FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Song's been going through my mind for some reason. Weep, sad freaks of a nation.

•    I guess 2012 was the last year I paid attention to "Human Achievement Hour," the annual chest-thump in which the Competitive Enterprise Institute says Fuck You to the World Wildlife Fund's Earth Hour by asking True Sons of Liberty to burn up as much energy as possible in celebration of the stinking shithole we've made of the earth, I mean progress. The event remains hilarious. Got some links from a CEI publicist to "Human Achievement of the Day" posts about how guitars only exist because of capitalism and so forth. My favorite is about bitcoin:

These are still very early days, and bitcoin is still thought more as a volatile store of value rather than an emergent system of property rights, but the prospects for this particular human achievement are incredibly bright, if regulators do not find a way to stifle it (by regulating people rather than the system, for example).

This puts me in mind of Hearst on the trail of The Color in Deadwood, except Hearst's psychosis was not the type that kept him in his parents' basement. Murder and dismemberment were more his thing -- the sort of activities in furtherance of capital that the CEI pencil-necks are more likely to dress up in purty language than directly perform.

•   In the high-decibel world of wingnut blowhards it's tough to rise above the din, but in a column about the Bowe Bergdahl prosecution at PJ Media Michael Walsh amps it up:  In addition to standard-issue slur-slinging -- "the Coward-in-Chief and his deliberate thumb in the eye to the honor of the American military," "pathetic little pansy Bergdahl," "painfully stupid Jen Psaki," aargh,  blaargh -- Walsh bellows:

...it’s a rare instance of the military finally asserting itself against a rogue commander who is imperiling the nation and insulting it as he goes. Unlawful orders do not have to be obeyed, even from Fearless Leader; that’s a principle the U.S. clarified at Nuremberg. 

One imagines Walsh parachuting into Fort Bragg, a cigar in one hand and a pearl-handled revolver in the other, crying PATRIOTS! NOW IS THE TIME! Or maybe not: see, everyone's a disappointment to Walsh:

John McCain and Mitt Romney should both be hanging their heads in shame. They could have defeated him, and they chose not to. But that’s America in the 21st century — it never saw a fight it wanted to finish.

Maybe Walsh can stake out a little corner of his mental ward and declare that The Real America. I'll have to read Walsh more often; I haven't seen anything like him since the heyday of Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters.

•   The composer John Adams recently remarked at Avery Fisher Hall that Rush Limbaugh exercises "casual brutality toward women" -- which, really, is about as close to an incontrovertible statement as you can get -- and to National Review's Jay Nordlinger this is Hitler plus Big Brother:

To this remark, the audience responded with sustained and robust applause. In 1984, Orwell writes of the two-minute hate. The applause in Avery Fisher Hall did not last for two minutes, but it went on long enough... 

You’re never supposed to analogize anything to the Nazis. That’s the rule. But sometimes I break the rule. And I believe I got a whiff — just a tiny whiff — of Nuremberg in Avery Fisher Hall tonight. Collective hatred, and self-satisfied hatred, based on damnable lies.

I suppose this makes me Genghis Stalin, but Nordlinger is a fucking idiot.

EVERYTHING IS POLITICS TO THESE PEOPLE, PART ONE GAZILLION.

I ignored the Super Bowl on Sunday, and a good thing too, as Ed Driscoll tells me if I had watched I would have been subjected to a barrage of liberal propaganda. No, this isn't the old Rush Limbaugh idea that the NFL itself is left-wing; it's about the commercials:

So starting with one of the first Super Bowl-only ads, the legendary Ridley Scott-directed 1984-inspired Apple advertisement to launch the Macintosh, Madison Avenue ad reps began to use the platform to have fun. Ad reps created brilliant demo reels for themselves, and buzz for the clients’ products, which sometimes, with a little luck, even translated into increased sales.

That formula began to grate a bit in the postmodern naughts, as a formula began to evolve that featured men as the butts of jokes, part of a larger trend in the media overculture that Glenn Reynolds and others were first commenting on well over a decade ago. But those seem like pretty carefree days compared to what we witnessed last night...

Even worse than dumb husband jokes? Steel yourself, my friends:

By my rough count, there were at least two ads featuring people with no legs, one with a missing father, one with misogynistic anti-male crack from comedienne Sarah Silverman, and one ad bullying a ten year old boy because he said someone “plays like a girl.” (The horror.)

The ads with people with no legs, I suppose, were meant to make you feel sorry for them, which is a classic Democrat trick, and the father was probably missing because of no-fault divorce.

And perhaps most infamously based on comments on Twitter and even the London Daily Mail, one dead ten year old boy, thanks to Nationwide. (And if you don’t approve of this understandable media gruel, you’re an Internet “hater” — says Coca-Cola?)

I'm not sure why the famous dead kid ad is left-wing: was he murdered in the womb?

A friend of mine watching the game at my house last night, a fellow member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy bivouacked behind enemy lines in Deep Blue Socialist California, dubbed it “The Nanny Bowl.” He’s definitely on to something. As journalist Kevin P. Craver tweeted to me last night, “I fell into an alternate universe in which the party that loses the November election gets to write the Super Bowl ads.”

Actually, the people who write the ads do so because they are paid by clients, who carefully vet the ads and then pay millions of dollars to get them on during the game. Contrary to Driscoll's paranoid fantasy, they aren't doing it so the ad guys can have fun, or as a donation to the Democratic Party; they do it so people will talk about their brands, and then remember them when they go shopping. It's as pure a capitalist spectacle as can be imagined. The League, the network, and the sponsors can hardly help it if no one ponied up for a #Benghazi infomercial.

Rush Limbaugh has been talking for years about how hard the left has been trying to undermine football...

OK, this is where we came in. Oh, wait: Driscoll eventually gets someone to explain the dead kid-Democrat connection:

The modern left’s ideology is one big Nationwide ad. Submit to our practices or your kids will die. Only our mandated health insurance will treat your Bain cancer or protect you from global warming...

It's like he had a mole in the focus group! I look forward to Driscoll's column on how the left was responsible for Daniel Bryant getting screwed in the Royal Rumble.