Look forward in anticipation to this week's quizzes

Tuesday, May 25, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: '80s MOVIES

Wednesday, May 26, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: FRUIT

Great quizzo event for Philly Beer Week at El Camino Real on June 8

At our normal Tuesday 9pm slot at El Camino Real, as part of Philly Beer Week, we're going to have a brew-heavy quizzo. Obviously the Subject Round will be Beer.

Better yet, zymurgists from Philadelphia Brewing Company will be at the bar to inform you about the suds, and give away generous amounts of swag. Don't miss this one!

SkyTruth and The Oil Drum: Two of your only sources for the truth about the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster

With the corporate media, the White House, the Coast Guard (who apparently now take direct orders from British Petroleum) and even the NOAA downplaying the extent of the disaster, I point you to a couple of solid sources of informed fact and opinion on it all.

SkyTruth for the past few years has used satelite imagery to track the truth of the scope of environmental crimes. Their awesome site has a blog devoted lately to the developing story, and a great project called the Gulf Oil Spill Tracker to let Gulf and East Coast residents be their own media. SkyTruth is estimating the size of the spill to be one or more orders of magnitude larger than official sources have claimed.

The Oil Drum is a forum for discussion of Peak Oil issues. In the news and comments sections you'll find a great deal of often technical discussion about what must really be going on, mostly from current and former petroleum drilling and engineering professionals.

With a general censorship of imagery and real news about the disaster coming from the government, BP and corporate media, websites like these are an underutilized resource to keep from being ignorant of reality.

Tuesday night's quiz might start just a bit late

Tuesday, May 18, 9:15pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: ELECTIONS

Note that I will be serving my first day tomorrow as Minority Inspector of Elections for my electoral Ward and Division in the Pennsylvania primaries. Polls close at 8pm and I'm listing this quiz's start time 15 minutes later just in case I am a bit late.

Wednesday, May 19, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: FRUIT

Call him Ishmael; Obama sharpens the harpoon for another senseless generation of ... commercial whaling?!

Before we get directly to the subject of Barack Obama's otherwise inexplicable hard-on for resuming commercial whaling, a bit of background-setting is in order.

As I remind people with hypnotic regularity, I voted for Ralph Nader in 2008 as I did in the previous three presidential elections. I'm actually in that tiny minority of people who wrote Ralph in back in 1996, following four years of Bill Clinton kicking labor and the environmental movement sharply in the nutsack (fast-track NAFTA for starters), bombing a variety of countries to no coherent end, denying Iraqi children too young to know what an "Iraq" is chemotherapy, ramping up military spending and, just in case you were still wondering whether or not he's a decent fellow, electrocuting the lobotomized.

Those of us who have been paying a modicum of attention over the past 30 years and ditched the two big corporate parties have the Mother of All I Told You So's owed us, so allow me that much. It's the consolation prize for my society taking the greased shitslide to Hell.

I voted for the Arkansas Dressstainer in '92, swept away in the precursor idiocy to Obamamania that was Clinton/Gore. Almost immediately I knew I wasted my first-ever presidential vote, and unlike nearly all voting Americans I felt my share of personal responsibility for getting suckered by what in retrospect was such an obvious matched pair of narcissist social climbers and sociopaths, the Bilary Clinton. Should've gone with Ross Perot. Weird dude, but at least he understood that sending decent jobs out of the country was eventually suicidal, and for all his billions he seems to retain some sense of noblesse oblige toward working folk. Since the first Reagan term that's more than you get out of the vast majority of Democrats, and the less said about the same count on the Republican side of our political River Styx the better.

Ever since Barack Obama made a stomach-churning war prayer of a keynote speech as an opening act for militarist, homophobe demi-billionaire John Kerry in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention - essentially a sort of demented coming out debutante ball to run him by the war industry and Wall Street for approval - it was evident to me that Obama was a similar form of Clintonesque social climbing cutthroat with the soulless reptilian eyes and meaningless, dead language of the Ivy League arriviste.

Four years of taking the el from a lower middle class Philadelphia rowhome to the University of Pennsylvania every day - a journey more of class than distance - was more than enough to help me spot the species from a football field away for the rest of my life. There exists a particular breed of Ivy Leaguer who is smart enough to sound philosophic but not actually an intellectual. This is actually the majority of students. Within that category are the cunning bastards who have risen from middle class backgrounds with the awareness that they can make great strides in escaping the middle classes and catapult themselves to nouveau riche status by prostrating themselves to power and molding their minds as tools of empire. The process begins at a frighteningly young age. The Bilary Clinton and Barack Obama are this type of pseudo-intellectual power elite, its most venomous subspecies.

Thus I can never say I am disappointed by Obama as many liberals do. Disappointment requires expectation. What I can say is that even I have been stunned by the level of the Obama Administration's general depravity.

In order to climb higher and faster in the ranks of America's elite in one lifetime - and these are the people who started at home plate or on first base as opposed to most of our elite, who were born rounding third - it is vital that the middle class elite-aspirant display a cartoonish servitude to the powerful and partake in acts beyond the usual bounds of cruelty to those in the middle and lower tiers of the social pyramid. The Baracks and Bilarys climb to the top on the mounds of dead and bleeding poor. (Those who think I exaggerate have clearly never had too many discussions of length with Wharton sophomores in the Penn Commuter Lounge.)

The elite doesn't want anyone who's going to shake things up and make life easier for the serfs should they be allowed to play with government, so any kid from a working family who wants to get a shot at running the CIA or Goldman Sachs or the World Bank, or even have some office just below that level like President of the United States, is pretty much going to have to do the moral equivalent of setting kittens on fire in order to prove loyalty to the top 1% of the human food chain.

For example, if George W. Bush - born and bred for the power elite - is going to fry white trash in Texas as governor and laugh about it, that really ups the ante for the children of the Lumpenproletariat. How does one follow that act? A working class kid from Arkansas is going to need to fly back to Little Rock during a campaign and make sure personal-like that a black near-vegetable got the life shocked out of him. Fry a brain damaged black man while the country watches, and the power elite begins to trust you. Take money from a weakened organized labor already on its knees for your campaign, then turn around and fuck them on an unprecedented scale, and you and your business partner/spouse are well on the road to being worth $100 million.

We had 8 years of George W. Bush, which was like a decade of Caligula minus the fun bits. If the power elite of this cursed, declining superpower was going to let a half-African, middle class psuedo-academic co-run the country with Wall Street and the Pentagon, they had to be damn sure he wasn't going to 'go rogue' on them like that class traitor FDR, and start treating the serfs like humans.

Thus far Obama has not disappointed the machinations of Empire on any count.

Crippled kids vs. landmine manufacturers? Obama sides with the latter.

The world's oceans vs. some more oil? Drill baby drill.

The telecom industry vs. your privacy? Bye bye privacy.

War criminals vs. the general public? Happy day for war criminals.

Your right to know? No.

Civilians vs. mercenaries? Fuck you, civilians!

21st century unions vs. 19th century management? Duh.

It's in this twisted psychological realm that I can find the only Occam's Razor-worthy explanation of Obama's decision to lift the moratorium on commercial whaling. It takes one sick fuck to advocate killing the oceans' remaining whales. It takes an even sicker fuck to advocate the same in his first term when it's so obvious that this is cartoonishly in opposition to everything that his voting base claims to give a flying crap about. Obama could have proposed pissing in every liberal family's refrigerator and this would have had the same effect on his approval rating with that demographic.

Whale killing? We're talking about the industry that started to decline in the US following the discovery of oil in Western Pennsylvania in 1859, and was down to one operable commercial vessel in 1924? (This happens to be fresh in mind as American Experience had a two-hour show about the topic tonight, which is delicious irony.) We're talking about the caricature pet issue of the American liberal from 35 years ago? We're talking about an issue that was so dead that Rush Limbaugh and Fox News haven't even been advocating it.

Whaling. Whaling. For profit. In 2010 AD.

Is pedophilia being saved up for the 2012 campaign trail? "Barack NAMBLAma" would be just slightly less popular than whaling (it'd be close), but as there doesn't appear to be much money in it maybe that won't be the signature depredation of 2011. If Goldman Sachs figures out how to make a buck from cornholing toddlers, all bets are off.

B.O. isn't just advocating opening most of the American coast to offshore drilling, he's bringing back whaling. Finally caving to the big pro-whaling lobby in DC, are we? It's those millions of people in the whaling unions who don't want to lose their jobs, is it?

No, this doesn't make sense. Unlike being bought by the oil industry, this one doesn't pay large enough to justify the public backlash. There's something darker and deeper at work. There's something twisted when you have to rub your voters' noses in it on Earth Day.

Obama's not misguided from his true intentions nor is he misadvised, as many of the usual suspect "liberal" and "progressive" websites have clung to, the way beaten wives cling to the notion that really do fall down the steps and accidentally land on both eye sockets every Friday night. He's an ambitious, power-hungry sick bastard who does bad things that hurt innocent people and the planet, often both at once, usually so some obese plutocrat can make a nickel. He has internalized the priorities of the worst elements of the power elite, and in fact takes additional overcompensating steps that a psychologically secure rich kid like W. wouldn't bother with.

Once W. trashed the constitution, slaughtered civilians, gave billions to industry... what could Obama do as a second act? Sure, he's kept trashing the constitution, slaughtered cilvilians apace, gave a trillion to industry...

... but if you really want to be in the club, if you really want to be in the power elite and make Clinton-style money ...

... you have to take scads of $5 donations from liberal grandmas and get 23 year old minority kids to vote for you for the first time in their lives, then use the power they gave you to kill the fucking whales for a small temporary profit for white people who are already rich.

That makes sense. It's immoral and insane, but it has a working internal narrative. It has cause and effect.

If loyal Democrats had any spine, they'd be calling for the impeachment of this asshole and demanding their campaign contributions back. Of course at this point you could gut every loyal Dem from Boston to San Francisco like a... well, like a sperm whale in Barack's Magical Lagoon, and not find enough verterbrae material to build a decent baboon, thus as usual I fear I hope for too much. No? Prove me wrong.

For a final pathetic, tragicomic look at the degraded position of the Obama voter, check out Save the Whale Activists for Obama from the 2008 campaign. Says the webpage's designer: "Although I'm not sure if any candidate has spoken about the whale crisis, I'm sure Barack Obama would be the most caring toward whales." Indeed. Your son will be equally safe in his care doing some work for him in Afghanistan, so by all means swing by the Army recruitment office if Junior needs a job.

Interestingly I learned tonight that in Moby-Dick, Herman Melville intended the sinking Pequod as a metaphor for the Republic itself driven to destruction by the mad impetus of blind national ambition, personified by Capatin Ahab. Whaling. Yeah, makes sense for Obama.

This week's quizzes; no word yet on Thursday nights

Tuesday, May 11, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: ARKANSAS

Wednesday, May 12, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: SCIENTISTS

Thursday, May 6, c. 9:30pm
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)

Seeing as graduation takes place this Thursday, the quiz is done for the term at Temple. I'm scheduled to return in September.

There is a strong possibility I'll be picking up a West Philly quiz this summer, hopefully Thursday evenings. I'm looking to fill Mondays as well. The Thursday night place has been dragging their feet in getting back to me with details, I'll let you all know what's going on as soon as I do.

A very masculine set of quiz Subject rounds this week

Tuesday, May 4, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: SAILORS

Wednesday, May 5, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: FRANCE

Thursday, May 6, c. 9:30pm
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)
Subject Round: MUSICALS

Final game of the Spring term. Thanks to the Temple U. community for another great term! I'll see you again in the Fall and possibly sooner at a special event this summer. Note the later starting time, I'm doing the irregularly scheduled Univeristy of Maryland Alumni quiz earlier in the evening in Center City.

Reaping the benefits of "drill baby drill" with Mr. Hope and Change

Just a few weeks ago, our fraudulent asshole president (the latest in a series of wholly corporate-owned turds masquerading as leaders) stood in front of a fighter jet on a military base and backed the Sarah Palin "drill baby drill" mantra as a national energy policy. This was no surprise to me as it is and was self-evident that Obama/Biden was in no way different than McCain/Palin on any issue of import, save for the bizarre fact that self-described "liberals" agree with a position when a Democrat takes it up and are critical of the same position on the same issue when a Republican takes it up, which is about 95% of the time.Those of us who held out hope for doing better and voted for Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, the Libertarians, Ron Paul or so forth were duly lectured less than 2 years ago for our irresponsibility in not backing the Obama Wall Street/corporate/war machine. My wilder fantasies include Obama voters being organized to mop up the Gulf Coast with "Yes We Can!" T-shirts - their first practical usage ever (both the shirts and the voters themselves) - but I ask for too much.

Any self-respecting "liberal" should have serious concerns about an energy policy written by corporate lobbyists, cheerleaded by a president beholden to rapacious corporate America and presented in front of an instrument of war currently being used to kill people on the other side of the planet in order to secure access to their energy reserves. As Democratic voters gave up self-respect decades ago no such audible complaint was registered. "Yes we can!"

UPDATE: Obama was the #1 recipient of British Petroleum money in the US Senate in 2008, receiving twice as much money from them as John McCain (which is not, you understand, a point in McCain's favor).

Obama was opening up most of the Atlantic seaboard - oil clumps at Wildwood, party on! - as well as even larger areas of the Gulf of Mexico and Alaskan coast to this sort of deep-sea offshore drilling which is essentially impossible to do in any environmentally responsible way. Environmentally responsible is actually something of an understatement; it's impossible to do this crap in any way which isn't sociopathic.

The only small satisfaction that comes from this unmitigated disaster - entirely possibly the worst single-incident disaster of its sort in US history - is that it might slow down or even, if people act up and fight back for a change, halt - the Bush/Cheney/Obama/Biden/Palin plans to do even more offshore drilling off most of the American coast. Hopefully too people might slowly wake to see, as if his positions on war and human rights and the health insurance industry and the Wall Street bailout and even frightening recent comments on the Warren and Burger courts didn't make it obvious enough - what a complete and total corporate whore and warmonger jackass Obama is. He's not your buddy. He doesn't share your dreams. He shits on your rights and opinions. He's a bitch boy for Goldman Sachs, landmine manufacturers and British Petroleum.

Instead of pumping major money and laws into clean renewables such as wind and solar, Obama heeds his corporate masters' voice and drills baby drills. He is also using billions in taxpayer funds to reanimate the uninsurable corporate disasters waiting to happen that are the nuke industry. It's as if Chernobyl and Three Mile Island never happened.


Still don't think Barry O's a jackass? How about his Cheney-like support of (ahem) "clean coal."

Beyond the irreparable wildlife deaths and ruination of our common property in the form of national preserves, this disaster is going to wipe out livelihoods and tax revenues in large parts of four US states. BP will never be held accountable for all that entails, not with the two corporate parties in charge. (My simple solution to this on the economic side is the corporate death penalty; freeze the assets of BP in the US, nationalize them to pay for whatever necessarily insufficient clean up happens and as reparations for Gulf Coast residents... and pull its corporate charters so they can't kill again.) Fortunately it is possible that as vacations and fishing trips are cancelled, as seafood markets are ruined and unemployment claims increase, the drill baby drill politicians can and must be taken the fuck down this year and in 2012. Don't buy any BS about a 30 day review in order to start drilling off of our coasts "responsibly."

Obama now has his own Hurricane Katrina-times-ten. Well deserved by him, not at all deserved by its victims. How refreshing that as the crude oil sullies the southern United States it also finally begins to sully the empty Obama marketing myth. Who will be our next Kanye West for this disaster, finally declaring in public in plain language that "Barack Obama doesn't care about working people"?

Happy May Day