people’s heads like angry birds every day from their favorite news broadcasts, its hard for most people to put it all in perspective. So let me help you with that: we are deep into the shit here, folks. Deep. We are in the middle of the first global recession since World War II, and it wouldn’t take much of a shake-up to turn it into a full-blown global depression: the first since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Tim Geithner in a rare photograph which actually makes him look as old as he is.
Hell, Blanchard even said that if it hadn’t been for the ambitious stimulus spending plans of the United States and other developed nations across the world this year, the global contraction would have been even 1.5 to 2 percent worse and, as Blanchard put it, “We would be in the middle of something very close to a depression.”
Tim Geithner perhaps said it best when he commented separately on the results of the I.M.F. report: “Never before in modern times has so much of the world been simultaneously hit by a confluence of economic and financial turmoil such as we are now living through.” Even though globalization helps economic growth in good times, Geithner said, “now we are learning that in times of contraction, globalization transmits trouble with enormous speed and force, affecting economies around the world — the relatively strong as well as the more vulnerable.”
I’m not saying its time to start stockpiling canned goods, but I’m saying you should think about it if things look like they’re getting any worse.
Anyway, I’m going to go and smoke some more herb before I have to read anything else about the Taliban being sixty miles form some nuclear warheads, the swine flu spreading over the planet, or cyberterrorists trying to destroy the U.S. power grid. If you people have any sense, you’ll do the same.
P.S. If the swine flu does explode into a pandemic and destory the human race, I think that Hunter S. Thompson will have missed out on some satisfying cosmic irony. What better disease to wipe out the modern world that was built by the era of greed, excess and rampant deregulation which began in the 1980’s? Thompson described that generation best himself in Generation of Swine: “Huge brains, small necks, weak muscles and fat wallets — these are the dominant physical characteristics of the ’80s… The Generation of Swine.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself, friend. Oh and thanks a lot, Ronald Reagan.
The New Apocalypse: Special Christmas Edition
Enough politics, I thought as I woke up in a pool of my own vomit under the Christmas tree in my living room this morning. I had been drinking heavily the night before and experimenting with… well… you get the idea. I had been planning on writing something for the blog today before I descended into the annual two days of living hell and oblivion that I call Christmas with my family, but until I woke up under my soiled Christmas tree, I only knew that I needed a break from arguing with retards about political maneuverings.
It was at that moment as I sat gathering my wits beneath the tree’s twinkling lights that I decided I would spend my blog today debunking the myth of Christmas as the birth date of Jesus Christ (pictured at left).
Some of you readers out there may be offended that I would even think of questioning 2,000 years of “beautiful” Christian tradition, but I assure you my assertions about Christ’s actual birth date are grounded in reason and research. I would never even think of debunking a thing like this in a disrespectful manner or without taking special considerations for the feelings of the people it might affect… Wait, yes I would.
You see, I know some things that many of you Christians out there may not know and in this post I’m going to tell you all about them. Yes, I’m going to burst the comfortable little Judeo-Christian bubble you seem to live in. To be honest, I’m amazed that in the wake of a so-called Enlightenment and with today’s technology and scientific reason that people haven’t thought of this sooner. It’s really common sense: how could a baby possibly survive a night of literally freezing temperatures in the middle of a Bethlehem winter in a fucking manger without dying of exposure? Bethlehem can be fucking cold in late December, and they think it used to be even colder back then!
In any case, an Australian astronomer named Dave Reneke (pictured at right) recently asserted that based on the night sky, the activities of people and the weather as described in the Gospels — as well as on advanced astronomical course-charting software of some kind or another — Jesus Christ was actually born on June 17th and not December 25th, as previously surmised by almost everybody. Turns out a couple planets (Venus and Jupiter) appeared very close together as one brilliant object in the night sky around the date of June 17th in the year of Christ’s birth. This is the most likely explanation of what the three wise men were following when they saw the “Star of Bethlehem.”
So why then would the Church have declared so long ago that they knew with certainty the birth date of Jesus Christ was December 25th and that we should celebrate it by throwing crap onto a tree and giving each other material possessions as gifts? (Never mind that Jesus repeatedly denounced material possessions as sinful and encouraged his followers to get rid of them.)
Well, it turns out that for a long time no one knew when Christ was born. It wasn’t even until around 500 C.E. that December 25th became popularized as the birth date of Jesus. The earliest record of a celebration of Christ’s birth actually occurs in Egypt around 200 C.E. when Clement of Alexandria wrote about a group of Egyptian Christians celebrating the birth of their Lord on May 20th (which is actually closer to our Australian astronomer’s date).
In different parts of the Christian world between roughly 400 C.E. and 600 C.E., Christian rulers started to decree that Christ’s birth should be celebrated symbolically by tacking it onto the end of another holiday called Epiphany on January 6th (though that holiday focuses on the baptism of Christ, not his actual birth). Not long after that, Christians started to spread like wildfire through the land, and quite a few heads of state started to become Christian. It was at this point in history that the early Catholic Church decided to use its political power to get rid of so-called “pagan” religions by absorbing their peoples and their holidays into the Christian faith when they were conquered and “converted.”
Please note: not an authentic Germanic pagan festival tree.
You see, Germanic pagans used to celebrate this thing they called Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (meaning “the birthday of the unconquered Sun”) roughly around the solstice (which they celebrated on the 25th of December). The customs of their celebration — which had been going on traditionally since the late third century — included many traditions we would recognize today long before Christianity ever got its hands on the holiday: the baked ham, the “yule” goat (where else do you think we got that weird ass word “yule”?), stuffing stockings full of trinkets, and the decorating of trees in the center of the village with candles to imitate the image of stars twinkling in the heavens (after all, “the birthday of the unconquered Sun” was a celestial holiday originally).
When Germanic pagans got their asses kicked by Rome and its Church, Catholics decided it was time to make the date official, and they started declaring publicly that crazy new “Biblical research” placed Jesus’ birthday on the 25th of December and we should all start celebrating it formally on that day. History is written by the victors, as they say…
What? Did you think ancient Romans gave each other pieces of shit like this with a greeting card attached?
Alright, I guess I’ve shattered the fragile little mental world of enough Christians for one day. It’s time for me to clean up the tree, get a shower, and wrap some more of this cheap shit I bought for my family. Maybe I should think about sprinkling some powdered milk inside this sweater I got for my uncle (seriously, best prank ever; look it up).
Hope you enjoyed this special Christmas edition of The New Apocalypse. Just wait for the special Valentine’s Day edition where I write all about how virgins used to be paraded around ancient Roman towns so single men could fling bloody animal innards at them to bless them for fertility rites during the festival of Lupercalia on February 14th… until Christianity came along to save the day and rewrite history of course. Coincidence? You decide, dear Constant Reader.
But seriously… happy fucking holidays, everybody. I’ll be seeing you in 2009.
Even Greater Idiocy From the Right: Will It Never End?
Sidney Allen Johnson in 1990 with what I can only assume was his fourteen-year-old crack whore at the time: "Victoria." I'm not making this up; it's all on his website at http://www.babylonmysteryorchestra.com.
It seems we haven’t heard enough from Sidney Allen Johnson (click on his name to check out his MySpace for reals), the subject of ridicule in the previous post. In response to his lambasting there, Mr. Johnson thought it would be in his best interest to post another even more offensive comment. This time, I thought it would be best to leave his full statement off of my blog and only include the parts which would not get my column banned from WordPress due to vulgar hate speech. Here those parts are:
“Defending Islam is a fools errand. No religion has killed more people, and they are equal opportunity killers… Obama’s vote total only proves how easily you left wing wackos are to deceive. You have voted for death… your own. Lets see: questionable citizenship, a socialist and a desire for a national security force under executive control. That worked out well in the 1930’s didn’t it!”
I wonder why Mr. Johnson’s George W. Bush brand of neoconservative politics didn’t get back into the White House with John McCain as its champion… Oh yeah, because these people make themselves look like idiots so I don’t even have to.
The Crusades, as invisioned by modern Christian quilters.
Look at the shit this shithead says: “No religion has killed more people”? Are you serious? Islam lost the Crusades, Johnson you dumb ass. Muslims may have killed a fair number of folks back in the Dark Ages, but who didn’t? You want to know what religion killed the most people back then, and continues to persecute others in any way it can today? I’ll tell you: hard-line “orthodox” Christianity!
I’m not even going to argue about that, though. I don’t have the energy. It’s really another post entirely; I promise to someday spend that time writing that post ripping Christianity a new arsehole, but for now I need to focus on ripping out other assholes: namely that of Mr. Johnson, who also claimed that President-elect Barack Obama has questionable citizenship and is a Socialist. Are you kidding?
Mr. Johnson would get along quite well with the bonafide retard who filed a Supreme Court case which alleges Obama is not eligible to become President because he is not a natural born U.S. citizen. I really hate to be the one that bursts Mr. Johnson’s bubble (wait, no I’m not), but Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and has a birth certificate from that state, and at least one of his parents was a natural born U.S. citizen themselves. That’s all you fucking need to become a fucking natural fucking born U.S. citizen, idiots! Stop arguing about this!
Since Barack Obama is now going to be the President, his birth certificate is a matter of public record and its really no secret. Nor is there any doubt that he has the fucking social security number for that matter. He wouldn’t have gotten this far without records, people.
By the way, the Supreme Court has agreed not to even hear the case in question because they all think its fundamentally retarded. And lets not forget that the current Supreme Court has a Republican majority, so the case must have been really bonkers if they had a chance to get rid of Barack Obama and they decided not to. Here is the fucking birth certificate if you still think I’m in on some nut job left-wing conspiracy:
By the by, look at that “controversial” little middle name there: Hussein. Yes, Barack Hussein Obama. Our President-elect’s middle name is Hussein, as in “Saddam Hussein.” Can you fucking deal with it already people?!?! Dear Constant Readers, can you believe that people were even asking Barack Obama if he would use his middle name during his inauguration? Of course he will! Every President ever has used their middle name in their inauguration!
The tyrant of Iraq himself in his final... and very pathetic... days.
Why wouldn’t Barack Obama use in his inauguration a common name in many parts of the world which means “handsome” or “good,” given to him by his father (a Kenyan, let me remind you) at his birth in 1961 before the more infamous Saddam Hussein ever came to power or even got out of prison?!?!
As for being a Socialist: John McCain saying Barack Obama was a socialist over and over throughout the campaign didn’t make him one, and Mr. Johnson saying it over and over again won’t have any greater measure of success. By the way, since “the Liberals” orchestrated their take-over plot by collapsing the economy and getting that 700 billion dollar bail-out through Congress (oh, wait… didn’t the G.O.P. have something to do with that?), we’re all Socialists now. I mean, our banks are socialized anyway… Next is health care… Bwahahahahahahaha!!! Victory for the Proletariat!!! (I’m sorry, isn’t that what you were expecting to read, Mr. Johnson you paranoid lunatic?)
As for a national security force under executive control, when the fuck has Barack Obama said he wanted another one of those? He already has a national security force under executive control: the fucking U.S. Military, Johnson you neanderthal. And that was created a hell of a lot earlier than the 1930’s. What the fuck are you talking about, Johnson?!
But let me get back to talking about colossally stupid financial bail-out plans: did y’all hear about this U.S. auto-manufacturer bail-out nonsense. The bail-out plan to rescue the troubled U.S. auto-makers from a financial ruin which would also leave millions of Americans jobless was just stalled in the Senate recently by a couple of vocal G.O.P. assholes. These motherfuckers said they couldn’t pass a bill which wouldn’t have “responsible” cutbacks in salary and wages for U.S. auto-workers.
The U.S. auto industry bail-out plan, as invisioned by the G.O.P.
What kind of “responsible” cuts would those be? Those auto-workers are blameless. It’s the fucking executives born with silver spoons in their assholes who don’t know how to run a company which are to blame, and they are the only people that should suffer in this whole equation. But as it stands, Republicans have proven once again that their lunatic leaders are assholes who want only to bring this country crashing down into a complete economic meltdown. Now we’re just hoping Bush will stop sitting on his hands and release some funds from the T.A.R.P. to ease the stress on the automotive industry and prevent its imminent collapse. And well all know how optimistic we should be about that since Bush has said he doesn’t want to do anything of the sort (though he has recently softened that stance to a lazy, “I’ll think about it in a few days after I finish shitting out this greasy kielbasa sausage…”). To sum up, the neoconservatives are trying to destroy the country before Obama can even take office. And if people don’t get off their asses, the neoconservatives might even do it.
I’m starting to get worried, people. We could lose about 3,000,000 more jobs before Barack Obama even has a chance to say the name “Hussein” during a Presidential Inauguration. We’re talking Second Great Depression time, dear Constant Readers. There are a lot of “ifs” there but nonetheless we should all be very careful in the coming months and be wary of assholes like Sidney Allen Johnson and his cronies.
It’s just as my good friend’s grandfather once said: “Basically, people are no damn good.” If we can all accept that one foundational truth of the world, we might come out of this mess okay.
H.J. Herrick Addresses Some Criticisms from a Traditional Gothic Heavy Metal Doom Rock Musician, and so on…
I would like to address a comment left in response to my previous post by an idiotic ideologue (just click here to email the moron if you wish). The comment was left by one Sidney Allen Johnson (pictured at left; and no, I’m not kidding), who is the sole member of a band called the Babylon Mystery Orchestra. This “group” is self-described as “a blend of Gothic and Traditional Rock music with elements of Heavy Metal and Doom that produce that elusive result that so many artists strive for and so few achieve.” What would that be? Total shit?
Anyway, this Sidney dude’s Babylon Mystery Orchestra homepage proudly proclaims that he is personally at war with Muslims, Socialists, and a fictional secret society called the Illuminati. I know you probably think I’m just dreaming this up, but its all there in black and white (literally) on his web page. Just look for yourself. In any case, I will respectfully reprint Mr. Johnson’s argument in its entirety here:
“Two landslides for Bill Clinton? How did someone who did not get 50% of the vote either time suddenly qualify as a landslide winner? He benefited from third party candidates, without which he would never have been elected. Your attempt to rewrite history in your own image is laughable. You must have a college education. No one could have such a fantastically imagined, and distorted, view of the world without some coaching. Its always good to see someone on the ‘tolerant’ left rejoicing in the suggestion of the death of others…you’ll make a fine Muslim some day.”
His message begins and you’re thinking, “Okay, he’s not that smart but he’s not totally insane,” but then the thing about me being a death-hungry Muslim arrives and you of course must conclude he is a racist asshole. Let me defend my position point by point…
First, I’ll point out that both of Bill Clinton‘s Presidential Elections (1992 and 1996) were landslide victories in this way if nothing else: both victories achieved a number of electoral votes which are widely considered to be landslide electoral college victories. Just click here to see a definition of “landslide victory” in which Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are specifically mentioned because of their wide electoral college victories. Yes, Bill Clinton’s popular vote left something to be desired because of Ross Perot, but you must still remember that he maintained a six to nine percent margin of victory over his nearest trailing opponent in both elections. Not to mention, in 1996 Clinton did win half of the popular vote (well, within one percent) and the rest was split between his two opponents. Dole, his nearest competitor was about ten percent behind in the popular vote. If 1996 isn’t then a popular vote landslide as well, I don’t know what is.
Second, I’ll refute Mr. Johnson’s claim that Clinton wouldn’t have won without third party candidates stealing votes from George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole: People always blame Ross Perot (pictured at right) for taking votes away from George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, but I really doubt those sad twisted people that voted for Perot ever would have shown up at the voting booth if the crazy Texan hadn’t been running. Besides, even if Perot did take votes away from Bush and Dole, he certainly took as many away from Clinton both times. After all, Perot may have supported economic Protectionism and opposed gun control, but he also supported a woman’s right to choose and the Environmental Protection Agency. He likely lured hesitant Clinton voters away as much as hesitant Bush and Dole voters. If you split the votes that went for Perot between Clinton and his opponents, he would have had popular vote wins by 53% to 46% and 54% to 44% in 1992 and 1996, respectively. That leads into Obama’s 53% to 46% victory nicely, I think. And just compare those numbers to Ronald Reagan‘s 1984 historic landslide victory, in which he won 58% of the popular vote against Walter Mondale‘s 40%. Riddle me this, Mr. Sidney Allen Johnson: at what point between Reagan’s “crushing” 58% and Clinton’s (adjusted) 54% or Obama’s (unadjusted) 53% does the popular vote stop being a landslide? Is Reagan’s lead over the others of four to eight percent (depending on how you look at it) really so much better?
Third, I’ll bring into question whether I am re-writing history: How the fuck is repeating a fact from a textbook definition in an encyclopedia entry re-writing fucking history? Landslide fucking victories are generally decided by a (approximately) ten percent margin of victory or more in a popular vote or a 65% or better electoral college victory. All three of the elections of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama fall into the low end of that category (as does George H.W. Bush’s first election to the Presidency, by the way). No, they are not the same kind of landslide enjoyed by a Ronald Reagan or a Franklin D. Roosevelt, but they are still pretty fucking big victories. By the way, I would like to note that more people voted for Barack Obama in 2008 (65,098,323) than did for Ronald Reagan in 1984 (54,455,075). In fact, more people voted for Barack Obama than for any other Presidential candidate in U.S. history. Deny that, you Doom Metal loving son of a bitch!
Fourth, I will confirm that I have a college education: Yes, I do have a college education. That’s how and why I can and do choose to think, learn and grow as a human being instead of declaring war on Islam and mythical secret societies (pictured; and no, once again, I am not making this up). I can only guess that the bitter scorn with which Mr. Johnson accused me of possessing a college degree (in fact, I have a B.A. and a Masters degree) indicates that he is not college educated. Yet again I seem to be confronted by the kind of person who laughs at the idea of learning anything beyond high school, and in the same breath manages to demonstrate their profound ignorance and bigotry, which brings me to my last point…
Fifth, I will deduce that Sidney Allen Johnson is a fucking racist prick and that he is in fact guilty of his own accusations of reality distortion. In the penultimate sentence of his comment, Johnson said, “Its always good to see someone on the ‘tolerant’ left rejoicing in the suggestion of the death of others…” First of all, I don’t ever recall describing myself as on the tolerant left, only on the left. Second of all, I wasn’t rejoicing at the suggestion of the death of others; I was rejoicing at the death of the ultra right wing foothold on power in America. And if I suggested that, “At least for the next four years, we can tell lunatic fringe right-wing conservatives to fuck off, eat shit and – most importantly – die,” as I did at the conclusion of my previous post, I hardly think I should have to feel bad about it.
Why would anyone care if members of the lunatic fringe right wing conservative movement (pictured on the right, of course) died? Would the world be so much more terrible without Pat Robertson praying on national television for Supreme Court Justices to die? Would the world be so much worse without George Bush and his cronies fucking up relations with the entire planet except England and destroying our homeland? Would the world really be so much worse off if we didn’t have people like you, Sidney Allen Johnson, declaring war on an entire religion because you don’t understand that the actions of a few terrorists on 9/11 can’t be used to judge all Muslims any more than the outrageous actions and words of people like Jerry Falwell can be used to judge more reasonable and – yes – tolerant Christians like Barack Obama. I would also point out that Democrats and Liberals can’t be blamed for the things I say just because I agree with them most of the time.
I do not want reasonable and good people whom I disagree with to die, Mr. Johnson. I just want people like John McCain, Sarah Palin, Ted Stevens, George Bush, Karl Rove, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, you and all the rest to go far far away from me and the rest of the human race, because its lunatic fringe losers like you who leave the world a worse place than you found it. At least Muslims invented the first windmill in the 7th century, founded the first degree-issuing university in the 9th century and invented suntan lotion in the tenth century. That beats out Catholics. All they ever invented was guilt.
In Other News, H.J. Herrick Issues a Correction: Herrick’s Projections More Accurate than Previously Projected
Well, I was so right once again that my righteousness exceeded even my own expectations: it turns out my electoral vote count projection of November 5th was incorrect by one vote. Of course, Obama did even one vote better than I expected. As of today, the final electoral vote count is Obama 365, McCain 173.
How could this have happened, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you: I called Nebraska (with the exception of three outstanding Obama counties: Saline, Lancaster and Thurston) for McCain, as did every other reputable news outlet on the planet (for once, I’m was in line with them). Then I called Missouri and North Carolina for McCain and Obama, respectively. It turns out I was right about those.
We know now that everyone was a little bit wrong about Nebraska. Lo and behold, Nebraska is one of two states (along with Maine) that does its electoral votes on a county by county basis instead of the usual winner-take-all method that most states use. This means that if enough counties vote for the minority candidate in Nebraska, the state can split its electoral votes between the two. Turns out some outstanding ballots in Douglas County, Nebraska got counted late and tipped the scales in favor of Obama there. This will cause Nebraska to cast one of its five electoral votes for Barack Obama, increasing his final vote count from 364, as I predicted, to 365.
Way to go, Nebraska. Keep living “the good life,” whatever the fuck that would mean in Nebraska.
The Morning After the Election: Waking Up in the Antichrist’s New America
Dawn has broken over a United States of America transformed. The world will never be the same as it was when we woke up on the morning of November 4th, 2008. This morning is a new morning, full of sweet promise for most and full of bitter defeat for the rest.
To think that in March of 2008 some crazy Christians started saying that Barack Obama was the Antichrist (crazy propaganda found on 4chan.org pictured at right) because he fit the following criteria:
- He is a man (check).
- He is in his 40’s (check, gotcha).
- He will have massive Christ-like appeal (okay, I guess I can see that comparison; he is pretty popular).
- He will deceive the nation with persuasive language (uh, did Obama ever lie once during the election?).
- He will promise false hope and world peace and people will flock to him (um… correct me if I’m wrong, but neither candidate was running on a world peace platform, though I guess Obama did use the word “hope” during his campaign and people are sure as hell flocking to him).
- He will be of Muslim descent (okay, argument over; you crazy Christian assholes lose; Obama is Christian and was baptized in the Trinity United Church of Christ in 1988; that means he is a reasonable Christian who wants to help people instead of destroy them like you).
With all of that religious swift-boating propaganda behind us, it’s 10:00 a.m. pacific time on November 5th, 2008 and the current electoral vote count is 349 for Barack Obama and 163 for John McCain. Two states – Missouri and North Carolina – haven’t yet been called by most respectable outlets, but I’m going to go ahead and call them…
Missouri Goes to McCain
Missouri will go red with McCain bringing in 50% of the vote over Obama’s 49%. McCain is currently winning this state by only about 6,000 votes with 100% of precincts reporting, so they are counting carefully there. But I’m going to give McCain – who, let me remind you, has already lost – the benefit of the doubt and say he wins this state.
North Carolina Goes to Obama
I’m going to go ahead and call North Carlolina for Barack Obama. The President-elect is bringing in 50% of the vote in North Carolina compared to McCain’s 49%. Obama is currently up by about 12,000 votes in North Carolina with 100% of precincts reporting.
So what does that mean?
Well, I’ll tell you. It means I was right when I said a week before the election that Obama would win with 360 electoral votes to McCain’s 178 (well, almost; things went even a little better than I thought they would). With North Carolina going for Obama and Missouri going for McCain, that puts the final electoral vote count as follows:
Barack Obama 364
John McCain 174
I hate to be the kind of person who says, “I told you so,” but… wait a damn minute! I love saying, “I told you so!” I fucking told you so, America! Despite the fact that all my liberal friends and acquaintances were scared to death McCain was going to pull some kind of rabbit from his top hat in the final days of the election, I remained unafraid on the eve of the ballot count. While my friends and I sat down to watch the election coverage after a lovely Thai dinner, they were nervously buzzing before the television was turned on. Then, twenty minutes later – at 8:00 pm Pacific time – the election was called in Barack Obama’s favor as the results of Washington, California and my home state of Oregon came over the wires. It was only twenty minutes of election night angst for them before I could start dancing and screaming, “I told you so, motherfuckers!” And I had been smoking and relaxing since I’d gotten home from work, drinking coffee and beer. In other words, it was the most relaxing election night I’ve ever experienced, and the most gratifying.
The Implications of Having a Black Dude in the White House
A lot of people are wondering: what do the results of this election mean for America? Well, since I’m busy telling you what to think about everything else, I’ll tell you about that too…
America has finally proved that – while many of us are still racist assholes – most of us are (somewhat slightly) enlightened people who do not believe black people are inferior, and we really can’t get too grandiose and pretend this means much more than that. Racism still exists, and don’t let Bill O’Reilly, Pat Robertson or anyone else tell you different. ‘Nuff said there.
What about Implications for the Democratic and Republican Parties?
The real news is this: neoconservative Republican politics is dead and in the ground. After two landslides for Bill Clinton and a landslide for Obama, the country has said firmly for the past two decades that it is a left-leaning nation. Those two elections which George W. Bush won (well, sort of) by narrow pissant margins have today been revealed for what they are: flashes in the pan.
I compare the neoconservative victories in 2000 an 2004 to what scientists call an extinction burst: a sudden resurgence in a negative behavior or a viral infection before it burns out completely and disappears.
Am I saying that Republicans will disappear? No. I’m simply saying that the new Republican party cannot afford to let itself be run by evil dictators in disguise like the Bushes, who use people like Karl Rove to steal their elections. If the Republican party wants to survive in the future, it will have to change itself into a more palatable organization which accepts that they are in the minority and most Americans will disagree with them on all the issues that matter. In other words, Republicans have hit the wall and they will adapt into something we can all respect or they will eventually die and be replaced years from now by something like a Democratic monopoly or – holy shit – a system where Independent candidates can actually run for election in a major office and win.
How do I know a Democratic shift is happening in this country and will continue to happen in the future? Well, I’ll tell you. As I said before in “Further Proof that McCain/Palin Supporters are Retarded…” trends show that more and more people will continue to become more educated, more intelligent, and will continue to register Democrat in greater numbers. Meanwhile, Republican supporters (pictured at left) continue to dwindle as time marches onward.
If all of that previous information isn’t enough to convince you, the National Student Mock Election, which just closed at 12:00 p.m. eastern time on November 4th, shows 64.12% of the popular vote going for Obama and only 32.31% for McCain. For those of you who don’t know, this mock election has students participating all around the country in high schools and middle schools, and most of its participants will be able to vote in the 2012 Presidential election. If I were a Democratic candidate in the next Presidential election, I would be pretty happy to know that two thirds of first-time voters will probably be registering Democrat.
To sum up, the American People have been fooled by Bush and his neoconservative friends before, but they were not fooled this year by neoconservative predators like John McCain and Sarah Palin posing as maverick house pets. As W. said…
Good work, America. Way to get a black guy into the Oval Office. Way to change history. Way to shove your collective boot up John McCain’s withered old ass. At least for the next four years, we can tell lunatic fringe right-wing conservatives to fuck off, eat shit and – most importantly – die.
H.J. Herrick Calls the Presidential Election for Obama at 7:50 pm Pacific Time, or John McCain wins 100% of the Loser Vote
Well, I’m sitting at my dining room table watching CNN and it’s 7:55. Oregon, Washington, and California are about to close and if all of them go for Obama, he will win the election. All of them are expected to go for Obama.
This news reaches me while beautiful women suck on my toes and a trained monkey injects heroin directly into my tear ducts. I really couldn’t care less. I already knew Obama was going to win in the biggest landslide in as long as anyone can remember. I said it a while back: 360 electoral votes for Obama. It looks like he’s headed for that or more. Think about it: have you ever heard of an election being called at 8:00 pm Pacific Time?
This is what I call a mandate from the masses.
Wait just a moment… it’s now 8:00 pm and CNN has just called it. Barack Obama has been elected President. That’s the earliest I can ever recall an election being called in modern times.
Holy shit… History has just been made in my lifetime.
Barack Obama is not only about to become the first African American President in U.S. History, he is about to win by what might be the biggest landslide in American history.
Yes, you heard it here first: Barack Obama has just raped John McCain‘s hairy withered old asshole with his throbbing black cock. And I couldn’t be more honored to say that my home state of Oregon was one of the final three states to deliver the death blow to John McCain’s wicked black heart.
God bless America.
P.S. It’s already on Wikipedia, so that means its true. Fuck yeah!
Sudden jump in the polls? Are you kidding me?
Some news cable outlets have been reporting that McCain is making gains in the polls and tightening the gap between himself and future President Barack Obama. Are you serious? How could that actually happen? Look at McCain’s supporters on the left; could those people get excited and mobilized for any purpose besides fresh jelly-filled pastries?
It is true that Gallup‘s “traditional” polls most recently show a slight tightening: 49% Obama, 47% McCain to be precise. However, the traditional Gallup poll, according to their own website, “factors in prior voting behavior as well as current voting intention. This has generally shown a closer contest…”
If you want to see what is actually going on in this country, you should check out Gallup’s new and improved “expanded” poll. Gallup’s expanded poll (which shows Obama leading McCain 51% to 44%), according to their website, “determines likely voters based only on current voting intentions. This estimate would take into account higher turnout among groups of voters traditionally less likely to vote, such as young adults and minorities.” I’m sure you all know that Barack Obama has brought more young adults and minorities out of the woodwork to vote than any other candidate in history. I think we can safely say that the expanded Gallup poll, then, is the more reliable reflection of the actual popular vote outcome.
Still worried that the electoral college could do something different from the popular vote? Well, don’t worry (sorry if that wasn’t suspenseful enough for you, CNN and Fox News). Just take a look at the current electoral college projections:
As you can see (I’m sure you’re not blind or retarded… well, ARE YOU?!?!), there is no risk whatsoever of McCain winning this election. If McCain got every solid and lean state polling for him as well as every single toss-up electoral vote, and got all but two lean votes currently polling for Obama, he’d still only have 268 electoral votes. Obama would then have 270, which is all he needs to win at that point. I don’t think I need to explain that every toss up electoral vote and every electoral vote currently leaning for Barack Obama will not go to John McCain. A shift like that has never happened in the last seven days of an election in electoral history.
The most reliable projection, as of today, is that Obama will win with 360 electoral votes to McCain’s 178. We have not seen a margin of victory that wide in a Presidential election since Clinton and Dole in 1996. In other words, stop listening to the television media. There has been no actual distinguishable tightening in the polls. Barack Obama (pictured at right) is awesome and they are just telling you there has been so they can get higher ratings on election night.
But I’m not worried. I know you’re smarter than them, dear Constant Reader. I will sit in my den alone with my viscious German Shepherds on election night, tripping balls on something and languishing in these very comforting thoguhts and statistics. America is going to be safe, at least for the next few years. Well, it’ll be safe from most any threat except me…
Voting in Oregon: It’s Swell!
Because I live in Oregon, I get one of those peachy little vote-by-mail ballots every election year. Oregon is one of only two states that is completely vote-by-mail (the other being Washington), though several other states are in the process of joining the march into the future, and convenience. In places like Maine, Maryland and South Dakota, absentee ballots may be requested without any explanation.
As you can see from the picture above, the vote-by-mail method allows me to relax at my dining room table with my voter’s guides, ballot, cell phone, my laptop for instant research and a nice cool glass of water all spread out in front of me. Conclusions: I’m in favor of voting through the mail. It rocks cock. My own opinion notwithstanding, though, people have criticized the vote-by-mail system in various ways:
Some say it destroys the American tradition of going to a polling place; I guess for black people in the South that means that they would miss out on all the fun of being beaten to death in a public place because they voted for an anti-segregation candidate. No, I don’t think anyone under the age of fifty is ever really going to miss the voting booth.
Some folks think that it removes our ability to make sure there is no voter harassment. These people argue that – for instance – a dominant spouse might pressure their significant other to “vote the right way.” While it is true that some of this might (unfortunately) happen, I think that the number of people who have extra time because of vote-by-mail to research the issues and vote in an educated fashion far outnumbers the people who get threatened into voting a certain way within the privacy of their own home.
Some say it does not actually increase voter turnout. It may be true that voter turnout is the same either way, but think of all the people who try to vote the traditional way but can’t because they’re called in to work overtime when they had been planning on voting that night… What’s the call, Bob the steel worker? You going to get enough money to feed your family tonight, or are you going to vote? No, I think vote-by-mail – or at least the option to vote by mail without explanation – is superior to voting in that vinyl death trap: the voting booth.
Another group of worrisome assholes says that its easier to tamper with a vote-by-mail ballot than a traditional ballot. Trust me; it’s safe. Just follow this four-step process:
1) Place the folded ballot into the security envelope (pictured).
2) Place the security envelope, with the ballot therein, into the mailing envelope (pictured).
3) Sign the mailing envelope in the designated spot (as pictured).
4) Put the bitch in the mail or drop it in a ballot box on election day (standard underhand mail-dropping technique pictured). And no, my name is not really C. Phan.
There are not enough amateur vote-tampering assholes out there to amount to anything notable, and the idea of orchestrating a giant vote-by-mail-fraud conspiracy (which would take massive numbers of people participating at an unprecedented level) without anyone slipping up or spilling the beans is incomprehensible.
Anyway, the best part about vote-by-mail is that it allows you the luxury of smoking a certain something out of a pipe while you fill out the ole’ ballot. I did that while I voted today. That’s right… I smoked tobacco. Sorry, Big Brother. Not going to give in that easy… But anyway, if you’re a “Joe Six-Pack” and you’re not comfortable with all that consciousness-expanding… um… tobacco, you could always just get drunk while you vote. Hell, I did that too.
God bless America. God bless Oregon. Fuck yeah.
For Oregon Voters Only: Now that I have your attention, let me nag you about some local measures…
If you’re voting in Oregon, the marks on your ballot had better match the ones on mine in the following areas:
- No on Measure 58.
- No on Measure 59.
- No on Measure 60.
- No on Measure 61.
- No on Measure 62.
- No on Measure 64.
- No on Measure 65.
That’s right: a big fat NO on all of those. In short, those measures fuck the following people in the ass: Hispanic Americans, poor people, teachers, people who smoke pot and taxpayers, the school system, unions of any kind and candidates from independent parties, respectively. (Note that the people fucked by a “yes” vote on any of these measures are not limited to the aforementioned groups; those groups merely make up the bulk of those fucked.)
If the measures on your Oregon ballot look different from the list above in any way, you are a social conservative moron asshole and I will break into your house at night, cut out your tongue, bind you to the bedpost and make you watch while I tear your wife in half. Then I’m going to use your own ballot to paper cut your throat repeatedly until you bleed to death.
That is all.
A Night at the Movies with George W. Bush
If you look over a list of films by Oliver Stone, you begin to see a pattern: all of them are controversial, topical, relevant and brilliant (except for Alexander and World Trade Center; those were pieces of shit). Oliver Stone’s latest film, W., is no exception to the brilliance of his earlier career. He has fully redeemed himself for the terrible transgressions of Alexander and World Trade Center (god, the hours I lost watching those…). I’m just going to come out and say it: In W. Oliver Stone has made the most important film of his career and will probably never top it.
If Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July were critiques on the terrible machine of modern warfare, if Wall Street was a critique on the greed and corruption of the financial machine in this nation, if Natural Born Killers and Any Given Sunday are critiques on the twisted bent or utter irrelevancy of modern media, if Nixon is a critique of corruption in modern politics, then W. is an utter fucking slap in the face to George W. Bush and everything that has allowed his administration to happen. Wow, that was quite an “if, then” statement.
The most terrible tragedy of George W. Bush’s life and of our generation is that George W. Bush is actually a fairly likable guy when you meet him and just shoot the shit about football. Pretty much everyone who meets him in real life thinks so. That’s why the motherfucker got elected. How else do you think it happened? It’s not because he has good policies or is very smart, now is it? Anyway, enough of that tangent. Even Elizabeth Banks (playing Laura Bush), who met the Bushes once at a White House screening of Seabiscuit, said that while she utterly loathes Bush’s politics, she found him to be a very charming and funny.
I ate another special rice crispy treat before going into the theater on the opening night of W. and boy was I happy I did… The special treat allowed me to relax a bit, and thus relax my raging hatred of George W. Bush for a time. While my defenses were down, I was struck by Josh Brolin‘s rendering of George W. Bush as a confused young man who wants only to do right by his father (played gloriously by James Cromwell) but is constantly overshadowed by him and his brother Jeb. I’m just going to come out and say it: I felt sad and sorry for George W. Bush, the evil dictator himself.
That is to say, the film served as a reminder to me that I should passionately hate Bush the Politician and leave Bush the Man alone. Bush was not a villain in the film; he was a likable and charming young man who was turned into a likeable and hatable pawn in his autumn years by puppet masters like Dick Cheney (played hauntingly by Richard Dreyfuss) and Karl Rove (played by Toby Jones). No, this movie does not excuse Bush. His tragic flaw in this film is his total inability to finish what he starts or to think a course of action through before it ruins him. The movie merely reminds us that there are far more people to blame than just Bush alone for what has happened under this administration; this is where the villains like Rove and Cheney enter the story of W. and muck things up for our hero (?) by exploiting his tragic flaw.
Dreyfuss plays Cheney with a perfect level of private malevolence. In one of my favorite scenes, Cheney explains in a secret war strategy meeting how Iraq is just the first step in a leapfrog tactic to eventually capture Iran and its oil reserves, thus establishing a U.S. empire. Bush in that scene appears skeptical of Cheney’s ideas but eventually goes along with the plan after careful moral nudging from Cheney and others.
It’s in this way that the film begins as a biopic drama and then transforms into a tragedy of epic (Greek, even) proportions. By the end of the film, things are getting a little eerie as you are occaisionally reminded of Oedipus Rex.
What I’m trying to say is that this film is fucking powerful and you should see it. It is the only movie of its kind ever released during the term of the world leader it is about, making it probably the most topical biopic ever made. And on top of that, it will be talked about for decades to come, whether or not it does favorably at the box office. I give it five out of five Flaming Cocks of Justice or whatever (I should probably work on the rating system, huh?).
Anyway, check out the trailer and then go see the son of a bitch. Enjoy, dear Constant Readers.
The Third Presidential Debate, 2008, or Super Happy Fun Debate Times with John McCain, Senator Government and Joe the Plumber!
I sat down to watch the third and final Presidential Debate of 2008 Wednesday night only after I had finished eating half of a very special rice crispy treat and smoked a bit (you can infer what you will from that, Big Brother). I thought it would be the only way I could survive the desperate bitterness I was sure I would feel every time John McCain opened his mouth. As it turns out, it was the best decision I ever could have made.
I was immediately mesmerized by the ties of both candidates. Barack Obama was wearing the most stunningly red striped tie I’d ever seen, while McCain was wearing this sad blue old man tie. It was no contest. I was so mesmerized by these ties that I somehow forgot to listen to anything either of them were saying through that twenty minute period at the beginning where all the analysts seem to be saying McCain actually did well (What? Seriously?). Whatever. We all know McCain fucked up his third debate in a row, but we won’t get into that in too much depth. I’m going to try to focus on all the ways Obama did well tonight. Someone once told me I should be positive on occasion…
The debate began with moderator Bob Schieffer of CBS News asking both candidates to defend their economic plans and explain why it is better than their opponent’s. McCain succeeded only in futilely accusing Obama of “class warfare” by raising taxes in a time of economic crisis. Obama on the other hand was able to easily defend himself against those futile accusations by reminding the audience that people earning under $250,000 per year will receive a tax break and only the rich will receive a tax hike. He repeated that key statistic which seems to be bringing so many doubting lower class Republicans under his wings: 95% of Americans will receive a tax cut under his administration. McCain, of course, had no answer for this except to bring up Joe the Plumber… Holy shit…
Joe the Plumber, a.k.a. Joe Wurzelbacher the Tax-Dodger
McCain brought up an incident where this guy named Joe Wurzelbacher (pictured at left) told Barack Obama a few days before the debate that he wouldn’t be able to buy a plumbing business he’s worked in for lots of years under Barack Obama’s new tax plan. That’ right, its Wurzelbacher, not “Wurzelburger” as McCain said.
Of course, if you’ve ever listened to what Obama plans to do with his tax plan, you’d know that you won’t receive a tax increase unless you make more than $250,000 a year. So that means that Joe Wurzelbacher is rich (…in theory, right? Check out the links below…). So why was McCain calling him Joe the Plumber? It’s not like the guys ever actually put his hand in a toilet for the past few years if he’s somehow worth over $250,000 per year… right?
The answer, by the by, is that McCain wants everyone to think Obama is hiking a plumber’s taxes, which would mean that he’d hike the taxes of all lower class people by implication. It’s almost as if McCain thinks saying that Obama is going to hike poor people’s taxes all over the country will somehow make it true. Nevertheless, Obama did a fine job of reminding the American people that his tax plan was middle and lower class friendly.
By the way, Joe Wurzelbacher has no plumbing license, is not rich, and would only have his taxes increased if he bought the business, which he cannot afford to do… and he owes the state of Ohio $1,200 in unpaid income taxes.
Oh, fuck… sucks to be you right now, McCain. Have fun eating your words, fuckhead.
Who the fuck is Senator Government?
"Hi, I'm Senator Government! Life is swell!"
At one point, McCain referred to Barack Obama as Senator Government. Yeah, make what you will of that Freudian slip. I’m going to focus on the positives today…
Um…
Yeah, it’s positive that Obama was able to resist the urge to skull fuck McCain after he was called Senator Government. Fuck this positive thing… I mean seriously, how evil and absent-minded do you have to be to call your Democratic opponent Senator Government and not catch yourself when you say it? Could you be advertising yourself as more of a Republican asshole, please?
Jesus… the rice crispy euphoria was wearing off far too much by the time McCain let slip the Senator Government comment. I couldn’t handle it. I started screaming and throwing beer bottles at the television. Now I’m $600 in the hole this month for a new HD flatscreen television…
Conclusions
Overall I was very happy with how badly McCain did and how well Obama capitalized on it. Obama was able to diffuse every single negative attack by McCain, and was also able to promote his own ideas as superior. All McCain could do was tear his opponent’s arguments down without any evidence (only the promise of evidence to come, which never comes) to back up his statements. Post-debate snap polls were right behind Obama on who made a better impression to the American people:
I saw on CNN after the debate that if states go for whom they are polling in the Electoral College, John McCain has already lost. See for yourself:
To sum up, things could not really be going any better for Barack Obama after this third Presidential Debate. John McCain is against the ropes in every state that matters and Barack Obama is still gaining steam in many of them. We may see a Democratic victory in this Presidential Election greater than any since the 60’s.
I mean, who can blame all these people for voting Obama? Think of the alternative: a McCain White House which becomes a Palin White House within three months after McCain succumbs to a fatal heart attack during a meeting with heads of state. Just imagine it…
P.S. You should really try to find the deer and shoot it in the palinaspresident.us link. Only then can you be a true flash game zen master…
Conclusions: Epilogue: Postscript: Outro
To sum up summing up, I found myself passed out in a dumpster somewhere across town the morning after the debate. I must have blacked out for about three to six hours. But what would you expect after shooting a lot of heroin into your eyeballs?* And how could you blame me for doing that after I’d spent ninety minutes of my life I’ll never get back looking into John McCain’s beady old eyes and seeing three letters: an D, an O and an A.
*Not actually true, Big Brother.
Further Proof that McCain/Palin Supporters are Retarded…
If you’re reading this and you support John McCain and Sarah Palin, please give me the pleasure of being the first to tell you that you are mentally retarded.
Yes, you, not-so-dear not-so-constant reader.
Do you realize that the people in the video below are on your side? Do you realize that you are with them?
Do you ever wonder why educated people overwhelmingly vote Democratic? Yes, that’s right. About 50% of people who identify themselves as liberal are college graduates, while only about 30% of social conservatives are college graduates. Liberals also boast the fewest high school dropouts (only 2%).
Some statistics on voting tendencies by level of education not enough to convince you? Is your nose so far up McCain’s asshole that you can’t see the facts all around you? Well how about this…?
Conservatives score lower on I.Q. tests as well. Here is a chart which contains all fifty states, the states’ average I.Q. scores, average income and which way they went in the 2004 Presidential Election (for those conservatives out there who are too stupid to know the official color of your political party, the red states voted Republican):
Average IQ Average Income '04 Electoral Result (1) Connecticut..................113 $26,979 Kerry (2) Massachusetts................111 $24,059 Kerry (3) New Jersey...................111 $26,457 Kerry (4) New York.....................109 $23,534 Kerry (5) Rhode Island.................107 $20,299 Kerry (6) Hawaii.......................106 $21,218 Kerry (7) Maryland.....................105 $22,974 Kerry (8) New Hampshire................105 $22,934 Kerry (9) Illinois.....................104 $21,608 Kerry (10) Delaware....................103 $21,451 Kerry (11) Minnesota...................102 $20,049 Kerry (12) Vermont.....................102 $18,834 Kerry (13) Washington..................102 $20,398 Kerry (14) California..................101 $21,278 Kerry (15) Pennsylvania................101 $20,253 Kerry (16) Maine.......................100 $18,226 Kerry (17) Wisconsin...................100 $18,727 Kerry (18) Virginia....................100 $20,629 Bush (19) Iowa.........................99 $18,287 Kerry (20) Oregon.......................99 $18,202 Kerry (21) Colorado.....................99 $20,124 Bush (22) Michigan.....................99 $19,508 Bush (23) Nevada.......................99 $20,266 Bush (24) Ohio.........................99 $18,624 Bush (25) Alaska.......................98 $21,603 Bush (26) Florida......................98 $19,397 Bush (27) Missouri.....................98 $18,835 Bush (28) Kansas.......................96 $19,376 Bush (29) Nebraska.....................95 $19,084 Bush (30) Arizona......................94 $17,119 Bush (31) Indiana......................94 $18,043 Bush (32) Tennessee....................94 $17,341 Bush (33) North Carolina...............93 $17,667 Bush (34) West Virginia................93 $15,065 Bush (35) Arkansas.....................92 $15,439 Bush (36) Georgia......................92 $18,130 Bush (37) Kentucky.....................92 $16,534 Bush (38) New Mexico...................92 $15,353 Bush (39) North Dakota.................92 $16,854 Bush (40) Texas........................92 $17,892 Bush (41) Alabama......................90 $16,220 Bush (42) Louisiana....................90 $15,712 Bush (43) Montana......................90 $16,062 Bush (44) Oklahoma.....................90 $16,198 Bush (45) South Dakota.................90 $16,558 Bush (46) South Carolina...............89 $15,989 Bush (47) Wyoming......................89 $17,423 Bush (48) Idaho........................87 $16,067 Bush (49) Utah.........................87 $15,325 Bush (50) Mississippi..................85 $14,088 Bush Bush..... IQ: 91 Kerry.... IQ: 128 * Borderline mental retardation is considered 75-85.
I think we should all take a moment to congratulate the good citizens of Mississippi, whose average I.Q. score is legally classified as borderline mental retardation.
Some of you fucking people might say, “So what, Mr. Herrick? We may be more dumber than you, but we still won the last election!”
Well, to you people I would say, “Fuck off. You’re not going to win this one because the average American is getting smarter and more educated, contrary to popular belief.” Yes, that’s right, not-so-dear conservative reader; the U.S. population is becoming smarter and more educated! The average I.Q. of the common U.S. citizen is rising slowly over time, as is the percentage of people with a college education in this country (about 30% these days, and climbing steadily).
So fuck off and die, McCain/Palin supporters! Your time is nearly over anyway… You might as well go out on the front lawn and eat your gun. Soon us terrorist liberals will be in control…
The 2008 Vice Presidential Debate: Holy Shit, Sarah Palin is a Fucking Idiot!
I mean, seriously. Did she answer even half of the questions she was asked? I didn’t know why she was talking about almost anything she was talking about. Who was she convincing? I mean, according to a CNN post-debate poll I just saw, 51% of viewers thought Joe Biden did a better job and only 36% said Sarah Palin did. Who does Sarah Palin think she’s fooling? If McCain gets into office and kicks the bucket, we’re all doomed! DOOMED!!! Ask yourself if you’re that scared of Joe Biden taking over after a terrible tragedy. Then vote. Dammit. Don’t let Sarah Palin flaunt her anal beads (pictured) all over the United States for the next four to eight years!
But guess what: Sarah Palin – if McCain fails to get elected – will have a splendid music career to fall back on. Check out this clip of her singing in a crappy Christian group called “The Wasilla Singers” (she’s on the far left, ironically):
The First Presidential Debate, 2008: What You Don’t Seem to Understand…
I feel the need to come out of what must seem like retirement to say something on The New Apocalypse about the first Presidential Debate of 2008 (full video below). I can’t fucking believe how many people are saying this debate was a draw or actually ended in favor of John McCain. Are you serious?
I actually watched some Republican asshole (a guest on a CNN panel at the conclusion of the debate) say that he thought McCain held his own and Barack Obama was – I quote – “On the defensive throughout the debate.” This same dick head moron said – again, I quote – “I think John McCain’s numbers will go up one or two points in the polls.”
Let me ask you, dear Constant Reader… did you watch the debate? If you did, please tell me… do you honestly think there was any question as to who came out ahead? Do you really think John McCain argued his points fairly and accurately? He was caught in outright lies more than ten times by Obama and Obama called the motherfucker on it point-blank. McCain avoided answering nearly every question that was posed to him directly, instead skirting around the central issues, while Obama answered every question succinctly and completely with multiple specific points of support.
Not convinced? Let’s talk about body language: McCain never looked Obama in the eyes throughout the entire debate, while Obama had no trouble facing McCain directly with his accusations (probably because they were all accurate and fair). Obama also had the balls to look the American People in the eye while he was speaking to them; Obama looked at the camera when he was speaking to the American people. McCain could only talk about the American People in the third person rather than the second, as if there weren’t voters in the audience of the debate or watching at home. How can you watch that, dear Constant Reader, and then say McCain is actually in touch with the public?
A friend of mine (author of Historical Rockuments; check his stuff out, dear Constant Reader) said he thought Obama did well but didn’t strike hard enough and brutally enough when McCain’s defenses were down while the candidates debated the economy and national defense. I respectfully disagree. I think Obama’s calm refutation of McCain’s outrageous lies and accusations were just what the situation called for. If Obama had resorted to blunt and visceral attacks, he would have been sinking to McCain’s level. That was just what McCain wanted when he kept baiting Obama with cheap childish teasing tactics like saying, “What Senator Obama doesn’t seem to understand is…” over and over and over. The whole reason Obama appeals to so many people and has throughout the Primary season and the General Election so far is that he walks a higher road than John McCain, who apparently has no reservations about telling bald faced lies to the American general public.
McCain even managed to make a fool of himself by saying that North Koreans are shorter than South Koreans because they are so oppressed, which had nothing to do with anything and is patently unproven. While it is true that North Koreans are shorter than South Koreans on average, how the hell would McCain know scientifically if it had anything to do with their being oppressed? And I would like to join many others in asking why McCain smiled so warmly while making the comment about North Koreans being so short. Does he think its funny that the little almond-eyed people are so tiny? What the fuck is up with McCain anyway?
Besides, the proof of Barack Obama’s victory in the first Presidential Debate lay in the polls: post debate polls by CNN and CBS News show that the American People believe Obama did better than McCain in the debate. Of adults who viewed the debate surveyed by CNN, 51% said they thought Obama did better, while only 38% believed McCain had the upper hand. CBS News did a poll of voters who were undcided entering the first Presidential Debate. Of those undecided voters surveyed, 39% said Obama won the debate and only 24% thought McCain had won. You do the math.
No matter how many Republican pundits say McCain held his own or even out-debated Obama, I take comfort in the fact that there are enough non-retarded Americans out there to show their approval of Obama and reject McCain’s tired old attack strategies. I say “enough” meaning enough to get Obama elected in a couple months, not to stop the world exploding before the next century ends. I don’t want you to think I’m going soft or anything. The human race is still doomed.
But you don’t have to take my word for it, as Geordi says in Reading Rainbow. Take a look at this:
Further Proof that Jesse Jackson is Retarded
Way to go, Jesse. Thanks for being the crazy black counterpart to Pat Robertson. Democrats would look way too good without you.
That is all.
Upton Charles
H.J. Herrick
The New Apocalypse 
A New Chapter
Greetings. I am Upton, the new writer here at The New Apocalypse. I’d like to thank Mr. Herrick for his introduction in the previous post.
As was mentioned by Herrick, we met at what was, at the time, the biggest dive bar in New York City. It was also one of the few places where you could get a drink for any price close to reasonable. It was a haunt of mine mostly for the cheap drink and good people watching. The place was roughly the size of a live-in trailer and about as luxurious. The clientele generally consisted of punk rock kids and seasoned drunkards. Most of the Williamsburg hipsters stayed away from the place, though it was the bar where the Yeah Yeah Yeahs formed.
I was drinking a Corona out of a bottle (one of the two beers served there) and heard some guy in an ragged blazer ranting on about Wall Street and the collapse of the housing market (Note: This was back in late 2007). Most people were ignoring him in that way that New Yorkers do. I was a transplant in the city and could tell that he was, too. The city must have been taking a toll on him, I thought. Why else would he stumble in here?
We got to talking and drinking and found we had a lot in common. A general distaste of most things (especially in the Bush II years) bonded us. I was a nice, warming thing to meet someone like him a city that was both literally and figuratively cold.
We shared a joint outside after last call and Herrick mentioned that he was starting a blog. Good God, not another one of those, I thought. I was less warm to the idea as I was a writer for print and, like many at the time, I saw blogs as an enemy rather than a future. But I wished him the best in his efforts. I stumbled back north to the L-line, and then home. I never really expected to see Herrick again.
But here I am, broke as hell living in Oregon. It isn’t where I thought I would be, but there are worse things. Things have changed a bit: The Mars Bar closed down, we have a new (er) president, work is harder to find, the garbage island in the Pacific is bigger every day. I recently went to a dive bar off Broadway called The Half Time that boasts $1.75 tallboys of PBR. I’d found a new home.
And who was in the bar but that crazy bastard Herrick! We started talking a bit more and he told me once again about his blog. I’ve become more open to the idea, so I agreed to come on board. Why not? It’s not like I’m getting paid to do anything else…
So I’ll be joining you here for a while. It should be a blast.
December 15, 2011 | Categories: Commentary, Humor, Opinion, Politics | Tags: Dive Bars, Drinking, George W. Bush, H.J. Herrick, Hipsters, New York City, The Mars Bar, Wall Street, Yeah Yeah Yeahs | Leave a comment