“It Is Common Knowledge That Whale Oil Is the Only Reliable Source of Energy.”

-- Mr. Ken Verybigliar, chairman, International Whale Oil Consultancy, LLC.

Wind and solar energy infrastructure is essentially worthless when it is dark outside, and the wind is not blowing. https://t.co/61rquLn5bg

— U.S. Department of Energy (@ENERGY) September 5, 2025

And from The New York Times:

Energy Secretary Attacks Offshore Wind and Dismisses Climate Change

Chris Wright, who travels to Europe next week to promote American gas, called climate change “not incredibly important.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Friday defended the Trump administration’s decision to block a nearly completed $6.2 billion wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island by saying offshore wind increases electricity prices and by downplaying the jobs at stake.

Energy experts accused Mr. Wright of oversimplifying the economics of offshore wind energy, noting that while it requires a significant amount of upfront capital to build a project, it was expected to create more than 55,000 jobs by the end of the decade and enough electricity to inexpensively power 22 million homes before the Trump administration took steps to throttle the nascent industry.

A former fracking executive, Mr. Wright said the focus in the United States to transition away from fossil fuels had hurt the country...

He called the 2015 Paris agreement, in which the United States and nearly every other country pledged to reduce greenhouse gases, “silly.”

“Climate change, for impacting the quality of your life, is not incredibly important,” Mr. Wright said. “In fact, if it wasn’t in the news, in the media, you wouldn’t know.”...

Sometimes you just have to take a moment, sit back, and wonder at the towering stupidity, not just of Trump and his cabinet, and his department heads, and not just the Republican senators who confirmed most of them, but of the tens of millions of racist, inbred meatbags who voted for all of this in three consecutive elections. 

 Sure, it's all horrible, but sometimes one incident sticks its head above the Great Scrum of Idiocy and demands special attention. 

Like rubbernecking a multi-car pileup the size of Montana where one group of idiots just keep driving more cars into the burning wreckage, while a much larger group of idiots cheer them on.  And then one brave man steps forward and announces, "Damn it, it's not enough to just pile my car into the inferno! I'm shall build a mighty ramp of paper-mâché and Trump flags and jump straight to the top of it in a motorcycle made of farts and old dynamite."

Burn the Lifeboats

I’m Familiar with Danger Mouse and Mighty Mouse and Jerry Mouse.

And the lesser-known but equally important Timothy Q. Mouse.

I have listened to Modest Mouse.  

I've used a Transparent Mouse (a novel idea), and am using a Laser Mouse right now.

I have read "The Mouse That Roared".  I've also read "Flowers for Algernon" which seems depressingly appropriate at the moment.  

But I'll be damned if I've ever encountered Transgender Mouse, which, according to Grandpa Syphilis, is an actual thing on which we're spending a few taxpayer pfennigs which is why [checks notes] Elon Musk is awesome and we need to cut Medicaid and fuck over American farmers.   

Yes, I watched the whole awful thing, and I wondered where in the world?  And to my complete lack of surprise, that story originated in the addled brain off rom psychological train-wreck Nancy Mace, and was then filtered through all the usual poison garbage sites -- 

Daily Mail

Shocking revelation woke Biden administration scientists spent millions turning monkeys and mice transgender

Nancy Mace makes stunning admission about trans lawmaker  

South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace slammed the Biden administration for using more than $10million in taxpayer money to fund ‘painful and deadly transgender experiments' on mice. 

Breitbart

Trump Reads Out ‘Appalling’ Examples of Waste Discovered by DOGE: ‘$8 Million for Making Mice Transgender’

Fox News:

$10M in taxpayer funds spent creating transgender animals: Rep. Nancy Mace

-- until, at last, Grandpa Syphilis puked it out on live teevee in front of an international audience. 

This was, of course, all deeply embarrassing to the sentient members of our species, and immediately debunked by [checks notes again] everyone who has ever taken high school biology.  

From everyone is entitled to my own opinion: 

“eight million dollars for making mice transgender. this is real.”

no, no, no, no. nobody is spending government money to make mice transgender. you low-wattage dolt. the word is transgenic.

let’s say you’re a cancer researcher, and you implant some human genetic material into mice, in order to better study how cells mutate. boom! — you’ve just created transgenic mice.

nobody is doing sex-change operations on mice and setting them loose in Nancy Mace’s bathroom.

reading comprehension, how does it work? how clownfuckingly illiterate do you have to be to screw that up? and how hot do you have to be to demonize people that every time you see trans at the beginning of a word, your brain goes fuckity-bye and visions of entire teams of boy mice playing against girl mice in mouse schools across the nation dance in your head?

Not that this will make one iota of difference, but those of us still living in the Real World do appreciate the effort.

Now take it away, The Irish Rovers:

Burn The Lifeboats

There. Is. No. Tea. Party: The Epilogue Continues

Funny story.  True story.

Once upon a time, about a fucking decade ago...

...millions of our fellow citizens who had cheered on the Bush Administration (and screamed "Traitor!" and anyone who dared question the infinite wisdom of George W. Bush) had a sudden and urgent need to completely disavow everything they had said and done for the previous eight years (without, of course, taking any responsibility for saying and doing it) so they could get on with the important business of hating America's first African American president with the heat of 1,000 suns.  In a normal, health democracy, the idea that millions of wingnuts could build a mile-high bonfire out of their Bush/Cheney lawn signs and then dance around it pretending they had never even heard of George W. Bush would be a problem for the nation's top mental health professionals.

But we do not live in a normal, health democracy, and millions of wingnuts really did leap almost overnight from relentlessly praising George W. Bush to deny!deny!denying! him harder and faster and more desperately than Peter denied Christ.

But that's not the story either, because really, Republicans lying en masse and in lockstep isn't even a story anymore: it's just another day in America.

No the real story is how massively well-funded and coordinated this lie was by Fox News and all the usual loathsome creatures of the Right (Media Matters has a sampling of Fox News' wall-to-wall barrage of "These are just plain folks rising spontaneously up again the Evil Gummit!" propaganda here.) The real story was how quickly and cravenly the "respectable" media went along with this transparent hoax.  In Washington D.C., David Brooks turned the act of jogging past one group of protesters into a deep, sociological proof that they were the salt of the Earth,  In Chicago, the local PBS affiliate went all-in with the "We've never even paid attention to politics before" teabagger line of bullshit, failing to do even the most minimal research to find out who they were actually interviewing and what their actual political affiliations really were.  Even the "liberal" New York Times could only manage a tepid, he said/she said, Both Siderist take on this "tea party" thing in which some people say it's a real movement full of awesome, while others say it's just ten square acres of Koch-funded AstroTurf, so who really knows?

And the only people straight up calling bullshit on the whole scam?

Surprise!  Those dirty, disreputable Liberals who no one listens to anyway.

By early 2010, it was absolutely clear to anyone who wasn't a Republican operative or enabler that the "tea party" was emphatically NOT a spontaneous movement of concerned citizens with no previous political affiliation, but was just one more, GOP-manufactured re-branding scam... 

But here's the thing.  There was absolutely no stomach in the Beltway media for reporting the obvious fact that these idiots in tricorner hats were nothing but the same old Republican wingnuts who, as one wag put it in 2009...

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin...have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

So here we are, a decade later.

And now that everything we dirty, disreputable Liberals had long since warned about has long since come to pass,  what story do I find running away with social media morning?  (From the WaPo)

“It turns out a lot of them were not in favor of limiting the size of government, they were just opposed to the president at the time,” said [Justin] Amash, who helped found the tea party-aligned House Freedom Caucus. “The tea party is largely gone. It was replaced with nationalism and protectionism and the general philosophy of the party now under Trump.”

Yet another Republican being elevated to the rank of Patriot Hero First Class by bravely noticing that his Republican party was full of Republicans all along.

So my question is, how the hell can I get myself graded on that curve?

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Half-Fox and Half-Free, Ctd.

Politico Magazine (h/t Alert Reader "Steve") does a splendid job deconstructing our current problem with race and politics...

...and discovers what any Liberal would have told you decades ago, and what every Liberal blogger has been saying since the dawn of blogging.

But the legacy of the all these landmarks is much more complicated and tinged with—make that drenched in—irony than the conventional story of courage and triumph lets on. It is time to state the obvious. Forget about weak explanations for today’s deep political divisions like “the culture of Washington,” gerrymandering or the rise of cable TV: The civil rights movement, while a victory on many levels, was also the origin of our present morass. It spawned a powerful national “white resistance” countermovement that decisively altered the racial geography of American politics, pushing the national Democratic and Republican parties off center and toward their ideological margins, undermining the centrist policy convergence of the postwar period and setting the parties on the divisive course they remain on today. Many will blame today’s unprecedented political polarization on recent events, such as the rise of the Tea Party or Obama’s election in 2008, but they will be wrong. The seeds of America’s dysfunction were planted 50 years ago. And the ugly politics of race had everything to do with it.

...

Though Johnson’s nomination was never in danger, the fact that at the height of LBJ’s popularity, an unrepentant segregationist could attract the support of between thirty 30 and 50 percent of registered Democratic voters in three Northern states was nothing short of a revelation to political strategists in both parties. Seeing an opportunity, an increasing number of Republicans began to embrace more conservative racial politics designed to appeal to Wallace supporters throughout the country. “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so,” said Ronald Reagan during his 1966 campaign for California governor, in which he also decried welfare and opposed government efforts to encourage neighborhood integration.

...

In the popular vote, Nixon edged Humphrey by the narrowest of margins, 43.4 to 42.7 percent. As Republican leaders looked to the future, however, they weren’t focused on that slim gap, but rather the whopping 57 percent majority represented by the combined votes cast for Nixon and Wallace. Republican strategists believed this figure represented a dominant conservative majority that could ensure GOP control of the White House for years to come. Nixon and the Republicans had claimed the lion’s share of the South’s electoral votes for the first time in history. In a scant eight years, the Party of Lincoln had gone from being the more racially liberal of the two major parties to something more closely resembling a coalition of white racial conservatives, with the South as its natural geographic home, at least when it came to presidential politics.

... These politics were on full display in the 2012 Republican primaries, a half a century later, with the candidates seemingly trying to outdo one another in impugning the poor and African-Americans in particular. Newt Gingrich accused Obama of being a “food-stamp president” and opined that, “poor people should want paychecks, not handouts.” Rick Santorum was even more explicit when he offered up the following quote: “I don’t want to make black peoples’ lives better by giving them someone else’s money.”

Even Mitt Romney played the race card, blaming his defeat on the policy “gifts” that Obama had bestowed on the very “dependent” segments of the population he had alluded to in his notorious “47 percent” video...

To which I say...so what?

Seriously, so what?

Every bit of this ugliness has been on public display and available for public comment for decades. 

And yet tomorrow and the next day...and on my next birthday...and the day after that...and on election day...and the day after that...this country will still be politically divided amount three groups.

• Exhausted Liberals, for whom this is all brutally self-evident and has been since forever.
• Conservatives, go to bed at to the reassuring, brain-killing hum of Fox News them over and over again that the real racists are those damn Liberals who keep talking about race. 
• And the Centrist/Independents...who hide in the No Labels political sock drawer and reflexively shriek "BothSides!BothSides!BothSides!" anytime anyone starts bringing up the sordid history of modern Conservatism. 

 This berserk monster that the Right built and then set loose in order to win elections has been running amok in plain sight for my entire life. 

Hell, Rod Serling was writing about it in 1964 (from Rod Serling writing in an editorial in the [then very right-wing] Los Angeles Times in 1964, in response to a series of articles by wingnut-apologist Morrie Ryskind:

… What Mr. Ryskind seems constitutionally unable to understand is that there is a vast difference between the criticism of a man or a party, and the setting up of criteria or patriotism which equates differences of opinion with disloyalty.

We have need in the country for an enlightened, watchful and articulate opposition. We have no need for semi-secret societies who are absolutist, dictatorial, and would substitute for a rule of law and reason an indiscriminate assault on the institutions of this republic that should and must be held sacrosanct. …

“[The far right cannot] discount the fact that sitting it their parlor is the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, every racist group in the United States and not a few of some Fascist orders that have scrambled their way up from the sewers to a position of new respectability.”

And this is the thing that haunts me. 

1964 is a very long time ago, and in the last half-century, like most of us, I have read I don't know how many hundreds of articles all pretty much like this one, all reaching the same loathsome conclusion.

And yet, here we are in the Year of Our Lord 2014, still being buried up to our knees every day under the same, steady cataract of predictable Conservative lies, and then buried up to our eyebrows under a second, smothering avalanche of predictable, Both Sider denial.

So once again last I am compelled to point out that trying to persuaded Conservatives with reason at this lat date is like trying to persuade the Moon with a two-by-four: you're swinging at air and you always will be,

The only way to break the lethal stasis that is poisoning our capacity to govern ourselves is to begin swinging our biggest rhetorical guns around and point them straight at Conservative-enabling Centrists every single day.

That is where they are at their weakest, so that is where we must be strong.

Just Another Day at the NRO

Shooting the breeze with imaginary long-dead colleagues.



 Attending sensitivity training.

 

And seeing (Liberal) Hitler around every corner.



 From Media Matters:

UPDATED: National Review Drops Writer For Speaking At "White Supremacist" Conference

National Review, which recently severed its relationship with writer John Derbyshire for a column in which he advised parents to teach their children to be wary of blacks, has another contributor who may draw similar scrutiny.

In March, National Review Online contributor Robert Weissberg spoke at the annual conference of the magazine American Renaissance, described as a "white supremacist journal" by the Anti-Defamation League. Reportedly proposing "A Politically Viable Alternative to White Nationalism," Weissberg described to the audience of 150 an "enclave" solution in which zoning laws and other methods could be used to create "Whitopias" in America.

Weissberg, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois, is a regular contributor to National Review Online, having written 10 posts for its Phi Beta Con blog on education, the most recent coming within the last week.

During his speech at the conference, Weissberg discussed how to keep "Whitopias" white and the positives of "maintaining whiteness," according to the American Renaissance website:

Prof. Weissberg argued that an "80 percent solution" would be one that enforced the "First-World" standards of excellence and hard work that attract and reward whites. He pointed out that there are still many "Whitopias" in America and that there are many ways to keep them white, such as zoning that requires large houses, and a cultural ambiance or classical music and refined demeanor that repels undesirables. This approach to maintaining whiteness has the advantage that people can make a living catering to whites in their enclaves.

Prof. Weissberg went on to argue that liberals are beyond reason when it comes to race, that explaining the facts of IQ or the necessity of racial consciousness for whites "is like trying to explain to an eight-year-old why sex is more fun than chocolate ice cream."

Other speakers at the conference include James Edwards, known for his "pro-white" radio show, Political Cesspool, and the presidential and vice-presidential candidates of the white nationalist American Third Position party, Mervin Miller and Virginia Abernathy.
...

UPDATE: In a post last night at NRO, Rich Lowry announced that Weissberg "will no longer be posting" at National Review due to his appearance at the American Renaissance conference:

Unbeknowst to us, occasional Phi Beta Cons contributor Robert Weissberg (whose book was published a few years ago by Transaction) participated in an American Renaissance conference where he delivered a noxious talk about the future of white nationalism. He will no longer be posting here. Thanks to those who brought it to our attention.

One flew East

One flew West

And one



flew over the cuckoo's nest

By the way, if you missed my recent fundraiser, don't panic:  I am more than happy to take your dough anytime!

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Last of the Summer Whine

Intrepid Conservative fabulist, Doughy Pantload, finally gets at the real Perry Problem.

Guess what?

Turns out, The Perry Problem has nothing to do with Perry's unhinged ideas or arrogant, diamond-hard ignorance.

Nope.

Turns out, once you flense away all the annoying fact-y stuff, the real problem is, as always, the bigotry and snobbery of those damned Imaginary Hippies that hide under Jonah Goldberg's bed and vex him night and day.

Pantload from the Chicago Tribune:

...
Let's cut through the clutter: A lot of people on the East and West coasts are bigots and snobs about "flyover types." They equate funny accents with stupidity, and they automatically assume someone who went to Texas A&M must be dumber than someone who went to Yale. Overt displays of religion trigger their fight-or-flight instincts, causing them to lash out irrationally.

My favorite example? When John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, University of Chicago professor Wendy Doniger wrote that Palin's "greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."

When I read such idiocy, it's impossible for me not to love Bush, Perry, Palin, et al. for their enemies.
...

See! I told you it wasn't 'cause Perry, Perry, Quite Contrary is an injection-mold Dubya replicant made out of Pure Righteous Medieval Dumb!

And with so many powerful, tireless imaginary enemies circling and mocking this Good Christian Man for his Goodness and Christianity, the author of "Liberal Fascism" and inexplicable beneficiary of a million-dollar book contract

finds the notion of defending the verbal tics and cultural projectile vomitings of another shitkicking Preznit Cretin from the Empire of Texas just too, too exhausting.

But here's my problem: I find the prospect of another four or eight years of defending these cultural distinctions to be intensely wearying.

My weariness is hardly a major consideration for anybody, but I think it reflects a larger problem. Conservatism is starting to have an identity-politics problem all its own. I think conservatism needs to spend less time defending candidates for who they are, and more time supporting candidates for what they intend to do.

Bush's inability to articulate arguments had nothing to do with his Texan-ness or his Christianity, but a lot of folks on the right defended him as if that was the case. "He speaks American, don't you get it?"

To which I'd reply: "No, he speaks badly."

Perry's not a bad speaker, and I'm trying to keep an open mind. I suspect I agree with him more than I did with Bush, whose compassionate conservatism I loathed.
...

Actually the real, real problem is that Jonah Goldberg is a very lazy hack and stunningly bad writer whose had hoped this particular, embarrassing cup o' bad Dubya Reruns could pass him by this time and doesn't relish the thought of having to bestir himself, don his cardboard armor, take up his Crayola sword, once again pressed very reluctantly into defending the open, running, yahoo sewer of a Movement upon which his livelihood completely depends.

So why is this bush-league toadstool even in my Chicago Tribune at all?

Oh yeah...

The Clown Show at the End of the Universe

I wonder if the King of the Oompa Loompas still has some of that sweet, sweet tobacco baksheesh left over in the kitty (from Bob Herbert in the NYT):

That’s Where the Money Is

...
I remember writing about that day back in the mid-’90s when this slick, chain-smoking, quintessential influence-peddler decided to play Santa Claus by handing out checks from tobacco lobbyists to fellow Congressional sleazes right on the floor of the House.

It was incredible, even to some Republicans. The House was in session, and here was a congressman actually distributing money on the floor. Other, more serious, representatives were engaged in debates that day on such matters as financing for foreign operations and a proposed amendment to the Constitution to outlaw desecration of the flag. Mr. Boehner was busy desecrating the House itself by doing the bidding of big tobacco.

Embarrassed members of the G.O.P. tried to hush up the matter, but I got a tip and called Mr. Boehner’s office. His chief of staff, Barry Jackson, was hardly contrite. “They were contributions from tobacco P.A.C.’s,” he said.

When I asked why the congressman would hand the money out on the floor of the House, Mr. Jackson’s answer seemed an echo of Willie Sutton’s observation about banks. “The floor,” he said, “is where the members meet with each other.”
...

Because it sure looks like he's gonna need every pfennig in his bribe sack and then some to squeak his utterly meaningless plan past his own members in his own House:

Boehner debt ceiling vote delayed, lacks votes for passage


House Speaker John Boehner announced late Thursday that a proposed plan on increasing the nation’s debt ceiling was delayed as party leaders scrambled to find additional votes.

The news came just minutes before Mr. Boehner was set to hold a 5:30 p.m. vote on the proposal, which would cut roughly $915 billion in spending over the next ten years but only raise the debt ceiling through the end of the calendar year. A Republican aide said the House would vote on the bill later on Thursday evening.
...

A plan which -- should it actually pass-- will immediately crawl under the Senate's porch and die.

And since Boehner's bill is absolutely DOA in utero, so to speak, this pointless drama is about one thing and one thing only: whether of not, in the House tiger cage, Boehner is the one holding the whip, or the one obediently running in a circle with a little dog prancing on his back.

You know, back in aught-nine I believe it was, I wrote a little song about it.

And here it is:

Oompa Loompa Sprayontan Dude
I've got another puzzle for you
Oompa loompa doompeda dee
If you are wise you'll listen to me

Who do you fault when your Party's insane?
A shrieking, bigot-riddled daisy chain?
Rabid from a diet of paranoid lies
Peddled by demented teevee guys?

The
Gutless
Party
Leadership

Oompa Loompa Sprayontan Dude
Letting his Party come completely unglued
A laquered corpse, irredeemably screwed
Like the Oompa
Loompa
Sprayontan
Dude...

Later Herman's Hermits stole that song and made a fortune off of it.
Me? I never saw a dime.
Damn hippies.


Meanwhile, the eminently calm and rational James Fallows (to whom I actually owe a beer next time he comes to Chicago) joins Paul Krugman in the Big Driftglass Party of filthy, America-hating Communist dupes:

Sad, really...

Five Reasons the House GOP Is to Blame

By James Fallows

Jul 28 2011, 2:56 PM ET
Many Republican readers have written to ask why I have posted "partisan" charts, like the one after the jump, that use data from the Congressional Budget Office and elsewhere to show that tax cuts over the past decade have played a huge role in creating mammoth federal debt.

In my view, these have been "charts," rather than "partisan charts." And to me their significance is less in allocating responsibility for creating the problem than in clarifying the real options for dealing with it.

Still, anyone who thinks I am mainly blaming the Republicans for the needless debt-ceiling fracas, especially the Tea Party-era House Republicans arrayed behind Rep. Eric Cantor (and Rep. Jim Jordan), is correct. To put the reasons in one place, as things go down to the wire, here they are...

Dearth of a Salesman

Crazy old man vows to fight on!

The further Adventures of Baron Grifthausen.

File under: Fleas leaving a sinking rat.

From the AP:

Gingrich campaign fundraisers quit

By PHILIP ELLIOTT, Associated Press

ATLANTA (AP) — Newt Gingrich's top two fundraising advisers resigned on Tuesday, and officials said the Republican candidate's hobbling presidential campaign carried more than $1 million in debt.

The departures of fundraising director Jody Thomas and fundraising consultant Mary Heitman were the latest blow for the former House speaker who watched 16 top advisers abandon his campaign en masse earlier this month, partly because of what people familiar with the campaign spending described as a dire financial situation.
These people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the campaign inner workings, said the former Georgia lawmaker racked up massive travel bills but money had only trickled in since he got into the race earlier this spring.

These officials said that he is at least $1 million in debt. The current fundraising quarter ends June 30, and Gingrich will have to disclose his campaign finances by July 15. He is personally wealthy and could fund his campaign out of his own pocket, at least in the short term, to keep his campaign afloat.

Gingrich has insisted that he will not abandon his troubled bid and will continue fighting for the Republican nomination for president "no matter what it takes." He's revamping his campaign, given the series of departures.

"Newt 2012 continues its reorganization and alignment as a grassroots driven, substantive, solutions-oriented campaign," a spokesman, R.C. Hammond, told The Associated Press, adding that the campaign is "as committed as ever."
...

He has refused to answer questions about his rocky rollout, his vacation to the Mediterranean or the exodus of his top staff from his headquarters near Atlanta and from the early nominating states.

"I will endure the challenges. I will carry the message of American renewal to every part of this great land," Gingrich told a crowded ballroom at a Beverly Hills hotel recently. "And with the help of every American who wants to change Washington, we will prevail."

Where have I heard this hearty tone before?

Oh yeah.

Jefferson Davis, April 4, 1865.

To the People of the Confederate States of America.

...
We have now entered upon a new phase of a struggle the memory of which is to endure for all ages and to shed an increasing luster upon our country.

Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities and particular points, important but not vital to our defense, with an army free to move from point to point and strike in detail the detachments and garrisons of the enemy, operating on the interior of our own country, where supplies are more accessible, and where the foe will be far removed from his own base and cut off from all succor in case of reverse, nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain but the exhibition of our own unquenchable resolve. Let us but will it, and we are free; and who, in the light of the past, dare doubt your purpose in the future?

But don't worry about Newt; as long as David Gregory has a mouth, the Smartest Baby in the Sandbox will always have a warm place to park his sphincter and hawk his drivel.

Fundamentally.

Basically.

Radically.

Your Friday Podcast

Beyond Stupid and Evil.

Also an "It Gets Better" for the freaks, weirdos, outsiders and other involuntary conscripts into the Tribe of the Terrorized. You know who you are, and let me tell you kiddo, it gets much, much better.



Thanks again to Frank Chow for the graphic and Heather at Crooks and Liars Video Cafe for their help. And don't forget you can listen to our archives for free with no downloads at Professional Left.

"My mission in life is to point out to the monkeys of the universe that they cannot continue to exist in the state of stupidity."

-- Harlan Ellison

Triumph of the Shill

This is Nissan's latest triumph of the copy editor's art.

It is called the Nissan Juke, and comes complete with the usual multimedia blitz, a Wikipedia page, a Facebook home, a Twitter presence, etc.

And while I am only pretty sure that some (member or members) of their marketing department's "master race of highly gifted toddlers" (h/t "Malcolm Tucker") made enough off of this campaign to buy themselves a second home...

...I would be willing to bet the mortgage money that no one involved in making this decision had any idea that the name "Jukes" has a long and not-exactly-fashion-forward history. From Wiki:

The Jukes and the Kallikaks were pseudonyms for two families used as examples during the latter 19th century and early 20th century to argue that there was a genetic disposition toward anti-social behavior or low intelligence. The arguments were used to bolster advocacy of eugenics, or the pseudo-scientific breeding of human beings, by demonstrating that traits deemed socially inferior could be passed down from generation to generation.

As a general concept the Jukes Family represented inherited criminality and the Kallikak Family inherited mental retardation.

The Jukes family was described by Richard L. Dugdale in 1877 in The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity.
...

So....anybody want to "friend"a Juke now?

Seriously, I would have to think pretty hard to come up with three descriptions I would want associated with my brand, new automobile less than "Crime", "Pauperism" and "Disease" (well, maybe "socially inferior", "low intelligence" and "eugenics", but it would be a very close call.)

So, Nissan, before sinking several million dollars into your next big campaign for the "Catamite" or the "Slattern" how about doing something really edgy, like putting someone in charge who is vaguely aware of that vast swath of life, history, culture and literature that existed before Tosh 2.0.