Okay.  One more thing about this Beck book before I trash it into the mental junk heap.  I had a surprising “AHA” moment of “I know that one” insight.

I almost hate to mention her, because there’s nothing all that much to begrudge with her, and its a long ways from that time, and also I think some of my siblings had a reasonably good relation with her.  What you need to know about my high school Health teacher is shown in part from this inspirational cartoon and message that was plastered to her desk — the cartoon kid coming from roughly the same school of cartoons as the “Love Is” monstrosities of the 1970s — with the message “God Ain’t Made No Trash”.  Thematically this ties in with the item of “I know that one” perfectly, but in general it also offers something I always thought of her: the proscription against prayer in the public school was made for her, and that left to her duthers she would have been leading the class with the Lord’s Prayer at the start of each class.

I tend to think that there were too many videos shown through my K-12 years anyways.  I guess this comes off of two theories: one, kids learn in different manners and you have to have a panoply of techniques to reach them.  Two:  a good portion of the kids are illiterate.  (I’ll pause to allow any consideration of any possible interplay between these two concepts.)  A third works especially well for the Elementary years, which is that Elementary school teachers are in large part functioning baby sitters.

The sex education program was interesting.  That was, so far as I remember, a week of videos such that the teacher did not say anything to the class herself.  This after having our parents sign a clearance for the Sex Ed.  These classes tended to end with regular end of class apologies over inappropriate material she’ll have to screen out in the future.
One video jumped out at me as it seemed to be nothing but a sly and relatively subtle anti-abortion video — a long focus on an ultra-sound emphatically emphasizing the life of the fetus.  While overall it seemed that she was shifting through a back-catalouge of thinly disguised religious films, the sex week ended with what struck me as a “Very Special” episode of “Sweet Valley High” centered around the virtues of chasity — I base that on seeing an episode of this teenage show a year later and making such a connection, but I have never been able to verify whether I am right on that one.
I don’t really remember if there was more to this lesson plan than these stupdifying videos.  There may even have been a reasonaly legitimate second week of work-sheets.  In the end, she talked thoughtfully on the meeting with some parents over the sex ed program and their airing of concerns, which I assume may have taken place but have a hard time imagining anything substantial.

The Drug and Alcohol Awareness section of Health class was… well, there was a video about popular music references.  It was over a decade out of date.  It touched briefly on “backward masking”, but I think this was a matter of her letting the video run longer than intended, wanting to clip it down to the multitude of drug references in popular music as opposed to where Satan rears his head.  This was quite a revelation:  You know the Eric Clapton song “Cocaine”?  It’s actually about Cocaine.  Talk about a double entendre!  [pause]

We were all familar with that song as it played five times a day on the classic rock radio station.  “Slow Hands”, right?

So, from Alexander Zaitchik’s Beck book, page 208:

The web site of the church owned Deseret Book Company describes The Christmas Sweater as a “warm and poignant tale of family, faith, and forgiveness.”  This faint praise is the same cookie-cutter judgment Deseret’s in-house critics pass on every work of Mormon popular fiction to meet the genre’s rote requirements.  There are simply no subjects in this blank-eyed literary canon beyond the church approved troika of family, faith, and forgiveness.
LDS Church produced films offer more of the same.  All follow the same trajectory of cartoon tragedy to bright-light redemption with pummeling predictability.  Consider the plots of Mormonism’s most famous “fim classics”, as described in the BYU Creative Works catalouge.

The second item he lists, and “I Know that one!”

Cipher in the Snow:  When a teenage boy dies unexpectedly his math teacher is asked to notify the parents and write the obituary.  Although he was the boy’s favorite teacher, he hardly knew him.  Shy and ostracized, the boy was considered a “cipher” — an unknown number in a class roll book.  As the teacher unravels the mystery of what led to the boy’s death, he commits himself to not letting others suffer the same fate.

Adding to my original mystery about my Health teacher’s showing of this film is a second one:  I always understood her to be combing through some religious themed tracts — though this one didn’t hit me as religious in nature.  But she was Catholic.  What was she doing plucking something out of the Mormon canon?  Is there some sort of vast Ecumenical cataglouge of this type of materials?

My bigger question, and the one I had a hard time with at the time, can be fit in more current logoism:  WTF?  What — Huh — Why — Why did she show that to us?  It was a hokey Emotional Snuff film.  The kid drops dead in the opening scene as the school bus drives up, prompting the other kids to gasp “Oh My Gosh.  I think he’s dead!”  The teacher investigates and finds neglectful parents.  I don’t understand the value of a film like that.  Surely there’s a better way to approach the concerns of Depression and having a hard time getting going with school?

I can say one thing — something relatively interesting within the generally bored arena of high school which is never felt in quite the same way at any other point in life in this culture — (or maybe it is, but I’m just not really aware in elementary school).  The Culture War gets played out in some very peculiar ways, with broad attempts to hide its presence.  There was a Science teacher who gave a few out of the blue lectures / speeches which seemed to be thinly disguised slams at religious fundamentalist PTA-ers he had to deal with — but I think I may have been the only student who caught it like that.

Continuing on with the next ingredient in Beck’s make-up.

I don’t find the geneology of his history of conspiracism entirely convincing.  I’m not widely and systematically read on the subject, as much as I’m scatterdly so — the basic thrust needs a little tweaking.  It may be just that the antecedents exist such that trends in development never come out of whole cloth and are just re-tapped or re-emphasized, or re-discovered.

The lien goes that the major reference point for “The Enemy” in right-wing circles shifted from Moscow to a Western axis of Major Capitalist centers with Carroll Quigley’s 1966 book “Tragedy and Hope”.  Or more to the point, the 1970 Cleon Skousen book riffing off of Qugley, “The Naked Capitalist” — named after his 1958 “The Naked Communist”, and Gary Allen’s 1970 “None Dare Call it Conspiracy” — named after John Stormer’s 1964 “None Dare Call It Treason”.  But, the perfididy of The Rockefellar Clan and concerns were targetted a long time back, percolating about through various channels.  Maybe The Far Left (good and bad) fed into the Far Right through the 1960s the evils of the Institutes (leading up to Glenn Beck’s famous piece of Art Criticism.)

A fun little game to play.  Okay, one of a multitude of fun new “America Fallen from Its Limted Government foundings” — a check-list bullet-point list of secrets the liberals / socialist culture are keeping from you as they try to implant “Progressivism”.  You think it all started with the 14th Amendment or Woodrow Wilson, the Federal Progressive Income Tax, the Fed?  HA!  Shows what you know!
Martin Van Buren has a nightmare and big government is born– in the 1820s!
He did keep us out of War Against Britain, along the Canadian Border while the border hawks were clamoring for blood.  He deserves credit for that, doesn’t he?  (Or maybe he doesn’t, depending on which slice of Ron Paul you feel a kinship toward.)

The other week I listened to some supposed “Christian” AM radio, and heard that whole line about the Freemasons on the founding of this nation, symbols abounding everywhere — the all seeing eye on the dollar with the pyramid.  This show was immediately followed by a standard for this station items from American History — a highly selective quotation from a Founding Father to show this country was born a Christian Nation.  I guess you can give it up to this “Religious” station for airing a diversity of opinion, though they tend to exist in the same mind interchangably on whatever is needed at the time.  (Months back I heard on this station that Rockefellar was behind the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a means of putting Rockefellar on the Nazi Path I gather over the Nazis, you see.  Things make more sense and gain more context as I read a bit of bathroom graffiti alerting me to the story of IBM and —??? — letting WWII run its course for profit.  I’ll have to run an ametuer investigation on whether whoever wrote this bathroom graffiti is behind a scribbled note on a one dollar bill that circulated into and out of my hands — “alex jones infowars.com THE TRUTH”.

     When I first heard Glenn Beck in 2002, I knew instantly that he came from this particular radio world.  The effect was Limbaugh on ADD. 

It strikes me that this is the first of several components in the shaping of Beck’s persona, and this book suggests that you can follow the path of his radio ratings and career advancment on how he shaped himself.  Personal problems and issues aside, I can actually take the career move from Morning Zoo to Talk radio as a rather straight-forward desire to change career projections — he started in radio playing for Top 40 radio something like Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” and finished by playing Britney Spears — you understand how you can become sick of moving with a trend-line marked by a particular age group you lose more connection to with each passing minute.

But it is curious to learn how close Beck’s launch-pad into national talk fame came to failure.  As it says in Beck’s promotional material — he landed in Tampa Bay in 1999 and quickly grabbed the #1 rated local talk radio show.  And as those in the know can tell you, there is a punchline there in its concealment, something pierced with the simple question “And who was #2?”  Media deregulation and corporate consolidation worked its way in a very acute way in Tampa — Clear Channell acquired another major radio ownership corporation, and these two companies happend to together have owned several more stations than legally allowed by one corporation.  So Clear Channel sold excess stations in such a way as to avoid direct competition — Tampa has itself a new Spanish language station! — and liquidated some local talk radio talents to go with the cheap flow of national syndication.  Glenn Beck was number one by default, which wasn’t to say he didnt’ — until the end — struggle commercially at the number one slot.

The first transformation in his persona came as he moved from a generally conservative and obviously Republican voting record host with a bent more toward some morning zoo pack of stunts over to your rigid partisan warrior.  Beck had replaced a local liberal radio host with a long time devoted following, and the thing that the local Clear Channel executives could tell their disappointed listeners was to give the new guy a chance, assuring them he wouldn’t be a cookie-cutter clone of the ditto-head dominated AM Dial.  It is interesting to see that I actually remember reading about an act he did at the time  (though I don’t think the piece referenced Beck) at the time in a “Death of Radio and New Lows in Radio Culture” themed piece.  He would alert the audience that he would, in a future segment, come out on a preposterous and outrage provoking position, and have callers chime in agreeing with him — for purpose of fake debate with outraged listeners not in on the joke.  This is an area in radio trends that belong more to a variety of pranksters than your Hannity — though I guess I have to say it is not too different in theme to a favorite of mine, Phil Hendrie, so maybe I’m a hypocrite is offering that this sounds stupid.
Near the end of the road, knowing he had to find a ratings boost to keep his career alive, he kept in mind advice from a consultant to jump full frotal on the next local news story of national resonance.  The 2000 election came, and with it the Recount.  It was this story that Beck projected himself into the limelight, and also garnered a local audience by becoming a Partisan Warrior — fighting and exposing the treachery of Team Gore.  24 News Channels having 24 hours to fill, it seems you could grap a seat at the table by being a media personality in one of the three key spots in Florida, and so it was with Beck.
He followed down the new found Partisan Warrior in championing Terri Schiavo — noteworthy in that he did a 180 in his opinion, noteworthy too in that in both instances the opinions were rather tastelessly expressed.
The next media news event, and the one that bolted him onto national radio, was 9/11.  In the immediate post-fully news coverage period of 9/11, Clear Channel had a need to provide feed for their host of stations with (Republican conservative) generally political topic talk radio station, all beating their chests for God Country and War on Terror, but with shows on the schedule such as Dr. Laura.  So, under the umbrella of “America Under Attack”, they gave the nation Glenn Beck as a temporary stop-gap.  This sampler served beneficial for his more proper syndication launch.

You can spot the next crucial ingedient in Beck’s brand making as coming in part from having his network of stations leaning on small to medium sized markets, and not LA NY Chicago.  With this, he discovered the “Heartland”.  To a large degree, they all have this line, but he came to beat this one in a heavy handed manner.  The cover of his first book:
  — which strikes me as rather artificial and contrived.  (I note that the latest edition he has changed to having him hold out an apple pie — this suggests a note of self-awareness that he can’t get away with this.  Or perhaps a note of irony in that the tropes now have understood quotations around them.)
It is here that we see his particular synergy with a Sarah Palin and the nationalistic “Tea Party Express” strain of Tea Party-dom.  He built this brand with his “Rally for America” tour, at the time blasted as seemingly a Clear Channel — connected to Bush conspiracy of wartime propaganda.  These were at once war protest protests with glitzy country music performances (“Put a Boot in your Ass”, remember?).  It was also more to the point a Beck promotional tour, where he pounded away to his fans that he was, as they were, a “Real American” coming out of the “Real America”.  I am surprised that author Alexander Zaitchik didn not mention at this juncture a central irony in this construction — in setting off a designated “Real America” out in a fly-over country of rural and exurban lands, the inhabitants of New York City — scene of the tragedy which prodded and enforced the need to assert the dichotemy — falls into the “Phony American” category.

I can anticipate the next major transformational ingredient in Beck’s radio persona, though have not read far enough in the book to get to it.   I can provide the outline already, though, as this is where he came into his own.  It comes with Cleon Skousen.  The last major key in the shaping of Beck is the conspiratorial element — the shadowing into someone like Alex Jones.  I can suggest that part of this comes with the oppositional line that comes within the 2006 falling of public esteem of the party that he was partisan warrioring for — which was and is, after all, the Party of Real America.  It is this equivalent of pounding away at Vince Foster’s suicide in the 1990s.  The other part comes from the shock of the 2008 Fiscal Crisis and the campaign and election of that man — Barack Obama.  From his persona built around something to the effect of “I’m you” — just a guy trying to find answers in this crazy world of ours where something has gone off-base, he breathlessly lead his fans on a crash-course of studious discovery with a supposed “Great Books” program, learning alongside everyone else “what’s really going on out there”.

It is one paint job made over another — and each item is still there.  Just under his chalkboard filled with the name of the foundations secretly running the world is lurking him standing on a stage with a Jumbo-tron of video of George W Bush saluting the Troops.  Just under that is the PJ Barnum showsman searching for an angle, who knows how to work a crowd.  His core does make him distinct from someone like Hannity, but it somewhat bounds him.

Following their victory over the Rams last night, Quarterback Charlie Whitehurst talked to the media wearing, what else? — the 2010 NFC West Division Champions cap!  I cannot quite tell if this shows a lack of pride and dignity, or a well of pride and dignity.

Go to the Seattle Seahawks website, and you will see that right there, the merchandise — the 2010 “NFC West Division Champion” material.

I trust that anyone who purchases such items will wear it ironically.  Perhaps alternate them with the “19-0” New England Patriots merchandise that never made it to market.  Or, the 2004 “Joe-Mentum” merchandise the Joseph Lieberman Presidential campaign offers for sale.
Really, these things would probably sell better if it had a little bit of insignia noting the story.  Something like, “7-9, BITCHES!” would work.  I guess, reading the press quotes — Coach Pete Carroll saying “Is this fun or what?”, and enter the references to “don’t give a crap” about the nay-sayers  — the team seems to be going full force with it.  Meantime, a fun little google search to go with is “Seahawks” and “Embarrassment”.

Nate Silver crunches the numbers for you. 

Okay, let’s pile on: I don’t think I have a trip to Seattle planned any time soon. According to Mr. Sagarin’s formula, the Seahawks would deserve to be favored by just 3 points against the 2008 Detroit Lions, who went 0-16.

And for me, the football season is now over — there is nothing left to cheer for – everything after this is an anti-climax.

A sentence that is sure to be brought into wikipedia:

LaRouche, a polarizing political figure and eight-time presidential candidate, served 5 years of a 15-year sentence in federal prison.

There is an arbitrariness for the word “polarizing”.  Sometimes it gets used for matters that have approval ratings in the 70-30 split range.  This usage, I am having trouble conceptualizing the polarity.  Can someone diagram this magnet for me?
Your wikipedia update, by the way: Will Weback removed a dead link to the wikipedia page for Dennis King (as there is no longer a wikipedia page based on him).  The Larouche Wikipedia Team chimed in with a couple of insults of Dennis King as “not the King you were looking for” and “permanently unnoteworthy.”  That’s the big news item in Larouche Wikipedia Team Action.  I’ll keep you abreast of future activity on this front.

My thought on reading that Dave Christie is now running for the Democratic nomination in a Congressional district out of Seattle, out of a slate of six Larouchies — you could say they’ve doubled the square but a more accurate reading is that they’ve made a pentagram out of a triangle — was… They cannot possibly be running against Jim McDermott.  That makes no sense given the org’s political feignings — it’d be like challenging Dennis Kucinich.  Then again, this is a world where the Larocuhies have the Democrats divided in the familiar “FDR and etc” category against the “DLC / New” category, and slot Bill Clinton (and Big Time) in the former category.
But there was the qualifier — “Seattle area”, and with that, they’re challenging Adam Smith of the 9th Congressional District.  Kind of.

The district actually makes some sort of sense for the Larouchies, if you consider the big population center of “SeaTac” is practically named after the airport — and so they can double their supposed electoral battle against Representative Adam Smith with their actual contest against the Hare Krishnas.   OR. It appears they will be spending a majority of the campaign in McDermott’s district, which is just as well — it is the media market.  But we get some further geographic confusion.  Dave Christie uses his campaign announcement speech to brush lightly against the Member of Congress Adam Smith to launch a full attack on the 18th century Economist as one of the Fathers of Naziism:

And what we see then, is with Adam Smith’s writing, the idea that man is merely a beast, pursuing pleasure, avoiding pain, we see the later writings of Bentham, whose utilitarian philosophy was essentially that. Bentham also was writing for the British East India Company. And that utilitarian theory was at the core of the Nazi system.

From there he jumps down to his real target of enmity, the member of Congress from Portland — Earl Blumenauer.  And while I could venture into the virtues of his part in “end of life counselling” and discuss the matter of the Weasel that is Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, the more interesting part of the full frontal attack comes in in the following paragraph.  We’ve see that the Larouche og has been where others of his ilk have been — Wayne Madsen for instance, and it seems obviously Webster Tarpley — in describing off of something called “Ulstermann” a world where Obama is in a Nixon-like situation of talking to presidential portraits.  Apparently Earl Blumenauer has joined in on that fun!

And I would ask Blumenauer, who would he maybe be more afraid of confronting? Goering? Or Franklin Roosevelt? Perhaps walking to Roosevelt, and saying, “You know, FDR, the New Deal, the Glass-Steagall, this is all antiquated. We New Democrats have the solution — bailouts, austerity for the states and cities! We don’t need to put anybody to work, we’ll just start killing off the elderly, to get the resources for the bailouts. And, y’know Roosevelt, the war has been difficult for you, I see it — have you considered end-of-life counseling?” Perhaps Blumenauer would find Franklin Roosevelt’s wheelchair so far up his ass, he may not know what to do.

And if you think that’s harsh, you should have heard what he had to say to John Quincy Adams!  (Of course, Blumenauer’s high-five to Woodrow Wilson was simply disgraceful and shocking.)
I can only assume that the Larouche org saw that Delia Lopez already have this particular electoral market cornered (and in the general election yet).

Things get a bit more geographically confusing.  Shortly before making this big announcement, Dave Christie took his act, running the Larouche Youth Movement Basement Team, over to Kennewick.  (Yes, you read that right.  Kennewick.)  They appear to have reneted out a hall, plastered it with “Larouche Pac” stickers, and made big announcements on their big plans for Hanford.  (The people of the Radioactive Tumble-Weed have been warned… but, you know what type of stories they’re familiar with reading and seeing)

As the intersection of three rivers, the Yakima, Snake, and Columbia Rivers, and with its plentiful farmland, as well as home to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the Tri-Cities of Washington could not be better situated as the site of the first NAWAPA conference in the Pacific Northwest, December 4th, 2010. […]

Dave Christie, of LaRouche PAC, started with an introduction of the panelists, mentioning that this NAWAPA conference was not just in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, but was rather part of an international fight against the British Empire to fight for development, as opposed to the globalization policy of de-industrialization.

Scattered in this conference there was undoubtedly a mix of something worthwhile — somewhere after the news that this is a major front in the battle against the British Empire.  The Larouche speakers seem to come out loopily followed by more reasonable concerns from — what the hell was Hanford Advisory Board Keith Smith doing with this thing?

Kirsch then introduced Keith Smith, former head of the Machinists Union for southern Washington, and a retired machinist at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where he also sits on the Hanford Advisory Board. Smith provided insight into scaling issues, making the point that due to the size of NAWAPA, simply scaling machinery up in a linear fashion results in exponential rates of complexity and or problems. He then went into some of the concerns around training a young generation of machinists, since it takes approximately 5 years and many of our skilled machinists are now approaching retirement.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to see where this conclusion splits into two different worlds:

But perhaps the most interesting part of the conference was the relationship between the presenters and the audience. There was a lively back and forth throughout the whole conference, essentially ending in a discussion that circled around the basic question of how you organize. It was here that Kirsch and other members of LaRouche PAC, both full-time members and active supporters, led the discussion on sticking to principle above all else. From the interviews that followed, many of the attendees left emboldened with their own sense of how to organize on based solely on principle.

I wonder… did this thing happen in a vacuum, or did it filter in any form whatsoever in any local press or media — a press release statement in the “events” section of the Tri-Cities Herald, perhaps?

Another candidate that brings about Geographic Confusion is Diane Sare, who says she is running in the “New Jersey-Philadelphia region”.  Given that this covers two states, I can only assume she will be campaigning across multiple congressional districts at area post offices, see which one meets her the most favorable response, and take the fight there.  We may also have an answer to who gets to speak to media outlets — if we see them smiling for the camera and not answering questions with a “We don’t talk to the Media” — it seems to suggest an improvement in chances that they’ll be tapped for electoral office — see here.

We can assume that the third new Congressional candidate — for the “Detroit area” — will not be running against Conyers or Dingell.  More on this whenever they decide to put him in an actual congressional district race.

Going down the comments for the Ballot Access News clips, we see that the campaign manager for the two Larouche nominees of Illinois in 1986, Gerald Pechenuk, chimes in against Rahm Emanuel. This is neither here nor there, Bill Clinton will surely do everything in his power to stop this Mad Man from ascending up the ladder to Chicago Mayor.  (If it weren’t for intervention on the part of the Emanuel style Eugenics Democrats, we’d have seen Adlai Stevenson III get to the presidency with Economics Adviser Larouche in tow.  Or so Pechenuk says.  Too bad he wasn’t quite where is now in 1986:

LaroucheIsRight:  The fun thing to think about for me, is that in three thousand years of this war the Oligarchy has never faced a foe as competent as Lyndon LaRouche. He is the best General our side has ever had. I don’t mean to say people should get giddy, but we can win this time if we focus and must every once of fight within us. I hope those who can will go to LaRouchePACdotCOM and contribute.

See also this comment:

Read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I hear you can find that in an old copy of Dope, INC.  But probably not the just re-released version.

Hey.  This is interesting.  Ballot Access News missed a big scoop.  Look here and click on Robert Lauten’s comment line.  And you get the URL:  http://robertlautenforcongress2012.com/ .
It is a dead link, but there it is.  I assume that Robert Lauten will be running again on the American Independence Party line, meaning he’ll even be there for the General Election.
Otherwise, the comments section here veers over to the predictable: What 2012 election. Will Adolph Obama really let another election to take place?

To complete the package, the Org really needs to find their presidential candidate.  I assume that they in a post-Larouche candidacy lull right now, and will resume new runs after he passes away — selecting a candidate from amongst their sea of congressional candidates.  But surely they can use a caretaker style candidate to bridge the two eras.  You know who I suggest?
Do you really need to ask?
And you know… he can create a National Unity ticket by tapping Delia Lopez as a running mate!

Random item I read in a copy of 1933 American Mercury: a short bullet-point review of a book on the just now (1933) passe topic of Technocracy.  The author of the book — obviously pseudonym:  Spengler.  That David P Goldman really gets around!
Note:  I hope to never bind those two topics here again.  Then again, I already hoped to never mention Goldman again.  I’ll add a new one: I should stop with gratuitous references to Delia Lopez.

I can’t really work out, in a quick and rough manner, the probability increase in getting “worthwhile games” with the NFL’s shift to a final week of all divisional match-ups.  The idea is to ameoleriate somewhat the standard “playoff locked team with nothing to play for sit starters” routine.  But it doesn’t add up — the luck of the draw would have preferred last week’s Green Bay — New York Giants match-up for this week, and indeed flexed into prime-time.  As it happens, the New York Giants probably lost out on the playoffs when the Eagles were upset by the Vikings on Tuesday Night Football — thus making it likely that the Bears will sit their starters this week against the Packers as it locked them the #2 seed and bye week.

But the Giants play at the same time as the Packers.  The NFL either was smart or lucky, as all these games that may mean something, but quite possibly don’t mean anything, occur at the same time.  The “gotta play” effect is maximized.

The one thing the NFL seems to want to have happened was to have essentially a Divisional Tital match-up be ready to be pulled into prime-time.  Here the league whiffed.  I imagine the league wishes it could have Baltimore play Pittsburg or Jacksonville play Indianapolis for the last week of the season, but instead the only game that unambiguously decides who moves into the playoffs and who doesn’t… a real clash of the Titans:

It hold’s the key to that situation I’ve been discussing here on this blog for weeks, rooting for… It is the NFL’s Worst Nightmare… and even as they moved this game to prime-time, the big whigs in the NFL were probably cursing and swatting at flies…

The 7-8 Saint Louis Rams visit the 6-9 Seattle Seahawks for ALL THE MARBLES!!!

Unfortunately for my long desired spectator sports dream of the 7-9 Divisional Championship, I have no confidence in this team winning, and suspect the Rams will romp forward… thus moving the 7-9 Laughingstock to the 8-8 shrug.  The Seahawks are not just a 6-9 team, but they are a bad 6-9 team.  Their 9 losses all came in blow-out fashion — one 15 point loss being in a sort of gray area (Can they put their hat on that one, as it came against their likely playoff match-up, the New Orleans Saints?)  The worst of the lot was a drubbing by the hands of the New York Giants, which was a game where Charlie Whitehurst started for an injured Matt Hasselback.  Whitehurst will make his second start next in this “NFC WEST CLASH FOR ALL THE MARBLES” following Hasselback’s surreal injury in last week’s game.  The team started 4-2 — winning their opener against San Francisco in a blow-out which has since been avenged, winning against a San Diego Chargers team that essentially handed them a game gift-wrapped in a game they had no business winning, winning against Arizona, and this makes their victory in Chicago the most impressive win of the season.  Their two victories since have come against Arizona again, and against the worst team in the league, the Carolina Panthers.
And the nine losses were all blow-outs.

Seahawks fans appear to be rooting for a loss.  This is a booby prize of a playoff appearance which isn’t advancing the team in future years in making strides and improvements, and a better draft pick awaits a loss.  The team faces the prospect of either losing and fading into the usual obscurity of bad teams, or winning and being a Laughingstock in the anals of NFL history.  (I see references when I google the team up to national sports writers saying the Seahawks could make history with this game, Dubious History they don’t want to make.) For all I know this sense has filtered the team, and the insistance on starting Whitehurst is an admission of absurdity.

Pat Buchanan exonerates Haley Barbour by bringing up Woodrow Wilson? Always with the Woodrow Wilson.

Understand, Pat Buchanan, during the Nixon Administration, proferred affirmative action for everyone BUT blacks.

Also understand, Reason Magazine, as a sort of anti-Obama back track to Franklin Roosevelt’s shadow, ran an item about Wilsonites disillusioned and chomping at the bit against President Roosevelt.

Understand, Wilson was Nixon’s presidential role model in the sort of statecraft, world scene, grafting to your yearning of Greco-Roman Parliamentary theory sort of trope.

Meantime, in other equivalency throws for the defense of Haley Barbour, there is this thing about the pre-desegregated Yankees.  The difference between the New York Yankees of the 1940s and the Citizens Councils is that the premise of those Yankees teams was to most efficiently hit balls around with sticks and run in circles and stop the hitting of balls and running around in circles, whereas the premise of the Citizens Councils was to halt the march to desegregation.  Actually, we’re stuck back at Barbour’s point of contention — “in the North, they thought they were the Klan”.  Put this alongside the demands of how to understand Confederate history, and so long as these contentions remain we have a problematic political culture.

But Hey!  Did you know that Bull Connor was a Democrat?

I was born in a small town.  I was raised in a small town.
There is a wikipedia article about the small town.  Your encyclopedic information, more or less firmly in place.  Go into the history anals of the wikipedia address and I imagine these are fairly typical temporary contributions to this subject of article.  Go look at your small town and see if there are any similarities!

 ghetto ass little village right smack in the middle of
FUCK G-CITY!
These two additions were made on the same day by the same user.  They were deleted three days later.  Then, a couple of days later someone added something more… positive, along the lines of a “Woot!”

It was the hometown of the awesome [name] Brothers, [name] and [name]
Represent!
Deleted the same day.

The only person in the “notable residents” list was added at about this time, by someone who is apparently an aficinado in the field of this genre of things — a voice actor who did some radio stints way back, and starred in a famous cartoon in the late 1960s and early 1970s (which the courts ruled were not owned by Dan Decarlo), and is now on a “Focus on the Family” radio theater.

Then we get back to this:
fuck this city for real

A “bot” deleted that edit.  Bots will delete a lot of these contributions.

And then, more bored teenager hi-jinks:
hershey highway heading straight to your ass
This remained there for two weeks.  The bot wasn’t operating correctly.

Apparently seeing the addition of a “notable person” category, someone threw a lob to…

[name] a nazi general from World War III he killed twenty six people with his bare hands. He discriminates against all imigrants from foreign lands and hate towards the people of mexico.

Which, I can only guess he shared this with a friend, as someone added this the next day:
He created the Stranger, a technique known as sitting on your hand until it goes numb and the you masterbate with it
This person created an account, which was quickly deleted, and the only thing I can say is that his contributions for the neighboring small town are modestly more clever… modestly.

Someone added a college football player to the “notable person” category several months later, which I guess is a new addition to the “woot” category.  (Curiously he had to edit it twice to decide whether it was proper to leave the state or required a “University of” state.)  It was deleted by a wikipedia editor who deemed him not sufficiently notable.  But only after  nine months.  The college football player got his nine months in the sun on wikipedia.  Maybe he was benched at that point?

At last our depressed small town teenage vandals came up with something… anything.:
After the battle of Choxulla. General [name] defeated the dreaded purple orangutan of doom, Dreaded purple Orandgutan of doom was the dictador of Choxulla, he ruled with an iron fist for 200 years and forced his people to learn the dark form of majic that he was so fond of. Untill [name] destroyed the Dreaded Purple Orangutan of Doom, and his satanist followers in the battle of Choxulla were 73.5 percent of the inhabitants were killed. Afterwards he cristened the the new city [city name], and ended the use of magic and it was instantly replaced by rigorous training in Physics and technology. [Name] ruled 70 years from 1909-1979, [Name] ruled with an Iron Fist as well, but was considered more responsible because he could actually relate to the Human/Elven/Creaton inhabitants better than the Dreaded Orangutan of Doom. [Name] kept the city very clean/neat and kept his people under a military lifestyle and soon [city name] gained a reputation for being very diciplined and highly skilled in their sciences. Skarks rule was constantly seeing resistace from the elven race which highly agreed with the used of magic, and seeked a more free and relaxed form of government. The Creaton race (Creatons are animals wich have magic in their blood and have reached a higher level of conciousness) also were a great source of resistance, they still held rage at stark for killing their king the Dreaded Purple Orangutan of Doom, and seeked to regain their rightfull place as rulers.
This was deleted two hours later.
His contributions to the neighboring town are shorter, though no less creative.

We get another “woot” for the “notable residents” list:
[Name] — really nice guy

Deleted immediately.  And back to some hometown love:
May it be noted that its a peice of shit town that would burn to the ground it the world had any justice. Seriously this place should eat shit and die.
Deleted eleven minutes later.

Some racial issue:
lots of meskins live there since 1990’s
Deleted a minute later.

The football player was added again.  This time he had a much shorter stint — he made it for eighteen minutes.

And… more hometown love:
settlement type = HEHOLE!  (SIC?)
nickname = WHERE FUN GOES TO DIE!
motto = WE WILL CONSUME EVERYTHING THAT YOU REPRESENT!
It will alwhays live in the gut of a giant turtle who likes to consume the souls of orphans and hates YOU!

Looking at his contributions, I’m impressed he tacked to a contribution for an old Speaker of the House of the first part of the twentieth century, and less impressed that his contribution was to note that he was “really gay.  Ha Ha Ha!”

More racial fun.  To a statistical round-up of demographics, after listing Africans Americans in a tiny percentage, someone adds: “(Thank god!)” 
In the same editing binge, we have notable resident:
[Name], town douchebag
And he does the honors of deleting his own contributions.

And…
In more recent years the town has become overrun with gangs and troublemakers. Some local residents have nicknamed the town Compton. Compton, CA is well known throughout the world for it’s gang violence and dangerous neighborhoods. Although anyone who has ever been there would agree it’s a much safer place to live.
Some standard issue homophobia, possibly reference to some local person.
[Name]- Local penis sucker – Can almost always be found at one of the local glory holes.

Both deleted… immediately.

Two edits made at the same time:
crap hole
Fine.  I suppose he’s sliding that in with:
The official language is Spanish.

And so it goes.
Um… It gets better?  Maybe?

Okay, Sports Fans!  Another week, and we have further clarification on that NFC West race I’ve been following with some glee.  First, a look at how the four teams fared last week.  The good news, for the hopes and dreams of the 7-9 Playoff Team (and Division Champion), is that they were all playing games against teams outside their division, and thus… all lost.

The Arizona Cardinals were officially elimated from the playoffs after losing 19-12 to the team with the worst record in the league, the Carolina Panthers.
Carolina 19 , Arizona 12

You know it’s going super bad for the Arizona Cardinals this season when the network studio crew covers its eyes and ears and doesn’t even want to discuss their game Sunday against the Carolina Panthers.

And that was at halftime.

“I didn’t see it,” Cardinals coach Ken Whisenhunt said. “That’s the business in the NFL. If you don’t play well, you’re going to be subject to that. Do I like it? No. Of course not. Our players don’t like it.

Seattle got thumped by the Atlanta Falcons.
Atlanta 34 Seattle 18
And this spurred a genuine “Quarterback Controversy”.

On Seattle’s first offensive play of the second half, Hasselbeck failed to get rid of the ball in his end zone, was sacked by Jamaal Anderson and fumbled. At the bottom of the pile was Babineaux, and the score gave the Falcons a 24-10 lead.
Hasselbeck followed with interceptions on Seattle’s next two series’ and was eventually replaced by Charlie Whitehurst. Hasselbeck now has 13 turnovers — 10 interceptions and three fumbles — in Seattle’s last four games. […]
Seattle was nearly perfect on its opening drive in taking a 7-0 lead on Marshawn Lynch’s 1-yard plunge and from there did little right. Hasselbeck followed up his costly end zone mistake by throwing interceptions on the Seahawks next two possessions, getting loudly booed.
Whitehurst was greeted with cheers from the remaining fans. The decision will only fuel speculation on what future Hasselbeck might have in Seattle — not only after this season, but next week at Tampa Bay.
The fans seemed to make their choice, chanting “Charlie” after Whitehurst scored on a 1-yard TD run in the fourth quarter.

The San Francisco 49ers were thumped by San Diego.
San Diego 34  San Francisco 7.
“After that game, right now “… you walk away not feeling good,” quarterback Alex Smith said.

The Saint Louis Rams were smashed by Kansas City, who got their starting quarterback back from injury to stay apace in front of San Diego in their divisional race… a division race where the teams actually have to win games in order to do “stay apace in front”.
Kansa City 27 Saint Louis 13

So, let’s look at the standing.
Saint Louis Rams:  6 wins, 8 losses
Seattle Seahawks : 6 wins, 8 losses
San Francisco: 5 wins, 9 losses
Arizona: 4 wins, 10 losses.

The Race for a 7 – 9 playoff hinges off of the three meaningful games.

This Sunday, the San Francisco 49ers will play host to the Saint Louis Rams in a crucial divisional match-up.  Should the 49ers win, they will remain in the play-off hunt, and have only a Tampa Bay home victory against Seattle to gain “control of their own destiny”, for the final game against the Arizona Cardinals.
Should the Rams win…  Seattle’s game in Tampa Bay would become, for them, meaningless, and perhaps they will just go ahead and throw the game away to rest their starters, in what would have to be the most hilarious example of that in league history.   (Particularly because the league shifted the time schedule to put a game against two teams fighting for the playoffs in a key slot).   This will set up the Exciting Final game of the season, a match-up between Saint Louis and Seattle for all the marbles.  Unfortunately, St Louis will be 7-8 with a chance at an 8-8 season, but I guess that would add to the anticipation for Final Game 7-9 Heroics.