Category Archives: Pop-Culture

Life On The 'Swedish American Health-Plantation'

Healthcare, Liberty, Pop-Culture, Propaganda, Regulation, Republicans, Sarah Palin, Socialism, The Zeitgeist

Thomas Fleming administers a dose of reality about our “Swedish American health-plantation,” the lying conservatives and their standard-bearers, Palin and Gingrich, an infantile and retarded under-class that makes for a sizable clamoring class, and most enjoyable: the good doctor cocks a snook at a servile, stupid, unfree people afraid to live or die:

“I eat when I’m hungry, drink when I’m dry,

And if whiskey don’t kill me, I‘ll live till I die.”

Spoken like a free man.

Read “Just Say No — To Healthcare”:

“The American medical system, however, teaches us to live each day in bondage to death. Not dying—as opposed to living well–is the big objective, followed only by being healthy. This is exactly like our educational system that is not at all concerned with training minds to be intelligent and creative but is only interested in propaganda, basic literacy and job skills. Since they cannot really improve the performance of the stupid, they create equality by stultifying the intelligent. The result of the American Health Education and Welfare State is three generations of Americans who are stupid, timid, and servile, incapable of appreciating anything better than Michael Jackson and Desperate Housewives. They cannot even roll their own cigarettes; indeed, they don’t smoke, not because it is a stupid vice but because it will cut short their entirely pointless lives. There is truth in what we used to say in the good old days, ‘Anyone can quit smoking, but it takes a man to face cancer.'” …

Read the complete post.

Paglia’s Statist Prattle

Barack Obama, Democrats, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Political Philosophy, Politics, Pop-Culture, Pseudo-intellectualism, The State

Camille Paglia is the scrappy Democrat adored by conservatives. On politics, she conceals heavy-duty statism behind the fig leaf of libertarianism. In the realm of art and culture, she substitutes symbolism for substantive assessment. Remember her clapped out claptrap about the significance of drag-queen iconography? What she knows about music is positively dangerous; she has conceptualized of Madonna—who is unable to sing or compose a warble worth hearing—as “an authentic, creative artist”? The Paglia prattle about the mismanaged sexuality of well-worn, ugly monsters like Britney Spears, here, was as worn and uninteresting as anything Gloria Steinem has ever mustered.

This month’s canned performance, “Obama’s healthcare horror,” can be followed from the conservative, Drudge newssite. (The “edgy” stuff about nude depictions is supposed to give this bit of banality a cutting-edge feel. Please! How original do you have to be to admit that Sharon Stone takes a good picture?)

Here’s a quick précis of the essay that instantiates Paglia’s hallmark statism and proclivity for the stylistic over the substantive:

• She voted for Obama so that he could repair the country’s IMAGE overseas. She’s pleased with that choice.
• She has complaints as far as his domestic policy, but they concern strategy rather than philosophy.
• A case in point: “healthcare reform,” which she thinks is the most important thing confronting dying America. It, of course, has been merely mishandled.
• The once beloved House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is no longer in Camille’s good books.
• Congress is “chaotic, rapacious, and solipsistic”; Obama is usually “sober and deliberative.”
• It is the State’s responsibility to see to it that an individual in “a major crisis,” or “earning at or below a median income,” has healthcare.
• More tired odes to the 1960s and the Democratic Party as a relic of that great era.
• Poor Camille is disillusioned. She never saw it coming: “I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic Party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.”
• Camille beats on breast because her “party is drifting toward a soulless collectivism.” Pray tell, Ms. Paglia, what would a soulful collectivism look like?
• Obamby failed to engender an “in-depth analysis, buttressed by documentary evidence, of waste, fraud and profiteering in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and insurance industries.” Another one of Ms. Paglia’s contradictory spasms; big pharma/business bad; big Obama good.
• On the Gates Case; she has nothing new to say that has not already been said by Pat Buchanan and this column.
• “The basic rule in comprehensive legislation should be: First, do no harm.” That was said by your host first.

(The same goes for Paglia’s eventual evaluation of the blogosphere; it came well after mine and only echoed what I had said in “The Importance of Boundaries.”)

THERE ARE A FEW paragraphs that are poignant. For instance: “The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.”

Overall, you’re better off watching the pictures linked, instead.

Updated: Clinton To The Rescue In N. Korea (Will He Pack For Iran?)

America, Foreign Policy, Gender, Hillary Clinton, Iran, Journalism, Pop-Culture

Lisa Ling of the National Geographic Channel can usually be found running around the world transmitting the propaganda du jour about “dying,” forests, “melting” icecaps, and “exploited” peoples. For some time, however, this annoying female has been preoccupied getting her sister Laura Ling released, after the woman was caught nosing around in North Korea with another “journalist,” Euna Lee.

How American! You land on foreign soil with a distinctly American approach to everything—you ignore borders, dangers, and differences. You demand in Yankee drawl, “Let’s have a show of hands for American values.” And you proceed to stomp about “exposing” the ills of the world. When some hostile primitives enforce their jurisdiction and show no appreciation for your patronizing good intentions, you cry foul. Oh please!

An extension of this mindset is the habit of stupendously naïve American parents sending their precious progeny, during their most stupid years—the teens—to dangerous spots around the world for a “growth experience.” My comments here.

(The CNN version: “Lee and Ling were arrested while reporting on the border between North Korea and China and sentenced in June to 12 years in prison on charges of entering the country illegally to conduct a smear campaign.”)

I don’t wish these silly girls ill—although Mr. J-Il obviously did—and I’m glad Bill Clinton rode to the rescue. Bill was, in all likelihood, asked to assist by Al Gore, who employs these broads in his California-based Current TV media venture.

Bill ate humble pie for the women, apologized for their idiotic indiscretions, and has brought them back home. One less topic for Larry King to stagger through on his nightly scintillating hour (He’s currently stuck on M. Jackson).

It’s not over for Bill; he had better pack his bags again. This time for Iran. A couple of American hikers wondered into … Iran, after backpacking across … Iraq. You heard right. Their greeno friends stateside say they’re just amaaazing human beings, thirsty to embrace the world. (Here’s a pic of one Californian adult blowing bubbles into the ether; she’s a “teacher-activist-writer from California currently based in the Middle East.” ) Apparently the feeling was not mutual.

Is natural selection at work?

Update (August 6): One ought to separate heartfelt sympathy for these young women from what I have done above: taken a close look at the hubristic arrogance and self-righteousness often undergirding their actions. Every bit of cynical approbation is warranted, that is if you’re not Oprah, and few on this site, thankfully, wish to emulate Oprah’s weak minded, anti-intellectual mushiness. Someone has to say the politically unpalatable: these broads are levitating in la-la land.

Update II: Michael Revivalist Revelry

America, Journalism, Media, Music, Pop-Culture, Sarah Palin, The Zeitgeist

Civilians are dying in Iraq; soldiers in Afghanistan, Putin, his little helper (Dmitry Medvedev), and the patriotic Russian people, are getting the better of Barack; China’s Uyghur minority is going ape on its Han majority, Zelaya is seeking solace from Clinton—Bill, that is; key Irani clerics have dismissed the results of the vote (that’s good news; sensible non-interventionist wanted any findings to issue from Iran)—all the while, America’s cable news channels have been glued for hours-on-end to the formless shape of Rev. Al Sharpton, and other other black entertainers, swaying to the sounds of a pop singer passed. The same specter has occupied the front-pages of major newspapers.

To paraphrase Pat Buchanan, a silly people living in serious times.

Perhaps our Alaskan lass gets it. Having, we hope, seceded from “politics as usual,” Sarah went fishing with her hunk and her adorable kids. I hope she’s winking in the direction of Russia, and having a laugh at the expense of the self-important Obamas.

Update I: Marc Lamont Hill, Ph.D, Bill O’Reilly’s token black intellectual (read: a man who is clearly a product of America’s system of racial promotion, and doesn’t make O’Reilly’s lack-luster intellect too obvious), said: “Michael Jackson is the greatest child prodigy since Mozart.” Good grief. This man teaches at an elite university and he cannot distinguish between a Mozart and a songster, who was able to write a simple, three-chord jingle and dance to it; and who couldn’t even play an instrument proficiently, much less compose a symphony or an opera?

For this music lover—Bach, anytime anywhere—that was the most obscene comment to come out of the “wall-to-wall Michael Jackson coverage.” Writes Debbie Schlussel, with equal disgust: “the only people I feel for at this funeral circus are those kids. Sad to see his daughter, Paris Michael Jackson, cry. It’s probably the only sincere moment in the entire thing. The rest are just phonies glomming [sic] onto a successful circus act.”

[SNIP]

Bubbling up from this sewer of coverage, so emblematic of American society, was the repeated refrain that MJ managed to transcend race and gender. How stupid. The man was tortured by his race and his looks. The latest reports detail the shocking lily-white color of his frail, emaciated body, and the fresh track marks along his snow white bony arms. This was a man wracked by hate for his original looks. It takes self-loathing to voluntarily transform yourself—through dangerous, disfiguring, bone-crushing surgery—from a black young man into a no-nosed elf whose facial structure—the bones—had been chipped away to render a concave, collapsing mess, both sexless and raceless.

As for MJ’s alleged genderless “achievement”: the claim that Jackson was gay is certainly silly. He was clearly childlike and quite innocent. He didn’t have a history of affairs, male or female, and there was no evidence of child-molestation, although there was ample evidence that MJ assembled around him grafters who did not hesitate to use their kids to blackmail a childish man with means.

Update II: Jackson’s adopted daughter is a lovely little girl, who doesn’t sound remotely like the Valley Girls infesting that state. I dread to think how she’ll fare if one of the sisters takes her in. MJ seems to have imparted some manners to his kids.

“Ever since I was born, daddy has been the best father you could ever imagine.”—PARIS KATHERINE JACKSON, Michael Jackson’s 11-year-old daughter, at the pop icon’s memorial service Tuesday.