I Really, Really Hate These People

Shorter Paul McMullan: If you've ever been paid by someone in exchange for work which you then did, you lose your right to complain when they illegally monitor your phone messages.

You have to give Coogan credit here.  Sure, he was agitated and straining at the leash, but he managed too very impressive things: he didn't walk over and cockpunch McMullan with both fists, and he managed to avoid saying what I shouted about five seconds into this clip: "Surely the biggest loss here is the 200 jobs you've pissed away, you remorseless cunt." [1]

Now that would have been telly.

(h/t to Rising Hegemon)

[1] Actually, he may have said that later on in the clip, I could only watch a couple of minutes before my monitor was in desperate danger of being smashed.

Nice Package, Shame If Anything Were To Happen To It

Just a quick grumble to start the day: when did delivery services get so breathtakingly gittish?

An Amazon order I made a couple of weeks ago was finally dispatched at the start of the week, and I missed both deliveries due to, you know, having a job.

The delivery service is now offering me two options.  I can either drive 30 miles to pick the package up, at a precisely arranged time and with my passport and a utility bill, or I can wait in from seven thirty am to seven thirty pm for them to drop it off.  And that has to be on a week day.

Anything else will cost me extra money: five pounds to choose something as obviously unreasonable as either a morning or an afternoon delivery, or ten pounds if I want it delivered on Saturday, which makes it more expensive than having simply gone for the first class option in the first place.

Right, that's better.  Rant over.  We now return you to your regularly scheduled program of ranting about comic books and American politics.

Two Shorts Make A Long

Shorter David Brooks: having encouraged my friend for decades to drink heavily, vomit on his opponent's carpets, and drive me home whilst he's steaming drunk, and having on multiple occasions called the barmen who wouldn't serve him as secret Prohibitionists who don't realise or care how much Americans love their booze, I am disgusted to find that said friend has an alcohol problem.

Shorter rest of the internet: Go fuck yourself, David Brooks!

American Gods

I've finally gotten around to reading this, having waited so long that they even published online for free at one point.  On the other hand, it does mean that my statue of limitation of spoilers has expired.

Except... I can't really think of a way to discuss this book without (very slightly) spoiling the fifth year of Supernatural as well.  So that's what I'm going to do.  Anyone behind in their Winchester watching (though , really, it's about the same level of spoiler as mentioning that Season 1 features wendigos and Bloody Mary), look away now.

Quote Of The Week

Having spent forty eight hours at his Count's pleasure, I'm a bit behind in my reading, so I didn't really get to grapple with this until a few hours ago. I've talked a lot in the past about how baffled I am over the sheer ferocity of hatred so many in the American Christian right have for homosexuality.  I could go through all of that again, but really, what's the point?  Let's just boil this down to the quickest rebuttal possible:

I think we need to remember the term sodomy came from a town known as Sodom and Sodom was destroyed by God Almighty and the thing that they practiced was homosexual activity and even they tried to rape angels who came down there, so that’s the kind of people they were.

So is it possible, is it just about conceivable, that Sodom was destroyed not because it was chock-full of homosexuals, but because it was packed with vicious packs of gang-rapers?

About ten years ago I started reading the Bible from cover to cover to try and get a better grip on it.  I ended up abandoning the attempt somewhere in Numbers (if only I'd thought about starting a blog charting some ridiculously arbitrary variable throughout the book's run), but I distinctly remember the story of Sodom.  I kinda thought God was being a dick about it, quite frankly, right up until a mob showed up at Lot's door demanding he give up his house guests so that they could rape the shit out of them.   I switched sides pretty quickly after that.

I did always think it was interesting that Lot's retort - the response of the only good man in Sodom - was to say something along the lines of "There's no way I'm turfing out my guests so that you can screw them to death.  You'll have to take my daughters instead."  The general Sodom citizenry might have been pretty unfortunate to be surrounded by homosexual rape gangs, but it turned out to be pretty lucky for Lot's daughters. 

Not that they probably appreciated it at the time, of course.  I doubt that "Hooray!  The men father has offered us to as rape-victims have no interest in the front-bottom!" is likely to have been their response.  I suppose they got their revenge later on, when they got their father too drunk to know what he was doing and then took it in turns to fuck him.

(h/t to Steve Benen).

A Chance To Be Original

Like anyone else with an interest in the future of the state of the global economy, I've been watching the debate over raising the US debt ceiling with a great deal of interest (albeit with a far smaller amount of experience or understanding).

My economics skills are all but non-existent; I know what I taught for my Actuarial Maths course, and that's about all.  Having said that, I don't think you really need to know your Keynes from your Friedman to grasp the basics of the current fight.

DEMOCRATS: Failing the debt ceiling would be disastrous on a global scale!
REPUBLICANS: Yes, it would!
DEMOCRATS: We must raise it!
REPUBLICANS: So long as we get what we want!
DEMOCRATS: What do you want?
REPUBLICANS: Spending cuts!
DEMOCRATS: Only if we get tax increases!
REPUBLICANS: Let's cut a deal!
DEMOCRATS: Here are your spending cuts!
REPUBLICANS: Hooray!
DEMOCRATS: Now about those tax cuts hikes...
REPUBLICANS: Fuck you!

An awful lot of ink and bile has been spilt on the way the GOP has behaved during these "negotiations".  Essentially, it boils down to this: the Republicans get literally everything they ask for, without the Democrats getting anything, or the global economy - the global fucking economy - goes into free-fall.

The liberal/left-leaning/remotely sane areas of the blogohedron are going mad, desperately trying to process why anyone would be so sociopathically irresponsible.  The Republican strategy, they argue, is to simply sit in a corner demanding they shouldn't ever have to increase taxes until Obama caves in the hope of, y'know, keeping the world turning.

That would be insane, of course.  And whilst my contempt for the Republican leadership is both boundless and well-documented, I don't think they're this crazy.  I think they have something up their sleeve.

Or rather, some of them do.  The Tea Party, as far as I can tell, is taking advantage of the crisis to start demanding the most imbecilic legislation imaginable.  Hardly a surprise, of course.

But for the larger block of what I'll reluctantly call "The smart GOP", I think a different strategy is in effect.  If I'm right, the plan is pretty simple: reject all offers, all deals, even all serious attempts at negotiation until the eleventh hour.  Then have a super-secret Republican huddle, in which tears are shed and hard choices made.

Then announce a press conference.  A big one.  A huge one.  And walk to the podium and say: "The Republican Party is opposed to tax increases.  They are never a good idea, and at this point in our nation's history, with soaring unemployment and a low median wage, they're frankly insulting.  However, the debt ceiling must be raised to prevent calamity.  The Democrats have agreed to many of the spending cuts we have asked for, and in return we are prepared to make equally hard choices.  We are willing to increase taxes N and M by X and Y percent.  We ask for only one further thing in exchange.

The job-killing Affordable Care Act must be repealed."

BAM.  That's how you do it.  You take Obama's signature act, and argue that it costs so much that it's a deal breaker.  Tax cuts on the rich are massively popular.  The ACA is (just) the wrong side of public opinion.   So you swap a very unpopular stance for one the US public has decidedly mixed feelings about, and you do it close enough to the deadline that alternatives suddenly seem distinctly reasonable.

And you do it in the certain knowledge that the American media won't spend even five seconds considering why this has been asked for and what the consequences to poor people will be.  All they'll give a shit about is that the Republicans have "shown leadership" (stopped sulking) and "offered a bipartisan solution" (agreed to the debt ceiling range in exchange for Obama's second term).

I might well be way out on this, of course, but it's something to think about.

Friday Equestrianism

Never let it be said that there is nothing of interest to be found through Twitter (h/t to Jewel Staite).