Holy crap.

Posted on by Dale

I think that on the whole it is better if we don’t delve too deeply into the fever swamps of deluded rightwing conspiracies, but today a “friend” on Facebook shared a meme from Exposing Satanic World Government.  That’s a Facebook group, folks.  (I would like to say that this “friend” is a recent addition, and I do—I really do—look for signs of this kind of thing before I click on the Accept button, but sometimes they just slip by you, you know?)

Here we go, straight into the deep end.

Let’s start with an easy one.

—click for the original article—

This is the kind of thing that one usually gets: the government is out to get us, etc., etc.

Nothing new or exciting really.  Just your run-of-the-mill, take-a-standard-government-program-and-turn-it-into-ONE-WORLD-GOVERNMENT-WAKE-UP-SHEEPLE stuff. As one does.

But I would like to draw your attention to that first comment. The poor guy meant “patsies,” I guess.  Easy typo, or perhaps an autocorrect, but I’m comfortable thinking that he just didn’t know the difference.

This is the level of discourse we’re dealing with here. Literacy is not this kind of person’s strong suit.

I should say at this point that the whole group is purely Christian in its approach.  I think it’s part and parcel of the whole authoritarianism thing that has recently caught the attention of the pundits trying to explain why Donald Drumpf is leading the Republican pack—and is closely followed by the even bigger horrorshow of Rafael Cruz.

(Of course, the hippies have been making fun of Republican “strong daddy” types since the days of W, but just like the Iraq War it sometimes takes time for the Very Serious People to catch up.)

Anyway, this is the kind of group that seeks strength through Christ, and by that I mean pure, naked power, not the strength of quiet faith and good deeds that the wiser among us picked up in Sunday School.  Since they seek power, they see it everywhere.  Since they want dominion over the earth, they a) create a self-image of being righteous warriors, and then—because what good is a flaming sword unless you have someone to smite it with—indeed, why does the flaming sword even exist unless there were, of course, b) an all-powerful Enemy?

Once you have this mental framework in place, then every waking moment of your life is spent looking under the bed and in the closet for that Enemy.  Every. Waking. Moment.

What was it the man said?  “Seek and ye shall find…”?

—click to see the original video—

EVERY WAKING MOMENT, KENNETH!

The comment on this one is representative of many of the comments on this page, a kind of pearl-clutching fantod that reassures the commenter and the readers that yes, they are servants of the Risen Lord and all manner of things will be well.  I’ve written about this before, this curious split-brain thing of thinking that one is simultaneously on the losing end of this corrupt world and yet the victor.  I still don’t get it.

—Do click on this one—

Mercy.

I mean, these kinds of theories have abounded about the Beatles since the 60s, but it’s still hysterical to see all of them so tidily presented (and by a 24-year-old author!).

You may have noticed by now that there seems to be no dearth of websites dedicated to exposing the TRUTH to the world.  Once you start clicking, there is no end to them.

None of them explain why the Illuminati/Bilderberg/Freemasons/Satanists are taking their own sweet time in implementing the New World Order. You would think that our all-powerful overlords would have lost patience with teh sheeple and just taken over by now, but no, it’s clear they must get a kick out of teasing us with the threat of a nightmare future.

Again, I’ve written about this before, but it’s important to remember that this frisson of fear is a feature, not a bug, in these people’s worldview.  They wouldn’t see it that way, but their brains love that little tickle of terror they get when they imagine Satan just sitting there like a spider in a web.  They’re addicted to it.

Moving on…

 

Closer to home:

It all seems so clear now, doesn’t it?

I like the part about “intelligent people who actually understand socialism.”  This is something I have not noticed to be true in this election, especially from this kind of voter.

And the comments… The old “Marshall law” gambit: remember when the crazier liberals thought the same thing about W?  But this time… You know it’s true.

The energy expended by these people is incredible.  How do they keep it up when none of their fears are proven to be true and they just transfer the fear to something new? It exhausts me just observing it.

As for the “will of God” gambit, mercy, people, when are you ever going to think that perhaps God is working his spirit out through Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders or even, Cthulhu help us, Clinton?1

Spoiler alert: never.  It will never occur to them that God might be a liberal.  Or that she might not even care.

And if “our blessings will be just the same,” then why all this energy directed at identifying, exposing, and defeating the Satanic World Government?  I’m not sure what the point is, if nothing you do matters because God has his eye on the sparrow.

 

Last one, I promise:

—Really. There’s a video.—

There is a 15-minute video which I have not watched—nor am I going to—positing that Donald J. Drumpf is a high-ranking priest in the Satanic World Order.

This is not an isolated viewpoint.  Click through and a) read the comments; and b) check out all the videos recommended over on the side.

Jebus.

As I’ve said, folks, EVERY. WAKING. MOMENT.

Once you’ve committed to this mindset, the whole of the planet must be viewed through that lens, and everything must be made to fit the madness.  Donald Drumpf is just a egotistical bully?  Nonsense: he’s part of the conspiracy to elect She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.  The Beatles were a talented group of men who hooked into the zeitgeist of a world waking up to possibilities of not despising those different from you?  Crazy talk: they were puppets of a conspiracy so vast that it is capable of destroying all that we hold dear.2

Personally, I blame the Wachowski sisters.  Red pill/blue pill, my ass.

——————

1 Just to be clear, I am not a Clinton basher.  It’s just that she’s the current repository for all the irrational fear and hatred.  What do people think is going to happen if she’s elected? What on earth could it be that would make it better to vote for Trump or Cruz??

2 Because, really, who wouldn’t want to rule over a world that you’ve wrecked beyond repair?

Not the Drumpf you’re looking for

Posted on by Dale

I would like to entertain the idea that Donald Drumpf is a Jedi master.

I mean, his whole campaign is kind of a “these are not the droids you’re looking for” hand wave, right?  He has his supporters give a Nazi-like salute; he says he will order our military to act illegally and they will do it; he vamps about deporting immigrants while hiring them, and snagging jobs back from China while exporting them; he’s endorsed by David Duke and the KKK.

And when quizzed about any of this, he just waves his hand: “That’s the first I’ve heard of it.” “I don’t know anything about that.” “That was taken out of context.” “We were just having a good time.”

I’m sure the press thinks they are doing their job just by allowing him to expose himself as a lying liar who lies, but that’s not what is happening.  What’s happening is that people see him successfully elude the mainstream media and think he’s more majestic than ever.

Help us, Obi-Drumpf, you’re our only hope.

Jebus.

Honey please: on the wheel-spinning martyrdom of the right wing

Posted on by Dale

This turned up on the FacePlace today:

[VIDEO] Obama Wants To Shut Down Judge Pirro After She Exposes Damaging Leaked Info About Him…

Here’s a brief (yet complete withal) summary: Jeanine Pirro thinks Muslims are scary and said so.

Really, that’s it.

But Dale, you will marvel, what was the damaging leaked info about Obama that “Judge” Jeanine Pirro exposed?  And what exactly does her furry look like?  (Okay, so you might want to go read the first sentence.)

Spoiler alert: there is no damaging leaked info about Obama.

Nothing.  Nada.  I read the article three times thinking I had missed something.  But no, it’s not there.  The headline has nothing to do with the article.

And the article is simply telling us that “Judge” Jeanine Pirro said some things.  On the teevee.

By doing so, of course, she’s become a “political enemy of the White House.”  We guess.  There’s no link to any kind of statement from the White House.  There’s not even an educated guess about an Enemies List, which I think is just lazy rightwing martyrdom-doing.

But given how vindictive the President is—oh, come on, you know how he yells on the teevee and calls people names and threatens them[1]—we all would be astonished if Pirro’s days were not numbered.  You just know we’ll find her in a ditch any day now.

I like the way Pirro rants about House Resolution 569, or Condemning Violence, Bigotry, and Hateful Rhetoric Towards Muslims in the United States Act; the author of the article immediately confuses it with an actual bill before Congress.  I guess she didn’t get to that webpage when she was homeschooled.[2]

Somehow neither Pirro nor the author of the article seems to realize that this “bill” “establishing Sharia law”[3] had to have been passed by the Republican House.  Such is the power of Islamic terrorists, I suppose.

Pirro also makes the whoa-if-true statement that Islam is the only religion “protected” by this “bill.”  I wonder if she read it.[4]  Yes, Islam is the only religion mentioned in the resolution, but perhaps that might be because the House of Representatives wanted to offer their “thoughts and prayers” to any member of that religion who finds themselves in danger because of rightwing demagogues like “Judge” Jeanine Pirro.

::sigh:: Another day, another rightwinger throwing stones at themselves because no one else is doing it.

I’d feel sorry for them if they weren’t enjoying it so much.

—————

[1] Oh wait.  That’s Donald Drumpf I’m thinking of.  My bad.

[2] Sorry, homeschoolers, that was a cheap shot.  I apologize.  I was just highly amused that the first and most succinct explanation I found of the difference between a resolution and a bill was on a conservative homeschool site, i.e., this author had resources congenial to his/her worldview and failed to use them.

[3] No, really, another nutjob website headlined the resolution exactly this way.  I will not link to it, if only because ALL THE TEXT ON THE PAGE IS CENTERED, KENNETH!

[4] Spoiler alert: she didn’t.

Cocktails: The Best Friend

Posted on by Dale

This one was an accident.

I had copied down a bunch of cocktails from the interwebs, and one of them was called New Friend, ringing changes on a classic cocktail called Old Pal, which in turn is based on the Boulevardier, which in turn is based on the Negroni.  Got that?

Here’s how it goes:

Negroni: equal parts gin, Campari, sweet vermouth

Boulevardier: rye, Campari, sweet vermouth

Old Pal: rye, Campari, dry vermouth

New Friend: rye, Aperol, Cocchi Americano

Yeah, that’s a big jump between the Old Pal and the New Friend, but it works.  You can read about it at Serious Eats.

But then I messed up.  In pulling ingredients, I got the rye and Aperol but then had a brain-fart and grabbed the new bottle of Amaro Nonino, which is not the same as Cocchi Americano.  But the drink was scrumptious, so I finished it before trying the actual New Friend.  (The Cocchi Americano is a vermouth, so it had a brighter, grapier flavor than the mellower Amaro Nonino.  Slight preference to the Amaro Nonino.)

Best Friend

  • 1 oz rye
  • 1 oz Aperol
  • 1 oz Amaro Nonino
  • orange peel

Stir with ice, strain into glass, garnish with orange peel.

A reason not to vote Republican that you may not have considered

Posted on by Dale

This message is intended for those who are going to vote for Donald Trump. Please feel free to pass it along to someone like that.

In this post I am going to outline what I feel is a very strong rationale for not voting for the Republican candidate for President (and by extension, for Republican candidates for Congress), even if you are a die-hard GOPer.

Warning: there’s a lot of reading here. I’ve linked to original articles, but I will summarize each. Trust, but verify. (But you can trust my summarization.)

Point #1:

Dow Chemical was involved in a class action suit that was on the docket at the Supreme Court. When Antonin Scalia died, Dow settled the suit because they could not count on Scalia’s vote against the citizens suing Dow. They said so. This is not liberal fantasy. They said so.

Likewise, the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association (NYSRPA) has abandoned its suit challenging New York’s ban on assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines for the very same reason.

“There is, however, a very great risk that, in the absence of Justice Scalia’s influence, a majority could in fact vote to affirm the Second Circuit case, which would result in binding Supreme Court precedent and create a potentially insurmountable obstacle to the practice and enjoyment of those rights elucidated in the Heller decision.” (Here’s an actual news article about the case.)

Point #2:

Republicans almost always side with corporations over us citizens. Note their stated (and continuing) opposition to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; the refusal to allow Medicare (Part D) to negotiate the price of medications with the pharmaceutical companies; or even support for predatory lending companies over our service members.

Point #3:

This preference for capitalist cronyism over the private citizen also manifests in the fetish for privatization: jails, internet service, defense mercenaries, schools.

Point #4

Go read this one: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/24/nestle-chairman-time-to-turn-off-the-water-taps.html

Got it? Nestle wants to privatize water systems. To protect humanity, of course. It’s a privilege to pee.[1]

updated 3/21/16 to add: Bills Would Make It Easier to Privatize Public Water Utilities and Chris Christie Is Turning Tap Water Into a Private Commodity

Point #5

Flint, Michigan. Look up your own articles.

And so…

Nestle, with the support of Republican lawmakers,[2] privatizes your water system.

They bungle it. Your water is unsafe.[3]

You and your city file a class action suit against Nestle because you’ve suffered significant and irreparable damage.

The case works its way up the appellate system, and finally the Circuit Court rules in your favor. Nestle appeals to the Supreme Court.

And there…

Here’s the question you have to answer honestly to yourself: Do I want my recourse to compensation and damages handled by Antonin Scalia?

I put it to you that even if you hate Hillary Clinton with the heat of a thousand suns, even if you fear that Bernie Sanders is going to turn the U.S. into a communist hellhole,[4] even if you’re positive that Donald Trump is going to somehow make America great again5]—you might want to rethink your long game in this one respect alone.

Don’t vote for a candidate who’s going to nominate Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court. The life you save may be your own.[6]

—————

[1] I know, conflicting messages in that one.

[2] And the support of any corrupt Democratic ones who are on the take from Big Water—but trust me, it will originate and find its main support from the Republican Party.

[3] “But a corporation has to maintain safety/not harm customers because…” Because why, exactly? You’ll take your tap water business elsewhere? They might get sued?

[4] Spoiler alert: he’s not.

[5] Spoiler alert: he’s not. Nope. Not going to happen.

[6>] Because even if you stop abortions from ever happening ever again,[7] the resulting children are going to be poisoned by Nestle.

[7] Spoiler alert: you won’t.

Coloring books. Yes, coloring books.

Posted on by Dale

Here, go read this.  I’ll wait. [NOTE FROM 2025: That link does not work any longer.]

tl;dr: a very long, quite well-written piece by a Christian author warning us about mandala coloring books being spiritually dangerous.

Okay, woo alert.  Since I am an Existential Mystic, my tendency is not to grant woo an independent reality, so perhaps it’s a little unfair for me to pick apart the writings of a Spiritual.  But the far ends of any scale are fascinating, so let’s dive right in.

Sure, click here if you want to risk your IMMORTAL SOUL!!!

One of the issues I have with die-hard Spirituals is that their belief in the reality of their particular woo is so absolute that it extends to all the other woo as well.  In this case, we have a carefully reasoned blogpost that provides proof of the dangers of simply filling in random spaces on a piece of paper: if you color a mandala, it will automatically open the door to your soul/mind/body and let demonic forces in.

Evangelical believers, particularly, are prone to this kind of thing.  Their understanding of God is that of a “personal God,” which does not mean (as most of them think it does) a God who is “mine”; rather it means a God who is “a person,” i.e., independently existing as an individual outside our reality.  The same applies for the idea of a “personal Satan” or “personal demons.”

This belief, coupled with some vague biblical literalism,[1] leads them to the understanding that not only do God and Satan have a real existence, but so do witches and demons and all those “other gods” whom generally our evangelical friends ridicule as nonexistent “false gods” but who really exist not really yes really.

In the same vein, they understand transactional magick to be real and effective: that’s the basis of their belief in intercessory[3] prayer. They easily transfer that belief to pentagrams, Ouija boards, Dungeons & Dragons, yoga, and yes, mandala coloring books—just touching one of these things is enough to unleash the hounds of hell whether or not you believe they’re “real.”  Just joking around at a sleepover with “Bloody Mary” or taking a hot yoga class will press the On button on the remote control, and, well, you’ve seen enough horror movies to know what happens next.

Here’s the interesting part: the only proof they ever have is their own belief in the reality of belief systems that otherwise they will tell you are not real.  It never occurs to them to say, “Hm, those other people are trying make sense of the Infinite, too—I wonder how similar their approach is to mine.  Maybe I could get further in my own faith if I paid attention to theirs.”

Nope.  Instead, because their Tao is the only Tao—they can NAME IT AND EVERYTHING, KENNETH—all those other paths to the Infinite have to be wrong.  Demonic.

Coloring mandalas.  You may think there are 64 colors, but as we all know, there’s only one real Flesh.

Here endeth the lesson.

—————

[1] I say “vague” literalism, because no one reads the Bible literally literally.  No one.  They may believe it’s Adam & Eve[2,] not Adam & Steve, or that Noah took a gazillion pairs of animals on the ark (including diplodoci), but quiz them about owning slaves or sleeping with the maid or stoning a bride who everyone knows has been living with her new husband for two years, and their literal understanding rapidly evolves into something more metaphoric/historical/pragmatic.

[2] NSFW LINK!

[3] Or imprecatory.

Grrrr

Posted on by Dale

I wish to make a complaint. And a confession.

I freely admit that I have not been assiduous in my composing. Part of it is being busy riding infuriating theme park rides, part of it is laziness, but—and here’s the complaint—a very large part of it is my keyboard.

It’s an M-Audio eKeys-49, a little 49-key keyboard controller. That is, it cannot produce sound on its own; it merely sends data to some other device when you play it. In my case, it sends data to the music notation software Finale.1

The problem is that it has stopped sending data to Finale. Or to SimpleSynth, the nifty little piece of software that I can use if I’m just noodling around and need sound out of the thing. Or to the computer’s MIDI Audio Setup app, which allows me to hook up this kind of thing or to check why it’s not hooked up.

It started getting flaky last year when I was working on A Christmas Carol, so much so that after I was done with that I really really avoided getting back on track with composing. It was too frustrating: I could input about five or six notes before the keyboard just lost its connection.

Today, as I started to work on a new song for Mike Funt because he really thinks I’m going to get that finished soon when in fact I started today, the keyboard completely lost it. I could play one chord, and not only would it drop off the map it also produced a “hung note,” requiring me to get to the menu to “turn off all notes.”

Blergh, as we say in the business.

Sometimes, especially with updates to the operating system and/or to Finale, it’s an issue of the driver needing to be updated. (That’s a tiny snippet of software that the system uses to make the equipment in question go.)

A brief moment on the googles was enough to show that M-Audio no longer supports the eKeys-49. Not only that, but a simple USB-connected keyboard usually doesn’t even need a driver.

tl;dr: my keyboard is officially an ex-keyboard.

What to do? I thought I would stop by Musicology to see if those guys had any recommendations for a keyboard controller that was affordable, but they don’t open till noon. I emailed them.

In the meantime, I went to the FacePlace and asked the hive mind, and within ten minutes I had some guidance. I found and have ordered the Korg microKEY2, 49-key version.2

Free shipping, it will be here Thursday, and then I can get back to whining about how hard it is to write Mike’s song.3

——————

1 Finale has its own issues. Grrr.

2 Just so you know, there are buttons on a 49-key keyboard that allow you to play the lower or upper octaves.

3 I mean, what do I know from Dixieland/gospel?

In which I grouse

Posted on by Dale

You may have wondered, if you are of an inquiring mind, whether there is anything on the planet as vapid, obnoxious, irritating, and offensive as a Michael Bay movie.

I am now able to assure you there is: a theme park ride based on a Michael Bay movie.

To wit: the Transformers 3D ride at Universal Studios Resort in Orlando. Sweet Cthulhu, what an indictment of humanity!

It did not help that during the supposed 30-minute wait the ride experienced “technical difficulties,” and so we were stuck in one room for an eternity listening to the same loud sound effects and storyline video without air conditioning or indeed circulating air. Or that this took place in mid-afternoon when I had about had it with all the intense joy generated by theme parks in general.

But my lovely first wife is for some unknown reason a fan of Michael Bay’s oeuvre, if I’m allowed to use the term in connection with a man whose entire output seems deliberately designed to kill off humanity’s fascination with plot once and for all. What Jorge of Burgos accomplished in The Name of the Rose[1] with Aristotle’s missing treatise on comedy, Bay seems determined to do with the remainder of western civilization’s theory of drama.

And so I found myself dutifully accompanying my spouse into this disaster, knowing there was a possibility that I might not find it very enjoyable.

I did not find it enjoyable.

It may be that in the dim, dark future—and here I am thinking specifically of Idiocracy—Michael Bay will be hailed as a genius of filmic structure and this blog post will be included in one of those tidy anthologies of critical snipings that entertain us so today, e.g., the critic who called Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 “a gross enormity, an immense wounded snake, unwilling to die, but writhing in its last agonies, and in the Finale bleeding to death.”

Permit me to doubt it.

Full disclosure: I have never watched an entire Michael Bay movie, yet somehow I do not feel disqualified in assessing his skills as a storyteller. If you’ve seen one Transformers preview, you’ve seen the whole series.

So what exactly do I think about Transformers 3D: The Ride? It was loud, splattered over enormous screens, and visually incoherent.[2] Perhaps aficionados of the genre could distinguish friend from foe, but I suspect that is beside the point. The visual field was simply filled with roiling bits and pieces, none of which ever stopped moving long enough to establish the who/what/when/where (and I understand that some consider this a feature not a bug.) Focus was always diffuse/split, and Bay seems to understand “pacing” to mean “sempre fortissimo e presto.” The whole thing was a brutal assault on both sense and sensibilities.

Lest you think that I did not enjoy this ride because I am an old fart, remember that I had waited even longer to ride Minion Mayhem earlier in the day, and it was essentially the same ride in terms of throughline and effects: swoops, jerks, reversals, zooms, bumps. But it was delightful: I laughed and giggled the entire ride. In Transformers 3D, I simply closed my eyes halfway through the ride to escape the boredom of the violence.

Likewise, even earlier in the day Harry Potter & the Escape from Gringott’s was a superb example of the exact same technology in service to a carefully crafted sequence of encounters.

So, yes, I am capable of enjoying a simulator/dark ride. Just not this one.

Here, for those who doubt me: https://youtu.be/4SQtBh_LCNs

And get off my lawn.

—————

[1] RIP, Humberto Eco

[2] In other words, a Michael Bay movie.

I come to praise Scalia, not to bury him.

Posted on by Dale

Because it is considered to be bad breeding to speak ill of the dead, I will now say something very nice indeed about Antonin Scalia, the dead jurist.

Without Scalia’s scathing and snarky dissents in Lawrence v. Texas and United States v. Windsor, we would not have gotten to marriage equality as quickly as we did than if he had just kept his mouth shut.

You can read real reporters’ commentary here and here, but I’ll lay out the basics for you.

In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the Supreme Court struck down Texas’s sodomy law and in so doing struck down every state law criminalizing sodomy (as legally defined) in general and homosexual behavior in particular.  Scalia’s dissent essentially said, “Well, if you’re not going to rule on cases by going on what most people think is icky, you’re going to end up letting the homos marry, mark my words.  Get off my lawn.”[1]

In United States v. Windsor (2013), the SCOTUS struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act and its discrimination against same-sex marriages, which were already legal in several states.  Scalia whined, “My esteemed colleagues are poopy-heads for making me look like a bad guy for hating the queers, and now all the fags are going to sue and we’re not going to be able to stop them from marrying like normal people, believe you me.”[2]

His words came back to haunt him as circuit court judge after circuit court judge wryly used his dissents to underscore the basic fairness and justice of overturning marriage equality bans in the several states where, in fact, all the fags sued. The axe fell when the Sixth Circuit refused to overturn a couple of states’ anti-icky-homo-wedding laws—when the circuit courts disagree, the cases end up in front of the Supremes for a final decision.

And that, my children, is how we got Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).

I like to think of it all like a real-life version of the final episode of Boston Legal, in which Alan Shore (James Spader) and Denny Crane (William Shatner) argue before the Supremes that Denny be allowed to use an experimental drug to ameliorate his Alzheimer’s.  At the end of the episode, having stopped an injunction preventing them from marrying morganatically, they fly to their remote Maine resort to get married, only to find that they have no minister or justice of the peace.  Iudex ex machina, Tony (who had been grousing from the bench that he wanted Shore to stop talking so he could go on vacation) shows up, fishing reel in hand, and is prevailed upon to marry the two.  Which he does, albeit grumpily.

So here’s to the good a man does in his life—we all owe a debt of gratitude to Antonin Scalia for moving us into the 21st century.

——————

[1] I may have paraphrased a bit.

[2] Here too.