Obligatory Friday Sex Post

Halloween Edition:



And, of course:



Blessed Samhain, all you lovely freaks!

The Raiders Narfle the Garthog

I'm an Oakland Raiders fan, and have been for many, many years.

Which means I've had to endure what passes for wit among my coworkers (who were gleeful Buccaneers fans until they started going south) since Oakland lost the Super Bowl back in 2002. True for telling, Oakland made it easy for a lot of jokes with their floundering for the past seven years.

A bunch of coaching changes guaranteed that the players would never have any consistent schemes to work from, and Big Al Davis made some poor picks in the draft. The worst pick, however, was in selecting JaMarcus Russell from LSU.

Well, there were signs of a turnaround after last year's debacle, which saw Oakland finish up 5-11 (a better record than Tampa's 3-13, mind you, but you'll never hear it). For starters, we got rid of Russell, whose play was so bad that he's still unemployed almost halfway through the 2010 season. Second, the Raiders made all the right picks in the draft and traded for Jason Campbell from the Redskins. But the biggest sign, in my opinion, was the retention of Tom Cable as head coach.

Cable's made a few dumb moves, but he's defense-minded, and a strong defensive squad is the foundation on which you build Super Bowl teams.

Oakland has shown flashes of growth into something productive (when they beat San Diego in Oakland) but this usually gets counterbalanced by something stupid (like losing to the 0-5 San Francisco 49ers).

Now, Oakland's in the AFC West. As a Raiders fan, I am required to actively despise all the other AFC West teams, dislike all other AFC franchises, and ignore the NFC altogether. I reserve real hatred for the Miami Fucking Dolphins, though.

We beat the Chargers, then lost to the 49ers. That brought us to this week, where the Raiders went to Invesco Field to play the Denver Broncos.

The Broncos were crushed and humiliated by the score of 59 to 14. The Raiders started strong and by the fourth quarter had backup QB Kyle Boller in. Oakland has never scored more than 52 points in their entire history, so this was a milestone.

Now we see if they can build off that, and start a winning streak by beating Seattle at home next week. Kansas City looms the week after that, but for the first time in a while I genuinely feel good about the Raiders' future.

Juan Williams

Or "How to Spot A Terrorist."

Juan Williams is one of those people fond of speaking out of both sides of his mouth. In addition to his work on National Public Radio (that supposedly well-known bastion of liberalism), he carries water and parrots talking points diametrically opposed to anything smacking of good sense. In other words, he spent his off days on Fox.

No longer.

Williams got himself canned from NPR for blathering that he feels "nervous" when he sees a Muslim wearing distinctive garb on the same airplane he's riding in. Do I agree with NPR's decision? No; Williams can talk about whatever makes him nervous (I get nervous when in airplanes too, but that's because I don't like to fly).

But if NPR shitcanned Williams for being an idiot on Fox, they should have cut Mara Liasson off years ago. He had a First Amendment right to say what he pleased, provided it stayed within the bounds of good taste and wasn't inflammatory. If he had said, "You know, I get nervous when I see a sand ni**er wearing a towel on his head gibbering about Allah on my airplane," NPR would have been justified in firing his sorry ass.

The real issue here is Williams' stupidity. If you look at the Maine airport video from 9/11, you'll see that Mohammed Atta and the other eighteen hijackers were dressed just like you and me. In other words, "normal" for the place and culture they were in. If they had shown up at Logan and JFK dressed in thodes with keffiyehs on their heads it would have been a dead giveaway, wouldn't it?

The 9/11 hijackers blended in, Juan my boy. That's how they managed to get aboard the planes they later commandeered and flew into their targets. Simple observation would tell even the dullest person that this is simple camouflage - you don't see an undercover cop wearing a badge, do you? You don't see Rich Iott on the campaign trail dressed in his Waffen-SS playset.

There's only one close-to-justifiable reason for NPR's action, Juan.

NPR is for people who think critically and have a strong grounding in reality. Which means, of course, you were bound to leave at some point.

In Our "Well, Duh" Department

Harmeen Jones is a thirty-two year old man who makes his living as a TV news technician. He is also an African-American, a fact that shall figure prominently in the following narrative.

Needing employment (and who doesn't?), he started working part-time for a major TV network in 2005, and began working full-time in 2007.

But no longer.

Mr. Jones alleges in a recent $5 million lawsuit that he endured racist and sexist and offensive comments during his years on the job, and got fired from his job after he complained that a coworker was a racist.

His employer?

FOX News, at their hindquarters in New York City.

Mr. Jones should have known way back in 2005 that statements like "This is what happens when you mess with white people's health care" are pretty much the norm there, and if they'll let Falafel Boy Bill O'Reilly flourish there, it's pretty much open season.

T. Rex on the Menu? I'll take mine medium rare, please.

A Yale University professor and his colleagues have published a study where they theorize that Tyrannosaurus rex, one of the Cretaceous Period's top predators, sometimes predated upon each other.

In short, cannibals.

Which, while completely and utterly obvious to me, did bring this to mind:

"Re-educate?" Who's the Goddamned Marxist Now?

I was reading, as is my wont, and I ran across this little snippet of bovine fecal material belched from the gaping maw of Ron Johnson, the GOP candidate for Senate from Wisconsin (courtesy Politico):

Instead, he committed himself to a "re-education of America" and talked about how expectations of government help are spinning wildly out of control, creating “a culture of dependency" that has little appreciation for what it takes for individuals and businesses to thrive.

"Re-education?"

Excuse me!?

What? The? Fuck?

If a Democrat or, Gods forbid, a LIBERAL had said that word, every news organization and pundit in the Chattering Class from one coast to the other would be screeching bloody murder. "Re-education," dear readers, harks back to the worst nightmares of Americans in the Red-baiting McCarthy Era. Dark, forbidding tales of camps little better than gulags where people were taken to be "re-educated," only to never be seen or heard of again.

The horrible thing is this pustule actually has a chance of beating incumbent Russ Feingold on November 2nd.

Ron Johnson is just one of a thundering herd of disgusting dregs vomited out of the deepest recesses of the American Id - not the Silent Majority, but the craziest nest of assholes you'll ever hope to find:

Christine O'Donnell, whose every utterance makes one yearn for the intelligence of Sarah Palin;

Marco Rubio, who crippled Florida's economy and now wants to do the same to America;

Sharron Angle, who thinks that helping bring jobs to Nevada is not her job and wants to destroy what's left of the social safety net.

All symptoms, of a hideous disease.

Bwahahahaha!

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates

Should shut the fuck up.

For the past seventeen years or so, America's armed forces have had a policy popularly known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" or DADT. DADT basically says that if you're gay you can join the military so long as you don't tell anyone. In exchange for this silence, your superiors aren't supposed to ask.

They will anyway, even to the point of intercepting mail and recording phone calls.

Thousands of Americans have been dismissed from the armed forces since 1993, for the simple reason that they weren't straight - not that they couldn't shoot straight.

Recently a Federal judge handed down an injunction that effectively abolished DADT for all American servicemembers worldwide.

And that has Bob Gates' panties in a wad.

See, Gates believes that it's the Congress that should rule on DADT's abolition, and only after the Pentagon completes its much-ballyhooed 'study' into the ramifications of legalizing gays in the military. Of course, Gates is much in the dark about reality, as his use of the words 'action' and 'Congress' in the same sentence blatantly illustrates.

His real babe-in-the-woodsness comes at the point he mentions the Pentagon 'study.'

DADT's been in existence 17 years, Bobby, and that's a good long time for most studies to build up the dataset you require. What is going on here, in my opinion, is that the Pentagon top brass and the bureaucracy in that five-sided Monument to Murphy's Law are going to 'study' the problem for another 17 years - or until a new government comes into power that won't ask them to even think about anything so icky or gross as homosexuals in the military. Other countries may do it, but not the good old God-fearing self-righteous bigoted and homophobic U.S. of A., right?

Wrong. The First Amendment allows people to petition the Congress for a redress of grievances, that is very true, but when Congress balks or drags their feet it is the right of every American to take it to the courts. The rather distressing waffling of the President on this issue makes it doubly certain that DADT will be abolished through judicial action, not legislative.

And Bob Gates can simply shut up and learn to get along, as the token Republican in the Cabinet.

Nietzsche Would Have Loved Limbaugh

A couple days ago, the globulous fraud Rush Limbaugh, the homophobe who had Elton John sing at his wedding (I expect a divorce within a year), slobbered the following into his microphone (hat tip to John Amato at Crooks and Liars, where he listens to Rush so you don't have to):

"... some people are born lazy. Some people are born victims. Some people are just born to be slaves. Some people are born to put up with somebody else making every decision for them."

Okay. This is, by the way, what Rush truly believes. He's not an entertainer or rodeo clown like Beck, he's not a fame-whore like Coulter, and he's never held a political post like Dead Fetus (p)Rick Santorum. He's sincere in his beliefs, and makes no bones about what he spews out onto the airwaves he's abused since the early days of Clinton.

Now, while Rush was vomiting on his mike, another story surfaced, about Christian missionaries who espouse a somewhat different view of Christ's message. These are Christian warriors, who aren't afraid to break boards or bricks or (dare I say it? Dare, dare!) heads in the Name-o-Jeezus. No more "love thy neighbor" claptrap, no more "turn the other cheek" bullshit. Beat your enemies to death in the name of the God of Love.

We've seen this before, and that caused me furiously to think.

And Freddy Nietzsche popped up and said "Hi."

You see, Nietzsche espoused what he called a Master Morality, a kind of take-no-prisoners, hardheaded approach. Master Morality, according to Freddy, values pride, strength, and nobility. Of course, there's also the inverse of the Master Morality, the Slave Morality - which values things like kindness, humility and sympathy.

Nietzsche believed, as I'm sure Rush does (though he may only realize it subconsciously), that Christianity is Slave Morality, and the concentration of Christianity on the "feminine" values of humility, kindness, charity and love for one's fellow man had actually served to hold Humanity back, depriving people of the morality that their wills yearn to embrace in order to advance.

Not content to stick to his bed (from which he eventually went mad and died), Freddy took aim at the rising tide of democracy in his era, claiming that it was slavish and weak. He saw Christianity and Democracy as essentially emasculating humanity by making everyone equal - in this case, equally slaves.

Interestingly enough, a cult grew up in A Certain Nation in central Europe called "Positive Christianity." It proposed to make Christianity Nietzschean by purging it of the slavish influences (and surprisingly, Positive Christian doctrine said that these influences were Jewish, imagine that) that had "corrupted" it since the year 800 AD. And, equally interestingly, this sect used the Sun Cross as a symbol.

Now, where have we seen that before?

Oh, yeah ...

Here.

Friends Don't Let Friends Listen to Glenn Beck

Because it can do terrible things to susceptible minds.

There's Something Happening Here

And what is, is actually fairly clear.

The picture below is cropped from a recent issue of The Atlantic, and the little red arrow points to Rich Iott, a Republican who's running for US Congress from Ohio's 9th District. One of Mr. Iott's hobbies is historical re-enactments, and he and a bunch of his buddies enjoy dressing up as members of the Waffen SS 'Wiking' Division.


I have nothing against war re-enactors (apart from a desire to have them use live ammunition on each other - let's be real here, folks!) but dressing up and playing as members of the SS? According to the original Nuremberg War Crimes Trials papers, the Schutzstaffeln or SS was declared to be a criminal organization. Wearing the uniform or possessing memorabilia is a crime punishable by prison time in Germany and Austria.

And THIS wants to be a US Congressman?

It should come as no surprise whatever that Iott's also a darling of the Tea Party set.

And, hey! Here's a fun fact or two to kick off Monday!

The symbol of the SS Division Wiking (which was a 'foreign' division, made up of Danes, Norwegians, Belgians as well as Germans) is this:

This is known as a Sun Wheel or Sun Cross.

It's also a symbol of the ultranationalist, white supremacist Christian Identity movement.

Surprised?