Osama lives

By Capt. Fogg

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I "But Joe, you're ten years dead"
"I never died" said he,
"I never died" said he.

I've read that Mormonism is the fastest growing religion, but I doubt it. I think it's Denialism, at least in the USA; and yes, it's a religion. Like other religions, it offers peace and a feeling of importance, enlightenment, inclusion and a chance to be part of something bigger than oneself. You don't need to read any long and boring scriptures either and for ADD America, that's a major selling point. There aren't even a lot of commandments. "Whatever they say is a lie" covers most of it and almost anything can be denied: that the Apollo program ever landed anyone on the moon, that high bracket tax cuts boost the economy in a healthy way (or at all,) whether smallpox and Polio went away because of vaccines, and that oil reserves are finite -- and a long list of things.

It only takes a rare overthrow of scientific opinion or historical interpretation or the discovery of any actual conspiracy to cast a warm blanket of approval over all the tenets of Denialism. 30% of Republicans still believe the president, like John McCain, was born abroad. That's not going to change and any release of DNA tests or gory photos of bin Laden with the top left quadrant of his skull blown off and his homogenized brain oozing out isn't going to do more than put a bigger sneer on the face of Denialism.

Now I don't mean to say that all Republicans are Denialists or that all Denialists are Republicans by any means, but the biggest clamor for releasing the gruesome pictures and videos is from the right side of the aisle and from thence comes the argument that there's a huge worldwide "debate" about whether the bogey man is dead. Claiming that there is a "debate" that involves any participants outside the faith is, by its own right, is an act -- a typical act -- of Denialism. I'd be amazed to see evidence that any large part of humanity questions the demise of Osama as a fact but I'd be more amazed if the media doesn't continue to milk the manufactured controversy and politicians don't attempt to cash in on it.

To be sure, there were debates about whether Hitler was dead for many decades; whether Josef Mengele was dead or Martin Bormann. We had no pictures, no tissue samples and no credible witnesses, but although one of those men did indeed survive the war, the belief never really was about the evidence, but about sustaining the holy state of denial and the profitable state of fear. After all we still have substantial belief that Jesus didn't really die or the Hidden Imam or Elvis. The Princess Anastasia cult may still have some hangers on. Denial after all, is faith and to be human is to have faith and the maintenance of faith often forces a choice between pain and denial; forces us to create other forms of reality where our heroes and loved ones live -- and sometimes our bogeymen. The loss of bin Laden is, like the loss of the Soviet Union, a setback for fearmongers, after all. Profiteers who even now are assuring us that revenge will be swift.

But Osama bin Laden is dead and time will only confirm that Osama bin Laden is dead and as the President said, he's not coming back, ever. Which is another way of saying that like Elvis, Jesus, Satan and the Buddha, he's always going to be with us.

Uppity

By Capt. Fogg

I can't laugh, or smirk too hard since it's pretty easy to mix up the names Osama and Obama even for those who don't have old age as an excuse. But when Glenn Beck came up with “lets kill Obama” would not be “a tough call to make” the other day, it certainly had to raise an eyebrow even the eyebrow of one who long ago lost faith in Freud and his slips.

It's a different story though, when Beck had to temper his admission that some respect was due with the notation that the president seemed "a little arrogant." He didn't seem so to me even if I force myself not to remember his predecessors little end-zone dance on the flight deck where he had just pretended to land a fighter plane and with his parachute harness arranged to accentuate his manhood. I didn't notice any Foxers laughing that "mission accomplished" day -- quite the contrary, really.

Obama was a model of confident restraint as far as I'm concerned, but that's just what his paid detractors would prefer to call "uppity" if they hadn't been told not to. I mean, isn't the fellow who accomplishes what you've failed to do in ten years and without breaking a sweat or busting the budget going to feel a bit arrogant to you, even if he's a bit to classy do the victory dance and the high fives?

Swingin' round the circle

Long before we had Steven Colbert with his espousal of conservative views that reveal trenchantly cynical commentary beneath, we had Petroleum V. Nasby writing in the dialect of the South in praise of the "secessionists" and their northern friends the Copperheads. But it works both ways and the infamous Palm Beach man of the people, Rush Limbaugh is borrowing the technique to express his gratitude to God that we have a man in the White House like Barack Obama.

Such a character as Colbert uses takes strength and skill to maintain, but it's a strength that Rush either doesn't have or doesn't want to have. Like a dog who just can't sit still with the smell of bacon in the air, it didn't take long, yesterday night, for Limbaugh to crack under the strain of decency and honesty and reveal what hunger lies beneath.

"I, me, my, three of the most used words in President Obama's media appearance last night, not a single intelligence adviser, not a single national security adviser, military adviser, came up with the idea...not one of them... according to Obama, had the ability to understand the need to get DNA. This was Obama's message last night,"

said Limbaugh. I suppose he simply didn't listen to the same speech I heard and perhaps he wrote the script before it even aired, but at any rate even the faux appearance of pleasure at our success in doing away with mass murderer Osama bin Laden was too much of a strain and the cynical, dishonest and slimy hate just had to come out.

No, Obama just couldn't be honest enough to admit that George W. Bush really was responsible for it. Couldn't resist telling us that it would have been better just to carpet bomb Abottabad and perhaps start another trillion dollar war against Andorra. He couldn't even be a man enough to admit being a Muslim and to stop fooling people with his birth certificate. But then what can we expect of a black man and a Democrat?

The eyes of Texas

By Capt. Fogg

It's no secret that Florida's economy is hurting more than that of many other states, but I'm sure it would be much worse if our sales tax cap on yachts costing more than a quarter million weren't in place. Of course mine didn't cost quite enough for me to benefit significantly, but it's gratifying that some of my friends saved enough to pay for a few thousand gallons of fuel. I'm sure it puts a smile on the faces of the many who have to choose between lunch money for the kids and driving to work. I'm sure that the several of my neighbors in foreclosure are altruistic enough to be glad those with that level of disposable income might use the savings on that Taiwan built vessel for an extra trip to the Abacos this summer.

Texas, which has a share of the yacht trade, is jealous, which is an extraordinary thing to say of our second biggest state with its continental sized self esteem. A Republican sponsored bill to cap the sales tax on yachts is now out of committee and will be considered by the Texas House along with deep cuts to education, nursing homes and other things that benefit only the surplus population.

The eyes of Texas are on taxes and the rest of us are watching.

America - Fuck Yeah!

You know, there are people out there who don't understand what it means to be an American!

I mean, you know what we learned today? That secret prisons where people got waterboarded led us to Osama!!!

Yeah! Waterboarding worked! How about that, libs? We got actionable intelligence by torturing somebody! Awesome, right?

I mean, yeah, there's this guy, Mohammed Basardah. He talked. He spilled all kinds of names and locations and everything else. They couldn't shut him up, he talked so much. They rounded up all kinds of people based on what he said. He gave them so much intel, they let him go out of gratitude for the help.

But, I mean, that's where it gets funny, right? Because Basrdah turns out to be just a small-time pot dealer in Mecca. He made up all this stuff, and threw in some names of people he didn't like, or that he'd heard of, or just fake names. So we round up all these people, and they have no idea what's going on, right? But we have "actionable intelligence" saying that they DO know, right?

So, they act like they don't know anything, and do we have a choice? Hell, no! We have to waterboard them to get the truth out! I mean, yeah, they don't know what the "truth" is, because it's just stuff Basardah made up, right?

But that's what's so funny!

Same thing with these people that the Pakistani tribes sold to us - they were just passing through, but we were offering thousands of dollars in bounties! What could the tribesmen do? How could they resist that kind of money? So they sold us tourists - can you blame them?

Now, we have these people in custody, and they claim they're innocent, right? As if! So we have to waterboard them, or chain them up, or do the sleep deprivation thing, until they answer us, right? I mean, do we have a choice?

You know, looking back, maybe there are some hippies who'll try to claim that when we torture innocent people, we might be making another generation of people who will stop at nothing to kill us. But what do they know, right?

Because we're Americans, motherfucker! We do what's right! Even if it seems like it's wrong! I mean, this is what we have got to do, right?

Right?

...right?

Finally!

So, ten years and several billion dollars later, we finally took the fucker down?

Let me just point out that in the coming week, right-wing pundits will try to claim that Obama should not receive any credit for this. Of course, in the meantime, all the evidence shows that Bush had the chance to get him and let him go. (After all, the unkillable boogeyman is a better way to get unlimited funds than a guy you pick up in the first few months of a manhunt.)
_________

Update: from Pam at Pam's House Blend:

Welcome to Abbottabad

Local forecast - partly cloudy, high 32°C, low 14° C … less one infamous tourist (terrorist).

The etymology of the name is a compound of two words, Abbott and Abad. Abbott refers to General Sir James Abbott, a British army officer after whom the city and the district are named.  Abad means a place of living in Urdu.  Note:  Abad is also the old English spelling of the modern word Abode.  Oh, yes.  Before I forget:

Obama got Osama!

Monday morning update: This article by Juan Cole, Obama and the End of Al Qaeda offers a worthwhile retrospective.

How Rebecca Black and Glee Are Destroying the World

Pitch adjustment has probably been around as long as there's been recorded music. George Martin is famously credited with getting two different takes of the same song, originally played at slightly different tempos, and splicing them together using a Vari-control pitch shifter to match them together (this is most obvious in the slight distortion in John's voice during the line "Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to...").

But then, in 1997, Dr Harold "Andy" Hildebrand, a former geophysicist studying seismic activity, developed and patented a process called Auto-Tune™. And in doing that, he may have destroyed the concept of music entirely.

Auto-Tune™ is phase vocorder, an audio processor which can be used both live and in recorded tracks, which adjusts the voice to the nearest true semitone and correct the pitch to match whatever scale is specified.

It can also be used to distort a voice - most famously, Cher's warble in 1998's Believe.

Auto-Tune™ is still considered the industry standard. In 2009, a 24-year-old Brooklyn musician named Michael Gregory started a viral series of videos making extensive use of the technology.

Although the success of Autotune The News led to the first release of original music by the Gregory Brothers, the strategy backfired to a certain extent:

Andrew (Gregory, the guitarist in the group) also makes folk music, but, unfortunately, many of the Brothers' new fans have no patience for anything that's not "Auto-Tune the News."

But those are effects. The more insidious use of autotuning is its prevalence in the music industry. It's almost impossible to find a CD where a singer doesn't tweak, warp, or totally alter their voice.

"It usually ends up just like plastic surgery," says a Grammy-winning recording engineer. "You haul out Auto-Tune to make one thing better, but then it's very hard to resist the temptation to spruce up the whole vocal, give everything a little nip-tuck." Like plastic surgery, he adds, more people have had it than you think. "Let's just say I've had Auto-Tune save vocals on everything from Britney Spears to Bollywood cast albums. And every singer now presumes that you'll just run their voice through the box."

All of this leads to lazy singers, unwilling to practice; lazy musicians, happy to take someone else's work, loop it, and claim that the result is an "original" composition; and lazy performers who go on tour to lip-synch to their own music.

Sir Elton John's live reputation is second to none. Even when he's not actually performing.

His off-the-cuff remarks at the Q magazine awards ceremony last week, when he reacted with undisguised horror to the very notion of Madonna being nominated for best live act, surely represented the great singer-songwriter at his extemporaneous best. "Madonna, best f---ing live act? F--- off! Since when has lip-synching been live?"

At many of today's big live music events, the only thing that can really qualify as live is the dancing. I once saw Madonna drop her microphone without it affecting her vocal performance one whit.
...
It doesn't matter whether you have the pyrotechnic vocal skills of Michael Jackson or the somewhat more limited range of Kylie Minogue, you cannot throw yourself about like an aerobics instructor on fast-forward while delivering a perfectly honed, exquisitely phrased vocal.

And in many cases, performers can't deliver a "perfectly honed, exquisitely phrased vocal" in the first place.

If you watch Glee, a TV show ostensibly about singers, you won't hear a single note that hasn't been chopped up, glued back together, polished and shined until it's practically unrecognizable.

It's not just the lifeless characters, bad acting, unoriginal scripts and robotic music that can make Glee painful to watch, it's the unreality of the way music is portrayed. Characters burst into "song" without ever practicing a note. This leads to unreal expectations among young singers, that they don't need to rehearse (the Trophy Wife teaches voice, and runs into this problem on a daily basis) - they expect to just open their mouths and watch liquid gold flow out.

Which leads us to Rebecca Black. A 13-year-old girl from Orange County, her mother paid $2000 to the Ark Music Factory (the musical version of a vanity press) who gave her a choice of two songs; and after a 12-hour video shoot and a digital bludgeoning of the vocal track, she became an international sensation with an artificial song sung by a robotic voice with only a passing resemblance to her own.

Friday has been called "the worst pop song of all time," and that's a fair assessment. It's also symbolic of the place music has ended up: lifeless, heartless, pre-processed blandness; uninteresting gruel served to children who don't know any better than to call it "music."

It's time to grow up, America

Listen to this message. And remember one thing: the birther message that Donald Trump was able to ride was only possible because Barack Obama was black.

Would it have been possible for anyone, at any time, to make an ignorant claim like this, that Obama wasn't truly an American, if he had, in fact, been white? If his father had been Barry O'Bama, an Irishman, who'd gone back to the ancestral shores of Ulster, would anyone have been able to carry this ignorant, racist message as far as Donald Trump (and his media representative, Joseph Farah) were able to flog it?

Would anyone have cared if Obama was a white man?

(OK, I'll even add a caveat - "a white man with no Russian background"? Because, yes, they're that stupid...)

If Barack Obama wasn't different from "you and me" - if he wasn't "the other" - if he didn't seem "foreign"...

GOD DAMN IT!! If he wasn't black!

If Barry O'Bama was a white man raised in Chicago, would anybody have gone to the ignorant, racist extremes that the GOP has gone in the last 4 years?

Yes, if you ever worried about the birth certificate of the duly elected president of the United States, you are a useless, inbred racist fuck. You might as well pull out your bed-sheets with the eye holes cut out.

Welcome to the 21st Century.

The Death of the Birther Movement?

Well, now he’s gone and done it. Yessirree, our Kenyan Moozlum radical soshulist Sharia-promulgating President has apparently released his full, hopelessly official birth certificate. (All the online papers probably lead with this story, so just Google one for yourself.) Birthers across the nation are no doubt spraying their morning tea all over the kitchen table, wondering how to organize their lives in the wake of this catastrophe. “Oh the humanity,” ladies and gentlemen!

So why did the president do such a thing? It is ridiculous that he should have felt it necessary, but at the same time, producing one’s birth certificate, I think the White House must have opined, isn’t the same as getting into a fracas with a covey of your crazy opponents. No, it’s a more final gesture, sort of like throwing down a royal flush at a poker game. You win. All they can do is grumble and pay up. Politically it’s arguably astute in that it takes the wind out of birther sails just as the 2012 campaign is getting underway. I say arguably because it isn’t entirely clear to me why, from a purely Machiavellian electoral standpoint, the Democrats would want to do that – the birthers marginalize the GOP with everyone outside the party, so having them around isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

But beyond short-term electoral considerations, the decision may have had something to do with a statesmanlike appreciation of the importance of numbers in a democratic-spirited country. The percentage of Republicans who profess belief that the president is from Mars, or Kenya, or Indonesia, or Canada, or – well, anywhere but the United States – was becoming alarming. Wasn’t it something like 67% when you combine the “don’t know” polling respondents with the “O Hell No, he’s definitely not one of us!” respondents? That’s the combo number I’ve run across a few times.

If two out of three people in one party have been convinced by vicious demagogues (or have convinced themselves even before such help came along) to think you are, or might be, the Brother from Another Planet, I guess you might as well try to set them straight even if it’s a bit embarrassing.

This gesture won’t end what Capt. Fogg aptly calls “Obamahate culture” because that’s founded on racism rooted in centuries of oppression, fear, and rage. But it will probably cut into the numbers – now perhaps only a third, or even (if we want to be optimistic) a fourth or fewer, of Republicans will keep insisting that the President isn’t American and will eventually take that firm belief with them to their graves. That’s still a lot of addled, ignorant, confused or mendacious and dishonorable people to reckon with, but it’s better than two-thirds.

It may not seem like much of a transformation, but I’ve long suggested that ultimately, a small number of percentage points one way or the other means the difference between continued democracy and a rough-beast’s slouch towards dictatorship, plutocracy, or some other unbearable form of government. A small but persistent percentage might make the difference between getting a majority of people to do abominable and stupid things and being rejected by them for making such suggestions.