Tammi
My calves are shredded. Being Greensboro’s only transvestite Hooter’s waitress takes its toll. I take advantage of my little feet and muscular legs by wearing 3″ stilettos while the other girls clomp around in tennis shoes. My high-set nipples occasionally jump out at the customers in the push-up bra, and my naturally long eyelashes are a perfect platform for the largest fake lashes. My wig, makeup and manicure are flawless and I have the tips to show for it. But what makes me truly devastating are the frank and beans downstairs under my skin-tight orange shorts, where a camel-toe is expected. The general response is either hilarity or revulsion.
Billy Yow and Doug Adkins dropped by a few days ago, so now I’m working nights in a champagne room at one of their joints. They don’t know my real identity, so everything is copacetic, so far. Brad Riddleberger has shown up a few times and surreptitiously shot video of my pole dances. Thankfully, nature and a lifetime of exercise have afforded me the body of a fifteen-year old on steroids. I’ve received offers to do porn, but the plumbing doesn’t suit my taste, NTTAWWT.
Apparently, they have a studio outfitted with A/V equipment stolen from the Guilford County courthouse. So far, they’ve produced only Spanish titles, but are hot to get into the English-speaking tranny market. I’m holding out for more money, but have some real competition from a fetching lass named Josephine G.
Waka Flocka
I Wish My Foes Were Smarter
Sometimes, when I don’t have a dumb conservative to torture, I hang out with the Wife and read Fortune magazine while she watches crime dramas. I can’t help but notice how the villains display considerable artifice in the execution of their particular exploits. Invariably, I return to the blogs and am disappointed by the mud-dumb tactics of conservatives, both locally and on a national level.
I’m here to say that shooting fish in barrel gets old real fast. Whether it’s The Evil Dr. Guarino, Art Pope’s Stooge or Charles Davenport, Jr., who is so fucking stupid I have not been able to assign a suitable monicker, their xenophobic and paranoid arguments remain slow balls down the middle. Worse, they usually don’t respond, and even when they do, it’s obvious they aren’t aware of the criticisms leveled against them.
At some point, I became ashamed of my cruel assaults on obvious retards, but then some local media fuckwad would hold them up as legit, which only proved that the local media fuckwad was just as vapidly clueless as the dumb conservative. I’ve been compared to John Kennedy Toole for referring to Jonathan Swift‘s A Confederacy of Dunces, but that is inaccurate subterfuge, because in reality, I and my thoughtful confederates are in fact surrounded by dunces.
Who knew The Age of Enlightenment would be succeeded by The Dark Ages of Idiocy?
Pragmatically speaking, our local public servants and elected officials need to ignore the unfounded criticisms of the lunatic fringe as represented by The Evil Dr. Guarino, Triadwatch and C4GC. It is plain that they cannot be approached with logic and reason. The rest of us need to make a conscious decision to move on with the hard work of responsible governance. It has never been true that those who speak loudest are necessarily right. Indeed, my fear is that their unhinged allegations have kept more reasonable voices from being heard, lest they suffer the derision of these demonstrated lunatics.
Hieb Compares Guilford to Jefferson County, AL
Art Pope’s Stooge has a post up comparing Guilford County to Jefferson County, Alabama:
In fairness, Jefferson County leaders believed they were providing an essential service, which conservatives maintain is the true key to economic development. But they went overboard with the “Taj Mahal of sewage systems.” As you can imagine, it doesn’t end well —the county borrows vast sums of money, which in theory would be paid off in revenue. But when the revenue didn’t materialize —you guessed it— everyone’s rates went up.
In fairness, that is not at all what happened. The Jefferson County authorities, like many municipalities, school systems and universities, engaged in interest rate swap derivatives sold by NY banksters promising low pay back rates. What they failed to say was that should the economy go Tango Uniform, these public entities would find themselves upside down on the trades and forced to pony up much more than the customary loan payment.
Additionally, Jefferson County, like much of the Deep South, had neglected sewer services for generations, often resulting in little more than ditches to dispose of human and industrial effluent. Also, the officials entrusted to manage the process received large kickbacks from the banksters, resulting in a few being prosecuted.
Leave it to Art Pope’s Stooge to get it wrong. He compares our recent news about econ dev bonds to Jefferson County’s sewage improvement effort – definitely a case of apples and oranges. He could have at least compared Guilford County’s long partnership with Greensboro to charge homeowners for a fund to build out water and sewer at Forest Oaks and the I-40/85 corridor, but that would have exposed a visionary program of responsible planning. No, the JLF journalist knew what he was doing by pointing to the econ dev bonds instead.
This is just the most recent example of willfully inaccurate reporting from an organization which has recently become infamous for telling lies about such things as a “food police” in our schools, substituting parent-provided turkey sandwiches with school cafeteria chicken nuggets.
Late Night Downtown
I’ve been meaning to post about this experience for days, but wanted to give it some time to think through, first. I may not handle the issue well, but I believe it may impart some truth about the real reason for the revised noise ordinance.
Last Saturday night, the Wife and I returned from a party in Raleigh and drove downtown to grab a late bite on our way home. We parked in the deck behind Liberty Oak about 10:30 and walked to Zen on Elm for some sushi.
On the sidewalk, there were groups of young black men talking loudly and, while not being overtly intimidating, were making their presence known. I don’t know if this behavior is what is known as “wilding,” but it was sufficiently disruptive that the cops were gathered in a cluster, as if for their own protection.
Juxtaposed to the boisterous young men were lots of scantily-clad young women making their way to the clubs. It was an environment electric with sexual tension and the potential for violence.
I’m certainly no prude, having spent many years playing in bands and going to clubs, but I don’t remember anything like the scene we encountered downtown on Saturday night. My memories are of good friends, happy to see each other, enjoying lots of laughs and engaging in pleasant conversation. Perhaps this edgy, highly sexualized club scene has always existed somewhere, but I’d not seen it and I don’t like it now.
Maybe it’s a black thing. If so, I feel sorry for them. The young men appear as would-be thugs and the women as their potential victims. Perhaps the hip hop appeal of the thug life is a natural response to their perceived disenfranchisement. Whatever the reason, the spectacle is upsetting, if not actually frightening, to the rest of us. If that is the intent, it is working.
I contend that as we consider deliberations of the revised noise ordinance, we also recognize the actual nature of what is occurring downtown late at night. Some will be tempted to call this view racist, but I have little tolerance for lawlessness, no matter who is involved. There are private citizens living and trying to sleep in the vicinity. Noise of every variety continuing until 2:00 AM, and who knows what else, presents a real nuisance and possibly a danger to these residents.
Local politicians may have brought up the issue, but it’s obvious they speak for many of those living downtown. It’s easy to accuse them of being naive for choosing to live downtown with the bars and nightclubs. However, I submit that the scene I have witnessed and described represents something potentially more sinister than the average person realizes. Indeed, to gain a proper perspective, you may need to visit downtown at 11:00 PM on a weekend to see it for yourself.
Unfortunately, revising the noise ordinance is not an effective way to deal with the problem and I don’t have a solution to driving off this undesirable element. On the way home, we passed by Buckheads on Lawndale, where the parking lot was full. It may well be that a lot of folks have already chosen places other than downtown for late night entertainment. Whatever happens downtown, we sure have a new sympathy for the residents.
Iran and the Shape of Things to Come
From Mike Lofgren at Truthout:
Americans’ proud ignorance of geography and history compounds the problem by making self-contradictory narratives sound plausible. We read in Foreign Affairs, the bulletin board of the foreign policy establishment, that Iran is collaborating with al-Qaeda. The implausibility of that argument in a Middle East riven by religious schisms – Iran is a theocratic Shiite nation-state, while al-Qaeda is a stateless group seeking a universal Sunni caliphate – matches the unlikelihood of a secular Arab gangster state like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq collaborating with al-Qaeda. But Americans – not all, but enough – fell for that one, too…
Prime Minister Netanyahu will be in Washington March 4-6. A potential indicator of future events will be whether he gets an invitation from the speaker to address Congress and push the required emotional buttons. The first new moon thereafter will occur on March 22; even with the existence of radar, combat aircraft still gain tactical advantage by maximum optical concealment. It is worth noting that the invasion of Iraq occurred on March 20, 2003.
A Stranger in the House
From Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone on the Arizona GOP debate:
This is the last stage in any paranoid illness. You start by suspecting that somebody out there is out to get you; in the end, you’re sure that even the people who love you the most under your own roof, your own doctors, your parents, your wife and your children, they’re in on the plot. To quote Matt Damon in the almost-underrated spy film The Good Shepherd, they became convinced that there’s “a stranger in the house.”
This is where the Republican Party is now. They’ve run out of foreign enemies to point fingers at. They’ve already maxed out the rhetoric against us orgiastic, anarchy-loving pansexual liberal terrorists. The only possible remaining explanation for their troubles is that their own leaders have failed them. There is a stranger in the house!
This current race for the presidential nomination has therefore devolved into a kind of Freudian Agatha Christie story, in which the disturbed and highly paranoid voter base by turns tests the orthodoxy of each candidate, trying to figure out which one is the spy, which one is really Barack Obama bin Laden-Marx under the candidate mask!
Guarino on the Guilford GOP Platform
From The Evil Dr. Guarino:
The draft I saw last night, which was represented to me as the new proposed county platform, appears to be poorly written. It contains at least one or two errors regarding the fundamentals of statecraft. And there was some vague, nonspecific language that suggested to me the local party might be moving toward aquiescing with the gay sociopolitical agenda.
From Jon Firebaugh in the comments:
Joe,
Your tactics are pretty much on par with the left wing media you so despise. Throw some mud, see what sticks, and when it doesn’t, throw a little more. If you have specific problems with the platform you should act like an adult and SPELL THEM OUT, and not use insinuation and innuendo.
Joe: “The draft I saw last night, which was represented to me as the new proposed county platform, APPEARS (Caps Mine) to be poorly written” [snip] “And there was some VAGUE, NONSPECIFIC LANGUAGE THAT SUGGESTED TO ME (CAPS MINE)the local party might be moving toward acquiescing (<–corrected your spelling) with the gay sociopolitical agenda."
The only paragraph that I see that could REMOTELY, (and I mean REMOTELY be considered in the vein you suggest is as follows: "We believe that our societal structure, dependent dependent upon the traditional family unit, should be determined by the people within it,in accordance with there values and principles, rather than be imposed by an outside entity."
Later the platform goes on to state: "its(the community's)foundation is the traditional family unit." That is a total contradiction of your ridiculous attempt to misrepresent.So Joe, either you agree that "our societal structure" "should be determined by the people within it" or you believe that "our societal structure" should be "imposed by an outside entity". If you believe the latter then you are against individual liberty, and your beliefs are on par with Islamic fundamentalists whose goal is to impose a societal structure that obliterates personal freedom.
If you want to amend the platform, attend the GOP County Convention on March 3rd, and seek to change the language rather than spread hog manure across the blogosphere.Maybe Fec is right, as much as I don't want to go there.
12:30: Guarino issues a mea culpa:
It appears that the intentions were good in many respects; and I think I know what they were probably trying to say in each of these cases. But some things desperately need to be cleaned up. The last clause I published above is highly problematic. Even if it is taking a stand for the traditional family, it can be interpreted in a number of ways. I think I initially misinterpreted it.
No More Greensboro Bonds
From David Wharton in the comments at Ed Cone’s:
We already have $134,108,500 in approved (2008) bond projects that are still outstanding, which were slated to be completed “in 5 to 7 years”. Four years later, the majority of big projects have not yet reached the design phase, and none of them has been completed. In fact, as I understand it, most of the bonds for these projects have not yet been sold. Many neighborhoods have been waiting patiently for the improvements that the public approved in 2008.
I would like to know by what process the council schedules the sale of these bonds, and whether the current mayor and council intend the proposed PAC and economic development bonds to cut into the queue ahead of these projects.
From David Hoggard in the comments:
Specific to DW’s link of already-approved City bonds: We in Aycock started our journey to get the Summit Avenue Corridor improvements underway back in 2003 during ‘baseball’.
Over a period of 4 years, utilizing our own money, we undertook the necessary background work to complete the Corridor Study and spent untold hours refining the plan prior to getting it approved for implementation by Council back in, I believe, 2007. It was successfully approved by voters in 2008 which, we were told, put us toward the front of the line.
Then here comes the Johnny-come-latelies: Downtown Greenway, GAC, “economic development”, Lee Street Corridor, etc (all of which we supported via the ballot box). Biding our time, we will probably also agree (mostly) that a new PAC would be a good thing, but not if doing that (and Zach’s new 30M) further delays our already approved project.
Voters live in neighborhoods. If Council continues to defy them by implementing stall tactics (“well, you know, priorities change”) and ‘bait & switch’ methods (GAC, Coliseum Amphitheater and PAC) to fund the latest suitor, they will find neighborhoods abandoning them in droves.
Might be time for neighborhoods to storm the Council chambers and demand our due while, at the same time, reminding them that cutting in line is unfair, rude and disrespectful.
I agree we should send a unified message to Martinet Perkins and the Perkinettes that no more bonds will be approved by the voters until existing commitments have been honored.
From Jordan Green at YES! Weekly, in September of last year, on the fast-tracking of bonds for Natural Science Center improvements and the Coliseum’s Aquatic Center, designed to increase voter turnout:
Voters approved $134.1 million in street improvement bonds in 2008, but Fischer said only about $2.2 million has been issued from those funds. The money has been spent to design streetscaping for High Point Road, construction of part of the Downtown Greenway and design of the Fleming-Horse Pen Creek Connector. Future bond issues from the 2008 referendum will finance construction on those projects. The 2008 referendum also includes funding for the Cone Boulevard extension-Nealtown connector, the Florida Street extension and improvements to Alamance Church Road.
Authoritarian Psychopathology
Mike Lofgren at Alternet cites Wilhelm Reich:
The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and sexual anxiety…. The result of this process is fear of freedom and a conservative, reactionary mentality. Sexual repression aids political reaction not only through this process which makes the mass individual passive and unpolitical but also by creating in his structure an interest in actively supporting the authoritarian order. The suppression of natural sexual gratification leads to various kinds of substitute gratifications. Natural aggression, for example, becomes brutal sadism which then is an essential mass-psychological factor in imperialistic wars.
Thus is the fascist born.
