From Five Feet of Fury comes this gem, proving that to liberals EVERYTHING is political. Not content with their choke-hold on journalism, academia, law, government, the institutions of pop-culture, and the GOP, liberals are now mobilizing to assault the sole remaining bastion of good-ole-boy, patriarchal homophobia, racism, sexism, Islamophobia, intolerance, and hate that is “the oppressive food system.”

Yes, you read that right, they’re looking for a “freelance copywriter who can write like Malcolm X speaks.” I guess they’re looking for something like this:

If I have a cup of coffee that is too strong for me because it is too black, I weaken it by pouring cream into it. I integrate it with cream. If I keep pouring enough cream in the coffee, pretty soon the entire flavor of the coffee is changed; the very nature of the coffee is changed. If enough cream is poured in, eventually you don’t even know that I had coffee in this cup. This is what happened with the March on Washington. The whites didn’t integrate it; they infiltrated it. Whites joined it; they engulfed it; they became so much a part of it, it lost its original flavor. It ceased to be a black march; it ceased to be militant; it ceased to be angry; it ceased to be impatient. In fact, it ceased to be a march.

Admittedly the use of this type of hyperbole can be quite effective and – more importantly – inflammatory when, for example, a writer argues that a cook has “engulfed” his/her french onion soup with so many onions that it ceased to be a soup. Though I’m not sure if randomly interjecting “Fuck Whitey!” throughout the copy is necessarily either “groundbreaking” or makes the dish being reviewed any more “sexy and delicious.”

“Writing like Malcolm X speaks” really shines, however, when equating the act of cooking with capitalism and imperialism, since a chef is in essence oppressing and exploiting all the ingredients used in a particular dish for personal financial gain. When Malcolm X said:

We’re not Americans, we’re Africans who happen to be in America. We were kidnapped and brought here against our will from Africa. We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock – that rock landed on us.

the copy writer who can create “powerful, snappy, copy that incites” and who isn’t “afraid to be controversial, polarizing and poetic” could make a similar allusion to the “kidnapped” ducks whose legs and livers were used against their will in the platters of duck confit and foie gras found in five-star restaurants throughout the country.

So since crème brûlée and tiramisu are both too bourgeois and “White” for the leftist intelligentsia and require a copywriter to provide a suitably multiculturalist, post-modern, literary re-interpretation for guilt-free consumption, that leaves more for me. 

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Since the end of the world is less than eleven months away, I thought I’d offer you, dear readers, a little background on the Maya, especially since it’s their calendar that says we’re all doomed. The Maya were a Mesoamerican civilization that enjoyed mass human sacrifice, genital mutilation, a planned economy, totalitarianism, a corrupt ruling class, a virulently intolerant political pseudo-religion, and sloped foreheads. Actually they differ very little from modern liberals. Despite the fact that their ruling class was enabled and encouraged by a very sympathetic entertainment-media complex and controlled almost every aspect of Mayan culture (from the legal professions, journalism, and academia to music, satellite television, and the internet), their society nonetheless collapsed due to a lack of green jobs and an ineptly run anti-obesity campaign that had its genesis in a crusade against trans-fats but ended up banning all their food.

Oh well. At least they left us their calendar! Modern New Agers and liberals looking for something – anything – to believe in after being so bitterly disappointed by yet another Messianic Socialist who seduced them with stupid slogans find the Mayan calendar’s immutable guarantee of cosmic doom to be refreshing. Especially after enduring four anxious – and ultimately disappointing – years of waiting for Gitmo to close and for the government to redistribute every dime of the “1%’s” cash. However recent archaeological discoveries have caused Mayan experts to re-consider their original theories regarding what the Mayan calendar’s abrupt denouement was really alluding to.

Early in 2011, in the jungles of southern Mexico, a stucco mural revealing an exclusive Barbara Walters’s interview with the great Mayan king Pakal was discovered among the ruins of the majestic city of Palenque. In it, Pakal made numerous references to the “Pakal Rule,” which would raise taxes on the rich, thereby lowering Palenque’s $1.6 trillion budget deficit by .000000000000235121%. Pakal said this was necessary since he paid less in taxes than his secretary. He then made a cryptic reference to Mormons, Saul Alinsky, “The Bain Way,” and borrowing cash from the Chinese Politburo. Following a fawning question from Walters on how his wife’s organic garden was progressing, Pakal stated that despite running Mayan civilization into the ground with confiscatory taxation, PakalCare, and an activist Environmental Protection Agency, it still wasn’t as bad as what would happen to people 1400 years later. The program then cut to a commercial.

Following a mural for a buy-one-get-one-free deal on Maize Nuggets at the ubiquitous fast-food chain McMaya’s, the Pakal interview continued. Unfortunately this section of the stucco was heavily damaged by hackers from WikiLeaks, but researchers believe they were still able to piece together a somewhat coherent narrative in which Pakal, acting as an emissary of the corn god Archer-Daniels-Midland, revealed that – instead of an apocalypse or a “paradigm shift” in universal consciousness – the Mayan calendar predicted that on 21 December 2011, a demonic Ego with big ears would defeat both a robot and a flabby, pasty man with a shock of white hair (whom Pakal alternately referred to as “Camelot” and “Silver Queen”). Following this victory, the Ego would initiate a period of unbridled barbarism by classifying everyone as “the 1%” and sell them as an IPO through Morgan Stanley to Middle Eastern investors. Or something like that. Unfortunately, like deciphering the quatrains of Nostradamus, interpreting Mayan prophecies can prove equally capricious. Recently Mayan researchers have cast a pall of doubt over the accuracy of this scenario as, due to the mural’s damage, they admit it’s unclear whether it was the robot or the Ego who emerged victorious from their clash; however despite this uncertainty, they hastened to add, the ending remained the same.

Note: All images property of National Geographic and their respective photographers. Click here to see more amazing images of this once flourishing civilization.

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This delightful collection of toy Stormtrooper still life photos by Kristina Alexanderson is simply brilliant! For more genius, visit her filckr photostream here.

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The GOP’s talking heads, giddy in the afterglow of Romney’s Florida victory, are now debating just what, in fact, that win means. Rejecting their jubilant assertions to the contrary, Romney’s inevitable GOP nomination simply means ObamaCare is here to stay. Even if Romney wins the election, a proposition I find dubious at best, it’s unlikely that a Big Government Republican – whose signature gubernatorial policy “achievement” served as the model for President Obama’s signature domestic policy “achievement” – will ever consider repealing the monstrosity that is ObamaCare.

The GOP establishment knows RomneyCare is a problem, so they are now trundling out their own legion of useful idiots to convince the hoi polloi that universal health care was the casus belli for American independence and that evil King George III was against the individual mandate. Hence the interminable attempts by Jennifer Rubin, Karl Rove, and a host of other GOP luminaries to both pick-up Romney’s fallen standard during times of defeat and advance it in times of victory. However the oddest and most unlikely of Romney’s crusaders has been conservative pundit Ann Coulter, who has decided to lend her prodigious mane and short skirts to Romney’s campaign. Yesterday, Coulter offered a bizarre, ill-reasoned, almost Obama-esque defense of RomneyCare, claiming that it IS in fact “conservative” to assault individual sovereignty.

No one is claiming that the Constitution gives each person an unalienable right not to buy insurance.

States have been forcing people to do things from the beginning of the republic: drilling for the militia, taking blood tests before marriage, paying for public schools, registering property titles and waiting in line for six hours at the Department of Motor Vehicles in order to drive.

There’s no obvious constitutional difference between a state forcing militia-age males to equip themselves with guns and a state forcing adults in today’s world to equip themselves with health insurance.

The hyperventilating over government-mandated health insurance confuses a legal argument with a policy objection.

So using her argument, it’s also fine for the state to force its citizens to perform abortions, force children to euthanize their parents, and force non-Muslims to convert to Islam. Just as Obama’s domestic policies are a logical progression from George W. Bush’s, so too is ObamaCare a logical progression from RomneyCare and any pundit who will argue that RomneyCare and ObamaCare are anything but statist solutions to statist-caused problems will eventually drift to becoming statists themselves.

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Willie Nelson sang:

In the twilight glow I see her,
Blue eyes crying in the rain.
When we kissed goodbye and parted,
I knew we’d never meet again.

Love is like a dying ember,
And only memories remain.
And through the ages I’ll remember,
Blue eyes crying in the rain.

Someday when we meet up yonder,
We’ll stroll hand in hand again.
In the land that knows no parting,
Blue eyes crying in the rain.

It’s not a flight of fancy to imagine America as the “Blue Eyes” crying in Willie Nelson’s rain, especially after we left her for “compassionate conservatism” and “Hope and Change.” Look, for the past two years I fought the good fight against pessimism, cynicism, and nihilism – or at least what passes as a close approximation to them – and I can now admit it was a heavy cross to bear. But in the end, broken by reality, I gave up being a goody-two-shoes Jedi apprentice and embraced the Dark Side. Darth Steyn will now complete my training. Why did it take me so long so see the error of my ways? Ironically, I blame my own beloved conservatism for my dogmatic slumber.

An unfortunate quality of classical liberalism’s Enlightenment heritage is its belief in the innate goodness of Man. That Man will, with all things being equal, always use reason to meticulously plot a rational course to a logical and satisfactory end. Of course thousands of years of human history belie that utopian belief, but at least it sounded sophisticated, anthropocentric, and sufficiently nuanced. But like progressivism, the Enlightenment was all a fantasy of Change We Can Believe In, a chimera of folly, a phantasma of good intentions. Though a cynic by nature, I admit that on occasion this Siren of Utopian Impossibility and Community Organizing has proven too alluring to resist and has subsequently lead me into the heresy of pretending that Man is something he is not. But the cold, hard backhand of reality and disappointment always returns me to my native misanthropy.

Like The Enlightenment, America also began as a noble experiment designed to promote individual liberty, responsibility, and the Rights of Man. The expectation that the nation would forever be led by great men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln was probably unrealistic, and in conformance to the reality of our lower standards the Republic’s latter days have seen a menagerie of milquetoasts like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama parade through the White House. While we can blame the establishment for giving us such mediocre candidates – including Micheal Dukakis, John McCain, Bob Dole, Al Gore, and John Kerry – to chose from, the fact of the matter is we deserve these losers. Why? Because a nation that was once comprised of rugged individualists, that produced the men who fought a brutal civil war to preserve the Union – thereby ensuring freedom for all its citizens – and who in a national collective effort would later defeat the combined forces of Japanese militarism and Nazi barbarism has devolved into hipsters, hoes, and thugs, yo. So what was it that finally broke me? It was an accumulation of failure, actually. An electorate so willing to suspend reason in order to elect Barack Obama President is the same electorate that gleefully wallows in contemporary pop culture.

So in honor of Mark Steyn, I admit that we’re screwed. And for proof, you don’t need to look at unemployment figures or cratering home values, no my friends, just watch a music video.

*******

The Collapse of Western Civilization, in HD

From time to time, I enjoy visiting Alternative Right in order to observe white intellectuals compete with black ones over which race is the most victimized and aggrieved. Fortunately it’s not all intellectual hijinks over there as they are performing yoeman’s work by documenting the end of civilization. From Alternative Right’s So This Is How It Ends (STIHIE) Series, enjoy a comparison between The Onion’s contemporary pop music parody featuring K’ronikka and current American pop sensation Nicki Minaj.

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(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

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Of course he’s the most electable.

Everybody’s got their own metaphor for 21st Century America and they usually relate to some kind of man-made disaster: The Titanic, The Costa Concordia, The Lusitania, Eric Holder, etc., etc. One could even make the argument that while America represents in the macrocosm the blundering, pathetic state of collective denial and ennui that has historically afflicted civilizations in terminal decline, this collapse is also fittingly represented in the microcosm by the GOP. And, as I opened this post with a metaphor for the inevitability of America’s self-inflicted apocalypse, I can likewise make a similar metaphoric association between the Republican Party and its own self-inflicted disaster: Mitt Romney. But instead of hitting an iceberg or getting torpedoed, the GOP is about to get Bain Capitalized.

Ah yes, Bain Capital. That noted symbol of capitalism and free markets. The MittBots at Romney Campaign Headquarters – or using its more recognizable nom de guerre, National Review – now assure us that it is quite commendable Romney personally made hundreds of millions of dollars by destroying “failed” companies and liquidating jobs as Bain Capital’s CEO since “the road to job creation runs through job destruction.” They then emphasize the point by offering up a smug comparison between passé legacy corporations such as GM and Kodak with hip, profitable companies like Facebook and Instagram. All the while calling people who disagree with their myopic, Wall Street-defined capitalism as “anti-capitalist.” That’s your cue, Reihan Salam!:

Every presidential candidate has to defend himself against accusations of wrongdoing — an affair, abuse of office, campaign-finance impropriety, and so forth. Mitt Romney finds himself in a predictable defensive crouch, too, but the allegation against him is extraordinary: He stands accused of doing his job too well.

As the founder and CEO of the private-equity firm Bain Capital, Romney was a turnaround artist. In that role, the GOP frontrunner says, he restored failing firms to health, usually with great success. He claims to have helped create thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars in new wealth.

Some of Romney’s Republican rivals, particularly Newt Gingrich, haven’t framed Romney’s record in such generous terms. They say Romney was a “vulture capitalist” who used financial chicanery to enrich himself and his cronies at the expense of helpless workers. President Obama and his allies will surely make the same case in the months to come. Indeed, a recent memo from Stephanie Cutter, the president’s deputy campaign manager, accuses Romney of having sought “profit at any cost,” and of believing in “an economy where the wealthy and powerful can rig the game at the expense of working Americans.” Romney’s verbal gaffes, including an ill-considered soundbite professing his love of “being able to fire people,” have made him vulnerable to more demonization still.

After his victory in New Hampshire’s primary, Romney fought back with unusually strong words. “President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial,” he said, adding that “we have seen some desperate Republicans join forces with him.” But Romney was only partly right. The plaintiffs against free enterprise are not just a handful of politicians, but a growing number of American voters who think corporate elites have jeopardized a social contract that once guaranteed, as Bill Clinton put it, that “if you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to have a decent life and a chance for your children to have a better one.”

There is some reason to believe that in the 21st century, that contract has expired. Over the last decade, job destruction has outpaced job creation in the private sector. Great American brands like GM and Chrysler went on life support, and others like Kodak died altogether. Today’s corporate success stories, meanwhile, are nimble, brainy start-ups rather than the glorious industrial giants of yesteryear. Consider Instagram, a cellphone-photo-sharing service with 10 million users and, as of late last year, six employees. Even a Silicon Valley behemoth like Facebook, currently valued at over $82 billion, has just 3,000 employees. Kodak had 19,000.

Companies like Instagram and Facebook will hire more — but they probably won’t hire those veterans of Kodak or GM, and they won’t flock to Rochester, N.Y., or Detroit, Mich., to chase after the Next Big Thing. We can blame economic abstractions, such as globalization or skill-biased technical change, for this upheaval of the American economy. Or we can blame those who have profited most conspicuously — the highest-earning 1 percent, and the man who now serves as their political stand-in: Mitt Romney

Eliminating American jobs, accelerating American de-industrialization, basing the American economy on over-valued social networking companies, and advocating for more offshoring and outsourcing is what passes for “conservative economic thought” in 2011. I’ll ignore the basis of Salam’s economic argument and merely state the obvious as it applies to Mitt Romney and his quest for the Presidency: A man who defined his career by destroying jobs is not going to be able to create them. For proof, just look at Barack Obama since, by National Review’s own criterion, as America’s most successful jobs destroyer he should stand as America’s most effective jobs creator. But with total unemployment and underemployment around 18%, the reality just doesn’t jive with the theory. So Mitt’s acolytes can babble “2002 Winter Olympics” all they want, but the fact is “turning around the Olympics” isn’t a résumé enhancer. Romney’s own progressive record as Governor of Massachusetts mitigates anything he may have achieved as a cash-stuffed suit on Wall Street and getting the ski lifts running for a Giant Slalom in Salt Lake City.

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Whatever.

Happy New Year. I rang in 2012 by working, though I don’t know why. I mean, what’s the point? The fact that our sovereign debt is now equal to our economy has so unimpressed the Wizards of Smart that they are demanding a further increase in the debt limit with no obvious intent of ever paying their creditors back. Just try negotiating those terms with your credit card company. What’s worse is that my tax dollars are merely encouraging Leviathan to become an ever more bloated carcass of sclerosis and oppression, stifling everything from economic recovery to personal initiative, common sense, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Sure I should derive a perverse sense of satisfaction – more like the euphoria derived from surviving a massive zombie invasion really – from being one of the rapidly dwindling 88% of “gainfully” “employed” “Americans” in the Obamaconomy. But any feelings of relief and satisfaction are tempered by the realization that we’ve got Obama for another five years (i.e. one more of Barry and four of Mitt). While the Era of Obama is hardly worthy of the moniker “Era,” at least it’s been one of those historical moments that future generations will recognize as being – similar to the benighted reign of the Roman Emperor Elagabalus – indicative of the fall, and not decline, of an entire civilization. A government so debauched and out-of-touch that it willingly provides weapons to Mexican drug cartels while harassing law-abiding citizens over their Second Amendment rights deserves to be unloved and disrespected. Thus the only positive for 2012 is that the tempest of idiocy swirling about the nation’s capital is scheduled to expire, along with the rest of the world, in a Mayan-predicted apocalypse conveniently scheduled for December. If there’s a silver lining to dying grotesquely in a Götterdämmerung before Christmas, it’s that at least the nation won’t suffer the ignominy of swearing-in either its first Mormon President or, more depressingly, re-swearing-in its first moron one in January. If the best the establishment can give us is a choice between a white Obama and a black Romney, then we collectively deserve the cataclysm induced by our rendezvous with Planet X. Oh how I yearn for the sweet release from the dysfunction and stupidity of statism.

Melodrama and Armageddon aside, at least in the interim we can enjoy the spectacle of Ann Coulter shilling for the least conservative candidate in the GOP field. Just be prepared to wretch violently as Coulter’s unmelodious voice warbles dissonantly through the ether as you listen to her mendaciously defend Romney from the depredations of Peter Robinson on the latest Ricochet podcast. According to Coulter – and apparently to the entire cabal of smug GOP “intellectuals” – RomneyCare, which possesses a striking similarity to ObamaCare, is more than acceptable if it’s imposed at the state level. However, once it becomes “federalized” it’s of the devil and must be consigned to hell along with any cuts to the defense budget; people who don’t want a panorama of tacky, plaster Ten Commandments mounted in every school and courthouse across the fruited plain; and critics of Wall Street “capitalism.” Plus when the best thing you can say about your candidate is “he’s the most electable,” in a way you’re just saying “Hope for the best but plan for the worst, suckers.” It’s not that we’re at the point where we can “manage decline,” it’s that we’re at the point where decline is unmanageable. Yet our ruling class remains blissfully unaware of this. What does it say about the present when in a nation of fat-asses, Hostess – the maker of Twinkies – declares bankruptcy? It’s that the days of artificial flavors and preservatives are over because no one has the money to pay for it anymore. An economy based on consumption instead of production, a government kept solvent by borrowing and confiscatory taxation rather than through responsible budgeting, and a ruling class motivated solely by personal greed and power is a recipe for bankrupt Ding Dongs. Welcome to America. That damn asteroid can’t get here fast enough.

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There are many reasons why liberals should never be placed in positions of power: Eric Holder being one. And Joe Biden being another. Yet while university psychology departments could spend decades studying the enigma that is our Attorney General, Joe Biden makes for a more accessible topic of analysis. Admittedly we have Biden’s own idiocy to thank for that. From the semaphore that is his facial expressions and hand gestures to his frequently uttered banalities and malapropisms, Joe Biden is the master of the unintended spectacle.

And for his latest performance, leave it to Joe to expose the “logic” behind the Obama administration’s Afghanistan “policy” by admitting that we’re in it to lose it.

The White House on Monday defended Vice President Joe Biden for saying that the Taliban isn’t an enemy of the United States despite the years spent fighting the militant Islamic group that gave a home to Al Qaeda and its leader Usama bin Laden while he plotted the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

“It’s only regrettable when taken out of context,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said of the vice president’s remarks in an interview published Monday.

“It is a simple fact that we went into Afghanistan because of the attack on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. We are there now to ultimately defeat Al Qaeda, to stabilize Afghanistan and stabilize it in part so that Al Qaeda or other terrorists who have as their aim attacks on the United States cannot establish a foothold again in that country,” Carney continued.

That the Taliban IS Al Qaeda is inconsequential. And since our political leaders don’t know what it is we’re fighting against (i.e. Islam), much less what it is we’re fighting for (i.e. insert your own “stopping the proliferation of WMDs;” “stopping terrorism;” “forcefully spreading democracy, liberty, pornography, abortion, etc.” justification here), it therefore becomes as easy to create a strawman – like the administration has done with “Al Qaeda” – as it is to cynically define what is “victory.” The insipid post-modernism that has created the yawning abyss between what liberals imagine reality to be as opposed to what reality actually is can also be blamed for creating not only a dangerously naive foreign policy, but a completely fanciful one.

The left and its neo-con allies on the right have spent $1 trillion dollars, thousands of American lives, and over nine years to transform Iraq and Afghanistan into Iranian and Pakistani client states respectively. Never, aside from the Manhattan Project and the Saturn Program, has any endeavor undertaken by the often reliably feckless and incompetent federal government ever been so “successful” (other than Holder’s “Fast and Furious” fiasco). From Pakistan to Morocco, the Obama Administration has successfully overseen the Arab Spring’s transformation into an Islamist Winter. Such a legacy of failure is nothing new for liberals, of course, since Carter and Clinton were known for their victorious forays into the arena of foreign policy disaster (Carter’s timid response to Communist aggression and Clinton’s misguided support of the Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs are just two examples). But since we achieved such sterling “successes” as Egypt, Libya, and Morocco with no loss of blood and treasure, we could have reasonably achieved such ends in Iraq and Afghanistan without invasion and occupation. In fact, now that we’re admitting that Afghanistan is going to be ruled by the Taliban by 2014 at the latest, the entire invasion was pointless anyway. Much like Joe Biden and the President he represents.

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