Oh, boy.  I thought pre-emptively awarding Obama the Nobel Pleas Prize was the feeblest, most child-like display of “please, daddy, don’t euthanize Fluffy the Furniture Slayer,” imaginable, and then the fucking pig farmers hand one to the economic collapse known as Europe, which means bombs are being autographed as I type.   Don’t say you didn’t have a seat at the table of this end-of-growth, post-industrial horror show.  How ’bouts we start off this nine-course, debt-deflationary extravaganza with some tasty civil wars in the peripheries as central bankers tighten their sphincters around your neck? Talk about a kiss of death…  

Humanitarian warfare.  Conducted not by stupid, lazy humans, but by indefatigable professor drones, wherein any old pile of programmable junk becomes a universal Töten machine.  Because piles of robot junk are more ethical than humans.  Because they are rules-based logic devices merely programmed by unruly humans.  Robots do not metaphorically “flip-flop” their ruling creed.  Without an extra logic gate, block of programming, or “fat-fingered” meltdown that inexplicably passed the compilation test.  We could bypass humans and have the robots program themselves, with the “thou shalt not hurt humans” proviso, modified to exclude the humans we want to kill.  Never to be confused with the humans we don’t want to kill.  Unless they happen to be double-agents.  

Let me suggest that a state of confusion reigns concerning warfare, technology, humanitarian impulses (as literal flip-flop switches), and ethics.

Hello, World!  I am your new emotions-based, fully-embodied killer app designed to avoid unnecessary tit-for-tat death spirals, meaning I sure as fuck didn’t start it.

I mean, if autonomous assassin robots are not godzwounds-a-flopically compounding the problem of human ethics, I will vote affirmatively for the newly-shed, post-debate exoskeleton of the Willard Mechanism AND the fur ball-coughing incumbent.

Mr. Smiff is a genuine kick in the pants.  Dude’s worth listening to.

The fact that he got Buffalo Bill-ed by our psychopatho-genic society simply gives him more time to kick me in the pants, which is fine by me, as I appear to be a more-than-fashionably-late political bloomer.  If only he had gotten to me sooner.  I wish him the best in a long, wave-lapped retirement.

However, my eyebrows torqued when he claimed that [unlike humans], “You’ll never see a squirrel trapped by a syllogism,” while continuing his discussion on the “lesser evil” problem presented by Democrats, i.e., the neurotic yowling between advocates of lesser evilism (logic-trapped squirrels) and the “fuck all y’all and the horse you rode in on” camp (my people).

Mr. Smiff’s main point, to my mind, is that you can’t fucking tell Republicans & Democrats apart!  It takes such a fine-tuned sense of discrimination to reveal the iota, the remaining quantal unit of distinction, and even that discrete packet is suspect, that it drives one fucking nuts, neurotic, pissing oneself, snarling, hunkering in dark corners, clawing at the handlers, and falling down, sprawling and panting.  Be more squirrel-like, and reject the choice itself.

I am not claiming that my admiration for squirrels is any less or more than Mr. Smiff’s  (some of my best friends in Golden Gate Park are squirrels!), but mine is different, in that I think squirrels and humans have more in common than Herr Smiff thinks obtains.  To phrase my view in Clintonesque Obamanisms, there’s nothing right with our squirrels that can’t be fucked by what’s wrong with humans.

My good buddy and comrade, Ivan Pavlov — who was probably dead wrong when he apocryphally warned his underlings that “The revolution is not out there; it is in here, in this lab!” —  provided some relevant experimental evidence on conditioned conflict behavior in dogs, which he referred to as “experimental neurosis.”

Pavlov was toying with the borderline between competing conditioned responses, using a discrimination task (circles v. ovals as signals) to train responses, and then inducing conflict by making the discrimination ever more difficult.  

In experimental canine terms, the syllogism is expressed as:

IF circle, THEN respond (orient to the circle, and get food reward.)

IF oval, WITHHOLD response (do not orient to oval, or else!  Zappo! Electric shock.).

After training both competing response elements, the un-American commie bastard then proceeded to present increasingly oval-shaped circles, and increasingly circle-shaped ovals. The dogs, unable to tell the difference between reward and punishment, became progressively unhinged, and unmanageable (Yay, dogs!).  The same has been shown in cats.  Democrats and Republicans have merely demonstrated that such frustrating breakdowns in discrimination also occur in humans.  If that finding, “experimental neurosis,” does not also hold true in squirrels, I’ll eat my straw hat loaded with nasty brick dust.

My point is this: it is precisely the current non-difference between our formerly distinct expectancies of Republicans and Democrats (ovals and circles) that evokes our conflicted animal phenotypes.  The formulation, “You’ll never see a squirrel…” only works until you present the squirrel with a choice between Republicans and Democrats.

The confused frustration expressed under such confused signaling conditions in all mammals tested to date already indicates that the answer is “none of the above.”

Next week we’ll discuss flesh-ripping weasels.

Around 2008, a few of us were knocking back some drinks one afternoon at Yancy’s Saloon in the inner sunset, discussing the impending doom, inflation v. deflation, etc.  Hyacinth (approximately pronounced “ya-SINTH”) the Montrealer showed up with his nubile and simmering cousin, just a kid really, whom I asked whether she thought the world would end in fire or ice, to which she said in a heavy French pout, “the world will end ‘orny.”

Hyacinth turned to me and said, “Boom.  You are blown away, man.  B-o-o-o-m!”  

Found poetry from Ilargi.

Perhaps one of my favorites:

Like their mouth-breathing brethren, today’s liberals love to stand up on the chairs and denounce the depredations of conservatives.  And rightly so, as far as it goes.   Outraged liberals have excellent retrograde memories, but seem to have suffered an inability to form new memories since the election of Prez Oh, Brother!

It only takes one example out of many to demonstrate that liberal outrage against conservatives turns out to be nothing but sham outrage, fake, phony, fraudulent partisan bullshit.

Remember the Bush tax cuts?  Now they are the Obama tax cuts.  The historical trends of wealth distribution are bad enough, and getting frightfully worse; indeed they are hitting asymptote under Obummer! Where’s the liberal outrage?  Aside from a handful of principled stand-outs, we got squat.

We could write a friggin encyclopedia on Oh, Brother!’s horrendous criminal record on war crimes, financial giga-crimes, civil liberties atrocities, but fuck all that.  Lefties know all that.  Ignoring the harsh realities like the fucking historical revisionist hypocrites that keep your outrage meters pegged in the past, while being blind to the present, makes you no better than Andrew Sullivan.  Worse, even.

It’s not the party in power that’s the problem, but the entire imperial wealth pump. The inchoate partisan tub-thumpers refuse to believe their lying eyes.

Wouldn’t I love to see driftglass wield his flame thrower wearing a blindfold?  Sh-yah, crispy neo-liberal Democrats and comatose corporate Attorney Generals are tastier than you’d imagine, but partisans are too busy humpin’ a dead horse at Manassas to notice.  

Fifty-six of the last fifty-seven

unemployment Stats have been revised,

(after the Rosy-Fingered Dawn),  upwardly.  

meaning that The Gub’mint ha’ been

low-balling the Numbers over ninety-

eight Percent of the Time.  The Chances of That

Mistake happening by Chance is Something like

four Chances in One Quadrillion.  Unlikely

that That happened by “Chance” if their Model

were Fair: Half over, Half under.  A Coin Toss.

The Statistics suggest the BLS has

a bad Model.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics

should learn some Statistics.  Occam’s Razor

says They are lying, AND perhaps stupid.

(as a special funky coda to my crappy spank verse, a word from ckm):

How many people are staying in their underwater, over-priced homes only because they’ve killed several family members and buried them in the back yard?

Heh.  To the Indeedyth.  But less funny than it sounds.

Don’t get me wrong, I love all 88,

But the piano’s register just below the waistline

Is The One For Me.  That’s where my own voice

Lives, it’s where my ears understand the sick

Sweet chords.  I’m no musician, but play

Billy Preston, in super slo-mo,

which is transcendent enough

for me; well, have you tried it?  Believe

you me, it transports at any pace.

irreplaceable, like the spoken word;

From friend to friend, from generation to

generation.  The human ear cannot hear

some of Bach’s melodies in the wrong

tempo.  A Viennese friend proved that

to my satisfaction, but you can play

Billy Preston like molasses, and feel fine,

All over.  Just to stroke the same chords

In order places you next to god.  Amen.

I know I’ve run this one past you before, but here it comes ag’in.  It’s unstable in flight, like a high-tech fighter plane, but this is a high-tech funky love plane, instead:

Biologically, the default body-plan, including humans, is “female,” without which there could be neither males nor females (I consider “selfers,” aka xerox-ers, as inherently female).  And yet, sex obtains, a lot, to the point of hermaphroditism.  Why even have males?  Why halve reproductive success with a male partner?  Halve-sies?  You better have a good mother flipping reason to go “halve-sies,” because “half” is a large cut in pay.  Selfers take the entire reproductive pot.  “Why is there sex?” is a difficult question almost like “why is there air?”  To pump up volley balls! Except “to pump up volley balls” is an evasive, smart-ass response.  The problem of sex is deadly serious, perhaps not unrelated to our problems of empire.

Some say that sex evolved in order to stay one step ahead of the parasites; change the locks on the immune system every generation, and therein lays the value of going halve-sies. That sounds “just so,” but whatever the explanation, the sexes began specializing.  We are all steeped and infused in piping hot myth.

I seldom comment on conservatives, because, well, just listening to them disengorge the recesses of their imaginations renders me speechless: