Now appearing at zombietime and Pajamas Media:

San Francisco “Anti-War” Rally: The New Communist/Truth/Jihad Alliance

Obamandias

I met a traveller from a once free land
Who said: A vast and fathomless ego hath
Scorched the earth. Nearby, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose contempt
And tilted chin, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read.
Few survived that parliamentary Armageddon
The rest were run out of town on a rail, or fled.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Obamandias, king of kings:
Look on my legislation, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the ruins
Of that colossal Self, burnt and bare
The lone and lifeless prairie stretches far away.

My latest post at PJM:

Anarcho-Left Meltdown as Radical Infighting Turns Violent

“Like starving wolverines in a canvas sack, they tear at each other until there’s nothing left but shredded fur.

That’s essentially what’s happening on the West Coast anarchist scene, as far-far-far-far-left radicals have taken to assaulting the merely far-far-far-left radicals for being insufficiently revolutionary, opening up a huge rift in a political milieu that is now hemorrhaging adherents as we speak.

It all came to a head at this weekend’s Anarchist Bookfair in San Francisco, an annual convention of left-leaning anarchists and anti-civilization activists (which I covered extensively in previous years). One of the invited speakers was Lierre Kieth, a 45-year-old anarchist who spent decades on the cutting edge of environmental extremism, but who recently wrote a book explaining why she abandoned her once strict vegan diet after realizing that it probably wasn’t going to save the Earth after all. She’s still a committed anarchist, mind you, who “believes in militant action, even property destruction, if it can lead to change,” and who wants an end to all mass-production of food (i.e. agribusiness and factory farming), with the goal of restoring the Earth to its pristine pre-civilizational state if possible. Oh, but you see, that’s not radical enough for many of the deranged San Francisco Black Bloc anarchists, who somehow got it into their heads that she was a traitor to the cause and a puppet of the meat industry because she abandoned her vegan diet. And so, while she was speaking at the conference on Saturday, three masked young men rushed onstage and threw cayenne-pepper-laced pies in her face — an incident which was (as is everything these days) naturally captured on video:

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Rest the rest here!

New at PJM — you won’t want to miss this one! :

The Footprint Theory of Life

I made a resolution to lower my carbon footprint. Everyone‘s doing it. They say it’s good for the Earth!

I tried my best at first. But the more I learned about carbon footprints, the harder it became.

Turns out that just about every single thing I do uses up carbon! Since almost every form of transportation — trucks, cars, trains, planes, ships — uses petroleum-based fuel, and since petroleum is mostly just carbon mixed up with hydrogen, then everything I use, eat, touch or want requires carbon combustion to reach me. Damn! Every manufactured product of any kind is made up of raw materials that were dug up or retrieved by fuel-burning machines, then transported in fuel-burning trucks or trains to huge plants to be processed or refined, then transported in fuel-burning trucks or trains to different factories where they’re made into everyday objects, then they’re again transported by ship or plane or train or truck to the store, where I go to buy them. That’s a hell of a lot of carbon being used! Even if I ethically bicycle to the store to do my shopping, that’s only, at best, a 1% carbon savings over the amount of carbon that was required to get whatever I’m buying to the store in the first place.

But then I looked down at my bike and realized that it too followed the same high-carbon manufacturing trajectory to reach me when I bought it! And the tires on the wheels, and the steel in the frame, and the . . . well, it all just became too carbon-y to even ponder. Even worse, I just found out that the gasping and panting I do when bicycling is just another way of expelling carbon into the atmosphere! Has anybody calculated whether 20 minutes of heavy exhalations from bicycle riding produces more or less carbon than the three minutes of car exhaust it would take to travel the same distance? So much research is required! It’s simply overwhelming.

Why only carbon?

It began to dawn on me that my carbon usage was just the tip of the iceberg. I was literally devouring the Earth little by little as I used up all the other elements as well! Forget about my carbon footprint: What about my aluminum footprint? My oxygen footprint? My plutonium footprint? If I want to be serious about “living lightly on the land,” I feel that a complete inventory of ALL my elemental footprints is in order. And through that process, perhaps we all can learn to lower our footprints of each and every natural element.

Let us begin the inventory. …
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Read the rest here!

New essay at Pajamas Media:

Anti-Bush Truther shoots up Pentagon; Should we play the political blame game?

On Thursday, a “9/11 Truth” fanatic named John Patrick Bedell started shooting at the Pentagon and managed to wound two guards before they mercifully put him out of our misery.

We now know that the guy thought the government and the Bush family were behind the 9/11 attacks (or “demolitions” as he called them), and was basically frothing at the mouth with Bush hatred.

Now, I’ve been to innumerable “Truther” rallies over the last 8 years, and can say with some confidence that about 98% of folks who think 9/11 was a hoax are left-wingers, or at the very least fit in very comfortably in the left-wing milieu, since the impetus behind Truthism is to undermine the basis for Bush’s “War on Terror,” an impetus which is also a cornerstone of modern Leftist thought as well.

So far, however, I’ve noticed a deafening quietude on the left-leaning blogs about this guy’s affiliations and belief systems. Those brave enough to troll leftist comments sections have noted mumblings therein that the guy was probably a secret “teabagger,” despite all evidence to the contrary. …
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Read the rest here before you jump to any conclusions!

Tired of the Coffee Party and the Tea Party? We’re the newest game in town!

I woke up this morning and realized I didn’t want tea or coffee. I wanted hot cocoa!

So I turned on my computer and in a few minutes founded a new political movement — The Cocoa Party!

Yes, it was that simple.

Then I got one of my friends at the newspaper where I used to work to violate all professional journalistic ethics by writing a puff-piece about me without revealing that I used to work there. Thanks!

Also, thanks for not mentioning that I used to really really really like Kool-Aid.

Now, in between fielding 100 emails an hour from new members wanting to start chapters from Wasilla to Waco, Twittering 17 witty tweets per minute, fielding calls from TV producers and journalists, and weeping with joy and sincerity about our wonderful country, I barely have time to consider that I’ve just revolutionized politics — all before lunch!

But enough about me. This is about The Cocoa Party!

MISSION
The Cocoa Party Movement gives voice to Americans who want to see chocolate in government. We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of chocolate, but the expression of our collective will to drink hot cocoa, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as cocoa-drinkers. As voters and caffeinated volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward the addition of those little marshmallows, and hold accountable those who want to ban hot beverages altogether.

We’re so grassroots, we’re weedroots.

About Us

We are diverse — whipped cream, cinnamon, mint-flavored, soy, or straight-up old-fashioned.

We are 100% weedroots. No astroturf Obama-campaigning former New York Times employees in the Cocoa Movement, no sirree! No grassroots racist fascist redneck Neanderthal Teabaggers either! And no hyper-partisan strategists calling the shots in this movement. We are a spontaneous and collective expression of our desire to forge a culture of ludicrous propaganda that is entirely blame-oriented.

We demand a government that responds to the needs of the majority of its hot beverage drinkers as expressed by our choice of mugs or cups; NOT corporate interests as expressed by misleading coffee advertisements posing as legitimate journalism!

We want a society in which hot cocoa is treated as sacrosanct and ordinary citizens drink it out of a sense of civic duty, civic pride, and a desire to taste something delicious. The Cocoa Party is a call to action. Our Founding Fathers and Mothers gave us an enduring gift — chocolate — and we must drink it to meet the challenges that we face as a nation.

Oh wait — I forgot: We don’t hate those Teabaggers or those upstart Java Jivers! No really, we don’t! In fact, we’re just like you guys. Honestly. You prefer one kind of hot beverage, we prefer another kind — it’s all good. Can’t we all just get along? But remember, there’s only room for one hot-beverage-weedroots movement in this sweet country of ours — so abandon your deeply held beliefs and principles and join our 100% authentic political uprising today!

Update: The Cocoa Party now has its own Facebook page!

(Cross-posted at PJM.)