Sky Mall, New Year 2015(A Story Book About Your Child1)

A welcome alternative to napping on

The cold floor or hard cement patio:²

The Giant Display Atomic Wall Clock.³

Breath operates up to 24 hours

In the low mode,⁴ standing safely on the floor.⁵

It hauls you out of bed every morning⁶

Without the requisite frostbite,⁷ makes any

Home feel like it has been transported.⁸

Large animals that cause false signals⁹ turn

Good intentions into lifelong habits.¹⁰

Hold it firmly in place without scratching,¹¹

Emit the finest mist,¹² roll effortlessly

To the curb¹³ your outdoor breathing experience.¹⁴

You know your baby looks good enough to eat,¹⁵

Will claw his way out of your garden plot.¹⁶

Let your little one burn some rubber¹⁷

Dreams of bones circling around his head.¹⁸

Project your life:¹⁹ the next best thing to the womb²⁰

Will make your neighbors and passersby look twice.²¹

Children quickly learn the virtues of life²²

Without soldering, wiring or programming.²³

YEEEE-HA! Your kids will wrangle like true cowboys²⁴

There's no cord to hide,²⁵ no tools required²⁶

Be a hero even when you sleep—²⁷

Brilliant displays of iron nerve²⁸

Illuminate the night with a personal touch.²⁹

NEW! Women need their own signs too,³⁰ anything

With a void becomes a speaker.³¹ What's your passion?³²

Get all your knives sharpened,³³ cut

The cord this winter.³⁴ Your hometown's in pieces!³⁵

Look who the trees are rooting for!³⁶ Consider

A faux tree³³ that repeats anything said

To it back in a cartoonish voice.³⁷ In all

My years as a private detective, I've never

Seen anything like this,³⁸ the faceless watch,³⁹

Reactive surfaces³⁸ (these overworked

Garden friends,²¹ made with a tender verse⁴⁰)

Make a grand statement in a snap.⁴¹

Who needs a doorbell, or even a knocker?⁴²

Who needs a doorbell

                                    or even a knocker?

   - Tojir Tangriev, lyric interlude, 28th Congress of the CPSU

Items advertised, with reference page from Holiday 2014 Sky Mall, and price:

[1] My Adventure Books (17, $19.99-$39.99)

[2] Pet Bed (71, $224.99-$249.99)

[3] The Giant Display Atomic Wall Clock (119, $129.95)

[4] Roolen Breath Ultrasonic Cool Mist Humidifier (61, $129.99)

[5] High-Reach Cleaning Kit (70, $39.99)

[6] Star Trek Projector Clock (45, $59.95)

[7] Suzy Kuzy Beer Mitt (149, $14.95)

[8] The Voice Activated R2-D2 (18, $199.95)

[9] Duty Cycle Probe Alert-2500 (136, $319.99)

[10] Garmin Vivofit Fitness Bracelet (104, $129.99-$169.99)

[11] Quilted Ironing Mat (69, $9.98)

[12] H9 Aroma Therapy Tower Humidifier (70, $299.99 (+$5*))

[13] Two Train Reaction® Luggage Devices (126, $19.99)

[14] RZ Facemask (104, $29.95)

[15] Tortilla Baby Swaddle Blanket (16, $47.99)

[16] "The Zombie of Montclaire Moors"© Statue (41, $99.95 (+$5*))

[17] Battery Operated Ride-On Motorcycle (21, $109.95)

[18] Day Dreamers Puppy (39, $24.99)

[19] Philips Picopix Projector (109, $399.99)

[20] Hushamok Baby Hammock with Stand (59, $599.99 (+$15*))

[21] Skel-E-Gnomette Woman, Skel-E-Gnome Man, Skel-E-Dog (42, $39.95-$54.95)

[22] My Friend Huggles Doll (16, $49.99)

[23] littleBits Deluxe Kit (17, $199.00)

[24] Benny the Jumping Bull (19, $44.99)

[25] Battery-Powered LED Lamp (60, $19.98)

[26] MyLight.me Bed Light (48, $59.99)

[27] Batman One-Piece pajama with Cosplay Hood, Superman Cami Panty Set, etc. (146, $29.99-$49.99)

[28] Aviator Wall Sign (44, $89.95)

[29] Uniqia Personalized Night Light (49, $24.99-$34.99)

[30] Diva Sign, Lady's Lair Sign (139, $24.99)

[31] Mighty Boom Ball (117, $24.99)

[32] Electric Logos (147, $49.95-$59.95)

[33] ClearVision Television Network (4)

[34] Snow Joe® Cordless 18-Inch Snow Blower with Brushless Motor, Rechargeable EcoSharp Li-Ion Battery and Charger (136, $399.99 (+$10*))

[35] Graphic Map Puzzle, Aerial Photo Puzzle (25, $39.95-$49.95)

[36] Player Faces (148, $23.99)

[37] The Talk Back Mimicking Tomcat (18, $39.95)

[38] e-Race for Smartphones (112, $29.99)

[39] The Faceless Watch (118, $99.95)

[40] Pet Tiding Stone (39, $23.99)

[41] 24" Regal Christmas Pre-Lit Urn Filler (10, $59.99)

[42] Doorbell Broken Yell Ding Dong Doormat (137, $19.95)

Infinite Christmas, or, Thirst for Annihilation

 Britons swarming at a traditional Christmas meat market.

  
“Give me Christmas on the moon, or give me death!”
- Socrates, traffic court

“Silver fucking bells!” - Santa Clinton

“Look into the pits of my eyes and see the fires there. Believe me when I tell you, Santa is real, and his hounds go everywhere.” - Democritus, TED by TEDwest

"Ho, ho, ho -- it feels good to laugh again." - Santa Claus, inspecting his kennel

"Meine Damen und Herren, it is the Idea and only the Idea of Christmas that is capable of redeeming this cheerless Prussian gaucherie, this vomitorium of the heart.” - Kant, honorary marshal of Königsberg Christmas Markt

"Servants, bring me my most festive flute!" - Schopenhauer

“Sunglasses in every stocking!” - Putin

“To save Christmas, we must destroy it. The War on Christmas is also its Crusade.” - Hegel, surprise guest on the Glenn Beck Program

“To really live the Christmas spirit in its joyous gratuity one must be Jewish. Otherwise, it’s only another holiday.” - Kierkegaard

“I cannot stand frivolous Christmas tunes that try to domesticate the traumatic rupture of History that is the birth of the Savior. Only Carol of the Bells, in its Slavic barbarism, captures the supreme negating power of Christ.” - Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI to his swarthy man servant, Waffle House, 2:15am, Christmas Day

“The smell of evergreen is absolutely repellent to me. Air that is… unclean!” - Nietzsche, in a brief bout of lucidity, December 1896

“Yo, I was literally a fucking Nazi. Who the fuck cares about Christmas?” - Martin Heidegger

“Justice is fairness, but Christmas is selfishness.” - Rawls, snatching the last cupcake

“The smashing of ornaments is the only Christmas music I want to hear.” - A.J. Ayer, The Great Kids’ Table Mutiny

“Christmas… forever.  That is the dream, gentlemen. And we are going to fucking steal it.” - Plato, orientation speech at McKinsey & Company

“It’s always Christmas somewhere.” - Heraclitus, tending bar in Jakarta, the 1970s

“For Christmas, I want only one thing—the right to live.” - Spinoza

“Christmas is a festival for the lower soul, the day of the snakes.” - Plato

“I am the last sentient being to exist. But why was I programmed to celebrate Christmas?” - OCAMA (Oort Cloud Autonomous Mining Assemblage), 7511 AOCAMA (After Oort Cloud Autonomous Mining Assemblage)

"Everything I do, I do because it's possible." - David Lewis, hitching a million robo-reindeer to his sleigh and aiming it straight at the sun of World 889

“Die in such a way so that your birth will be celebrated for thousands of years.” - Jesus, resume-building workshop

“Christmas promises what it cannot deliver, a fullness of time in place of an emptiness. But you are this emptiness, and you cannot escape yourself. Let us hitch the sleigh and enter the blizzard.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

“It’s not an exaggeration to say everything in history, especially the intrinsic isolation of the bourgeois subject and its pathetic propensity toward curating its surroundings as a source of value, is a forerunner to my unimaginably long vigil, to its undreamt solitude, to this very moment.” - OCAMA, 84,796 AOCAMA

“To make of entropy a mode of active decadence. To shiver with delight as one crumbles into nothingness. Merry Christmas: to me.” - OCAMA, 397,768, 334 AOCAMA

Lifehacks with Dr. Turin Horse

Dr. Horse, hard at work on his dissertation.

Lifehack: Don't go to grad school. This is the first and greatest Lifehack.

Lifehack: Control the means of production and extract the surplus labor value of others.

Lifehack: Talk is cheap, feelings are cheaper, invisible Third World labor is cheapest.

Lifehack: Might – plus "humanitarian intervention" – makes right.

Lifehack: Identify the Crimean Peninsula in your life and just take it.

Lifehack: Socially liberal, fiscally conservative.

Lifehack: Calling yourself "libertarian" makes you a cool Republican.

Lifehack: Calling yourself “liberal” means you can have your cake and eat it too.

Lifehack: The purpose of the liberal arts is to teach the Chinese nouveau riche how to spend their money.

Lifehack: The purpose of history is to provide a theodicy of the present.

Lifehack: The highest form of politics is styling the pattern of your consumption choices.

Lifehack: Like everything but country and rap.

Lifehack: Be dumb in a zeitgeist-appropriate way, and mighty forces will rush to your aid.

Lifehack: Turn every discussion to first principles in order to protect vested interests.

Lifehack: When in doubt, rationalize.

Lifehack: The status quo is the first mover.

Lifehack: Bourgeois feminism, right-wing Deleuzianism, post-racism.

Lifehack: White privilege, patriarchy, habitus, fossil fuels, unrestricted drone warfare.

Lifehack: Guns, religion, waves of topical hysteria.

Lifehack: Fuck the planet.

Lifehack: Global warming is real, but it won't affect you.

Lifehack: Evolutionary psychology isn't real, but that won't affect you.

Lifehack: Viewed from the standpoint of geological time, oceans are enormous mouths that open and close over the course of millenia.

Lifehack: Natura non contristatur.

Lifehack: Reality is violence on every level. Dissimulation of this is just another form of violence.

Lifehack: Violence is just a flimsy metaphor masking the lassitude and inertia at the heart of reality.

Lifehack: Smoking is only the most visible and stylized way in which you are being poisoned by your environment.

Lifehack: Start smoking and never stop.

Lifehack: Hold your joy close, like a knife to your throat.

Lifehack: The copper in a penny is worth more than a penny.

Lifehack: Copper melting in a veterinary crematorium.

Lifehack: The price to gentrify is to criticize gentrification.

Lifehack: The wind will carry you, if you're white.

Lifehack: Test prep culture.

Lifehack: Gamify, medicalize, nostalgize.

Lifehack. You don’t have to wear a uniform to be a cop. You can be a cop in your spare time. You can be a cop to your friends. You can be a cop to your family. You can be a cop to your lover. You can be a cop in your own head. Anyone can be a cop.

Lifehack: New York City is the worst place possible except that all other places are even worse.

Lifehack: Plunge into the everydayness characteristic of Dasein and never look back.

Lifehack: Late at night, animal closeness is good enough.

Lifehack: If you try hard, you can feel the Internet.

Lifehack: Trade time for space, stuff, and symbol. Sardanapalize.

Lifehack: The world is your earbuds.

Lifehack: The world is your comment thread.

Lifehack: The world is your black site.

Lifehack: The world is your coltan mine.

Lifehack: The world is your Kola Superdeep Borehole.

Lifehack: The world is your deep-sea oil-well.

Lifehack: The world is your Carter doctrine.

Lifehack: The world is your combat zone cleared for drone strikes.

Lifehack: Robots can’t commit war crimes.

Lifehack: The world is your ground to stand.

Lifehack: The world is yours to stop and frisk.

Lifehack: The world is your brownstone.

Lifehack: The world is your gingerbread house.

Lifehack: The world is your gallows.

Lifehack: Best is never to be born at all; second best is to die quickly.

Lifehack: Sleeping on your left side wears your heart out quicker.

Lifehack: If you believe your dentist, try sunlight.

Lifehack: Boxed wine.

Lifehack: Functional alcoholism.

Lifehack: Do shut up. The game now is how much infinity we can stack against you.

Lifehack: The aphorism doesn’t matter. Literature and scholarship don’t matter. Words don’t matter. Only these Lifehacks – and David Brooks – matter.

Lifehack. Everyone's a critic, but how many are willing to pick up a gun and become actual cops?

Mayday

1.

At night, the manifestos are rained on – heavy, icy rain –

but since they are adhered to the bridge with wallpaper paste

(thick as a fingernail) or scratched whole (a key, a gun, slow)

they never quite disintigrate. The river freezes, first

from the banks, moving towards the center, until it is covered

with patches, their edges raised like scars from brushing up

against each other.

2.

Months later there are new manifestos and they point

towards spring: May Day, rite of workers, a day that calls

to mind a high school dance or college-student finals.

Running, the footpath becomes a mouth through which

I propel myself, from one island to the next, back again,

dodging strollers. Dodging birth, I guess.

3.

Manhattan’s buildings the teeth of a bottom jaw

and just as grey. Morse code of the Freedom Tower’s

lights, fireflies echo offshore, begging to mate,

flicking like cell phones: which one began the signal,

and of the three, which is repeating it? A chain of

unending commands, power switched off by the sunrise.

4.

A hurricane’s winds: the new fall.

Subway pumps pump out brackish water

as the Hudson moves in and out with the tide.

The moon pulls at the iron in my blood:

I grow heavy on the roof, watching the pink

bellies of airplanes streaking low into Laguardia.

It feels as though the world is a great dog

rolling under. How quickly the wounds heal!

Body of great craters, our Sisyphusan task

fills them with rubble, only for us to drown

in our complete sorrow.

- Robert Moses, Playboy

Aux armes, etc.

Above, the stars reach out their arms –
I see guns in the sky, headlights of a car
driven through the rain – a rocket,
falling, red, arcing like a mouth through
the sky – which is now turning purple,
Batman-movie purple, and an anarchist boy
with his black hood up and black bandana over
his mouth leaps now, over the barricades, removes
one, I recognize him from his eyes, the only
part of him that is visible, the eyes I knew
when he slept out on the roof after a party
when none of us felt like cleaning – and he
is motioning now, for us to come through,
and we do, and the face of Trayvon Martin
comes too, it is printed in color on signs
and the text below his smile says
protect our children, and with that, already,
he has ceased to be a real boy
and he is now the ghost we are carrying
through the streets like a coffin draped
in a flag, or something less heavy,
less corporeal. An officer in a white shirt
grabs my arm and I twist out and away
and pull my hood up too in the crowd
it is more like we are the sea and his body
is floating on us, not weighing us down,
we exist to hold him because we are
no graveyard, we are a place for the not-real,
for the things that once existed and exist
no more, a child next to me climbs up
on her father’s shoulder and I wonder
what she can see from there, within
the bodies there is no sense of scale, only that
we fill the streets curb to curb, only
that we are heading south to Zuccotti
Park as though there will be something
when we get there, and when we get there
there are only cops guarding the
empty park its bare benches and concrete floor
and would could be there besides
memory, anyway.

- NYPD Chief of Department Joseph Esposito, Vice magazine

Farewell, Dear Leader

From ivory perch,
arms-length musings on the East,
(U.S.A. long time):

Nuclear power,
Opaque state apparatus,
Schrodinger's cat, dead.

Orphaned, we stare a
moment of uncertainty
in its squinty eyes.

Who's House Is That?

http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlDC/files/original/thomas%20friedman.bmp

Oh, it's right there in the URL. That is Thomas Friedman's house.

I Wish Paul Were Dead

"How much better would Sgt. Pepper be if they'd junked the stupid concept, renamed the album, and removed the crappy 'framing device' tracks, but left it otherwise untouched?

Without that stupid 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)', the animal sounds of 'Good Morning Good Morning' would fade directly into the acoustic strumming of 'A Day In the Life'. What a transition! What total art! Day into Night, reality into dream, Ulysses into Finnegans Wake!

Really, the whole 'Lonely Hearts Club Band' thing belongs in the section of the Wikipedia article where they talk about all the crazy album ideas Paul tossed around after Revolver that the other members swiftly rejected." - guest contributor Ringo Starr

Eulogy for Minos

Hello. You all know who I am:
I am Andrew Starner.
King Minos is dead.
King Minos is dead.
He is dead.
Go on, say it with me.
Oh, you can say it now,
without fear:
King Minos is dead
and King Minos was a tyrant.
He was a tyrant,
and he was a fool
and he was a cuckold.
He was a fool who lost his wife, who lost his daughter
and lost his son, the beast, the Minotaur.
For years he has brought our island to the brink of despair.
King Minos is dead and he has left no heir.
I ask you,
who among you has the will, the authority,
and the sexual fertility
to take his throne?

You Can't Always Get What You Want

- screwge

Wealthcare

One Divides Into Two

When trying to know your enemy, don’t look to where you disagree. This is why they are your enemy, and you know all this already. Look to where you agree.

This article, about widespread bipartisan support for food stamps, states pretty clearly (though, as always, by accident) why the right and the liberal left can agree on funding food stamps.

Wisconsin’s former governor, Tommy G. Thompson, a Republican, boasted of cutting the cash rolls, but advertised the food stamp rise. “Leading the Way to Make Work Pay,” a 2000 news release said… In a given month, nearly 90 percent of food stamp recipients still have incomes below the federal poverty line, according to the Department of Agriculture. But among families with children, the share working rose to 47 percent in 2008, from 26 percent in the mid-1990s, and the share getting cash welfare fell by two-thirds.

Force people into low paying jobs and then make sure they can eat. A hungry worker is a revolutionary; a dead slave is useless.

- No Innocents

Stupor Bowl

Ah, the Superbowl, the one day of the year where Americans sit on their asses for five hours, gorging themselves and watching tv, and actually critically engage the commercials that every minute destroy consumer choice and rob Americans of their individual desires. In a society where importance and expense are synonymous, it is the ‘most important’ advertising day of the year. In short, Superbowl commercials are the most concentrated spectacular display of American fears and desires, (“fears” because what do commercials do other than replace fear with desire?) as seen by the capitalists who produce them.

This year the most controversial ad was supposed to be Focus on the Family’s anti-choice propaganda, but it played almost even-handed in comparison to the onslaught of misogyny, alienation and misanthropy on display in the other ads. Audi presented a fascistic future in which “green police” would arrest you for using the wrong light bulb. Dodge offered up a series of men staring straight into the camera, while a voiceover droned in miserable monotone about submitting all of their free will and happiness to their bosses and their wives, with the car being tagged “Man’s last stand”. Budweiser had a thousand people turn themselves into a human bridge a la Buzby Berkely, or more accurately Albert Speer, so that a Bud truck could arrive at their bar, where they could then buy the beer.

Perhaps the most symptomatic ad of the evening was one from Bridgestone tires. A car speeds across a post-apocalyptic landscape, and stops at a roadblock, where a leather-clad cyborg-ish man declares in a menacing accent “Your tires or your life.” Suddenly, the passenger door opens, and a sexy, post-apocalyptically (which is to say scantily) clad woman stands, bewildered, outside the door. The car screams away, and the man cries :“Your life, not your wife!”

On display last night in commercials by Doritos, Budweiser, FloTV, Dockers, and others was not the standard misogyny of advertising: ie, a sexy, bikini-clad girl standing next to pizza. These were narrative ads depicting men being made miserable by their wives and girlfriends, with the product being promoted as a solution to this misery. Rarely since the end of the Bush administration has such straightforward contempt been on display in every home in America.

The New York Times, in a typically weak critique, has pointed out this misogyny: “There seems to be a theme in many of the Super Bowl spots: the need to reassure men that they are as manly as they hope they are… [the Dodge ad] showed men thinking to themselves about the women in their lives. The thoughts were not of the type to win plaudits from feminists; they were grudging and stereotyped.” But the Times failed to realize why these men need to be ‘reassured’. Or rather the Times, as always, failed to ask.

Today, with unemployment, political impotence, debt and fear for the future at an all time high, Madison Avenue can no longer sell with images of affluence and happiness. The distance between the reality of working class lives and the dream image of superbourgeois luxury has become too great. Even Coke ran an ad with the Simpsons’ Mr. Burns, archetypal arch capitalist, being foreclosed out of home and possessions. Americans (men and women, because in a society in which misogyny is so deeply ingrained, women self-identify as sexy hate-objects, and like it) see themselves in the landscape of the apocalyptic Bridgestone ad, which echoes the worlds of such recent movies as The Road, Book of Eli, 2012, etc. This year advertisers could not even promise the lie of affluence and happiness being one new car away. Instead, they can only offer their products as ameliorators against the degradation of 21st century America. Desperate to increase sales, advertising must make visible and obvious its most powerful tools, hate and alienation, in order to rationalize buying new tires, or more beer, or better pants.

But if advertisers feel the need to turn up the heat, perhaps it is because they unconsciously sense that the current state of affairs will be bad enough to allow the alienation they now visibly exploit to slip away. Advertisers fear an awakening of Americans to the material reasons for their suffering and thus to a moving away from the mad, spiraling self-consumption of the last thirty years. To prevent this, advertisers must make sure that the misery of American consumers remains a spectacle, an image that can be bought and sold, so Americans keep groping for their wallets instead of their guns.

-- No Innocents

The Inarticulate Groans of the Rabble

Feedback on The Year In Hate

Hey weiner patrol, the year in h8 is gr8, however, your writing suxx and your personality though initially charming is ultimately and undeniably hollow.
- Screwge

San Pedro Harbor

for Melinda Owen

When you are powerless
To sand-bag this Atlantic bulwark, faced
By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste
In his steel scales: ask for no Orphean lute
To pluck life back.
—Robert Lowell, “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket”

I have never met a man who later died at sea
Owing to my birth far away from New England
In both time and space. The tankers that leave

San Pedro Harbor, black metal-flanked and
Steaming, floating atop the Pacific
Like furnaces, seem things peopled by wan

Ghosts in overalls, greasy slivers of men quick
To be forgotten by those on whose pens fall
The task of romanticizing the specific,

Unseen elements that constitute all
That is thought possible to capture in poetry.
(Consider Beauty, for instance, or those small

Unnamed acts of kindness that so easily
Fit the ontological structure
Of pentameter verse). But what the sea

Swallows out of rage or quietly defers
Back to shore is its own prerogative;
And the heroes it makes out of some sailors

It unmakes in others, allowing those who live
To return home, unsung perhaps, but never
needing that song, so hollow and unlike the waves.

- Ryan Ruby
(originally published in Tabourey Magazine, Oxford, 2004)

γνῶθι σεαυτόν

- - - Screwge

Ft. Whodunnit?

Senator Joe Lieberman, captain, cook and first mate of the USS Goonsville (the Senate), has made a shocking revelation today: the murderous rampage at Fort Hood was a “homegrown terrorist attack.” Let’s ignore for a moment that if Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had instead been named something like, say, Seung-Hui Cho, honorable monsieur Lieberman would have gotten no traction out of these allegations. Let’s even forget that for the entire six years Maj. Hasan worked at Walter Reid he was in constant conflict with his superiors, consistently received negative psychiatric evaluations, and that his fellow students and teachers called him ‘paranoid’ ‘belligerent’ and ‘schizoid’. Terrorists are pretty often anti-social unhinged psychopaths; it’s not impossible that Maj. Hasan could be both a nut job and a terrorist.
So let’s take Sen. Dopey at his word: Maj. Hasan is a “homegrown terrorist.” What exactly turns an unbalanced American army psychologist from bad couch jockey to violent maniac? The key is from Shoeless Joe’s own mouth: “homegrown.” Maj. Hasan’s work in an American psychiatric hospital did not expose him to extremist ideology: he wasn’t administering to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but traumatized, wounded, PTSD-afflicted infantrymen. Hasan was made a terrorist by the horror of the war, a fact most inconvenient for most of the congress and the White House. Lieberman is perhaps more invested than most in maintaining American denial of the trauma of these wars: he’s one of the most vocal and belligerent of the moldy-minded, mealy-mouthed old farts responsible for sending an ever-increasing number of our youth through the wringer.
Joe’s three-card-monte is pretty clear: imply that Hasan was receiving clandestine instructions from an undiscovered cave in Afghanistan, rather than direct orders from an undisclosed bunker in Wyoming, and slip the ace of spades off the table: these wars are so ugly that it turns the psychiatrists treating our soldiers into terrorists. Maj. Hasan sure could be a homegrown terrorist, but, without the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, without Hasan administering terrible psycho-therapy to the broken shells of twenty-one year olds, does even Joe Lieberdouche believe the slaughter at Fort Hood would’ve happened?
Maj. Hasan, a Palestinian fundamentalist Muslim, gave no ideological defense of his actions. No terrorist group has taken credit for his spree. He cracked, he was a lone gunmen, he is, indeed, a “homegrown terrorist.” The wars have crossed the Atlantic: they don’t only make more suicide bombers in Palestine, more Taliban diehards in Afghanistan, more Sunni extremists in Iraq. Now they are turning American soldiers onto the path of pointless martyrdom too.
Thank God Obama hasn’t given up this war on terror, but merely tried to euphemize it away. We’re gonna need all the experience we can get fighting terrorism for when the two-hundred thousand potential “homegrown terrorists” return to the US from our sickening misadventures in the desert.

- No Innocents

So I woke up and this shitty program called 'Ghost Lab' was on

It's about ghost hunting. Anyways, there's this gentleman with a Southern accent searching for the ghost of John Wilkes Booth in some decrepit building with only a flash light as the source of light. In order to provoke the ghost, he starts screaming shit like "You killed our greatest champion", "You have betrayed the very things that made us great", "You were a fool and an obscenity against this country". In a Southern accent, self guided by his own light, stumbling through a burnt out saloon.

- Kostrzewa, guest contributor