Pepper Spray Cop

After the pepper spraying event at UC Davis, Pepper Spray Cop has been appearing lately in classic paintings. Lest we forget, he made his first appearance back during the Bush administration. Of course, back then all he did was stand around with his homeys on iconic street corners looking menacing, but it was enough to scare the bejesus out of Democrats who feared Glorious Leader was only days away from ushering in a police state.

Who could have knowed it would be President Hopen Change who would hold the door open for the jackbooted thugs.

Mr. Conspiracy Wonders

The (swine flu) vaccine recall is the second this month caused by declining potency and comes as public health officials urge millions of Americans to get vaccinated against swine flu. - link

Mr. Conspiracy wonders, what is this lack of potency of which they speak? Perhaps it is the lack of a massive epidemic, which was supposed to be delivered via the vaccine. They're wondering what went wrong, why aren't more innoculated people dying, why is the most dangerous epidemic evah winding down just when flu season is shifting into high gear?

Hopefully Governor 'The Body' Ventura will get to the bottom of this mystery. Are you of "The Body?"

Davy Jones' Bank

Hey kids, it's economic metaphor time again!

If you're captain of a sinking ship that doesn't have enough lifeboats for everybody on board, you basically have two options.

Option 1: Declare women and children first and get them off the ship. Of course, to accomplish this, you must first consign yourself to an agonizing descent to the crushing black depths of Davy Jones' Locker. This is what leaders used to do, back in the day - sacrifice themselves for the good of others, unless they were, you know, the president of the shipping line, then they'd dress up in women's clothes and sneak aboard a lifeboat.

Option 2: Tell only your friends and business partners that the ship is going down and quietly lower the lifeboats in order to avoid a stampede. Meanwhile, you pretend the listing decks are only temporary and hope the ship will stay afloat long enough for your pals to float away. Then you and a couple of mates launch the captain's yacht and laugh at all the suckers clinging to the rail as the ship slides beneath the waves.

Clearly, we're in option 2 territory now. There's just one problem - all the other ships are sinking, too. Nobody to come to your rescue. Now you're in the middle of a cold dark sea a thousand miles from shore with nothing to eat but your fellow survivors.

Bon voyage! Let's refloat the bubble.

Do Not Use!

Another way of saying this (and this) is:

If we can just replace his bad brain with a good brain, the monster will be as right as rain and we can all go back to our jobs flipping houses.

I'm with Doctors Krugman and Atrios. Dr. Banksterstein put an abnormal brain in a seven foot tall, 800 pound gorilla of an economy and now the only honest solution is to shoot it in the head, not pay its creators to dance with it.

The Emperor and the Ferryman

The emperor of China had grown weary of his spring palace and his spring concubines. He decided to travel to his summer palace in the north. Though spring was still young, he set out with his slaves and his eunuchs, his ministers and his most trusted guards, and an army of servants to see to his every need upon the road.

Soon he found his way blocked by a raging river. In previous years, the river was low enough to ride across on horseback, but that had been during summer. Now the river was swollen out of its banks, the current swift and powerful, churning and violent with foam, and there were great whirlpools in which dragons cavorted.


As he sat and looked at the raging river, the emperor noticed two men sitting in a ferry boat in a still pool at the water's edge. One was an old ferryman, the other a handsome young nobleman, and they were playing a game of Mah Jongg on the bare boards of the ferry's deck, there at the very edge of the flood.

The emperor rode down to them with his retinue behind him, many thousands strong. Seeing him, the nobleman sank to his knees and pounded his head upon the deck, but the old ferryman only stared at his tiles.

"Old man, take me across the river," the emperor commanded.

The old man looked at the emperor, then he looked at the river. "I will take you across when the flood has passed," he said, and he returned to his game.

"Guards!" the emperor shouted. "Kill this impertinent fool!"

His guards rushed down to the ferry and bending the old man over his knees, they lopped off his head with one stroke of a sword.

Now the emperor turned to the nobleman. He had never seen this man before, but there were many nobles in his empire and he could not be expected to know them all. "Young man," he said. "Do you have servants who can take me across the river?"

"Oh most excellent and wise emperor of heaven," the young man said, "I am forever your servant, for you have rescued me from the vile magician who held me captive. Now that I am free, I may reveal myself to you." And so saying, he became a dragon, huge and majestic. In fact, he was the king of the dragons of that river.

"If it pleases his sublime majesty, I shall take the emperor across the river upon my back," the dragon said as he bowed.

Now, the emperor knew better than to climb upon the back of a strange dragon, for he was familiar with the old stories, though he did not understand many of them. But he had once heard the story of the serpent and the donkey.

The serpent had promised the wary donkey that if he would carry him across the river, he would not bite him. So the donkey agreed, but as they reached the deepest and swiftest part of the river, the serpent bit the donkey on the neck. The donkey said, why did you bite me? I will die and you will drown. To which the serpent replied, I am a serpent. It is my nature.

So the emperor said, "It will be enough to ride the ferry, if you know a ferryman."

The dragon became the handsome young nobleman once more. "If it pleases his benevolent majesty, I shall serve as his ferryman." And he bowed.

So the emperor went on board in the company of his most trusted guards and ministers. The nobleman took up the pole and prepared to push off, but the remaining members of the emperor's retinue cried out in their dismay and terror, "Lord! Do not leave us here on the edge of the flood, for we are afraid!"

"If it pleases his circumspect majesty, I shall summon an army of 10,000 demons to carry his servants safely across the flood," the dragon noble said.

The emperor nodded his head, and the demons appeared, and were it not for their lord's tranquil demeanor, his servants would have cast themselves in the river in their fear. But the demons lifted the slaves and eunuchs, ministers and servants ,and flapping their wings they began to fly across the flood, so they could be there to greet the emperor when he arrived on the other side. Meanwhile, the dragon noble pushed off and soon the ferry was gliding across the raging river as though it were a still pond in the emperor's winter palace garden.

The emperor thought, perhaps it is not such a bad thing to have a dragon king as a servant. He said, "You have proved yourself trusty and true. Let it not be said that the emperor fails to reward those who serve him well. Whatever you ask of me, I shall give it."

The dragon nobleman thought for a moment, then said, "Three hundredth's part of the revenues of the empire."

The ministers gasped and the guards drew their swords, but the emperor stayed their hands. The dragon's impertinence amazed him, but he was curious to see how far down the path of destruction his draconic greed and his pride would tempt him. "For how many years would you demand this tribute?" the emperor asked.

"Only for as long as it takes to cross the river," the dragon king said with a bow. And the ministers smiled and the guards put away their swords, and the emperor laughed long and loud.

"You shall have it!" he commanded.

At these words, the ferry began to sink, and the waves of the river tossed it about so violently that all the guards and all the ministers were thrown into the water. The guards, in their armor, sank with a gurgle, and the ministers with their pockets full of gold and jewels sank with a gulp. High above, the demons released the emperor's slaves and eunuchs, lesser ministers and servants, and they fell screaming into the river, like a torrent of silken rain. The dragon lord leaped into the water, and he became a dragon and swam away, crying to his dragons to go and feast upon the dead. And the waves washed over the ferry and slowly it sank as it spun upon the flood.

The emperor looked up and behold! he saw the old ferryman walking toward him across the water. The old man was carrying his head in the crook of his arm. The emperor cried out, "Master! Save me!"

The old man set his head on his neck, then reclined upon the water next to the sinking ferry as though he were resting upon a couch after a day of weary labor. "Every spring during the floods, hundreds of your subjects drown trying to cross this river. Yet not far from here, there is a place where a man of skill and determination could build a bridge, and so spare them the terror of the spring floods."

"Master, save me and I will build the bridge!" the emperor cried as the ferry sank.

"Half your army and your engineers you sent to conquer the western desert. The other half you sent north to build a wall a hundred feet high and a thousand miles long to protect your summer palace from a few tribes of nomads. Who will build the bridge?"

"Master, save me and I will recall the army and the engineers!" the emperor cried as the ferry sank.

"You have squandered the empire's treasure on wine, concubines and palaces, and your ministers are corrupt. They take for themselves nine-tenths of what is collected to maintain the empire and live upon the fat of the land like gods, while the people starve or are murdered by highwaymen. Yet like a child to his father, they do as their lord teaches and allows, even to their own destruction and the destruction of the empire your fathers built."

"Master, you are wise. Save me and I will make you emperor of all China," the emperor cried. And he sank beneath the waves, dragged to his destruction by the rings on his fingers and the weight of his sodden robes.

Now alone upon the river, the old ferryman stood up, and at a wave of his hand the ferry rose beneath his feet. The emperor lay upon the deck, half-drowned and vomiting, with snakes in his sleeves and weeds in his beard. The old man poled the ferry back to the shore, and when he had moored his craft safely to a rock, he sat down and laid out his Mah Jongg tiles.

When the emperor had recovered, he sat up and looked at the ferryman with great wonder and awe. He bowed his head to the deck and said, "Master, you are now emperor. Command me."

The generals of the army were recalled from the western provinces and the northern wall to search for the emperor. Many months later, they found him sitting on the ferry playing Mah Jongg with the old ferryman. His fine robes hung in tatters from his shoulders and his hair clung to his face, but he smiled as he played, smiled as he had never smiled at his riches or his concubines. At the generals' command, both armies fell to their knees with a shout of joy so great it shook the hills. Slowly, the emperor looked up from his game.

"My lord, command me!" the western general cried.

The emperor said, "Not far from here, there is a place where a bridge may be built across the river. Please build it, so I may cross."

Won't Somebody Please Think of the Cartoonists?!?

First they came for the cartoonists, and I said nothing, because I can't draw. But neither can they. That isn't the point. The point is that during these times of economic crisis, independent news weeklies, especially those owned by huge corporations like Village Voice Media, which kind of contradicts that whole independent part, because if they were truly independent, they could decide for themselves whether or not they want to try to ride out these tough times by giving their readers even less reason to pick up a copy of their news weekly.

Anyway, support your cartoonists in your local paper, because if you don't speak up for them, who will?

Where's the Door?

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you're flush pride keeps you

from the pawn shops and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because
you are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you

e e cummings

He is the Kwisatz Haderat

An ancient prophecy speaks of a time of human tribulation in which a mouse, named Muad'dib, will appear and the human scourge will be wiped off the planet. Mice will become the dominant species, ushering in a new golden age of enlightenment and cheese.

That day has come.

At first we knew him only by his poo, and even then we did not believe. It can't be mouse poo, we said, because no normal mouse could get on top of the microwave. And even if he could, why would he climb up there just to poo and leave the pie untouched?

Then one day we found a bag of cookies on the floor. The bag was much too large and heavy for a normal mouse to move. Eppur si muove! And why would he nibble a hole through the bag, yet leave the cookies untouched?

And still we found poo. Vast quantities of poo. Striking here, dropping poo there, he was like a ghost. He could not be seen but by the destruction he wrought with his copious poo. He taunted us with his scratchings and nibblings in the walls. Spice production ground to a halt.

We retaliated, to no avail. He has survived a massive dose of poison. Now we find the blue dye of poison in his poo. He managed to evade our primitive traps, licking them clean of peanut butter, so we bought better traps from the engineers of IX. Their newest traps are devilishly clever, sensitive to the touch of so much as a butterfly, yet he manages to lick them clean and escape unharmed, the trap empty and unsprung.

Slowly we came to realize, this is no ordinary mouse. This is the prophesized one, the Kwisatz Haderat. The Mouse that can be everywhere at once. The hegemony of man is at an end. Weep, ye monkeys, for Muad'dib has come!

However, let him beware, for the way of Jihad is a trap, even for the Kwisatz Haderat.

Wall Street - The New Moria

I wonder what fresh new balrogs the greedy dwarves of finance will loose upon the economic markets today.

They delved too deep.

From the Mouths of Babes

This morning, as my oldest son huddled in front the bathroom heater, he made the following observation:

"I'm cold. When I become a daddy like you, I'll be warm."

aside - I serve as a reliable source of heat on cold mornings. Even our cat, God rest his soul, used to put his cold feet on me to warm them up.

He continued, "When daddies get married, they get warm, but when mommies get married, they stay cold."

Truer words were never spoken, my son.

Modern Ship Building

"I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. Modern ship building has gone beyond that." - Captain Smith, Commander of the Titanic

Bad housing/economic news here, here and here.

Our house is currently on the market. If you can call it a market. More like a garage sale. We couldn't have picked a worse time since before we were in high school to try to move. Funny little world, innit?

So earlier this week, our realtor sent me the latest data on comparable home sales in our neighborhood.

Since July, there have been twelve houses sold. Of the those, nine were foreclosures and one was a foreclosure house flip that sold for $20K under market value.

I have nothing more to say about this, except that it blows donkey.

on second thought

I do have something more to say. The reason we want to move is so we can get our kids into a good school district.

Which begs the question, why does where you live determine whether or not you get to go to a good school? The accident of a child's birth should not, in any kind of just world, condemn that child to ignorance and poverty.

What kind of fucked up world do we live in where if you live on this street, you can attend a decent school, but if you live one street over, that's just too bad, so sad, cry me a river. Tell your parents to get off their asses and get a real job and maybe they can afford to move to a better neighborhood.

We happen to be able to afford to move to a better neighborhood. Because of the shitty housing market, we're stuck here, which means our kids are stuck going to subpar schools. And these schools aren't even that bad - we just want better for our kids. If we lived a few miles to the northwest, they'd be stuck in elementary prison.

America is the wealthiest nation in the world. So why don't all American kids have good schools to go to? Why, in God's holy name, does their ZIP Code or for that matter which side of the street they live on determine the quality of their school?

Life isn't fair. I'm a realist. And I know this complaint isn't new or even particularly original. But Good God, people, this is as fundamental as it gets. If we lived in a world in which the government went out and speared to death all the children in a particular ZIP Code, we'd never ever let that action stand. So why is it ok to allow these kids to die slowly over the course of fifty or sixty years of poverty and ignorance brought about by the accident of where they were born? Wouldn't it just be simpler, and less expensive, to kill all the first born of the poor? We would achieve the same results. What matter the day they enter the grave, they're doomed the day they're born.

Good schools for every child is not a fundamental right, but it should be. It has to be, if this country is to survive. How much longer can we last as a nation if only a small percentage of our population is able to get a decent education? We seem to be blind to the icebergs in our path. We think we're too strong a nation to founder, but we're foundering now.

And when we do go down, rest assured, the people who brought us here will be the first off the boat.

"What do you think I am? Do you believe that I'm the sort that would have left that ship as long as there were any women and children on board? That's the thing that hurts, and it hurts all the more because it is so false and baseless. I have searched my mind with deepest care, I have thought long over each single incident that I could recall of that wreck. I'm sure that nothing wrong was done; that I did nothing that I should not have done. My conscience is clear and I have not been a lenient judge of my own acts." -J. Bruce Ismay, Director of the White Star Line, and survivor of the Titanic

Dumbledore's Army

Now that Dumbledore is officially out as a gay man, surely this just goes to prove that all those people who were against him and Harry Potter, people like Jerry Falwell, Bill O'Reilly, and Lord Voldemort, were justified in their hatred of this man and his very gay crusade to turn all the little witches and wizards into an army of homosexual tolerance crusaders of paganowiccaSatanifascism.

Dumbledore made the kids use wands, after all - that should have been a dead giveaway, along with all the subliminal messages hidden in Rowling's seven guides... er, books. Let's see how many we can find:

"The wand chooses the wizard." Wow, this is a pretty obvious reference to homosexuality, laying the foundation in young minds for the false lie that a person is born gay. At the same time, it shows the power of "the wand," especially a large, black, turgid wand with a phoenix feather core, to convert an otherwise straight man into a raging homowizard.

Cornelius Fudge? Oh, come on! This name screams gay. And he was Minister of Magic! That's like the president or something.

Quidditch is a game based on soccer (only slightly less gay than gymnastics), in which boys and girls compete as equals (as if) as: Chasers (chasing tail) who chase a quaffle (to swallow!); Beaters (!!) who whack mindlessly violent balls(!!!) called Bludgers (anti-man) with penis-shaped bats; a Seeker (code for gay temptor of straight men) who tries to catch a Golden Snitch (a spy trying to discover the real motives and methods of the gay agenda, someone like Rev. Ted Haggard or Sen. Larry Craig). When the Snitch is caught, the game is over!

Speaking of Quidditch, what kind of man rides a broom? A gay man, of course. Real wizards ride gas-powered leaf blowers.

I'm sure you can think of others. There's bound to be tons. Just be careful in your research. If you read these books too closely, you're liable to find yourself having odd thoughts and desires about your beer drinking buddies. Normally, it is perfectly safe to have odd thoughts and desires about other men, but these books will also have conditioned you to accept them as normal and fill you with an irresistable desire to act upon them, which you MUST NOT DO openly. REMEMBER, if you gaze too deeply into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you and turns you gay as a smurf.