Genuine Lyin'
Socialist Weasel

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

T-Ball: The Right puts its best feces forward
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 15 April 2009

I have read the tea leaves, and the tea leaves say “clusterfuck!”
   Today was tax day, and of course that meant the loony-tunes right had their big tax protests, the “teabagging parties.” As Anderson Cooper memorably remarked, “It's hard to talk when you're teabagging.”
   Not, mind you, that this slowed down the diarrhetic right any. Governor Perry, dubbed forever “Governor Goodhair” by the late Molly Ivins, stood and proclaimed Texas' right to secede from the union. I had to remind myself that Texas has ports and resources that are valuable to Americans, and that not all Texans are batshit crazy like the gubbiner. Even if they do keep electing clowns like Goodhair and before him, George W Bush. Besides, someone should ask Mexico if they want a third world buffer state between themselves and the US, especially since about all Texas can do is contribute to the gun running and drug addiction problems Mexico and the US inflict upon one another.

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The April Fools' Budget: GOP holds a feast of St. Swithins
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 1 April 2009

As someone of British background, I regard April Fools' Day as a high Holy Holiday, on a par with Festivus or St. Swithin's Day (both holidays center around the use of bare poles). It's a day for reverently reflecting on the spaghetti farms of Switzerland, or the flying penguins that Terry Jones found in the Arctic.
   I do my part, of course. This year, I sent a piece out on my newsfeed that, pursuant to his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Newt Gingrich had proceeded to resign from the GOP and re-register as a Democrat. Last year, I grandly announced that the LA Dodgers had signed Barry Bonds to a ten-year, $250 million contract.
   But this year, the best tribute to April Fools' came from that most unlikely of sources, the grim, humorless stalwarts of what's left of the Republican Party.

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AIG on Our Faces: The real reasons behind the sudden “bonus” rage
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 19 March 2009

During the French Revolution, little old ladies sat, doing their knitting and chit-chatting, and watching with mild amusement as the guillotine chopped off the heads of hundreds found by the Revolutionary Committee to be at odds with the needs of the people.
   America isn't there yet, but it isn't so outlandish a notion as it was a year ago. There's a lot of anger, and it's building.
   As long as the social anger doesn't have a nexus, a focal point on which it can concentrate its rage, it's unlikely to result in much of anything expect loud voices and a few fights in bars, and a lot of sullen expressions out on the streets.

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SOTU 2009: A new tone as a legitimate President speaks
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 25 February 2009

One thing I was struck by in the wake of the SOTU address tonight was that Faux News handled him with kid gloves. While reciting GOP talking points about exploding the deficit and letting government take over our lives, they were conspicuously circumspect. Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, the conveniently (and rarely) ethnic spokesperson for the GOP, was chipper, chirpy, optimistic, and made a few vague promises to quibble over the details of Obama's vision for America. He kind of let the cat out of the bag at the end, though, when he said, “Tonight, on behalf of our leaders in Congress and my fellow Republican governors, I say this: Our party is determined to regain your trust.”
   Yeah, he knows that the GOP is in deep, deep trouble.

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A Little Touch of Flurry in the Night: February, and winter finally shows up
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 12 February 2009

When I got home this afternoon, I was cold, wet, and miserable. And I couldn't have been happier about that. It's not just my Scottish genes acting up. (We believe suffrin will imprrrove yuh murral character). It was the weather. It was snowing like a mad bastard.
   OK, you might say, you live in the mountains of Northern California, and it's February. What were you expecting?
   Well, yes, we expect snow in the winter. Copious amounts. You can tell when a Siskiyou grandmother is driving; she's the one who, when the snow on the road gets to a foot deep, slows to 70 miles an hour.
   And that was the problem. It started snowing unusually late—two days before Xmas—and then, just 12 days later, it quit. Altogether. We went through a strange, warm January where highs were often in the 60s (the record for the month is 69 degrees), and each sunny warm day melted away more and more of the snow until, by the end of January, there was none left. The local ski park was open, but only barely, with a base of 6” (compared to 232” the year before on that date) and management doing what little work was needed.

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More on the Stimulus Package: Why this has to pass
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 6 February 2009

I watched Obama's speech tonight to the Democratic Retreat conference. The speech was carried live on cable networks, and I was amused that Obama referred fairly frequently to “cable chatter” which was fueling opposition to the stimulus package.
   Faux News launched a new show, “Comrade Update”, starring the repulsive Glenn Beck, and the point – if that's the word for it – of the show is to play up the supposed communistic traits in Barack Obama. It launched on the same day that Faux's parent corporation, News Corp., announced a loss of $6.4 billion for the previous quarter. Nothing like sending a vacuous millionaire out to defend capitalism while your accountants are handing you your ass on a platter. Kangarupe Murdoch must be very proud.

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The Stimulus Package Vote
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 28 January 2009

Yesterday, someone asked me if I thought Obama's trip to the House to negotiate and press for his stimulus package might dent the stubbornness of the Republicans. I remarked that if the package got five GOP votes, that would be a strong indication that Obama had broken the hammerlock the ideologues had on the party.
   In reality, I was expected to see it get about 25 or 30 Republican votes. Most Republicans are from dirt-poor areas, already hit extraordinarily hard by the economic implosion. Some of them, I reasoned, would remember that without some support from their constituents, it didn't matter how much they got from their corporate backers.

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What I didn’t write about the pardons
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 20 January 2009

A friend of mine emailed me Sunday, and wanted to know if my next essay would be about The Pardons. “Almost certainly,” I replied. I’m glad now that I put the qualifier in there, so I can weasel out by saying “well, I didn’t say DEFINITELY certainly.” Or something.
   Bush surprised me by not granting blanket amnesty to all the banksters, thieves, charlatans, warmongers, sadists, bigots and morons who supported him lo these eight long years, leaving it to me to puzzle over whether the man thinks he can issue the pardons tomorrow, or if he’s just counting on Democratic cowardice to ensure that all the people he didn’t pardon will skate anyway. Unfortunately, the second possibility is a lot more real than the first one. Oh, Pelosi made some brave yaps about punishing law-breakers, but face it: Bush ate her lunch long time ago. It would be nice if the Congress could surprise me on this issue as much as Bush just did.

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Goodbye, Asshole: A fond farewell to the “Mission Accomplished” man
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 14 January 2009

Watching Putsch prance around trying to put lipstick on his failed presidency (an action akin to bronzing a turd) is both funny and sad. It’s bad enough that despite everything that has happened over the past eight years, one in four Americans still think he was a good President. “Bob” once said that “If you consider how dumb a person with an IQ of 100 is, then ponder that by definition half the population is dumber than THAT!” Figure you can spot the dumbest 25% by the Bush stickers on their cars.
   You look at the Putsch supporters, and you think of Detroit Lions fans. Yes, the team did go 0-16 this year, and there weren’t many bright spots. But where the Lions have it over Putsch is that you can at least hope that the team will do better next year. Supporting Putsch at this point is a bit like supporting the Cleveland Spiders, a long-defunct major league baseball team that suffered the ignominy of compiling the worst record in major league history. As with Putsch, who was given a country that was at peace, had budget surpluses and no problems bigger than Clinton’s zipper, the Cleveland Spiders were contenders who traded away all their talent, including some pitcher named Cy Young, and went 20-134 the following year. They were 84 games out of first place, 35 games out of next-to-last. They were so bad they got traded to the American League.

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Pretty Kitty: The cat who visited
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 5 January 2009

Back shortly before Labor Day, the office manger for the outfit with which I share office space tapped on my door and poked her head in. “Do you know anything about the cat that’s trying to get in here?”
   Mildly puzzled, I shook my head. Computers, filing cabinets, swivel chairs, the usual office stuff. Nothing that would attract cats, or even mice. The rest of the day passed with no evidence of any attempted feline B&Es into my office, and I very nearly forgot the matter.
   Until the next afternoon, when my most frequent client came in. A Siamese kitten skittered in between his legs, startling him and surprising me. I own cats, and they don’t startle me. The kitten – about six months old, I guessed – jumped into the chair facing me and turned and gave my client a baleful look. The message seemed clear enough: -I- got here first, so -you- can sit on the floor.

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2008 Sucked: Hopefully, robots will, too
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 1 January 2009

I’ll let you in on a little secret. 2008 sucked. Oh, you already heard about that? OK, I won’t belabor the point. People are out partying tonight. They’re partying like it was 1933. There’s stuff to celebrate. We’re getting rid of a vicious, stupid, heartless toad of a President, and his puppet, George W. Bush. Forbes Magazine thinks venture capitalism, with its propensity for tearing apart productive businesses, sucking all the money out of the best parts or shipping them overseas, and leaving the rest as a debt-ridden husk, is dead. Unbridled capitalism is dead. For a couple of generations at least, until the country recovers, and another batch of stupid, greedy morons from the upper class declare that business is good for America and that we should all just let them take care of ethics and self-restraint, rather than having the people do it.

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Blago and Burris vs. The Senate: Former attorney-general warms his hands on a chunk of plutonium
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 31 December 2008

The main problem the Democrats face right now is that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s nomination of Roland Burris, a former Attorney General for the State of Illinois, is perfectly valid. Blago, while about as radioactive as a politician can get short of trying to pick up a vice cop in a public toilet, hasn’t been convicted or even indicted, and isn’t presently being impeached. The present Attorney General of Illinois, Lisa Madigan, tried to get the state Supreme Court to rule that Blago could be restrained from appointing a successor to Obama’s Senate seat, to no avail. The court collectively shrugged, noting that since no criminality was involved, it was out of their jurisdiction.
   Until he’s impeached and/or convicted of something, he’s still the governor with all the powers and prerogatives of his office.

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The GOP’s dumbest idea: The Balanced Budget Amendment
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 29 December 2008

Back in 1980, the Republicans adopted as one of their party platforms the plank, “If necessary, the Republican Party will seek to adopt a Constitutional amendment to limit federal spending and balance the budget, except in time of national emergency as determined by a two-thirds vote of Congress.”
   At that point, the national debt stood at under one trillion dollars. But later that year, Ronald Reagan, a man who believed, among other things, that military spending was off-budget and thus didn’t affect the annual deficit, was elected, and before Clinton was elected 12 years later, the national debt had ballooned to $5 trillion, and the grim forecast was “deficits as far as the eye can see.” Reaganomics put the budget in a tailspin from which we never recovered. Clinton nearly
managed it: at the end of his second term, they were actually debating how to divvy up the vast, two trillion surplus that was projected. Republicans, of course, wanted steep tax cuts. Dems wanted to use it to reduce the national debt and shore up public services.

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Stop Backing Genocide
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 28 December 2008

Suppose, for a minute, that it’s World War Two. You’ve just heard that Germany has responded to Resistance attacks against them in occupied France by bombing the hell out of several villages near where the Resistance has struck, slaughtering hundreds of French men, women, and children.
   If you were American, British, or Canadian, you would heartily condemn the German actions, and hope mightily for the day when Hitler and his evil regime are wiped from the face of the earth.
   Of course, if you were an American conservative, you would probably blame the French for concealing terrorists among the civilian population, and make little simpering noises about how Mr. Hitler really ought to try avoiding civilian casualties. A more courageous Republican might add, “no matter how much provocation the French have given Mr. Hitler, who, after all, has a right to exist.”

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CHILL: The latest from the front on global warming
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 27 December 2008

One of the bright spots in print journalism is Tom Knudson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the Sacramento Bee, who has had a brilliant ongoing series about how humanity has affected California’s splendid Sierra Nevada range. Since much of what he writes about the Sierra pertains to where I live in the Mount Shasta region, I’ve read his work with considerable interest. His latest deals with the effects of global warming on the Sierra. It’s a must-read.
   Knudson concludes what we had already noticed here. The snowpack is diminishing, decade by decade. Quite often we get rain instead of snow here at the 3,500 foot level, and as a result we often have winters with less than five feet of snow. When I moved here nearly 20 years ago, the annual average was 14 feet a year. We’ve matched that only twice in twenty years.

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Food for Fought: How to win the battle against overpopulation
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 25 December 2008

Back about 35 years ago, a science fiction writer named Philip José Farmer wrote a novella called “Seventy Years of Decpop.” The premise was that a mad-scientist sort released an aerosol that blanketed the entire earth and rendered 99.999% of humanity sterile. The story covered, in jumps, the seventy years following this action, at the end of which humanity’s population was reduced to some 200 million (from nearly five billion at the beginning), and was looking forward to a bright new future on a clean earth with lots of resources and incredible high tech.
   Farmer tends to be an annoying writer, but every once in a while he comes up with something that just stays with the reader for life. The first book of his Riverworld series had a similarly unforgettable premise.

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Solstice 2008: Leaving the cookies out
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 20 December 2008

In Iceland, they believe in elves.
   Well, that’s harmless enough. Most societies have legends and folklore regarding “the little people,” Jungian myths writ small. When you think of Jungian legends in the überconsciousness, you think of Thor and Jehovah, Prometheus and Lucifer, angels and dragons, vampires and giants. Variants on those figures exist nearly everywhere.
   What makes Iceland stand out is that the belief is pretty literal, enough so that their twenty-first century technology bends to the belief. When they consider building a new road, or a subdivision or a canal, they don’t just consider the impact on the environment and local economies and quality-of-life issues, and propose mitigations, but they consider the impact such things might have on the elves. The government has a guy whose job is it to pore over the plans, go out to the site, have a walkabout, and come back and tell the government if, in his opinion, the elves would like it or not. There’s one case where a two-lane highway abruptly narrows to one lane, an inconvenience and potential hazard even in a place where traffic is light, as it is in Iceland. It’s done that way because the government determined the elves wouldn’t like a two lane highway along that particular stretch. It didn’t pass the EIS: the Elvin Impact Study.

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2008: Personal bright spots in the media
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 19 December 2008

This isn't a typical “best of” end-of-the year throwaway. This is more along the lines of “stuff I liked and want to share” and maybe some “stuff I hated and suggest you avoid if you have a brain in your head.” For example, my choice for “most enjoyable movie” for this year wasn't the best movie I saw, but rather was the one I got the biggest kick out of and wound up watching two more times – and will probably watch again at some point in the future.
   Oh, the usual caveat obtains. There’s no guarantee you’ll like these, or any of them. In fact, I doubt any of my readers will like all of them. My tastes are...scattered.

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Get a New Plan, ‘Stan: Meanwhile, in the American garden colony of Afghanistan...
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 15 December 2008

One reason I’m so contemptuous of the mainstream media in America – aside from the fact that they are upholstered corporate lackeys – stems from the sheer shallowness of their coverage. For instance, when a NATO convoy was attacked in Afghanistan last week, the typical news coverage on TV consisted of an overview of a bunch of smoldering trucks, and the reporter might interview some short-tail colonel who would explain that with winter coming on, insurrectionists wanted the same supplies meant for the brave Afghani fighters along the border. This would be followed by an excerpt from a press conference at the Pentagon, in which resolve would be expressed as regards the war on terror. There wouldn’t be any interviews with any Afghanis, partly because there is an endless supply of idiots back home who feel that ignorance is next to patriotism and talking to a native would amount to collaborating with the enemy, and partly for the simple reason that none of the American reporters there speak Arabic, let alone any of the local languages.

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The Jimmy Carter Conspiracy: How he is to blame for Obama not being blamed for Blagojevich
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 13 December 2008

If you live outside of a blaxploitation movie such as “Shaft” – and most of us do – then when someone refers to someone else as “a motherfucker,” it doesn’t carry connotations of warm regards and best wishes. It suggests that party “a”, the motherfuckant, is disgruntled with party “b”, the motherfuckee.

It seems that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s gruntles were substantially dissed, and in the general direction of President-elect Barack Hussein Obama. Blago was interested in a return of perceived value on something that actually was not his to sell, a Senate seat, one recently vacated by the President-elect. However, BHO wasn’t playing ball, which is why Blago referred to him as a motherfucker. As you may have heard, Federal District Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald was taking a lively interest in Blago’s gruntlements, and was taping everything that was being said. There has been some small mention of it in the newscasts, I understand.

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Zepp was born in Ottawa, Ontario, and spent his formative years living in various parts of Canada from Halifax to Victoria, and then the UK, South Africa, and Australia before moving to the United States, where he has lived for 40 years. Aside from writing, his interests include hiking, raising dogs and cats, and making computers jump through hoops. His wife of 25 years edits his copy, and bravely attempts to make him sound coherent. Zepp lives on Mount Shasta.

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