The Religious Sentiments of 3:00 PM on the Friday before a Holiday Week

On Monday all the ordered angels woke
to muddy post-creation throbbing heads,
regretting the beer-winged hook-ups in their beds,
mumbling need some coffee, need a smoke,
when fucking sober Yaweh, thunderous, spoke,
a boom of early-risen pep; he said,
What’s wrong with you? You all look like you’re dead!
and laughed at his immortally funny joke,
But serious, the Lord went on, we must
provide him occupations lest he stray
from righteousness. The angels said, You jerk!
Who wants to labor? Let him play.
Like fathers everywhere the Lord just cussed
beneath his breath; shazam!—created work.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Cop

"Police departments should not be using weapons built for the military on civilian protesters," said Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania "As this case shows, the LRAD cannot be controlled to prevent serious harm to innocent bystanders. Collateral harm to innocents may be justifiable in wartime, but not to quell protesters who overturned a couple of trash dumpsters."

-ACLU report quoted by James Wolcott

Reason number one gazillion and one whyIamnotalibertarian: the conviction that you can keep the cops out of the army's arsenal. Oy ya yoy. The relentless division of the world into gaggles of citizen-subjects and the idea that Brutalizing Their Own People is a category that permits you, whomever you are, to go in there and brutalize them instead and for their own good are theneat corollaries.  Remember the old NRA adage: guns don't kill people, people kill people?  It's true!  But it too has an attendant truth, which is that weapons do not cease to be effective when pointed at the wrong people.  If you concede that sound weapons may exist, may be permitted to exist, then sorry, but you must also accept and understand that they may one day be used against you, just as satellites and drones peer through your curtains as readily as they peer through the curtains of Kabul, just as the Total Information Awareness machine minds read your blog as happily as Vladimir Putin's tumblr.  The agents of state power cannot be prevented from availing themselves of the tools of state power through any application of the clever little fictions called laws.  The law itself is an instrument of state power as surely as guns and nuclear bombs.  You will often hear civil libertarian types say that the police should not act like soldiers.  Why not?  They are.

One Day You're In, und the Next, You're Out

So I am a huge fan of competition-style reality shows and consider them an essential guide to the nature of democracy: a series of characters, each with a particular strength, a distinct character trait, and a dead parent or rare disease to add some struggle to the backstory and make any triumph more emotionally satisfying and complete, participate in a series of staged contests--who can transform the moosemeat into an ice cream; who can turn these old Capri Sun containers into a prom gown--which are ostensibly judged and graded by a panel of experts, and in the end whomever the producers want to win wins.  I think we should mate Bobby Flay with the winner of this year's Rupaul's Drag Race.  If he's freaked out by that, he can just use one of those squirt bottles.  Heidi Klum can be the Dowager Regent until the little fucker comes of age, at which point we'll make him President-for-Life.  Think of it as a Republic-in-Syndication.  Does the USA Network still exist?  It can carry America's Next Top America forever between reruns of Silk Stalkings and the rape version of Law and Order.

The Onion You Are Eating Is Someone Else's Chrysanthemum

Imagine, if you will, that China just announced its plans to put 2,500 troops in Belize.

Wax On, Wax Off

Truly, I don't understand liberals.  I suppose if you believe there is something called journalism, that it is practiced on the teevee, and that it represents some kind of crucial epistemic advancement in the human understanding of its own collective mind-state . . . but fuck, man, getting upset that some politician's spawn got a job on the nightly news is like getting upset that Will Smith's brat got cast in a shitty remake of Karate Kid.