Member of the famed racing family, Baze had 6,969 career starts with 918 wins with mounts earning $32 million. At age 20 he became the youngest rider since Bill Shoemaker (in 1950) to win a riding title at Hollywood Park. He rode 73 winners at the 63-day stand. He was 24.
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Grace and Damien. So adorable. So undeniably evil.
PAPAL STATE OF INSANITY
Regarding the dead vs alive and dumping of bodies in seas vs. ceremonial corpse-schlepping debates. Remember what happened when we tried to “bring to justice” that other terrorist, the one who wasn’t Osama bin Laden? Seriously, imagine the GOP fueled brouhaha when “Obama” drags that guy into the U.S. to “face American justice”. Remember what American justice is? Its not the wild west, it’s a system of jurisprudence, and the same rights that applied to your Uncle Moe’s DUI case will apply to Osama bin Laden. Can you see that parodic 7 foot embodiment of the national terrorist nightmare in prison stripes in town for a carnival in our courts that would last for 20 years? Some fame seeking Mark Geragos type calling into question the (nonexistent) physical evidence? Al Queda targeting every judge, jurist, attorney, cop, press and family member at the carnival? The sea burial – off an American aircraft carrier in the North Arabian Sea – added a creepy, mysterious coda to a life that had been shrouded in secrecy for a decade. The body was placed on a board, tipped up and then “eased into the sea” (i.e. dumped), giving new meaning to the word “waterboarding”. The idea behind the deep-sea-dumping was to avoid a “Pilgrimage site” where Osama supporters could go hang out and take pictures or absorb its magical healing powers. It may not seem like a huge deal, but it seems as if the bigger and more vivid the collective remembrance is, the bigger and more vivid the memory, and that without ritualized and emotionally compelling acts of remembrance, dead people eventually fade and dematerialize. Do you think people would still be SO obsessed with Jesus without Easter dragging out the whole resurrection hoo-ha every year, and without Christmas reminding us how the little Lord Jesus had no crib for his bed? 1.5 MILLION people crammed into Rome for last week’s beatification of Pope John Paul II. Think of our own national holiday and parades celebrating the genocidal slave master who didn’t discover America. The Brits have pyres and folk songs and orange marches to elicit the outpouring of Ulster Protestant fervor that has kept sodomitical fop King Billy alive for the past 300 years. Of course these things resonate with people and they will all have been affected by the experience, and long after the event, his presence will be “real” to them. That’s why maybe it’s better to have that “Pilgrimage site” in the middle of the Gulf Sea. A venerated figure is kept alive because the fight they engaged in was a real one, and is ongoing. If the fight, or the society which fought it, ends, so does the deity. The end is always the end. And life after death is not immortality.
To all post-imperial Europeans, and across-the-ponders who find America’s public rejoicing over an intentional killing a bit “unsavory”, first know that I’m more than a little…. uneasy about people hooting in the streets in flag suits, too. Nothing good has ever come of the “USA!” chant, and folks waving flags are like some of the scariest motherfuckers on earth. But in America, there’s always some idiot ready to come to the game with the team’s colors painted on his torso, or with the bible verse sign, and there will always be overexcited flag wavers.
A product of Quaker schools and scientists, I am constitutionally unable to feel anything other than queasiness over one human intentionally taking the life of another. Most (principled) people feel that we ought to respect human life above all else – above even our own existences and our own safety – and that in turn, we should only ever feel grief over someone’s death, regardless of our righteousness and no matter how much our hand had been forced by our enemy. But. Guys. When our President – who since taking office has been the object of unrelenting, racially depraved attacks on his character, his courage, his intelligence, his Americanism – takes out the guy who ruined our country….the guy who eluded our previous, terrible president, and who is the embodiment of the national terrorist nightmare….are you seriously saying only a disengaged response is appropriate?
I get that to some folks, killing bin Laden makes the devastation the US has caused over the past decade in response to 9/11 even more futile, and the torrent of jingoism and triumphalism grotesque. But, it’s not like it’s the first time Americans have celebrated a bloody military coup. We were given the catharsis that had eluded America for a decade. And for once, Americans are able to collectively agree that something is “good”. The same marauding Americans didn’t rejoice over Saddam Hussein’s killing, and they weren’t rioting over some cretin burning a bible, or celebrating the deaths of innocent women and children as a result of a coward’s suicide bomb. We are not emulating our enemies — we are emulating human beings. [click to continue…]
From Gawker April 15th, 2011
Dilbert Creator Pretends to Be His Own Biggest Fan on Message Boards
Adrian Chen — Scott Adams, creator of the great comic strip Dilbert, is sort of a prick. He is a horrible boss, and recently penned a charming misogynist rant comparing women to children begging for candy. Now we learn he likes to bash critics on message boards under a pseudonym.
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I’ve talked about Big Evil before. It’s like the more famous Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big Tobacco, but not as romantic as smokes and Lunesta. Big Evil is more insidious because it’s banal. It’s rooted in the faulty organization of people, not necessarily the overwhelming individual badness of the people: the war profiteers, the mercenaries, the torturers, the mental midgets who are also fathers, aunts, “cat people”, scout leaders, dog owners – I mean, how to possibly explain the easy acquiescence of perfectly ordinary human beings in grossly inhuman behavior? To expunge Banal Big Evil, we need a ground-up do-over. I mean a “put on the garb of the founding fathers and get to work with plumed pens and parchment, tar and feathers” type do-over. Because there aren’t mechanisms in place to “address” the problem of a system which cannot be anything but corrupt. Structural malfeasance in the American system of governance can’t be ‘fixed’ by the American system of governance, it’s all foxes in sheep’s clothings guarding hen houses. A reorganization by the people (in knickers and powdered wigs), is in order, and such a reorganization in the face of concentrated power may be the most difficult problem we will ever confront.
The allocation of all the major conduits of power is really just a small smattering of malevolent but frail lunatics, huddled together, bleeding from their eyeballs. There are 300 million of us. I’m not saying KILL the Fox freaks, the Teafodders and the newscast broads, it’s not even really their fault, that’s just the way human beings are. Given the colossal influence of television on events, those who control it are bound to become degraded and spoiled, corrupted by their own power. But they can’t be left to control the one key communication path in our civilization, while the rest of us control only our own thoughts (and if we’re “lucky”, a twitter stream or a blog). If we didn’t have a communications medium of our own, we’d have no voices at all (thanks, Al Gore!). The TV and radio behemoths are bellowing so loudly that a mere “human” voice is like the tiniest Who in Whoville, just a small speck of dust on a clover, trying to be heard over the cacophony, trying to tell everyone that is is there. That is exists.
I read somewhere that the German people who possessed any sort of conscience effectively died during the Nazi reign. They technically lived out the rest of their lives, but they might as well have been dead. That’s why we must act, even if it kills us. Because we’re sort of dying anyway now, aren’t we? Living in shame and disgrace over things done in the name of our country. Kind of watching it happen, sick and horrified, unable to change a thing. Living in a kind of state of permanent low-grade mortification. It’s what gives life in Today’s America such an eerie feeling of morbidity. The spectral feeling of death in life. La vie des morts, en français. It’s why America has no feelings whatsoever for the Iraq war. It crosses minds like an Impresario’s cape. But it isn’t real. It’s as if it passes in a dream from what already is a dream. It occurs….but out “there”….somewhere else, in the distance…..as just another shadow world.