Thursday, March 16, 2017

PEEPS-Flavored Oreos Review!

Now do you believe me that this whole "co-branding" food trend has dragged on long enough?


By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

In marketing speak, there's this thing called "co-branding." Basically, it's whenever two brands come together to simultaneously hype one hybrid product. Now, in the fast food/junk food industry, we've been seeing this going on for years, and perhaps no product not called "Pop-Tarts" has milked the gimmick as hard as Nabisco's Oreos.

Go ahead, type "Oreos" in the little search box at the top of the page and you'll be barraged by a seemingly endless array of fucked up flavored twist-top sandwich cookies. Cotton candy-flavored Oreos. Red velvet cake-flavored Oreos. Lemon-flavored Oreos. Cookie dough-flavored Oreos. Rice Krispies-flavored Oreos. For fuck's sake, they even made watermelon-flavored Oreos, and somehow, the NAACP didn't stage any protests. And that's not even counting the Oreos even my LTO-obsessed ass never got around to trying, like the root-beer flavored ones or the ones that purportedly tasted like Swedish Fish. Aye, one of the greatest regrets of my adulthood is never getting to try those limited time only cookies 'n' creme Oreos at Kroger ... what were, effectively, special edition Oreos-flavored Oreos.

Granted (and this is gloriously evident by my excessive coverage of said products), I don't really have a conceptual problem with these "variation" Oreos. I wholeheartedly believe in the free market and whoring out novelty items, but one of the things that really peeves me to no end are those aforementioned "co-branded" products. You know the kinda' stuff I'm talking about here. Crush-flavored Pop-Tarts. Burger King Fried Cheetos. Taco Bell selling Cap'n Crunch Cinnabon Delights (which is actually a rare - if not foreboding) example of a tri-branded co-product.) These are just the laziest things in the world, the junk food equivalent of all those shitty "mash-up" albums that used to be popular about 10 years ago. No, taking two semi-divergent things and slamming them headlong into a Franken-snack-food isn't the same thing as building an original product permutation from the ground up (and if any of you wanna' give me any shit about the Hegelian dialectic, I'll fist fight you anytime and anywhere.) Here, the intrinsic appeal of the LTO isn't the product's core flavor, but simply the fact that it's a pre-existing brand that kinda sorta tastes like an entirely different pre-existing brand. Instead of taste taking center-stage, the entire product hook revolves around the texture and the fact you're consuming one product in a different form than your are generally accustom to. I mean, does anybody out there really want to know what it's like to chew Dr. Pepper instead of drink it? Well, apparently, corporate America thinks you do, and as long as people keep buying A&W Root Beer Twizzlers and cheeseburgers from Carl's Jr. that taste like Budweiser, you're pretty much signing 'em a permission slip telling them it's A-OK with you if they keep shoveling this half-baked crap on store shelves and fast food menus.

Which brings us to perhaps the most shameless co-branded foodstuff ever -- motherfuckin' PEEPS-flavored Oreos. 


Now folks, you really have to think long and hard about the Peeps track record. After all, this is a company that actually tried to sell consumers marshmallow chicken flavored milk  a few years back, so it's pretty much a given that these people will sell anything with the Peeps logo on it as long as they think it's kooky enough to ensnare consumers who apparently only eat the weirdest limited-time-only shit at the grocery store (meaning, effectively, me.) In that, I have more than a few questions, perhaps the most pertinent one being is the Peeps brand flavor really all that recognizable to the average American consumer? I mean, all marshmallow products more or less taste the exact same in terms of mouthfeel and general texture, so really, the only thing you can do to set yourself apart from the herd is add more sugar or spruce the shit up with artificial flavoring. And since Peeps is a brand so dependent on flavor variations to begin with, does the company even have a flagship original flavor to promote or pride itself on? To me, those baby chicks they sell every Easter have never really tasted like anything more than standard marshmallows, albeit with a speckling of crystallized sugar on the outside to give it the illusion of some kind of aesthetic glimmer. And since that's the big selling point for these co-branded Oreos, I can't help but wonder if the folks at Peeps even really understood how to market their own damn product here.


I guess you really don't need me to run down the general idea of what Oreos are, do I? Understandably, Nabisco opted for the alternate uni "golden vanilla" exterior shell, which I suppose makes a good deal of sense ... that is, until you suddenly realize that by eschewing the regular black twist top cookie hue, you found yourself robbed of eating what would've been Bret Hart-stylized Oreos.


The interior creme is a bright purplish-pink hue, which for some reason, makes me think of this one girl I dated my sophomore year in college who wore a blinding neon lipstick shade practically the same color. You can detect a little bit of shimmery sugar sprinkles here and there, but by and large, as soon as you crack these sumbitches open, you're pretty much staring at Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in edible paste form. Well, that, or a wad of already chewed up bubblegum. Needless to say ... they prolly could've improved the basic aesthetics on this one.


Of course, the only thing that really matters is how the product tastes, and these Peeps-influenced Oreos taste like ... well, I'm not really sure. It's usually pretty hard to replicate the overall texture of marshmallow in artificial form, but somehow, someway, Nabisco managed to make this creme at least feel a little more airy and pillowy than your average Oreos creme. Or maybe, my mind was playing tricks on me and I was just imagining all that gustatory bounciness - I wouldn't be surprised, either way.

But does the damn thing taste like a Peep? Well, I'm not really sure I'd describe this thing's flavor as, uh, Peep-ish. I guess it has a similar flavor, but really, the Peeps just taste like sugary fluff as is so it's kinda hard to nail down the intricacies and nuances of whatever its core taste is supposed to be. Your tongue does pick up the light tingle of one of those heavily touted sugar crystals, though, which is a nice experiential touch. But yeah, at the end of the day, these things just taste like slightly fluffier, slightly sugarier and 100 percent pinker Oreos, and that's about it. 


I'm not sure how much money Peeps or Oreos are going to make off this stuff (but boy, would I love to know what their profit-sharing set-up is like), but I really wonder if the promotional and cross-licensing costs come anywhere close to meeting the earned revenue of the LTO cookies. Maybe that's why we're seeing such a proliferation of co-and-tri-branded foodstuffs these days - if the fusion product loses money, I guess it's a smaller overall financial loss for each brand then it would have been if they lost money on a proprietary, from-the-ground-up, in-house solo product launch. 

It might seem like a ludicrous jihad to take up, but I can't help but ponder exactly where this conglomerated brand fad is going to take us over the next few years. Sure, it's all fairly innocuous now, with our goofy Peeps-flavored Oreos and whatnot, but how long before we're seeing companies forming symbiotic branding plans with the intent of deterring start-up products from ever entering the grocery store supply chain? That's one of the things nobody really thinks about when it comes to co-branded foods. For every needless, superfluous merger-food, that means less shelf space for anything else. So in a way, perhaps this whole co-branding explosion is actually a concentrated industrial effort by the titans of junk food and fast food to muscle smaller brands (and especially store-brand) items from menus and the aluminum storage racks? Sure, the consumer only sees a kooky Frankenfood when he or she gawps in wide-eyed disbelief at toaster pastries that taste like soft drinks or ice cream tubs glutted with diced up candy bar chunks from a competing brand,  but for the forgers of said co-branded items, the "novelty" items serve more of a strategic purpose as "gap-fillers" - i.e., all-too-expendable products that can be switched in and out quickly simply to maintain maximum occupancy of finite retail space. 

I don't know, maybe I'm reading way, way too much into this. That said, when multi-billion dollar industries and ferocious market competitors decide to "team up" for anything, that nonetheless should give you pause - if not outright concern - as an American consumer. Today, it's consolidation of Peeps and Oreos, tomorrow, it's consolidation of Nabisco and Just Born. Today, it's Cap'n Crunch Taco Bell balls, tomorrow, it's Yum Brands! merging with Quaker Oats (which, believe it or not, is actually owned by Pepsi.) Today it's Dunkin' Donuts flavored Pop-Tarts, tomorrow it's Kellogg's flat out purchasing Dunkin' Brands for a couple of billion smackers. And with the big huge mega super duper companies getting even bigger, that means the entry point for upstart brands is going to get even smaller and smaller, with the Goliath fast food/junk food brands gobbling up even more of the low culture comestible pie.

Now, you may take a gander at something like the Peeps-branded Oreos and simply call it silly synergy. But the way I see it, it very well could be a premonition of wide-scale brand acquisitions and corporate mergers on the horizon. This is how the world of Rollerball came about, I suppose: not with the sudden and startling consolidation of corporate interests, but with those eye-catching "novelty" co-brands that distracted us from the mass coadunation of our corporate overlords going on right under our noses ...

Monday, March 13, 2017

DOUBLE REVIEW: 'XX' / 'VooDoo' (2017) Movie Reviews

It's a one-two combination of no-budget indie horror ... but are either of these way off the beaten path genre films actually worth tracking down? 


By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

Alright kids, we've got a problem we gotta' talk about - Social Security. You know, that thing that represents a third of the total federal budget and makes up easily twice what we spend on the military each and every year?

Long story short, we're starting to run out of funding. By 2023, the Social Security disability fund  is supposed to disappear and by 2034 - that's 17 years from now, folks - the general Social Security fund for retirees is expected to go kaput. Which means - despite the feds taking a generous chunk of the pay you rightly earned out of your checks to fund the program - basically, we've all been paying into a system that will NEVER, EVER pay us back.

Factor in a rapidly aging population and an underpaid younger workforce and I suppose you can see the writing on the wall. We've got too many old farts dependent on the puny ass pay stubs of underemployed millennials, and that little boondoggle of an economic equation is only going to get worse from here. According to fake news monolith CNN, to insure Social Security will be a thing 70 years from know, the gubberment is going to either have to raise the Social Security payroll tax rate to 15 percent or slash S.S. benefits by 15 percent - but probably both, and odds are that 15 percent on both ends is going to go up considerably.

Factor in Medicare expenses, and a grand total of 40 percent of the ENTIRE U.S. federal budget today is allocated exclusively for people over the ages of 62 (which is barely 15 percent of the total U.S. national populace, in case you were wondering.) Well, by 2050, retirement-age Americans are expected to make up one-fifth of the national population, if not even more ... and since those decrepit old fucks are living even longer (thanks in no small part to all of that free - read: taxpayer subsidized - health care we're forced to give 'em), that means not only are we going to be spending MORE tax dollars on the AARP Generation in the not-too-distant future, we're going to be economically indentured to fiscally supporting their old, leathery asses for even longer.

For the life of me, I just can't fathom why the media (and ESPECIALLY Millennials and Gen Z kids, in general) are so obsessed with trifling bullshit like trannies in bathrooms and free abortions when we're all riding aboard the Titanic and hurdling headlong into a gigantic economic iceberg. The math is staring us directly in the face - this whole Social Security thing has too many beneficiaries, who are eating up way too many tax dollars, who are going to be gobbling up even more of our wages and making us all poorer as working Americans, and ain't nobody - left, right, communist, socialist, alt-right or Skrull - saying anything about this all but inevitable financial time bomb. With wages doing down and entitlement recipients going up, maintaining the Social Security program - as is - is quite literally impossible. The amount of money coming in to the program is soon (very, very soon) going to be less than the program costs to operate. Either the old fogies take one for the team, or we are going to get taxed out the ass so much we'll never be able to live even remotely comfortable, economically stable lives.

So basically, we're about to become a society of underpaid employees who are forced to live lower-quality lives (to the point that luxuries of modernity all the Baby Bommers and Gen X-ers enjoyed, like home ownership or raising a family, become economic impossibilities) so that the elderly minority can get $3,000 a month from the feds to spend on QVC cookware and Christmas decorations and go to the doctor to have their titties looked at whenever they want somebody to touch their withered, beef jerky-like bodies.

Well, to quote that dead guy from Drowning Pool, "3, something's gotta' give, eeeeyarghhh." Thus, I've taken the time, the effort and the general human decency to drum up three potential solutions to that looming Social Security crisis everybody else is too busy playing with their puds to directly address and rectify. Granted, these ideas may seem a little radical at first, but remember - desperate times clamor for desperate measures, and remarkable questions absolutely goddamn demand remarkable responses... 

SOLUTION ONE - This one's real simple. Next Tuesday, we just stop handing out any Social Security payments. Hell, for that matter, we might as well cancel all the Medicaid, Medicare and food stamp checks, too, and just get the whole guldarn welfare state over and done with in one fell swoop. Naturally, I suppose the good half to two-thirds of the country dependent on at least one kind of government assistance won't take the abrupt news too kindly, but from there, we can just let natural selection take care of things. The smart senior citizens will find a way to keep trucking along, while the ones too feeble to take care of themselves get to march into that wide blue yonder the way God intended man to live out his or her golden years - starving to death on the streets or getting raped and eventually murdered by roving post-apocalyptic youth gangs. But hey, don't worry about them too much ... by the time 95 percent of our nation's inner cities are nothing but democratic-voting tire fires, we pretty much won't even have an entitlement dilemma to worry 'bout no more. 

SOLUTION TWO - Now this one is a little more bureaucratic, insuring a whole lot of federal government workers prolly won't lose their jobs. Right now, we've got about 320 million people living in the U.S., and that's not counting all the people named Jose and Javier who snuck into the country last week and are currently soliciting odd jobs/blow jobs down at your local Home Depot. To preserve our illustrious Social Security safety net, I reckon we need to whittle that number down to about half of what it is now. Now, how could we go about doing so? Two words, folks - motherfuckin' THUNDERDOME. That's right, we put every man, woman and child in the States inside a lottery and, two at a time, force 'em to fight to the death inside a facsimile of The Road Warrior set, complete with chainsaws, scythes and rusty pick axes hanging from the top of a huge-assed jungle gym. We already have the Census in place, and since those people only work three weeks every 10 years, I'm sure they'd champ at the bit for the opportunity to round up everybody for the great human harvest. Now, the beauty here is that everything is totally random: you might get lucky and draw a fight against a paraplegic 80-year-old or a four-year-old with brittle bone disease or you might wind up drawing a Hell's Angel coked up on PCP, or Mike Tyson (prolly also coked up on PCP, but that sorta' goes without saying.) Oh, and if neither competitors want to duel for their right to exist, we'll just open the arena gates and let a whole bunch of starving lions eat both of them. Naturally, this would lend itself well to prime time television; I figure we could put the most intriguing and competitive bouts on PBS, with the really good ones slotted in for State of the Union-style multi-channel broadcast. Hell, this thing might even be worth bringing back the old Olympics Triplecast, complete with that fruity ass remote control nobody could figure out.

SOLUTION THREE - You know, for a nation of people who pride themselves on pragmatism, we don't necessarily have a keen taste for the most pragmatic of solutions no more. Let's cut to the meat of the matter, why don't we? The problem with Social Security is, what, essentially? Not so much that we have this behemoth entitlement program in place that effectively enslaves federal government and all of the nation's taxpayers to be its keeper like the mama in The Babadook, but more the fact that we've got too many damned old people in this country as is. Simply put, the Framers of the Constitution never really intended for a thing such as Social Security to exist, because when America was founded, old people didn't exist. At the time America declared independence, the average life expectancy was barely 35 years old, and even at the beginning of the 20th century most people couldn't expect to live past the age of 50. There was never any need for government subsidized old age care because nobody lived long enough to experience an age old enough that they had to be totally dependent on federally-subsidized services. So if you're a fan of natural law, you'll quickly come to the realization that the problem here isn't Social Security as a national policy, but much more so the fact that people are living far longer than nature ever intended them to. Therefore, I propose we institute a national framework in which every man and woman in the U.S. be involuntarily euthanized at the time of their 65th birthday. Come on, by that point they've pretty much done everything they're going to do professionally and from there on out, their bodies and minds are just going to deteriorate into mush and they're going to spend the next 40 pointless years of their lives doing nothing but gobbling pills like Skittles and watching reruns of Judge Judy. And in that, who in the world could consider sparing millions of people such abject degradation to be an act of "inhumanity?" 

Granted, your mileage may vary on any of the solutions proposed above, but hey, at least I'm trying to do something about this Social Security nightmare nobody else seems to give half a shit about. And if you think making random people fight to the death or offing senior citizens before they can start collecting discounts at Denny's is too ghoulish to consider, just imagine what the consequences would look like if two-thirds or even four-fifths of all U.S. tax dollars went not to defending our borders or promoting domestic industry or achieving energy independence, but to keeping 60 million Golden Girls conked out of their minds on high-powered psychotropic pills while they shit all over themselves 35 years after Alzheimers' transformed their minds into gingivitis-pockmarked pickles. Welcome to America, 2060: an entire nation of severely underpaid workers with 40, and sometimes even 50 percent income tax burdens, forced to live like transient community college students for the entirety of their lives so a bunch of blue-haired old farts can down free prescription drugs like Hungry Hungry Hippos and waste valuable healthcare funding to get their buttholes looked at every time they feel one too many dingleberries. Yeah, some future to look forward to, ain't it

Yeah, you don't know who any of these broads are, and to be honest, you don't really need to know who any of 'em are, either.

Speaking of things better left unseen, the first flick in our double header this week is XX, a horror anthology where all the mini-movies are directed by women. Ever heard of Jovanka Vuckovic, Roxanne Benjamin or Karyn Kusama? Well, me neither, and that's for a reason: none of these skirts really know how to make a movie scary, or unsettling, or really, any good for that matter.

This is one of those movies financed by people who think stop-motion porcelain dolls with busted eye sockets and time lapse rotting apples are hip and edgy and horrifying. Granted, that may have been the case when Tool music videos were in heavy rotation on MTV 25 years ago, but today? That kind of stuff just comes off as all kinds of hackneyed and uninspired, and unfortunately, the movie don't really get much better after the opening credits. 

To be fair, the first story - which is actually an adaptation of a Jack Ketchum story - is pretty good, but it still has more flaws than positives. It's about this suburban mom who's riding the subway train with her two kids and they're sitting next to this old creepy pedophile looking dude with a wonky eye and one of the kids asks if he can see what's in his spooky red gift box and he shows it to him and after that, he stops eating altogether. Right then and there you realize this had to be made by some hoity-toity upperclass suburban-weaned post-mallrat broad - prolly  born and raised in some cosmopolitan Yankee hellhole, like Long Island, Boston or, heaven help us, Toronto because if this kinda' thing happened to a family in the Deep South - white or black - the movie would be over in five minutes. The very moment Little Billy would have told his ma he doesn't want a third helping of blueberry cobbler with a double dollop of Cool Whip, she'd reach over the table, slam a plastic funnel down his gullet and force feed him deserts until he weighed as much as a blue ribbon prize pig at the annual FFA convention. But since this is one of those white families, the parents don't do shit except slam their fists on the table and sneak outside to smoke Marlboros because their kid refuses to eat pizza or eggrolls. Strangely enough, it takes them a full four days before they take their kid to a doctor, and even THEY don't do anything for the anorexic little twerp, who then whispers something into his sister's ear that makes her not want to eat, either. And then he tells dad something, and naturally, he stops eating, too. Then there's this dream sequence where mom is laying on a dinner table and the rest of the family is eating bloody chunks of her thighs, but that's not the real ending. By Christmastime everybody in the family except mom weighs approximately 50 pounds and then they all starve to death at the hospital. Now, as to why she didn't get them shipped out to a psychiatric facility for their eating disorders ... or why she waited until they were at death's door before taking 'em to the hospital ... or why she was even cool with her family wasting away to skeletons over the course of two months ... or why the medical personnel couldn't stick an IV in them or force feed them muscle-building milkshakes from GNC until they looked like something other than Auschwitz victims ... well, the movie never tells us. And if you're looking for an explanation for why the family suddenly decided to stop eating, there's no exposition - it just ends with mom riding the subway, hopelessly trying to find the guy with the wonky eye and the gift box. Bad and stupid endings, I can do, but filmmakers who are too lazy to come up with any ending? Next to the film itself exploding and the theater refusing to hand out any refunds, I can't think of anything that infuriates audiences as much

Still, that first vignette is far and away the best thing about XX, seeing how boring and formulaic the other three stories are. The second one isn't even really a horror short - it's basically a re-do of Weekend at Bernie's about a grandma trying to hide her son-in-law's corpse in a giant panda costume so it won't ruin her grandkid's birthday party, where all the kids are dressed up like shrimp and toilets, for some inexplicable reason. The third one is a total ripoff of The Evil Dead (and Scalps and Equinox) about these four hippies that take their RV into the desert and smoke pot and then one of them gets possessed by some Native American demon spirit and turns into a terrible-looking CGI chicken nugget herky-jerky zombie, and the fourth one is a total ripoff of The Omen and The Babadook and even We Need To Talk About Kevin about this single mom who has convinced her son his daddy is some Hollywood movie star, but he's actually the Antichrist and he's running around nailing squirrels to trees and ripping the fingernails off girls at school but he never gets in any trouble because he's (unwittingly) using his devil worship mind control powers on everybody.

So needless to say, after the 22 minute mark, there ain't Jack Shit worth anybody sticking around for. This stuff don't come anywhere close to matching other contemporary horror anthologies - V/H/S and The ABCs of Death and especially Three...Extremes - but I will give it some credit for not being filled to wall-with-wall feminist-propaganda identity-politicking, which is pretty much what all of us expect out of something called XX. It still sucks, but hey - at least it doesn't suck for ideological reasons.

We've got six dead bodies. No breasts (kind of a shocker there, huh?) One dead squirrel. One CGI zombie monster. Gratuitous stop-motion animation baby dolls and grungy teacup sets. Gratuitous rapping panda telegram. Gratuitous slow-motion kids' birthday party reaction shots. Gratuitous devil toenail clipping. One dudebro tossed through a window. One nasty compound fracture. Anorexia fu. Cannibalism fu. And the thing pretty much responsible for this film even existing, obvious-regret-over-pursuing-a-film-career-instead-of-having-children fu.

Starring Natalie Brown as the mama that doesn't really find it odd at all that her kids haven't eaten anything for three weeks and look like gaunt elementary-school-aged heroin addicts; Melanie Lynskey (the other chick in Heavenly Creatures) as the GMILF who thinks zipping her daughter's dead husband into a giant furry costume makes more sense then just telling everybody she found him keeled over on his work desk; Angela Trimbur as the girl who gets possessed by really, really shitty looking Final Cut Pro effects; and Christina Kirk as the mother of the Antichrist, who tries really, really hard to channel the spirits of Essie Davis and Tilda Swinton before a demonic whirlwind makes her puke blood all over her kid's birthday cake.

Eh, I'll give it two stars out of four simply for refusing to lay on the women's lib rhetoric too thick. It still prolly isn't worth your time, though, unless you REALLY need to get out of the house for an hour and half, and even then I'd recommend doing something else with your disposable income and free time, like hitting up an all you can-eat pizza buffet or going mini-golfing.

When Ron Jeremy provides the bulk of your movie's star power, you know you either did something really, really wrong or something inadvertently really, really right.

We do, however, have ourselves a slightly better female-oriented horror flick making the rounds at local arthouse cinemas with really low standards nationwide in the form of the second half of our double feature, Tom Costabile's VooDoo. Now, it is, unfortunately, one of those damned found footage movies, but at least this one has the horse sense to use a steadicam instead of shaky cam so you can actually see what's happening onscreen instead of having to just sorta' guess at what you're looking at like in Blair Witch and Unfriended. We start off with a guy finding a woman with her guts torn out in a kids' sandbox, and then this ebony hoodoo priestess gets possessed by African-American Satan and starts speaking in tongues and stabbing a still living victim with a butcher knife and rubbing blood all over her face before singing the preamble to "Circle of Life." Then we cut to this actress with the worst Southern accent you have ever heard in your life (at times, she sounds more like she's doing an imitation of Katherine Hepburn more than anything else) arriving in California so she can visit her wannabe punk rocker cousin's place and admire the voodoo beads and baby doll masks just laying all over the place.

So they shoot the shit by the pool for awhile and then talk about Mardi Gras and go sightseeing in Hollywood while smoking kush. Then they do shots at The Rainbow and dance with Ron Jeremy (yes, that Ron Jeremy) and the visitor from New Orleans talks about her husband leaving her for his ex, a voodoo queen (uh-oh) and sure as sugar, as soon as she flips on nightvision mode, a whole bunch of invisible shadow demons pop up on camera and two things become quite apparent: one, nobody on the payroll had any idea how to animate anything with a computer, and two, the shit is about to get real crazy in a real hurry.

The next morning they pour Bloody Marys into Gatorade bottles and hit up Venice Beach and this homeless dude won't stop staring at them while they sunbathe and then a fortune teller freaks out on 'em. Then they monkey around on Rodeo Drive then Louisiana Girl gets a phone call from her ex and learns that his crazy-ass ex is in L.A. looking for her. And NOW is the part where Devil-Mania 2017 starts running wild; after a shitty shadowy CGI monster attacks her and crucifixes start spinning around on the wall, our leading lady goes down stairs and - yikes - the whole damn house has turned into Dante's Inferno - a Dante's Inferno built using $20 worth of art supplies from Michaels and the services of part-time community theater actors for half an hour, but Dante's Inferno nonetheless.

We've got disemboweled drummers nailed to the cupboards. We've got the prodigal cousin turning into a really, really bad Evil Dead ripoff demon. And worst of all - or maybe best of all, depending on your sense of humor - a chorus of Satanic minions take over the soundtrack, only they didn't do the audio mixing too good so they either sound like Bill Cosby on autotune or E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial. 

But we haven't gotten to the really wacky part yet. Then a whole bunch of imps literally drag the "final girl" into the bowels of hell, and I don't know what it resembles more: that really, really bad port of Doom on the Game Boy Advance or one of those really, really shitty Dungeons & Dragons-ripoff VCR board games from back in the day. The fog machine is turned on ultra-blast, there's red Play-Doh smeared all over the walls and for the demonic statues, I'm pretty sure they just glued some horns on some lawn gnomes and called it good. 

And now we're finally at the part where things get kooky. This guy in a Shriner's cap chains her up so these albino S&M elves can smell her feet, then he brands her with a big old pentagram. Then she walks into a room full of meat hooks and you can just tell they went down to the seasonal Halloween supply shop and just tossed as many plastic arms and heads around the set as possible. THEN she walks into another room (actually, I'm pretty sure they just used the same room over and over again, only with the plastic skeletons arranged differently to create the illusion of a different set) and we get to watch pregnant women choked to death with their own umbilical cords and zombies literally chowing down on newborn infants. Then she watches a priest have his butthole sawed open and she runs into the ghost of the uncle who used to molest her then demons kill her dead mama all over again and for the grand finale? Well, let's just say it involves one of the blunter devil rape scenes in horror history; and, I, for one, never would've guessed the Prince of Darkness would've been that into anal. 

Sure, sure, all of it sucks, but at least it sucks in a refreshingly non-ironic way. Unlike a good 90 percent of the no-budget genre movies getting made nowadays, at least these people TRIED to make a serious movie. Corny, cheesy and shitty on purpose I can't tolerate, but corny, cheesy and shitty because that's literally the best the filmmakers could do, I can't help but admire and appreciate.

We've got 11 dead bodies. Two breasts. Ritual blood drinking. Multiple disembowelments. Zombies. Demons. A Satanic knight that appears to be wearing a suit made out of tinfoil. Fetus chewing. A flaming hot branding iron right to the stomach. Priest torturing. Satanic rape (complete with a Lucifer that looks like an extra from 300 spray-painted red.) Gratuitous demonic cackling. Gratuitous molester uncle. Gratuitous bloody pentagrams. Gratuitous devil worship graffiti. Heads roll. Arms roll. S&M fu. Butcher knife fu. Perverted imp fu. And, the thing responsible for the whole movie ... the world's sturdiest video camera fu. Hey, you have to admire the craftsmanship on anything that has enough battery life to make it sightseeing on the Sunset Strip and going through all nine circles of hell in just one night

Starring veteran TLC dramatic recreation actor Samantha Stewart as Nawlins' vacationer Dani Lamb, whose trip to L.A. involves slightly more contact with slimy sadomasochist sex demons than your average three-day stay in Hollywood; Ruth Reynolds as Stacy Cole, the Louisiana transplant who named her shitty pukola punk band "Rapeseed" and eventually winds up turning into an albino crater-face necro-cannibal; Dominic Matteucci and Daniel Kuzul as the bandmates who spend more of the movie with their guts hanging outside of their body than inside them; Constance Strickland as the child-murdering Santeria practitioner who really can't stand seeing her former lover move on; and Ron Jeremy, who I'm pretty sure wasn't scheduled to appear in the movie, but since he was already on set at the Rainbow, they gave him a few lines anyway.

Directed and written by Tom Costabile, who you can tell is going to have a long and fruitful career making movies like this for a long time to come, as evident by his showstopping dialogue "choke on your mother's bowels, you fucking cunt."

I'll give it two and a half stars out of four. Jimbo says check it out, especially if you ever wondered what a stage production of Hellraiser produced and financed by GWAR would look like.

Thursday, March 9, 2017

How Feminism Killed Journalism

It's more or less indisputable at this point: the more women are involved in journalism, the more biased (and lower quality) the media becomes. 


By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

The absolute worst job I've ever had was working as the only male reporter at a shitty small town newspaper where practically everybody else in the office had ovaries. Holy hell, the horror stories I could tell you here.

Do we begin with my Skrillex looking editor, some 30-year-old bipolar, cat-worshiping spinster-in-training who came into the office hung over at least once a week and spent 95 percent of her on-the-clock hours having phone calls about having sex with random guys for cocaine (no, for real) so loudly that the owners of the day spa next door had to waltz on over and tell her to STFU because she was scaring off their clients? Or how about the staff photographer, who just watched episodes of Ninja Warrior all day, or the associate editor who made flippant, degrading remarks about how unattractive our visitors were (this, despite the fact she looked like Zoe Deschanel with Down syndrome?) You get all of them in the same room, and absolutely fucking nothing got done, ever. They'd just gossip about everybody else who worked for the company, and as soon as one of them would leave, they'd start gossiping about her. And for those of you keen on sexual equality, I'll have you know I was referred to by all sorts of hilariously progressive slurs by my female cohorts, including but not limited to "fag," "faggot" and "homo" - whenever they thought I was out of earshot. 

Alas, despite being sexually harassed virtually every day I was there, that's not what pissed me off MOST about these menstruating Haagen-Dazs and Zoloft receptacles. What really irked me were the stories I proposed and the stories they assigned me. I wanted to do hard-hitting stories about classism and the lack of affordable housing in the community and discrimination against minorities in the local school system, and they turned around and told me to cover ice cream shops and animal shelters and - the one that infuriated me most - advanced publicity (read: shameless propaganda) for all of these circle-jerkin' socialite "for a cause" weekend parties arranged by the county's hoity-toity elites, despite the fact the money never ever went to what they said it was going for and none of those stuck-up pricks ever did a goddamn thing to address rampant poverty in their own fucking neighborhood. So why was I constantly forced to cover these trifling parades of real white privilege, seemingly week-in, week-out? 

Well, for one, it's because the newspaper wanted to suck the upper crust's dick because they were the only people outmoded/disconnected from reality/flat-out stupid enough to actually spend money on newspaper advertising in the 2010s. But mostly? Because by me covering these stupid aristocratic, oligarchical jerk-off sessions, that means all the broads and floozies I worked with got to attend them for free. And boy, did they never turn an opportunity to get shit-faced ... especially on the company dime.

Hey, did I mention that virtually all of my period-havin' colleagues were also borderline to severe alcoholics with at least one co-morbid mental disorder, like bulimia or "severe depression" (which, conveniently enough, afforded them all sorts of PAID healthcare-related days off?) Because they were, and my goodness, did they play the "muh ovaries card" any and every time it appeared they were in the cross-hairs for any kind of upper brass admonishment. 

That oh-so-fanciful "millennial feminine mystique" was evident in the production process, too. It soon dawned on me that they didn't even bother editing their own papers - you know, the thing they were being paid to do - so I had to spend untold off-the-clock, unpaid hours making sure my articles were as polished as possible before going to the printer. So yeah, I literally had to do their job in addition to my own, while they kept the extra $4 or $5 per hour to themselves.

I couldn't say anything, because the entire Leviathan of shitty journalism (if you even want to dignify it with the term) was basically one big, fat, ugly, woefully unhappy "girl squad" that covered for each others' many glorious incompetencies. They put their own in-group bullshit above actually producing a halfway decent product, and none of them gave a damn. They had a cushy job were they didn't really have to work (even if their income was a relatively paltry $13 or $14-something an hour), and the "office" gave them ample time to chinwag with their kindred about whatever stupid TV shows they were into and the deeper complexities of the Ed Sheeran discography and - most importantly of all - plan out all of their drunken escapades over the weekends.

It didn't take long for me to realize this wasn't a newsroom. Rather, I felt like I was stuck in remedial English class, cloistered in the cluster of snobby, pampered, upper-middle-class girls who just wanted to talk about getting drunk and who's fucking who when a midterm group project was due. So I just did the exact same thing I did in the seventh grade - I kept my mouth shut, did everybody's work for them and got the hell out of Dodge the first opportunity afforded to me.

That grisly little year in Tampon journalism land taught me a lot of hard truths about the media and gender. I've worked a lot of places over the years, and looking back on my litany of experiences, one fundamental truth arises: wherever there are more women employed than men, a.) the less overall productivity there at least seems to be and b.) the lower the quality of whatever product you are putting together appears to be. This is especially relevant in journalism/new media, where the percentage of women in the office has already risen above the male populace (with more women than men, by a fairly large margin, wielding executive editorial power.)

With the field of journalism losing almost all of its lucrativeness in the Great Recession, I'm guessing a lot of seasoned male writers, editors and publishers cut bait while they still could and migrated over to other industries. So what we've seen is a twin effect; because journalism revenue keeps going down, the overall pay for most reporters and even some editors has become less than the national average pay for custodians. But the publishing structures are still there, and because there is a surfeit of women with college degrees in stupid, non-skilled things like gender studies and race theory, somebody has to write the damn news ... and since that affords them the appearance of wielding just a sliver of a microscopic thread of cultural power, the modern newsroom has been flooded with millennial women - often, with no real reporting experience - willing to work for $11 an hour because one, it beats Starbucks, and two, it gives them the (perceived) ability to set the local cultural narrative. And let's face it - just about all of them are still living with their parents or being heavily subsidized by them anyway, so it's not like the piss-ant pay is that much of a deal breaker, especially when the trade-off is being able to shower your friends' social media feeds with a deluge of posts about all of that hard-hitting journalism you're doing.

Holy shit, have you ever seen news this hard in your fuckin' life?

And there is a big, big difference between traditional male reporters and contemporary female reporters. The old vanguard of male reporters had no political affiliations - they hated all those elected motherfuckers equally and sought to knock EVERYBODY off their pedestals. Above all else, there causa sui was a crusade against the state; not a particular political entity, mind you, but the mere existence of these gargantuan, overbearing taxpayer-funded mechanisms that lord over everything. They weren't driven by a desire for status or recognition - indeed, even before the cyber-revolution, most journalists were paid fairly poorly - they just wanted a legacy. They wanted to rage, rage, rage against the machine their entire lives and when they finally keeled over at their desk at age 54 from a heart attack, they at least went to their grave knowing they left behind some kind of important track record. The absolute best reporters were never in the game to "make a difference," they were in it because they understood the grave danger of bad record keeping. Fifty years from now, what they wrote might be the only surviving information and chronicle of the times. They regarded that privilege as the penmen of modern history with great responsibility; at the end of the day, their utmost goal was to be as accurate over the course of their career as possible. Getting as much truth - literal, tangible, physical truth - out there before they croaked was their utmost goal in life. Everything else - including their families and their own health - were secondary causes. 

From my experiences, female newspeople have no such allegiance to the truth as is, because they generally see promoting their own brand of identity politics as priority number one. To tell the truth about the world isn't even on their radar - rather, they just want to air their opinions on the world to as large an audience as possible. They seek not the pride of accurate record keeping, but the positive affirmation of their like-minded identitarians. To them, news is anything that reinforces their preconceived notions of society or anything that bolsters their own biases. Anything that doesn't gel with their own personal prejudices - and really, anything that is beyond their narrow realm of personal interests - is never considered, and virtually never published. So stuck in the new wave feminist hive mind that they can't actually detect the pulse of modern existence around them. For example, my Corey Feldman looking coke-snorting editrix once pooh-poohed a story about the new head coach of an NFL team doing a surprise appearance in town in favor of covering some stupid ass bicycle committee meeting that a whole three people attended. My story could've garnered national attention (since it was just a day after the dude got hired), but she was so blind to the reality outside herself that she couldn't see the potential.

The problem isn't so much their inability to distinguish opinion from fact as it is their seemingly universal ideal that journalism should be some sort of vessel for political activism. Simply stating what happened isn't enough for them, they have to be able to express how things ought to be, as well. They see no conflict of interest here, which makes the Kotex Newsroom all the more insular and detached from public life. Remember all those bitchy girls who put together the yearbook in middle and high school, who did as much as the administration would allow to fill them up with photos and writings from their friends? Well, those egotistical little snots have all grown up, and now, they're in charge of writing your hometown newspaper. And because prestige - even a facade of it - means more to them than anything else, of course they're going to turn the damn thing into a rag vaunting all of the hoity-toity about-towners, if only for the sake of getting themselves free drinks at the next "upper crust" social mixer.

Perhaps it's just the fact that I'm a male, but does anybody else see the inherent moral hypocrisy here? All of the newswomen out there want to promote their pro-XY, pro-multiculturalism and pro-leftist causes under the auspices of legitimate news coverage, but their very survival as newswomen hinges on courting and maintaining the approval of the rich white men who tend to run everything in their specific niche or locality. Sure, sure, they may express a stated desire for political change or what have you, but deep down, what they REALLY want is social power. They want to have the same culture-shaping capacity as the town's big wigs, the developers and attorneys and big businessmen, yet without their financial blessings, their own journalistic power-grab attempts couldn't be funded. To be a "feminist" in journalism means being utterly schizophrenic; to further your agenda by writing anti-patriarchal screeds while simultaneously furthering your own personal career by sucking up to the very same patriarchal forces you perceive as public enemy No. 1.

Then again, the bulk of the newswomen I've encountered have very much settled on being professional dead-enders. Theirs may be a small domain, but they would rather lord over an ant hill (or a shit pile) than be outside the sphere of alleged "cultural influence." They've no real career aspirations, more or less beaten down by the consequences of their own bad choices to the point a quite static quo sounds mighty comfortable - even if it also means never earning more than $15 an hour in their life. Almost certainly already buried alive in student loan and credit card debt they'll never repay, financial success becomes something they simply stop caring about. Thus, their cultural lifeblood becomes an altogether different cultural commodity - good old fashioned in-group approval. Popularity and affirmation and anything else that reinforces their ego is worth more to them than money - so in short, with absolutely no willful consideration to being stewards of truth and chroniclers of the times, constantly pollinating the hive mind becomes their only reason to exist.

Now, I'm not saying that every last woman in the field of journalism is like that, but I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of them most definitely are. Hell, that's pretty much the way it is in every woman-dominated office setting. My S.O. has worked in a totally male-free work environment for eight years, and every day she tells me stories about all her colleagues acting like a bunch of high school bitches, bickering and complaining and branching off into Survivor style alliances and scheming to get one another fired. Nothing ever gets done, she keeps telling me, because their clashing egos and malicious gossiping overshadows - and really, overrides - all the functions they've been hired to actually perform as employees.

Here's the the big difference between men and women when it comes to office politics. You see, men are competitive when it comes to work, but collaborative when it comes to life outside of work. Of course, you want be more productive at work than the guy at the cubicle next to you, but outside of the confines of the office and your official work duties, there's no antagonism. You don't give a fuck if he has a hotter wife than you or if his kids are smarter or if he has a nicer TV or that his dick is probably a good two inches thicker, wider and longer than yours. Just as long as he does what he's supposed to in your professional environment and he doesn't try to fuck you up while you're doing what your're supposed to be doing in your professional environment, everything is just peachy between the two of you. If you're having a game day barbecue you'll invite him over for beer and brats and if he asks you to help him move some furniture on the weekend - or vice-versa - both of you'll do it out of common, reciprocal human decency and the tacit understanding that neither one of you considers the other a major league asshole.

Now, the womenfolk do it the exact opposite; they're collaborative in the office but competitive as all fuck when it comes to life outside of work. That means they all huddle together and help each other with their assignments and they throw birthday parties and shit for one another and they all like to go out for lunch on Fridays and cry on each other's shoulders and text each other back and forth and share inside jokes on Facebook. So, really, there's no attempt to outdo one another the way men do, by pumping out a higher quantity (or higher quality) of work. The idea, of course, is to keep the "girl squad" together at all costs, because as one codependent blob, they can all slack off together and no one individual can rightly be set up as "the fall guy." Naturally, this leads to fissures, with the "girl squad" inevitably splitting into two secretively warring factions a'la the N.W.O. and the N.W.O. Wolfpac (or hell, maybe even more subgroups than that, depending on how large the operation is) that jockey for position in virtually every facet of life you can think of. They WANT to be thinner and prettier than everybody else at the office and have a better looking husband with a higher paying job and smarter kids and a bigger house and a better Pinterest page and more likes on Facebook, and they want to flaunt it in the face of everybody who works with them. They're all striving for some sort of "queen bee" social stature, but they're also trying to keep their little work in-group cohesive enough that nobody really has to do that much work or at the very least, so that nobody can really be blamed for doing anything wrong because everybody's kinda' working on the same thing and it's one of those group efforts were nobody really has any personal liability for fucking things up.

Now imagine a doctor celebrating the death of the Hippocratic Oath, or an attorney celebrating the repeal of the Fifth Amendment.

So basically, the matriarchal work environment is intrinsically bipolar, this little ecosystem where everybody is impossibly trying to cover for each others' asses but at the same time trying to exert their dominance over everyone else in the office. And of course, when you strive for two diametrically opposite endgames, you inevitably wind up unsuccessful at obtaining either, and nowhere is this product failure more apparent than the world of girl journalism.

Solipsism and the quest for in-group approval is especially pronounced in female-oriented journalism. Rather than envisioning the journalistic medium as a vessel for facts and truth, they instead see it as another opportunity to self-justify whatever stupid intersectionalist feminist bullshit the virtually worship as a sacred Tao. News, to them, doesn't exist to relay impartial facts, but to reiterate their own identitarian doctrines and advance their own insular group narratives. If what happens supports their pre-existing precepts of how the world is, they try to make it a bigger story than World War II and if what happens doesn't support - or mayhap even refutes - their shared idealism, not only must it be glossed over, it must be swept under the rug or distorted (perverted?) in such a way to superficially contour to the girl squad mission statement. 

Notice anything about the list of Pulitzer Prize winners for best investigative reporting? Not factoring in the catch-all awards given to entire newspaper staffs, give or take 30 female reporters have received the distinction, while more than 70 male reporters have received the honor. It's an even larger differential if you factor in the winners of the category's forerunner, Best Reporting, which was awarded from 1917 to 1947 - and to a grand total of zero female reportersThe gender gap is even bigger when it comes to the winners for best explanatory reporting: less than 10 women have ever received the honor, while about 40 male reporters have been given the coveted award. Meanwhile, the only Pulitzer categories where there seems to be a considerable gender equilibrium are the categories that shirk objective news reporting, categories like Feature Writing and  - god help us, Public Service - which are literally anchored around the author's attempts to persuade the reader into believing his or her perspective. Meanwhile, male reporters' absolute dominance in the award category for History and Biography writing - which not only entails a dedication to objective fact and the renunciation of the author's own opinions, but innately demands it - more than demonstrates the clear cut gender divide on the role, purpose and general ethics of news writing.

Simply put, male reporters tend to write because they want to thoroughly explain how things objectively, TRUTHFULLY happen while female reporters tend to write because they want people to side with them when it comes to certain issues.

You see this when The Huffington Post publishes articles about how the word "too" is disparaging to women, as if such was an objective fact of reality. 

You see this when CNN runs stories about fringe feminists who put glitter in their underarm hair, as if such was even remotely newsworthy to anybody outside of said fringe feminists.

You see this when Teen Vogue publishes pseudo-scientific quackery about the trauma of slavery LITERALLY being hardwired into the genes of black women, as if such was a 100 percent indisputable biological truth.

You see this when Buzzfeed runs a photo spread on women's reactions to junk-food-inspired makeup, as if such was even remotely informative or insightful or enlightening use of website bandwidth.

Generally speaking, men tend to value facts more than feelings, while women tend to value emotions over reason. Men find themselves subservient to the logical and the evidence-supported, while women find themselves subservient to whatever aesthetically pleases them and provides them with the least difficult solution. Men tend to confront cognitive dissonance head on, while women tend to mire in it. Men tend to think more about the long-term consequences of decisions than women, who generally try to solve issues as fast as possible without giving too much consideration to the possible unintended consequences of their actions. Men tend to put the larger, broader issues at the forefront while women put their narrower, more personal issues ahead of the supremely important (albeit frustratingly complex) issues of geopolitics and international economics. Men hunker down on the technical specifications of things, while women care more about the general concept of thingsWomen may be more sympathetic, but men are generally more empathetic - their aim is to understand the minds of the masses, not the longings of their hearts. 

Or to put it in a very concise little summary statement, men simply care more about what's real, while women care more about their ideals

And with that noteworthy (yet largely overlooked) discrepancy between the sexes factored into the equation, is there really any wonder as to why female-oriented and female-operated journalism - where the truth is not reported, but manufactured - is such a fantastic, flounderingfinancial failure these days?

Tuesday, March 7, 2017

Fear of a White Planet?

Why is there so much anti-Caucasian hostility these days, and how come no one is taking all of this bitter, bigoted honky-phobia seriously?


By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

"Policy makers ignored such disparities within America's white cultures when, in advancing minority diversity programs, they treated whites as a fungible monolith. Also lost on these policy makers were the differences in economic and educational attainment among nonwhite cultures. Thus nonwhite groups received special consideration in a wide variety of areas including business startups, academic admissions, job promotions and lucrative government contracts.

Where should we go from here? Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end.

Nondiscrimination laws should be applied equally among all citizens, including those who happen to be white. The need for inclusiveness in our society is undeniable and irreversible, both in our markets and in our communities. Our government should be in the business of enabling opportunity for all, not in picking winners. It can do so by ensuring that artificial distinctions such as race do not determine outcomes.

Memo to my fellow politicians: Drop the Procrustean policies and allow harmony to invade the public mindset. Fairness will happen, and bitterness will fade away."

- James Webb

"All I want for Christmas is white genocide."

- George Ciccarello-Maher

If you've never seen 2015's Kingsman, you should. Not only because it's one of the better comic book adaptations out there, but because it contains a scene that pretty much sums up the contemporary post-liberal weltanschauung on "diversity."

There's this one part where a spy visits a church in Appalachia which is supposed to be some sort of stand-in for the Westboro Baptist Church - even though in the film, the pastor is virulently racist and the real Fred Phelps was honored by the NAACP. But - digression. Anyway, the scene more or less concludes with all of the hate-filled rubes - those inexcusable homophobes and racist scalawags they are - being brutally maimed, mutilated and massacred to the tune of Lynyrd Skynryd's "Freebird." Now, contextually, the movie does make up some sort of convenient in-universe explanation (oddly enough, a black billionaire is trying to make the human species go extinct to prevent global warming by making peoples' heads explode with free SIM card implants), but deep down, we all know why the scene was included. To put it bluntly, it's pretty much every modern liberal's fantasy come to life - the vicarious extermination of the white race via highly stylized CGI guts and gore

Now, of course, liberals don't want ALL white people to die. They just want the ones that refuse to kowtow to their multiculturalism uber alles religion and vote Republican to die in an orgy of graphic, kinetic violence. The problem there is that they've so firmly embedded resentment of the white man inside the heads of their minority constituents that they've grown to genuinely despise the entire Caucasoid race. What makes this especially self-defeating (and really, party-destroying) is that it's a truly indiscriminate antipathy of white people that has been engendered and encouraged, which means the honky-hating planks of the Democratic base make no distinctions between Donald Trump supporters in Michigan, actual Klansmen in Mississippi, latte-sipping pseudo-socialists in New Hampshire or even the big donor Jewish folks in New York and L.A. It's the classical "Frankenstein fuck-up" that Dems won't realize until it's about 20 years too late. Sure, all of the politically charged leukophobia was meant to JUST get rid of the whites that voted for the other side, but after the aPOCalypse comes, the brainwashed hordes coked up on self righteous fury will inevitably - if not outright instinctively - turn to liberal white meat to fulfill their insatiable hunger for tribal vengeance.

A couple of years ago I wrote an article called "The Marginalization of the Heterosexual, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Male." Now, at the time, I was still in my shit-headed college liberal phase, so of course, I had plenty of nonsense to spout about the non-existent "wage gap" and the absurdities of "reverse racism," but - for the most part - I still stand by the article's core thesis. Yes, bad shit may be happening to white men, but by and large, white men still have a disproportionate amount of economic and political power in these United States. And while white males' share of the demographical pie continues to get smaller and smaller, I still think it's going to be a long, long time before white men in the United States can justly consider themselves second-class citizens ... in any capacity. 

But that doesn't mean I believe in the liberal fairy tale of white male privilege, either. The thing is, since white people are the majority in the U.S. (well ... until 2040, at least), of course they're going to make up both the high and low ends of the nation's socioeconomic totem pole (although Jews and Asians both post higher annual incomes than whitey, but shh! We're not supposed to talk about that annoying little trifle.) And if you're wondering why white folks seem to have a disproportionate amount of economic and political clout, the answer you're looking for isn't racism, but classism. Harvard and Berkeley studies pretty much tell us inherited wealth is the key to economic and political success in these United States, and since more white people have successful parents to inherit preexisting money and prestige from, what's supposed to be the surprise there?

That said, you'd have to be one ignorant S.O.B. to say there isn't a lot of anti-white hostility on the Internet ... and virtually all of it is coming from leftist-progressivists who see the inevitable demographic decline of the white man as some sort of proxy victory for socialism and (ironically enough) egalitarianism. "If only we could rid of all those worthless white people in states that don't matter like Idaho and Arkansas, by golly, we would FINALLY have ourselves that hyper-diverse Wonderland of total equality we've always dreamed of!" Hell, even liberal whites themselves have wholeheartedly embraced the ethnomasochism epidemic, with many declaring their whiteness - you know, that thing none of them had any control over - as some sort of sociocultural original sin. Of course, no one ever turns that on its head and asks if all white people have to answer for slavery and KKK lynchings, how come all black people can't answer for the nation's highly disproportionate number of interracial rapes and the Moors' conquest - and subsequent enslavement - of the Mediterranean peoples. Just why is inherent racial guilt only mandated for Caucasians and not the Chinese, Indians and pretty much the descendants of every African nation on Earth - when they too promoted slavery, ethnic tribalism and long, bloody conquests of less advanced peoples? How come only the descendants of British and German people are supposed to feel hereditary unworthiness because of what their great, great, great, great, great, great grandfathers probably didn't even do, but nobody ever gives the Native Americans shit for practicing cannibalism and ritualistic torture for centuries before Paleface even arrived stateside? Why must all white people feel intrinsic shame for the institution of American slavery - despite the fact that barely 8 percent of all families in the U.S. at the HEIGHT of slavery actually owned slaves and most white people at the time were much likelier to be the offspring of people brought to the colonies in bondage themselves - but nobody's demanding all black people feel intrinsic shame for Uganda's track record of child sacrifice (which, unlike slavery in America, continues to this day throughout sub-Saharan Africa?)

Of course, there's no question as to why so many People of Color (a term that always miffed me, seeing as how black is actually the absence of color) hate Whitey with the same indiscriminate fury that old Adolf fostered for Der Jude - because the media and academia tells 'em to hate 'em because THAT'S supposedly a central part of their ethnic identity. All these publishing empires and TV channels and highfalutin, ivory tower-perched, taxpayer subsidized college propagandists want everybody who isn't white to feel as if being victimized by El Honky is some sort of common bond for them and their kind. It's cult programming 101 - if you want to get a disparate group of people who (ideologically and perhaps even physiologically) are totally incompatible to "unite," you give them a shared enemy that purportedly threatens their very livelihood at every conceivable opportunity. The U.S. and Russia didn't have Jack Shit in common circa 1943, but the fear and loathing of the Third Reich gave them something to circle jerk to. It's the same deal today - Asians, blacks and Latinos have practically zero cultural commonalities, but you can (temporarily) get them working on the same page if you can get them worked up enough about the Great White Menace running roughshod over all of them.

So Democrats - even though most of them are rich white motherfuckers themselves - have gone to great lengths to get virtually everybody who isn't a.) white, b.) straight, c.) a Christian, or d.) a man to hop aboard their war wagon under the pretense that white, straight, Christian men were going to fuck them up royally. 

Now, the effectiveness of this - as an actual political strategy - is disputable. It worked wonders in 2012, for sure, but in 2016? Eh, as evident by who is sitting in the Oval Office right now, not so much. The problem with this approach is that it requires 100 percent hive mind uniformity, and to be frank, most minorities in America are too smart to fall for that (after all, they should know full well the social hazards of castigating an entire group of peoples just 'cause.) Deep down they know that pledging undying allegiance to a political party means ultimately having to abandon their core ethnic identities to better serve the lord ideology, and at the end of the day, the only people they truly want running their lives are their damned selves. Really, the only people who fall head over heels for the "hate whitey" ruse are white democrats themselves, and boy, do they EVER swallow that claptrap hook, line and sinker.

Ha ha ha, that's what you get for choosing to be poor, you stupid white asshole!

People of Color aren't masterminding this whole anti-white shtick, and they sure as hell aren't the ones keeping it well-financed. The white-shaming campaigns (pogroms?) are bank-rolled by extremely wealthy, predominantly white liberals who THINK a general white population too guldarn ashamed of all the shit 99 percent of white people 300 years ago didn't even do will be much more willing to accept multiculturalism and globalization as moral imperatives, when in reality, they're just methods of socially engineering an economy and a cultural environment where the rich get richer, the poor become poorer and the middle class all but disappears.

You have to be a mush-headed college kid or some 20-something ne'er-do-well for the all encompassing white antipathy to be even remotely appetizing. Even if you aren't white yourself, you'd have to be one cynical - if not gleefully ignorant - sack of shit to brand all white people as one-dimensional, intrinsically evil or amoral people. Odds are by the time you are 30 or 40, you've learned to NOT evaluate people based on broad generalizations but take them on their own merits - in other words, you judge people by the content of their character as opposed to their skin color. The entire liberal Tao is an utter bastardization (well, really, more like motherfuckization) of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s post-racial utopian dream. Rather than triumph over the prejudicial ways of yore, they're actively encouraging people to simply flip the script and foster a "natural" distaste for a different kind of social "other."

And for what? What exactly did white people do that's worthy of such universal condemnation? Every fucking ethnic group in history has - at one point - enslaved people of a different ethnic group (including the tribes of Africa and Latin America.) Every fucking ethnic group has attempted to conquer at least one other ethnic group and tried to take land, artifacts and even people that formerly didn't belong to them (again, the tribes of Africa and Latin America are just as guilty of this as the Europeans and Asians.) Every fucking dominant ethnic group in a multicultural society has sought to reinforce its societal supremacy - and no, as evident by the tribalistic strife in Rwanda, Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya, this isn't simply an after-effect of America's most over-used (and vaguely defined) scapegoat, racism. Simply put, there is nothing that white Americans did THROUGHOUT the history of America that every other fucking hegemonic ethnic group hasn't already done. And unlike the majoritarian ethnic groups in China, Japan, India, Mexico or - irony of ironies, pretty much any country in Africa - white Americans have actually gone to great lengths to cede power to smaller minority groups, as evident by the nation's menagerie of race-based hiring quotas and affirmative action academia policies that favor non-white beneficiaries for simply not being white while penalizing white applicants simply for being white. If American whites really are the bigoted boogeymen the liberals have made them out to be, they're doing a pretty poor job of playing prejudiced pricks, seeing as how the United States of America may very well be the least racist country on the planet.

In the lead up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the slow demographical death of white people - in particular, low-income rural white people in flyover country - was practically celebrated by the media. By proxy of supporting Donald Trump, the lowly agrarian and Appalachian Caucasian was demonized as subhuman scum, a bunch of backwoods neanderthals who, at best, were too inbred and/or retarded to be worth saving and at the worst, were literal Nazi mountaineers, whom are actively engaged in trying to kill every black, gay, Muslim and feminist in the country. Their slow, geographical demise at the hand of migrant Muslims and Hispanic border jumpers isn't just something that shouldn't be mourned, it should be seen as a winning predicament for civilization itself. Once these sorry, hate-filled cracker motherfuckers are out of the way, then human progress - perhaps even human evolution itself - can finally crank into overdrive.

Of course, nobody really tells us what happens ONCE whites stop being America's hegemonic racial group (and if you're wondering when that might be, the U.S. Census Bureau projects it'll be neck and neck between whites and Hispanics come 2100, with Asians likely outnumbering African-Americans for third place.) All you really have to do is look at countries like the U.K., the Netherlands and even Canada - all places where there are dozens of "major" political parties - to see what's going to eventually happen here; with every voting bloc heavily balkanized, we're inevitably going to be seeing elected officials who win maybe 20 or 25 percent of the national (or even state-level) vote winding up in power because the glut of also-rans (and their ethnic voting base) are scattered so widely across the political spectrum. There's no way the Democratic Party can continue to be the floating ark of all non-white-male voters and stay relevant politically; as evident by the pioneering work of sociologist Robert Putnam, diversity - much to the chagrin of its globalism-espousing cheerleaders - does a much better job of dividing people than uniting them. Without that Great White Adversary (TM) serving as the adhesive that holds all those divergent groups together, the liberals are poised to witness their great multicultural society collapse like the tower of Babel.

The frank reality is that all ethnic groups - intrinsically - are isolationists and healthily xenophobic. Authors Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld made this clear as day in their 2014 tome The Triple Package, which examined why certain ethnic enclaves in the U.S. - including the Chinese, Jews, Nigerians and even Mormons - seem to produce an inordinate number of successful business people. Their central thesis is that these groups are disproportionately successful because they foster a particular sense of cultural superiority tempered by a concomitant sense of tribal inferiority and a steadfast dedication to impulse control. Ultimately, their allegiance isn't to a particular party, but their own kind; they feel as if they individually owe it to their shared collective identity to be successful, or at the very least, better off than their rivaling ethnic counterparts.

But something interesting happens when you wedge these very specific in-groups into larger out-groups - they become combative. For example, although Chinese and Japanese people are both technically Asian, the two ethnic groups feel no sense of solidarity or brotherhood - in fact, their entire mutual history is pretty much nothing but a running list of hostilities, resentments and actual genocides. Along those same lines, Jews can easily be wedged into the same greater ethnic bloc as Muslims as members of the Arabian genus, but both sides foster such a great historical hatred of one another that they'd rather blow each other to smithereens before accepting they share SOME kind of ancestral, cultural or especially genetic common link.

Our prejudiced, patriarchal society is clearly kinder to these people than the Obamas.

The strange thing is, this is something we DON'T take into consideration when talking about "white people." What exactly makes somebody white, to begin with? Do you consider Italians and Spaniards the same ethnic group as the Irish and Scots? Are Greeks and Estonians culturally the same as Siberians and Scandinavians? Or does simply hailing from Europe genetically constitute "whiteness" across the board by proxy? And if that's the case, how come white folks never drudge up all of the historical oppression they've faced as a universal social policy bargaining chip? You guys ever hear of the Spanish Inquisition? Or how about Oliver Cromwell? If black Americans are entitled to reparations for slavery, aren't white Americans entitled to reparations for feudalism

For fuck's sake, a lot of these anti-white social media shit stains don't even take the time to differentiate class differences between whites in the country right now. Can't they see how fundamentally absurd it is to grant a universal "white privilege" to people born in dirt poor rural communities, which are not only devoid of the ample job opportunities in urban environments, but completely shut off from the same generous social entitlement benefits and free-to-all public utilities that inner city P.O.C. have had access to for 50 years? Close to half the nation's impoverished people are white, and the majority of its homeless people are likewise melanin-deprived - yet you coddled, entitled and yes, PRIVILEGED, little anti-white snots have the audacity to bemoan their non-existent sociocultural advantages as some sort of sticking point to guarantee you MORE free stuff from the government?

The more I reflect on the Black Lives Matter fad from a few years ago, the more I'm convinced the whole thing was a actually an enormous anti-white dog whistle. For god's sake, you had kids receiving full rides (on the public dime) to IVY LEAGUE schools belittling white people, regardless of socioeconomic differences, for preferential social treatment and, yes, far-reaching social privilege. Meanwhile, Nobel Prize winning economists were releasing studies revealing uneducated, middle-aged white males in rural communities were literally dying off at a rate rivaling the death rates of gay men at the height of the AIDS epidemic - clearly, yet another symptom proving that ALL white people, socioculturally, are doing better than the spoiled black millionaires confusing lab equipment for Klan members across our nation's college campuses.

Think, for a moment, what kind of historical antecedents exist for a culture that gave birth to something like Dear White People - i.e., weekly dispatches blaming a singular ethnic group for all of society's ills and injusticesNot only is it considered fashionable to hate on an entire ethnic bloc because of the color of their skin and the perceived entitlements that comes along with it, it's actually deemed a nigh-mandatory moral calling. In fact, denouncing white people for - well, just being white - is such an entrenched part of our cultural tradition that the idea of white people showing the same kind of ethnic group pride as blacks, Hispanics or even gays is considered socially taboo.

Hell, I don't think Joey Goebbels did as good a job convincing the Krauts to foster a distaste for the Jews as well as our mass media is trying to get the citizenry to dislike white people. It's an unscientific, irrational and totally manufactured ideal that's been elevated to status as unquestionable truth - to question the existence of "white privilege" is to commit the closest thing modern U.S. society has to cultural heresy. Not only is that perspective "wrong," it's unthinkably, unfathomably wrong and must be stamped out to prevent the hideous injustices of yesteryear from re-emerging.

Why wouldn't I and millions of others want to heed the advice of a self-loathing ethnomasochist?

If all of this highly fashionable anti-white conservative/Red State honky rancor seems somewhat familiar, it's because the things multiculturalists are saying about nativists now is the EXACT same thing that hardcore racists were saying about blacks 100 years ago. The perceived anti-liberal/anti-globalist white in this day and age isn't just criticized for an unpopular perspective, he's literally degraded as subhuman scum - not just ideologically, but genetically and biologically a lesser human product.

But what really gets me is the lukewarm response from white people. Can you imagine ANY other ethnic group in the U.S. laughing off such widespread cultural derision and scapegoating? Do you think if college students ran around decrying "Jew privilege," the Chosen would ignore it? If a whole bunch of demonstrators started marching up and down the street demanding less Asians in the workforce, do you think local Indians and Chinese residents would acknowledge the validity of the protesters' concerns? If a talking head went on TV and asked black America to apologize for their long history of criminal misgivings, do you think any black American anywhere would feel intrinsic shame and say to himself "yes, I do bear the full weight of my entire race's sins on my shoulder, and not only should I recognize them, but dedicate my life to atoning for them?"

Never in history (that I'm aware of, anyway) has there been a group of people so masochistic as to not only not care about their own civic persecution, but actively strive to eliminate themselves as an ethnic bloc. Instead of fearing their loss of sovereignty, they embrace the prospects of alien rule, praying for their kind's political death like one of those suicidal cults waiting for the Hale-Bopp Comet to whisk them away to paradise. 

Except the "paradise" they're clamoring for is actually a third world purgatory with a diminished quality of life for all peoples. I am reminded of the chilling words of Patrick J. Buchanan in his 2012 tome Suicide of a Superpower - "absent an authoritarian regime or dominant ethnoculture, all multiracial, multiethnic and multilingual nations are ever at risk of disintegration."

So what happens to our diverse utopia sans that pitiful and pathetic white "over-culture" holding everything together? Will a surging Hispanic minority-majority simply become the new overbearing "whites" come 2150, or without a core demography, will the nation wind up splintering off into a bunch of proxy mini-nation states along ethnic lines?

From what I've gathered, U.S. whites - in particular, the working class, rural Republican whites - are vilified by progressives NOT for their historical misdeeds (remember, the first Democratic President genocided the Indians and pretty much ALL of the state politicians during the reign of Jim Crow in the bad old days of the South had big old "Ds" next to their names), but because they represent the nation's biggest barrier to multiculturalism and globalization. So captivated by this romantic notion of diversity - and the open-borders and open-trade wonderland it facilitates - that Dems are willing to demonize themselves in order to bring the John Lennon commie nirvana to fruition.

The problem, though, is that never in history has a truly multicultural society succeeded. That's because - as much as we may hate it - tribal identity always triumphs over group politics. That's why the entire Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, the horn of Africa, Central America, the North Caucasus region of Russia and migrant-strewn Europe is such a festering shithole of racial resentment nowadays. And lest we forget historically,World War I and World War II were both brought about by aggrieved nation states trying to redraw the border lines around ethno-identities.

So yes, the U.S. white population is declining, but who gains from that? Certainly not Black Americans, whose share of the national populace is expected to remain static over the next century. The overall Asian population in the U.S. supposed to quadruple, but to be frank, they already have disproportionate economic and political power in the States already. If demographics truly are destiny, that means the civic decline of the white has only one real beneficiary, and that's the Hispanic base (which, again, is supposed to climb to nearly 40 percent - perchance even 50 percent - of the U.S. national populace come 2100.)

Which begs this unthinkable, unanswerable question - how exactly would minority citizens fare any better under a dominant Hispanic society as opposed to a dominant Euro-Caucasian one? Sorry kids, but a quick gander at how well Central American migrants fare in Mexico - or the soaring rates of Hispanic on black violence in America's inner cities - shouldn't exactly fill you with optimism for our post-white Latino-led multicultural utopia

At the end of the day, though, maybe it's just the fact that people need a convenient scapegoat to pin all their blames and failings on. Today, all you young whipper-snappers are persecuting rural, conservative whites for fucking up the country and holding back national progress, in much the same way the Germans kept blaming all of society's ills on the Jews in the 1930s. Or how the Hutus blamed the Tutsis for everything sucking in Rwanda in the early 1990s. Or how the Japanese blamed the Chinese for everything in the lead up to World War II. Or how the Turks blamed the Armenians for everything before WWI. Or how the Indians blamed the Muslims and the Sikhs for everything in the 1940s.

As cliched as it sounds, history really does repeat itself. The victims and the victimizers may change, but the narrative pretty much remains unchanged - as this lamentable Wikipedia article surely demonstrates.

Alas, today's anti-white crusaders for transnational progress appear to have forgotten that. Little do they know that inhumane brutality in the name of diversity doesn't differ an iota from inhumane brutality in the name of ethnonationalism

After all - dead is dead, regardless of the ideology that produced the corpse.