I Think It's The Shifty Eyes...

Speaking of dorky Lord of the Rings crap, H.D. Miller seems to have found a certain striking similarity between the trilogy's most interesting character and the real world's most annoying political commentator. Think about it, won't you?

The Haul

Well, well, well, I had myself a merry little Christmas, and I hope y'all did to. I don't know what the hell people are talking about with a decline in consumer demand, but there certainly weren't no such thing at the Mojo family gathering. Pop's got himself a shiny new printer, the kid sister got a sweet little MP3 player, and the 3-year old niece got a mountain of gifts. I got my much coveted History of Britain (thanks Pops!) along with a collection of John Wayne movies, the collector's edition of the first Lord of the Rings DVD (accompanied by a very nice hardbound and illustrated edition of the ring trilogy) from a good friend, and other fine assorted gifts from many other family / friends. My dork heart sings in happiness.

Everyone else got an assload of miscellaneous crap. Consumer demand indeed.

I Really Get Into This Christmas Spirit Thing

My Christmas gift to the Blogosphere:

Have a good one folks! Hohoho...

Rawk, Rawk, Rawk

Lexington Green over at Chicago Boyz has a very nice post on everyone's favorite all-girl rock band, The Donnas.

I hear they're touring with OK Go at the beggining of the year, so make sure and see 'em if you get the chance.

Rope-A-Dope Redone

My blogparents are fighting. How it pains a young boy like myself to hear their screams. I pretend to sleep as the yelling shatters the nighttime quiet. Oh, the agony I suffer, the hurtful words that I must desperately try to live in denial of. Surely, it's somehow my fault.

Well, OK, it's not that bad. I spend my nights crying myself to sleep over entirely unrelated matters. However, over the past week or so, Bill Quick and Stephen Green do seem to have made clear a significant difference of opinion regarding the Bush administration's plans against Saddam Hussein.

Quick is convinced that the Bush administration is not serious about persecuting a total war against the enemies of America. He views the White House moves over the past few months as caving to the hostility and obstructionism of the UN, and that we have slackened in our response to all the many threats we face. He seems to be firmly convinced that the Bushies lack any of the conviction that their earlier rhetoric demands. A list of his concerns are listed in this post.

Green disagreed with almost everything Quick had to say. He believes that things are, more or less, going on as they should, and that the one threat that we face that can easily be dealt with through military force will be being dealt with by the start of February.

Dr. Frank has titled it the Cockeyed optimist vs. the Clear-eyed Skeptic debate, and for the most part agrees with the Daily Pundit, but I don't see it quite that simply.

My $.02? The argument boils down to a choice between one of two possibilities: the Bushies have some kind of plan and goals in dealing with the greater threats facing the west, or they don't. We can only judge the administration's motives and goals from the information they've provided or through their actions. And our information set is still insufficient to make any kind of reasonable conclusion.

If there is an overall administration plan to deal with the ol' Axis of Vile Dipshits, it may not be what you or I may expect or want. Bush is still a politician, and always has eyes on reelection. This means any plans he makes will take two things in mind; 1) don't screw up the economy, and, 2) win any wars decisively. That means that, no matter how hawkish the administration is, we're not going to be invading Riyadh any time soon. There is no replacement for Saudi oil yet. The Bush administration has also, for the sake of dovish political sentiment at home and the whining throngs abroad, tried to dismiss the unilateralist cowboy image by working through the UN. How serious it takes these international attempts is unknowable to anyone outside of the inner circle.

If there is no plan (or worse yet, as Quick and Frank suggest, Bush has simply decided to let the status quo continue like a common European socialist), there isn't much to talk about, because we're fucked.

Since the beginning of this latest crisis, the administration has sent contradictory messages to Iraq, to foreign governments, and to the American people. One day Rumsfield is glibly bragging about how we're going bomb ol' uncle Saddam back to the stone age, and the next we have Ari announcing that the president still thinks there can be a peaceful solution. If we were to take all these various leaks, press briefings, and speeches at their face value, we do have a confused administration. However, that would entail taking politicians at their word, which is something I'm quite incapable of doing. The administration is lying (or is simply inconsistent, depending on how combative you feel towards Washington doublespeak today) about Iraq. It has been from the start, and it will continue to do so in the future. Whether this is actually rope-a-dope™, or just your average political filth is not clear as of now. 2004 is on the horizon, after all.

For now, I tend to be in the same camp as Vodkapundit. I see troops moving into position, hear the words "Material Breach" being spoken by none other than SOS Colin Powell, and I see action coming. The Carrier Battle groups are moving into position and reserves are being called up. One war at a time, and the right opponent at the right time. And Iraq is it for now. Then we can deal with other threats. Blind Optimism? Perhaps, but the alternative is not fun to think about.

My real hope is that the buildup will force one of Saddam's Colonels to put a bullet in the dictator's head and deliver the Hussein children to the US in hogties, thus saving needless deaths in an invasion. War is a nasty business after all, and we'd all prefer to avoid it. However, that ideal solution is not something we can plan on, and when the time comes, Bush has to decide to move forward.

Whether he does or doesn't, it's out of our hands for now. Bush has all the authority he needs to act; he has the consent of the US Congress. He will or won't act at the end of January.

As a final note on the subject of the wider struggle, Bill Quick writes at the end of the post that started it all:

So, rope-a-dopes, you call this sort of a thing a victory? I call it a mess we'll be fixing for the next generation, whether Saddam stays or goes. And you're more than welcome to it.

But this has been a generational mess from day one. Ever since the snooty colonials drew their squiggly little lines on maps and got the hell outta dodge, this simmering hatred of America has been building. Military force is necessary to weaken our enemies, to deny them funding, sanctuary, and safe haven and to protect our cities. Without these actions, we would be doomed. However, our offensives are really just the defense, holding the line and keeping the hoards at bay. Final victory won't come through missiles and guns, or crashing through dictator's bunkers, but will come instead through blue jeans, rock music, and Baywatch reruns.

Iran was the first nation to go fundamentalist in the Middle East, and 20 years of tyrannical religious rule is starting to crack as the young realize that their lives suck more now than their parent's did under the Shaw. We'll need to show the next generation of Islam that Islamofascist regimes suck all the joy out of life, and will kill their own in mass for minor offences, all the while stifling economies and keeping the populace in medieval conditions, whereas Western culture keeps bellies fed, families safe, and fun alive. This is a flippant view of the issue, of course, but I think a valid one.

Now, please, stop the fighting guys, you're frieghtening young Mojo!

A Wonderful Life Is For Pansies, or, "You'll shoot your eye out kid!"

There are a billion holiday comedies out there. Almost all are heavy on the sap, and light on the hardy-har-har. I would just blame the whole mess on that wussball Chris Columbus, but it seems this horrible trend dates back many decades. Home Alone was certainly not the first shitty movie to pull at the collective heartstrings of America's emotional retards. George Bailey was really just following the literary footsteps of that sissy Ebenezer Scrooge, now wasn’t he?

However, in the long line of these dismal crap movies, there is one glorious, brilliant film. A movie that reaches deep into the heart of the Middle American Christmas experience. I speak of none other than 1983's A Christmas Story. In this epic tale of a boy, his lust for a magnificant BB Gun, and the Christmas spirit, which is clearly revealed to be both terrible and fantastic.

Now, I first saw this movie when I was a very young lad. Probably no older than Ralphie's kid brother. I was stunned at how it captured family life so well: the overprotective mother, the angry, insane, profanity shouting, but ultimately decent father, the idiot classmates, and the imaginative internal world of young Ralfie. It superbly melded the twisted and the normal, all with the delightful narration of the story's original author, Jean Shepherd.

And any movie about an 11 year old that contains the line, "Only one thing in the world could've dragged me away from the soft glow of electric sex gleaming in the window" or the Chinese restaurant Christmas carol, really can't be all that bad, now can it?

So there you have it. A Christmas Story, a family classic that even your average misanthrope (i.e. me) can enjoy.

The Madness That Is A Mojo Family Christmas

The Kid Sister has just posted pictures from the Mojo family Christmas tree at the Mojo Parent's house. 8 feet tall, and 6 feet wide, it is properly megalomaniacal. Last year they got some puny 6 foot tall midget tree, which outraged me. I bitched somethin' fierce, and you know what they say about the squeaky wheel. This year, our tree can eat your tree.

And yes, the homoerotic elves and effeminate Santa decorating the tree are a long standing family tradition. After decorating this monstrosity, we set out to gather earthworms in the rain and held the annual offensive noise contest. We're a very strange bunch, and I must never, ever, bring women home to meet the family.

Happy Festivus!

Could Hollywood Surprise Me?

I've certainly no great love for the acting skills of Leonardo Dicaprio, or any work that features him prominently. The upcoming Gangs of New York was to be no exception to that rule. However, the History Channel, in the latest of its ongoing cross-promotional History Vs. Hollywood shows, just featured the film. The hour long commercial was basically a lesson on 19th century New York's infamous Five Points neighborhood interspersed with clips from the film. And you know what, their vile synergistic marketing strategy worked on me.

It looks like a good movie. Lots o' old fashioned ultra-violence and proddie-papist tension. Daniel Day-Lewis' character looks particularly cool. The Leo-Cameron Diaz subplot reeks of shitty romance, but, hey, they've got to give the girly titanic crowd something, right? Anyways, the promotional machine has effectively influenced this monkey.

Speaking of the History Channel, the new show Conquest, hosted by actor Peter Woodward, rocks. Definitely check it out if you're channel surfing.

An Update To An Update

To futher clarify on my earlier Joan Jett Rolling Stone post, the actual letter to RS was written by New York rocker Maya Price. Thanks to her kind comment in said post, I'm now aware that her band is called Mother Goddess. Check her out y'all...

The Table Of Contents

For those who haven't seen it, The Federation of American Scientists has the TOC of the December 7 Iraqi weapons declaration report (PDF format) online for your perusal.

Let The Inevitable Hannibal Lecter Comparisons Begin

And the award for most stupendously fucked up news story of the year goes to... Penis Eating Cannibal Consumes Willing Victim.

No, that's not the title of some gay porn, it's a literal description of the story. The killer actually posted ads on Internet dating services looking for men that he could slaughter and eat. Several replied, and at least one respondent willingly became lunch. Sick, sick, puppies...

The Dipshit International

So your country is one of the western hemisphere's poorest. You've got high levels of poverty, a hefty drug trafficking problems, and burgeoning youth gang violence. What do you do to fix this problem?

Well, if you're Honduras, the answer should be obvious: ban violent video games.

I mean, we all know those teenage gangsters coming from impoverished ghettos would be the perfect little proles if they just weren't getting those pesky anti-social ideas from their brand new Playstation 2's, right?

Idjuts.

Ship Naming Fun

Interesting little tidbit, the Navy has decided to name the next Nimitz class carrier, the currently under construction CVN 77, after George Bush Sr. Me thinks some pentagon folks are brown nosing Jr somethin' awful.

Anyways, I'm down with presidents and all, but why can't we name these ships after battles, or glorious old ships like we used to back in the Good Old Days™. You know, like Saratoga, Yorktown, Lexington, or Intrepid. Cool ship names that have history behind them, and that aren't being used anymore. Right now Kitty Hawk, Constellation, and Enterprise are the last big boys with cool non-person names, and KH and Connie will both be decommisioned within the next 10 years. Sad really.

Somebody's Infected...

Ok, somebody keeps sending me emails infected with the Klez virus. It has to be coming from someone who's emailed me via the blog, since I don't use the captainmojo account for anything else. I'm protected against the bastard virus, but one of you, my dear readers, is infected and is sending out these accursed files.

The mail's headers say they're being routed through hostcentric.net, but I don't know how reliable (or useful) that information is. The virus is spoofing foxnewsonline@foxnews.com as the reply address, which I believe means that whoever's infected has that email address somewhere in their address book. I received several of them on Friday, none over the weekend, and several today, so that may indicate someone's work machine being on during the work week perhaps?

Always be on guard against the villainous virii Mojoteers!

The End Of The Line?

It seems the ol' blogosphere is going through a period of contraction and consolidation. Numerous stars in the mighty constellation warblog have dimmed, and some have even disappeared altogether. Even the stalwart Vodkapundit seems to be in hibernation. It is indeed a bleak time for bored news-junkies everywhere.

I too have suffered from a devastating case of writer's block. What little output I've managed has been piss-poor and petty. Not that there's anything wrong with piss-poor and petty. Hell, I love that kind of meaningless crap, but it seems like the magic hasn't been there lately. Oh, sure, there's still Donahue's dismal failure to brighten my day and give me fodder, but at the end of the line I don't feel satisfied with the site anymore.

It's not that I have a good excuse for not writing as much, as I did during my October hellproject, because I don't. In fact, if anything, I have a pathetic excess of freetime, lacking any kind of social life, and no real responsibility outside of work. What then has lead to the horrible decline? Part of it is that the initial romance has faded, of course. I've said all the quick and easy things, made all the cheap jokes. Is there really anything left to write about?

Of course there is you silly bugger. This is no farewell post, if that's what you were thinking. Happily, not all is collapse and decay in the blogdom. In fact, our good pal Will Wagner is back to blogging after a few months of silence. He's tanned, rested, and bringing up terrible memories of that wuss-fest MASH show. His return heartens me in these dark and boring online times.

I've been lazy, and the quality of my stuff has suffered, but this site is still enjoyable to me. I need some little creative outlet from the mundane world of coding or editing, and until I start working on the great American novel, this is that outlet. Plus I've paid for my server, so I ain't quitting for nothing. Some weeks I'll post more, some less. Life is good. Enjoy.

The Israeli Connection

Has anybody else found this story about American avionics technology winding up in Chinese hands (in the form of the new J-10 fighter) via arms deals with Israel disturbing?

I mean, we expect this crap from Russia, and even our "allies" in Europe, but Israel!?! I'm down with the Israelis and all, but they are an American client state, like it or not, and this kind of shit cannot be allowed to happen in the future

Stop Laughing... This is a Funeral

At the end of August, John Bono started the Donahue Show Death watch. A number of us amateur television critics posted our hopeful predictions. Here's mine:

He's gonna last until one week after the elections, when the idiot MSNBC bigwigs realize even post election analysis work save them from the curse of Phil.

Friday, November 15 will be the last show.

I was certainly wrong. However, at the time, I thought my prediction was quite conservative. Several others had far sooner predictions. After all, Donahue had been rapidly eroding MSNBC's ratings since his show started on July 15. Not even the vile Alan Keyes show was such a fiasco. Surely the MSNBC execs could see this disaster for what it was and cut their losses.

Well, that was a perfectly reasonable line of reasoning, predicated on one simple assumption: that these execs had any fucking common sense whatsoever. Instead of realizing Donahue was a gigantic problem, they figured the show just needed some tweaking (and in my predictive defense, these tweaks were made in mid-November). So, now, thanks to these power-tie wearing assmonkeys, we've got Phil in front of a live studio audience, pandering to the same bored housewife audience that watched him in the early eighties.

There was a reason Phil's first talk show got canceled: Oprah stole his format and sodomized him with it. Yes, Oprah Winfrey is better at this format than Phil. Oprah. Freaking. Winfrey. And, lets face facts, the fans of the audience talk show format can get something like 12 hours a day of the big O on Oxygen. And this audience does not have a much of an overlap with the cable news junkies, who are the ratings base of MSNBC, Fox, and CNN.

I've wanted MSNBC to survive. I've hoped for a centrist alternative to the leftist filth on CNN and the idiotic right-wing posturing of Fox, but it's not to be. Drudge gave us this report today on the latest cable news ratings. MSNBC is now dead last in all its timeslots. The network suits, finally realizing the horrible mistakes they've made, are coming to the conclusion that, rather than kill Phil's show, they'll just axe the entire network:

Executives "clearly put all their eggs in the Donohue basket," says one well-placed NBC source. "The word from the higher-ups is that if Donohue can't sell the network, then NBC will have to sell the network. It's not just a coincidence that Brian Williams was moved to CNBC; they wanted to protect him, anticipating any MSNBC failure."

I love these guys. Pure freaking business genius at work.

How could anyone have possibly expected a boring, tedious, ignorant, irrational, self-righteous twit with a shitty haircut and stupid looking glasses to sell anyone anything? The raw stupidity involved in this whole process is beyond my reckoning, and I've reckoned some seriously stupid shit in my day.

The worst part of the whole thing is that you know the soulless, asslicking executives making these disastrous programming decisions earn more money squeezing off a turd on their gold-plated toilets than I'll make all year. There is no God.

Schroeder's Suffering Sounds Sumptuous

Our Germanic buddy, Ralf Goergens, gives us a brief rundown of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's many problems. A razor thin parlimentary majority, taxpayer anger, high unemployment, and the lowest point of US-German relations since the Battle of The Bulge, are all leaving the Schroedster a little pressured. And Ralf doesn't even mention the Chancellor's epic hair dye fiasco.

So, since when did Ralf start posting on the Chicago Boyz? Why was I not informed?

Internet Uber Alles

Interesting little thing I noticed while watching FOX a few minutes ago. Fred Barnes dropped Mickey Kaus' name while discussing the John Kelly creepiness thing. Sure, Kaus is a bigtime Slate guy, but I don't think I've heard even this much of a web writer reference on any of the big cable news shows before...

I'm Afraid I Can't Do That Dave...

Michael Kinsley fears the machine. Google News is threatening his livelihood as an editor with its highly effective black magic news sorting technology:

Throughout the revolution of technology and globalization that has been going on for two decades, responsible mainstream commentators, pundits, analysts, and miscellaneous gasbags (including this one) have taken the view that progress is a good thing. Some people are unfortunately caught in the gears of change, but society as a whole benefits. It's not very complicated if you know a bit of economics. You've got your "invisible hand" (that's free markets), you've got your "comparative advantage" (that's free trade), you've got your "perennial gale of creative destruction" (that's competition and new technology), you've got your "can't make an omelet without breaking eggs" (that's attributed to Joseph Stalin, but never mind). The losers in this process deserve sympathy and help, but special pleading must not be allowed to thwart or slow this process.

We must distinguish, however, between special pleading and legitimate alarm about deeply troubling developments. It is one thing to sacrifice textile workers and auto workers on the altar of progress. It is quite another to start throwing journalists into the flames. And the difference is? Well, it's very different. Completely different. Couldn't be more different, quite frankly, my good madam, because … because … well, it occurs to me that I'm a journalist. This puts the whole situation in a new perspective.

A whole new perspective indeed. But, fortunately, he has a solution:

Until just days ago, it might have been impossible to do anything about this impending crisis due to impediments such as the First and Fifth Amendments. Fortunately, however, we now have the Department of Homeland Security, which must make it an early priority to impose regulations forbidding the use of a computer to perform any functions traditionally performed by human journalists.

He’s joking of course. Or at least I think he’s joking. You can never be sure about a man’s anti-luddite credentials when his livelihood is on the line. Regardless, Kinsley has nothing to fear from the machine, as he’s a fairly smart guy who can write decently. I’m sure our machine overlords will always have uses for human vermin who have skills controlling the other vermin through language. It will be most convenient for them when they use us as batteries like in the Matrix.

However, this technology could be a big worry for employees of the nation’s “Paper Of Record”. With the Google News technology and a few story generating scripts, like the Postmodern Essay Generator, to output the Op-Ed section, we could completely automate the NYTimes. I mean, your program would just need an array filled with phrases like "boy-emperor" and "like, totally" or "groady to the max!" and it could easily output a Maureen Dowd column.

Actually, now that I think about it, maybe the NYTimes is way ahead of us on this one. Have you read MoDo's stuff lately? The woman may be nothing more than a script running on one of the Times computers ever week. And, is it just me, or has Tom Friedman been writing the same freaking column for the past two years? Yes, I think the script generation theory is the most plausible, in which case I salute the Times for pushing the technological edge in journalistic mediocrity.