Kim Jong Un gave a lecture to high-ranking officials earlier this year where he mentioned that Adolph Hitler had managed to rebuild Germany in just a short time after it had been defeated in WWI and has directed his subordinates to study which aspects of the Third Reich’s rule would have implications for North Korea. He has reported also given gifts of Mein Kampf to senior officials.
A source told New Focus International, a North Korean news organization that sources from both defectors and anonymous citizens from within the country that the boy dictator wants to see if there are “practical applications” for North Korea to learn from Hitler’s successes and bolster the desperately poor state. Shirley Lee, New Focus’s international editor told The Washington Post by email that some of her sources think North Korea, a country heavy on race-baiting and its supposedly charismatic dictators, has a lot in common with Germany, although it’s probably the Nazis’ propaganda machine that is being the most closely studied, not the Final Solution (who would they pogrom against in NoKo anyway?):
“One source says there have been many overt attempts to imbue Kim Jong Un with an ‘intimidating charisma,’ such as having him shout very forcefully at associates (Kim Jong Il was never seen to do such a thing) and even throwing things at people. According to another source, this may explain why the [official state newspaper] Rodong Sinmun has been showing photos of Kim Jong Un looking angry and scary – again, unprecedented in the history of Kim presentation.”
Yeah, you, Mister Totalitarian Dictator, butch it up!
Outgoing GOP crazypants Rep. Michele Bachmann of MN seems to have accidentally taken some sodium pentothal before sitting down for this recent interview with WorldNutDaily. In it, Rep. Bachmann states, with no equivocating (as is her wont), that if immigration reform passes, there will never again be a Republican President or a GOP ruled Senate and that they’ll eventually lose the House for good, too.
Oh, how I love these rare moments of Republican candor! But Bachmann, as true as what she is saying really is, misses the equally valid flip-side of her statement: If immigration fails to pass, there won’t be another Republican President ever again either! Win/win!!!
The Republicans, are, of course, fucked in every respect and they have only themselves—and their staggeringly stupid brand of politics—to blame. Instead they’re probably just going to point the finger at “Mexican anchor babies,” but to no avail.
You snooze you lose. For the politically tin-eared Rip Van Winkles of the Republican Party, it’s already too late.
But that’s no going to stop Reps. Bachmann, Steve King and Louie Gohmert who are reportedly planning a revolt in the House over immigration reform legislation forcing additional debate (likely to prove highly embarrassing with those three clownjobs leading the charge) on the immigration bill they say will have “dire consequences for the country.”
The minute immigration reform gets passed, you can put a fork in the Grand Old Party. Even the reddest of redneck states will start turning blue very, very quickly and there is nothing the Republicans can do about it, either. Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place. These assholes are staring down a demographic tidal wave that is going to DROWN THEM.
Admittedly, although a one-party rule by the Democrats doesn’t sound like much of a prize—it has been pretty great for California, though, hasn’t it?—that party will be increasingly easier to reason with once the GOP—so pathologically impervious to reason, obviously—has suffered continuing electoral humiliation and diminishment at the vote of a rapidly changing American electorate.
People are debating whether or not the woman filming and berating this poor Dunkin’ Donuts employee is mentally unstable. I don’t know.
I’ve worked in customer service jobs before. I have encountered this particular breed of asshole before… many, many times.
If this guy wasn’t even responsible for what she perceives as her mistreatment at the hands of the entire Dunkin Donuts organization, you can only imagine how this jackass acted the night before!
In the video she says she’s worried about having her drink spit in. I think that seems like a rational fear to have when one drops the N-word in an eating establishment.
Larry Wessel’s 2011 Boyd Rice documentary Iconoclast was, I thought, an interesting way to spend four-odd hours. In it, Rice does come across as a curious individual, half dark lord and half fabulous fan-boy, with a mania for tiki bars, practical jokes, and a hundred other peculiar hobbies and fixations. It was noticeable however that the film—seemingly made in close collaboration with its subject—was also something of a white-wash regarding Rice’s flirtation with white-supremacy.
It seemed significant, for example, that the following appearance by Rice on the US Nazi Tom Metzger’s self-styled “controversial pro-white TV show” Race & Reason didn’t make Wessel’s capacious final cut. When not discussing electronic music’s “intrinsic whiteness,” and deriding “pitiful liberal humanist values,” Rice, Tom Metzger, and the show’s co-host (a Neo-Nazi Hank Kingsley!) find common ground concerning Adolf Hitler’s underrated prose style. “Whenever you see Mein Kampf referred to in print,” muses Rice, “they always use the exact same words—they call it turgid prose and incoherent and stuff (…) when you read it it’s like the exact opposite.” (Which, according to the Thesaurus, throws up the following antonyms: “humble, modest, quiet, reserved, self-effacing, balanced, collected, normal, sane.” Sounds like Mein Kampf to me!)
A man has denied trying to film up a woman’s skirt, claiming he may have been trying to light a fart.
Brian Whitehead entered a bar in Bristol, England, where he was seen to place a “mystery object under a woman’s clothing as she stood at the bar.”
Whitehead claims to have no memory of the incident, but told police:
“Maybe I was trying to light a fart. It could have been a joke.
“Maybe someone says ‘I bet you a fiver if you light her fart’.”
He was later arrested after he being identified on the bar’s CCTV footage.
At his trial, where Whitehead denies a charge of “committing an act outraging public decency, by placing a camera under a skirt in September last year,” Bar manager Alexander McEvoy Williams, said he was “shocked” when he saw Whitehead’s actions, as the Bristol Post reports:
...Williams told the jury he had been collecting glasses outside the Wetherspoon’s bar when he came back inside and saw a man standing close behind a woman who was chatting at the bar.
He said: “As I approached from outside I saw the male with a black object in his hand. As I drew closer I saw it to be some sort of electronic device with a screen and buttons, either a camera or a mobile phone. I saw the male place the device under the woman’s skirt as she was leant forward, looking at something on the bar. When I saw what happened I initially was so shocked I couldn’t believe what I had just seen. I put the glasses down and I asked the woman if she had seen anything, and she said ‘no’.”
Mr Williams said he went to check the bar’s CCTV to be absolutely sure of what occurred. He said: “I couldn’t believe it, it was so blatant. Another manager has seen it and he said ‘Did you just see that?’
“The CCTV confirmed what we had just seen.”
A picture of Whitehead was displayed at the bar, and when he returned and was recognized, he was arrested. Despite the CCTV evidence to the contrary, Whitehead denies his actions were lewd, insisting he had been drunk. He also denied using a camera or having a sexual motive.
“I don’t remember it clearly. I don’t know what I was doing. I believe I had a Clipper cigarette lighter, a black one. I think it was still in my hand after just having a cigarette,” Whitehead told the court.
Dignity, schmignity! Who am I kidding, the man is shameless! Watch in slack-jawed boredom as Glenn Beck interviews himself, in a kind of idiotic (or demented, if you prefer) Swedish Chef impression.
Glenn Beck lost his mind (and the vast majority of his audience and influence) a while ago, but has Beck the showman lost his mojo, too?
He’s not even trying here. Well, he’s trying to take up airtime, I guess, but not much else. I can’t imagine too many people, not even stupid ones, would subscribe to this, or continue their subscriptions if this was the quality of the programming they would receive for their hard-earned dough. There aren’t enough hours in the day and this doesn’t even rise to the occasion of lame.
I shit you not. Apparently the G8 leaders and their entourages are such delicate flowers that they can’t bear to see the effect of the global recession on the towns they drive through, such as upcoming host Enniskillen in Northern Ireland.
Local councils in Northern Ireland have painted fake shop fronts and covered derelict buildings with huge billboards to hide the economic hardship being felt in towns and villages near the golf resort where G8 leaders will meet this month.
Northern Ireland’s government has spent £2m (€2.3m) tackling dereliction over the past two years, the environment department said. Some buildings have been demolished and others have been given a facelift in an attempt to make areas more attractive.
Almost a quarter of “dereliction funds” were freed up for local councillors in Co Fermanagh in anticipation of Britain hosting the annual Group of Eight leaders’ summit there on 17-18 June. More than 100 properties have been spruced up. In the one-street town of Belcoo, the changes are merely cosmetic.
At a former butcher’s shop, stickers applied to the windows show a packed meat counter and give the impression that business is booming. Across the street, another empty unit has been given a makeover to look like a thriving office supply shop.
Locals are unimpressed. “The shop fronts are cosmetic surgery for serious wounds. They are looking after the banks instead of saving good businesses,” said Kevin Maguire, 62, an unemployed man who has lived all his life in Belcoo.
“The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals.”
― William S. Burroughs, Nova Express
In the mid-1970s, William Burroughs wrote a monthly column for the rock magazine Crawdaddy called “Time of the Assassins” (which he got from a line of Rimbaud’s “Voici le temps des Assassins”).
Evocative, isn’t it? The “Time of the Assassins.” It has such a nice ring to it.
That we may soon be (or already are) living in an age that would require assassins struck me last week as I was watching the controversial statements made by former Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe (today he is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Nestlé S.A.) who said that water should be valued like any other commodity. Brabek’s comments were made in a 2005 documentary, We Feed the World, and are today, eight years later, being scrutinized in horror and exchanged feverishly by lefties on social media. As a result, Brabek’s been on the receiving end of quite a lot of stick on Facebook and Twitter, and not without some justification, if you ask me.
Brabeck’s flawed “free market” remarks betray such a peculiarly evil “logic” that only an extremely wealthy man, far, far removed from the rest of humanity, could have conceived of it:
My name is Peter Brabeck. I’m from Villach in Carinthia. And for the past 7-years I’ve been head of the Nestlé Group, the largest foodstuff corporation in the world, with a turnover of around 90 billion Swiss francs or around $65 billion, and with around 275,000 employees working directly for us. So, it’s quite a large ship. We’re the twenty-seventh largest company in the world.
Today, people believe that everything that comes from Nature is good. That represents a huge change because until recently, we always learnt that Nature could be pitiless. Man is now in the position of being able to provide some balance to Nature, but in spite of this, we have something approaching a shibboleth that everything that comes from Nature is good. A very good example is the organic movement. Organic is now best. But organic is not best.
After 15-years of eating GM food products in the USA, not one single case of illness has occurred from eating them to date. And in spite of this, we’re all so uneasy about it in Europe that something might happen to us. It’s hypocrisy more than anything else.
Ah yes, if you overlook what that benevolent gangsta Monsanto is doing to the soil and the water in much of the country and the fact that our vegetables have mere fractions of the nutrients they used to (like apples and spinach), then, yeah, I see his point. LOL.
There’s that lovely old Austrian folk song: “The dear cattle need water, hollera, holleri,” if you remember. Water is of course the most important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter.
The one opinion which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution.
It’s an extreme position to expect… water? Wait, wait, come on, let’s let the man who is the Chairman of the world’s largest multinational manufacturer of bottled water define his terms, before we lay into him, shall we:
And the other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value. Personally, I believe it’s better to give foodstuff a value, so that we’re all aware that it has a price, and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water and there are many different possibilities there.
Okay, folks, I’ve heard enough, go ahead get your knives out for this bastard.
And if that wasn’t bad enough already, then he really goes off into the stratosphere:
I’m still of the opinion that the biggest social responsibility of any CEO is to maintain and ensure the successful and profitable future of his enterprise. For only if we can ensure our continued long term existence will we be in the position to actively participate in the solution of the problems that exist in the world.
What.The.Fuck.Is.This.Guy.Talking.About? The obesity or diabetes epidemics he’s done his part for, perchance? Brabeck-Letmathe helmed goddamned Nestlé for seven years! It’s the largest foodstuff corporation in the entire world and just look at what their over-packaged, corn syrup-heavy product lines consist of! Nestlé, the corporation that ran a massive advertising campaign in Africa discouraging breast feeding and then sold African mothers powdered milk, which they diluted with dirty water resulting in the deaths of literally millions of infants? (The UN had to get involved!) Nestlé the corporation that turns a blind eye to child labor practices… That Nestlé?
I’d trust Peter Brabeck—who started working for the corporation in 1968 and was the 2007 recipient of a “Black Planet” award given for destroying the environment, monopolizing water resources and tolerating child labor—and Nestlé‘s shareholders with the water supply of a Third World nation like I’d trust a fuckin’ coyote to keep an eye on my Chihuahua. A Russian hacker with all my online banking passwords. A famished shark with my good luck ham.... (Sorry, I think I got carried away there).
First it will be some country we’ve never heard of and will never visit in our lives. Next thing you know, a Republican governor will be proposing to privatize the water supply in a southern state… because, you know, the freemarket is more efficient than the private sector or perhaps just because a Swiss multinational food company donated a shit-ton of money to his campaign ....
We’re in the position of being able to create jobs: 275,000 here, 1.2 million who are directly dependent on us in principle. That makes around 4.5 million people in total—because behind each of our employees are another 3 people, so we have at least 4.5 million people who are directly dependent on us.
Because the world needs moar Kit-Kats! The idea that the notoriously predatory Nestlé is somehow “a part” of the solution to poverty at this advanced stage of capitalism’s life cycle is surrealism at its best. Brabek’s like a caricature of a crazed Bilderberger. I half-expect him to goosestep around wearing a paper Burger King crown and tissue boxes on his feet in his private moments. He is Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, incarnate. Ah Pook is here!
The part of the video clip that has nothing to do with privatizing water is actually the best bit, in terms of the off-the-scale absurdity of this privileged man’s blinkered 1% vantage point.. on the “little people”:
If you want to create work, you have to work yourself, not as it was in the past, where existing work was distributed. If you remember the main argument for the 35-hour-week was that there would be a certain amount of work and it would be better if we worked less and distributed the work amongst more people. That has proved quite clearly to be wrong. If you want to create more work you have to work more yourself. And with that we’ve got to create a positive image of the world for people, and I see absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t be positive about the future. We’ve never had it so good, we’ve never had so much money, we’ve never been so healthy, we’ve never lived as long as we do today. We have everything we want, and still we go around as if we were in mourning for something.
The Japanese. You can see how modern those factories are; highly robotized, almost no people.
(Shakes head) You get the picture. I present to you, solely on the basis that he spoke these words (which he ostensibly seems to believe), that the man is a criminally insane psychopathic wanker. He has the worldview of a sociopath top executive of a large multinational, which of course, he is. If Peter Brabek were willing to share his nine million euros a year salary with some of Nestlé‘s rank and file workers in Bangladesh, I’ll bet they’d be JUST FINE with with cutting back their work week and spending more quality time with their kids instead of slaving in sub-human working conditions to make Hot Pockets that’ll be bought on a credit card at Wal-Mart by a morbidly obese couch potato living in Georgia… Just sayin’...
Naturally, seeing the consternation his words have unleashed, Brabeck tried to back-peddle furiously, limiting the damage that his 2005 remarks have caused in an essay that he (or more than likely a PR flunky at Nestlé) wrote for Huffington Post (Whose side are they on, anyway? Brabeck or humanity’s?)
At its heart, though, is still the kernel of the idea that it’s a good idea to put a price tag on water:
I do need to correct a misconception that has fueled a lot of the criticism on Facebook and elsewhere.
I do not deny that clean and safe water to drink or for basic hygiene is a human right. Of course it is.
However, I do not think it is right that some people in the world do not have access to a clean, safe supply when others can use excess amounts for non-essential purposes without bearing a fairer cost for the infrastructure needed to supply it.
When we give water a value, we use it more carefully, and this does not mean privatization.
Sounds almost high-minded, don’t it? I love this part, too:
Why does a company like Nestlé care about this?
Our consumers need access to clean, safe water and decent sanitation, wherever they are in the world, as do our hundreds of thousands of employees, their families and friends. As a good global citizen, we have a responsibility to be part of the solution.
And to skim a little off the top and then eventually skim a lot off the top... Hey, that’s capitalism, baby! The first sip is free!
Which brings us full circle back to William Burroughs: In The Naked Lunch, the author laid out a nightmarish vision of an out-of-control, planet-destroying consumer culture addicted to that which will most certainly kill it, with the metaphor of a junkie hooked on, and controlled by his metabolic need for heroin.
As Burroughs wrote to Jack Kerouac:
“The title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”
“The little people” are what will be on the end of Nestlé‘s fork if elitist viewpoints like Peter Brabek’s hold sway over public debate. It’s an idea that should be stomped out with extreme mob violence, if you ask me. Eliminated from the conversation.
I think it’s fair to say that 100% of the human race is “addicted” to water and this is why, when I listened to what Herr Brabeck had to say, I thought of William Burroughs and wondered, if he were alive, what he would make of all this.
What chance does the human race have with enemies of Earth like this, when vast monied interests and multinationals start to have designs on our drinking water?
Is it an absolute truism that the most strident, vociferous homophobes are always self-hating closeted gays? Judging from the dozens upon dozens of anti-gay Christian activists and conservative pols who have been “outed” over the years, it would seem to be an immutable law of that particular brand of assholism.
And speaking of assholes, Liberal radio host Alan Colmes very nearly got rabidly anti-gay, hate-filled Christian hater Bryan Fischer to admit to something truly hilarious on his show the other day.
Read between the lines of this exchange:
Colmes: Have you ever had a gay impulse?
Fischer: (Laughing) Alan, I am not going to talk about that ...
Colmes: I’m just wondering ...
Fischer: Alan, I’m not going to go there. Give it a rest Alan ...
Colmes: It’s a simple yes or no question.
Fischer: We’re not going to talk about that.
Colmes: Because maybe if you’ve been able to overcome your gay impulses and you’ve been successful in doing it, you could be a model for other people you’d like to see act the same way.
See what he did there? Standing ovation!
Fischer: The focus here, Alan, is that everybody experiences sexual impulses that if they acted on those impulses, it would destroy them.
Colmes: Well, can you give me an example from your own life? What would be some of yours?
Fischer: You’ve experienced them ...
Colmes: I have?
Fischer: I’ve experienced them. Every man, every woman has experienced certain sexual impulses that, if they acted on them, if they conducted themselves by yielding to those impulses, it would destroy them. Ask Tiger Woods about that.
Nice try, Bryan, but he’s asking YOU.
Colmes: I don’t think I’ve ever had sexual impulses that would destroy the society or the culture or make me a deviant in some way. I honestly don’t think that’s ever happened, even in your eyes, so I’m surprised. I wonder what impulses you’re talking about. If you’ve had them, I’d love to know what they are.
Fischer: Well the focus Alan is on sexual conduct, sexual behavior, not on sexual impulse ...
Colmes: So you won’t tell me whether you yourself have been able to overcome a gay impulse?
Fischer: Alan, give it a rest.
Getting a little squirmy there, are we Bry?
What’s Fischer hiding? It is, as Colmes said during the conversation, a simple yes or no question. He knows what the answer is, just like anyone else would and yet curiously, he chose not to say. Somehow I think that if the answer was, ahem, a straightforward “no” he would have just said “no” without hesitation.
But he didn’t. You don’t need to be Alex Jones (or much of an amateur psychoanalyst, either) to draw certain observations from this unintentionally revealing exchange…
Hopefully this question will dog Bryan Fischer around for the rest of his fuckin’ life… or at least until he’s caught with a “traveling companion” he met on Grindr…
OK, I know this will come off as a little harsh, heartless and probably as deeply lacking in compassion or empathy, but let me say that, first of all, someone needs to say it, and why not me? Although I’ve lived in New York City since I was 6 (well, with a few breaks here and there), I was actually born in Oklahoma City. And even though I do acknowledge that it’s distasteful to mention this “so soon,” it has to be said now, before the vote goes to Congress.
So here the fuck it is: NO EMERGENCY FUNDS FOR OKLAHOMA. There, I said it. Sorry, but fuck ‘em. Why do I say this? Is it simply because their scumbag senators (Tom Coburn and Jim Inhoffe) dragged their feet for MONTHS on voting for aid for New York and the Sandy-impacted areas here in the Northeast? Yeah, that’s part of it. A big part of it. Is it because both of them ultimately voted AGAINST Sandy-aid to this area? Yeah, that’s a big part of it, too. But it’s more than that. Much more, and soon you’ll see it too, so give me a minute to make my case…
The first thing that should be noted is that Oklahoma is one of the biggest, fattest, Federal-funds gobbling hobo states in the nation, receiving $1.36 in federal funds for every dollar in taxes it pays to the federal government (It’s also the 10th least unionized state with 5.5% union membership). Meanwhile, my state, New York, received just 79 cents back for each dollar that we paid, and we paid a helluva lot more in taxes than Oklahoma did. In other words, it’s fair to say that New York keeps Oklahoma afloat. We pay to keep Oklahomans employed and we pay to keep up their infrastructure via the federal funds Oklahoma vampirically sucks out of our state, to the detriment of our students and our fucking roads. And yet, Oklahoma senators were stupid enough to vote against Sandy aid? Huh?WTF?Please don’ hit me massah I’ll get back in de house!
At least a good pimp knows to sweet-talk his working girls when he needs to keep the cash flowing. But Senators Tom Coburn and Jim Inhoffe are incompetent boobs. Their reverse NIMBY shit is for the birds: What happens in their backyard isn’t as important as what happens in mine? Come on up to New York and say that to our faces (Peter King is a moron, but he’s right some of the time...).
Let me pause for a second and consider that not all of Oklahoma supports that incredibly hypocritical Repuglicant policy. There have to be some counties that recognized just how insane and self-defeating their bullshit policies are.Right? WRONG. Lookie here. Yep. All Oklahoma Counties voted for Romney. They were ALL “red” counties. (And both Senators, of course, are Repugs. I didn’t bother looking up if there were any Democratic Congresscritters, though I think there might be a couple.) Let’s also remember that Romney wanted to abolish FEMA. That’s right. Every Oklahoman county voted for the dumb scumbag that wanted to kill FEMA. So let’s give them what they wanted: NO FEMA FOR OKLAHOMA.
Now you’d think this is bad, almost a case to vote against aid to Oklahoma, but here’s the kicker. The real thing that makes me fuckin’ angry. Let me put it simply…
If I built a shack on, say, active train tracks and then, shortly thereafter, my shack was demolished when a freight train came through, how would you feel if I asked you for some money to rebuild my shack on those same goddamn train tracks? Without a doubt you’d say, “Fuck Off.” Well that’s what we have in Oklahoma City, and believe me I know: Oklahoma, Kansas, and the Texas Panhandle are all a part of “tornado alley” here in these United States. Remember The Wizard of Oz? That was Kansas, kids, right next door to Oklahoma. In other words, they get lots of tornadoes there every year and everybody knows it. It’s not a surprise, and maybe not (arguably) due to global warming or anything. And yet they’re playing Russian roulette again and again and again, very frequently losing. And they want us to bail them out? (Fun fact: Oklahoma building codes don’t require basements because it’d be more expensive.) New York, meanwhile, has NEVER been flooded before. New York flooding? NOW THAT’S A FRIGGIN’ DISASTER and yet, Oklahoma voted against aid to New York? And now they want US to bail THEM out… AGAIN?
Fuck that. No aid to Oklahoma for the tornadoes. Sorry, folks, you shot off a couple of rounds at your golden goose and now we’re gun-shy.
