Architectural Abortions from the USA and Around the World

Photo and commentary courtesy of Jim Kuntsler's
Clusterfuck Nation. Thanks Jim, Click to enlarge

***After Super Bowl XLVI, when a few asshole fans began shouting insults at her about her husband Tom Brady, Brazilian supermodel, actress, UN goodwill ambassador, diet guru, and new mommy Gisele Bündchen, shouted right back:
    "You need to catch the ball when you're supposed to catch the ball. My husband cannot fucking throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time."

   
                Gisele ─  who else? (Click to enlarge)
    Right on girl!
    I’m a Giant fan, but that’s what I call standing up for your man.

***I’ve commented previously on the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) fad, an amazingly absurd technology that replaces a simple push on a phone button with a protracted and pointless conversation with a female automaton. This pervasive and nonsensical bullshit exists because an army of marketing assholes concluded that "IVR be cuttin’ edge an’ ever’body am doin’ it so us has got to be doin’ it too...duh."
    In a similarly asinine vein more and more news-oriented web sites (e.g., Drudge and USA Today) have rolled out Auto Refresh, a Medieval torture device that causes the page you’re watching to vanish every minute or two, then, (after a delightful pause to allow your blood pressure to rise) gradually reemerge.
    Why?
    Once again, following a few thousand meetings, the marketing assholes who run the corporate world merged their tiny brains and came up with this marvelously inane idea, upon which the leading cretin among them was assigned to draft a form email to be sent to all Chief Executive Morons:

Uhhh, duhhhh...Boss Man or Boss Lady as Yous Cases Might Be.

Uuuuhhh...Us marketing assholes been tinkin’ hardly and us agrees dat sum kinda AutoFrescha ting am gonna make peoples tink dat yous web sight is right on top of all da latest news stuff becawse ever’ time th’ page shuts off dey’ll...duuuhhh...tink yous is postin’ sum kinda hot new news tip stuff when yous aint. Y’followin' me?

    Of course, for you hundreds of millions of internet users who feel that Auto Refresh is infuriating crap, you can always take action. For example, email your thoughts to drudge@drudgereport.com . In a month or two you’ll hear back....nothing.
    Is there an alternative? Sure. Just resolve never to watch fucking Drudge or any other Auto Refresh site again..

"Some states are preventing illegal immigrants, prison inmates, underage juveniles, dead people, and African-Americans with multiple identities from voting for Barack Obama."

● A fumble that was recovered by the Giants was incorrectly called "down by contact" despite instant replay proving it was, indeed, a fumble.
● A perfectly clean, legitimate, and unavoidable hit by the Giant’s fearsome DE Osi Umenyiora on Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rogers was ruled illegal, presenting a crucial and utterly unwarranted gift first down to the Packers.
● Several blatantly late hits by Packer defenders on Giant’s quarterback Eli Manning were ignored.
● The Giants were forced to punt after an official cost them a first down by incorrectly spotting the ball a yard short of where the runner had been downed..

    Two of the atrocious decisions led directly to Green Bay touchdowns.
    Three of them cost the Giants opportunities of their own to score.
    Fortunately for the reputation of the National Football League, the Giants were able to defeat the combined forces of the Packers and their Zebra allies. Nevertheless, the NFL must immediately open an investigation into the actions, motives, and behavior of the officiating crew.
    Pending results of the investigation the entire crew ─ and especially referee Bill Leavy, already famous for blowing calls in Super Bowl XL ─ must be suspended indefinitely.
    In the meantime, the best that can be said of these supposedly impartial arbiters is that they unconsciously tried to influence the game in the Packers favor.
    The worst that can be said ─ and what many fans believe ─ is that they deliberately attempted to arrange for a Green Bay victory.
    It’s a damn shame that seven very well-paid men, charged with ensuring a fair game, succeeded in staining an otherwise enjoyable and exciting contest.

***Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow regularly drops to one knee, bows his head, and gives thanks to Jesus Christ for whatever successes he’s had on the field. He also tends to bring up his faith during meetings with the press.

From Kinsley’s review:
Bush’s policy [on stem cell research] continues to do damage by leaving the impression that stem cells are controversial and require some sort of compromise between science and morality.
From the European Consortium for Stem Cell Research:
Because a single, well-identified type of cell is affected in Parkinson’s disease, stem cells offer great potential for treatment.
And this news item:
In December 2001 Michael Kinsley announced that he has been suffering from Parkinson's disease for eight years.

    Let me sum up Kinsley’s belief system: "When it comes to my own skin, my own life, and my own well-being, morality can go fuck off."
    If this sorry excuse for a man had an atom of ethical fiber in his minute soul he would have recused himself as a reviewer for being hopelessly biased. But minor considerations such as ethics, fairness, intellectual honesty, journalistic standards (an oxymoron?), and common decency have never interfered with a true Liberal’s readiness to prostitute himself for a few dollars ─ nor with the New York Times readiness to cough up the 50 bucks per needed to purchase their scrawny butts.

In societies governed by persuasion, politics is mostly talk, so liberals’ impoverishment of their vocabulary matters. Having damaged liberalism’s reputation, they call themselves progressives. Having made the federal government’s pretensions absurd, they have resurrected the supposed synonym "federal family."
Having made federal spending suspect, they advocate "investments for job creation," a euphemism for stimulus, another word they have made toxic

In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll describes Alice’s trial by a pack of cards led by the tyrannical King and Queen of Hearts.

"Hold your tongue!" said the Queen, turning purple.
"I won't!" said Alice.
"Off with her head!" the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.
"Who cares for you?" said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) "You're nothing but a pack of cards!"

Friends, there is no need to knuckle in to a limp-wrist cabal of timorously vicious assholes.
It’s time and past time to take up arms against liberalism’s war on the English language. Liberals are nothing but a pack of cards.

Wendy Hilton
I don’t know Wasserstein’s oeuvre from a hole in the wall nor do I care to; nor do I know to which planet she sent up the various targets of her displeasure.

● The Smithsonian is an Institution.
● Slavery is an Institution.
● Harvard is an Institution.
● Marriage is an Institution.

But Heterosexuality?
Is a Vagina an institution? Is Testosterone an Institution? Is Love an Institution? Is Masculinity an Institution? Is Hunger an Institution? Is an Erection an Institution? Is Sexual Intercourse an Institution? Is Death an Institution?
To pursue Hilton’s logic, I guess he considers Fag-Haggery, Homosexuality, and Pedophilia to be Institutions as well.
What a friggin’ jackass.
[And yeah, I did a Google check and Mr. Als is indeed gay. So now we know why the New Yorker hired him.]

***The last space shuttle has, supposedly, made its final flight. I guess NASA and the D.C. bureaucrats will now busy themselves with some new scheme on which to squander a few trillion rapidly depreciating U.S. dollars ─ maybe a manned flight to Jupiter to investigate a mysterious black monolith that recently landed on the moon.
Even when I was an aerospace engineer at RCA, I didn't see much purpose in burning up vast quantities of fuel in order to shoot Americans into space except, perhaps, to beat the Russians to the punch or to prevent an army of technicians and scientists from going into marketing or becoming hedge fund managers.
Yeah, yeah, yeah....I know...we might not have had space blankets and zero-gravity crappers without the Apollo program, and we certainly wouldn’t have been treated to Neil Armstrong fucking up his little speech when he set foot on the moon. (If it had been Obama, he would have had a teleprompter to help out.)
As I mention in a recent post, the Englishman George Mallory was keen on climbing Mt. Everest because it was there.
That’s about the long and short of why we send men into space ─ with one important difference: Mallory had the right to do anything he wanted with his own life and fortune no matter how stupid, but ferrying people back and forth from space platforms or propelling them to the moon, mars, or whatever, involves absurd amounts of time, resources, and taxpayer money.
In the future, let’s stick to using outer space for what God intended ─ to provide TV service to Uganda, Antarctica, and New Hampshire, to spy on the North Korean missile program, and to help female drivers find their way home after a few too many in the local bistro.
This country should get the hell out of the manned space flight business. It’s a total loser. And if, 20 years from now, we wake up to learn that Mao Zedong has become the first mummified Chinese tyrant to land on Uranus, who gives a good goddamn.

***Plaxico Burress, the wide receiver who caught the winning touchdown pass in Super Bowl XLII that ended the New England Patriots perfect season, has been released from prison after serving two years on a gun charge.

Mark Gastineau doing his sack
dance over a fallen quarterback

Nowadays when a Black football player pulls the same sort of crap or worse the broadcasters and commentators chime in: "He’s letting his emotions hang out"...:He’s having fun"..."The fans love it"..."Let the kid enjoy himself."
Well I don’t know what fans other than myself love, but when a 300-pound lineman performs simulated sexual intercourse after he sacks a quarterback or a 250-pound running back prances around jiggling his ass after scoring a touchdown or a six-foot-four wideout does the cakewalk after he catches a pass or a 260-pound linebacker straddles the man he has just tackled and beats on his chest like a mountain gorilla, he is insulting his opponents, debasing himself, and acting as if his audience is as crass and stupid as he is...even if he is Black.
What? I’m a racist? Fuck you.
It’s the media whores and coaches and team owners and NFL officials — the White apologists who think of Blacks as children with ADHD and who, out of fear and bigotry, permit and abet these ugly, undignified, embarrassing, and unsportsmanlike displays — that are the real racists.

***In a recent NYT recap of L’Affaire Olbermann, replete with typical liberal euphemisms for left-wing fascists ("outspoken," "distinctive," "mercurial," "forceful"), reporters Bill Carter and Brian Stelter emphasize Olbermann’s role in hiking MSNBC’s ratings and establishing the channel’s "brand.". According to the article, Olbermann’s daily rant and frequent Paul Harvey-like cornball readings of James Thurber stories, boosted MSNBC viewership from several hundred thousand to a million plus.
What nobody seems to ask is: What sort of people constituted Olbermann’s following? Since I personally never met anyone who admitted to watching the show, my assumption is that the audience for a rabble-rouser like Olbermann consisted (you guessed it) of rabble.
Look friends, any psychotic megalomaniac with a prime-time slot on cable TV can entice a million or two zombies to tune in provided the channel is jake with having the dregs of the earth as an audience and can dig up enough zombie advertisers and wealthy zombie activists like George Soros to foot the bill.

***The New York Times, America’s crusading or jihading Newspaper of Record, has once again trumped the opposition.
In a stunning and highly disturbing exposé published August 11 by two Jews and someone who sounds Polish, the Times has revealed a horrific shortage of "minority" third-base coaches in major league baseball. Here are the shocking facts straight from the horse’s ass, er, I mean mouth as reported by Alan Schwarz, Thomas Kaplan, and Jack Styczynski:

About 40 percent of the players in Major League Baseball are black, Hispanic or Asian, and the sport is seen as a leading example of diversity, yet a curious disparity has emerged in a corner of the game.
Among baseball’s 30 teams, only 23 percent of the third-base coaches are members of minorities, compared with 67 percent of its first-base coaches. The disparity has existed for decades but it is now about twice as large as it was in 1990, based on an analysis by The New York Times.
The question is why.
It is more than a mysterious quirk...

Is there no bottom to the bottomless pit of American bigotry...no top to its topless tower of anti-minority evil?
The Times itself, despite valiant efforts to purge racists from within its own ranks, has unwittingly fallen prey to the awful sickness of discrimination.
Why have Schwarz, Kaplan, and Styczynski failed to note that not one quadriplegic Asian is employed as a batperson by the Boston Red Sox?...That not a single Hispanic lesbian has ever hit in the cleanup position for the New York Yankees?...That only one midget has ever appeared in a major league game and, after he drew a base on balls on four straight pitches, the powers that be forbade future midgets from appearing in lineups?


Eddie Gaedel at bat in 1951 for the White Sox,

And how many seven-foot-tall black sportswriters are employed at the Times despite the fact that 11.37 per cent of players in the NBA are seven-foot-tall blacks? None! Coincidence? Mysterious quirk? I think not.
I leave you with this final thought:
Independent and rather sloppy research by Dome of Glass has found that 99.98 percent of cornerbacks in the National Football League are African American or some other kind of African and yet There Is Not a Single Black Third-Base Coach in the NFL!

BULLETIN! The Boston Red Sox have just named Daisuke Matsuzaka as their third-base coach. This raises the percentage of Asian-non-American third-base coaches to 3.333% (6.667% if you count Dice-K’s interpreter who will share the position with him since none of Dice-K's teammates speaks Japanese)

***My wife and I went to buy a car last November to replace our ’95 Saturn. Our first stop was the Mazda dealer in Keene. As soon as we arrived, a heavyset member of that peculiar breed of human known as A Car Salesman bounded smilingly out of the showroom.
"What can I do for you folks?" it inquired.
"We’re looking for a new car," I said.
"Anything in particular?" it asked.
"Small," I said. "Cheap."
Its smile faded, but it gamely led us to a collection of several hundred vehicles in various shades of maroon, blue, silver, red, gray, white, and black arrayed in a row like whores in a cat house.
I took one look and said, "What the hell are these things?"
"Introducing the new, updated, redesigned, improved 2010 Mazda3," the Car Salesman proudly said.
.

2010 Mazda3. Teeth, mustache, and pink eyes
available for modest cost at DOMEOFGLASS.com
I stared at the Car Salesman, stared at my wife, stared back at the Car Salesman, gathered my thoughts.. "These are the fucking ugliest automobiles I have ever seen," I said politely. "Do you have any 2009 leftovers?"
"They’re all sold," said the Car Salesman.
"I can understand why," I said.
"Let me tell you about the exciting new features in our ‘10s. There’s..."
"I don’t care how many new features these monstrosities have. I’m not going to get up in the morning, go to the garage, and be greeted by a gaping, grinning, chrome-lipped black-holed car snout. Who designed the damn thing; the make-up guy who did Heath Ledger as the Joker?"
"But..."
"Sayonara. I’ll see you at the bankruptcy proceedings." And with that my wife and I took off as fast as our pickup could manage, praying the while that the horrific image of the new, improved, exciting 2010 Mazda3 would not linger in our nightmares.
─────
Back home, gin-and-tonic in hand, Two and a Half Men on the boob tube, I reviewed the day’s events. What in God’s name possessed the executives at Mazda to approve of this abomination, I asked myself.
At first I assumed the idiots in marketing were to blame, but I soon rejected this hypothesis ─ it takes a perverse sort of genius to come up with something so appalling as the 2010 Mazda3, and it’s well-known that marketers don’t have any genius, perverse or otherwise.
No, I decided, there was only one possible explanation for the vehicle: An agent employed by one of Mazda’s evil competitors ─ Honda, Toyota, Subaru, Isuzu, Suzuki, Mitsubishi, Hyundai, Kia ─ must have infiltrated the firm’s top management, installed Paris Hilton as head of automotive design, replaced the design team’s engineers with Haitian Zombies, and then bribed, black-mailed, and seduced the CEO, COO, and Board of Directors into approving the resultant catastrophe.