It’s bad news all over, for the left and the right. Democracy and the markets are taking a thrashing, and the bodies are piling up. It’s starting to stink, and we can use some graves, but there aren’t many real journalist left to do the digging. They’ve all either been laid-off or bought-out, and a hungry man doesn’t wield a shovel.

A few of them, though, were either lucky, smart, or stupid enough to read through the lines of their own bullshit early on, and got out while the getting was still good. They were able to make it out West before the law did, and those of them that were lucky were able to claim a chunk of the Ponderosa for themselves (those that weren’t either scalped or shot in the back by a flippant drunk horse rustler).

One of the lucky ones was Tom Forenski. He’s managed to find a way to keep his belly full and his shovel out of hawk for long enough stretches to dig’em six feet deep before the rainy season turns’em into sinkholes. His latest ode-to-a-spade has enough room it for just about anyone he’s ever worked for, with, or on.  Sifting through the annual Edelman Trust Barmometer, Tom has found that:

- Trust in information from friends and peers, “people like me,” dropped by 20 points, from 47 to 27 percent.

- Trust in information from digital media–blogs, social networks, and free content sources like Wikipedia or Google news, remains low: only between 11 percent and 22 percent of respondents express trust in information about companies from these sources.
[...]
- Trust in credibility of TV news declined by 20 points, from 44 to 24 percent.

- Trust in news coverage on the radio dropped by 17 points, from 48 to 31 percent.

- Trust in newspapers fell by 14 points, from 46 to 32 percent.

- Only 38 percent trust media (as an institution) to do what is right, down from 46 percent in 2008.

- Media companies (as an industry) have declined in credibility by 16 points (from 48 to 32 percent).

- In the U.S., media companies are tied with the insurance industry for last place. Banks are second from the bottom.

- Top trusted industry is technology and it has widened its lead over other industries.

- Tied for the second most trusted industry is Biotech and Automotive at 63 percent, followed by Energy, Retail and Food at 61 percent.

I can get Automotive tying for second place. I mean, geezus, the American people own the auto-industry now. If they can’t trust themselves, how are they supposed to look themselves in the mirror every morning and keep bullshitting themselves into thinking that what they’ve been doing for last two decades has actually meant anything and that they should keep doing it?

Besides, we’re a nation of smug, arrogant apes. About the the only thing we trust is our gut instinct and it tells us we’re hungry. So how are we supposed to afford an $8 non-fat caramel double machiatto to wash down our Grand Slam breakfast if we don’t trust ourselves enough to show up and work and bring home the bacon?

But Biotech? Ye gawds, it’s a college student’s worst nightmare. I mean, they’ve done things to farmers, genes, and the American justice system that would make an Father O’Hanrahan blush. But I digress…

It seems like America is losing faith in anything with a type-face. We’re losing faith in the people we don’t really know and the blogs that they write. We’re losing faith in Google and it’s ability to gage the relevance of something based on how many virgins linked to it. And we’re also losing faith in the media companies that can no longer afford to pay their creditors, never mind the interns that are supposed to be fact-checking the weather reports.

Tom thinks it’s bad news for PR agencies, “social media experts,” citizen journalists, and media start-ups. But what about the poor and wretched souls in middle-America who don’t know whether to be more terrified Osama, Obama, or the impending Zombie apocalypse when their kids ring-in 2013 with a double of their cerebrospinal fluid on the rocks?

These are the people whose weekend trips to Walmart and Costco keep the coffers of the agencies and media companies replete with fresh lies, and how are they supposed to keep spending if they’re too terrified or confused to make it to work in the morning?

Two decades of whore-mongering is catching up with us folks. It’s daybreak, the party is over, and before the shooter-girls can count-out, go home, and sleep it off, the rest of us have to face the reckoning and pray to the vengeful, pagan gods we’ve worshiped all night that there’s enough left-over for the cab ride home.

Not that I think there’s anything wrong with some man-on-man action. I mean, a few drinks and I start getting a little curious myself. It’s when you only like women who are drugged that there’s a problem, and the guys in that picture are pretty much closet butt-pirates. They’re the boys of Pi Kappa Alpha and as the Michigan Daily reported:

Police have been unable to locate a woman who entered the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity house without permission on Thursday and began to masturbate on a couch.

Fraternity members asked the woman to leave the house, but she refused and continued masturbating for about half an hour, Nye said.

There’s something seriously wrong with your libido when you preferred your drugged-up poontang to be gagging on roofies instead of alert and willing. What happened to these boys is what I spent most of my teenaged years fantasizing about. I guess she didn’t want them remembering how bad at it they were going to be. Personally, I would’ve pretty much counted on the drugs taking care of that for me, but I guess if I ate ivory I’d understand.

Via This is What We Do Now.

Oh, I get it: it’s Washington’s fault that those wetbacks are such a slippery bunch. MSNB reports:

EL PASO, Texas – For all the tough talk out of Washington on immigration, illegal immigrants caught along the Mexican border have almost no reason to fear they will be prosecuted.

Ninety-eight percent of those arrested between Oct. 1, 2000, and Sept. 30, 2005, were never prosecuted for illegally entering the country, according to an Associated Press analysis of federal data. Those 5.2 million immigrants were simply escorted back across the Rio Grande and turned loose. Many presumably tried to slip into the U.S. again.

Now, it might be a bit of a problem finding room for 5.2 million new inmates in our already over-crowded prisons, but we can always put them to work building new ones. Of course, then they’ll be stealing jobs from you and me.

What’s a xenophobic, fascist police state to do? I mean, what’s this country coming to when you can’t lock people up without putting decent, honest, hard-working American out of work.

Via Scandal Times.

This is an ad for a Leadership Conference being put on by Abstinence Clearing House. What a fucking name. If you’re not even into putting out, how am I supposed to swallow that you’re clearing out. Hm, I don’t even think that what I just typed made any sense.

Anyway, it turns out that Abstinence Clearing House hates black people. You see, according to them, black=promiscuity and white=purity. So black people can’t help but be bad and part of the problem. I bet you that it’s all that hippity-hop music with its music videos. Okay, I don’t think that that made any sense either.

Either way, this ad is terrible and is the reason that these guys are losing the war on masturbation: their cause is fundamentally at odds with any effective marketing strategy. You see, all the best mind-fuckers out there understand that sex sells better than anything else, you can’t use sex to sell no-sex, and their ads end up looking like a spot for Herpes medication — ironic, isn’t it? Besides, they’re all already working for American Apparel anyway.

Via Feministing.

If you thought that the American Revolution, Boston Tea Party, and War of 1812 were about more than just land and taxes, you might have been wrong. First, it became un-American to question the government — meaning that, technically, we should all still be English. Well, it looks like a Maryland lawmaker (pictured right) has taken that to heart by arguing that 300 year old British Civil Law has a direct bearing on how we should treat sexual assault today in America. The Washington Post reports:

A senior Maryland lawmaker this week invoked a 17th-century English jurist who instructed juries to be suspicious of women’s claims of rape, infuriating women’s advocates and some lawmakers who say the comments were insensitive.

Del. Joseph F. Vallario Jr. (D-Prince George’s), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, recalled the words of Sir Matthew Hale at a hearing Tuesday on a bill to deny custody, visitation and other parental rights to rapists whose victims conceive and have a child.
[...]
A delegate on the committee searched the Internet for the exact words of the prominent British lawyer, who, as England’s chief justice in the 1670s, instructed juries to be skeptical of rape claims: “Rape is an accusation easily to be made, hard to be proved, and harder yet to be defended by the party accused.”

Great, so our laws really do need to be as paternalistic as the elitist monarchists we rebelled against to gain our independence. Maybe it really was all about land and not paying taxes. Fuck, it sure explains a lot, doesn’t it? The Patriot Act, the Imperialism, the growing gap between rich and poor. Well, hopefully my daughter’s rapist feels at least enough sympathy and remorse while visiting his bastard child that he actually makes some child support payments.

Story via Feministing.

Apparently, every four years, the Boy Scouts of American hold a National Jamboree (oh god) at Fort A.P. Hill in Fredericksburg, Virginia. It turns out that the ACLU was protesting this on the grounds that the Boy Scouts will pray to Jesus, and that shit shouldn’t fly on public property.

Even though the last shin-dig featured 300 cases of heat stroke and 1 death by electrocution/burning-alive, the freedom-hating pinkos got nowhere with their case. The Wonkette thinks that the ruling by the US Court of Appeals has something to do with “the entire federal government is run by god-nuts who spend all their time on public property muttering to god,” but it’s never that simple.

It probably has something to do with a long tradition in the Western World of military dictatorships fostering close relationships between their warrior caste and young boys. The Spartans did it, the Hitler Youth did it, and now its America’s turn. The religious part is just an excuse to feed the impressionable young men Jesus Juice so that it doesn’t hurt as much — and can’t remember enough to deliver a coherent or credible testimony if it does.

Stumbled on this at Feministing. I love those girls. They remind me that there are still people out there who give a shit for reasons other than that it can get them their 15 minutes and a couple easy bucks. You know, that whole phenomenon makes me wonder: how does a massive supply of 15-minute-fame drive the demand up so quickly. It’s just another paradox of consumer-capitalism.

Anyway, I wonder if the girl on the billboard is actually a virgin, or if she’s just one of those pathetic born-agains who didn’t get off the first few times around, so she figured that sex just had to be bad. I kind of hope that she is just another skanky model that’ll endorse anything as long as her check is in the mail, because that would give me hope that the bible-thumping mind-fuckers with control issues aren’t that much of a problem after all.

I mean, I was reading the Grapes of Wrath a little while back, and the pious, Christian, simple country (ex-)preacher was even talking about how much fun he’d have rolling in the grass (literally) when he was a “youngin,” and especially on Sundays after preaching up a storm. If backwards, Depression era Oakies (as opposed to the Victorian kind, that is) could appreciate the innocent pleasure of sex and not take the Bible so goddamn literally when it’s not practical, then how come modern bible-thumpers can’t?

It just doesn’t make any sense, but then again, I guess the religious seldom do. Hey, look at that, I’ve just assumed that these folks are religious, even though I can’t find any hint of it on their site — not that I’m looking all that hard. Fuck it, they probably are. Only blind faith can generate the kind of fanaticism that would waste money on shit like this while there are children who are too hungry to get laid.