The Super (Wolf) PAC

This was my response as I watched the South Carolina primary results roll in on Saturday:

@ZacharyWhitten Ever wonder how much it costs to buy a state primary? Newt’s SuperPAC bought South Carolina for $5 million.

Which is pretty much exactly what happened.

Well, that and the religious conservative voters of South Carolina apparently bought into Newt’s crocodile tears over his sexual escapades being brought up again. I will give his team credit, though. They did manage to turn what I was sure was a bullet to the head of his campaign into something used to rally the base.

But, back to the Super PACs!

First off, what is a Super PAC? Well, a PAC stands for Political Action Committee, and are legal entities created as means to raise funds from groups that are normally forbidden to donate money directly to candidates. Unions and corporations, for example. This money is then used to bolster the messaging of a candidate or cause, since direct donations are limited to a paltry few grand. Every politician out there has a PAC, as does every big special interest group like the NRA. They’re legal loopholes that are the main reason it is so damned expensive to run for office. The only real check on them is that they have to disclose the people who are giving them money, and what they are spending that money on.

PACs get much more complicated than that, but that’s the framework you need to understand the next part.

So what’s a Super PAC?

Simply put, they are maybe the most damaging thing the Supreme Court has ever done to American democracy. Super PACs spin out of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Citizens United case back in 2010, in which the Court said that according to the letter of the law, corporations and unions were essentially people and their spending of money during elections constituted free speech, which was ensured and protected by the First Amendment. Oh, and that they didn’t have to tell anyone about where the money came from or what they spent it on. Only catch was, they were still forbidden from donating to candidates or working directly with them on how to spend that money.

And what do they do with this new-found freedom of monetary expression?

They create the Super PAC.

A giant, money hoovering political black hole that can accept limitless donations and spend that money however it damn well pleases, so long as it doesn’t directly give to the candidate or collude with them on what the Super PAC is going to spend it on.

Well, the Super PACs aren’t giving the candidates money, but they are sure as hell colluding with their campaigns. Romney Super PAC’s plastered the whole world with anti-Newt ads before the New Hampshire primary, then he claimed ignorance of them during the debates…at least until the after commercial break when he referenced the content of one of them.

In South Carolina, Newt’s money came from a billionaire casino magnate that is apparently hoping to buy himself a president. He gave the Super PAC a check for five million, and the Super PAC blew it all in South Carolina. I think I heard somewhere that the average South Carolinian would see or hear the Super PAC’s anti-Romney spots sixty times in the week leading up to the election. Over ten times a day. It was the political equivalent of carpet bombing the whole state with their messaging.

But, lo and behold, it worked.

Newt’s Super PAC bought a victory in South Carolina, and prolonged the Republican primary a few weeks more.

Fleshlight is making an iPad attachment…thing

A-yup.

That’s it right there. Molded plastic lady parts attached to a snap-on iPad harness.

If you’ve been paying attention to this blog today, then you’ll have learned three things about science and technology:

1.  It can put a working rover on Mars for 8 years.
2. It can be used to spy on the world.
3. It can let you fuck your iPad.

What a Brave New World we live in.

Image borrowed from Geekosystem.com. They’ve got more facts about the Fleshlight iPad Abomination Thing if you are interested.

A River of Cow Blood, A Drone, and the Spying Future

You may have seen the story already, about how a consumer-grade aerial drone with a camera mounted to it captured shots of a Texas meat-packing plant illegally dumping cow blood out the back of their facility.

It’s here if you want more information.

The interesting thing in this for me is how common the usage of drones like these is becoming. The #Occupy movement’s got one. The ship from Whale Wars does, too. You can buy them on Amazon and control them with your phone.

A few years back, drones were things the military used to kill people in places where they didn’t want to risk losing a hundred million dollar fighter jet. Now, they’re something you can mount a webcam to and take a remote tour of your next apartment with.

As their cost decreases and their technology level increases, these drones are going to start posing a real problem for personal privacy. They’re already working on one that you can mount a DSLR to. Which will pretty much turn it into a flying peeping-tom.

In my head I can see swarms, utter swarms, of these things clogging the skies over Beverly Hills as paparazzi use them to try to snap of picture of the celeb du jure in the middle of something embarrassing. Or in a vertically oriented city like New York or Hong Kong or Tokyo, they will be the 21st century equivalent of spying on your neighbor with a telescope.

And these are just the annoying downsides. What about when stalkers use them to harass their victims? Or pedophiles use them to get a view your kids changing at the pool. Things get very real and very scary, very quickly.

I bet within a few months, a year at the most, we start seeing technologically progressive cities passing zoning ordinances that forbid the use of drones in certain areas. Like near schools or residential areas, hell maybe even banning them within city limits altogether.

But they’ll never be able to full stop them. Pandora’s Box has been opened when it comes to these things, and there’s no putting them back in, they’ve already flown off.

Happy Birthday, Opportunity

Eight years ago you rolled down the ramp onto the cold, dusty, still surface of Mars.

Your original mission was for ninety days, which means that you’ve achieved it thirty-two times over, outlasting even your hearty sister rover, Spirit.

So, here’s to you, Opportunity. Thank you for showing us what we’re capable of when we try.

Election 2012: Newt Gingrich is the Avatar of Hypocrisy

This whole campaign I’ve been calling Mitt Romney that, but last night at the final South Carolina primary debate, Newt took the title from him and beat the everyone in the room to death with it.

This is what I’m talking about:

For those just joining the crazy circus, it broke on Wednesday that Newt’s second wife was going to say in an interview that Newt had asked her for an open marriage…since he’d been banging his Congressional aide for the previous 6 years.

Now, for a man who’s trying to recast himself in the armor of righteous morality, this is a real news story. It isn’t a personal attack or something that over steps a line. We knew he cheated, for years, and then divorced his wives while they were deeply ill. That’s already out and can never be shut away again.

I will admit that ABC timed their release of the story for maximum effect, but do I think that’s politically motivated as Newt would have you believe? Of course not. The only motivation of a television network is money, and you get money by selling ads during highly rated programming. It’s hard to draw a bigger audience than with a sex scandal involving a political figure.

Which brings me to what really blows my mind about this.

Newt is well aware of this fact because, you know, he impeached a president over a blowjob.

That’s right, boys and girls, that swine-faced mound of pasty flesh up there nearly brought down the government of the United States because of a sex act between two consenting adults. But God forbid anyone be allowed to treat his illicit dalliances in the same way.

I won’t even go into the his tirade against liberal media because I don’t have that much time.

That video is the kind of double speak that would make George Orwell absolutely turgid.

The Manufacturing of Lana Del Rey

You’ve heard the name in passing, friends or coworkers talking about the curious new artist with the disastrous performance on Saturday Night Live, so you look her up on YouTube.

This is what you find.

A beautiful young girl with a sultry voice that evokes the best moments of Tori Amos from the 90s.

But, there’s something wrong.

The beauty is artificial. Sculpted with a surgeon’s knife and approaching the alienating expanse of the uncanny valley.

The music is crafted so she won’t have to push out of her vocal range, organized into easily editable phrases that can be cut together from multiple takes and written by song writers that know just what strings to tug in their audience.

The video is just like a few others she put out, a mix of public domain footage and moments of her mouthing the words at the camera, head askew in an awkward attempt at demure sexuality.

If everything about Lana Del Ray smacks of artificial, untenable perfection because that’s just what it is.

Her real name is Elizabeth Grant, and she’s a millionaire’s daughter. Her father made his money by jumping on thousands of domains in the early days of the internet and charging people to lease them from him. Which meant that he had the capital to indulge his daughter when she wanted to become a star. He’s hired managers, producers, song writers, stylists and god knows what else to turn his daughter into this impossible thing.

Elizabeth’s been at this for years, trying to find the right combination of things to fit her unique style of might-be talent. It took them five years and who knows how many marketing reps to settle on the Lana Del Rey name

She released her first EP in 2008, then a full album in 2011 – neither of which are publicly available any more because a decision was made by her “team” to pull them so they’d have a clean field for the newest iteration of the Lana Del Rey construct.

Which about catches us up to the slow motion car wreck that was her on SNL.

Normally, I’d be at head of the pack, racing into savage a pop star for their hubris and lack of talent. But, there’s something different here. To me the story isn’t about how she can’t perform live, the story is about how she was made.

With digital recording technology we can already create singing computer programs to power virtual pop idols. With Lana Del Rey, though, we’re now coming at it from the infinite-number-of-monkeys-with-type-writers direction. Provided a person hits every note in a song just once while be recorded, the song can be sutured together with ones and zeroes into something that sounds like it was done in a single take.

And when a creation like Lana Del Rey steps out onto a live stage, how can you expect such a meticulously crafted illusion to hold up? It would be akin to asking Peter Jackson to do The Lord of the Rings live…in one take.

Lana Del Rey does give me a bit of hope, though. Hope that the same technology that was used to build her will be used by more interesting people to do more interesting things, and they’ll be the ones that push the horizon out just a bit more.

(I will admit I’ve found myself humming the hook to Video Games without realizing it.)

Bartholomäus Traubeck’s “Years”

YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo.

Laurel pointed this out to me this morning. Yes, those are the rings of a tree trunk being used to procedurally generate music. Good music, too.

Election 2012: Revisionist History

Well holy crap. Didn’t see that coming.

Turns out that Rick Santorum actually won the Iowa Caucuses by 34 votes, not lost it by 7 as we previously thought.

It doesn’t really change anything since Romney’s going to lock the nomination on Saturday, but it makes Santorum’s performance so far even more surprising.

It is a brave new world we live in when people aren’t afraid to vote for a frothy mix of feces and lube.

Election 2012: You Broke My Heart, Rick Perry

And now he’s out, too.

Or will be by the time I finish writing this. Which is weird, considering he was all gung-ho at last night’s Republican debate. But, hey, when you’re the homophobic lovechild of George Bush and Ronald Reagan you can do whatever you like, right?

I’m a bit surprised that he’s out before South Carolina’s primary on Saturday, but I’m sure he’s seen better polling data than I have, and what I’ve seen painted a pretty grim picture for his chances. Last numbers I saw had more people undecided than voting for him. Which for a strongly religious state he was projected to sweep (you know, before real people started voting), is utterly ruinous to a campaign.

My secret hope was that Perry would stick with his bumbling idiocy until the convention, but sadly that looks to not be true at all. Now all that’s left for him to do is throw his support behind Rick Santorum and cement the evangelical vote against Romney and his magic underpants.

Oh, Rick Perry, I hope we don’t forget you like you forgot that third government agency you’d shut down.

Edit: Huh. Perry backed Gingrich. Didn’t see that coming, either. Been a morning full of surprises!

COMMONPLACE – Two Ideas

I’ve got two million dollar ideas.

Which I’m not sure if I could ever pull off.

First is a simple, character-based set up with legs for miles: a public relations operator that works for superheroes.

Main character is a self-made woman that’s the biggest player around for superhero PR. She’s up at 5am every day, an hour at the gym, and in the office before anyone else. She’s dated a few capes in the past, but’s decided that’s bad for business these days. Another major firm is starting to press in on her business, she’s got a client that she just can’t make click. They’re working on a do-or-die rebranding effort for him now. Costume, name, attitude, patrol areas, the whole shebang.

And then there’s the big thing, potential new business that’ll make her the king of the game for all time. But, how do you help a super villain go straight…and stay on the right side of the law yourself?

The second one is less concept, more creepy kick/punch/shoot. It’s called AGAIN-MEN, and the title would be written as AGAIN-MEN.

G-MEN.

Zombie g-men to be specific. It is the height of the Cold War and the US government has started a secret program of necromancy. They’re bringing dead spies back to life for another go. The stakes are higher than they’ve ever been before, but what’s a suicide mission to some one that’s already dead?

The Russian Phobos Grunt is Coming Home Early

The Phobos Grunt was supposed to have been a curse-breaker. The Russians have had a hard time sending probes to Mars since, oh, 1960. Everyone they’ve sent up has gone wrong in some for or fashion. Nineteen of them in total over the past five decades.

But Phobos Grunt was going to be different. It was going to work.

The Russians were going to be the first to put a probe onto a Martian moon, and then they were going to bring part of it home with samples for analysis. It was going to be the biggest Martian endeavor since the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. It was going to break their curse and put them back on the bleeding edge of space exploration.

Notice how I’m talking about all of this in past tense? Was? Were? Yeah, there’s a reason for that.

See the area with the blue on that map above? If you live within any of those lines you might want to take care this Sunday when the Phobos Grunt comes burning back down through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds. Four hundred plus pounds of the thing are expected to survive reentry, and while the Earth is mostly water, they can’t guarantee it won’t come down on your head.

Just what happened to the great Russian hope? No one’s really sure. The Phobos Grunt hit Earth orbit in November and then sort of stalled out and went dead. They weren’t able to stir the probe back to life, and the orbit’s been decaying ever since. I’m just glad it didn’t hit anything while it was up there. We don’t need any more debris up there.

So this Sunday, keep your eyes up and your head down. Michael Bay doesn’t need any reason to make an Armageddon 2.

Election 2012: Romney’s Bain

…And things didn’t so much change for the rest of the night.

Note, this was the first graphic CNN put up for the New Hampshire primary. With 19 people reporting in.

Yep. 19 people. 0.00143% of the New Hampshire population. Which, near as I can figure, means CNN took a straw poll of the people they had working in their press trailer and put those numbers up.

Anyway, like I said, the standings didn’t change for the rest of the night. New Hampshire’s was Romney’s to lose, and he didn’t. He ended the night with just under 40% of the votes, which because of wacky New Hampshire primary rules aren’t just Republicans – but anyone who wants to brave the freezing cold grayness to vote.

I had kind of hoped that Huntsman would’ve done better than a weak to middling third, since he’s probably the least frightening one of the bunch, but he’s pretty much finished now. Question is if he’ll be an also-ran or share the ticket with Romney as the VP nom. Gingrich and Perry are all but done at this point unless they get the South Carolina religious conservative miracle they are hoping for.

Romney was pretty bullet proof in the last few days of this primary. His opponents ignored him in the first debate, then ganged up on him to little effect in the second. The only story that got any traction was how he presided over the liquidation of several companies while working at Bain Capital. The basic narrative goes that Romney killed businesses and fired people to line his own pockets. Which, while totally and completely true, is sort of like blaming a snake for its venom. Bain has investments in the tens of billions, and they are in the business of increasing that number by any means necessary.

To me, the real story here isn’t about how Romney did his job and people lost theirs, but how fucked up the system we live under is. Whole companies get blasted into nothingness by a single swipe of red ink all so the bottom line looks a bit tighter. There’s no compassion, no morality, just profit. Which is exactly the sort of thing that Romney would bring to the Oval Office. Well, that and a whole lot of hypocritical reversals of opinion.

Just an aside…but, Bain Capital? Really? That’s like naming your company THE DEVIL WORKS HERE, LLC. Also, it is a Batman villain. Way to go, guys.

The interesting thing shaping up on the horizon is how the bottomless money pits of the SuperPACs are being used. Gingrich is being kept on life support by the billionaire gambling magnate backing his SuperPAC, and Romney is using his to rip into his opponents in a way that he couldn’t directly. Frankly, I’d have expected the money to be having a bigger impact on the race, but it really isn’t. I’m shocked to say this, but it looks like you can’t buy an election with SuperPAC money. At least not a primary. We’ll see if this holds true in South Carolina or not. Gingrich is spending 5 million there. His last hurrah, basically.

Next up is South Carolina on the 21st, then Florida ten days later. Question right now is if Romney can clear the field before Super Tuesday, or if some one else will be stupid enough to waste their money running against him. I’ll be shocked if this makes it to Illinois or Texas. I’ll laugh my ass off if it makes it California.

I’m working up bad puns for next week’s election post, since I think I’ll be talking a lot more about the SuperPACs then.

The Thing Nightmares Are Made Of

Oh god that mouth where did it come from why is it oh god the stars I can see forever into the still nothingness of the abyss! Ry’leh! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!

You can thank Ben for that.

Comic Stores and Customer Service

Last week Laurel and I got into a pretty intense discussion about comic book stores and the effect a growing digital market place will have on them.

It is going to obviously be bad for most, but I also think good for some. It will force the bad stores out of business and force the good stores to redouble their efforts, making them even better.

So, why is it going to be bad? Same reason the good stores are good: customer service. I’ve been a comic fan since my age hit double digits, L’s been a fan since she realized Jean Grey existed, but both of us cringe every time we have to go into a comic shop. I’ve found a few exceptions, but she’s never found one that didn’t make her feel uncomfortable for being a girl or that would actually help her find new books to read.

If we can bypass those cringing, awkward moments by buying our books digitally – also free of fear of them selling out – why in God’s name would I want to suffer those moments?

What we’re talking about is a customer service problem that is more of the rule for the industry than the exception.

Which Laurel tweeted about the day after our discussion:

@imatangelo: I have not been to one comic shop where I felt welcome.

A few of us retweeted that, including to #ComicsMarket, a hashtag used by comic store owners. And who should respond?

Fucking @LarrysComics.

With this bit of brilliance:

@LarrysComics Are you a creep? RT @ZacharyWhitten “@imatangelo: I have not been to one comic shop where I felt welcome.” Problem #1 w/ the #comicmarket.

Keep in mind, this is the known racist and homophobe that became Internet infamous after making offensive jokes about the new black Spider-Man.

Needless to say, things got silly from there, and the customer service problem hole got dug a little deeper.

Until anyone from a neophyte fan to an octogenarian collector, male or female, can walk into nearly every store and be greeted with enthusiastic and honest help, the industry will continue to hemorrhage their lifeblood into the digital void.

And I don’t want that. Laurel doesn’t want that. Fans in general don’t want that.

We want stores that make us feel like kids in candy shops and staffers that can help us guide the nearly hundred year history of this wonderful medium.

All it takes is a little customer service.

A Brief Moment on Rhetoric and Hyperbolic Words

“Now, Zach,” you might say to me, “you talk a lot of shit. You say a lot of bad things about people in the public eye. Things that would be incredibly rude if said to their faces.”

“Yes, yes, I do.” I’ll admit. “But,” I’ll say, “I only do it after they’ve said something first.”

Do you know the old adage “It is better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than open it and remove all doubt”?

The same goes with political speech, especially hateful speech.

Today on the way home to pick up lunch, I stopped my radio on a talk radio station, foolishly assuming it was some kind non-biased news summary, I left the dial where it was. (Remember when that was the sort of thing you could take for granted?) Over the next few minutes, I was bombarded with pure, uncut, unmitigated hate speech.

“Homosexuals are a disease vector. Their illness is a sign of their unholy lifestyle. They are all on drugs.”

These were all things that the pundit on the radio was sending out over the public airwaves, and there was no one stopping him. He was free to say completely untruthful and inflammatory things on airwaves that you and I own.

And I utterly lost it. I screamed bloody murder there at the stoplight. Screamed so loud the lady next to me rolled up her window thinking I was probably some kind of mental case.

But, no, I wasn’t the mental case. The fucking morally-righteous-but-really-moral-bankrupt asshole on the radio was the mental case.

Those are the sort of people I talk shit about.

Because they fucking deserve it, and because they did it first.

Election 2012: 8 Iowans

That’s what you call them, right? Iowans?

Sounds like a race of elves from Lord of the Rings. But don’t tell this guy I said that.

So, 8 Iowans were the difference between Rick Santorum (ubiquitous link to the Google-joke of his name) winning by losing coming second to Mitt Romney and winning by, you know, actually winning.

But thankfully a .000266% difference in final votes meant that Mitt Romney is the guy that won the Republican Iowa Caucus, but completely lost the news cycle to the guy with the anal sex joke last name who wasn’t supposed to win anything at all.

And why wasn’t he supposed to win anything at all?

Because he’s the sort of skin-crawlingly horrible human that makes even staunch conservatives a little uneasy to be around him.

He’s done things like say that homosexuality is on par with incest (he earned the homonym of his name for that one and probably lost his Senate seat because of it, too):

“[I have] a problem with homosexual acts, as I would with what I would consider to be acts outside of traditional heterosexual relationships . . . if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery.”

He’s also declared all forms of contraception to be against God’s will:

“It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

Oh yeah, and he thinks that privacy is a made-up, non-Constitutional concept:

“[The] right to privacy…doesn’t exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution.”

If his social stances weren’t horrific enough, he’s also spineless and in the pocket of big businesses – like when he tried to abolish the National Weather Service and hand over all of its functions to Accuweather, one of his biggest campaign contributors.

So, yeah, Rick Santorum, a slimy fecal matter smear of a human being was eight votes within of pulling a come-from-behind (most over used headline joke so far!) win in the first primary election of 2012.

And to those eight Iowans, I have to say thank you. Thank you for voting for one of the great hypocrisy machines in modern politics instead of Santorum. I can suffer through the news cycle of the next few days so long as I know all his bragging doesn’t really mean anything.

As for the rest of the Republican field, Ron Paul came in third and Newt finished fourth. That’s fine for Paul – he won’t be winning anything, but it really is a hit to Newt who was hoping to carve out some space between him and the rest of the pack.

On a completely thrilling and unexpected note, they are said to be readying Michele Bachmann to drop out of the race. Which is great, because for a “Constitutional Conservative” (her words, not mine) she knew pretty much nothing about the Constitution, and was also batshit insane.

Oh lord, we’re only just getting started with this, aren’t we?

Back on the Air

It’s a new year. One where the Mayans are supposedly going to kill us all from beyond the grave, or something.

Been quiet around here for a bit.

The site’s been just a numbers station, really. Humming along through the dark of the night, waiting for something to happen, waiting to screech back to life, commanding the sleeper agents to throw off their sham lives and but a bullet in the neck of every apparatchik they can find.

Time to fill the dead air, I think.

You see, my book’s done. Memphis Fast Fiction is dead and in a bag, waiting for the taxidermy of the editing knife to come and pretty it up before I turn it out for publishers to reject. I wrote 365 stories about Memphis in 2011, and I sure as hell thought it was going to drive me mad, but, by God, I did it. Now to see if anyone wants to pay to put the thing to paper.

I heard dead trees are expensive these days.

(Hah, “my book’s done” – now that’s something I never thought I’d get to say.)

And now I’m turning my attention back here. Time to start writing about things that aren’t the city I live in.

There’s a whole big world out there, with mad, wondrous things in it. Time to go exploring.

This is the Brain Release Valve, welcome to the Mayan Death Year.

Brain Release Valve will be back 1-1-2012

Spending all my time writing Memphis Fast Fiction right now. Nearly to 275 stories this year. Should hit it before the week is out.

But, once that project is over, I’m eager to get back to doing whatever it was I did around these parts.

See you after the New Year.

Lily, White

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The Sky is an Ocean

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