The Benghazi Security Office reported "terrorist attack" within moments of the shooting.

Some Arab countries have offered to foot the bill if we attack Syria.

Which sounds nice but... eh.

And that's all I got.

Sorry.

We Kaboom Folk are used to disappointing people.

Posted by: Ace at 04:20 PM | Comments (392)
Post contains 50 words, total size 1 kb.

I don't want to admit this, really, but -- and what you're about to read is pretty much actually true -- since I was a child, I've had a strong revulsion to Kaboom cereal, due to what may be called a early-childhood type of social dysmorphia.

And, ultimately, self-hatred.

You say you've never heard of Kaboom? You think I'm making Kaboom up?

Well let me explain this. You've heard of Apple Jacks, right? Sure you have. Everyone has.

I wanted to be an Apple Jacks kid.

Apple Jacks kids had so much fun in the commercials. Fresh-faced, healthy, and free, and hopeful for the future. Singing and dancing and just loving on their Apple Jacks.

And the cereal was awesome too. I had it once in a Snack-Pack that fell off a truck.

But there were no commercials for Kaboom.

It was just a dirty little secret, like massage parlors and the back room at a pawnbroker's.

That's why you never heard of it.

But Kaboom kids know. Kaboom kids understand.

Apple Jacks was for winners.
Kaboom was the cereal of The Defeated

I mean, look at this box. Who is that box for? Who is the intended demographic here ?

People who are coming up in the world? People who are upwardly mobile?

No. Kaboom was for people -- children, I mean -- who had decided to give up on life. And it's a sad thing for a six-year-old to have already thrown in the towel and said, "Ah well. The hopes and dreams of kindergarten are ultimately exposed as so much folly. Give me the Kaboom, Ma. I'm ready to settle."

Because that's all such a cereal is fit for, those who settle, who accept, those who lower their gaze in defeat and shame. This, this horrid Clown Cereal that looks like it's some kind of weird generic brand but it's actually marketed by General Mills. I suppose this was General Mills' attempt to tap the "downscale demographic" in six-year-olds.

First of all, children hate clowns. All children. There's a joke that everyone's afraid of clowns. Well that's not true. But everyone does hate them. Children most of all, because clowns get up in your grill with horrible jokes and diseased breath, eyes glassy with vodka and pedophilia.

So who's this cereal for exactly? I suppose clowns might buy it for their victims and abductees, but that's not a large market. Well, not that large, anyway. Couple hundred thousand units a year, tops.

When marketers found that most children
described the Kaboom clown as "creepy,"
they called a meeting, and then added
a creepy bear and creepy hippo into the mix.
Note that the hippo is not really your classic circus animal
but this is in line with Kaboom's "Who Cares?" design parameters

And look at that box. Look at the colors. They're horrible. And this was not a color scheme that was in vogue back in the day, either. No, among all the other breakfast cereals, Kaboom stood out as a cereal where the manufacturers simply were not even trying, because they wanted to appeal to children who had already decided that Track 3 in reading class was probably a bridge too far and not really worth the effort.

It's like they gave a bunch of crayons and construction paper to illiterate hobos and said, "Do your best. Or your worst. We don't care. We're aiming for the dregs of second grade. Try to include a clown. Or don't. It really won't matter either way."

And the cereal was not even good. You would think that if you're selling this abortion of a breakfast cereal to the primary school underclass -- the emerging nihilistic YOLO demographic -- you would at least load it up with sugar because, what does it even matter?, the sort of kids who eat Kaboom know they're going to die young anyway. They have no illusions.

But you'd be wrong. Actually Kaboom was not very sweet at all.

I think they decided to skimp on sugar so they could put extra sugar on the more upscale cereals like Frosted Flakes and Frosted Mini-Wheats.

It was mostly just... oats.

You know: Like what they feed to the animals.

Prize at the bottom of the box? Oh no way, not with Kaboom cereal. No way they're throwing a ha'penny whistle in there for the poor kids. You're lucky they even bothered putting the cereal into a box, instead of just distributing it off a government assistance truck into your cupped hands.

I think occasionally they had mail-in sweepstakes where you could win a welfare voucher.

Or maybe a coupon for the orphanage PX. So you could buy some extra gruel and sewing supplies for the weekend.

A "prize," if you can call it that, included in Kaboom cereal,
when they briefly offered such toys in 1972.
Kaboom cereal pioneered Choking Hazard technology
until tepid public criticism forced them to end the practice
and to issue a halfhearted apology.

And it was unappetizing looking in the bowl as well. The colors were off. They weren't bright friendly colors like you might find in more respectable, upwardly mobile cereals like Lucky Charms. They didn't even pay for regular food coloring. They made Kaboom with discount irregular food coloring usually used for cat treats.

Kaboom's color palette was like the bright hues of a poisonous toad designed to warn off predators, a mixture of the garishly day-glo and and bizzrrely dark (the purple was that of a deep bruise, still bleeding beneath the skin). When milk was added, Kaboom became a nightmarish swirl of ugly, angry colors not to be found in nature, making your milk look as if it was just curdling into a loathesome cheese produced by an alien mold.

Detail of Kaboom Cereal.
Nothing says "part of a balanced breakfast"
like the Faces of the Unquiet Dead.
The famous "death mask imagery" of Kaboom
teaches children that aspiration is vanity
and all dreams are lies

They should have called it "Kabul." Just come right out with it. Let the people know what they're in for.

This is a cereal intended for bulk purchase by the United States Department of Agriculture to feed dirty foreign children. And their animals, too. One stop shopping-- they can all feed out of the same trough.

The cereal's chief use was as a humanitarian insult.

You might wonder at this point, What possible connection is there between the clown theme and explosions, as suggested by the name "Kaboom"? Well, don't bother thinking about it too hard. They sure didn't. This product was slapped together more or less randomly by People Who Didn't Even Care, intended for sale to People Who Care Just a Little Bit Less Than That.

Kaboom is not really a product designed for those who enjoy the life of the mind. Quite the opposite. It's a product designed for those whose subnormal IQs locate them in the brutish twilight existence that divides, hazily, the crude human from the cunning beast.

The cereal is essentially designed with an eye towards the inevitable devolution of the species. Future-proof, if you will.

If the Morlocks had a cereal it would be Kaboom. But they'd insist on more flavor.

Wow, Kaboom, 45% of some vitamins and iron.
Way to swing for the fences on nutrition.
You know what 45% is in school? That's right, it's a failure.
Kaboom relentlessly transmits the message that Failure Is Freedom.
And I can't wait to cut out that "Circus Game" and
play with some cardboard, either.
It's like it's designed to teach kids that the power
of imagination will only end in embarrassment.

Kaboom was made with a special secret ingredient: Contempt.

Did I eat Kaboom as a kid? You bet I did. If I didn't, I wouldn't have such a strong memory about it. If I never ate Kaboom, I would have just said, "Oh, that's the cereal that other children whose parents don't love them eat."

But no. I ate Kaboom. Quite a few times. More times I care to remember. And every time my mom brought home that garish yellow box of sorrows, I had the same thought: "Ohhh... we're that sort of people then, eh? We're just not even keeping up appearances anymore, are we, Mother?"

We weren't. And although we struggled to deny it to ourselves, we were now Kaboom People.

The truth is a relentless hunter.

Oh, we didn't quite sink to Kaboom's level. Not at first.

We strove to endure.

We were fighters.

But the cereal did drag the family down. It very nearly ruined us all.

And this is hard to say, but -- in the end we surrendered ourselves to Kaboom.

The "New Look" of Kaboom attempted
to make the cereal more "relevant" to kids in the 80s,
apparently seeking to play on fears of nuclear holocaust.

Ultimately, our sin wasn't in consuming Kaboom. Our sin was in letting Kaboom consume us.

We Descended.

We found the Kaboom Folk, or rather, they found us. The Kaboom Folk know their own. The downcast eyes, the twitch in a shameful smile. The know the Signs.

And then together we went wild into the night, without shame and without shoe, running petty scams at the carnival, stealing newspapers out of boxes and selling them for a nickel, eking out a rough existence at the grubby margins of human habitation.

Half-feral urban nomads living in communion with packs of wild dogs. For six months I wore nothing but a a fur jerkin and a genital sock.

My pack name was Mokh-Mokh.

And each night we came back from our scavengings to our shelterpit to eat our Kaboom, our shabby bowl of weirdly-colored animal feed and shame. But we no longer cared. We were free, but it was not true freedom.

It was only the dark, oatey freedom of Kaboom. A freedom I would not wish upon my worst enemy, or even the urban dogs who would fight us for pigeon carcasses.

Nowadays I can afford any sort of cereal I like. I can even spring the extra quarter for the high-class muesli-inflected Eurocereals if I like.

But I'll never escape where I came from. And where I came from was Kaboomville. Population: A ghastly clown, his stupid pink-purple parasol, and me. With my spoon, crying into my oddly discolored milk.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 03:23 PM | Comments (850)
Post contains 1812 words, total size 12 kb.

You know what's even more anti-constitutional than a president who makes mockery of Congress' power to declare war?

A Congress which makes mockery of Congress' power to declare war.

I'm glad the Foreign Relations Committee took, what, seriously?, six total hours to consider the question of embarking the nation on the path to war? We have to exclude lunch breaks, bathroom breaks, and McCain's Poker Jones, of course.

And weren't they scheduled for a closed-door classified briefing? And they did all this, plus visit their mistresses, in one day?

Could they at least pretend to be thinking about important matters?

Nah, let's ignore rules that provide for a minimum period for contemplation so we can just get to the fait accompli. We know no one is bothering to think about this, or look at the facts, or ask critical questions; perhaps we should praise them for not insulting our intelligence any further by going through the pantomime of pretense that they are doing such things.

So far, in the house, the bushes are not yet overflowing with warberries. So far, it's 46 in favor, 169 against.

Let's listen to Allah because he bothers to read this crap:

Of the 169 nays, 124 come from the GOP and 45 come from liberal Democrats. The obvious strategy here for undecided Dems, then, is to sit back and wait to see if Republicans can produce 49 more nays on their own to defeat the measure. There are 98 undecided GOPers, so if they split exactly in half then the resolution is dead and Democratic fencesitters can go ahead and vote yes en masse. That way they can say they had ObamaÂ’s back while not fearing too much backlash from the anti-war remnants of their base for supporting a measure that ended up dying anyway. WhatÂ’s truly worrisome for O here is that, even on the Democratic side, thereÂ’s slightly more early opposition than there is support (just 35 votes). That means he wonÂ’t be able to scapegoat the GOP for blocking the resolution if the House torpedoes it.

Does Obama really care? No seriously, let's think about it. Obama is a Gestural President. He doesn't necessarily want to do things; he wants to be credited as Thinking Good Thoughts About Things.

I don't know if Obama gives a crap if this passes or not. If it doesn't pass he could do the whole, "I was spoilin' for a fight but my pussy buddies held me back, man."

In fact, now that I read to the end of that piece, there's a possibility that Obama may be looking to get... rejected by just the House, so he can frame them for inaction?

I don't really understand that part. That Obama just wants the Senate to vote yes and the House to not vote at all? What?

I suppose if the AUMF is going to fail, they'd want to "voluntarily withdraw it for future consideration," to let Assad know that there might be more than one vote, so he'd better cool it with the gas.

Over on Breitbart, I floated the stupidest Conspiracy Theory I'd ever heard. And I know it must be the stupidest, because it issued forth from the bountiful cornucopia of dumb that is Joe Biden's bottomless, tireless, relentless, pitiless moronmouth.

[Drew: I corrected the name of the committee in the headline]

Posted by: Ace at 02:27 PM | Comments (255)
Post contains 602 words, total size 4 kb.

You know, if I only had to write twice a week, I'm pretty sure I could avoid sounding stupid at least one of those two times.

Not Thomas Friedman.

We need to use every diplomatic tool we have to shame Assad, his wife, Asma, his murderous brother Maher and every member of his cabinet or military whom we can identify as being involved in this gas attack. We need to bring their names before the United Nations Security Council for condemnation. We need to haul them before the International Criminal Court. We need to make them famous. We need to metaphorically put their pictures up in every post office in the world as people wanted for crimes against humanity.

Yes, thereÂ’s little chance of them being brought to justice now, but do not underestimate how much of a deterrent it can be for the world community to put the mark of Cain on their foreheads so they know that they and their families can never again travel anywhere except to North Korea, Iran and Vladimir PutinÂ’s dacha. It might even lead some of AssadÂ’s supporters to want to get rid of him and seek a political deal.

blahblahablahblah

i'm like totally phoning this in i wonder if anyone can tell

i gotta give it to myself, i'm pretty good at writing total nonsense which liberals are too intellectually insecure to call such

i'm pretty good at appeasing my bien pensant base without saying anything except to pander to them about easy choices and Diversity and the Marvels of Chinese Tyranny

i mean right here i'm writing a column pandering to liberals' desire to not intervene, but rather than speak to them like adults and say we're choosing between the evil of intervention and the evil of nonintervention, i'm spinning this ridiculous tale about "shaming" where we can have the world for no cost at all

but i know my audience... they just want to hear Serious You Guys Solar Energy is a Real Thing

good lord i'm gassier than nickel hot dogs...

mmm... hot dogs...

why don't restaurants offer spaghettio's with hot dogs..? i'd buy it...

i wonder what's on TLC... ooh hoarders marathon

i gotta summon up all my writerly powers now and Finish Strong, maybe with some em-dashes and a breezy parallelism

It is easy for Putin, China and Iran to denounce American bombing, but much harder for them to defend Syrian use of weapons of mass destruction, so let’s force them to choose. Best of all, a moral response — a shaming — can be an unlimited response, not a limited one.

Some of that might not be technically part of his column, but it seems implicit in what idiots would call "The Text," with capital letters, just like that.

Posted by: Ace at 01:12 PM | Comments (634)
Post contains 485 words, total size 3 kb.

I don't judge him for being a fan of masturbation -- let him without sin blast the worst sock -- but I will insist he swallows his food before he talks.

That's just manners, man.

Via Hot Air but like really via everywhere.

I dunno. Beatin' up on Anthony Weiner seems like pure muscle memory at this point. He's not going to win the primary.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:21 PM | Comments (207)
Post contains 82 words, total size 1 kb.

Infuriating. A bakery has decided it has no choice but to sell cakes from home -- hopefully turning a business into a "private endeavor" beyond the power of the state to coerce.

And thus Americans are forced into unemployment by a movement drunk on self-righteousness and acting with every bit of the bullying cruelty they complain of in others.

I have little doubt that these operations are not being chosen haphazardly-- I believe they're being targeted for just this purpose.

Because scratch beneath the surface of any leftist, and you'll find... well, a leftist, which means a person with a sadistic interest in using the machinery of the state to crush those who think and live differently than himself.

In an earlier thread, I commented, in reply to someone else (Soona? Soothsayer? One of the S's, anyway):

The MFM have invested their all in [Obama]. He's also the idol of their leftist passion. They'll never turn on him.

Obama is not a politician; he is the Highest Exemplar of a Cultural Type. He therefore does not represent just a politics but pinned to him are the aspirations and hopes for validation of a cultural cohort, the New Class.

The media could no more disown him than they could their own White Grandmother.

The only thing keeping me sane is viewing things in these humorous (but true) terms, a bunch of people who think They're Doing Politics but are really only engaging in perpetual self-flattery.

I guess I get very annoyed when I see this going on on the right too, with the various overheated arguments between RINOs and Traditionalists which, let's face it, are overheated precisely because they're Not Really About Politics but rather vindicating and championing one's cultural heritage.

We need to put that aside. Government isn't about vindicating a cultural cohort's minor preferences and mode of life, it's about creating a set of policies which will promote the most cultural cohorts to live their lives in peace, without interference.

But what we see here in Oregon -- as we saw earlier in New Mexico, and as we will see everywhere, unless we do not pass a law sharply delimiting people's right to sue people for unamerican, subversive crime of nonconformity with the current temporary government's ephemeral cultural allegiances -- is the attempt of a group of people who have long contended that they merely wish to be left alone to live their lives in peace suddenly feeling a little power and deciding that now that they have a short-term burst of political muscle, they may now indulge in the bullying and coercion they once thought was kind of a bad thing.

People are monsters and government is worse, as the government is the internet of people -- it permits us to vent all of our hatreds and resentments behind the wall of anonymity and free of the typical social restraints that exist in face-to-face encounters.

The government is the Internet of Life's moderators, and depending on what four-year period we're in, it will tend to let one group of trolls or another run roughshod over people just trying their best to live their lives as they'd like.

Currently the government moderators are just smitten with the Hardcore Gay Triumphalist Trolls & Vengeance Committee.

The Hardcore Gay Triumphalist Trolls & Vengeance Committee should reexamine its assumptions. They will not always have Friendly Moderators.

They might want to start considering the benefits of a society in which the government intrudes less into people's lives and does less coercing towards what the government, at any particular moment, considers The Right Way To Be Which Is Now Subject To Court Order and Enforcement.

No minority, political, racial, or sexual, should be entirely comfortable with making each and every of their actions, thoughts, and beliefs subject to Majority Vote.

Posted by: Ace at 11:20 AM | Comments (567)
Post contains 664 words, total size 4 kb.

From Hot Air.

I think there's a meta point here, in as much as it's left to Al Jazeera America to report the truth that the American media refuses to.

The report by an independent panel of five security and intelligence experts describes how the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi, Libya, which left Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans dead, exploited the State Department's failure to address serious security concerns at diplomatic facilities in high-risk areas.

Among the most damning assessments, the panel concluded that the State Department's failure to identify worsening conditions in Libya and exemptions from security regulations at the U.S. Special Mission contributed to the tragedy in Benghazi. Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy approved using Benghazi as a temporary post despite its significant vulnerabilities, according to an internal State Department document included with the report.

Ed Morrissey notes that it's a small miracle that this report utters the name "Patrick Kennedy" at all, because the laughinstock "Accountability Review Board" deliberately looked only at low level people and wouldn't even question Hillary Clinton, for example-- explaining, in an incredible Admission Against Interest, that "[w]e knew where the responsibility rested" in advance of the inquiry itself.

Yes, you did "know where responsibility rested," or, rather, you knew where you where instructed to find it rested. You don't have to conduct an investigation when you already have the Official Approved Conclusion in hand.

When we see this sort of behavior in the corporate world, we rightly laugh and roll our eyes cynically. Yes yes yes, it's always "low level employees" who did these terrible or stupid things without the knowledge of the people being paid a million or more a year. Of course! Of course low-level dummies routinely run circles around their Masters of the Universe managers and corporate officers.

The fact is the United States Government is, in fact, a corporation, yes, a sort of corporation, a perpetually existing fictional person. And yes, all that bad behavior the liberal drive-by media is determined to expose in the Corporations You Guys exists to twice the extent in Government, Incorporated.

Remember these people have "Real Careers."

Real Careers You Guys.

Posted by: Ace at 10:32 AM | Comments (260)
Post contains 393 words, total size 3 kb.

Philosophy professors Alex Rosenburg and Tyler Curtain ask, “What is economics good for?”. And the answer, as far as they can tell, is “Not much.” Richard Epstein, a noted libertarian law professor, dissents somewhat from this view.

Normally I would be in full-throated agreement with Professor Epstein, but I think he kind of misses the point in his essay (though his heart is certainly in the right place). Epstein's point, boiled down, is that even if economics is not predictive it still has value as a modeling theory and helps us to define our terms and establish boundaries when discussing economics. But here again economics falls down -- its practitioners cannot even agree on a basic model. Keynesian school? Austrian school? Chicago school? Marxist school? Anarcho-capitalist school? These models do not overlap much and often lead to wildly-different results. (Disclaimer: I am a partisan of the Austrian school of economics.)

Economics is not a science of any kind (though I guess you could wedge it in as a sub-specialty of human psychology). It is not predictive, and not at all rigorous either in theory or practice. Never mind the fancy mathematics or complex models: modern economics isn't far removed from astrology or the casting of bones or reading tea leaves. more...

Posted by: Monty at 04:15 AM | Comments (152)
Post contains 992 words, total size 7 kb.

Perfect. In related news, The Hill has signed Andrew Sullivan to write a column on "The Human Reproductive System & Other Lies."

Also joining The Hill: This dog.

"Have you guys seen Levitated Mass?!?!!"

Update: Nevermind. Politico blew it. Never trust content from Politico.

"Correction: It was our initial impression that Carville's entire
column would be dedicated to modern Republicanism and modern
conservatism. That is only the subject of his first column."

Attempting to retain some reason for this now-exposed-as-even-more-of-a-nothing-post-than-it-already-was-post...

Posted by: Ace at 09:21 AM | Comments (465)
Post contains 144 words, total size 2 kb.

Live now on CSPAN (live stream here).

Should be fun to watch him explain how it's their fault Obama is in this mess and how it's their credibility on the line.

Thanks to John E. for the photo.

Meanwhile, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is supposed to be marking up the resolution. It doesn't seem like it's going well. John "Jack High" McCain wants it to be tougher.

One other note...heck of a job by Boehner and Cantor yesterday. Instead of waiting for Obama to make his case they came right out and supported him. In thanks, Obama blamed Congress for putting the country in this position. They are so afraid of being called bad names they simply cave for no reason and get smacked around anyway for their efforts

Posted by: DrewM at 08:29 AM | Comments (265)
Post contains 155 words, total size 1 kb.