“IS THIS WHERE YOU WANT TO BE WHEN JESUS COMES BACK? I DON’T THINK SO! AMERICA, GET IT RIGHT!!”

I still don’t know how people aren’t seeing that Operation Jade Helm is going down. This is a parking lot at Sam’s Club in San Angelo, Texas where there is obvious Jade Helm activity. There were containers, tarps on chain link fences, moving trucks with Knights Templar insignia on them, and all of this stuff was laid out in a triangle - obvious Illuminati involvement. This is big, people. Get right and get ready!

The only thing I’m going to say about this upfront is that a sizable percentage of the people reading this very sentence will hit play and not realize that this is satire.

And most of them will have something about the Confederate flag on their Facebook page. And bad hillbilly dental work. They will invariably be Republicans. I even bolded the part about it being satire. I’m mentioning it twice, aren’t I? Still some large number of people will not get the joke, or that the joke is, in fact, on them.

For everyone else, enjoy the comedic stylings of Get Right America.
 

 
Donald Trump’s anti-Mexican comments have made him few (no?) friends in America’s Hispanic community. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that other than a few Fox News-watching racist Republican trolls, his (unfounded) remarks seem low, vile and ridiculous to just about everyone. He’s a silly, grotesque man, full of himself and… he’s just a shithead. Fuck Donald Trump.

No… fuck his hair.

5 Rabbit Cerveceria is a Chicago-area microbrewery that had been supplying the signature beer for the ritzy Rebar in Chicago’s Trump Tower. The owners are Latino and have decided to sever ties with the loathsome billionaire. Now the Trump brew they had left over has been renamed “Chinga Tu Pelo”—which translates as “Fuck your hair”—in honor of the GOP Presidential and loudmouthed comb-over casualty.

5 Rabbit Cerveceria co-owner Andres Araya told WBEZ radio:

“We would be doing an injustice to the community we serve (and live in) by engaging in business with someone who does not accept our role in society and expresses a rhetoric of hate and ignorance towards us,” Araya wrote in a statement to WBEZ Monday.

“On a personal level, if I did, one of the things that scares me the most is sending the wrong message to my daughters. We are active members of this immigrant community and we need to stand up for ourselves, and more importantly, for those who do not have the voice or means to do so. The very foundation of the United States of America was built on acceptance and inclusion.  That is what drew us here, and that´s what why we feel so strongly about this.”

“As a company, an integral part of our vision reads that we are ‘not only based in, but also look to promote a strong and positive image of Latin America, its heritage and people.’

It would be hypocritical of us to sustain the relationship.”

Right on! Chinga that moron’s pelo!

The giant mattress company Serta yesterday announced that it too would be severing ties with the GOP’s lumbering, out of control Frankenstein monster. Recently NBC and Univision both dumped their ties with the toxic Trump brand.

This self-immolation—Trump’s moronic inferno—is spectacular to watch, but I DO hope the thick-fingered vulgarian makes it to the first Republican debate in August and beyond. Look at how much damage he’s done to himself in such a short time and just imagine what he can do for the GOP!

DONALD! DONALD! DONALD!

Photo posted to Facebook of the scene outside the South Carolina statehouse during a brawl over the Confederate flag.
 
At approximately 7:15 PM on June 29th, a brawl broke out in front of the South Carolina statehouse between supporters of the Confederate flag and protesters seeking to have it removed from the statehouse grounds.

According to the Bureau of Protective Services, about 30 anti-flag protesters were on statehouse grounds when a group of fifteen vehicles carrying pro-flag supporters pulled up and stopped in the middle of Gervais Street, in front of the statehouse. Between eight and ten occupants exited their vehicles and began to engage in an altercation with the crowd.

One eyewitness claimed tensions escalated when a convoy of Confederate flag supporters began shouting “racist remarks” from their vehicles at anti-flag protesters.

According to another eyewitness, a Confederate flag was ripped from a passing car of hecklers. The car following behind stopped, and a passenger emerged, confronting the crowd, inciting the brawl.

Another eyewitness stated, “several people were fighting and it spilled into Gervais St, and some people started pulling over and getting out of their cars to join in. Police began separating the two groups and pushing them back onto the statehouse grounds, and then a small group charged the other group, a quick secondary scuffle broke out, and then the small group took off running with several dudes chasing them behind the capitol.”

One man was arrested at the scene and charged with disorderly conduct.

An anti-Confederate flag rally on June 20th attracted nearly 2000 protesters. A similar rally is scheduled for July 4th. The Ku Klux Klan has also scheduled a pro-Confederate flag rally for July 18. It looks like it’s going to be a long, hot summer.

Here is eyewitness footage of the fight:
 

 
This had me on the floor laughing and crying, not the least because of the hilarious commentary coming from behind the camera which predicts what’s to come. But what happens at the end is just too, too perfect. Thank god for smartphones or else we wouldn’t be laughing about these dipsy doodles and their instant karma.

This is less than two minutes long, watch the entire thing and know that your time will be well-rewarded.
 

 
The smug, judging record clerk is a sad cliche, but the stereotype exists for a reason. Not all of them start out that way. Sometimes it’s a process of grinding down that takes place over several years. I’ve been working in and around record stores since 1991. Anyone working retail knows dealing with morons and nutjobs comes with the territory, but music retail people will tell you they deal with a completely different breed. There’s something special about a record store that attracts a fringe class one might never encounter any other place, save the emergency room or the DMV. Ask anyone who has worked in music retail, especially the old-timers, and they’ll tell you. We all have a story to tell.

In 2002 I stashed a notebook behind the counter of the shop where I work, something I wish I had had the foresight to think of years earlier. Anytime we got a dopey phone call, boneheaded comment, or generally batshit customer experience we’d log it into the book with the date and time of occurrence. We’ve got a few volumes filled at this point. Earlier today I flipped through some back pages and noted favorite entries. I have omitted the date stamps for the sake of brevity, but these entries span from February 2002 to November 2014. There’s so much more where this came from, but ideally this begins a dialogue with other battle-scarred shop grunts. We want to hear your stories. If you have favorite quotes or tales, especially ones that top these, post them to the comments and share with others who’ve lived the struggle.

Enjoy these hand-selected quotes from the music retail front

 
 
Customer: “Why are there only 12 songs on this CD?”
Clerk: “Uh, that’s just how many songs are on it.”
Customer: “So, there’s six songs per side?”

*

Customer: “I’m looking for an old song called ‘The Monster Mash’. I think it’s by Kris Kristofferson.”

*

(phone call)
Customer: “Are you the manager?”
Clerk: “Yes.”
Customer: “OK. There’s a Beatles album… it’s really rare… it’s worth a whole lot of money… Do you know which one it is?”
Clerk: “No.”
Customer: “OK. How much would it be worth?”

*

Customer: “Do you have a Christmas album by Aryan Neville?”

*
 
Customer: “Do you have any Van Morrison? I didn’t see any under ‘V’.”
Clerk: (politely) “Well, it would actually be under ‘M’.”
Customer: “NEVERMIND!” (customer storms out)

*

(phone call)
Customer: “Is this the record place?”
Clerk: “Yes.”
Customer: “Could you tell me how to get a record deal? I do rap.”

*
 
Customer: “I’m looking for a Country singer. The last name is ‘Redding’. I think the first name is ‘Otis’”

*

(phone call)
Customer: “Do you have any… uh… Gospel… uh… I mean… uh… tape… on… video… uh… I mean… (screams) DO YOU HAVE ANY HALLE BERRY MOVIES?”

*

(phone call)
Customer: “Do you have constellation music?”
Clerk: “Constellation music?”
Customer: “You know… A variety.”

*

(phone call)
Customer: “There’s this lady that just put out a song. I don’t know what it is.”
(statement ends here with customer expecting an answer)

*

(phone call)
Customer: “I have some… I don’t know what they are… uh… (moment of silence) Do y’all buy 26 inch records?”

*

Customer: “Do you guys have any Kenny G posters?”
Clerk: “No, I’m sorry we don’t.”
Customer: “Well, if I get two then I’ll give you guys one.”

*

Customer: “I know that the Beatles Red, White, and Blue albums are the best, but are there any other good copulations by the Beatles?”
 

 
Customer: “Do y’all have ‘Old Mount Zion’?”
Clerk: “Um, who is it by?”
Customer: “The New Years song everybody sings!”
Clerk: “Auld Lang Syne?”
Customer: “I dunno, maybe.”

*
 
Customer: “Are all your CD’s made?”
Clerk: “...?”

* 

Customer: “I’m looking for ‘Theme From a Summer Place’.”
Clerk: “Do you know by who? About 100 different artists have done that song.”
Customer: “There’s no ARTIST! It’s an INSTRUMENTAL!”

*

A guy comes in and wants to order a TV-only-offer CD. He brings in the 1-800 number from the commercial and asks if we can call it in for him.

*

Two sorority girls come into the shop.
Sorority girl #1: “Do you guys have any Beatles DVD’s?... no… wait… I guess they didn’t have video cameras back then.”

*
 
A young white woman’s inquiry about Reggae:
“Y’all got that Reggae guy? ...He’s black.”

*

Customer: “Y’all got any Ronald McDonald?—You know that guy who used to be with the ‘Doobie Boys’”

More after the jump…

 
Because so much ink and so many pixels have been committed to the ongoing and breathtakingly stupid culture war over childhood immunizations, I’ll keep my comments brief: anti-vaxers? You are destructive fucking morons and if you die of something easily preventable I will laugh about it.

But though the numbers of anti-vax jackasses have grown dangerously out of control in the recent years since the likes of Jack Wolfson, Jenny McCarthy, and Andrew Wakefield started spewing the criminally irresponsible shit they should all be in goddamn jail for, there have always been people ignorant of the necessity for childhood vaccinations. In the late ‘70s, when Star Wars mania was at its height, the CDC obtained permission to use C-3PO and R2-D2 for an immunization education campaign. From the Nov/Dec 1979 issue of Public Health Reports:

In a continuing effort to focus public awareness on childhood immunization, the Center for Disease control has distributed to State and local health departments copies of a poster featuring the “droids” R2D2 and C3PO from the movie “Star Wars.” Special permission to print the posters was granted to CDC by Twentieth Century Fox as a public service.

The poster has proved to be so popular that it has entered its second printing. The posters have been used as a reward to individual children who complete the basic immunization series, as reminders to parents in doctors’ offices, hospitals, and pharmacies, and as attention grabbers in announcing mass immunization clinics at schools and shopping centers. The poster is also drawing increased attention to child health in conjunction with projects sponsored as part of the International Year of the Child celebration.

 

 
This television commercial from the campaign has an unusual role reversal—R2 is freaking out over bullshit and 3PO serves as the voice of reason. It seems to actually be voiced by actor Anthony Daniels, who played the droid in all six Star Wars movies, and indeed, the typically reliable Wookieepedia claims that both Daniels and R2-D2 actor Kenny Baker did in fact appear in this PSA.
 

 
UPDATE, Thu Feb 5, 2015, 8:17 A.M. EST: This post as originally published contained a significant error, which I deeply regret and have corrected in the text. I misspelled ‘Wookieepedia.’ My sincerest apologies to anyone who was misled by my negligent inaccuracy. See how that’s done, science-deniers? It’s not so difficult.

 
No Other Possibility was Negativland’s first video, released in 1989, the same year as “Helter Stupid,” pitched right between their “Christianity Is Stupid” hoax of a couple years earlier and “U2” a couple years later.

I hadn’t seen this in quite a while—I had honestly forgotten how tremendously enjoyable Negativland is. Their stuff is way more entertaining than any anti-establishment culture-jammin’ nutcases have any right to be. (I guess if you invent the term “culture jamming,” you have a license to transcend the genre.) This video is very good, and I had also not realized the high level of musicianship on display here—certainly “Nesbitt’s Lime Soda” and “Fire Song” and “Very Stupid” (I’m not sure that last one has an official title, the Internet seems to call it “Theme From ‘a Big 10-8 Place,’” which is dumb) are all top-notch.

Negativland are pitched almost exactly between DEVO and Tim & Eric—with less instinct for schtick than either (this is a brave and good thing). And yet there is a kind of schtick to it, too. In the opening crawl, supposedly penned by “Crosley Bendix, Director, Stylistic Premonitions” (later played by Don Joyce), you can hear that excessively modest and self-annihilating tone, familiar from David Letterman in his NBC days and also certain misanthropic comix guys like Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes. I think the idea is that you have to be as hard on yourself as you are on your target; you have to torch the self because you can begin to reconstruct (and also criticize/satirize others).
 

 
The video is purest 1980s slacker fodder in that the biggest sin is to be unaware, to be incapable of irony. If only the suburbans/corporates/normals could be more ironic! You see much the same idea in, say, Reality Bites, but it’s not really a good tack—the slackers (hey, I’m one too) couldn’t figure out any other point of attack. Negativland’s methods haven’t dated much at all IMO, but that part, the pro-irony ethos, does feel a bit dated here.

In addition to being an essay about the vapidity of American culture, No Other Possibility also serves as a kind of diary for the Negativland guys themselves. About halfway through we get a video report about a fire that destroyed their apartment/studio in El Cerrito, California on Friday, February 13, 1987. The very end of the video is taken up with a terribly earnest report about Negativland’s involvement in the David Brom murders of 1988, based on connections that were entirely made up by Negativland.

At some point “Crosley Bendix” (Don Joyce) has a little speech about numerology, at the end of which he cries, “Thanks a million! You’ve been a wonderful audience. Bye, Cleveland!” Which is only noteworthy because I was in fact watching it in Cleveland.
 

 
A blithering idiot, far too stupid to realize just how deeply dumb she truly is decided to tell science where to get off. Megan Fox—not to be confused with the gorgeous Hollywood actress—has uploaded a video of her visit to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago to YouTube for all the world to see point and laugh at.

Since it would be pointless to go into it any further—she’s an idiot, she homeschools her kids and she’s a fucking dingbat with her own YouTube channel so she can inflict her low IQ buffoonery on everyone else, these three things should suffice—here’s how Megan herself describes what you are about to see:

In November 2014, Megan Fox toured the Field Museum’s “Evolving Earth” exhibit to audit it for bias. She found many examples of inconsistencies and the Field Museum’s insistence that people support opinion as fact without proof. The Field Museum pushes certain theories as if they are absolute proven law when that is not how the scientific method works. She found enough bias to show that the people who put this exhibit together at the Field Museum pushed an agenda with quasi-religious overtones: the cult of “science” where the “scientists” are more like high priests pushing a religion instead of using the correct scientific method. Aside from having time machines, there is no way these people can be this certain about things they speculate happened millions of years ago before recorded history.

This video is currently being torn apart like red meat by the wry wolves over at reddit:

She’s so stupid that she doesn’t even know she’s stupid.

More of the “If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” and ‘You weren’t there, you didn’t see it.” arguments.

“You weren’t there, you didn’t see it.” I have never been able to grasp how individuals who use this argument are incapable of seeing the irony of their own statements.

If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear it, is this bitch still an idiot?

Yes. There is no circumstance in which she isn’t an idiot. This incident has permanently collapsed her wavefunction.

There are an infinite number of universes. She is a complete idiot in all of them.

 

 
UPDATE: More from reddit. You know she’s reading them, but will they have any effect on a plank like Megan?

Exactly my thought. I barely watched any of it, but I saw her saying something along the lines “..don’t tell me what you think on how animals started from a cell, you don’t know so don’t tell me you do, or my kids….” Yet I’m sure her religion has a creation story that they can prove either…. It’s just so weird to see someone reaching like that for an argument, and them thinking it’s solid.

“I don’t know what this word is” she says. Then maybe don’t act like you are an expert on the topic?

I love that she begins her attempt to disprove evolution with an admission that she has no idea how to even pronounce the word.

One of the simplest principles of biology….That’s how I knew she had no education.

I’ve thought about how to respond to people that have the “If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” argument. It’s surprising hard to counter, mostly because the people with that frame of mind are stubbornly stupid.

I think the best way to elucidate the issue for them is to ask - if the original colonies in America came from Europeans - why are there still Europeans?

That’s a pretty good analogy. The best I could come up with is, say you make some dough. You throw half of it in the oven and it becomes bread. So if bread comes from dough, why is there still dough?

Might as well disable comments so no one can actually explain to me why I’m wrong! LALALALA CAN’T HEAR YOU!

This is the kind of thing the rest of the world sees and thinks that this is what Americans are like… BECAUSE WE ARE.

Fox probably votes in every election, too. DO check out her videos about the “problem” in her local library. It’s a real saga. Fox also reviews YA books looking for “subversive” messages and she is a featured contributor on goofball / rightwing / old people’s blog PJMedia. She is working on a book which she claims “will be an exhaustive investigation into the myriad of ways that our children are corrupted by the Left’s anti-American and anti-Christian propaganda.”

The top post on her Facebook page currently is this:
 

 
Trust me, have a look at what she’s got there on her Facebook page. It tells a very “interesting” story. Not necessarily the one ol’ Megan thinks it tells, but a very “interesting” story nonetheless. Bless.
 

 
Via reddit

 
Anti-gay self-ordained fruitcake “pastor” Dr. James David Manning accidentally tweeted a satirical cartoon mash-up—in which he confesses to being a “homosexual sodomite”—to his 4,215 Twitter followers.
 

Pastor James D Manning Interview http://t.co/gW0NNeliHB

— James David Manning (@DrJamesDManning) November 18, 2014

 
“Pastor” Manning—a guest of Sean Hannity’s from time to time—was last seen propagating claims that Starbucks allegedly was using “sodomite semen” to flavor their lattes (This is hardly a secret: they had to get it somewhere and as everyone knows semen farmers tend to turn a blind eye as to the sexual orientation of their “studs.”) Manning has urged his followers to boycott the coffee franchise for putting jizz in their drinks.

In Adam Reake’s video, “Pastor” Manning of the ATLAH World Missionary Church in Harlem, is seen as a cartoon figure discussing the “semen” coffee story:
 

 
Reake continues his “interview” with Manning in a follow-up animation:
 

 
Via the Independent.
 

 
Some troll today tweeted a shocking and, it was implied, inevitable idea for a Halloween costume: sexy Ebola nurse.  The apparent price was 45 pounds, as you can see in the image.

This offensive costume idea elicited considerable outrage on Twitter, which is understandable considering that Ebola has already killed thousands (around 5,000 as of this writing) in 2014 alone. Then there is this sobering fact from the World Health Organization: “A total of 450 health-care workers (HCWs) are known to have been infected with EVD up to the end of 23 October.” Three days ago the first known case of Ebola in New York City was confirmed.

On Twitter, user @thei100 tweeted, “Are people really trying to sell a ‘Sexy Ebola nurse’ outfit for Halloween?” to which user ‏@cfly97live responded “Unbelievable.” Perhaps @thei100 will be heartened to hear that the answer to your question appears to be no. The UK website Metro was on the case. It turns out that the sexy Ebola nurse is fake. The images were taken from a preexisting costume idea which is pretty absurd in its own right: a sexy Walter White costume. 
 

 
So it’s all good news, right? Humanity is redeemed. There is no “sexy Ebola nurse” constume. But wait! It turns out there IS a “sexy Ebola containment suit” costume, available on the brandsonsale website—it costs $59.99 per outfit.
 

 
Here’s their product description for that one:
 

As the deadly Ebola virus trickles its way through the United States, fighting its disease is no reason to compromise style. The short dress and chic gas mask will be the talk of Milan, London, Paris, and New York as the world’s fashionistas seek global solutions to hazmat couture. Ending plague isn’t the endeavor of a single woman, so be sure to check out our men’s Ebola Containment Costume for a great couple’s costume idea.

 
Long story short, if you’re hung up on the word “nurse,” then you’re in the clear. But this other costume is just about as bad, so faith in humanity—dashed.