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Sunday, June 24, 2012
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WAITING FOR GAIMAN
I just returned from the Chapters superstore at John and Richmond where I waited for Gaiman. And waited. And waited some more. For five whole hours I waited for Gaiman. Okay, 4 hours and 57 minutes.
I had never ever heard of Neil Gaiman two months ago. Then Zombie gushed, so I picked up one of his books, "American Gods" (which I haven't read yet, sorry Gaiman). I respect Zombie's opinion on such things. She's smarter than I am and who can argue with those boobs? Then about a month ago, Zombie got real quiet and meek as she asked if I could do her a favour. I got scared. Maybe she needs a kidney, I figured. I know it may not mean much to you, but I like my kidneys, so kidney shaped and adorable. Anyway, I digress. I said I'd do anything in my power for her (which is true, I will. But I can't remove my own kidneys. I learned this manner of hedging from Bill Clinton. Go ahead, ask me what "is" is.)
"Well, Neil Gaiman is doing a signing at John and Richmond in Toronto..." Zombie continued.
"And you want me to kidnap him and spirit him to Michigan for you to sexually abuse? Jesus, do you know how time I could get for that? Have you been to the border lately? Besides, I don't even have a car."
"No, no, no...although that would be nice. But do you think you could...get a book signed for me?"
I was relieved, not only were my kidneys safe, I didn't have to go through the trauma of dragging an unconcious, internationally celebrated author across a border. "Done and done" said I. This was easy, I thought. Of course I'd do this for Zombie. How hard can it be?
Well, I didn't count on how famous Gaiman is. I figured, he has a blog, I have a blog. Shit, the Democratic candidates for president all have blogs. Only nobodies have blogs. John Edwards, me and Gaiman. How famous can he be? The logic follows, right?
Wrong.
The place was crawing with Gaiman types. It was sick with them. And this is a three story bookstore the size of your local Sears. It was unbelievable! And the fact that I haven't left the house since I lost my job blinded me to one of my bedrock rules: "No matter how much I or people I respect love a given artist, I will detest that artist's fans." I remembered the rule the second I entered the store. This was the blackest crowd I've ever been in. The clothes, not the people. There was only one black person there, way at the back of the line. I saw every manner of bad haircut, ill-advised tattoo and painful looking piercing imaginable. If I had brought a clipboard and paper, I would've conducted my patented "what the fuck were you thinking" poll. And I'm a guy with a shaved head and a full beard.
I counted no fewer than 7 people wearing heavy black leather jackets. Including Gaiman! This is August. Toronto gets humid in August. Isn't this taking "suffering for your art" a little far? Wasn't the eyebrow piercing enough? Where does it end? Barbed wire catheter?
It wouldn't have been so bad if there weren't so many of them. There were easily 1,500 of these people. 1,500 vampire wannabes and....well, me. You do the math. My mouth stayed firmly shut. Besides, I had my own book to read (thank Christ, because I now knew I was going to be there for a while), the third volume of Robert Caro's LBJ biography, "Master of the Senate". I prayed none of the goth teenies got too inquisitive. These people are so young and stupid that they probably think "LBJ" is spanish for oral sex.
So I got in line at 12:20. The line weaved up stairs and then down stairs then it went through each and every asile on the floor, some 17 or 18 of them.But I figured this was a book signing, not a book writing. How long could it take? Five hours is how long it could take! (Well, to be fair, Gaiman didn't start signing until 20 after one.So four hours.) So I move up stairs, then down stairs, then weave through aisles (it took 20 minutes to clear an aisle. Did you know they sell Penthouse letters as paperbacks now? Neither did I. Note to self: Buy a couple.Did you know Carnie Wilson has TWO books out; one about being kind of fat and happy and one about being thin and hungry? Note to self: buy neither)
But it was cool, I had my LBJ biography. Do you know how heavy a 1,200 page hardcover gets after standing with it for five hours? Really, really heavy. So for four hours I trudged through the aisles with this mutant horde and a book thick enough that I could kill an adult male with it
Then....there was Gaiman. Black pants, black T-shirt, black shoes. Longish, fashionably touselled hair. Gaiman! I got four people away, no more than ten feet from Gaiman. And what does Gaiman do? He gets up to take a piss is what Gaiman does! I thought my eyeballs were going to pop out of my fucking head. I couldn't take a piss! If I did that, I would've had to start the whole nightmare over again. I nearly left the line and went home. Then I thought, "that would break Zombie's heart." And you know what it takes to break a Zombie's heart. You've all seen the same movies I have.
So Gaiman comes back (much shorter than youd've thought, too) and I get to the head of the line and ask that he sign it to "Insert Zombie's real name here", which he did. He even drew a little picture for Zombie. And we chatted a little, too. Gaiman seems like a really nice guy. But now I know why it took five fucking hours. But I knew that I had just made a Lil' Zombie out there very happy.
And that's worth something, right?
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Tuesday, June 05, 2012
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Labels: Life With skippy
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Sunday, January 15, 2012
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 A lot of LIberals are speaking out against Bob Rae's apparent move to secure the permanent leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. Of course, it goes without saying that a lot of Liberals are very stupid, which is why they're Liberals in the first place.
Those people are also the reason that the LPC is on its deathbed today. Unlike most political observers, I'm willing to state the obvious and say that it's incredibly unlikely that the Grits will ever hold government again. I think it far more likely that
they'll be swallowed whole by the New Democratic Party in five years. And I believe it likely that the Liberals will destroy that party as well.
This is because Liberals love nothing more than going to war with one another. At this point, they love it more than winning elections. The party has been fighting their retarded leadership wars since 1975 and is divided into two factions: the Trudeau-Chretien-Rae wing and the Turner-Martin-Ignatieff wing. And each faction has acted as suicide bombers against the other for almost the entire time.
Granted, this didn't stop them from running the country. But that's only because conservatives were such an unmitigated goddamned mess most of the time. And when even a semi-competent Conservative leader appeared, the Liberals lost to him every time. They were beaten by three very different Conservatives; Joe Clark, Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper. The numbers show that it was only a divided conservative movement that allowed Jean Chretien to become prime minister at all. When the movement unified under Harper, the Grits were first reduced to a minority, removed from power altogether, and finally robbed even of their Official Opposition status.
The LPC is the most overrated political force anywhere in my lifetime. For at least forty years, they've only won when their opponents are so disorganized and dumb that they can't be trusted to run a profitable rub and tug, let alone a major industrial nation. And even under ideal circumstances, their own infighting does them in, as we've seen over the last decade.
Here's the thing. If I was a Conservative Party supporter (which I'm not. I last voted for the federal Progressive Conservatives in 2000, after voting Reform in '93 and '97), I'd be afraid of facing Bob Rae in a federal election.
Rae is easily the smartest and most experienced viable candidate in the party today. In a party of lifetime politicos, academics and bureaucrats, Rae is also the only person in the LPC who has ever run anything before.
Which brings us to Rae's time as Ontario's NDP premier, which the anti-Rae forces feel is disqualifying. That's a record that can and should be examined, if only because times have changed so much that it might actually work in Rae's favour during a campaign.
(For the record, I voted against Rae twice in Ontario, casting ballots for Progressive Conservative Mike Harris in 1990 and '95. After the 1999 campaign, I've voted exclusively for minor parties and independents provincially.)
Rae, as even he will tell you, was an accidental premier. He was elected because David Peterson's almost awesome arrogance - fighting no fewer than three elections in a single five-year mandate - finally blew him up, and the fact that Mike Harris had been leader for less than a year and no one knew who he was.
He was a socialist who was elected at the beginning of a worldwide recession, so he governed predictably, trying to spend his way out bad economic times. In the process, he created what was then record deficits.
But then Rae did something very unpredictable. He attacked those deficits and in the process destroyed his own political base. Instead of passing massive tax increases, which you would expect from an NDP government, he instituted austerity on the heavily unionized provincial civil service. That, you might have noticed, is conservative orthodoxy today. Indeed, the widely-hated Rae Days remain well to the right of what Republican governors like Scott Walker and John Kasich have attempting in the United States over the last two years. Walker and Kasich, like Paul Ryan in Washington, are trying things that won't produce savings for a minimum of fifteen years. Rae Days inflicted immediate pain on the bureaucracy and went a fair way in reducing the deficit.
I've spent that last five years trying to figure out exactly how the Harper Conservatives (or Harper's probable successor, Jason Kenney) runs against Rae. And I've got to tell you, I'm fucking stumped.
Bob Rae isn't a political novice, like Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff were. Indeed, he's been running bigger campaigns for longer than anyone currently in the Conservative Party. He also survived the Liberal Armageddon of last May, which few other national party figures managed to. That alone makes makes Rae a formidable opponent in ways that no other Liberal is. He understands what it is to run a major campaign, having done so four times in Canada's largest province.
Then there's his Ontario record, which is heavily mitigated by the way politics has changed over the seventeen years since Rae was ejected from Queen's Park. The Harris-Eves Conservatives left office with a fairly large deficit, and the current Liberal premier, Dalton McGuinty, has racked up deficits that dwarf Rae's. And the Harper Conservatives have pissed away money at a rate that would impress even Pierre Trudeau.
Yes, the Tories will almost certainly dive-bomb Rae with millions of dollars of negative advertising demagouging his record at Quuen's Park, which a broke and demoralized Liberal Party will be unable to counter. It worked maginificently against Dion and Ignatieff, so there's no reason that they won't go to that well again.
But at some point, the Tories are going to have to debate him on national television. And that's dangerous for them. Rae is smarter, a more experienced politician and a better speaker than Harper is. And if Harper leaves office before 2015 (which I think is a distinct possibility), Rae will almost certainly face Jason Kenney, who is a ward-heeling retard that only got where he is today by stealing the disgusting concept of identity politics from the fucking Liberals.
One can reasonably expect Harper or Kenney to start a debate by immediately attacking Rae's by then twenty year old deficits. If I was Bob Rae, my first answer would be "Yes, I was socialist who governed during a deep recession in the early 1990s, so I did what socialists are expected to do. Sir, what is your excuse for spending a $13 billion surplus on nothing and creating deficits that made mine look frugal by comparison?" That alone will be devastating because there is no plausible answer to it.
Then one can expect the attack on Rae Days. That's problematic in so far as if the Tories are even halfway serious about their deficit reduction plan - which they say will not include a tax increase - they'll have to do something that looks a lot like Rae Days, if not actually be more draconian. Remember, Harper pledged to reduce spending only down to 2009 levels, when the country was already in deficit and spending was at a high. If the Conservatives bar themselves from raising revenue and continue to use the tax code to buy themselves votes, the civil service is the only place left to save money. As a very smart guy, I expect that Bob will rattle off the facts and figures and look very credible doing it.
Also, by 2015 the Tories will have been in office for nine years, the standard exhaustion point for a government. Both Mulroney and Chretien were done at that point, and Trudeau was doing everything he could to postpone the election that would ultimately lead to his defeat. I think that Stephen Harper knows the history well enough to get the fuck out of Dodge and make some money before the next election, leaving a half-wit like Kenney as a sacrificial lamb that serves only to burnish his his own legacy, much like Mulroney did with Kim Campbell.
If the Liberals could mange to stop being Liberals for three whole years, I think that Bob Rae has an even chance of beating Harper, and could almost sexually humiliate Jason Kenney, even with a bankrupt and demoralized party. If Thomas Muclair wins the NDP leadership and takes Quebec off of the table for the Grits and Tories, I think that Rae could form at least a minority government. If the NDP falls apart, and Rae manages to keep Denis Coderre in line, the Grits could possibly win as many as forty Quebec seats and govern with a majority.
But the Liberals can't stop being Liberals for three whole minutes, let alone three whole years. As you're already seeing, there are factions of anti-Rae chuckleheaded strategists, bloggers and media types that are determined to pound the final nail in the Liberal Party's coffin if they can't have the Liberal Party all to themselves.
They don't care that Bob Rae is probably the only candidate that can work with the party machinery that the Libeals actually have, as opposed to what they wish they had. Instead of showing the kind of political discipline the Conservatives have always had in getting behind their leader, the Grits are flirting with an idiotic American-style primary system that will make getting behind the leader almost impossible, given that party's history.
Bob Rae has the best chance of any Liberal of beating a unified Conservative Party since Trudeau. But he can't do that if he has to spend his time as Opposition leader and a federal election candidate watching his own back.
Rae is alone as a Liberal who can beat the Tories, but the Liberal Party is incapable of unity, which is why the 2015 election will almost certainly be their last. If they give the leadership to another amatuer that loses even more seats in the interest of keeping Rae's critics happy, they won't survive it. Labels: Fear and Loathing at Quuen's Park, Fun With Politics, O Canada, Rae of Light, Retarded Bloggers and Media Types, Ruination With Sephen Harper
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Saturday, September 17, 2011
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It never ceases to amaze me that people say, do or support catastrophically dumb things and expect them to end up being anything less than catastrophic. My mayor, Rob Ford, is an object lesson in how this works.
If you've read this space for any length of time, you know that I've hated Ford for years. During last year's campaign, I argued that he was singularly unqualified to run this city and that he would be an unmitigated disaster for conservatism, if only because he isn't especially conservative. He's more of a self-aggrandizing blowhard and a drunken idiot than anything else.
During his decade on City Council, Rob didn't do much of anything other than vote no a lot and make a Coors Lite-fuelled spectacle of himself regularly, which is something that I can do. Being something of an elitist, I always endeavour to vote for people that are smarter than I am, which is significantly harder than you would think it is. The mayor has never built or done anything in his life. His money, his business and his original political base were all inheritances from his Daddy. The guy was environmentally conditioned to be a monumental shithead.
More importantly, his entire election platform was built on a shockingly transparent set of lies. He vowed to withdraw from a fully-funded public transit plan called Transit City, but would expand subway infrastructure using only magic. Actually, that's not entirely true. Ford thought that the deficit-laden federal and provincial governments would give him metric shit-tons of money by virtue of the fact that Ford is a confrontational prick and a borderline retard. And private business would finance the rest, despite the fact that the very same notion proved to be a spectacular failure on the original Sheppard subway line, a decade ago.
Rob further promised to do away with all manner of revenue to the city without cutting services. As a matter of fact, he specifically said that he would expand services where needed. This would be accomplished by cutting things like gardening at Nathan Phillips Square and the hallucination that career politicians would vote themselves into oblivion by reducing the size of Council by 50%.
I spent the better part of a year pointing out that Hizzoner's policy positions were silly and that his math didn't work. Moreover, his plan was based on such a fantastical notion of how politics works that even toddlers shook their heads at it once it was explained to them. Among other things, I said that supporting Ford was an act of willful ignorance, and perhaps evidence of a particularly worrisome extra chromosome. But it sure as fuck wasn't an expression of actual conservatism.
Most of my commenters during the campaign were either as cosmically ignorant of the laws of both both politics and mathematics as Ford himself is, or they acknowledged that he was lying, but it ultimately wouldn't matter. The voters were of a similar mind, and Boy Rob won with a margin that seemed to surprise even him.
Being the fan of reality that I am, I decided to sit back and watch the debacle unfold. I may have placed too much faith in the chronically self-interested and genetically defective electorate of this city, but I do understand how politics and, more importantly, math works.
The brothers Ford thought that they could score some easy points a couple of months ago by engaging liberal has-beens like Margaret Attwood over irrelevant issues like library funding. But times have changed and the math hasn't. So now we're looking at pretty dramatic cuts to things like cops, firefighters and the public transit that Ford promised to expand. And the same silly fuckers that supported Ford and putting on their outrage helmets.
One of the biggest polls ever conducted in Toronto shows residents from every corner of the city are overwhelmingly against Mayor Rob Ford’s cuts.
From Doug Ford’s ward in Etobicoke to budget chief Mike Del Grande’s in Scarborough, the results will serve as a sobering warning to councillors within the Ford voting bloc.
A Forum Research telephone survey of nearly 13,000 people reveals that more than three-quarters of Torontonians want their local councillor to protect services rather than comply with the mayor’s wishes. And only 27 per cent of residents say they would vote for Rob Ford if an election was held tomorrow.
More significantly, because of the poll’s size, Forum was able to provide the first authoritative assessment of support on a ward-by-ward level.
Forum’s poll, which was paid for by CUPE Local 79, one of two major unions at city hall, questioned 12,848 Toronto residents on Tuesday using a random dial, push-button response, phoning system. The margin of error is plus or minus 0.9 per cent, 19 out 20 times.
Say what you will about the poll being paid for by opportunistic communist hacks, but the sample size is stellar and you almost never see a margin of error less than a third of what you usually see. I don't see a professional polling firm putting itself out of business just for a quick paycheck from some Gambino Family-connected librarians. These are serious numbers that should be taken awfully fucking seriously.
Most importantly, the revolt is coming from the parts of the city that were the more vehement for Ford just 11 months ago. The numbers from wards like mine, which went heavily for Ford, are staggering and impossible to ignore. Once Hizzoner loses suburban councillors, he's done..
That fat asshole's political base has dropped out from under him. Right-leaning councillors now have the choice of either tying themselves to the fucking Titanic, or representing the wishes of their own constituents. If I know anything at all about politics, we're about to see the mayor reduced to irrelevancy by his own allies. The much-ballyhooed "gravy train" is getting ready to run right over that stupid motherfucker.
Here's the thing. I don't care all that much about service cuts. But the fact remains that Rob Ford went out of his way to specifically promise that they wouldn't occur. More importantly, his entire campaign was predicated on just how bad the municipal budget imbalance was, so he can't realistically hide behind the notion that the numbers were a surprise to him.
The fact is that he was lying, and most semi-reasonable and literate people should have known that. If this were a truly just and equitable world, the wards that supported Ford the hardest - like mine - would feel the goddamned axe most viciously. But I think that isn't going to happen, don't we? The coloureds along the Finch West and Eglinton West corridors are going to get hammerfucked directly into hell, while folks like me are going to get by. They already wait 9 hours for a packed and smelly cattle-car of a bus that seems more like it's going to Auschwitz than Yonge Street, so what difference is an extra twenty minutes going to make?
And no sane person thinks that Ford is going to annihilate the downtown wards that opposed him the strongest are going to get hurt, either. Shit, the Ford boys want to give those Marxist dickheads more fucking condominiums and lakeshore shopping malls that no one wants to pay for.
This isn't a local phenomenon, either. Ontario has a provincial election next month, and Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak, who had a double-digit lead just six weeks ago, is poised to have his ass handed to him by Liberal Dalton McGuinty, who has only ever been popular with shitheels and pederasts. And even shitheels and pederasts don't like McGuinty that much. They just like him a lot more than they do Hudak.
Let's look south of the border for a minute if you're not convinced. Take a look at the Tea Party candidates that actually got elected to positions of adult responsibility, as opposed to the MILF brigade of Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin. As I write this, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, John Kasich of Ohio, and Rick Scott in Florida are all polling behind church burnings. Sure, you could argue that they're only polling slightly behind church burnings, but you you can't ignore the fact that the numbers are upside-down in a big, bad way.
Even weapons-grade morons like Rick Perry aren't immune. Perry took steps to inoculate young girls from an entirely preventable cancer and large segments of the modern right are painting him as a straight Michael Jackson, whimsically dispensing "fuck drugs" to pubescent girls, presumably because he enjoys kidfucking. And that's when they're not running against other applied sciences, like evolution. It's also important to remember that this is the same Rick Perry that was actually applauded when he said that he "didn't lose sleep" over the possibility of executing an innocent person, mostly because he already has.
And they're not wrong in doing so. If I had their economic policies, I'd want to distract everyone from them by running against Darwin and for cervical cancer as much as I possibly could. The only halfway coherent plan out there is Paul Ryan's, which immediately increases the deficits that Republicans are running against in a big, bad way, and might balance the budget in thirty years, which just happens to be about twenty-five years too late.
The only thing that has allowed these people to get as far as they have is the fact that liberals are liberals. As such, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. If they were even halfway smart, they'd do what Bill Clinton did, which was steal issues from the right and address them in a way that's acceptable to the general electorate. At that point, it's pretty easy to paint your enemies as extremist assholes.
But even that's beyond the ability of most of the left. Dalton McGuinty is the exception in that he's blessed with ineffective and retarded enemies, much like Stephen Harper.
But that isn't always going to true, folks.
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Wednesday, June 25, 2008
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 FUCK IT, I'M GONE!
You can find me here from now on.Labels: Life With skippy
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 The Passing of Greatness: Notes on the Death of George Carlin
I find that as I get older, things suck more. Music sucks, novels suck, politics sucks, and few things suck as much as comedy. I'm a crotchety old man and I'm not even 40 years old yet. But the fact is that none of those things are as good as they were just a twenty years ago.
The only thing worse than watching everything suck more and more is watching the masters of those forms grow old and die. We're in an age where we're not just seeing artists go, we're seeing entire art forms go with them.
Will there ever again be an album as great as Exile on Main Street or Highway 61 Revisited? How about a novel like Lolita? Does anyone seriously think that there'll be another president who achieves as much as Harry Truman or even Richard Nixon?
Does anyone think there will ever be another comedian like George Carlin?
Anyone who studies comedy - which really isn't something to studied - will tell you that there's a holy trinity of the form. It consisted of Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and Carlin. Anyone who followed them modelled themselves on at least one. As brilliant as he was for about three years, Dave Chappelle was essentially covering the same ground as Pryor thirty years ago. The same is true of Lewis Black and Carlin.
What's different is that they don't have the same insight or humanity. When you watch Chappelle or Black, you'll laugh your ass off, but you don't feel like you would after 90 minutes of Bruce, Pryor or Carlin. You'll laugh a whole lot, but you won't really learn anything. Watching the first group, you walked away thinking "I never really thought of that that way before." And that just doesn't happen these days.
Unlike today's comedians, Bruce, Pryor and Carlin all structured their comedy like music. If you listen to it without paying particular attention to what they're saying, you start to notice little rhythms and counter-rhythms developing. It beautifully built to a point as opposed to race to a punchline, which is what you see all too often now.
Of the three, Carlin was the only one not to destroy himself. In so doing, we got to see that you can take that form of comedy and have it mature with you. Unlike George Carlin's predecessors from the fifties and early sixties, he wasn't doing the same act into retirement that he started out with.
If anything, Carlin's humor got much darker as he got older. Routines like Football and Baseball and A Place for my Stuff were gradually replaced with far more existential riffs that were far more entertaining, at least to me. As much as I appreciated The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television, I fell in love with the more apocalyptic aspects of his last twenty years.
When I was a little kid, my parents were massively pissed that my older cousin introduced me to George Carlin. They were even more pissed that I loved his work so much. By the time I was twelve, I could recite several of his albums by heart - not just the material, but all of the breaks and inflections in it, too. That made them truly nuts.
But the more he listened, the more my father, at least, understood that Carlin was much more than just a guy who said the word "fuck" a lot. Nothing that he did was done for the sole purpose of shocking an audience. When he did it, which was often, there was always a larger point to be made. There was a universe of difference between George Carlin and an idiot like Andrew Dice Clay. Having a point in recent years has been the death of otherwise great comedians. If you look at Bill Maher and Dennis Miller, as just two examples, you see how true that is. Both have suffered from the syndrome that killed Lenny Bruce's humor; they wanted to be right more than they wanted to be funny. But Bruce had been persecuted to the point that he earned that right. Maher and Miller just want to please their respective political comrades. Consequently, Miller has had a string of failed shows and Maher isn't far behind. Perhaps the greatest tribute to George Carlin was on Monday's Larry King Live. Some of the biggest names in comedy were on the show, and only one of them, Lewis Black, has been remotely funny over the last decade. Carlin was on stage three times as long as Jerry Seinfeld, but he always stayed hungry and wanted to always be better at his craft, while Seinfeld was happy driving his Porsches and making bee cartoons. Carlin worked for fifty years. He recorded 23 albums and made 14 HBO specials. He was one of the truly great ones and he will be missed Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: A Legend in My Time By: Johnny Cash From: American V: A Hundred Highways Permalink
Labels: Celebrity Skin
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Tuesday, June 24, 2008
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 WHEN DUMB AND CRAZY COLLIDE
I don't have aby first hand experience, but I'm pretty sure that being accused of rape would suck. That would be doubly true if you're actually not guilty.
Getting over a rape accusation would be pretty tough, assuming that you're even exonerated in the first place. This isn't a popular thing to say, but just the charge of a sexual assault makes a fair trial very difficult. The charge itself stirs up so many emotions that it can cloud the judgement of otherwise rational people. And no one wants to believe that a woman would make up such a thing.
Indeed, even if you're one of the few who manages to get acquitted, you still find yourself (pardon the pun) screwed. People will automatically assume that you must have done something to find yourself in a position where you're accused of that. People will always look at you just a little bit differently when they learn of your past brush with the law. It can ruin your life, both professionally and personally.
But women sometimes do fabricate a rape charge. In that, it isn't all it different than any other crime. Because even real victims frequently wait before reporting an assault, there is often no medical evidence to disprove the charge. In both the courts of law and public opinion, it is a matter of "he said, she said," and most people are naturally inclined to believe the woman.
In fact, it's probably more common when a celebrity is involved. Some accusers are little more than extortionists, who file a criminal complaint as a way to tee up a lawsuit which will inevitably be settled. And some accusers are just batsht fucking crazy. The fact that there are almost never any consequences for making a false rape accusation only encourages both the extortionists and the insane.
However, not only was Rockett not guilty, he wasn't even in Mississippi during the month in question. His exoneration wasn't as heavily covered. It was announced a month ago and I didn't hear about it until this morning at The Superficial. If you have as much time on your hands as I do, google "Rikki Rockett rape case" and you'll find his being cleared .... as the ninth entry. Seven of the first eight highlight his arrest.
Of course, I'd like to congratulate both Mr. Rockett and everyone in Poison, but that's hardly my point in writing this.
I always thought that if you were going to accuse a celebrity of doing something horrific that it would be helpful if you could find someone who is still actually famous. Seriously, Rikki Fucking Rockett? Is it still 1987 and no one told me?
 False rape accusations hurt everyone. The more often they occur, the less likely it is that real victims will be discouraged from reporting real assaults by practioners of hair metal. The saddest part of the Rikki Rockett rape saga is that it makes it almost impossible for anyone to believe my story about being fingered by Lita Ford.
I'm not saying that it was an assault or even unwanted. In fact, it was rather enjoyable and something that I'd very much like to repeat. I just wish that I could tell the story and not have people roll their eyes at me. Because the part about being held down by Vixen is really sexy.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Talk Dirty to Me By: Poison From: Look What the Cat Dragged In
PermalinkLabels: Celebrity Skin, I Fought The Law
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Sunday, June 22, 2008
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 "DESTROY ANOTHER FETUS NOW, WE DON'T LIKE CHILDREN ANYHOW"
I'd like to describe myself as "pro-choice when it comes to abortion, but I'm not a coward. I'm not afraid to say what I'm for, and that happens to be abortion.
No one would describe themselves as being "pro-choice" on, say, civil rights. When was the last time you heard someone say "You know, it would be really nice if black people could vote without being lynched. Y'know, unless white people don't want that?"
No one is "pro-choice" on guns. You either have that right or you don't. Period. The same is true of abortion. If you believe in it, you're not "pro-choice," you're pro-abortion. And if liberals weren't such snivelling little assholes, they'd be proud to say so. When it comes to the rights of the people, there really is no "choice" involved. You either have a right, or you don't.
It might not seem like it, but I actually do respect "pro-life" voices. The problem is that most of them are the same kind of cowards that the "pro-choice" idiots are. If you believe that abortion is the murder of another human being, you do not make exceptions for "rape, murder or the life of the mother." If you believe that there are certain classes of expendable human life, then you're no better than a fucking Nazi.
Abortion is not a morally incrementalist argument. It's either murder or it isn't. A fetus is either human life, or it isn't. The only truly immoral voices in the debate are those of the vast middle, the "choice" believers on the left and the "exceptionalists" on the right. What they seek to do is, pardon the pun, split the baby.
I disagree with pro-life absolutists with every fibre of my being, but I can at least respect them for being honest. I can't say that for everyone else who isn't me. If you argue that "rape, incest and the life of the mother" are incremental steps in banning abortion outright, you might be the most immoral people of all. You are, by your own definition, willing to sacrifice innocent life for decades until you achieve some far away goal. Those terrorist assholes who bomb abortion clinics are more morally honest than you are, and you should be ashamed of yourselves for even suggesting that in public.
I happen to believe that if you can't prove that a fetus is human life beyond any legally definable doubt, then you should cede the choice of what to do with that mass of cells that will someday drop out of college to the person carrying them in their bloated bellies. That's just how I roll.
I have a very difficult time reconciling the belief that "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects ... shall not be violated, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation" has any exceptions. If anything, the freedom of a woman's uterus from government interference is much more important than, say, your collection of sawed-off shotguns and Internet porn. My position on abortion rests on the foundation of security of the person, particularly the one that everyone can actually agree is a person. Without the security of the person, all other rights are essentially meaningless.
If I have a problem with Roe v. Wade, it is that Justice Blackmun's reasoning is almost incomprehensible. If I were to write that decision, it would be all of two sentences long. It would read "The Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth and Ninth Amendments to the Constitution, taken as a whole, clearly establish a right to personal privacy. Fucking deal with it."
Even as strident a pro-life voice as Justice Antonin Scalia has said that there is nothing in the Constitution that prohibits abortion. Whenever I see a doubt as to what the Constitution says, I feel compelled to side with the individual over the state, which the Ninth Amendment does, too.
Instead, Blackmun wrote an incredibly muddled opinion that has only served to make the United States the political laughingstock of the world. Even the people of a backward country like Ireland, that bans abortion totally, laugh their asses off watching American politicians obsess over an issue than effects a grand total of one (depending on your definition of "life") person.
Widely ignored is the fact that Roe was the least important of two abortion decisions from the 1973 term. The real ground breaker was Doe v. Bolton. Even if Roe was overturned, it wouldn't affect Doe, which established access to abortion.
As a Canadian, none of that matters to me particularly. Canada is alone in the industrialized world in having no abortion law whatsoever. This was a consequence of Dr. Henry Morgentaler, Dr. Leslie Frank Smoling and Dr. Robert Scott v. Her Majesty The Queen, in which the Court found that the federal law violated the "security of the person" provision of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
After Morgentaler, there was almost no constitutional foundation upon which to write a new, restrictive law. Also, the politics were horrible. Just mentioning abortion in the context of an election campaign is a good way for a political party to get dead fast.
It should be noted that unlike the United States, all criminal law is by definition, the jurisdiction of the federal government under the Criminal Code of Canada. One of the most important parts of Morgentaler v. Her Majesty, the Queen was the finding the provinces cannot pass abortion laws on their own.
Amazingly, Canada has been an abortion law-free kingdom of tranquility and happiness ever since.
Of course, that doesn't stop the jackals in the goddamn liberal media from polling us on abortion.
The poll by Angus-Reid - a firm that I have found to be traditionally unreliable - finds that 91% of Canadian support abortion rights to one degree or another. That isn't hugely surprising. What does shock me is what happens to the numbers when you add public funding to the equation.
When it comes to funding abortions, though, there is not the same level of support.
The same poll found 44% of respondents thought the public purse should only pay for abortions that were medical emergencies.
Four percent think the health-care system should never fund abortions.
Egan said the numbers surprised her, but that they may not truly reflect people's thoughts on the issue.
She said many younger women, low-income women and women from rural areas could not afford abortions if they had to pay for them themselves, and so if the public system didn't pay for their procedures, it would amount to discrimination. Firstly, the Canada Heath Act (socialized medicine to my American readers) doesn't, despite the best efforts of a bunch of liberal cocksuckers, doesn't deny treatment for maladies incurred by bad behaviour. Those leftist assholes would love to deny me coverage for my eventual cancer and heart disease because I love smoking more than anything in the world.
Furthermore, the taxes I pay on my cigarettes are, according to my government, supporting the fucking system in the first place. As I remember it, that's the justification for tobacco taxes in the first place. Should I demand that those taxes only pay the costs of smoking-related illness? How would all of Canada's remaining stupid motherfuckers react to that?
And what about all of those fatasses out there. McDonald's kills almost as many people as Imperial Tobacco does! Why are those sloppy, sweaty fuckers getting off so easily?
What said leftist assholes overlook is that most health maladies are the result of bad behaviour. When I first had this argument with a professor in college, I used the example of HIV/AIDS, perhaps the most preventable disease in North America after 1984. That didn't go over very well because liberals don't want to say that anything bad that happens to homosexuals might be a result of behaviour.
Making moral distinctions regarding care under a universal health care system would indeed be discriminatory. If you won't pay for a woman's abortion, why should I pay for her retard kid? Abortion is a one time payment of about three hundred bucks. Retards cost a fortune over their lifetime in health care benefits. That's to say nothing about the cost of their education. Them floppy-headed fuckers are expensive, and as a fiscal conservative, I object to footing the bill when an alternative exists.
Like it or not, Canadians have decided that health care is a right. Through our courts, we have also decided that abortion is a right. Furthermore, anything that involves sticking things into a woman's uterus that isn't me is by definition a health-related matter.
If nothing else, abortion and emphysema are at least fun-related conditions. Someone had a good time getting that way. But the 50% of you assholes who are body-surfing your way to Type 2 diabetes on a wave of fucking cheeseburgers and pancakes stuffed with chocolate and peanut butter are the last people who should bitch about funding abortions with your precious health care dollars.
Yet you fat, moralistic motherfuckers are going to be the first ones in my wallet when you have your fucking feet cut off, aren't you?
Let me get this straight, my tax dollars are only supposed to encourage certain kinds of behaviour and not others? Encouraging a girl to be a filthy little whore who needs it bareback is wrong because it costs a few hundred bucks, but holding a parade for you assholes who eat an entire pig for dessert because the fucking cow wasn't filling enough is right because you have a glandular problem is compassionate?
If that's true, fuck you and fuck Canada. I hope the goddamn terrorists win. At least they'll be more honest than you are.
Everybody in this fucking country is an asshole but me.
Thank you for your attention.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: The Future By: Leonard Cohen From: The Future
PermalinkLabels: I Fought The Law, Journalists Are Swine, O Canada, The Department of Professional Outrage
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