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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Mar 26, 2010 23:02:35 GMT 12
From SFGate.comOfficial member: Evil Gay ConspiracyBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, March 26, 2010"Texas Freedom Network, Planned Parenthood, and the Human Rights Campaign work together as ‘triplets’ and speak with one voice. Mark Morford is a part of that network. What parent in his right might would want TFN and their network to have any influence over what impressionable and vulnerable students are taught?" — In hilarious defense of the odious Texas State Board of Education, apparently.______________________________________ Here's how it usually goes down:
"The network" usually meets every Sunday morning at the churchly hour, right about 10 a.m. or so, at a top-secret location that is definitely not the latex water bondage olive oil leather-curing rope-making genital-torture foosball dungeon-slash-jam preserves stockroom over at kink.com, so please stop pounding on the door and begging to come in, OK?
It always starts the same way. Everyone hugging, kissing and injecting the demon seed into his/her genitalia and then inseminating the 13 glistening, moaning virgins, as we casually swap stories of our recent kitten bloodlettings and imbibe copious amounts of laudanum and absinthe from the polished skulls of Christian babies culled from last week's clandestine raids at various Orange County Gymborees. Then, coffee.
After six or seven hours of foot massaging, chanting, flagellating, bathhouse-grade sodomy, and the scraping of evil fingernails against the Great Chalkboard of Unrepentant Doom ($29.99, IKEA), we start the meeting.
Correction: It's not really a meeting, per se. More like a salon, an idea swap, a wicked cauldron of perverted inequity, wanton inebriation and sweaty yoga that's overslathered with entirely reasonable desires to deeply corrupt and misguide the youth of America, touch all straight people and make them gay and/or perverted, and further analyze methods by which we can seed giant clouds over Kansas, Texas and Utah to rain down body glitter, organic kombucha and Hendrick Hertzberg articles. You know, typical.
We're all there, like the Super Friends of Sodom, like What's Wrong With America, Inc.: Members of the ACLU, the Human Rights Campaign, Planned Parenthood, GLAAD, MoveOn, NOW, The Sierra Club, the liberal media (ahem), and many, many others, various and sundry groups/acronyms whose mission statements only seem to promote helping millions of people live better and more freely, but are really dedicated to converting unsuspecting adults to the joys of skimpy spandex bathing suits, champagne enemas and making Lady Gaga Supreme Leader of the Known Galaxy Including Hawaii.
Barbara from Planned Parenthood usually makes these crazy delicious cupcakes, totally decadent chocolate things with rum and real cream, covered in candy sprinkles and the scorched ashes of the Fallen.
Every once in a while she throws in a surprise flavor, and the lucky person who takes a bite of her Abortion Rights Special (tastes like choice!) gets to immolate herself at the Great Altar of Gleeful Lube — basically a big, acrylic bust of Dan Savage — while we all watch and cheer and whip the Mormon slaveboys into bringing us more drinks.
For the record: Screaming Moloch's many glorious names during the Ritual Call of Happy Blasphemy sounds totally funny when you do it through a mouthful of chocolate cupcake crumbs. Just FYI. We always crack up, even as the floor rips open and spurts up the blood of the Master. When Satan invariably appears, looking, somewhat oddly, like a cross between Thomas Friedman, Bill Maher and Charo, he's always, like, "WTF are you guys laughing about? OMG, tell me!" Drives him totally crazy.
Then he has a cupcake. All better. Barbara = awesome!
It's not always perfectly attended. Sometimes Rich from the ACLU can't make it, has this or that sudden flare-up issue to address, perhaps some lesbian high school prom thing in Mississippi or a racist toy at a Des Moines Wal-Mart, that sort of thing.
Do not misunderstand: We all think the ACLU does fine work. It ain't easy chasing down some of society's saddest and tackiest table scraps, just to make an example of them, to set the standard, to keep the constitutional vultures in check.
But damn, the poor guy's always dashing off to some reeking hellhole in Kentucky, Louisiana or rural Texas to fight for a fundamental basic human right you thought was pretty solid, but which is more slippery than it should be, amidst a sea of spit, intolerance and twangy country music. He almost always misses Vatican Pedophilia Scandal O' The Week (a slideshow, Benjamin Blower as soundtrack).
Of course, we all have our issues. One of the most poignant moments in the meeting comes when we all share a personal tale of just how tough it can be out there, how completely exhausting it is trying to inform/pollute so many human souls with notions of blissful dirty sex, unchecked joy and self-determined happiness.
It ain't easy extolling the idea that God is not what you think she is, that you have far more spiritual freedom than they tell you, that gender is fluid and love is a liquid pulse, and you are already hot like wicked sunshine with divine perfection. Not to mention how Jesus was just a weird mystic anarchist who hung out with hookers and freaks and would have completely rejected/abhorred every megachurch, pastor, pope and homophobic GOP doctrine in world history.
Turns out many people hate hearing that stuff. Just can't handle it. Personally, I can't count how many times I've been told I'm going straight to hell for whatever reason: championing gay rights, sex-positivism, proposing free Hitachis for every 14-year-old girl, that sort of thing. A hundred? A thousand? So far, I feel pretty good. Nothing's fallen off. Nothing on fire. At least, not in a bad way. We'll just have to see.
Speaking of the kids, we all take turns with the tutoring. Every couple weeks I spend a solid day with a few dozen or so, training them in the Beautiful Dark Ways, filling their sweet, innocent heads with simply luscious lies suggesting that, say, homosexuals are very nice people, gender and sexuality are far from fixed in nature, history is mostly spin and PR, Catholic schoolgirls are shockingly/delightfully well versed in doing quite nasty things with their mouths.
And they soak it up! Kids these days are so bright and willing, eager and wise! I always leave upbeat and encouraged about the future. Of, you know, evil.
Did I mention the orgies? How could I fail to mention the orgies? Every Sunday night, it's like a meth-fest gay nightclub in Rio meets a Roman whorehouse in Mickey Mouse's pagan daydream on the dark side of the Dog Star, but with a lots more Ecstasy, single-malt scotch and leather. But I'll hold off on the details; some things are better left to the imagination.
After all, as you surely know, nearly all the desperate or otherwise hateful reaction I/we always get from conservatives and fundamentalists alike invariably stems from, of course, insane jealousy. It comes with the territory, you know?
Hey, it ain't easy being part of a great and sticky conspiracy to defile/illumine the very soul of humanity. But sweet Jesus with a Burning Man ticket and a well-thumbed copy of the Bhagavad Gita, it sure is fun.______________________________________ Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Apr 8, 2010 0:03:28 GMT 12
From SFGate.comWhat Jesus reads when he's nakedBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, March 31, 2010Cover of “The Daring Spectacle” by Mark Morford, now available at daringspectacle.com.Often do I hear the scintillating words, "Oh sweet Jesus Mark, that column you just wrote about neurotic fundamentalists/the Zen of Obama/divine kinkiness/Canada's vile oilsands/gay Vatican lust/the need for more awe in the workplace just made my day/blasted coffee through my nose/completely wrecked my fragile relationship with my angry, born-again sister in Florida, and for that I should probably thank you.
"Not only that (these fine voices often continue), but so orgasmic/overcooked was that piece of writing that I decided before I even made it past the headline/second paragraph/part where you mention genital tattoos/high-fructose corn syrup/dark matter that I would forward it on to a select group of like-minded Wiccans/inmates/Texas Board of Education members, just to make them smile/convince them to sleep with me/ensure they hunt me down like a Mormon lesbian in Salt Lake City. Just FYI."
Yes, I get that a lot. Sometimes such sentiments are even followed by the hugely generous suggestion/drunken bar bet that I should consider gathering the finest, wildest and most incendiary columns I've ever written into some sort of bound, printed material that you can easily transport and about which you will not worry if you accidentally drop in an active volcano/leave behind at the NRA meeting/in the fetish dungeon. It's a wonderful sentiment, and I've been deeply flattered by it for years.
So I decided to do exactly that.
I finally wrote a book. A real one. Woodpulp and ink, sweat and spit, laughter and tears, wine and lust and the haunted howls of the wayward Muses. At least, that's what it felt like, during.
The book is called "The Daring Spectacle." It's pre-orderable right now, over at daringspectacle.com. It is, in short, more than 90 of my best, most popular, most flammable columns to date, spanning my entire 10-year career as a hardcore, sexed-up, yogically blissed, spiritually intoxicated, hugely imperfect liberal San Francisco satire columnist.
I call the book a "mega-compendium". I also call it "dangerous", "hilarious" and, strangely, "Thor, God of Ecstatic Sighs". I'm not exactly sure why.
But wait, that's not all it is.
I should tell you about the hate mail. For "The Daring Spectacle" also contains nearly 50 prime examples of the nastiest, most gut-wrenching hunks of spittle I've received over the years, much of it so vile and low it could never be printed in this very column due to editorial policies governing hate speech and the misspelling of "faggit" and "commy". It is something to behold.
These messages, almost exclusively from exasperated ultraconservatives, make for quite the spectacular sideshow of anger, sexual angst and atrocious grammar. They are unedited, raw and included nearly verbatim. You've never read anything like them. Trust me.
Have you ever wondered what sort of demonic angels inspired me to write a particular column, the process and the posture, the background and the bliss? Have you ever cared in the slightest? TDS has the answers. For every column in the book, I wrote a new piece of intro commentary; a little background, some personal insight, that sort of thing. Keeps it all fresh, interesting and relevant. I hope.
There are columns in the book that nearly got me fired, columns that were banned/spiked by the paper and hence have never been read before, columns that made my editors wince and pray we wouldn't get vicious letters from the Catholic church or the Scientologists or about two-thirds of Texas. Which we invariably did anyway.
There are also columns that won awards, columns that (reportedly) induced labor, arguments, lovemaking, spontaneous marriage, divorce, joy, astonishment, orgasm, disgust, wistful sighs, explosive laughter, heated debate and a great deal of dirty, winking bemusement. It's quite a read, if I do say so myself.
But that's still not all. "The Daring Spectacle", as the title suggests, is also a bit of a wild experiment.
Given the bleak state of pretty much the entire publishing industry right now — newspapers yes, but also magazines and books — and given the advice I received from multiple agents and publishers both large and small who offered to publish TDS even as they secretly questioned the value and necessity of the classic "book deal" in the modern age, well, I decided to bite the bullet, take the red pill, and ride the new media train to glorious salvation all on my own.
In other words, I have self-published "The Daring Spectacle" under my own, newly created imprint, my own company, my own one-man publishing empire. It is called Rapture Machine, Inc. Yes, a whole corporation, all to myself. Imagine the power. I shall be exploiting the masses and oppressing the workers any minute now. And vice-versa. I mean, wouldn't you?
I shall hereby spare you the gruesome details of the astonishing amount of work involved in both starting a company and overseeing every single wayward detail of this sort of book's creation. Who cares about any of that, really? (But if you do, I'm about to do an interview on NPR with Laura Sydell about the self-publishing phenom, airing soonish).
I'll just say this: "The Daring Spectacle" looks and reads like nothing else out there. Self-publishing means I could hone and design the thing to my exact specs, up to the final seconds, for better or worse. It is grungy and splattered and modern like porn-shaped candy lightning.
It is the ideal bathroom reader, bedside companion, post-coital rubdown, literate snacker. It is packed not merely with columns and hate mail, but also a huge array of personal pictures, some Mullet Haiku (you'll see), along with a gorgeous set of Burning Man photos kindly donated by my friend, the amazing photographer Patrick Roddie. And lots more.
I repeat: "The Daring Spectacle" is available for ordering right now. It will be available everywhere else very soon, including the Kindle, though you'll miss all the cool pictures and formatting.
All info, samples and everything you might want to know resides at daringspectacle.com. Buy one, buy five, give them as gifts, let me know you did. But better yet, let me know what you think. The book, after all, is made possible by you. I'm grateful beyond this small space. I hope you enjoy it.
Thank you, so incredibly much, for reading.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/03/31/notes033110.DTL
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Apr 8, 2010 0:04:41 GMT 12
From SFGate.comBack off, I'm a corporate whoreBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, April 02, 2010Here's what you should know right off: there is no secret handshake.
I was, to say the least, slightly disappointed. There is no secret code, no password, no futuristic RFID chip implanted straight into my retina allowing me instant, bar-coded access to gleaming glass corridors in the NSA, Goldman Sachs and the U.S. Treasury. There's not even a diamond-encrusted golden key in the shape of a dollar sign that opens recessed steel doors to underground lairs or private cocaine stashes stored in the perfect vaginas of flawless Brazilian supermodels. Alas.
Also, no blood. No swapping of any bodily fluids whatsoever, no ceremony where you go to a sweaty, fur-lined conference room, the lawyer stabs his palm, you stab your palm, and you chant some sort of dark incantation to the gods of filthy lucre, offshore bank accounts and D.C. lobbyists. As you shake bloody hands, you swear to oppress the workers, exploit the tax code and patron multiple Vegas whorehouses and/or LA fetish nightclubs for your Republican Party/NRA donor slut-fests.
But none of that really matters. Despite the lack of expected ritual and violence, I now officially own your pathetic and meager soul. It's true. I have joined my corporate brothers in holding draconian dominion over all you see and hear and say and do and read and believe, forever and ever. Amen. Just the way it is.
Let me explain.
See, I have become a corporation. A real one. I have launched a full-blown company, with shareholders (me) and a president (me) and a full board of directors (me, me and me). And we are, all of us, in total and complete control.
This is how I discovered all the above insights and secrets — and a great deal more that I cannot really share with you meager commoners — as I transitioned from lowly, average tax-paying citizen just like you, into giant, megalomaniacal corporate fat-cat tyrant just like, um, Saudi Arabia. It was kind of fun.
It happened, as such transformations are wont to do, somewhat unexpectedly, surprisingly, the pieces falling into place like Satan's dominoes, the Dark Fates of capitalism slapping me on the back and welcoming me into the gilded halls of power and influence, even as they calmly removed a huge chunk of my soul. Didn't feel a thing, really. Except for all the screaming.
After the act was done, they handed me the deed to what's known as an "S" corporation, so termed for the portion of the American tax code it happily exploits so that I — or rather, my fine corporation — may now purchase many rarified American goods, such as congresspersons, Supreme Court justices and Malaysian sweatshop workers, without remorse, guilt or concern for pesky trifles known as "ethics."
You perhaps think I am joking? I am not joking. The name of my corporation is Rapture Machine, Inc. It is a publishing company, so formed to help me issue my first amazing, tell-all book, the dazzling mega-compendium known as "The Daring Spectacle," which is available for purchase right here, right now. Have you ordered one yet? Have you ordered, say, five? Do you know any angry Republicans? They'll love it. Give them two.
Why go corporate, you may ask from way down there, in your lowly status as pitiable worker cog lemming creature I no longer have to concern myself with in the slightest? Simple: because it was the best way to organize my life and finances as a freelance writer, author and now, overlord of all that is and ever will be. It just made sense.
See, as I was preparing to self-publish my epic book, I was informed that some of the larger printing houses preferred to work with "real" companies, not individual authors. So I started Rapture Machine as a tiny sole proprietorship in San Francisco. But one thing led to another, and on the advice of sage tax accountant counsel, I decided to go all in, and become the Man.
A small pile of lawyer's fees, an initial shareholder's meeting, and an $800 annual filing with the California Attorney General later, and I have my "S" corporation. Just like that. Just like Exxon. Just like Wal-Mart. Nike. I can feel what's left of my soul shriveling away already. Just like Dick Cheney.
As you might guess, it was quite the unexpected transmutation, from humble writer and yoga teacher to heartless totalitarian kingpin, all in a matter of days. But I have to say, it's been completely wonderful so far. Except for the nightmares. And the spiders. And the zombie clowns. Otherwise, awesome.
No longer do I walk among you as an equal. No longer must I concern myself with petty nuisances such as fairness, justice, human decency. The Supreme Court said so; I no longer have to care. Like any American corporation worth its inbred cronyism, my company is only really beholden to one entity: its shareholders. Of course, as I am the sole shareholder in my corporation, that means, well, me.
Hence, I am only beholden to me, to making me as rich and mercilessly profitable as my shareholders demand that I be, for me, as far as I know. God bless America.
Perhaps you think I cannot really get away with this. Perhaps you think there are regulations and laws governing such wanton behavior, that I cannot, say, hire employees for pennies per day and make then mix me fine whiskey drinks and crawl around on all fours wearing only boy shorts and a smile, as they recite poetry and fulfill book requests and update my Facebook fan page.
What are you, high? Have you not been paying attention? Did you see how many of my vile brethren over on Wall Street are mocking Congress and Obama alike, still giving multi-million dollar bonuses as they engage in the same behavior that nearly caused the fall of the empire? Are you not watching the oil titans continue to rape the land worldwide? Nothing has changed, plebe. And it never will.
In fact, we corporate gods laugh in the face of your puny pleas for, um, whatever the hell it is people like you plead for. Decent wages? Health care? A tolerable ending to "Lost"? Whatever. I can barely even hear you from way up here on my gilded throne of sticky, glorious evil. It's the American dream. Hey, want to be my intern?______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/04/02/notes040210.DTL
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Apr 8, 2010 0:06:14 GMT 12
From SFGate.comSex rehab! Is it right for you?By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, April 07, 2010Sweetheart! Babydoll! You right there! Are you into moaning? Soft sighs? Furtive groping in the night?
Like licking? Favor fantasy? Stoked about stroking? Unable to resist turning, staring and drooling like a whimpering dog/feral cat whenever something callipygian and curvy or firm and sinewy walks by and winks in your general direction, and then invites you to forget your marriage vows for a few days and come identify every bone in the naked human hardbody with your tongue in a giant vulva-shaped bathtub at the MGM Grand with someone named Brandi or Rocco or "Mistress Midori"?
Sailor, have we got the latest trend for you.
Come join Jesse James, Tiger Woods, David Duchovny and many more slut-tastic humans you've never really given a damn about and only recognize because of the endless tabloid headlines assaulting your eyeballs lo these past many months, in the latest spurious rehab trend to hit your internal bullsh*t detector since the Catholic Church said it would "look into" the problem of all those priests molesting thousands of children and then lying about it for the past 2,000 years.
It's called sex rehab, honey, and all the studies, data and deep vibrational impulses since the Dawn of Humanity indicate every biped worth her tingling showertime genitals should be enrolling her filthygorgeous soul into such a facility right this minute, if not sooner, because... well, just look at you. You're naked and slippery at this very moment. Or rather, you probably really, really wish you were. Come on, don't lie. That's the first sign. Just ask the Mormons.
Sex rehab! It's where we all sit in small, awkward circles in very drab rooms with very weak coffee and absolutely no access to irresistible, porn-ready Wi-Fi, and everyone staples down their naughty bits, dresses in baggy hoodies and proceeds to tell shameful but still sort of hot stories about our endless desires to hook up with anything possessing a filthy mouth and a beckoning body cavity, just after the wife smashes our Escalade with a 9-iron or wins an Oscar for a rather mediocre feel-good movie that made many adults cry against their will.
Sex rehab! Got a bogus clean-cut image to repair, a billion-dollar brand to defend, or a wronged wife to win back from the clutches of a high-priced divorce attorney? Come to the clinic. We'll fix you up good, make you more goddamn miserable and joyless than a Tea Party member in a bookstore. Have you seen Tiger Woods lately? Guy looks like he's been hit buy a sledgehammer made of thumbtacks and rancid cheese. Success!
Is that too sarcastic? I do not mean to make light. Sex rehab is serious business. It is probably very helpful and necessary for many lost and desperate (mostly male) souls, yearning to break free from the need for far more dumb, sloppy blowjobs in the workplace. It's apparently the place to go to learn that sex is more than merely a shallow, insta-gratifying Roman candle of mindblowing, all-consuming awesomeness that makes Jesus weep, galaxies swoon and the stars drip raw honey down their thighs. Well, not exclusively.
Sex rehab! It's like an oxymoron disguised as a condition wrapped in a punchline. It's like a non-sequitur mated to a misnomer wrapped in a black latex bodysuit drizzled with dark rum and warm Nutella, which is then spread slowly all over my ... whoops, sorry, getting a little turned on there. Sex rehab!
Of course, like any unfortunate addiction in America, from booze to cocaine, food to fundamentalist Christianity, the actual success/recovery rate is, well, fairly dismal. A fraction. Between two and 10 percent, depending on whom you talk to, what you're wearing and how much Velcro it has right around the crotch.
But with sex rehab, it gets even stranger. Because unlikeother kinds of rehab, after a two-week stay at sexaholics anonymous, you don't go home with a plan never to have sex again. Of course you're going to touch that again. Of course you need to hit that, frequently and often. I mean, what are you, a priest? Oh wait.
Verily, sex rehab is not about halting all sexual activity forever. It's just about trying to prevent you from having really lame, stupid sex with people you are not legally, ethically, religiously or co-dependently bound to have sex with, whether you want to or not. That means you, Pastor. Congressman. Father O'Malley. Mr. Sheen. Your Holiness.
Indeed, much like the Catholic Church's heartwarming coloring books that instruct young boys to always be near an open door or another adult when a priest is nearby — so thoughtful! — sex rehab merely encourages all undisciplined addicts to, well, just try to minimize the temptation, eliminate the numerous triggers that lead to naughty behavior — such as porn, cable TV, skimpy underwear, olive oil, plants, staplers and air.
Sex rehab! Like many things in life, it's more fun to say than actually do. For most, the very idea of it triggers that internal, intuitive suspicion, that little recoil of the mind that says, "Yeah right, sex rehab — a bit like telling a shark to knock it off with all the fish, no?"
After all, as mentioned, they say upwards of 90 percent of sex rehab participants are males. Is this partly because men are far lamer at controlling their urges and/or more likely to get caught, whereas a female sex addict is not only uncommon, but generally considered a dire threat to all humanity? What about the scientific fact that the various synapses and networks of the male brain that control the sex drive are 2.5 times larger than that of the female?
It might lead to the conclusion that, well, sex rehab is just a little bit absurd, a hollow therapy that's nearly guaranteed to fail, given how the problem really isn't the drive for lots and lots of frequent sex, but the fact that too many of us just aren't very good at understanding the energy at play, and most of our nation has been brutally mal-educated about sex since we were knee-high to a wretched Puritan dogma. Really, how can you be rehabilitated about something you never really understood in the first place?
What do you think? Shall we sit around in small circles and discuss it? Shall we swap stories and sip our coffee? See you in the clinic. Wear that skimpy thing you know I love, OK?______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/04/07/notes040710.DTL
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Apr 9, 2010 21:22:25 GMT 12
From SFGate.comOne sandwich to kill you allBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, April 09, 2010Special deal! Eat two of these nausea bombs in a row and receive a coupon for a free surgical stent for your coronary artery, and 10% off an XXL casket at CoffinTown! Or eat three and die almost instantly and save us the postage. While supplies last! — Photo: KFC.There are many horrible jobs in this life. Emergency room janitor. Sow inseminator. Earwax collector. Sarah Palin's grammar checker. Glenn Beck's fluffer. Republican. New Jersey.
But when I sit back, sip my scotch and scan the newswires for sundry effluvia indicative of our culture's joyful hellbound deathspin, the realization soon dawns that I can think of few gigs more nightmare-inducingly, soul-deadeningly horrible than being an executive for garbage food megacorp.
That is to say, a VP for McDonald's, Taco Bell, Burger King or their ilk, someone who sits around all day trying to discover new ways to manipulate, coerce, poison, and otherwise flagrantly kill millions of humans worldwide by convincing them to eat mass-produced, industrial feedlot, chemical-blasted garbage you should not feed to your dog unless you totally hate him and want him to get heart disease and die.
Hell, even the oil titans right now raping Canada can claim to be supplying a commodity that runs the engines of the world. Even Wall Street ogres can claim to be partaking of a time-honored tradition of gutting the U.S. Treasury at the expense of the ignorant masses. But head of marketing for, say, Kentucky Fried Chicken? Oh, you poor soul. Hell hath a special room for you.
Who are you, really, Mr. KFC executive? Who are you who just gave your approval to a rather shocking new KFC food item, who said "Oh holy hell, yes! Look at these great test-marketing numbers! F**k it, let's go against every shred of human decency, common sense, and even the First Lady's humble plea to get us to please quit making the country so stupidly obese and sick, and sell a truly disgusting creation."KFC is introducing its first-ever bunless chicken sandwich: the KFC Double Down. This one-of-a-kind sandwich features two thick and juicy boneless white meat chicken filets (Original Recipe or Grilled), two pieces of bacon, two melted slices of MontereyJack and pepper jack cheese and Colonel's Sauce. — Photo: KFC.Do you know what I'm talking about yet? Have you seen it? Apparently, for many months, people who run the snarky junk food blogs on the Interwebs heard rumors that KFC was testing this item, and thought it might be a joke, a viral gimmick. Or if not that, then something that certainly would never make it to market, given how it looks like some sort of frat-boy prank, like the drones at KFC's test kitchens got completely hammered one night and had a bet as to who could come up with the most repulsive menu item imaginable.
Behold, the KFC Double Down sandwich. It is, if you really want to know, two slabs of fried chicken intersliced with two pieces of bacon, two slabs of cheese, and the Colonel's "special sauce." It comes in the form of a sandwich, with the fried chicken where the bread used to be. It's sort of hilarious. It's sort of perfect. And then it'll probably make you vomit (watch the YouTube video clip).Did you notice? How in one pseudo-food item, you are consuming not one, not two, but the mutated, chemically injected flesh/byproducts of fully three different distended, liquefied, industrially tortured creatures? Feel the love, pitiable animal kingdom.
You got your chicken-like creature, your pig-like creature, your dairy cow-like creature, all wrapped in a $5 fistful of nausea, ready to strangle your heart and benumb your brain. God knows what's in the "special sauce." Maybe some sort of fish byproduct, just to round it all out. It's like a wild kingdom in your mouth! It's like a toxic zoo in your colon! It's like a suicide note from what's left of your brain! "If you eat this, you are a complete and total idiot, and we're through. Signed, You."
Let us now add a shred of wary perspective. For well do I know this horrible crapbucket of chyme joins a very long list of fast-food nightmares you should never put anywhere near your mouth, unless you deeply hate yourself and don't give a damn anymore, and you want to die fat and stupid and smelling like that rotting thing you found in your rain gutter.
What's more, some fast food companies are trying, at least a little, to respond to the call for slightly healthier foods, adding salads and fruit and grilled chicken breasts to their menus, even though every single one of those items is just as jammed with chemicals, preservatives, synthetic flavorings and high-fructose corn syrup as the rest, and all the "healthy" meat products are still raised on the most execrable, environmentally rapacious industrial feedlots imaginable. But hey, it's something, right?
Further, some argue that it's a bit disingenuous to blame the junk food purveyors for all the obesity, cancer, impotence, bad skin and colonic pain in the land. After all, the undereducated masses love to eat this garbage, right? KFC test-marketed this Double Down death bomb for months, to (presumably) great effect.
Of course, it's sort of a foregone conclusion, a rigged game. This vile meatwich is crammed like a grenade with sodium, sugar, fat and chemicals. Ergo, the testers, presumably people with taste buds devastated by years of cramming similar compost into their guts, thought it was pure nirvana. And then their colons exploded.
Had KFC actually tested it on people who eat real food every day, folk who haven't touched fast food in years, whose systems are strong and fully recovered and in whose bodies blood flows unobstructed, had KFC dared any genuinely healthy human to take a bite, you can bet they would have heard, and smelled, a slightly different reaction.
Maybe it's all a silly, futile argument, a fool's game to point up the obvious evil of such products. These items are legion. They just keep right on coming. What's more, it's just capitalism at work. It's about giving the people what they want, right?
And if they don't really want it — if, deep down, most humans sense this garbage is hugely unhealthy, that it's a form of slow poison and there are far better and wiser options out there — well, you do what companies like KFC, Coca-Cola, Kraft, McDonald's and all the rest have done since the dawn of the free market.
You convince the less educated and the gullible that they are wrong, that this crap is actually a good value for your family, nutritious and safe to feed to children, even as you manufacture all the flavors, smells and meat-like textures in a giant lab and sell truckloads of the crap to the poorer classes, until they get fat and sick and die. Meanwhile, you employ cute cartoon characters and bright, funny mascots to lure in the next generation, to keep the cycle going.
Do I have that about right, Mr. KFC exec? Did I miss anything? Can you hear me down there, what with all the flames and the screaming?______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Apr 15, 2010 0:30:12 GMT 12
From SFGate.comThe great happy Vatican death spiralBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, April 14, 2010Nothing like directly linking the pope to child rape in the same serious, surreal, horrifying storyline to make the soul cringe and recoil. Just how villainous and ugly is this ‘holy’ man, really? — Photo: Gregorio Borgia/Associated Press.Is it almost time? Can we finally start making preparations, send out a global Evite welcoming millions to a grand ritual down by the beach, a fantastic ceremony featuring copious amounts of fire and cake, dancing and vodka, Shakti icons and free condoms for all?
Verily, is the Catholic Church and its dank, nefarious heart, the Vatican, with its attendant red-robed apologists, unreformed child rapists and a leader who is, as Richard Dawkins rightly declares, "a leering old villain in a frock, who spent decades conspiring behind closed doors for the position he now holds ... a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence," is it safe to say this archaic and vile institution is finally nearing its end?
How grand to imagine — even for a moment, even if you already sense it's damn near impossible, even if you think the Church still does some good in the world, somewhere — how utterly uplifting to think that finally, after all these centuries of lies and oppression, intolerance and cover-up, that one of the most dangerous, insular religious monoliths in the world could come tumbling down in a smoldering heap, with something fluid, feminine and utterly transformational to spring up in its place.
You want a true second coming? A big, happy slap of the Rapture? There you go.
I am nowhere near exaggerating. At present, it's nearly impossible to keep track of all the accusations, evidence, grim letters, bogus apologies and cover-up conspiracies, not to mention the hundreds — if not thousands — of newly emerging claims of child rape and abuse that are winging around that "holy" place, coming in from all over the world, as dozens of old white men in robes scurry about trying to deny it all and protect the kingdom at all costs, while the flames lick ever closer.
Hell, I'm still trying to stomach three of the largest and most nauseating scandals to erupt in the past year or so.
1. The staggering revelation of 60+ years' worth of sexual abuse and beatings of countless hundreds of orphans at the hands of Irish nuns and priests, dating back to the '50s.
2. The nearly 200 deaf boys sexually molested in Wisconsin over the course of nearly 25 years by a single priest, Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, a man who should have died in prison but who, due to the Vatican's reticence and equivocation led by Pope Benedict, instead went to his grave entirely unpunished, as a full priest.
3. The unconscionable tale of a priest named Stephen Kiesle of Oakland, who confessed to tying up and raping numerous children, who himself recognized his own vileness and begged to be defrocked, but who a then-archbishop Ratzinger insisted stay put for many more years to avoid bad PR. He therefore continued to rape and molest, unpunished, even returning years later to work as a youth minister. Put in its simplest terms: the current pope had full knowledge that one of his priests was raping children, and did nothing to prevent it.This Friday, April 09, 2010 photo shows a detail of a 1985 letter obtained by the Associated Press signed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then-head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, part of years of correspondence between the Vatican and the Oakland, California diocese. The future Pope Benedict XVI resisted defrocking California priest Rev. Stephen Kiesle, who had a record of sexually molesting children, citing concerns including “the good of the universal church,” according to the letter. — Photo: Kim Johnson/Associated Press.You'd think that would be enough. You'd think that might be sufficient to turn the stomach of the world, sufficient to overthrow the dour regime once and for all.
Of course, those horrors are just the tip of the repellant iceberg. Pull on those few threads and watch in horror as a string of lies and cover-ups 2,000 years' long uncoils like a tapeworm, revealing centuries' of hypocrisy and shame. As for Pope Benedict, well, he's increasingly revealed to be one of the more power-hungry, ruthless, ultra-conservative popes in recent history, with new facets of his ugliness being revealed by the week.
It brings up, once again and for the millionth time, a time-honored question: How much is enough? Will there ever be a point when all the scandals and lies, rape and abuse finally crash over the enormous legal and pseudo-moral walls that religions are allowed to put up to protect themselves from persecution and justice, with waves high and powerful enough that they could wash away the Vatican once and for all?
The answer is, of course, almost zilch. There is no chance whatsoever. The Catholic Church is simply too enormous, entrenched, global, powerful. What's more, Ratzinger himself is armored like a tank with wealth, power and papal infallibility. Good thing he's 82 years old. Not long for this world. A fact for which we can all be thankful.
Perhaps, then, the only thing that can truly change the church is the revulsion and outcry of its millions of followers, demanding change, revolution, upheaval. And millions of Catholics worldwide appear to be demanding just that; the Vatican is under unprecedented pressure to make amends, modify its repellant ways, maybe usher in a true reformist pope in the wake of one of the ugliest "holy" leaders in recent history.
Then again, maybe none of it will have any effect. After all, few Catholics of any modern stripe actually pay any attention to the Vatican's childish dictums and archaic declarations, even its scandals. The pope is largely irrelevant. Turning a blind eye to the real history of the church and the nasty cadre of creepy old men who rule it? That's just part of being Catholic.In this March 31, 2010 photo, Pope Benedict XVI waves as he is driven through the crowd during his weekly general audience, in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican. The uproar caused by reports that, as an archbishop years ago in Germany and later as a Vatican cardinal, Benedict and his aides were slow to defrock abusive priests, cannot be explained as the church equivalent of Watergate with the pope in the role of U.S. president. — Photo: Pier Paolo Cito/Associated Press.Meantime, the stunning numbers just keep coming. The Vatican has now reportedly spent between two and three billion dollars — that's with a b — in legal fees and quiet reparations to the thousands of molested and abused. That's just the current number. It will be growing exponentially, because the cases are nowhere near complete. They just keep coming. And they probably always will.
I wasn't kidding above. I firmly believe we have this apocalypse thing all wrong, backwards. The Second Coming has nothing whatsoever to do with some melodramatic return of a bearded, sandal-wearing hippie anarchist who comes back to take away all the booze, porn and tattoos as he whisks away the trembling "true believers" to a land of harps, minivans and horrible sex.
Wrong. The Rapture is when the major karmic roadblocks of man — all the Vaticans, popes, temples, cults, megachurches and even most organized religions all stagger and collapse under the weight of their inherent hypocrisy, all the oppressed sexuality, the homophobia, misogyny, fear of science, the denial of true spiritual source.
You could call it one of the greatest ironies of man: Only when our supposedly "holy" dogmas, institutions and leaders fail, can the human soul ever truly be free.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Apr 18, 2010 19:30:03 GMT 12
From SFGate.com37 things worse than a KFC meatwichBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, April 16, 2010And lo, the reaction was swift and true, an incredible flood of comment and reply, recoil and horrified laughter, in response to last week's column — and the Huffington Post's wondrous reprint — on the gut-clenching KFC meat phenomenon/abomination known as the Double Down.
But amongst the amazement and wonder, a few oxygen-deprived souls dared to write in to say, "Aww c'mon, it's not all that bad? There are far worse things out there, for sure." And then they proceeded to try and prove how the DD's noxious calorie and fat numbers aren't even as toxic as some other vile fast foodstuffs, completely ignoring the larger picture I was delineating — all the pollution, animal abuse, industrial farming, chemicals, synthetics, antibiotics, hormones and just plain insidiousness of a company concocting something this greasy and disgusting in the modern age.
But it got me thinking, aside from the food porn on ThisIsWhyYou'reFat.com, well, just what are those things that are worse for you than KFC's fistful of karmic hate? What else can you shove into your body, your brain, your very anima itself, if you really despise yourself, stopped caring long ago and just want to curl up and die in a corner somewhere? Shall we list a few? Let's.
1. Tea Party Rally. Recently did I stumble, like stepping on a rusty nail, across a surreal clip of Sarah "Queen of Duh" Palin rallying the "troops" at a Tea Party Express stop somewhere in Gunlick, Kentuckansasiana, and I found my mind suddenly blasted clean by the giant pile of dumb I was witnessing, unable to pinpoint exactly what it was that this circus sideshow reminded me of.
Then I had it. Remember that bizarre, 30-second acid trip of a scene in "The Wizard of Oz," the moment just before a very stoned Dorothy skips away to hook up with her crazy gay pals and traipse through a giant Pink Floyd album, the moment when those three adult dwarves stumble out of the Munchkinland horde wearing little kid outfits, and sing their little surly song, replete with surly, out-of-sync-leg spasms? Yes, the Palin-led Tea Party rally reminded me of the Lollipop Guild (see YouTube clip below), serenading Dorothy. Perfect.2. Floating garbage. Not to be outdone by the wily Pacific, the Atlantic Ocean is now reporting the existence of its very own giant, rancid, thousand-mile-wide swath of plastic collected over a period of years in a huge, swirling vortex and choking off sea life as far as the eye can weep. The Atlantic Plastic Explosion™ (as it would like to be known) is drifting somewhere between Bermuda and Portugal's mid-Atlantic Azores. Yay world!
Representatives for the Pacific Garbage Patch responded almost immediately, announcing plans hatched in the Netherlands to gather all its drifting plastic together and turn it into a colorful, Hawaii-sized floating island, suitable for living and frolicking and decrying the hellbound descent of man.
Aching for attention, the Indian Ocean is, meanwhile, planning to set itself on fire.
3. Military spending. Did you know 53 cents of every tax dollar you just sent to the IRS now goes to maintaining the U.S. military? Indeed, much to the confusion of gun nuts and warmongers alike, military spending is simply off the charts, even under Obama. We outspend all our allies and enemies combined, by a huge margin, far more than China, Russia, India and your grumpy right-wing grandfather hoarding bullets in the garage.
We have the largest, most bloated war machine in the world. We sell more guns, tanks, jets and warheads to more dictators, regimes and drug cartels than anyone on the planet. Are your local schools crumbling? Public hospitals failing? Entire state dumber than Glenn Beck's fact checker? Blame the military, at least in part, for sucking down about $1.6 trillion every year.
4. Miley Cyrus. Indeed, the sweet little billionaire's romantic movie came and went so fast you probably didn't even learn its name; it passed through the cultural slipstream like some sort of irritable bowel movement, the reviews of the poor tween's atrocious acting skills veering between a semi-gracious "maybe someday she'll be tolerable" and "Oh my God, someone stab out my eyes with a flaming pitchfork right now." Did you spend 10 bucks on this movie? How is it you're still upright? Shouldn't you be getting to a doctor? An asylum?
5. The Catholic Church. Sure sure, the Double Down will enrage your colon, toxify your blood, disfigure your heart, greasify your skin, shrivel your genitalia, and dumb you down to the level of slug shoelace. But that's nothing compared to 2,000 years of abuse, lies, oppression, lack of sunshine and dead, leathery skin that accompanies handing over your soul to the sinister clan of old men who run the Vatican. As for the pope, well, it would appear the "holiest" man in the Christian empire cares more about PR than child rape. You know, just like Jesus wanted.
6. "Jersey Shore," cast of. Word has it there's a new spinoff show in the works to augment this oily smear of cultural insect repellent, called "Wicked Summer" (or "Wikkid Summah" for those in the dialect) documenting — can you guess? — the awful hair, insane sports obsessions and big dumb babes of blue collar lugnuts from Boston.
The show's tagline, "Five minutes with these walking billboards for ‘No Child Left Behind’ makes you feel like a genius for being able to work a goddamn can opener" is still, apparently, being honed. Can't wait.
7. Republicanism. Some scholars believe there used to be a modicum of nobility and respect attached to this political party, long ago. History seems to indicate the GOP was, at one point, the home of a few reasonable and decent men, fighting for just and balanced causes.
Of course, the party of Lincoln has devolved into a shrill, shrieking puddle of Glenn Beck's crocodile tears, Rush Limbaugh racists and surly white men who hate the fact that you might have decent access to health care, can marry someone you love, and don't hate everything and everyone not inbred near a Texas football stadium. Want to ensure your kids grow up scared, angry, well armed, heavily medicated and confused about everything? Raise them Republican. Oh, and spank the hell out of them.
8-37. And finally, seeking additional input for this list, I posted a humble query to the 12,000+ followers on my Facebook fan page, asking for suggestions. And so, without further ado, I present to you an abbreviated list of those non-food items deemed far worse for you than a KFC Double Down, according to, well, you.
In no particular order, they are:
Marriage, Las Vegas, lobotomies, rat poison, spray-on tans, radioactive isotopes, Kansas, the Oklahoma militia, Meg Whitman, Ann Coulter, Nancy Grace, Fox News, Mormons, the Louisiana school system, the Texas State Board of Education, nuclear waste (barely), strychnine (ditto), Christian universities, unprotected bestiality, dating writers (wait, what?), foot binding, a dioxin enema, home-schooled fundamentalists (note: possibly a food item), auto-erotic asphyxiation, resentment, war, a closed mind, uterine fibroids, the Bible and, of course, sleeping in a cage with seven hungry weasels. Just FYI.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Apr 22, 2010 15:04:46 GMT 12
From SFGate.comHow many companies want you dead?By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, April 21, 2010Oh, don't even pretend to be shocked. You know it's true. You know there are simply a huge number of big, sweaty major corporations out there in big, sweaty capitalismland who claim to be in the business of feeding and caring for the human body, but who actually care about as much for your general health and well-being as a Republican cares for his meth dealer's lesbian daughter's organic free-range Vermont wedding.
Deny it at your peril: It is just sinisterly evident that many corporations — seemingly far more in quantity and scale than we like to imagine — would very much like to see you, well, if not completely dead, then surely to suffer, wallow, shake and wobble for as long as you shall barely live.
Why? Because, silly, no matter how you slice it and what sort of optimistic green/organic/progressive wool you like to draw over your eyes, the truth remains: Disease and sickness, obesity and mal-education are still where the real money is. It's just the American way.
Is that too malicious? Too ugly? I'm not so sure. You have but to ponder: Who wants a healthy and calmly educated populace? Who wants people attuned and wise, spiritually secure and inwardly stable? Not the Coca-Cola Corporation. Not Exxon. Not the life insurance industry or Big Tobacco or Big Pharma. Not the Catholic Church. Not Yum! Brands, Pfizer, big agribiz and industrial farms, McDonald's, Kraft Foods, or your local school lunch program. Not most of Congress. Not Fox News or reality TV or the bleating clown car that is the Tea Party. Not fundamentalist Christianity, Mormonism or about 89 percent of Texas.
After all, the smarter and healthier you get, the more you are self-defined, attuned to wisdom and spirit, the less power and influence they have over your life, and the less they can sell you swill and poison, false hope and a sour idea of a bitter, vengeful little God concocted by surly white men in a dank Roman basement sometime around 300 AD.
Let us examine one little example. It comes in the form of a nasty news tidbit that hit my in-box recently, courtesy of a thoughtful and rather horrified reader, in the wake of the greasy fallout over KFC's famously vile Double Down meat abomination thing.
It's a story that reveals a rather unexpected, but not entirely shocking little factoid: It turns out the health and life insurance industries are just hugely invested in the success of the world's fast food companies.
How hugely? According to the study, in 2009 the big health insurance companies owned upwards of $2 billion in stock in the biggest garbage food purveyors in the land. That's a lot of high fructose corn syrup, guar gum, ethoxylated monoglycerides, hormones, antibiotics, pesticides and buckets of greasy, synthetically flavored slop, happily sanctioned and supported by the very companies you would think very much want you to shun those poisons like the pope shuns Ireland.
You may then rightly ask: What the hell are they up to? What sort of nefarious forces are at play? At first glance, maybe you can excuse it as pure capitalism at work. Large corporations often invest in other large corporations, seeking any means to making as much money as possible; principles don't usually factor into it.
In fact, as the nation just witnessed, it is inherently forbidden for ethics to come anywhere within a 100-mile radius of Wall Street. You want to round out your portfolio? Are you seeking some good cash flow and (relative) long-term stability in the market? Invest in the classic cornerstones of capitalism: oil, sweatshops, junk food, pharmaceuticals, weapons manufacturers, industrial slaughterhouses, coal mining and so on, and tell your soul to shut the hell up. Daddy needs a new speedboat and some bullets for the apocalypse.
But that's only part of the picture. It takes no effort at all to peel back one more layer and say that the health insurance industry obviously has a vested interest in keeping you fat and sick and ever at their mercy. After all, they're just hedging their bets.
Much like Big Tobacco's brilliant collusion with Big Pharma, both cheerfully feeding you a slew of lies and misinfo about smoking's terrible addictiveness on the one hand, while turning right around and convincing you of the need for expensive drugs and patches, rehabs and gums on the other in a vicious cycle of shame, victimhood and failed willpower, so do the health and junk food companies work together to make each other mountains of cash, with you as the dumbass hub.
Put it this way: The more successful McDonald's is, the sicker the nation gets, the higher your insurance premiums will skyrocket, the more drugs you will demand, the less willpower you will have, the more you will crave toxic garbage "comfort food," the more you will believe you're a victim, the less control you will have over the your body and your life, the happier these companies will be. And lo, the circle of life continues. Until your heart collapses.
Do not misunderstand. I am not saying these corporations are intentionally, murderously malevolent. I am stopping just short of implying a scenario where despicable corporate meatheads sit around bland boardrooms concocting ways to literally poison and kill you. Well, not entirely, anyway.
Because the truth is, you're just not that important. Your health and well-being are entirely incidental to the larger goal — which is, of course, making a sh*tload of money. If these companies think of you at all, it's simply as a means to that end. You're just a bulbous ATM to them. You are, as always, entirely expendable.
Is there any good news? A little. As Michael Pollan pointed out, as flawed as the health care reform package is, come 2014, we will still see a dramatic shift, as heathcos will no longer be able to turn you down for coverage or charge higher rates for pre-existing conditions. This means they will have a far greater vested interest in keeping you healthy by eating better and living a tiny bit smarter.
Of course, it's still for the most part just a thin, ruthless charade. The fact remains: They're all still for-profit industries. Much like how KFC — and its vile parent company, Yum! Brands — showed that it could give a dead, hormone-engorged chicken about ethics, corporate responsibility or anyone's overall health, the instant that many of these companies sense any new path toward profit, they won't hesitate to glom onto it.
Does that path just so happen to involve poisoning your blood, crushing your coronary artery, or running right over you in the street? Well gosh. Too bad for you.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Apr 27, 2010 12:31:51 GMT 12
From SFGate.comReal women cause earthquakesBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, April 23, 2010Behold A fresh danger prowls the land, a grand and treacherous question disguised as a quandary wrapped in a predicament slathered in body oil and leather cuffs and Cosabella thongs. Behold!
The question rageths thusly: Who on this earthly plane, once and for all, really causes all the floods and fires, earthquakes and meltdowns in the land? Upon whose sinewy, godless shoulders can the nervous world — old, leathery white guys who never have sex in particular — foist all the blame? Is it the women? Is it the gays? Is it the goddamn dolphins? Do they even have shoulders? Maybe this is the problem.
More specifically, which of the world's myriad evil forces spell our certain doom? Is it the exposed nipples or the anal sex? The tantalizing ankles or the tongue kissing in the street? Is it the strap-ons? Designer jeans? The sacrum tattoos? Shaved genitalia?
If you have hot sex more than three times in a single day, will a portion of rural China fall off and die? If you have unmarried cunnilingus in the back of an unprotected Audi, will God make a million bunnies spontaneously combust? Do messy orgasms make angels cry?
Stop smirking. I am hugely serious. People are dying. Buildings are collapsing. Humanity is in dire peril, because the other kind of peril is, presumably, actually sort of nice.
Let us pose our query to the experts. Let us ask, say, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, a senior Iranian cleric, one of those gnarled, severe, crusted-over Muslims you should always turn to with the big questions about women, love and man's imminent downfall, because hoary old guys like him never lie or make sh*t up just to maintain their power, authority and secret access to gay prostitutes and cocaine. Let's see what Sedighi says:
"Many women who do not dress modestly... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes."
Yea! Testify! Sedighi hath spoken! Mumbled his Great Truth though a tangled beard and 5,000 years of misogyny, as he apparently vies for the title of Greatest Non-Sequitur Ever Uttered. Yes, Sedighi officially blamed Iran's deadly earthquakes on his country's promiscuous women and their terrifying scarves. "Also, the lack of Flash on my new iPad totally blows," he did not add.
But wait, can Sedighi, in all his obvious awesomeness, possibly be right? Because over here is Pat "Shriveled Soul" Robertson and his army of timorous trolls on the Christian right, going on record numerous times to blame those selfsame ills of the world — all the tsunamis, quakes, 9/11s and Mazda Miatas — not on the scary women, but rather, on the gays and sodomites. Oh dear!
(Side note: The wise ones among you may recall that, not long ago, Christianity was no different than Islam; for millennia, God happily shared Allah's fear of the devastating, world-swallowing vagina. But we switched to evil gays when we realized women are pretty good for certain tasks, like tea making, chicken plucking, rollerskating, paint matching, shimmying, and having sex with professional golfers).
Clearly, according to Christianity — in fact, according to most major religions of the world — gay people flout God's will even more than dirty, promiscuous females, given how... well, no one's exactly sure how. They just do, OK? Pipe down.
Of course, unfortunately for you ladies, it's been the women who have been raped, violated, beaten and oppressed throughout religious history for many thousands of years in far greater numbers than the relatively fresh-faced, new-to-iniquity gays. Can you see the problem? It's just so difficult to choose!
Ah, but maybe we're looking for apocalypse in all the wrong places. Because meanwhile, over at the Vatican, the staff exorcist, Father Gabriele Amorth, 85, says he has personally witnessed possessed personages spitting glass and shooting hot nails from their heads or something, and he doesn't just mean the creepy homunculus's on "The Real Housewives of Orange County."
Amorth claims Satan hizzownbadself prowls the dank and stuffy halls of the Vatican, presumably in the guise of a young, smooth altar boy and/or a suspiciously stained 1988 copy of Honcho, thus tempting all those wretched, desperate priests and bishops with overwhelming fleshly desires, to the point where some simply can't help but go off and, you know, molest some children. Hey, it's not their fault! It's Satan, for Christ's sake!
Now are you beginning to understand the importance of the question that afflicts our threadbare species? The ponderable that keeps us up at night, tossing and turning, wailing to God for some sort of answer as we pop our Ambien and have our sleepsex and dream about inventing the world's first iPhone app for porn?
I already know my answer. I can personally attest to the righteous cleric Sedighi's divine insights, and not just because I always trust a guy who hasn't had sex in eight million lifetimes and screams in terror at the very thought of a woman's tongue jammed in his ear. The poor dear.
I know for immutable fact that promiscuous women absolutely cause earthquakes. I have seen it happen. Felt them in my bones. Watched them wreck my furniture and steal all my hot water and rarely make me breakfast. Things quaking, smoking, moaning, falling off the goddamn walls. Totally wonderful. I mean, awful. Totally awful. That's what I mean.
Of course, there is one more possibility, one suspicious, rarely discussed, but no less devastating force that might very well be the source of all the tornadoes, temblors, firestorms and enormous floating plastic garbage vortexes of the planet. Can you guess?
That's right: the animals.
Have you heard? Reports are rampant throughout the biological sciences that the animal kingdom engages in all sorts of promiscuous sex, sodomy, gay co-parenting, even interspecies romps. It's true! Dolphins, monkeys, lions, penguins, rams and caribou, dogs and donkeys, snakes and iguanas enjoying all sorts of filthy, godless sex for all sorts of wanton reasons, including (shudder) straight-up pleasure. In fact, science is finding examples of gay sex across nearly every species on Earth. Damn you, science!
Good heavens, fellow sinner! What is to be made of any of it? Surely, God can not be pleased about any of this. Surely He hath had just about enough. Surely a Final Answer is forthcoming?
Until then, there is only one thing to be done: more experimentation. More testing. Eager salaciousness, respectful perversion, kink, lick, suck, love, nipple and yes and sigh, kiss and moan and smile, things unwed and illicit, fluxive and slippery, full of laughter and breath, joy and fleshy bits and much wild grinning into the Void. We must root out this great and terrible truth, once and for all. Care to join me?______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Apr 29, 2010 21:55:11 GMT 12
From SFGate.comPlacebo effect beats God, ProzacBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, April 28, 2010This is the story of three drugs. Except one is not really a drug at all and is merely an illusion, a nifty construct, an intense belief that it might be a drug, even though, as mentioned, it is very much not. We just think it is. Isn't that strange? Wonderful? Both?
The three drugs — which, sorry, are not so much drugs as they are modes of comprehending our own weird little minds, needs and inherent psychoses — are presented here by way of two recent studies that essentially reinforce what similar studies have been declaring for years and decades and, in the second case, since the ancient mystics suckled wild plants in the forest, licked God, found the source of the soul, and said, you know, holy f*ck.
Let's lay it out: According to a major new overview study, all of America's beloved wonderdrug antidepressants — all the Prozacs, Paxils, Effexors, Zolofts of the world — are essentially useless and don't really work worth a damn.
Wait, that's not quite right. They can sort of work just fine, help millions of people and have enjoyed tremendous success. But there's a huge caveat: Statistically speaking, all these drugs work no better — and often are far worse for you — than sugar pills, fake pills, placebos that patients only think are powerful, mind-altering compounds, but which in fact are no more chemically miraculous than a peppermint Altoid.
Have you heard this before? Of course you have. The placebo effect has been known for years. Decades. Forever. It's one of those hotly controversial, yet irrefutable medical/psychological wonders that we don't have the slightest clue how to unravel, much less leverage. And hence, it just freaks us the hell out.
Nevertheless, the recent findings, the result of one of the most comprehensive studies in recent years, are still nothing short of astounding. A sugar pill works as well as a hit of Prozac, if the patient believes she's getting the latter? It's just all sorts of confounding, in how it reveals how the power of the mind is still, to this day, barely understood, untapped, wildly feral, far more brightly powerful than we know what to do with.
It also reveals just how deeply invested massive drug companies are in convincing everyone they can "cure" depression with powerful, often dangerous chemical alternatives, how fearful doctors are of refuting this, how reluctant patients are to understand the difference, and how, above all else, nothing is as it seems.
Problem is, it ain't just the pills. The placebo effect — hereby defined as the sheer force of will and belief, of the mind's (and heart's) ability to heal and nurture itself sans external assistance — applies to all sorts of constructs in our tortured modern world.
Organized religion? Hell yes. Is your life flawed and painful? Are you guilt-ridden and terrified of the world's swarm of demons and daggers? Of course you are, sinner. Here, have a giant, unknowable deity. Give to it all your faith, hope, belief, money, angst, sexual shame. Believe in it wholly and without doubt, to the point where you lose a sense of yourself and your true divine source, forever and ever, amen.
There now. Feel better? Are miracles starting to happen in your life? Do you feel uplifted and joyful? Are you healed? It's the power of Jesus! It's God in your life! It's because you have blind faith! No no no, it's not you, silly. Even though, in fact, it totally is. Shhh.
Of course, what we call the power of faith is just the power of the mind, soul, the Self, rather harshly rerouted through some external conduit that relieves us from having to figure sh*t out for ourselves. After all, it's just much easier to give it all over to the god, the pill, the product, than it is to delve deep into one's own dark and inscrutable psyche. Same as it ever was.
But whatever works, right? If expensive pills genuinely help millions, who's to argue? If devout belief gives you stability and a sense of place, what's wrong with that? It's all well and good... until you factor in the cost.
The organized religion racket rakes in hundreds of billions a year, and requires a massive toll in guilt, shame, dogma, homophobia, war, pedophilia and sexual hysteria. The antidepressant market runs $10 billion a year and makes millions into casual addicts, convincing many they are powerless to get better without chemical assistance.
The placebo market is, at last check, absolutely free. Man, they just hate that.
Behold, study number two. This research reveals another time-honored truth that science is only now beginning to barely get a grip on, albeit nervously, suspiciously. Few want to claim it or ponder what it might mean to how we define illness, consciousness, God, the sanctity of the DSM-IV.
This research reveals, once again for the millionth time, that various psychedelics like MDMA, LSD and psilocybin really do, in fact, have a rather stunningly helpful — and often permanent — effect on the health and well-being of numerous patients, almost universally and without fail.
(Did you hear that? That's the sound of a million mystics and healers, teachers and gurus throughout history, sighing and rolling their eyes).
Of these drugs' power to dance and frolic with the brain's synapses, there is absolutely no doubt. This is no placebo effect. This is no sheer force of will. Psilocybin, for one, is an E-ticket to a shifting dimension, a dance on the blurrier edges of definitive reality. Ecstasy is a widening out, a warming up, an opening into the cold, cold heart of the human species.
Patients who get to dabble with these fine plants and chemicals are reporting astonishingly positive, almost impossibly curative reactions. Lives are forever altered. Ideas of the soul, heart, human connection forever reset and restored. Possibilities expand, PTSD contracts, hearts open, fear and inhibition dissolve. Love expands. And man, the PTB hate that, too.
Do you know why? Two reasons: One: No one holds the patent to these drugs. No one company stands to rake in billions if, say, MDMA is somehow decriminalized. Two: Science loves reliable data, anchor points, the flawed sturdiness of the scientific method. But when it comes to hallucinogens and psychotropics, it's all just a delightful, slippery mess. The swim and swirl of consciousness, it would appear, just refuses to be pinned down.
The grand upshot: We are but infants. We hammer and prod at the brain, the self, inundate it with chemicals and blast it with terminology to try and get it to behave and respond in somewhat predictable ways. And yet, the ancient plants, the mystical connections they offer to that original source seem to prove one irrefutable point: We still have a long, long way to go to get back to where we started.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/04/28/notes042810.DTL
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on May 7, 2010 21:22:29 GMT 12
From SFGate.com10 amazing truths you already suspectedPart IV! Pink fried chicken, Oklahoma vaginas, French G-spotsBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, April 30, 2010This much you already know:
1. The Bible is more violent than the Quran. Wait, what? Really? It's true... sort of. Don't tell this fine racist patriot, but turns out the Bible, America's favorite misinterpreted hunk of swiped fairy tale mythology, is packed like "Saw IV" with wraths and attacks, smitings and genocides, hacked-off limbs and fiery explosions in the sky. Whereas, despite its bad rap and its rather nasty "convert-the-world" directive, the Quran's scriptures are largely peaceful documents that've been hijacked and distorted by fundamentalist jackals for political purposes, to justify all sorts of bias, intolerance and violence against those they hate and fear. Sound familiar?
2. High fructose corn syrup is nasty, obesity-causing swill. I know, right? But here's something you might not know: As a columnist who writes, let's say "unflatteringly" about fast food and the noxious ingredients therein, I've received sneering little letters in the past from the Corn Refiner's Association when I've attacked their sticky cash cow, as they try to claim their synthetic goop is no worse for you than sunshine and flowers. Lying is fun!
Fact: HFCS "prompts considerably more weight gain than sugar," says a big new Princeton study. Fructose also scars the liver. It's nasty stuff, it's in everything from ketchup to soup to the despicable Double Down sandwich, and it's inextricably tied into the federal corn subsidy and the impenetrable farm bill, which in turn is guarded like the Pope's own porn collection by one the most powerful, ruthless government lobbies in America. Upshot: Until the Obama admin takes on the brutal farm lobby, this gummy poison is going to keep right on making everyone thick and fat and stupid.
3. And what happens then? Why, we lose WWIII to the skinny terrorists, that's what. Seems American kids are becoming "too fat to fight", and the U.S. military is in a bit of a panic, as it's becoming increasingly difficult to find recruits who aren't so hugely overweight that they can't even do a single pull-up.
A group of more than 50 retired generals and admirals released a study saying that 30 percent of otherwise eligible recruits are just too chunky to be of any use to the military. And they take anyone. Alert the GOP! The biggest threat to America isn't the gays or the vaginas or the "weak on terror" liberals; it's your own overweight kids.
(At least we're not alone. China, too, is terrified of losing the Great War with Japan — which is apparently coming around 2025 or so — due to its own surfeit of obese youth. Yay fast food! You will kill us all!)
4. Pink buckets of fried chicken = WTF? Speaking of obesity and the Double Down, does anyone know just what the hell the venerable Susan Komen Breast Cancer Foundation is doing sucking the vile greasepit that is KFC? Have you seen? The two have apparently teamed up to promote a pink bucket of fried meat-like chicken, some of the profits of which go to support cancer research. Which prompts one simple question: Are they f*cking insane?
Note to Komen people: No one cares how enormous is the mountain of cash you stand to rake in from this hellish union. Something is disturbingly wrong when you endorse a hugely unhealthy, chemically saturated "food" so you can ostensibly raise more money to try and cure one of the many diseases that same food is linked to. It's almost exactly like hawking a pack of pink Marlboros to promote lung cancer research. Fire your PR hack before everyone believes you really care about women about as much as KFC cares about chickens.
5. GOP mocks donors, used scare tactics to raise money. Gosh. Really. You mean to say the RNC is full of fearmongering jackals who lie like dogs about the so-called "threats" of President Obama, health care reform, global warming, gays and abortion and all those terrifying vaginas, just to get more money, power, and to shout down its more intelligent and informed detractors? And they think many of their own followers are morons? Look how shocked no one is.
6. Food expiration dates mean almost nothing. It's true. Those date stamps are largely useless, are far too conservative, are frequently put there by terrified and/or greedy companies who would simply love it if you'd toss out perfectly good products and buy new ones just because they claim its "freshness" date has passed. Upshot: Ignore the date stamp. Does the milk smell funky? Meat getting a little slimy? Veggies getting mushy? Visible mold? Is it endorsed by Tiger Woods? That's how you know.
7. You can tell a person's political affiliation just by looking at his face. Well, obviously. Do you look severe and constipated, nervous and ruddy, fearful the gays are coming to convert your cat and steal your fetish porn? You're a Republican. Do you look warm and approachable, calm and likable, slightly insane and mushy as a tofu popsicle? You're a Democrat.
But there are exceptions. For example: Do you look like the Pillsbury Dough Boy violently crossbred with an encephalitic troll who just so happens to look exactly like your creepy Uncle Paul who always insists on kissing you on the lips, wetly, with tongue, lingering for just a little too long? You are, of course, Glenn Beck.
8. Oklahoma: still grossly misogynistic after all these years. Are you youngish? Female? Do have a vagina and like to use it? Are you smarter than a tree stump? Do you live in Oklahoma? Here is your urgent advice: Get out now.
Witness, won't you, the two violently anti-choice laws Oklahoma's state Senate just passed — laws which, thankfully, will almost certainly be deemed unconstitutional and overturned — but which are so demeaning and antagonistic to women everywhere it's hard to believe it's 2010 and Oklahoma still exists. At least the state's Democratic governor thought these laws were ludicrous. His veto was defeated. Dear Oklahoma legislature: George W. Bush called. He wants his hateful, failed policies back.
9. Placebos are just as effective as prescription antidepressants. Yep, I talked about it all last column, but I'm still sort've astonished by the larger finding. One fact I failed to mention: it was mostly Big Pharma's own studies that proved that their drugs are actually no more effective than sugar pills. They have no idea how it all works, and it scares the crap out of them. While this might be one of those huge revelations you might've already suspected, it contains ramifications and meanings that remain tantalizingly out of reach, mysterious and profound. Gotta love it.
10. The French believe in your G-Spot. Here's what you must never do when speaking of the great, slippery mystery that is female sexual cosmology: Do not speak in absolutes. So it is that uppity French gynecologists rebuffed their staid, sexually stunted Brit counterparts, saying the latter was dumber than a box of dead vibrator batteries to suggest the G-spot is a myth and does not exist.
"It is clear that in female sexuality there is a variability. It cannot be reduced to a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or an ‘on’ or an ‘off’" said Pierre Foldès, a French surgeon, in the understatement of the century. Didn't you already suspect as much?______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/04/30/notes043010.DTL
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on May 7, 2010 21:46:54 GMT 12
From SFGate.comFive fun ways to obliterate all hopeBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, May 05, 2010Feeling despondent? Peevish? A little vengeful? Sick of all those perkyhappy people swarming around you, what with their annoying smiles and feelings of general optimism for no goddamn reason because Jesus, don't they know the world is packed like a hysterical nail gun with fear and shrapnel and pain? Want to lose a few friends and feel even more miserable and alone? Excellent.
Here is something you can do.
Just send your cheerful, soon-to-be-ex pals the link to any of the following stories. Be sure to endorse it enthusiastically, something along the lines of "Hey! This awesome story totally made me think of you!" or "Hi mom! Just sending you a note of love, despite all the guilt and the beatings and those times you let dad snuff out his cigarettes in my eyeballs. Enjoy this funny news item about cute little ducks!"
Any one of these stories is enough to crush a good mood for at least a day. But mix and match and stack them together, and — sweet Jesus swimming in the worst oil spill in a generation — you can obliterate someone's perky spirit for at least a week, inspire numerous depressing Facebook status updates, and increase alcoholism rates across the board. Really, who needs friends?
1. Screaming ducks. Just recently did I invest in a very expensive Hungarian goose down comforter from Macy's. It is, in a word, spectacular. Light and fluffy and yet toastier than a Thai clay pot in summertime, it's one of those 10-year investments that pays off nearly every single shivery, drafty San Francisco night; every time I slip into its Hungarian goodness a small part of me thanks God, Shiva and Darwin alike for inventing all those cute, generous waterfowl that so happily donate their extra feathers to the cause of keeping all us compassionate humans warm.
Whoops. Turns out there's this hideous, widespread practice called "live-plucking" wherein the geese and ducks, rather than first being lovingly slaughtered for food and then shorn, instead have their feathers ripped off their bodies, over and over again, while they're still alive — sort of like Brazilian waxing, only far less appetizing. It happens in China. It happens in Norway. It happens with maybe 80 percent of the down you buy anywhere, they say (though that's been rebutted), and it's largely untraceable. Nice!
2. The great global toilet crisis. Thank you, CurrentTV, for showing such pleasant footage of all those naked Indian laborers squatting in polluted fields, for allowing viewers to imagine the obvious activity taking place, and for having your valiant reporter dare step foot into a rickety rowboat for a sickening little cruise down one of the most putrid, toxic rivers in the world, all for the sake of a hard-hitting story on the lack of basic toiletry in developing nations like India. And you thought that homeless dude pissing in your driveway was bad.
It's one of those stories you can pluck out of the giant barrel o' global suffering, a single example from hundreds of public health crises across the globe, from the lack of clean drinking water to all the polluted soil, bovine waste, hog farm tailing ponds, China's air pollution, Alberta's oilsands, horrid health conditions in the world's slums, Sarah Palin and so on.
3. Oklahoma hates women. Oh, it really does. Largely overshadowed by Arizona's stunning proclamation of racism and ignorance, the Oklahoma State legislature just overwhelmingly passed two of the most repugnant anti-choice laws in recent memory, kindly reassuring the rest of the country that Oklahoma remains very much in the race — right along with Alabama, Kentucky, Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Nebraska, et al — to be one of the nation's most misogynistic, hateful places in which to live, particularly if you have a vagina, or a sex life, or an education.
The "good" news is, both bills are widely considered abrasively unconstitutional and will almost certainly be overturned. But the fact that states are still trying to cram laws like this down women's bodies in 2010 seems dangerous enough. To the sallow pack of fat, good ol' boy cretins that make up most of the Oklahoma legislature: you deserve widespread derision and a lifetime of miserable, desperate masturbating to bad fetish porn. Oh wait, that's already happening.
4. The sad fate of the honeybees. It's been out of the news for a while, thus causing many to believe that maybe science has solved the honeybee colony die-off crisis, or just the worst has been averted, or that we've figured out some magical way around the problem.
Wrong. Turns out the honeybee colony collapse is actually worse than when the first alarming stories emerged in 2006. For the fourth year in a row, more than a third of the colonies failed to survive the winter — with some collapse rates much higher — and scientists have made little progress in figuring out why. All they can deduce is that it's likely a multitude of complex factors (though mostly attributed to pesticides), making a simple fix nearly impossible. It remains potentially one of the worst ecological disasters in history — far worse than the BP oil spill — in how it affects the global food supply across the board.
5. Hmm. What to choose for number five? With a seemingly endless parade of ominous options, I decided to again open up this question to thousands of Facebook readers. Here, then, a savage hotlist of thoroughly depressing tales to make you sigh, shake your head and wish you could move to another planet entirely. Mix, match, cringe and recoil, and be insanely grateful for all you now have.
Then grab a bottle of white wine, get out in the sunshine, and stare at the trees for at least five minutes. They say you'll feel better.
The "skinny jeans" rape defense; the Supreme Court striking down another animal cruelty law; General Motors lying about repaying its debt to the Treasury (it used taxpayer money); continued overfishing means seafood stocks could collapse completely within 10-15 years (Bluefin tuna is down 97 percent in the Mediterranean); Rush Limbaugh saying eco-radicals intentionally blew up the BP oil rig, and that oil is "as natural as the water is"; Utah delaying the Ryan White AIDS program; Goldman Sachs slimebags blaming the collapse on everyone but themselves; Virginia's AG Ken Cuccinelli covering up the exposed breast of the goddess Virtus, John Ashcroft-style, on the state seal.
And of course, perhaps most frightening and depressing of all: geologists say we might be running out of rocks.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/05/05/notes050510.DTL
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on May 7, 2010 22:14:26 GMT 12
From SFGate.comThe end of the wicked old MormonsBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, May 07, 2010This is the good news: many of the world's most powerful, hurtful, wretched old men will soon be dead.
Does that sound cruel? Unkind? I might be OK with that. In fact, I might very much be in the mood to not really mind at all if a whole slew of these nefarious creatures of sociospiritual corrosion were to, say, spontaneously combust, or be struck by lightning, or perhaps accidentally fall into a giant, roiling vat of Astroglide and turpentine and a million duplicitous prayers. Whoops! Sorry, Monsignor!
It was one of those calm revelations, a heartwarming insight that came to me on wings of ironic angels lo these past number of weeks, as a foul parade of rich, pale monsters of modern culture passed through the particle beams of my Villain Detector, nearly setting it ablaze.
There was Pope "Sometimes I condone child rape" Benedict, trailed by his pallid cadre of attendant bishops — apologists and deniers, liars and prevaricators, each and every one.
When Benedict dies, he will have the pleasure of standing before whatever furious God he believes in, to answer for how it was that he knew for undeniable fact that one — if not dozens — of his priests repeatedly molested, abused and/or raped young children for decades, and he did nothing to stop it. How much does God believe the pope's argument that Vatican PR trumps pedophilia? Joe Ratzinger, 82, will soon find out.
Over here, we find far too many timeworn members of the U.S. Supreme Court, a majority of whom firmly believe that giant corporations are very much complete, entitled humans, but gay people most certainly are not.
Over there slithereth multiple members of Goldman Sachs, nervously twirling their diamond-crusted pinkie rings and text-messaging their preening girlfriends, as they blame the entirety of the U.S. economic collapse on you, your dog, your foolish wife who should've known better than to want to buy a small house, blaming it on anything or anyone but their own voracious and doomed souls.
The bad news is, many of Goldman's sharks aren't all that old just yet, so they might be around for many more years to come. Of course, if there is any real justice in the world, most of those years will be spent in prison.
Look! There go the slothful, gun-loving ogres of the Oklahoma state legislature, recently ramming through two of the nastiest anti-choice laws in recent history, bashing mothers and families and the integrity of women — and their doctors — everywhere. Hey, it's Oklahoma. No one really expects much. But oh, degraded daughters of the Sooner State, the nation turns its sympathetic eyes to you.
But perhaps none of these fine and soulless charlatans appears as noticeably miserable, as lost, as openly insulting to the human spirit as the wretched leaders of the Mormon Church in Utah. There, I said it.
Because here we find a very bizarre cluster of powerful, pale, sickly old men who are now sliding back into view thanks to a new documentary, "8: The Mormon Proposition", the trailer for which is available for your deep sighing and open cringing right now.
While I have no idea as to the overall quality of the film itself, the trailer alone seems to reveal a fine-looking flick (see YouTube video clip below) that, at bare minimum, details just how ruthlessly, how hatefully the Church of Latter Day Homophobes worked to terrify and intimidate its own uninformed followers into funding — to the tune of nearly $18 million — one of the most detestable pieces of legislation in California's history, not to mention the church's own "secretive, decades-long crusade against gay rights."Caveat: I have, as mentioned, only seen the trailer. I have only stared into the sallow faces of these pitiable men, these "prophets" of fear and intolerance, for a few short moments. Then again, with faces like that, you don't need much.
If there is a true measure of a person's soul, if there is a single gauge of real divinity, of how beautifully a fellow human honors this life, has genuine spiritual fire and is full of honest love and compassion, it has to be right there, in the eyes.
The Dalai Lama's eyes sparkle and dance with laughter and unbridled love. The Pope's eyes are dark and glazed, bleak as obsidian marbles. Pat Robertson's eyes are rheumy and hollow, like tiny potholes of old wax. Goldman Sachs cretins, well, they don't use their own eyes at all; they just steal someone else's.
But one glance at these frightened and sickly old men of the Mormon Church, and you see it — or rather, you don't see it.
These are the eyes of some of the most pained, deadened souls in the world. There is no spark. There is no hint of life. There appears to be only sadness and suffering, fear and dystopia, a disturbing sense that they all wish the world would just stop being so strange and perverted so they could just enjoy their watery gin, itchy sweaters, and loveless marriages in peace.
Here is where I admit a note of naïveté. Because I simply do not understand how any devotee of any belief system, organized religion, or grand Utah cult whatsoever could possibly follow leaders with such a flagrantly joyless and agonizing sense of modern existence. How can you see those eyes, those depleted and slumped bodies, say yes, oh dear God yes, that is my prophet?
But let's leave that question floating in the ether for now. It is, after all, far too easy to pinch and kick the bizarre Mormon Church; to say it's ripe for satire and parody is to say a Catholic schoolgirl is ripe for debauchery. It's like shooting polygamist fish in a barrel of coffee.
Let us instead deliver one overarching message to all these old men of pain and confusion. It is this: The next generation, a generation of mixed breeds and gay parents and Facebook transparency, a generation that's been exposed to more variations of love and relationship, more fluid notions of gender and identity than any generation in history, this generation, simply put, does not care about you.
We have but to momentarily recall the voting demographics of Proposition 8. The matrix was simple enough: the older the voter, the higher likelihood they would harbor extant homophobia and inbred generational bias, and the more likely they would be duped into voting for Proposition 8.
Conversely, the under-30 set was effortlessly, fearlessly against the insidious proposition by such a huge majority, it was shockingly clear it's all just a matter of time until the culture shifts again, for the better.
Translation: To the old, powerful men of the various churches and archaic institutions, to those that hold us back and demean the spirit in a thousands different ways, the message is clear enough: You will be gone very soon, right along with much of the enormous black cloud of fear and joylessness you carry.
And the world, it's safe to say, will only be the better for it.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/05/07/notes050710.DTL
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on May 13, 2010 22:32:19 GMT 12
From SFGate.comSan Francisco values save the worldBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, May 12, 2010So I'm skimming like a mud puddle Jesus through another hunk of grammatically wretched hate mail, kindly informing me that both I and the city in which I live are godless, stinky insults to all humanity (yawn), that all of us here in Perverted Pelosiville are depraved sickos due in no small part to our pathetic liberal values (zzzz), our lack of openly displayed firearms and our obvious adoration of terrorists, immigrants, communism, anal sex, artisan coffee, organic produce and, of course, organic analterrorist sexcoffee.
All told, it's a rather uninspired, typically brainless hunk of Tea Party-grade spittle, true 2nd grade stuff that's nowhere near as nasty as some of the hate mail I used to get back in the 00's BAC (Before Anonymous Commenting) — the absolute finest examples of which, by the way, I've included in my book, "The Daring Spectacle". It's something to see.
But this time, because this message keeps trumpeting the same old childish cliches about San Francisco in particular and blue state values in general, it caused me to actually do something I haven't done since Glenn Beck was knee-high to a crocodile tear...
I paused. Just before I hit the delete key, I actually stopped and wondered: What would happen if I did something I simply never do, and actually tried to engage this person, just a little, to speak to him with reason and tact, try to show him some facts and actual data, recent studies and long-term reports that prove, once again and for the 100th time, that the infamous "blue state" values — particularly those about family and family structure — that they so fear and abhor are, well, actually some of the most stable and healthiest in the country?
What if I were to trot out the irrefutable stats about, say, education levels, or teen pregnancy rates, or abortion? How about college graduation rates, marriage stability, or even adoption? What about general health? Obesity? What if I were to casually mention, with sufficient factual backup, how blue states tend to trounce nearly every red state across the board in these key markers?
Would it matter? Would the spittle-flecked bipeds who write to me (or comment down below my columns on the SFGate website) and misspell "commy" and "sodimite" listen or care in the slightest? I already know the answer.
But I paused on this piece of mail because I had just finished a fine article that discussed a new book, "Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture," written by a pair of typical elitist academic types the Tea Party crowd is so scared of (we hippies call these types "professors") detailing, in essence, how the "family values" that the red states so desperately cling to like drowning monkeys are exactly the ones that are undermining and sabotaging family stability in the first place. In other words, "family values" are the bane of family values. Did you already know? Of course you did.
Examples? Legion. You've probably already read about teen pregnancy rates in relation to religious belief (ref: this terrific piece from the New Yorker). It's a simple enough equation: the more religiously conservative a given state is, the more it's guaranteed to be lacking in quality sex education, easy access to — and information about — contraception and women's health, and the more it tends to wallow in fear of sex, the body and the stickier dynamics of human relationships.
Upshot: As the strict, antiquated religious codes of these states fail — as they have for millennia — a far higher number of those states' sad, uninformed teenaged girls get knocked up, marry far too young, get divorced, never get a real education, earn low wages and generally contribute to every unpleasant and downward spiraling statistic in America, right along with the slumpy males. Yay family values!
Check it: "Six of the seven states with the lowest divorce rates in 2007, and all seven with the lowest teen birthrates in 2006, voted blue in both elections. Six of the seven states with the highest divorce rates in 2007, and five of the seven with the highest teen birthrates, voted red."
With numbers like that, it's hard not to shudder in frustration, hit with an urge to hurl this information all over Fox News and the fundamentalist lintballs from the far right.
Let's pose it this way: Do you want a stable family, low divorce rate, low abortion rate, low teen pregnancy, an emphasis on intelligence, maturity and higher education? Would you like to more fully engage in the information economy, get a good job with high wages, live healthier and more spiritually free? Don't move to Alaska, or Kansas, or Texas, or any of the states so wildly drunk on "family values," silly. You go blue all the way. I mean, isn't it obvious?
(Did I mention how San Francisco was just rated the leanest city in the nation by Men's Health magazine, an admittedly mindless ranking, but still somewhat telling, especially considering Texas is home to five of the fattest cities on Earth? It's true. San Francisco is looking damn good in those jeans. Though that's probably just because we get the best cocaine and MDMA. Shhh.)
Of course, the instant I considered sending the depressed haters of me, you, this city, all "blue state" values a link to this or any of the other fine articles detailing the utter failure and bassackwardness of conservative "family values" mindsets, I just laughed and sighed and reached for my mug of analterrorist sexcoffee, remembering quite well my own hard-fought advice, dispersed not long ago.
It was a column titled, if you will, "How to talk to complete idiots" (also featured in the book, btw), which details the tragic failure of facts, science and research in the face of those real red state values, such as hysteria, alarmism and a childlishly literal interpretation of wonky Christian mythology.
But it gets better: Because even if they accept the data as partly true, the typical red state reaction is to argue that the real reason teen pregancy, abortion, divorce and so on are far worse in the "family values" states is not because the rules and religions are flawed and outdated, but because they aren't being enforced strictly enough. And for that, they blame ... you guessed it ... the liberals.
Ah, disingenuous doublethink. It's a family value.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on May 14, 2010 21:06:20 GMT 12
From SFGate.comLaura Bush meets the sex bloggersBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, May 14, 2010“OMG you guys, I totally love Dan Savage!” Laura Bush did not exclaim at a recent signing of her new book, in which it is revealed that the former First Lady actually believes gay marriage is A-OK and that Roe v. Wade ain't so bad. At which point the Hellmouth opened and swallowed her whole. — Photo: Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press.And over here we've got what we can only hope will be the final nationwide appearance of any kind whatsoever of one dangerously prim, heavily shellacked Laura Bush, trotting herself out like some sort of equestrian trophy on Larry King Live to shill for her new book, "Shut Up and Sit Quietly, You're Just a Woman" — er, "Spoken from the Heart."
Verily, it was on the advice of a handful of brave readers that I forced myself to watch the clip in which Laura, looking increasingly extraterrestrial and translucent, responds to a couple of Larry's mildly loaded questions by twitching, blinking a few times and then humbly, quietly, rather sheepishly admitting that, yes, she is, in fact, both pro-abortion rights and pro-gay marriage (see YouTube video clip below), and apparently has been for just about ever. You read that right.Well now. Here is where I would like to say that I stood up and screamed. Here's where I sort of expect myself to write that I leaped up in my chair and hurled something heavy at the screen with a full-throated "What the f*ck did you just say?!!" and then curse her in a hundred dialects for her pathetic decade of cruel silence and offensive passivity.
I didn't do any of that. All I did was sigh and shake my head in compassionate disgust, as a tremor of deep pain shoot through my heart, a visceral cringe in honor of all the suffering, sadness and loss Laura Bush could've have helped alleviate, even just a little, had she brains enough, and balls.
But just so we're clear on some details, oh sweet, pitiable Laura: You had, back in 2000, two young, party-riffic twentysomething daughters, you were, for better or worse, the default role model for women everywhere, you were the emblem for female freedom and feminine empowerment to a hundred nations, and you... did whatnow? Lied outright? Lived in quiet denial? Slaughtered your own core beliefs? Kept your second-class Southern wife mouth shut tight and sat by quietly while the men did the "real" thinking? You sacrificed your own daughters to the sweaty altar of Karl Rove and the fundamentalist anti-choicers? I see.
Oh sweet Laura, it is very likely you are going to hell.
Look, I don't care if Dick Cheney threatened you with razor wire and a concrete pumps. I don't care if Karl Rove said he'd suffocate you with his giant clammy hog thighs if you dared to speak up. You did a violent disservice, even outright harm, to women the world over, for nearly a decade. You helped allow virulent homophobia to rage in the nation and in your own husband's tiny soul, when you were in an insanely unique, privileged position to a stand, even a modest one, and help defy a deep hatred and ignorance in this country.
I'm not suggesting you had to become the spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood. I'm not saying you had to become a raging activist, a feminist icon. I know, as a Southern wife, you were trained from fetushood to stand by your man and never, not ever, speak against him or make him look like an idiot. But they say, Laura, that behind every great man is a great woman. George Bush was a small-minded, incompetent puppet. Shall we guess what that makes you?
All right, enough of Laura. Because over here, we have another weird angle on the female empowerment/role model conceit, by way of a swell micro-trend piece from Slate detailing the possible maybe trend of young female sex bloggers possibly maybe choosing to begin pulling back, just a little, from oversharing every detail of their mediocre sex lives — every orgasm, blowjob, conquest, erotic dream, rape fantasy, or muscle spasm that passes through their transom. Could it be? Is the TMI culture slapping itself awake? Don't bet on it.
It's the tale, primarily, of one Lena Chen, who apparently overshared far too much of her young (very young) and rather childish, raunch-free Harvard sexcapades on her personal blog to the degree that Chen suffered a bit of a twee recoil, a hot little backlash from bloggers and classmates alike, all resulting, Slate says, in Chen learning some sort of harsh lesson, given how she's now to be found all buttoned up and semi-proper, speaking at conferences on virginity and abstinence to people who have never had multiple orgasms using a Hitachi, two hits of Ecstasy and a large riding crop. Chen is now all of 22. Neat.
It's supposed to be a cautionary tale, I think, though where the caution is, it's impossible to say. Don't be a spoiled 19-year-old Harvardite who writes the word "f*ck" a lot and shows some nipple on your blog? Don't whine about how you're not getting laid because you have midterm exhaustion and you're just too tired? Wait until you're at least 25 and have a had a boyfriend who lasted more than two months until you start blogging about how he won't go down on you? I can't quite tell.
Does it matter? Even the meta-snark hipsterettes over at Jezebel hath declared the hookup/shaming scene to be totally over — despite, of course, how they reinvent and perpetuate it every fifth posting. So, you know, caveat emptor, perverts.
See, I know my share of sex bloggers. I personally know one of the best in the stratosphere, Violet Blue (former contributor to this very site), who's been doing her thing for years and has cranked out a zillion and five books and has enthusiastically exposed nearly every inch of her smooth, tasty, highly erotic mindset to anyone brave enough to follow along.
I've disagreed with V's stances on many occasions, but I really don't give a damn. Because overall she's fantastic a thousand ways from Sunday morning cunnilingus, effortlessly defies every Lena Chen, and is a fearless champion of good porn, good sex ed, and consensual respectful raunch like the Catholic church can only fantasize about. World could do with a million more like her.
Upshot: There's professional, intelligent, personality-rich sex blogging, and there's, you know, being a horny 19-year-old with free campus Wi-Fi and no real clue as to who you are, what you're doing, or why. Alas, the Slate piece fails to mention Violet at all.
There's a point in all this, somewhere. Oh, right: role models. Women. Sex. Responsibility. Empowerment. Where to find? Where do you seek? Chen was supposedly a role model to overanxious Harvard freshmen girls who've never swallowed. Laura Bush was a role model for terrified Southern housewives stuck with idiot-boy husbands, sad, lost women who, in Laura's case anyway, could have made a real difference, could have been downright historic, had she the slightest bit of nerve and soulful integrity.
All told, there appear to be about a million examples out there of, well, what not to be. Don't be Laura. Don't be Chen. Don't for damn's sake be anything like the half-baked treatises of Caitlin "Loving Our Inner Housewife" Flanagan, whose recent Atlantic piece dissecting teen sex and hookup behavior reeks of patronizing distaste for young sticky things she doesn't understand. I'd suggest being more like my girl Violet, but she's pretty much one of a kind.
Which, come to think of it, might be the best advice of all.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/05/14/notes051410.DTL
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on May 20, 2010 0:28:16 GMT 12
From SFGate.comAll kneel before the devil hornsBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, May 19, 2010Do not make the symbol lightly. Do not make the symbol in haste. Do not toss up this eternal gesture at a Miley Cyrus concert lest you be instantly struck down by demonflame and cursed to walk the planet in shame forevermore. Only make the gesture if, and only if, you wish to thoroughly and totally rock. That is all. — Photo: Sandro Campardo/Associated Press.Ronnie James Dio died the other day, quietly succumbed to a relatively sudden onset of stomach cancer and up and left the planet in a blaze of stage fire, dragonsmoke and general metal awesomeness. Maybe you heard.
It was an abrupt end to a sort of stunning, nearly unprecedented 35-year career in hard rock megastardom, a shock that sent all flags of classic campy Bic-lighter rock n' roll greatness to half mast for at least a solid year, or until Ozzy Osbourne spontaneously combusts, whichever comes first.
It is quite possible you have no idea who Dio was, or you don't really care, or you think he and his various multiplatinum bands — Rainbow, Black Sabbath, Dio — were a bit of a long-haired crotch-rock musical circuslike joke. Or maybe you were all aswoon for Rick Springfield or the Go-Go's at the time when a post-Ozzy Sabbath 2.0 was cranking out some of the best hard-rock songs of all time ("Heaven & Hell", "Mob Rules", "Voodoo", "Die Young" — see YouTube video clips below) circa 1980ish.It's also possible you know just enough to know RJD was pretty much heavy metal personified, a tiny 5-foot-4-inch sorcerer with a mangy mane, demonic eyes and sly grin, all coupled to a simply huge, operatic voice, a diminutive powerhouse who prowled the stage like a feline elf and who was, it turns out, also finely intelligent and well spoken, an actual gentleman in a genre known all too well for its bombastic, monosyllabic doltbuckets. A rare thing indeed.
Metal is made up of many silly cliches, and Dio's songs rarely shied away from a good cheeseball lyric about medieval knights and crystal balls. But the amazing thing is, Dio the man never succumbed to the typical ravages of drugs, booze or hideous all-body tattoos. He never gained 75 pounds later in life or lost most of his voice through merciless shredding and ended it all playing county fairs for 19 drunk dudes in a barn before collapsing in a heap in a motel room in Jersey. There's a lesson in there somewhere. Or everywhere.
Hence, it is time for respect. It is time to raise the fist and light the lighter and, of course, make the sign. Oh, the sign. It is formidable indeed. It is the thing that will last forever. It has the power.
Of the myriad impressive notables related to Dio's passing, perhaps foremost is the fact the man was 67 years old and was still making quality hard rock records, still touring with a new (old) version of Black Sabbath, still singing his absolute heart out about dragons and rainbows, making the infamous devil horns hand gesture he swiped from his Italian grandmother and which has since became the universal, undeniable, completely badass symbol for true metal across all galaxies everywhere, and for which Dio deserves to be ensconced in the heavens forevermore.
The gesture, it shall not be denied. The gesture is all. The gesture is made to this day by any true fan of rock 'n' roll, even punk or glam or Goth. Thus spaketh the gods: If you do not know the gesture, you simply do not know how to rock. Perhaps you should try it now. Thumb in, middle and ring finger down, index and pinkie finger up, raised in defiance, awesomeness, true devotion to all that is heavy and pulsing and 4/4. See? The symbol makes almost anything better. It also makes it more metal.
Ronnie James Dio was even older than Mick Jagger. This is sort of amazing, doubly so because Mick Jagger's band hasn't written a good song since the Carter administration. Dio, in some ways, remained more true to his origins and his passion than Jagger & Co. Deny it at your peril.
It's also worth noting because, as far as I can tell, Dio is officially the first of metal's genuine elder statesmen to exit this planet, the first of its true legends to have contributed a lifetime of songcraft to the genre. Sure, you had your Jimi Hendrix and Bon Scott and John Bonham, guys who all died lifetimes ago and who didn't even make it into their 30s. No one of Dio's stature has made the move to the great throne room in the sky. Until now.
It's a little disquieting. The lions of hard rock, guys like Robert Plant, Roger Daltry, Brian Johnson, Rob Halford, these monsters feel completely timeless, iconic, eternal. They simply shall not, will not, do not die. It's almost impossible to imagine a musical world without Robert Plant. No metal fan of any stripe can imagine a day when, say, Iron Maiden shuts it all down because Bruce Dickinson turned 85 and suddenly can't remember the lyrics to "Hallowed Be Thy Name". Metal revels in the raw energy and unchecked phantasmagorical ridiculousness of youth. It is all fire and testosterone and rebellious fantasy. It doesn't go well with reality.
So it is for hard rock and a guy like Dio, an elfin titan with an undying love for lasers and sorcery, dragons and kings. The man wrote some terribly corny metal songs, but he sang every one with a ferocity and love and total honesty. He also wrote some of the finest hard rock melodies of all time, sang them with a precision and love unmatched by any hard rock singer since. It's a rare thing to give metal some heartfelt props. It is time. Raise your devil horns and salute.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on May 21, 2010 21:11:43 GMT 12
From SFGate.comWelcome, nuclear terrorist supernuns!By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, May 21, 2010Be not deceived! According to recently declassified NSA reports, the one on the far left is an infamous multilingual mindreading supergenius, the Mother Superior of an ancient secret order of wondernuns with a fetish for thermonuclear explosives, nanotechnological espionage, and expert allspice muffinry. Shudder. — Photo: Handout.I am hereby delighted to report that, not a mere bucketful of weeks after one of the most devastating unnatural disasters in modern history, the mystery has been solved as to the real cause of the BP oil catastrophe.
Here is the good news: It has nothing whatsoever to do with annoying trifles like human error, mechanical failure, oil company oversight, greed, ignorance or plain ol' corporate malfeasance; it is nothing so mundane as, you know, normal life. I mean, duh.
Have you not heard the latest conspiracy theory? Have you not been sucking your laudanum, trepanning your skull with a Makita and smacking yourself in the head with a brick until you see the harrowing vision? Have you been doing the unthinkable and actually believing most of the lies of the media and the U.S. government? What the hell is wrong with you?
The spill, oh naive one, was not caused by anything so pedestrian as a failed shutoff valve. It was, of course, caused by a small missile, shot from a secret North Korean mini sub on a political suicide mission out of Cuba, a weapon that specifically targeted the Deepwater Horizon and blew it up just prior to Earth Day, all of which was spotted and confirmed by Russia's Northern Fleet of invisible black submarines, which you have never heard of because they might or might not actually exist, so far as you know.
And why was it blown up? Oh you silly plebe. In order to force President Obama into an "impossible dilemma", naturally, whereby he would be compelled to deploy a small nuclear warhead to permanently seal the leak, thus embarrassing him on a global stage, destroying the integrity of the U.N. nuclear conference and causing Obama to cry on camera, which would, in turn, re-empower all nasty third-world nations into demanding scary nukes of their very own, at which point Iran could gleefully bomb the crap out of Starbucks, but not before Miss America, a noted Lebanese stripper/terrorist with laser-beam breasts, gives the command from her throne in the MGM Grand. Awesome!
Did you follow all that? The details, of course, are still emerging (Miss America's shocking terrorist connections have just been added to the mix, an unexpected dollop of sexy frosting on an already creamy cake. Hey, you gotta be nimble with this stuff).
But wait, you still don't know a tenth of it. There is also apparently some sort of Irish/Israeli nun who goes by the name of Sorcha Faal, the Mother Superior of a secret order of ancient supernuns who pre-date Christianity, speak perfect dolphin, totally PWN the Illuminati, and also shoot fire from their cute little hats. Sorcha Faal is all over the oil spill because, well, that's just what supernuns do. Awesomer!
(There's also a rumor that China and Venezuela might be involved, perhaps in cahoots with powerful eco-terrorists from Berkeley who biked all the way to the Gulf on their solar-powered fixed-gear Bianchis, intending to destroy the Gulf in order to, um, save it. Or something).
Can you see why it took a few weeks for all that to come out? You gotta sniff a lot of glue, read a lot of David Icke and sift through a lot of splendid Rense.com goodness in order to cobble together a truly insane-but-plausible theory, one that's just cohesive enough to induce delicious brain wobble. After all, a really good, lasting conspiracy theory must contain spectacular amounts of bizarre, arcane technical detail and remotely credible factual data so as to make it appear tenuously believable. It's not as easy at it looks.
But when you get it right, it really sends the senses atingle. It's a wonderful thing about conspiracy theories: They operate fully and respectfully within scale. The larger and more destructive the event, the more elaborate the theory as to the various forces at play in the fields of the oh good lord would you please shut up, and the more you will swoon at the endless possibilities of humanity's dazzling vileness.
Recall, if you will, all the gorgeous conspiracies surrounding 9/11, easily the most complex and gloomily entrancing in a generation, a rabbit hole so deep and wide, with so many tributaries and sub-plots, it's already effortlessly swallowed up the relatively puny Kennedy assassination as a generational touchstone of collective insanity. Indeed, every culture, every political party, every generation gets the conspiracy theory it deserves.
Do not misunderstand. Of course, evil conspiracies exist. There are myriad dark forces at play in the world, spy satellites and government plots, coverups and sinister schemes and Dick Cheney planning to destroy the galaxy, poison the water supply and sell your Facebook status updates to the Chinese mafia. Shift your lens just right and suddenly everything is a conspiracy, an eternal intergalactic übermatrix of pain and panic that never, ever exhales. Awesomest!
And why the hell not? Real life, after all, is so goddamn boring. Dishes and phone bills, beer guts and Zoloft. The news is thick like curdled cheese with tepid murders and moron politicos, pedophilic priests and GOP senators snorting meth off the cheeks of their gay lovers. It's a huge problem: The watery cocktail of everyday melodrama doesn't get us nearly drunk enough. Reality is a depressing pop gun; we crave a magic bazooka.
But this is also why we're so often loathe to acknowledge the sad truth: The vast majority of terrorists, evil plots and so-called master plans are usually just crude and stupid things, no more elaborate or masterful than two toddlers wailing in a sandbox. Evil is banal, terrorists tend to be anti-social loner douchebags, bank execs and CEOs that are often just rich old imbeciles who need to buy a private jet for their mistress' coke dealer's accountant.
Remember the Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad? A guy who claimed to have trained for months, if not years, in Pakistani terrorist camps? He couldn't even blow up a van, much less be a key to a nefarious Taliban plot to undermine American democracy by giving away spoilers to the ‘Lost’ finale. Pop pop sigh, goes dreary reality.
So which is it? A mysterious, clandestine Sorcha Faal worldview straight from Dan Brown's last wet dream, packed with ancient gibberish and murky quasi-intellectual subterfuge that therefore has endless power to keep us dumbly entranced, so long as we don't think too much? Or a bunch of loner geek jackass anarchists who play too much Grand Theft Auto and can't get laid? Whiny sandbox thugs, or evil nuclear supernuns? The choice, as always, is yours.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/05/21/notes052110.DTL
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on May 26, 2010 23:32:56 GMT 12
From SFGate.comSPF 100 will melt your face offBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, May 26, 2010There is no such thing as 1,000-thread-count Egyptian cotton bed sheets.
Did you already know? Were you already aware of this trifling yet entirely obnoxious little lie that is regularly foisted, like Sarah Palin's insufferable wink, on an unwary populace by a completely evil bedsheet manufacturing industry, drunk on power, black tar heroin and the tears of Chinese sweatshop slave laborers? I bet you did.
Indeed, it's an ongoing, nefarious ruse that effortlessly dupes housewives and sorority girls by the millions as they browse Bed, Bath & Beyond and Target and run their middle finger over the slippery pink sateen and coo about how if 500-thread-count is yummyslippery like dime store baby oil, then 1,000 must be twice as Barbie-liscious. Right?
Wrong. Of course, anything beyond 300 or 400 threads is complete BS, total fakery, often less soft or comfortable, wherein they cheat the verbiage by twisting multiple threads or adding extra layers or coating the threads with oil wrung from dead baby seals (just a guess) and forcing them into entirely useless weavings until all meaning is lost and no one cares anymore and buying sheets is basically an insufferable crapshoot, and the industry goes ha ha snicker.
It's just one of those things, one of those everyday, widespread consumer-oriented lies that have anchored themselves in the culture like some sort of contemptuous tumor, one of a million myriad obstacles you gotta navigate around, through, up and over just to make it through the day and try and sleep at night without slipping off the goddamn bed in a fit of oh-my-God-why-did-I-buy-these-stupid-things.
(Oh, and beds? Mattresses? Those posh, $5,000 ones with the four-inch pillowtops and gold-dipped European springs that have been individually licked by eunuch gnomes? Also a total lie. After about a grand for a great, basic mattress, your body has no clue what it's riding on, and that includes Charlie Sheen and Stoya. Just FYI).
On it goes. Recently was I at Walgreens perusing the candy-colored collection of hardcore chemicals known as consumer sunblocks, all those supposedly safe, healthy, body-protecting lotions, liquids and sprays, nearly every one claiming something quite happily impossible (100 percent waterproof! Total sun block! Does not cause instant blindness in monkeys, we think!), all of them so full of marketing gloss that you're meant to believe one shot of Bullfrog™ Super Waterproof MegaSport SunPreventer Extreme II lets you go traipsing completely naked through sub-Saharan Africa for a month, never suffering so much as a freckle.
It's a crock. According to the non-profit Environmental Working Group, upwards of 92 percent of sunblocks on the shelf are so full of misdirection and deception that you're better off skinny-dipping in the Gulf of Mexico and draping yourself across the sun. OK, maybe not that bad. But close.
Did you read? The EWG's (not very scientific, but still pretty damning) report that reveals how only a handful of sunblocks actually work reasonably well in protecting you from the seriously damaging stuff, like broad spectrum UV rays, melanoma and most of Arizona and Texas? Go ahead, douse yourself in Banana Boat SPF 75 Ultra Sport. The number means almost nothing. Isn't that reassuring? Someone should tell the FDA about this. Oh wait.
What else you got? Food expiration dates? A lie. Ethanol? Lie. Clean coal? Lie. Coke mini? Total bullsh*t lie. Bottled water? Massive, unconscionable lie, still and forever. The Bible? Cute cluster bomb of childish oral-tradition mythology told by angry, sexless white men and then translated from multiple dead languages and re-written and re-edited countless times throughout history for the sake of power and political gain and to control the ignorant masses via guilt, shame and fear. Oh, and also a lie. But, you know, a well-intentioned one. Sort of.
So many lies, so many sighs. Quickly doth the question emerge: What the hell do you do about it all? How do you parse and move and breathe? Just how abused and infuriated do you want to feel, on a daily basis? Can you choose?
As if the BP oil spill, the Tea Party and the Texas State Board of Education aren't depressing enough, as if there aren't far too many large-scale events and sour prognostications whipsawing around the culture, nasty devolutions you have no real control over but which nevertheless seem like a loaded gun aimed squarely at the quivering, asthmatic hunk of bunny lint that once was your sense of hope.
Now you gotta deal with the daily pronouncements about how some basic product or service you thought you didn't really have to think or worry about, is actually yet another thing you have to think or worry about. Sure enough, it turns out they're trying to rob you blind and give you cancer and set your dog on fire. Ain't it always the way?
How long can you hold out? How strong is your laughter and how light your step? How much of the ongoing slasher flick nightmare of existence do you actually want to buy into as an actual slasher flick nightmare, and how much can you see as a sweet coming-of-age tearjerker about the little species that could?
Because here's the thing: once you get caught in the madhouse maze, everything begins to look evil and despicable, every product and service, person and politician, movie star and homeless ranter appears to be a minion of the devil out to slash your tires and steal your popcorn.
The good news is, it's not really true. The good news is, most of what we worry and stress about never actually comes to pass. The vast majority of fears are unfounded, the dire threats to our lifeblood turn out to be whimpering clowns who only wanted a moment of attention because they're lonely and sad. Just like everyone else.
The good news is, the good news is still outweighing the bad. The good news is, if everything were as dire and hellbound as the Christian fundamentalist right, the eco-maniac left and the libertarian nutball fringe say it is, we would've blipped out a thousand years ago in a puddle of whining, bloodshed and severely sunburned shoulders. Isn't that reassuring? I have no idea. Who wants lip balm?______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jun 2, 2010 20:54:31 GMT 12
From SFGate.comThank God you don't live in OklahomaBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, May 28, 2010There's a touching scene in "The Dildo Diaries", a sweet 'n' slippery little documentary released way back in 2002, in the very beginnings of the Dark Days of Bush, in which we as viewers are privy to a truly hellish hallucination, a series of images that, should you ever choose to bear witness, will haunt you for the rest of your days.
Even now, I believe it is one of the most frightening scenes ever put to film. Far more repellant, in its way, than images of thousands of dead birds in the Gulf, than KFC meat-like garbage food, than the slasher porn of "Saw IV".
We are shown, via actual footage, a typical workday inside the Texas state legislature.
Oh my sweet Jesus with stockroom.com gift card, you have never seen such discomfort, such moral claustrophobia, such unchecked legislative dorkage. The setting is exactly as you might expect: An ungainly, horribly dressed room somewhere in Austin, packed like chunky beef tallow with good ol' boy Texas manhood, a veritable cattle call of mostly older, largely clammy males and a scattershot assortment of nonplussed females, all ambling about with very few qualities resembling intellectual acumen, subtlety, grace.
Does that sound harsh? Unsympathetic? I don't mind.
The scene in question focuses on a very weird, amusing little debate on the House floor. The combatants are trying to decide, awkwardly, laughably, horrifyingly, the issue of whether heterosexual sodomy — good ol' anal sex — should be banned outright, right along with then-illegal homosexual sodomy, which in turn was a fine adjunct to the state's classic chestnut-of-a-law declaring that it was completely illegal to be gay in Texas.
The scene has become rather justifiably famous for its comedy — and for the play-by-play commentary supplied by the late, great Molly Ivins (see YouTube clip below) — as we get to watch these Texas lawmakin' menclods chortle and guffaw, blush and howl, shuffle their feet and punch themselves in the face in confusion as words about anal sex and "even if it slips" fly about the room like exotic birds they all claim to fear but which secretly fantasize about capturing, taking home and cuddling with for as long as possible.That scene gave me nightmares. Still does.
Fast forward nearly a decade. I am right now imagining no less a lurid, brutal scenario taking place over in the Oklahoma state legislature, equally surreal and lacking in grace, but unfortunately not the slightest bit absurd or funny, insofar as it is far more threatening to — and threatened by — sex and female power.
To this particular scene, to this roomful of angry, sad, Bible-thumping women and men, I am adding in a large farm animal, various pitchforks, some violent self-flagellation, a burning witch or two, assorted spitting, and a great deal of hatred and pain.
And why shouldn't I? Why not allow such cliché and violent stereotyping? For this drama is about nothing as benign as watching Texas dolts blunder on about where man should or should not be allowed to insert a penis. This is something far uglier.
This is about how the Oklahoma state legislature, as previously mentioned but not nearly sufficiently disgraced in this very column, has forced through three of the most appalling anti-choice, anti-woman, anti-motherhood laws in modern history.
One would require women seeking an abortion to fill out an exhaustive, 20-page questionnaire about all aspects of her personal life, which would be then given to a government agency for "analysis" and posted online. Another would force them to get an ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the fetus before getting the procedure. Another would encourage doctors to lie to expecting mothers. Still another would tie women to a pickup truck and drag them screaming through the streets for ever daring to have a vagina in the first place. I might be exaggerating that last one. But not by much.
It is not for this space to delineate all the ways these laws are an obvious abomination. (There were actually eight abortion-related laws slithering through OK's legislature. The state's Democratic governor, Brad Henry, has only vetoed three of them. Each time, the Oklahoma legislature overrode his vetoes).
Here is where we all offer up a collective cringe and recoil. Here is where we suggest, only barely jokingly, that if you live in Oklahoma, if you have a vagina and like to use it, if you are at any point hoping to expand your horizons and enjoy your body and celebrate feminine godhood in any way whatsoever, you should be packing your bags as soon as possible. Get the hell out. Now. Simple, really.
The question thusly hovers: Should you even care about these laws? Do they matter? Perhaps not. Perhaps it really makes no difference. For one thing, in every civilized, educated city and state in the land, a woman's right to choose is ironclad and permanent, obvious and guaranteed.
It's true. Despite all the hue and cry, the pule and desperation of the fundamentalist right, the hard truth remains: If Bush and his army of misogynistic darkness couldn't destroy Roe when the ultraconservative right was at its most dominant, it will never happen. What's more, Oklahoma's new laws are already moot: it's considered a foregone conclusion that they'll be deemed hotly unconstitutional by the courts, and summarily tossed (it's happened before).
So why bother? What to make of it? Perhaps just this: I think Oklahoma is notable mostly in relief, in contrast, as a reminder of how far the rest of the nation — and much of the developed world — has come, and just how backwards and archaic are a few lingering hunks of these inelegant Disunited States.
As gay marriage stumbles toward widespread acceptance, as the U.S. military will soon allow gays to openly serve, as women continue to achieve position and respect once only dreamed of, as we just recently came within inches of America's first female president, so we must acknowledge the weakest links, the dank underbelly, the Jungian dark side with which we all must contend. We must never forget.
There is no light without dark. There is no understanding the beauty and inherent divinity of the human animal without understanding its more shameful, malnourished cretins. And there is no appreciating progress without appreciating the stagnation and spiritual ignorance from whence it escaped.
So I suggest we offer up a moment of gratitude to Oklahoma (and Arizona, and Kansas, and Nebraska, et al) for reminding us of exactly that fact: that the grand dance, the eternal struggle of enlightenment over ignorance never really ends. The Great Work is never finished. Spiritually incompetent or no, their cries echo even now, and will continue to do so into the future.
But with any luck, as generations fall and new understanding emerges, the wails of ignorance and misogyny will slowly get fainter, until one day they simply fade away completely.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jun 2, 2010 21:00:08 GMT 12
From SFGate.comYour problems are lame and patheticBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, June 02, 2010Fact: Young people of binge-drinking college age are completely self-centered, insufferable dorkmonkeys with the souls of immature doorknobs, and they have entirely vacuous Facebook pages to match. There, I said it.
No wait: Actually, science said it, more or less, via a strange and rather impossible new study, informing anyone who might care to listen that young people, well, they just don't really give a damn about you, the world or its pathetic little problems — at least, not as much as they used to. Hey, it's a study. So you know it must be true.
Behold, one my favorite cultural gyrations. I simply love it when staid science furrows its brow, digs deep into the shallow gene pool that is the young, massively entitled, hormonally engorged, eternally baffled college-aged American animal, and attempts to examine his meager brain, draw out something resembling actual substance, evaluate it, quantify it, and then claim it as some sort of valuable truism.
So it is we learn that young people today, particularly this sample of 14,000 college kids, admit to having roughly 40 percent less empathy than their peers of just 20 or 30 years ago — i.e. youth of the late '70s and '80s, a gaggle of humans not exactly famous for their intelligence, substance and depth. But never mind that now.
According to the study, youth back then were significantly more concerned about their communities and the problems of others because — can't you guess? — well, for one thing, they didn't have Facebook pages and Twitter feeds and iEverything, because the world was not 100 percent user-customizable to their every whim, click and pule, because they were not, in short, the ultranarcissistic Me Generation. They just had, uh, MTV. And drugs. And giant hair. And cynicism. And microwave ovens. And too much freedom. Remember? Neither do they.
So, is it true? Do modern college noobs care less about others' problems than their predecessors? Are they more self-centered, less willing to see others' views, less compassionate overall, more willing to post puerile, obnoxious anonymous comments in the comment section below and/or sneer at their friends' Facebook posts and not give a damn about anything — the BP spill, your painful breakup, cancer — unless it somehow affects them directly or steals their favorite iPhone app?
I say: Oh, hell yes. And also, absolutely not. Of course they are. And no, not really. You're damn right. And what the hell are you talking about?
Here's the thing: Oft have I used this space to defend, to a point, the damnable kids these days, trying to point out how overall, despite all the porn and abusive priests, violent video games and beer-bonging frat boys, most studies actually indicate that young people haven't really changed all that much throughout history. If there's one constant in the universe, it is the excruciating narcissism of the young.
The current generation is, in other words, just as beautiful, strange, lost, smart, obnoxious, edible, badly dressed, and loaded with potential as ever. Sure, the modes of communication may shift and dazzle and totally confound their elders, laughable psychiatrists from Fox News may write the most idiotic, alarmist and out-of-touch generational analysis that I've ever read, but the fact remains that the basic human fears — love, sex, marriage, stability, will I die unloved and alone, why won't Sarah Palin spontaneously combust — stay essentially the same.
Don't believe it? Think about it. Every generation, it's the same old story. The outgoing curmudgeons, those just hitting their 40s, resentful of the passage of time, the speed of technology and the sag of their dreams, glance over their shoulders in anxiety and surprise, saying oh my God look at those damn kids these days, what with their telephones and their crazy jeans, their weird drugs and their bizarre mating rituals.
What the hell is wrong with them? Why can't I understand their music of their silly slang? What's that crap they're eating? Why can't they speak English? Why won't they sleep with me anymore? And etcetera.
On it goes. Your great-grandparents thought your grandparents' generation was packed with perverts and gin-runners, sickos and dirty girls showing far too much ankle. Your grandparents thought your parents were selfish and spoiled, never had to suffer the Great Depression, locusts, WWII, women demanding the right to vote. Now get the hell off my lawn.
Then came highways. Air conditioning. Sex toys. Women's Studies. Wal-Mart. "American Idol." Liquid cheese. Infused vodka. Starbucks. iTunes. Streaming porn. A black president. Do you get it? The world's going to hell, every time, over and over again, year after year, generation after generation. Someday it might actually be true.
Let there be zero doubt: The Net, Facebook, cell phones, new media, and so on have changed us forever. Alienation and prescription meds, declining social skills and shallow hookup culture, it's all true. But is there really a higher proportion of assholes and self-centered losers than ever before? Who knows?
One thing we do know: There is also a far higher flowthough of creativity and open ideas, access to global information like never before, a million microcommunities making people feel less alone and isolated. For better or worse — depending on whom you ask — there's a fluid exchange of identity and personality, a sense of raw experimentation on an unprecedented scale. It's like no other time in history. It never is.
Put it this way: For every unsightly Facebook posting detailing some ditzball's drunken party exploits or some douchbag's sleazy hookup, for every violent YouTube video showing a bloody street fight or "Jersey Shore" cast members' spray-on tans, for every juvenile Gawker posting or spitwad of anonymous comment, there's someone else who's posting photos of her trip to the Gulf to help the cleanup, someone launching a political action blog, a store on Etsy, a pet rescue foundation, a recipe for rum-marinated grass-fed steak that will melt your very soul.
There's an environmental rally, a pillow-fight flash mob, a stunning new piece of music, an invention, the thing that might change everything. There are countless YouTube videos of someone doing something incredible, artistic, beautiful and strange. There is, in short, a flood of new and different, unique and obnoxious, brilliant and idiotic, sacred and profane. Same as it ever was? Count on it.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jun 5, 2010 3:08:39 GMT 12
From SFGate.comBehold our dark, magnificent horrorBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, June 04, 2010How do you take it all in? How do you see, feel, understand the impact of what's happening to an enormous portion of our planet, the bleak and oozing death of it all? How do you shrug it off? — Photo: Charlie Riedel/Associated Press.There is, you have to admit, a sort of savage grace, a tragic and terrible beauty, to the BP oil spill.
Like any good apocalyptic vision of self-wrought hell, the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history has its inherent poetry. You see that creeping ooze of black, that ungodly wall of unstoppable darkness as it slowly, inexorably invades the relatively healthy, pristine waters adjacent, and you can't help but appreciate the brutal majesty, the fantastic, reeking horror of this new manifestation of black death we have brought upon ourselves, as it spreads like a fast cancer into the liquid womb of Mother Nature herself.
Really, it's not just the incredible photographs of the spill that are, in turns, heartbreaking, stunning, otherworldly and downright Satanic in their abject revulsion. It's not just the statistics that tell us how many millions of gallons might ultimately be spilled, or the stunned scientists who can only hypothesize how this unprecedented catastrophe might affect the fragile food chain and distress the ocean's ecosystems at the very root level.
It's not even the endless, heartrending tales of livelihoods lost, industries destroyed, coastlines ravaged or wildlife killed. The fact is, any one of these aspects alone is enough to poison your soul for as long as you wish to wallow in that murky state of fatalism and doom. It is nothing but bleak.Like Satan's own finger painting. — Photo: Dave Martin/Associated Press.To hell with video games, “2012”, apocalypse porn. The real thing has far more brutal beauty than any CGI whiz could ever conjure. — Photo: Gerald Herbert/Associated Press.Even the Associated Press can't help but take endless numbers of wonderfully stark, nightmarish photos like this (in this case, a cleanup worker leaving a gulf beach as a storm approaches), full of ominous, doomed beauty. — Photo: Jae C. Hong/Associated Press.I think the most disturbingly satisfying thrill of this entire event — and it is, in a way, a perverse thrill — comes from understanding, at a very core level, our shared responsibility, our co-creation of the foul demon currently unleashed.
What a thing we have created. What an extraordinary horror our rapacious need for cheap, endless energy hath unleashed; it's a monster of a scale and proportion we can barely even fathom.
Because if you're honest, no matter where you stand, no matter your politics, religion, income or mode of transport, you see this beast of creeping death and you understand: That is us. The spill may be many things, but more than anything else it is a giant, horrifying mirror.
Do you wish to try and deflect it? Lay responsibility elsewhere? Really? We can't quite blame an "act of God," as we would for some sort of hurricane or tsunami inflicted upon meager humankind by an angry deity, punishing us all for being too war-like, violent or perhaps naïve enough to want to enjoy the sunshine for five goddamn minutes before He decided He'd better kill some people lest we forget who's in charge.A bird flies above the oil spill. Pray it doesn't land for another 100 miles. — Photo: Charlie Riedel/Associated Press.Are we not awed by the grandeur of the horror? Mesmerized by the sheer scale of our own vile creation? We can barely even photograph it, much less comprehend the epic, irrevocable devastation. — Photo: Charlie Riedel/Associated Press.Oh the simple contrast. Oh the devastating poetic statement. — Photo: Charlie Riedel/Associated Press.We cannot blame evil terrorists, some cluster of swarthy foreigners who hate our shopping malls and secretly envy our Porsche Cayenne's. Nor can we blame the spill on some sort of nefarious conspiracy, a secret act wrought by devious agents in black helicopters designed to destabilize the U.N. and induce universal mind control — unless, of course, you're getting a little desperate and don't get outside much, in which case, you absolutely can.
Finally (and a bit shockingly), I'm not hearing Pat Robertson or any of his cretinous cult of apocalypticans blame the gays, or voodoo, or anal sex, or reality TV for what's happening in the Gulf. Oil is, after all, completely non-denominational. It mocks all religions equally — except, of course, the only one that really matters: capitalism.
This is how you know this is one of the more universally damning disasters of our time: No one really seems to know how to process it, much less react. The GOP is backtracking like terrified hyenas from Sarah "Queen of Duh" Palin's "drill baby, drill" mantra/ass tattoo, as suddenly the incessant Republican wail for more oil exploration, more drilling, more tax cuts for oil conglomerates don't just reek of the usual inbred cronyism; they reek of death and destruction the likes of which the country has never seen.
On the other hand, hardcore lefties are going mad with desire that the disaster will lead to the immediate imprisonment of every BP employee worldwide, as if BP is somehow any different than any other oil titan raping the planet right now (hi, Alberta's oilsands). Hardcore lefties would also appreciate it if Obama would use the disaster as a surefire excuse to instantly change the entire course of energy history by immediately shutting down all 48,000 oil wells (see YouTube video clip below) in the Gulf and hand every American a bicycle and a solar panel. See? All better.Sure. As if oil wasn't woven like oxygen into every single aspect of American life, as if fully 30 percent of domestic transportation fuel didn't come from the gulf, as if shutting down a fraction of those wells wouldn't re-devastate the economy, as if petroleum and coal weren't powering the very energy plants that deliver the electricity that charges the iPhones that allows everyone to Tweet their angry complaints through all the various energy-sucking server farms the size of a small country.
Truly, BP is behaving no better or worse than any other corporate spawn of Satan would in a similar situation. What's more, if you don't think every oil company on earth is right now kneeling before Beelzebub in gratitude that it wasn't one of their own wells that exploded, you haven't been paying attention.
That said, after all is said and done, it's gloomily nice to think our darkest disaster in a generation could somehow ultimately improve our attitudes, change our behavior, lighten our violent treatment of the planet. As someone recently noted, the BP spill isn't Obama's Katrina, it's actually Big Oil's Chernobyl. Meaning: a disaster so appalling and devastating it might very well alter the industry and change the course of our energy policy forever.
Is it possible? Or, more accurately, are we even capable of such a shift? Is there any silver lining to be found in that black and greasy gloom? This is, perhaps, the most imperative question of all: If we can produce a demon of such extraordinary scale and devastation, can we not also somehow create its exact opposite? Let us pray.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jun 9, 2010 21:36:45 GMT 12
From SFGate.comYour tar balls are in my junk shotBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, June 09, 2010Here's something I bet you never thought you'd hear coming out of your own luscious mouth in this or any other of your million slippery existential lifetimes, more or less:
"Oh my sweet capitalist god, I wish the top kill had worked after the useless top hat and that botched junk shot, because now the tar balls are rolling in, and the tar patties are collecting into glumpy gloops all over the beaches, and you can see the sheen stretching for 100 miles in all directions, all because the damn blowout preventer jammed and, of course, now they've dumped a million gallons of toxic dispersant on the gushing plume since the relief wells aren't nearly complete. We need more skimmers!"
Quite a mouthload, is it not? All sorts of joyful burden to roll these new and oily words around on your tongue, like candy-coated gunpowder? Like little cubes of raw demon blood? Verily.
It's yet another example of a fascinating little phenomenon: For every disaster and global heartbreak, for every world-altering mindf*ck of a toxic event, so evolves new verbiage, new frameworks, new structures of meaning, mouthmoves and tongue lashings, lip gyrations and glottal stops to contain it all.
In other words, other words. Every war, every devastation, every invention and advancement lets us further mutate, mingle and shapeshift our mindmelds, bedazzle the dictionary and upflip the lexicaldingle as we reconfigulate the snugglemodes of the metaverbalizer. You follow me? Of course you do.
So it goes. Alongside the flagrant and heartbreaking evil that is the BP spill, a whole swarm of not just strange and wonderful, depressing and cool new words, but also new implications and insinuations, layers and ideas promptly installing themselves into the American heartsong — at least for awhile, at least until the next big thing comes along to knock those words to the back nine of our collective unconscious, recycled back into the fertile madhouse topsoil that we call modern communication.
So then, what phrases and ticks from this particular epic meltdown do you think will stick to the roof of the cultural maw? What BP-themed verbiage will permanently penetrate the vocabulary, the American identity forevermore? Top kill? Tar balls? Deepwater Horizon? How has this event reshaped the American lexicon, and, by extension, our wonky understanding of just who the hell we think we are?
Maybe it's "BP" itself. Really, is it not quaint to recall how, not a mere few weeks ago, those two benign initials used to represent so many harmless and sweet ideas?
Aside from British Petrol, there was "beer pong" and "buddy profile," "blood pressure" and "bill pay" and even "bowl pack," as in a nice fat, bowl of marijuana to be smoked so as to enable the imbiber to recline and chillax so as to not to buzzkill the vibe and concern oneself with the utter and ongoing devastation of the planet. Ah, simpler times.
No longer. Oh BP, have you seen what hath become of your two tiny, nefarious initials? Here, let some of my brilliant Facebook fans/readers offer you some humble suggestions for a new interpretation. Maybe something like:
Bastard Polluters. Brutally Pollutive. Beyond Pollution. Bitch, Pay! Big Pricks. Bringing Poison. Bilderberg Perps. Brown Pelicans. Black Poison. Black Plague. Beyond Pathetic. Blundering Pissants. Bio-Philistines. Buncha Pinheads. Bloated Parasites. Blatant Profiteering. Bush Policy. Bush/Palin. Bitumen Prostitutes. Bitter Pill. Barbarian Pigs. Bariatric Pillagers. Blatant Plunderers. Biohazard Plumes. Better Payup. Beyond Prosecution. Bitch, Please. And (my personal favorite) Beauty's Pedophiles.
Of course, as any good cunning linguist will tell you, all such shapeshifting phraseologies are merely markers, symbols, stand-ins for things meaty and chthonic in our psyches, verbal representations for how many pins can dance on the head of an angel.
All language is just a slippery system of symbols and glyphs meant to point somewhat specifically toward some oily idea of what we think it might mean to meander down this wayward path of whothehellknowsuntilyoudie.
Let's be clearer, but still more ambiguous: As shifts the language, so shifts perceptions, minds, hearts, reality. Is that obvious? Maybe. Have you considered it in relation to our most vile admonitions? As we all observe the black wall of petrodeath as it poisons the very waters that sustain the vast majority of life on the planet, something happens, deep down, to our collective understanding, something oily and dark and not at all related to the happy ending to the story we're all trying to tell each other.
Like the top kill, like the junk shot, like the blowout preventer, the words we create ultimately fail, fall short of stopping the gushing plume of tragic meanings, the feeling that something is enormously wrong with how we're going about eating and screwing, singing and dying on this pale blue dot.
Put it this way: Our words, our media, our storytelling try to capture it all — the spreading sense of dread, the glooming doom, the hope for a quick and healthy fix despite the sinking feeling that one ain't coming anytime soon — to keep it in check and keep it from poisoning the pristine waters of life and love surrounding it. The oil is poisoning the ocean. The meanings are poisoning the soul.
So we try to speak about it. We try to joke about it. We try to add catchphrases and puns, action verbs and punch lines. Then you see the photos, grasp the scale of the horror, feel the blackness invade your heart, and it hits you: There simply are no words.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jun 12, 2010 23:26:10 GMT 12
From SFGate.comSex death apocalypse iPhone 4By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Friday, June 11, 2010There I was, calmly ogling Steve Jobs' shinyperfect new baby like a junkie rabbit at a carrot factory in SaladTown, happily swooning over its graceful industrial design and everstunned at the tiny slab's explicit lickability and amazing capabilities.
How easy to get caught up in the sheer madhouse magic of it all, the gyroscopes and voice activators, antennae and compasses, multiple cameras and 5,000 sensors designed to recognize when you might be hanging upside down from a banyan tree at midnight, suddenly needing to shoot high-definition video of a wild giraffe stampede whilst checking World Cup scores while live video-chatting with your wife in France while pricing out a flight to Singapore while doing, um, 2,000 other rather ridiculous things you could never have imagined in a million years back on the day you were born.
And I'm thinking, sweet insanity of life, what wonderful/nefarious creatures are we? How can we keep doing this in the face of all that? How is it that we can keep creating such beauty and cool wonder in the midst of meltdown and pain? What sort of desperate dance is this? Are we spinning faster and faster toward doom? Ecstasy? Both? Are they really the same thing? Aha.
I like cars. Particularly small European cars, particularly German ones, particularly those that are tight and refined and engineered like God's own Panerai, and in this personal fetish/incarnation I hungrily observe every new development in their technology, their engines, their design and capabilities and cockpits, especially all the astonishing concept cars that roll forth, how they keep getting better and weirder and wilder and usually somehow more gorgeous and fascinating, mostly.
Yet at the selfsame moment, as the best of the world's automotive tech evolves to new heights of power and sex, poetry and movement, the BP spill and global warming, Alberta's oilsands and various soul-crushing eco-disasters of the world scream louder and louder: Here is your price. Here is your deeper meaning. Are you sure you still like cars?
It's as though the further we push the edges of industrial beauty and refinement, invention and creation, the deeper we dive straight into hell, like a master chef creating the most delicious dish ever invented, using the last wild tuna on earth. Can this really be true? Is this our doomed equation?
I also like architecture. Modern, sleek, warm and open. I scan design blogs and sigh dreamily at countless mind-blowing heart-expanding creations all over the world, soaring spaces of light and wood, glass and steel; I'm ever incredulous at the artistry and technology of home building, the fit and finish, form and function, the extraordinary human ability to carve out space of every size and dimension, along with our remarkable power to bend the most reluctant materials of the world to our imaginative will.
And I think, how can this be? How can we steal such exquisiteness from empty space? Have these people not seen the slums in Mumbai? The homeless and their filthy shopping carts? How can we build such beguiling poetry and simplicity when a billion people have no plumbing? In short: How can the same weird little human creature contain such extremes? And are these extremes not getting ... extremer?
I get a little lost in the raging dichotomies, you might say. On the one hand, aswim like drunken angels in this, the wealthiest nation in the world, it becomes weirdly tempting to believe that much of what we are creating — not merely iPhones and Audis, but by extension modes of living, connecting, moving through — is getting better, easier, more highly designed, efficient and enjoyable.
Astonishing evolution is happening at astonishing speed, solar panels in your hand and a million songs in the space of a postage stamp, instant access to satellites delivering you information on the distance to the next coffee shop, your heart rate, your favorite entertainments, your friends and sincerest loves and a live videostream of your child's smiling face a thousand miles away.
There are moments when it becomes dangerously tempting to think: We're close, right? Surely with all this power and ease, we must have the major problems of the world almost licked? Energy, food production, pollution, disease? Look at all those insane inventions, all the brainiacs at work at MIT, the best and brightest tackling the toughest problems of the galaxy.
Any minute now, solar power and French fry grease, nanotechnology and organic microlending neurobiological hemp-powered oil-eating magic bacteria will take over and make it all better. Right?
And you slap yourself awake. You stab yourself in the soul with an ice pick of Now. And you remember.
We are nowhere near close. It takes no effort at all to flip the lens, to walk the street in fear, to observe, say, all the blood pouring through the streets of Mexico, the violent corruption in Africa, the drug-related shootings just down the street, the raging poverty and sickness, the wall of black death we have just unleashed into the ocean.
Which side is piling up faster, the beauties or the horrors? The refinements and miraculous advancements, or the massacres and planetary maulings? We've always existed in a constant flux of dualities and dichotomies, contrasts, pushpulls. This is nothing new. You could argue that it's within that frictive space that life happens. We contain multitudes, right? Either that, or it creates a chasm so vast and wide, we all eventually fall in and drown.
I try to piece it together. I try to remember what the wise ones and the ancients, the soul-seekers and Tantrikas tell us. The Source is always the same. The dark and the light coexist. The beauty and doom, the progress and the devastation, they only seem a million ideological light years apart; they are, in fact, co-creations, siblings, two faces of the same god.
Drill it down: The new iPhone, sultry and tactile tech marvel that it is, is born of the same forces as the BP spill. The slums and refined spaces, the sophisticated cars and breathtaking homes, the rage and the decay, all of the same divine floodstream. How can this be? It's both mandatory to remember, and nearly impossible to comprehend.
So what the hell do you do? You choose as best you can within that whipsaw spectrum, tread as lightly as you know how, celebrate the wild ride, perhaps try not to undermine every slice of newborn beauty by shuddering in paralyzing horror at the dark demons swimming just underneath. Simple, really. Now who wants an iPhone?______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/06/11/notes061110.DTL
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jun 18, 2010 21:51:25 GMT 12
From SFGate.comMarriage, kids, adulthood. But why?By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, June 16, 2010Look, you can't have it both ways, uppity American culture.
Which is it? Either we're forcing kids these days to grow up far too quickly, exposing them to a raft of brutal and complex adult ideas and pressures they are ill equipped to handle, or, well, something possibly far, far worse: They never really grow the hell up at all.
Here's the thing: Endless are the studies and countless are the shrill advocacy groups, politicians and bewildered grandparents lamenting just how harshly kids are raised these days, how we're sexualizing them at younger and younger ages, front-loading them with far too much stress and hardship, and drowning them in the ugly realities of the world before they even hit puberty.
And it's all underscored by a terrifying social networking landscape where every aspect of young life is exposed, scrutinized, mocked and shamed until the poor kid is nothing but a quivering pile of sexual anxieties, drunken party photos on Facebook and text messaging gibberish.
Possible upshot: We're robbing our children of any vestiges of true innocence, never giving them a shot at stability or happiness before they're stamped with a Disney branding iron and force fed to the demons of K Street, violent videogames, porn, prescription meds and oral sex on the school bus field trip. Perilous!
Either that, or we're coddling them to death, letting them delay "real life" for years and sometimes forever by allowing to cruise from spoiled, overprotected child to mealy pseudo-adulthood with the help of overpampering Boomer parents who give them too much money and attention and not enough boundaries or backbone-building responsibility.
And why? Because gosh golly, life is hard and rent is expensive, and who needs that when your parents let you move back home after college and live there well into your 30s, so you never have to fend for yourself, can't cook and don't know how to drive a car because you spent so much damn time on Facebook and MySpace that you never grew a real personality?
Possible upshot #2: A whole generation stuck in eternal, insufferable adolescence, emotionally stunted and immature, never fully desiring (or requiring) to settle down, "get serious," get a life. Marriage? Kids? A career? Maybe someday. Maybe when I'm, you know, 40.
So, which is it? Are we eternally adolescent or prematurely old? Reluctant to grow the hell up, or taking on way too much, far too quickly? Can it be both? I think it might be both.
It's a question that comes to mind as I read the analysis over at the New York Times of yet another wayward American trend, the much-discussed phenom/social shift of putting off until later — often much, much later — what previous generations barely put off much past high school graduation. Namely: Marriage, career, kids, buying a home, crushing debt, arguments over who gets the dog in the divorce.
AKA: real life. AKA: adulthood. AKA: the way it's always been done. Until now.
Well do I personally know this latter phenom. Here in the glorious SF bubble — which I presume is the exact same kind of bubble encasing any major American metropolis sporting a very high number of college degrees per acre along with a very low desire to do anything the same uptight, rigid way that the "Greatest Generation" did — I know almost no one (including myself) who fits the traditional models of path, relationship, adulthood.
In short: Few friends in my age demographic (35-45) were married under 30, no one I know has any teenage children, no one I know is therefore already on his or her third spouse or fourth therapist or tenth case of blood pressure medication. Everyone is experimenting to some degree, playing with time, rearranging the tropes, improvising the lifemap. Definitions blur, expectations evolve, possibilities tingle. What fun! Well, sometimes.
But it is all kinds of normal. To nearly everyone I know, marriage before 25 seems almost unconscionable, if not downright irresponsible. Hell, that young, you haven't even had time to develop your core beliefs, try on a few guises, calibrate your sexual appetites, set your taproot, figure out who the hell you are much less be anywhere near ready to share your life with another unformed creature who hasn't even had sex with more than two other people. Insane!
Hence, the median marriage age has shifted from 22 a few decades ago, to around 27 now, though for most urban regions I'd add a good five or 10 years to that, or enough to accommodate three or four career changes, a few serious relationships, world travels, pets, apartments, scars of various flavors and depths. The new mantra: Who wants to get married and have kids before you've lived a little?
Of course, downsides abound. When the normal markers no longer apply, when you gotta make 'em up for yourself, well, a huge hunk of this "exploratory" generation can be left seemingly adrift, with no real sense of place, family, home. It's pretty tough to redefine "adulthood" on your own terms if you're not quite wise enough to have any terms of your own.
Tradition, after all, has a few perks. It's greatest gift — OK, its only gift — lies in how it connects you to the larger storyline, to community and neighborhood, place and time. When you demolish the traditional pillars, you can lose your bearings. There can be regret, resentment, depression. You can wait too long. You can wait forever. As the saying goes, life is what happens while you're busy taking that life-planning seminar... for the third time.
But rest assured: The change is here to stay. Like many stale notions whose time has come, "adulthood" appears to be evolving, and now has less to do with marriage, buying a home, having 2.3 kids, getting a single job that lasts 45 years. It has become more of a state of mind, a kind of knowing, a bearing in the world. Hasn't it?
In other words, it's now fully possible to be a mature, functioning, successful adult without a single one of the traditional markers of same. Equally true that you can have all those markers, all the "right" achievements, and be a depressive, whiny brat with zero integrity and an imminent divorce. Who's to say what really works anymore?
It makes sociologists positively giddy. What might it all mean? How is it affecting the economy, the capitalist dream, the future of America? Does it even matter? Is the end of traditional adulthood a good thing, or a terribly dangerous one? Are we getting dumber and more unstable, or more fluid and powerful? Either way, does it spell doom for the beleaguered American experiment? And if so, should we not all drink to that?______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/06/16/notes061610.DTL
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jun 18, 2010 23:33:59 GMT 12
From SFGate.com19 reasons why God torched JesusBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, June 18, 2010Before, during, after. There's a life metaphor in there, somewhere. Oh wait, no there isn't. — Photo: Nick Graham/Dayton Daily News.Charred remnants remained this morning of the large Jesus statue iconic to Interstate 75 that was destroyed following an apparent lightning strike during a thunderstorm late Monday night. — Dayton Daily News.______________________________________ Never let it be said that God does not appreciate irony. Never let it be said that God does not have a sense of humor. Never let it be said that God loves tacky Styrofoam parade float lawn statue things that look like Charles Manson dipped in bleach and marshmallows and lost dreams. — Photo: Tiffani West-May/Associated Press.Remember that one time you downed five shots of Jagermeister and three vodka tonics and a hit of blotter acid? And then went on that roller coaster? And then died? And this is what you saw? Don't do that again. — Photo: Nick Graham/Associated Press.Dude! Check out those sprinkler things around Truncated Jesus! It's just like the Bellagio fountains in Vegas! Except, you know, horrible! And sad! And sorta creepy! — Photo: Associated Press.Why would God do such a thing? What could it possibly mean? Is the apocalypse nigh? Do I have to pay my parking tickets anymore? Herein, 19 possible reasons for His happy blasting of a six-story Jesus statue to fiery smithereens:
1. You ever wake up one day and look at your leopard-print bedspread or your jacked-up Ford F-150 pickup with the airbrushed scene from "Lord of the Rings" on the side, or maybe see your fifth wife's giant box of pink wine in the fridge and go, "Oh my God, what the hell was I thinking?"
You ever have that fine, epiphanic moment when you realize an eyesore's an eyesore and it's time for some, you know, housecleaning? And what better way to rid yourself of some of the more hideous crap laying about than maybe tossing it into a nice bonfire? By the highway? In Ohio? God has those moments, too.
2. The late, great fundamentalist nutcase Oral Roberts, he who singlehandedly inflicted the nightmare of the megachurch on humanity, he who invented Oral Roberts University and spawned a hugely corrupt, slug-slick huckster son named Richard to run it into the ground, well, Oral reportedly had himself a hot little vision some 30 years ago, in which he claims to have encountered — and chatted with — a 900-foot Jesus, which is as tall as the Chrysler building, thus making his casual conversation sort of like you talking to a flea. Cute!
All of which is to say: A measly six-story, truncated half-Jesus made out of Styrofoam and coat hangers and Elmer's glue, stuck on the side of an Ohio highway? You call that a vision? For that to be a real vision worthy of a pseudo-religious shyster worth his misfiring synapses, the thing should be on fire. Aha!
3. I'll let you in on a little secret: God had nothing to do with it.
A shockingly large number of Americans don't yet realize just how powerful the gay movement has become. Few seem to comprehend what sort of nasty underworld forces have been unleashed thanks to all those sassy gay sitcom characters, the gay marriage movement and Ellen DeGeneres. The homo energy wave has quietly been increasing in strength over the years and is now fully able, after millennia of bad Liza Minnelli impersonations, tight tank tops and Speedos, to actually control the elements.
Don't you see? It's all very timely, really. Prop. 8's ultimate fate is being decided in Superior Court as I write these words. The evil gays needed to send a message to really freak out the homophobes. Turning half the megachurch pastors, Catholic priests and Boy Scout leaders gay didn't seem to have any effect. I've got it! Torch the giant Jesus! So easy. Next up: hailstorms of butt plugs during the Super Bowl. Watch for it.
4. Oh sure, make all the jokes you want. "God struck down his only son. Again!" Or, "I guess God really hates Styrofoam!" Here's what the fundamentalists think: "It's genius! Don't you see God's master plan here? He started a holy conversation! We're all talking about Jesus again! He brought Christ back into the public consciousness! Yay, God!"
Sure, you could argue it's a form of the Savior that's just a wee bit tacky, insulting and childish, not to mention a laughable piece of "artwork" you wouldn't wish upon a blind quadriplegic goat herder. Whatevs. As the Pharisees used to say: "No such thing as bad press, yo."
5. He is resin.
6. The real Jesus of historical record, being a grizzled, husky, musky, dark-skinned Jew with short, curly black hair who rarely showered and smelled of goat droppings and dried sweat, and who had a thing for screaming random prophesies in the streets and talking about doom, fire and the unbearable hotness of Mary Magdalene, well, the real Jesus' spirit has been quite displeased with being eternally depicted as a pale, soft-focus blond European hippie in bleached-out robes who likes to give lots of there-there-now hugs while watching professional sports. Basta.
7. One word: S'mores.
8. Two more: Insurance money. God has been eyeing the new Cadillac CTS Coupe. In this economy? You do what need to do.
9. God: "Wait, what? That was supposed to be Jesus? It looked like Charles Manson after too many marshmallow peeps and a bad peroxide job. Aw, dammit."
10. Word has it the Hustler Hollywood sign sitting atop the adult bookstore across the street from the torched Touchdown Jesus was left unscathed, thus proving (once again) that God really does like porn. And irony. Or just needs a new contact lens prescription.
11. God is actually Larry Flynt.
12. Really, who doesn't like to watch fundamentalists scurry about in a baffled frenzy, unsure what it all might mean, vowing to rebuild the tacky roadside hellbeast in honor of, well, of not really understanding much about divinity, or art, or how nature works? Not God, that's who.
13. Thor had had just about enough.
14. Correction: Zeus.
15. Because God loves the smell of burning Styrofoam and fiberglass in the morning. Smells like ... victory.
16. Reminder to all smartass born-again sons-of-god in the universe: Do not toss your dad's last carton of Camel menthols into the lake of fire as a gag. He'll flick his pinkie finger and torch your favorite little roadside attraction in an eyeblink. So vengeful! Shoulda known.
17. Hey, all kids and parents argue.
18. The revenge of science.
19. At last! The End Times hath arrived! Wrath, hellfire, lightning, burning Jesus, oil in the seas, plagues of grasshoppers, a black president, Gary Coleman dead, the works. About time, no?The Bones of Jesus. “He's a lot skinnier than I imagined,” said one very drunk trucker. — Photo: Nick Graham/The Dayton Daily News.• With special thanks to all the Facebook fans and Daring Spectacle readers who inspired/contributed to this list.______________________________________ Mark Morford's new book, “The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”, is now available at daringspectacle.com and Amazon. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. He never reads the comments.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is markmorford.com.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/06/18/notes061810.DTL
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