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Nice hat, Senator

obama

Y’all know I’ve been pretty depressed about this presidential election. John McCain seriously harshes my shadenfreude. Every time I start to go after a Democrat, I hear McCain’s evil-grampa laugh in my ear, and my (entirely metaphorical) balls shrivel.

But I’ve listened to the entirety of Jeremiah Wright’s National Press Club and NAACP speeches and I can’t remember a time I have so passionately wished to poke someone in the snoot. Entirely metaphorically, of course.

I think it was where he imitates the way white people talk. Being mimicked reaches right back into my nursery school braincells and makes them throb with screaming monkey rage.

Or maybe that bit about how Europeans and Africans are different right down to the brainal level. I don’t know from neuropathology, I only know if a white man had said anything close to that, it would buy him a one-way ticket to Lepertown.

Listening to Wright made me feel grubby; that he is slick only makes it grubbier. It was like being dipped in a cesspit of toxic racial sludge. Like attending a Klan rally on Bizarroworld.

How bad was it? Bad enough that Obama disowned the man he could no more disown than the black community or his white grandmother (watch your back, Granny).

Wright didn’t develop his peculiarly smelly brand of afroNazism over the weekend. It’s totally implausible that Obama rubbed elbows with Wright for twenty years and never heard a word of his ridiculous, balls-out craziness before yesterday. Clearly, Obama chose this church for these qualities, because he desired that particular flavor of cred.

I doubt Obama believes a word of that crap; he doesn’t strike me as a retard. That makes this ass-bite especially satisfying. It’s dangerous to handle poison, Senator.

Heh. Heh heh. Heh heh heh.

Oh, shut up, John.


UPDATE: I told mesa I’d make a color version, but it was pretty much FAIL. I’ve never tinted a photo using this technique, and it looked awful. Like a tinted photo. So I made some slight adjustments to the grayscale version and replaced the image in the post. I’ve also uploaded a large version and one that is 160 pixels wide. It’s a bit too tall for a sidebar graphic, but I’m not the boss of you.

This is as good a time as any to review my graphics policy: take it. Take anything you like. Change it, if you want. Post it. Have it tattoo’d on your butt. No need to link back or give credit. This is ephemera we’re making here and I need the karma.

Just…say something nice about me when I’m gone.


UPDATE THE TWOTH: Yay! Ace-o-lanche! It’s raining morons! Thanks, Deb!

April 29, 2008 — 3:18 pm
Comments: 141

Madness

alioto-pier.jpg

The San Francisco City Hall is a beautiful, ornate building in the Beaux-Arts style. It was built to replace one the earthquake knocked down and has been continuously renovated, including a record-breakingly huge seismic retrofit of the dome after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.

But they missed a spot. In the room where the Board of Supervisors sits, the president’s chair is on a raised dais. Five steps leading to one chair. Steps without handicap access.

This is San Francisco we’re talking. Can’t just let it go. Particularly when Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier — who is not the president and never will be, but is in a wheel chair — threatens to sue the city.

Okay, whatever. Let the lady have her ramp. What can it possibly cost to build a ramp over five steps? Oh, about a million and a quarter.

It starts with a hundred grand worth of design work and 3D models. Then there’s the asbestos tile and lead paint removal. The dias is carved out of Manchurian oak, and they don’t just give that stuff away in corn flake boxes, you know.

Let’s see…there’s a supervisor, a construction consultant and an electrical consultant. The Bureau of Architecture, Bureau of Construction Management and Department of Technology and Information Services get involved. There’s $16,500 just in permits and fees. Oh, these things add up. Even before you toss in the $300,000 for the new audio-visual system, which you might as well do at the same time because construction will mess with the existing system.

The kicker? The president doesn’t actually use the chair these days. He sits on the floor with everyone else. So the chair is entirely symbolic.

Exactly! says Michela Alioto-Pier. Symbols matter. We didn’t leave the segregated waterfountains in place because they were historical, did we?

“I deserve equal access to every part of the chamber,” Alioto-Pier told her colleagues, adding that ending discrimination is worth the $1 million.

Discrimination. White people discriminated against black people. The laws of physics discriminate against cripples. Honestly, it’s not the same thing, injustice-wise. And I wonder when persons of color are going to get sick of the civil rights movement being compared to every little bitch and gripe on the leftist To Do list.

The president of the Board of Supervisors balked (after the price tag went public, anyhow), pointing out that a million plus can build a lot of ramps around the city that people will actually use, but Alioto-Pier will have none of it. Access to every inch of City Hall is what she wants, and the law by-god says she should have it.

And this is what’s wrong with grievance politicians: they don’t hugely care about fixing anything. Making things better would be bad for business. It’s about proving how important their particular special need is by forcing vast sums of public money to be thrown at it. It’s about status and dominance and sweet, sweet media attention. It’s about harnessing the awesome power of the state to their personal attention whoring.

That’s how you spot professional activists: when you give them what they want, they get angrier.

I remember years ago, we were all pretty embarrassed when it was pointed out how simple it would be to make sidewalks easier for people in wheelchairs. Everyone happily signed onto the sensible idea of a few spots near the entrance for handicapped parking. That turned into this. Bad liberal movements often get their first push from the good nature of the general population.

See, lefties, this is why righties fight your pet causes so hard. It’s not that wingers hate cripples. It’s that whenever we think we’re signing up for a sensible solution to a real problem, somehow ten years down the line you have us paying $10,000 an inch for an empty gesture. Just to prove you can.

wheelchairramp.jpg

April 2, 2008 — 9:11 am
Comments: 35

Exploit the earth or die

exploit the earth

Exploit the Earth or die. It’s not a threat. It’s a fact. Either man takes the Earth’s raw materials—such as trees, petroleum, aluminum, and atoms—and transforms them into the requirements of his life, or he dies. To live, man must produce the goods on which his life depends; he must produce homes, automobiles, computers, electricity, and the like; he must seize nature and use it to his advantage. There is no escaping this fact. Even the allegedly “noble” savage must pick or perish. Indeed, even if a person produces nothing, insofar as he remains alive he indirectly exploits the Earth by parasitically surviving off the exploitative efforts of others.

The fact annoys some people. But it shouldn’t: Hence our “Exploit the Earth or Die” campaign.

The Objective Standard

Nice. I’ve often thought one of the oddest aspects of leftist philosophy was the idea that no-one should be made to feel guilty about the things he or she can perfectly well control (like drinking or teen pregnancy) but everyone should feel aweful about things no living organism can help doing, like consuming resources and producing waste. Lefties live in Oppositeland, where everything is 180° from reality.

I think that’s what they mean by “reality based community” — they ascertain reality, and then stake out the opposite position.

September 5, 2007 — 5:54 pm
Comments: 24