Category Archives: Pop-Culture

The Rise of The Cr-ppy Chris Christie

Ann Coulter, Celebrity, Economy, Elections, Ethics, Free Markets, IMMIGRATION, Morality, Pop-Culture, Private Property, Republicans

“The Rise of The Cr-ppy Chris Christie” is the current column, now on WND. Here is an excerpt:

“Chris Christie’s problem is not his weight, but his character. New Jersey’s popular Republican governor is the consummate backstabbing, slimy, opportunistic politician, who, for good measure, also preaches and practices the dirigiste economics of an Obama (and a “W”).

Gov. Christie is in the news a lot lately, which is just the way he likes it—and the way he has planned it. To say that Mr. Christie hungers for the plum post of US president is a redundancy on par with, “Is the Pope Catholic?”

The governor is no boob, but he knows how to handle boobs, a requirement of public office. And one crucial question Booboos Americanus asks himself when electing a president is whether he’d like to knock back a Guinness with the candidate. A doughnut is as good as a beer.

So on the “Late Night Show” went Christie for a cameo. There he squeezed into a studio seat too small for his girth and humored the hubris sitting opposite him, while scarfing down a doughnut.

Befitting a nation that considers wisdom and intellect as liabilities—cretin celebrities will carry the day in the 2016 presidential run, as they do today. Visibility on late night TV is a requirement of the highest office.

Launched by the Queen of Kitsch, day-time talker Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama has normalized the cultural carnival that sees a president cavorting with dummies like Dave Letterman and the ladies of “The View.” He now sits at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where Chris Christie would dearly like to plunk his keister.

Like his predecessor, the next president will need the imprimatur of entertainers with canonical status. “The road to the White House goes through this chair,” a semi-serious David Letterman warned Republican presidential pick Mitt Romney. Romney had flouted the Letterman commandment. Where is he today? On the ash-heap of history.

Another chrysalis within which the American presidency takes shape is the liberal media. And it loves Chris Christie, holding him up as a paragon of the rudderless Republican the GOP ought to be running.

This wasn’t always the case…”

Read the complete column, “The Rise of The Cr-ppy Chris Christie,” now on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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UPDATE II: Live By The Sword, Die By The Sword (Ron Paul Agrees)

Media, Military, Pop-Culture, Propaganda, The State, The Zeitgeist, War

He sculpted a career out of killing for Uncle Sam. A former Navy SEAL, Chris Kyle’s claim to fame, by the news media’s telling: He “held the record for number of kills by an American sniper. The Pentagon has confirmed more than 150 of his kills. The previous record was 109.”

Nobody is prepared to say that it is NO astounding accomplishment to have killed so many individuals, in the service of the US state. So consider it said.

Now Kyle is dead, “shot point-blank” by “another soldier who is recovering from post traumatic stress syndrome.” The therapy “sometime involved taking these veterans to the shooting range.”

Live by the sword, die by the sword. Or in hippie speak: Kyle had bad karma.

UPDATE I: From the Facebook thread:

Kyle (and his kill-for-Uncle Sam supporters) reminds me of a real-life Jack Bauer “Federal Zombie”: “the unstoppable, undead agent who has actually been killed and brought back to life, in service—and in thrall—to the state…”

To be a man is to defend your family and community. Not the empire and its “goals.” Men like Joe Horn are American heroes.

UPDATE II (Feb. 4): Ron Paul agrees, down to the adage, tweeting out, on Monday, 9:05 AM, 4 Feb 13, the following:

Chris Kyle’s death seems to confirm that “he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.” Treating PTSD at a firing range doesn’t make sense.

America’s chosen heroes are either killing someone in far away lands, or crying on TV, here at home. Crying—and coming out about private, personal matters—this imbues someone with goodness, even conferring him with the status of a hero.

And always: Be they your grief, your struggles, or your Iraqi culling expeditions—the key to everlasting honor is to be public about it.

I hope you realize that these deformed values are exactly inverted.

UPDATED: Football Frenzy (The Ravens And 49ers)

Aesthetics, America, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, Pop-Culture, Sport, The Zeitgeist

Piers Morgan, who is warring against a quintessential and meaningful American tradition—self-defense—has declared his affinity for another: the Superbowl.

MORGAN: “Listen, I know what this game means to America. It’s going to be a hell of a day on Sunday. I shall be glued to it, as always. I love the whole entertainment. I love the commercials. I love the football. I love the fact that it’s such a huge part of American culture. And may the best team win.”

The truth is that we foreigners do not get it—and will never get it. Also true: One can never really be an American unless one talks the talk about the game and the scene.

Oh well. Not belonging to the cool kids’ fraternity has never bothered me terribly. And at least one great American agrees about the obscenity of the whole scene.

“I don’t pay much attention to it, replied Ron Paul to a Piers Morgan question, in February of last year, during the 2012 campaign.

My sentiments exactly.

… the American football scene is obscene, starting with its incestuous fraternities, the rock-star status surrounding handlers and players, their pompom-waving, knickers-baring groupies, and the tantrum-prone fans who experience bare-fanged fury when their heroes let them down.

The ads are always a big point of contention. Thus, in 2012 too, Freedom Watch’s “J-Nap” (a coinage by Jack Kerwick for Judge Andrew Napolitano) struck a blow for “liberty” by calling on a middle-aged Madonna to challenge The Censor and repeat the feat of another peer, Janet Jackson. (Yes, “Libertarianism Lite” carries the day.)

The apparition the Judge wished upon us was described, in 2004 (“JANET’S SACK OF SILICONE & OTHER SYMBOLISM”), as a “sack of silicone-filled skin, awkwardly positioned on Janet Jackson’s chest. Few will forget how pop singer Justin Timberlake released The Thing from Jackson’s bustier during the Super Bowl halftime show.”

Add the effects of age and gravity to a surgically over-stuffed breast, and you end up with a veiny mass, mounted inorganically on the breastbone. Take my word: This is not something you’d want to wave about. It looks like a stretched-to-the-limits Bota Bag (also known as a wine skin), only not nearly as inviting. The photograph also captures the gaze on Justin Tinkerbelle’s girlie features. The reviewers, mostly groovy hip-hop heads, described the sequence as “a sex-charged duet.” Justin, Jackson’s partner in the “stunt,” looks as turned on as a surgeon removing a suture. The “sensuality” was, er, a bust.

Contra “J-Nap,” I was comforted to learn that a quaint Old-World, quintessentially American gentleman like Ron Paul was baffled by America’s annual football frenzy. (And is guaranteed to find the commercials as off-putting as the frenzy.)

UPDATE: I’m one of you. Hear me talk Ravens And 49ers.

The two coaches are brothers. One quarterback has been a starter for barely half a season. The sport itself is under a microscope for its violence, and the setting, New Orleans, is where the home team found itself recently caught up in a so-called bounty scandal — bounty — excuse me — scandal.
The spectacle and the game, Super Bowl XLVII, between the Ravens and 49ers, it’s all set for Sunday, with an expected worldwide audience of more than 160 million.

MORE at PBS.org. I won’t be reading this. It’s for you.

UPDATED: Pimping The Culture (No Nirvana)

Art, Barack Obama, Celebrity, Human Accomplishment, Music, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

Below is an excerpt from the current weekly column, Pimping The Culture, now on WND.

“The marketplace doesn’t adjudicate the quality of art or pop culture—it does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the trillions of subjective preferences acted upon by consumers. That snapshot, in 2013, tells us that when it comes to “Bread and Circuses,” Rome and its provinces wallow in the same lowbrow popular culture.

Incidentally, to judge the quality of a cultural product is not to begrudge the preferences of the people who purchase it. It is simply to apply timeless, objective standards in assessing these products. …

… By and large, when it comes to entertainment, the people and the elites are on the same empty page—most of the musicians whose products they patronize, or with whom they fraternize, can’t read music, much less play it.

‘Grammy and Academy Award winner’ Jennifer Hudson, to whose primal screams the president and first lady attempted to dance, doesn’t sing; she screams. Voice coaches once considered the Hudson brand of ‘vocal wobble’ a deficiency in technique and talent. But then, ‘Why be a musician, when you can be a success?’ Such cacophony currently plays to full houses. It is to their credit that the First Couple smoothed the noise over with some smooth moves. …

… More sounds that curdled the air were those of Alicia Keys pounding on the piano keys. …

… I’d rather listen to the dodecaphony of twelve-tone music than sit through the guttural battle cries emitted by today’s entertainers. …”

The complete column is Pimping The Culture, now on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

JOIN THE DISCUSSION, AND DO BATTLE FOR LIBERTY BY:

• Using the content-sharing icons on Barely a Blog posts.

• At the WND and RT Comments Sections, and on Facebook.

• By clicking to “Like,” “Tweet” and “Share” WND’s “Return To Reason” , and RT’s “Paleolibertarian Column.”

UPDATE (Jan. 24): No fan of mine (or my column), the writer below, says the in-house studio musician, is “Obviously a nirvana fan…”

From: Daniel G
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2013 9:59 AM
To: imercer@wnd.com
Subject: anywho

“Typical prog fan, putting other people down because their favorite musicians don’t use 20 sided dice to choose their time signatures.”

HERE’S the good (non-nirvana) stuff: