If Only

I set myself a quest. I sought high and low for the object of a pretty faith, and a lovely sentiment. I set out, with the worst of intentions, and I discovered myself vain and even vainglorious enough to seek a distillation of it.

Despite that alarming vanity, or perhaps because of it, I bumbled across wordy glen, and falling sideways for what seemed a day longer than forever, fell upwards into a madman's cavern. What a treasure was held within. A glass vial - and no ordinary one, no, this was done in etch and filigree - within which was contained this most potent elixir, a magical essence, and even an animated one.

Fortuitous accident, in deed. So goes the reward of a hopeless self-regard, and a mindless vanity.

Having been led across that verbal field into the secret lair of a mad scientist by the good fish and a vast conspiracy, and stumbling drunk with my own mirrored self, the test tube nearly fell of its own accord, leaping - I swear it - from off its perch upon a dusty shelf, and into my grubby, grimy tramper's fingers.

Much amused, I thought to sniff the scent of it.

Surprised, instead, by an earnest, endearing whispered voice, all disembodied, coming up and upwards, from out of within it.

Like a captured soul, or bottled saint, that voice came unto me: "...Lock arms! And let's get this unprincipled ego-maniacal sell-out out [Obama] of office! "

Replying, slighting and slightly, I, an evil man and often proudly, said back to he:  "...to be replaced by a clone of him."

Incredulous, and tinny with despair, came that voice back out to  air, "Nope. Not if we ditch this party completely, and support the independent candidacy of someone with actual principles.... rather than just marketing gimmicks..."

And I know what elixir, what power, what magic mystery was now revealed to worthless, goblin me.

The secret of a secret faith.

"If only..."

"In principle..."

" And if..."

Refrains from the mass of a high church faith, choruses of magical incantation, and the bottle-bodied dreams of a future already written in the believers' pluperfect.

Open Letter to A Registered Democrat

1. Your party hasn't changed. It isn't betraying you. That you ever believed otherwise is entirely to your discredit. The onus isn't on you to figure this out. The onus is  you. We've been carrying your credulousness for so long now, you don't realize that you're a burden.

Anyway...

Your party hasn't rediscovered Reagan in the guise of Barack fucking Obama. It's still the same committee of vultures, with the same set of goals. They're just as content to dismantle the res publica now as they were two years after it looked like black people and the womenfolk might really want a piece of it. They're committed to a complete Enclosure of the remaining commons. Nothing is new except your whiny "disillusionment."

2. It's the messaging which has changed. That is all. The media environment is different because the media consumer no longer looks like your working class ward boss grandfather. It's a media market, represented by the credentialed middle manager, the professional and the sub-class of creative mercenaries. They're wholly invested in the meritocracy. They've bought in. The Ratchet moves with the medium.

3. They'll still take your loyalty, when you're ready to give in and give it back to them. They might even make useful noises about homosexuality and domestic terrorism. Ungod knows you're scared silly of god-sots with a microphone. And that's nothing new, is it? The Republicans have been willing to play bogey for seven decades now.

4. Everything you hate about today's Democrats was already in evidence during FDR's Administration. Everything. The compromises, the marginalization of population groups, the handing over of the Commons to private control, the transfer of public equity to corporate holding, the obsession with currency stability, oil supply, hegemony, central banking and European economic liabilities already obtained with Roosevelt and Truman. And the wars, the wars, the corporate bottom lining wars? C'mon now. War was as good for Democrat donors then as it is now.

The problem isn't a change in real relations. No matter what you tell yourself.

The problem is that you were never attentive enough to notice a change in perceptions.

The New Deal Democrats didn't have to worry about how to appease women and black people. That's the unspoken secret to FDR's success. His environment allowed him to appear as a patriarch - a precursor avatar of Rockefeller's bomfoggy united white Republic. The nationalist and universalist language was exclusive. The New Deal had no room for the Negro. It was a deal for the disciplined laborer, for the nationalist who was willing to do what he was told. It was a deal for the company man, not for the undesirables.

5. The Democrats still hate the undesirables. They still want a nation of property "owning" employees. Just like the Republicans do, of course. The Republicans are honest about it. They talk up their merit and bootstrapper rhetoric right out in public. They blame the poor, the Mexicans, the uppity women and the "urban welfare leeches." And they campaign on it. The Democrats treat with the poor dishonestly - as problems to be fixed, as people to be saved from themselves, elevated by Democratic grace into membership in the property "owning" class of behaving minions. The Democrat doesn't want shared responsibility. He isn't interested in cornucopia and the redirection of labor towards the enjoyment of life and the living of it. He wants more people disciplined by crippling debt, thirty year mortgages and student loans with compounded interest.

6. The fault is you. You've been a consumer of propaganda and your own stupidity for so long that you had yourself persuaded by delusions.  Your heroes were bought men. Made men; they were obvious stooges of the real victors of World War Two (transnational corporations). They were never in fact crusaders for the commonweal. FDR wasn't fighting for the little man. He was keeping his ruling class friends from facing down revolution. FDR was first and foremost good for business. Carter was a voice of austerity. Clinton, a remarkably forthright enemy of the little people.

And Obama?

Fucking Obama. It's not his fault you believed in him. He was preaching the Gospels of Austerity, War and the Bootstrap from the first day of his rise into prominence.

So, fuck you, registered Democrat. Fuck you and your self-deceptions. You have been neutering, negating and compromising genuine labor agitation, unrest and revolutionary impulses for so long we're past measuring in decades, and we're on to counts in centuries.

You know what you can do with your disillusionment and disbelief?

You can fucking choke on it.

Resistance

However we can, whenever we can, to the best of our ability, to whatever limit we can tolerate, for as long as we can hold out, so long as we do not betray, and can continue to bear the weight and the burdens of any friend, comrade or stranger.

That's how we resist.

What we resist is not simple, nor simple to describe. In fact, its greatest virtue (for those who rule and benefit from it) is its appearance of compounded complexity.

It's part of who we are. We are raised to belong to the thing which consumes us, to experience doubt as a double bind, to labor to overcome our own resistances as a matter of responsibility, pride, membership, morality, self-respect, vanity or honor. We have our personalities organized for us, to collapse under the weight of that bind made obvious. We are organized towards self-betrayal at the first hint of obstruction, or realization.

The essential point, if there can be one, is that the whole of society is organized to consume us. I don't mean that as a statement in the abstract. I mean it literally. When your boss's boss orders a thirty dollar glass of wine, it is your suffering he drinks. It's our suffering.

Our private agonies and alienation are not in competition. Some obviously have it worse than others. I know my own good fortune in escaping Lawrence, or not being born in Burkina Faso. I also know that there are days that Burkina Faso and a childhood without abuse would seem like a temporary paradise.

At the point of resistance, where we meet others who want to struggle, who want to fight, who have reached the apex of a necessary question, our origins matter less than our aims.

"What is that question? " you might wonder.

I'll gladly tell you. The question is, "Why shouldn't everyone have it easy?"

I mean, everyone. If you can ask this question, I kindly submit to you that you are all the way there.

So why not take the next step?

Why not resist?

Perhaps your involvement will not resemble my own. I am comfortable with hatred. I'm good at it, and I know that there are plenty of people whose only merit is that they are on the receiving end of my practiced enmity and life-affirming malevolence. I cannot look at my oldest child without knowing this for an exact truth. I cannot wake up in my own poisoned body and foreshortened life without reminding myself that an entire catalog of persons live their lives with greater ease because I broke myself to feed my children, according to a set of enforcements which guaranteed either compliance, or criminality. And I was long a criminal. It's rewarding, in so much as disobedience is its own end. It's also the sort of life which selects for the worst, and the hardest. I have kicked a man's nose almost completely off his face because, in the end, he had the audacity to sneer at the obvious poverty of my friends and I. We nearly killed that man, because we lived lives which demanded a terrible hardness.

Perhaps you also live that life, but call your hardness "career" or "family" or "self-preservation." It probably does preserve you. That's the price of entry to our collective existence. We select for cruelty, or for an involved detachment. We learn to blame victims for their conditions, turning against those honest enough to break with sanity, or sobriety. Villains we might honor, if only from afar, but everyone hates the drug addict and the welfare mother. Especially those who turn their self-preservation into charity, or worse, the plastic hatred of a comfortable pity.

You may not obtain the same hatreds as I. I suggest that this is no obstacle.

We have a common enemy.

It has thousands and thousands of faces. Yours might even be among them.

I know mine once was.

Let's agree to be honest about our complicity. All those points of connection with the machinery of our degradation are points of entry, as well. It's a trick of self-deception to believe that disengagement will stop its operation. It won't, because every slot one of us vacates will be occupied by an equally, or even more desperately desperate party.

The machinery is organized to consume us, to break us down, to constrain our thoughts towards a narrow focus and to run us as separate and isolated platforms, using whatever operating systems keep us divided, which keep each of us from turning our positions into loci of resistance, sabotage and revolution.

The trick isn't to escape. The needful thing is to capture the machinery, the tools, the wealth of our oppressors and turn it against them. There are so many of us, friends, comrades and strangers.

We are legion. We are the many.

And we can do it.

I'm willing to stake my life on that.

[If you have any doubt that our lords and masters understand the stakes, see the post directly below this one.]

(It's impossible to spell out how many people owe to this stupidly simple expression of a thought. But, most every one of you who have been generous enough to comment over the last year or so, and especially this week. Thank you.

The stupid simplicity is my own. The credit and inspiration, due to each and all of you.)

Revisiting the Enormity: "Super Congress"

When I wrote "The Enormity of It All" and attempted to paint a portrait of the crisis facing the ruling class, I had no idea that their Congressional stooges would be so overt about the solution.

Here, anyways, is the boldness of their solution:

"WASHINGTON -- Debt ceiling negotiators think they've hit on a solution to address the debt ceiling impasse and the public's unwillingness to let go of benefits such as Medicare and Social Security that have been earned over a lifetime of work: Create a new Congress. 

This 'Super Congress,' composed of members of both chambers and both parties, isn't mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, but would be granted extraordinary new powers. Under a plan put forth by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his counterpart Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), legislation to lift the debt ceiling would be accompanied by the creation of a 12-member panel made up of 12 lawmakers -- six from each chamber and six from each party.

Legislation approved by the Super Congress -- which some on Capitol Hill are calling the "super committee" -- would then be fast-tracked through both chambers, where it couldn't be amended by simple, regular lawmakers, who'd have the ability only to cast an up or down vote. With the weight of both leaderships behind it, a product originated by the Super Congress would have a strong chance of moving through the little Congress and quickly becoming law. A Super Congress would be less accountable than the system that exists today, and would find it easier to strip the public of popular benefits. Negotiators are currently considering cutting the mortgage deduction and tax credits for retirement savings, for instance, extremely popular policies that would be difficult to slice up using the traditional legislative process.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has made a Super Congress a central part of his last-minute proposal, multiple news reports and people familiar with his plan say. A picture of Boehner's proposal began to come into focus Saturday evening: The debt ceiling would be raised for a short-term period and coupled with an equal dollar figure of cuts, somewhere in the vicinity of a trillion dollars over ten years. A second increase in the debt ceiling would be tied to the creation of a Super Congress that would be required to find a minimum amount of spending cuts..."

I have no doubt that Boehner wants this.

I also have no doubt that Obama would love to find a way for him to get it.

That golf game is paying dividends for Corporate, eh?

Dear Progressives

I was going to be nice. But, alas, you merit it not.

You are nice people. And you are dumb. And I don't mean C minus average, but can fix a motor, run a team of oxen and whip up a meal for twenty on a budget "dumb."

I mean, actually dumb. You're mute about all the wrong things. Because, well, you're compromised people. And I don't mean, "ah fuck, I shouldn't have taken that job, but I have to feed my kids" compromised.

I mean, actually compromised. You chose your insipid, unrealistic, wrong-sided beliefs. You choose to believe that the federal death state can do good, if only given over to the right people, who being noble and pure white of heart, will of course transform it into an angelic instrument of human progress.

You've pinned your hopes on good persons and bad, on scoundrels and almost saints, but you've never figured out a simple truth available to every American smart enough not to care about the ballot box.

No politics matters. Because there is no "the People." They aren't out there, waiting to give their holy Consent to the men in white hats. Or to the ladies in white hats, if that's your primary criteria.

The State - and let's just flash back to Kropotkin - exists to protect property and to kill, hurt, maim and break the ruled classes who must not be allowed control of that property. The state exists to control populations so that class which controls the state can have its preferred forms of property. No matter how many times men have tried to capture it and use it towards a different end, the state returns again and again to its stable form of power, and its stable function.

And you, dear progressives, aren't willing to let go of property. You're still trying to figure out ways to protect it. To make the state which guarantees it solvent. To get more people tied up in it. To shore up the lending power of the government.

Never mind your love for the state's nastier functions. You might want the prisons to be prettier, and the schools greener, but you still want them to discipline and punish. Or, worse, to reform and redeem.

But, really, you love that private property and the gummint that protects it.

So, let's get back to property. You know what you mean by property. And so do the rest of us. Sure, you want a slightly larger Commons than the more cartoonish conservatives. Yeah, yeah - they're astroturfed into stupidity and they worship an angry Yahwehian Jesus. They like to pretend you are all socialists, and you like to get indignant about that.

The cartoons are wrong. You loves you some property. You know, land ownership, traded shares, accumulated wealth, cleaned up neighborhoods, community gardens for Bedford housewives, gentrification as long as its "green". And the American Dream. Oh, the American Dream.

Proggies love the American Dream, dontcha?

If I had a nickel for every time I heard a progressive prattle on about the American Dream, I'd have enough money to arm a whole army of Lucy Parson's grifters, grimers and tramps. Oh, happy day...

Anyway.

It's just that you can't have it that way. The American Dream is all tangled up with a real, actual, specific set of events. Let's call it, hmmm, history. What actually happened. And the American dream is inseparable from slavery, the Indian Wars, land grabs, Manifest Destiny, corporate finance, debt, war economies and the pillaging of native, tribal, indigenous and "third world" peoples the world over.

The American Dream is purchased with the blood of poor white folk from the Appalachians to the Ozarks, and all across the dying rust belt. It is cheap corn, sugar and wheat dumped into African and South American markets in order to destroy the ability of Africans and South Americans to produce their own consumables for local - wow, what a concept - consumption. It's shareholder meetings and school bonds and coolie built railroads. It's fungible oil. It's coal fired power plants. And the next twenty years of nuclear plant construction.

It's the Gulf Oil Spill, and all the spills that don't make national news.

It's the prison industrial complex, and the Drug War.

All of that shit goes into the federal stew and is produced to make sure that the middle class - that most persistent of useful fictions - is placated with cheap roads, petroleum fertilized lettuce, public stadium football and perpetual warfare.

Your ideal America depends on the outsourcing of death, and the in-sourcing of stable middle class homes, high wages, low costs, jobs guarantees for voters and cheap healthcare. It's paid for by the poor, everywhere.

You, you fucking ass clowns, are the eaters of the dead.

Their lives ring your stomachs as fatty deposits and the excreta of poorly digested comfort food. Their stolen rubber sponges the soles of your feet when you get it through your death riddled heads to treadmill all that fat off. It's the shit food the poor eat, so you can shop organic.

You eat the poor and you eat the dead. You drink in their stolen lives, and livelihoods. Their lost lives, their very body fluids soak through every word you write, type or whisper in collaboration with your own imagined genius. It's their water in that plastic bottle next to your desk.

While the rest of the world starves, you congratulate yourselves on a new/old theory to print money and secure for yourselves an American Dream without any history attached to it. Or with the bad history of Good Presidents and Golden Ages. You know, the ones where FDR didn't sell out the muddles in order to get New York, Chicago and Boston chained to a disciplinary economy. In your history, he saved free exchange. For the rest of us, he stopped a revolution in the making.

Ah, fuck. We're almost through this...

While the prisons fill up, you pretend that access to the Presidency will allow your White Hats to tame the hydra and make it a treasured pet. You're fine with the new Enclosure, as long as it gets you healthcare.

You are, in a word, fools.

And you are also the enemy.

The federal death state's operators aren't going to print up a whole bunch of money because you have noble intentions towards the creation of a new fiat money regime which magically manages to be immune from runs on currency, depreciation, inflation or foreign trading. They are going to print or coin money if and when they can get away with it, in order to drive down even further the real value of wages, while encouraging the rise of prices to as high as tolerable levels. They'll do it when it's time to "rescue" Mexico or Colombia or Venezuela from its rising poor people. Or when the Chinese death state has finally converted Africa into a giant death state dependent market and no longer needs the US worker drone to absorb excess production.

You cannot tame this beast.

You kill it. And you do that by, I dunno, killing it. Not by feeding it tasty human treats until it learns to behave.

Fuckers.

Figure it out already, or get out of the way. Because, come reckoning, if you're apologizing for evil as long as it wears your color halo, you get what the peasants got to give.

And I for one will be applauding them.

(thanks to good sir Shetterly for the inspiration)

A Reply to Believers in Good Government

If the state is run by people who are effectively oligarchs and timocrats,  if it is operated for the emolument of oligarchs and timocrats, and if it is organized for the protection and promotion of the concentration of wealth - you introduce its beneficiaries to the French Doctor's Remedy.

You do not beg it to be gentle and and loving and kind. Only a willing slave begs his master for kindness. And such a person is not fit company for free women and men. He may merit pity, but never trust or companionship. Such a man will turn you in when the master comes a' calling. If he can ignore what the state we have does in order to dream of what it might do in a world which will never exist, he is one platonic ideal or smarmy election away from handing you over.

No - you only trust people who want the master to get his just deserts. They deserve loyalty. They have earned a true friendship.

You do not, with all the self-degradation of a court sycophant or a house slave, prithee and plead for it to do right by the peasants, peons, hoi polloi and rough folk it is organized to control, capture, repress, oppress and imprison whenever feasible.

You introduce its managing partners and beneficiaries to the French Doctor's Remedy.

Or you are complicit in its offenses.

Still...

The naivete is adorable.

About Soccer

The Women's World Cup has been worth watching. All of it.

Right down to this penalty shoot out wire finish. Thoroughly enjoyed the Japanese play, today.

Truly shiny tending, by the Japenese goal tender, when it mattered.

Ursine ears and the remembrance of future events...

I have an appreciation for Robert Baer. As far as thoroughly compromised individuals go, he's a decent read, and his observations and insights are not without merit. I prefer him to Chomsky, who is equally compromised (though I tend to agree with the Chompers more).

That written, his latest prediction has all the ring of truth one might associate with a Sy Hirsch narrative foreboding - that is, nil; they're good analysts and Hirsch has managed more than one surprising "scoop," but prescient Cassandras they are not.

Anyway, Baer's casting of the bones:

"...There is almost 'near certainty' that Netanyahu is 'planning an attack [on Iran] ... and it will probably be in September before the vote on a Palestinian state. And he's also hoping to draw the United States into the conflict,' Baer explained..."

Netanyahu is a venal, stupid, clownishly evil man. I have no doubt that for all the praise heaped on him by Obama, and in spite of the cover the last nine US Administrations have given Bibi and his predecessors, Netanyahu in fact despises Obama and would love nothing more than to actually be the tail that wags the American dog. (Any suggestion that Israel acts militarily without some US support and encouragement is risible, at best.)

Let's go on record, here: Bibi Netanyahu would love to force Obama to make a Hobson's choice - one which would likely cost him an election if he didn't support Israel, the other costing the US government even considerably more in credibility and cache if he did not.

The US military is fully committed to the defense of Israel.

Let's have no doubts on that.

But, is Netanyahu actually, certifiably insane?

Would he precipitate a global war (see Chinese and Russian security arrangements with Iran) in order to prevent the recognition of a laughably containable, easily conquered, utterly corrupt and compromised future Palestinian state.

I don't know. Seems to me, all things being equal, that this is what Baer thinks, in making such a bold prediction.

What say you, intrepid readers, friends and newly met strangers?

A Suggested Reply to Austerians and Their Ilk

How To Do A Coup

1. Under the cover of regional unrest, encourage bankers with ties to the US security establishment to declare themselves the legitimate government of a country.

2. Make humanist noises about the terrible conditions for the oppressed people of that country.

3. Pretend very loudly that the leader of said country plans to massacre or slaughter thousands of his poor citizens.

4. Get the UN and NATO to rubberstamp, yet again, a "no fly zone" and limited defensive operations. For the good of the people about to have their lives massacred by the newest Next Worst Dude Since Hitler. Remember to remind the American public that "no boots [will be] on the ground." Make noises about not intending to do regime change.

5. Bomb the bejesus out of said country. Indiscriminately. If possible, bring to bear your infamous sky death robots.

6. Continue bombing.

7. Wait for the Fourth Estate to discover a missing white woman. Or a Princess's penchant for snazzy dress.

8. Recognize said bankers as the one, true, only legitimate government of poor, benighted nation suffering in the clutches of the Bad Dude Who Reminds Reasonable People Of Hitler. Free up Bad Dude's seized assets and hand them over to the new "legitimate government." Make no mention of Bad Dude's copious supplies of gold, the country's strict policy of preventing capital flight, or its relatively stable currency. Neglect all reference to its vasty vast catalog of natural resources.

9. Sign trade deal, concessions agreements and military pact with new "Legitimate Government."

Visual Interlude

More Funny. Or not.

h/t Flagrancy

Doubling down on the funny:

"Oh, the irony! Target Corp., long locked in a battle with labor organizers, filmed a notorious internal anti-union video with union actors and under the jurisdiction of one of the biggest unions in the entertainment business.

The 13-minute film, posted by Gawker this week, was designed to dissuade workers from signing up to be represented by unions. A pair of smiling spokespeople dressed like Target employees -- 'Maria' and 'Doug' -- warn workers that, despite what they may have heard, a union is a 'business,' one that is greedy for dues and will not be able to deliver on promises of higher wages. As it turns out, the video was filmed under the jurisdiction of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), according to actor (and union member) Ric Reitz, who plays Target spokesman "Doug" in the film..."

It seems, already, that folks have picked up on the banality and "cheese" factor of the video, some (see Gawker) even arguing that its low production value works against Target's anti-union aims.

I think they're missing the point.

This is a perfect sell because it's so cheese-funny, piss poor and laughable. It sends up no easily identified warning signals, no prosecutable red flags and no overt or ominous indications of planned hostility.

Which is why it's so effective. Because, for all that it works hard to be banal and harmless and crayon colored in pastels and smiling stupidity, it is clearly a threat.  If you've ever worked a stretch at any box outlet, chain or fast food joint, you'll probably recognize immediately that all the stuff you'd better remember was in the cheesy orientation videos. And they are always followed just as immediately by a raft of papers to which you fix your binding signature and, as likely as not, your commitment to non-disclosure.

This is a threat. An effective one.

Delivered from beneath the painted smile of a grinning clown...

Egalia

When I first read this article, I was all like omigodwhatthefuck, and shit. My reaction was, to put it lightly, negative. But, I also almost immediately distrusted my own emotional resistance to it. I could see the outlines of my own defensiveness, and those ramparts I've built up in my life, most often just to preserve that life.

I wouldn't call it crippling, but I found myself unable to write about it, or anything else. It helped that I've been ill and have paid more in co-pays and percentages, over the last three weeks, than I did over the last triplet of three year durations. If I'd been hit by a bus, say two weeks ago, I think my last emotional flurry before my brain went dark would have been one of gratitude.

All the same, this story has been on my mind the whole time. And I don't know what I think or feel about it, which is in and of itself unique.

I don't have an angry Crowvian rant, or anything.

Just, mayhap, some hope for an interesting discussion.

Anyway - here it is:

Egalia.

Thoughts?

Funny

Ray Wieczorek never had any moral quandaries taking payola from the city of Manchester's illegal gambling concerns, while he pushed to keep video gambling - get this - illegal. And he can sue me for hitting the publish button if he wants. I watched him take that payout. I know the people who paid him. I know the rackets they worked for. The Greek mob doesn't have as many cops on its payroll as it used to have, and it's having a hard time competing with its Hispanic replacements, but those gambling concerns still exist and everyone knows where they are.

Everyone, Ray. Even your proteges, the current and former mayors. Everyone in Shit Town knows how the shake down works.

He never had a problem insuring mill buildings owned by political allies. Especially when those buildings burned and improper entry and assessment required him to make full payment.

But, he sure seems to have a problem with poor women getting STD treatments, birth control and routine exams at slightly reduced rates:

"...Another executive councilor who opposed the contract, Raymond Wieczorek of Manchester, said he had asked if the contract could exclude the issuance of condoms. Wieczorek said he supports paying to test for sexually transmitted diseases but does not believe the state should subsidize contraception.

'If they want to have a good time, why not let them pay for it?' he said..."

Funny, Ray. Here's to hoping you get syphilis right up to your eye sockets, you fucking contemptible piece of shit.