America--FUCK YEAH!

Usually, upon viewing something with the feel of pro-America propaganda, I feel my skin begin to crawl. It's not that I hate the United States--I love it, and I rigorously defend it from people who've nothing nice to say about it. The source of my discomfort comes from the realization that propaganda with dubious veracity typically has the opposite of the desired effect on audiences, and the entire enterprise, which entails government manipulation in the marketplace of public ideas, strikes me as fundamentally undemocratic and orwellian. That's why I'm bothered when governments I like engage in propaganda production.

Thus, I cringed throughout the first ten seconds of this video clip:



After it was all over, however, I felt a sense of relief that the United States government had nothing to do with the production of this video. This relief, however, was replaced by a sense of projected embarassment on someone else's behalf. Two crucial opinion-shaping institutions in the western world--academia and the electronic media--exhibit growing anti-American bias. This may be mildly true in the United States (I'd reference Ward Churchill, but I hear Errol's insane antics have forever weirded him off CU's campus), but it's even more true in Europe, where, for example, BBC, the most trusted media outlet in the continent, recently admitted they suffer from an anti-American bias. It's stodgy academics and slanted journalists and entertainment producers who need to have their minds changed about the United States, but I suspect videos such as this elicit little more than a snort of derision from those quarters. Hence, my projected embarassment on the behalf of the producers.

And then I thought about it a bit more. All the video flatly states ... is true.

Sure, the United States has selfishlessly screwed over a significant amount of poor countries over the past century. We have been mostly fair but tremendously dedicated capitalists, and our business acumen has enriched our own citizens often at the expense of poorer countries and their exploited laborers abroad. Our weapons of war have repeatedly, through malfunction or user incompetence or purely rotten happenstance, taken the lives of thousands of innocent people. And our massive production industries have created environmental hardships for multiple countries around the world. Hell, the United States likely wouldn't even exist today had our ancestors not routinely enslaved and massacred weaker groups of people.

That's a tremendously dark picture, and I don't really fault critics of the United States for experiencing feelings of cynical pessimism (I frequently experience them myself). But I do fault the majority of critics for allowing their minds to stop there. I fault them for closing their eyes and plugging their ears and relentlessly claiming that, though they grew up patriotic, they've since taken the red pill and have followed Neo down the rabbit-hole where they've achieved enlightenment and no longer need to listen to viewpoints which contradict theirs. The notion that the United States is, in actuality, the one true evil empire befouling the planet is an irony too delicious for many to move away from.

The reason that irony is so delicious is because it betrays an obvious truth: with regard to the United States, the glass is obviously half-full. You'll find it's true if you scour all sides of all issues with your critical intellect fully engaged. If you haven't the time or the intellect, then take it from me: a man with no family or social life, but with plenty of time, an internet connection, and a curiosity to listen to all voices on any issue which is of interest to me at the moment. I've turned into an all-seeing, all-consuming devourer of news and information. Sure, my sanity is questionable (see last post), but when I'm lucid (as I am now) you can believe me when I say the United States may have a grey-colored past and present, but the truth is our shade is far closer to white than black. Americans do far more good to the world than evil, and, who knows, maybe in coming weeks I'll introduce a moral weight scorecard to this blog with graphs and pie charts that prove what I'm talking about.

Until then, you'll have to accept the simple apparent truths that are right in front of your face and on videos such as the one above.



PS: Matt's a big poopy-pants.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Hi everyone.

School's done. Been busy taking Japanese class. Real busy. Five days a week, four hours a day plus 90 minutes of homework busy. Nothing interesting going on in my life, whatsoever. Thus, prepare yourself for an excruciatingly dull post.

Matt sent me this sketch the other day. He originally drew if for his psychology-student friend who is conducting some kind of psychoanalysis based on artwork from headcase acquiantances.

At first glance, I immediately thought "gay." Perhaps this sketch is Matt's long-awaited and bold "Embrace Me for the Flaming Homosexual Artist I Am" piece for the contemporary visual arts community, which has traditionally been very homophobic. But then, I looked closer at the picture and realized that the art community has never really been homophobic, and Matt's not really gay, and there's no homoerotic content in this picture whatsoever. This was a series of stunningly disappointing revelations.

This raises the question: why do I desperately want to make the assumption Matt is gay?

Maybe I just wish he was gay, so I could legitimately make fun of him for being gay, in that un-PC way that's so popular among rowdy packs of guys these days.

Or ... OR ... ! Maybe I wish Matt was gay for "other" reasons ... ! If you know what I'm saying, wink wink!

And, of course, by "other" reasons, I mean, maybe, if Matt were gay, he could help me coordinate my outfits and give me advice on how to better communicate with women.

Alas, Matt is sadly not gay (which I suppose is good news for his wife), I don't really have any "outfits" in need of coordination (just random pants and shirts whose daily selection is determined largely according to the magnitude of their odor), nor do I have any female situations that might require the counsel of a trusted homosexual.

Sigh. I'm a man with no homosexual friends in no need of homosexual friends.

Anyway, sorry for the lame post. Here's Matt's sketch. I manipulated the colors in the piece so it would better match the color scheme of my overall web page.


PS -- The rumors that we've all heard appear to be true. Errol Jones, aka "Blackass", aka "E-Money", aka "T-bone" (am I missing any nicknames?) has discovered a (surprisingly attractive) woman unoffended by his filthy apartment and vehicle, mismatched socks, and rather creepy sense of humor. At first, I didn't think it was serious, but then Errol related to me that she complimented the texture of shirt of his that he likes to call his "Captain Kirk Shirt."

"I call it my Captain Kirk Shirt," he replied, presumably without an ounce of embarassment, to her tactile sampling of the fabric.

"A Captain Kirk Shirt?" she answered back. "But you're sexier than Captain Kirk."

I know what you're thinking. After hearing James Tiberius Kirk so casually blasphemed, Errol likely fell into a deep rage and spit in her face, or, at the very least, made the "impending backhand slap" hand gesture. Alas, none of these. Instead, he was jubilant.

"Sexier than Captain Kirk!" he cried. "Holy Shit! I didn't think that was even possible!"

And that's how I knew our little man was gone.

along similar lines... HOW TO POOP.

Here's a mostly-animated video from my current country of residence:



I like to watch this video and marvel at the fact that, not only do I live in this bizarre wonderland, but I somehow like it here enough to attempt mastering the language with the intent of lengthening my stay. Speaking of language, after the young tiger cub masters the intricacies of procedure number two and is awarded a pair of shorts, he exclaims, "pant-su ni kimochii!" I believe he's saying "pants feel good!" I'm unclear as to whether wearing the pants feels good, or being rewarded by his parents for making early strides to integrate smoothly into a hygenic and orderly Japanese society feels good. Personally, since I now live alone and never suffer visitors, I eschew wearing pants at home and do my all household stuff in boxer shorts and a t-shirt. I think that feels good.

My Sexy Toilet! (a photojournalistic exhibition)

I'm sure all five or six of my readers constantly wonder about the aspects of my life which revolve around expelling internal waste. Luckily for you, I've decided to break my silence.

Before we go any further, I'd like for you to imagine your own toilet for a moment. Perhaps it's sparkly clean; perhaps it's dinghy and dirty; perhaps it smells lemon-fresh; perhaps it smells a different sort of fresh.

Regardless of your crapper and its specifics, I am willing to stake my life on a single assumption: your toilet doesn't feature a bevy of soft-core pornography sculptures relaxing in a mock Japanese Hot-Spring.

Does it?

I thought not.

Behold all and tremble in erotic excitement at my sexy toilet, yet another reason to come visit me in Kobe:

A toilet so sexy, sometimes I flush it just for fun.


A closeup of my sexy quintet in varying states of nudity.


Click to enlarge! (If only they worked that way in real life...)


Just like real-life super-sexy women, they're made of shiny plastic.

Perhaps you're wondering what kind of kinky adults-only porno-emporium your intrepid weblogger had to brave in order to obtain five-inch plastic pieces of sex perfection. The answer: a regular, run-of-the-mill toy store (these were one aisle away from the Lego's) that was a floor below the menswear store where I recently got measured for a business suit. I was feeling slightly emasculated after allowing an effete Japanese fellow armed with metric measuring tape to advance to first base, and so, after exploring racks upon racks of gun-studded robot toys, my gaze drew me to the mysterious porno-sculpture section. A few strange looks from the cashier and a slow ride on the train home later, my toilet achieved a state of raw sex-appeal likely never before seen since our hirsute ancestors first installed an excrement drainage trench in their dank and pee-sodden cave.

Cool, huh? Feel free to share your own sexy toilet stories in the comment section. Until next time, I leave you with this video a powerfully sexy toilet that, almost unbelievably, fails to achieve half the raw sexiness of its primary user:

The only thing worse than children? Parents.

I'm not a big fan of children. I've never quite understood the appeal. Take, for example, very young children: when they're not bawling and screaming over the stupidest thing, they're drooling and peeing and pooping all over the place, a loathsome behavior compounded by the facts that they're utterly uninterested in cleaning up after themselves and barely bright enough to realize how disgusting they are. As they advance into prepubescence their intelligence awkwardly stumbles after, always tottering a few paces behind the threshold of tolerability.

As annoying as this is, it also represents the single enjoyable thing about young children: their gullibility. They so desperately want to be regarded as highly as an adult, they will say anything--no matter how retarded--as long as they think it will make their handlers happy. While it's always a hoot lying to children, their innate self-conscious stupidity has always distressed me for some reason. This has been a mystery to me until a recent epiphany: the stupidity that I see in children doesn't vanish in adults, but rather only becomes slightly more muted. Children remind me of what I dislike about humanity, and, as a human, I find this (and them) discouraging.

That said, it's parents that I find even more annoying than children. It's parents who fool themselves into thinking that they really do possess the godlike intellect their children naively assume. Thus, instead of perceiving their offspring as cruel mirrors which reflect the shortcomings of human genetic conditioning (as children should be seen), they see their little worshippers and assume the adulation is evidence of their own innate greatness.

Once a mother or father reaches this point, they become supremely annoying. Parents recognize their children are stupid and gullible, and they use this period in their kid's life to imprint their own worldview and ideology. Hearing children echo their weakminded drivel back to them gives them satisfaction not gleaned from conversing with fellow adults, who are more likely to scrutinize and criticize and arrogantly postulate their own perspective.

This brings me to two youtube clips, from both sides of the political/cultural spectrum, for your viewing disgust:



Ah, yes! Poor, idiotic, 9-year-old Rachel must be the apple of her moronic parents' eye! That she has so uncritically bought into her parents' mysticism is only proof of its validity! Never mind that her voodoo-esque blessing of a bowling ball results in a performace 200 points shy of bowling perfection, she mimics Mommy and Daddy's "wisdom", and that's all that matters. As for the uncomfortably awkward attemped conversion of the hot blonde: Why go to the trouble of proselytizing yourself when your kid can be brainwashed into doing it for you?

Oh, and don't quote me on this, but I think the church featured at the end of the clip is the same one formerly headed by the prominent pastor in Colorado Springs who got busted buying regular massages (plus happy endings and probably sodomy and felching too) from a male prostitute in Denver. I wouldn't mind hearing what Young Rachel thinks about the head of her flock "tossing another man's salad."



The girl in this video is hyped by her hippie folk-music handlers as "the Coolest 8 Year Old in the World." Of course, when one considers the frequent edits throughout the clip, it's easy to recognize that the supposedly precocious and shrewd girl is really just aping short lines and gestures from a coach, which is why the coach likely watches the clip and thinks of him/herself as "the coolest 36 year old mind-meddler in the world." Perhaps if the girl was a normal adult, instead of mindlessly parroting an equation as moronic as "KKK=Nazis=Republican Party", the coach would've received a rational response, such as "well, I don't care much for the Republicans, but comparing them to Nazis? Are you fucking retarded or do you not know anything about the second world war?"

The delicious irony is that one of the supposed messages in this diatribe is that children should be "treated like human beings." But the creation method behind this entire clip is predicated entirely on not treating the girl as a human being, but rather exploiting her enthusiastic emulatory zeal and oh-so-cute stage presence. That's not treating someone like a human being. That's treating them like a stage prop.

Anyway, the point here isn't that ultra-charismatic Christians and ultra-liberal hippie producers of musical excrement are horribly annoying parents. Just about all parents of young children that I've met are horribly annoying. Missionary-girl and Hippie-girl are only easy examples to illustrate my point. I could probably find more clips to show you what I'm talking about, but I need to go to bed now so I can get up early tomorrow and watch the Patiots-Colts game.

In the mean time, if you find a smug parent of a young child, you have my permission to punch him or her in the face and then spit on their child.

Four Hours of Bauer Power: DAMN IT!

The next installment of begins '24' is tomorrow! The premier will be two back-to-back episodes, and then the next day FOX will show two more sequential episodes. That's like a four-hour orgy of violence! I'm so excited, I can't write long sentences full of smooth, flowing prose like I normally do. Instead, I'll post some random Jack Bauer facts I found off the internet and then finish off this post with a youtube video.

Jack Bauer Facts:

• When a convicted terrorist was sentenced to face Jack Bauer, he appealed to have the sentence reduced to death.
• When bad things happen to good people, its probably fate. When bad things happen to bad people, it’s probably Jack Bauer.
• The city of Los Angeles once named a street after Jack Bauer in gratitude for his saving the city several times. They had to rename it after people kept dying when they tried to cross the street. No one crosses Jack Bauer and lives.
• After Season 6 of 24, the Chinese will be on the Endangered Species List.
• Once, someone tried to tell Jack Bauer a "knock knock" joke. Jack Bauer found out who was there, who they worked for, and where the goddamned bomb was.
• If everyone on "24" followed Jack Bauer's instructions, it would be called "12".
• There have been no terrorist attacks in United States since Jack Bauer has appeared on television. (This is true.)
  
• Jack Bauer sleeps with a pillow under his gun.
• Jack Bauer sleeps with a gun under his pillow, but he can just as easily kill with the pillow.
• Jack Bauer does not get taken prisoner. He puts himself in a disadvantageous position so as to make his next several killings more dramatic.
• If Jack Bauer's gun jams, it's because he wanted to beat you with it.
• Jack Bauer could strangle you with a cordless phone.
• Jack Bauer played Russian Roulette with a fully loaded gun and won.
• Most pilots need 5,000 feet of runway to land a plane. Jack Bauer needs 100 feet and a gun.
• On a high school math test, Jack Bauer put down "Violence" as every one of the answers. He got an A+ on the test because Jack Bauer solves all his problems with Violence.
• Jack Bauer is the leading cause of death in Middle Eastern men.
• In 96 hours, Jack Bauer has killed 136 people and saved the world 5 times. What the fuck have you done with your life?
• Jack Bauer doesn't speak any foreign languages, but he can make any foreigner speak English in a matter of minutes. (potential ESL techniques to be gleaned?)
• Jack Bauer doesn't take fingerprints, he takes fingers.
• Jack Bauer's favorite color is severe terror alert red. His second favorite color is violet, but just because it sounds like violent.
• In high school Jack Bauer was voted "Most Likely to Kill the Foreign Kid"... and "Best Eyes."

Required Reading

Amigos:

Plenty to report on, but not right now. I'm busy avoiding doing all the work I planned on spending my entire Christmas Break doing (the break ends in less than 48 hours, coincidentally).
But I know people check in, so I thought I'd post some links to articles on South Park. I realize that this show may not be your thing (and here, I'm addressing communist spies reading this page without my permission as well as those individuals who've only pretended to be my friend), but if you've some time and an interest in the show or libertarian philosophy, both links might intrigue you.

The first is entitled "The Invisible Gnomes and the Invisible Hand" by Paul Cantor. Since I'm recommending the article, and since my seal of approval carries with it much esteem, I need not mention that Cantor is some muckity-muck professor at some college somewhere, not just a jackass with a keyboard (like ... um ... me). The article itself is an interesting and in-depth look primarily at the episode in which Tweek's underpants are repeatedly stolen by gnomes as part of a greater capitalist scheme. Lotsa time and research went into the writing of this piece.

The second is an illuminative interview with Matt Stone and Trey Parker by Reason Magazine. Up for discussion is a statue of the Blessed Virgin shitting blood on the pope, Tom Cruise and Scientology, and why The Prophet cannot be depicted handing Peter Griffin a football. Interesting stuff in here about censoring South Park, downloading South Park, and how producers of both The Simpsons and King of the Hill deeply respect South Park for demolishing Family Guy.

And that's about it.

Stuff I'd Like to Write About, But Won't:

• Denver Broncos' Sad End to 2006
• How riding around in a bullet-proof humvee won't protect you from a spray of bullets, and why that's a total crock of shit
• Errol Jones' Emerging Love Life (you read that correctly, and, no, it's got nothing to do with Star Trek and, Dear God, I hope I didn't jinx anything by mentioning it here...)
  
• The embarassing and inexplicable erection I get from watching a low-budget video by a band of RATM-Pretenders called "Stuck Mojo". Did going to Bali turn me into a redneck bigot, or does this video suggest the beginning of an understandable and highly-needed cultural backlash against decades of namby-pamby multiculturalist indoctrination combined with a legitimate threat from extremists of a particular world religion?
  

Finally, please enjoy this CG posting from Stalhberg, an emerging master of the new medium. Let's just hope our guitar-playing philosopher friend has better luck than the mustachioed hot-tubber: