Congratulations to Aaron! And, a great product idea!

So, as the agile reader is aware, on-line edumacator "Captain Capitalism" Aaron Clarey has been on something of a legal jag involving this blog's prinicipal, (at least when he isn't making fun of MS sufferers).

Now after some struggle, he did get an impartial judge to review it. And that judge looked at Aaron's fine, fine writing and said,

based on the Court's review of the actual statements [Aaron] has made on the Captain Capitalism blog, the Court finds that [Aaron] cannot demonstrate that such a "complaint" [about racism on the blog] is false.

Which is, ya gotta admit, pretty cool! I mean, there's plenty of hatemongering bigots out there, sure. But how many of them actually get this kind of, y'know, official validation or whatchamacallit? I mean, Aaron's actually gotten somebody impartial to sit down, look over his stuff, and say, yep, it's reasonable to call this boy's output racist.

And, brilliant deep thinker that Clarey is, he knew that. After all, he was warned that this would happen. But Aaron, being so much smarter than us all, knew that only this way could he have something, y'know, official he could put on his wall, or business cards, or something: something to impress the most jaded of Klansmen. What a resume item!

So, special congratulations to Aaron for this notable (and probably expensive) achievement. And, hey, you gotta imagine how proud his parents and sister must be. I mean, to be able to say that you have a relative that a fer-real court decided, could be said to be posting racist material! Man, the pride they must feel!

And, well, that's the thing. Ho do you express that pride? We at the Clareywatch were mulling over this little issue and we thought, well, you do it like people have honored their special achieving relatives for years.

With bumper stickers.

And so, we're giving away this idea to all you enterprising capitalists out there who want to be able to do the Clareys and the many like them, a favor, all while making yourself a pile thanks to the ol' Invisible Hand! I mean, why should you have to wait for an occasion to subtly drop into that cocktail party conversation, that the little boy has grown up and gotten into race baiting and achieved some real recognition for it? No, you should be able to display your pride right on your car, with something like this:



I could see it going even farther and getting into the sort of humorous thing that taps into the cultural zeitgeist, say, making fun of those other parents whose children's accomplishments are infinitely crappier -- something like this:



Anyway: no patent, we're giving that one away! So all you Clarey capitalists out there, while you're cooling down the printers from all those pamphlets reminding people which Presidential candidates are black or Mormon or otherwise unAmerican: try banging out a few of these! They'll sell like hotcakes!

Wow, that's jut so nice for the troops!

Y'know what's touching? When "Captain Capitalism" Aaron Clarey -- a guy who's already pointed out that he's much too good to serve in the military and anyway pays taxes which is just as good -- slums a little to show his support the poor inferior soldier folk. He certainly seems to like dressing up like them, and going to places he calls "officer's clubs." (PDF) I mean, how comforting for people missing their families, or injured in the line of fire, to see their betters boying them on the Minneapolis stage. It's just so damn nice, no? The families of the dead must be so damn grateful, unless of course they're leftists.

"First it killed the Chippewa// And now it's killing me."

Some might be surprised to hear Ojibwe described as a "dead language." Well, it will be, dammit, once the white guys stop bending over. So look out all you evil Indians!

When asses read charts

Man, somebody has never heard of payroll taxes. It takes a classy, smart dude to never have gotten a paycheck!

It's so cool how nutcases can keep awarding each other military titles nowadays. Especially nutcases who are too good to serve!

It takes the brilliant insight of an Aaron Clarey to tell all the Christians out there how to practice, while not doing it himself -- wow! A theological wizard too!

So What?

Since "Captain Capitalism" Aaron Clarey seems determined to diss a lot of good hardworking musicians, and show his pretensions to culture, let's pipe up here.

Now, your humble blogger isn't really in much of a position to be a jazz critic, as about ten minutes at his house listening to him maim "All The Things you Are" on a clarinet or tenor or trumpet or piano or guitar or banjo or oud or any of the other things we have lying around will convince you. But I've been lucky enough to be backstage or in interview rooms with Nicholas
Payton, Elvin Jones, Kenny Burrell (even introducing him to my parents), Olu Dara, Mike Stern (my fiancee and I spent a memorable afternoon taking a tired-but-upbeat Stern to San Mateo, then -- not my idea -- a McDonald's), Mike Brecker, Stanley Clarke -- you get the picture. So I know somethin'. Unlike some.

And I honestly believe that if it weren't for a certain nostalgia thing, 1995-2005 would be regarded as jazz's finest decade, past even the classic 60's Blue Note years. You still had titans on the scene -- Wayne Shorter, McCoy Tyner, Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock, the Joneses, etc. And "mid-period" guys who'd done a lot to expand the compositional and arranging possibilities of jazz -- Metheny, Dave Holland, Carla Bley, Chick Corea, Arthur Blythe, Julius Hemphill, etc. Some long absent masters returned -- Andrew Hill, Charles Lloyd, Pat Martino. And you had a blend of older musicians who sat perfectly balanced between long-standing tradition and the new -- Dave Douglas, Tom Harrell, John Abercrombie, Joe Lovano -- while other guys genuinely expanded the range of jazz in ways you'd never have predicted -- Bill Frisell, Dave Douglas, Bela Fleck, Chris Speed. Add to that a group of phenomenally, frighteningly talented twenty- and thirtysomethings --maybe more than in any previous generation -- who had finally shaken the 1980's navel-gazing: Matthew Shipp, Brad Mehldau (!), Brian Blade (!!), Ben Monder, Bill Stewart(!), Bela Fleck, Chris Speed, Chris Potter, Mark Turner, Jason Moran -- the list goes on and on and on. The globalization of the music -- particularly to middle Eastern forms -- was completed too.

Now, I would think nobody on the planet has more authority to talk about what Armstrong or Ellington might've found musically satisfying, than Roy Haynes. And Haynes doesn't seem to have a problem working with rappers or hip-hop guys. Nor does Shorter -- probably our best composer since Strayhorn (and honestly: these morons are holding up Strayhorn's musical generation as moral paragons?) Hancock is arguably the new music's godfather. So I don't know a lot about hip-hop -- but I'm not stupid enough to argue against those guys. And you can either listen to them, or some snot-nosed ass who can't so much as play a scale on a harmonica, and is now trying to do for culture what he does for politics and economics. Take your pick. Guys like Clarey are why the music stultified through the 1980's and early 90's as a generation of players all tried to out-imitate Freddie Hubbard -- why wouldn't I just go buy the original? -- although at least sometimes their arguments found their way into the mouths of intelligent (if grossly mistaken) folk like Stanley Crouch or his pet trumpeter.

But if you're new to this stuff -- please don't just ignore these greats like they don't exist: that's a slur on hardworking people keeping the stuff alive. Ellington, Armstrong -- they're great, sure, but if you're starting out in this, there's a lot of blisteringly excellent young cats you can go see live now -- so start with their stuff and ignore fools like Clarey. You'll find there's two kinds of jazz fans: guys who listen hard, and passionately love the music, and know it -- and brainless poseurs who like the "cachet" of stuff which has some cultural stamp of approval, desperately fear and trash the new lest they reveal stupidity when they opine, and would rather be at home with Aerosmith or something at least loud, truth be told. Clarey uses jazz lyrics like "Mahan" uses common Latinisms in an attempt to fool you into thinking he's a classicist -- let him BS you, and you lose a lot of great art.

(Don't get me wrong - one can accuse a lot of modern lyricists of coarseness and vulgarity beyond what's common: but the same accusation was made of the classical jazz lyricists. And the culture may in fact be going to hell - but for evidence of that, look instead to grown men who go around spending real time playing video games (although that does give us the unintentionally hilarious rating "M for Mature.") Or worse yet, adults reading Harry Potter books in public - hey, buddy, what's next on your list, Goodnight Moon?)

Don't fight the five-year plan!

"Captain Capitalism" Aaron Clarey lets his full fury loose on a stupid activist today, and really fleshes out her motives. Check it out (PDF)!

It seems that the Belgian state, in the superior economic wisdom only a government can have, has determined that a port must be sited at a specific place. But it seems some evil, heartless woman, "who never starved or missed a meal, who is suffering from some kind of mid-life crisis and looks back at her life and says, 'what have I accomplished?'" doesn't like them building a port right next to her property, lowering its value to her and others. No, this spoiled brat seems to think the wise, all-knowing state's economic plans should take a back-seat to her so-called property rights! Outrageous! Astounding! Next she'll be bitching and moaning because somebody wants to make part of her land a protected wetland or something!

Fortunately, Clarey points out that if the state "knows what its [sic] doing" economically, it'll ship people who even complain right off to a gulag. After all, real capitalism is when the state buys ownership of companies. I guess it's a sort of "capitalism of the heart"!

Thank goodness for clever midwestern journalists or I wouldn't realize how libertarian all this is!

Your health this week

It takes a brilliant, scientifically literate guy like Aaron Clarey to discover that Western liberalism causes AIDS (PDF). Who knew?

Whine and cheese conservatism

So, you read this long extended whine from the Pathetic Ignorant Little Man, and you start to think, man, there's some admirable chutzpah in going to an interview even after they've pretty much told you, by refusing to pay your fare, that they don't want you to interview (although granted Clarey seems typically clueless that that's what was going on). But then it all gets ruined by the sour grape-ism. In particular, what kind of fool lies at an interview, gets caught lying, and then brags about it? I mean, what idiot, after reading this self-pitying screed, would ever hire this guy to do anything? But then, ah, yes, Aaron Clarey is the kind of daring, convention-defying soul who spouts crud along the lines of,

I lied at an interview and got caught, and then they didn't hire me: therefore the system is stupid and stacked in favor of Ivy Leaguers.

or

I spout every kind of misogynistic crap, and women still don't appreciate me, which just goes to show that all the misogynistic crap is true.

or even

I defecated out a lot of racist hate speech publicly, and somebody went and pointed it out. Clearly Somebody done me wrong.

Yes, folks, whine whine whine, that's the ticket to glory. Never forget that Clarey's problems are always somebody else's fault, and damn it, he'll hire people to harass you into the ground to prove it if he has to.

Contagion?

So here's a Deep Question: AM radio bigots -- are they maybe some kind of spreading plague? Like bird flu or something?

I find myself mulling over this little passage from Eugene Robinson:

Nor is there much exculpatory power in Imus's defense of himself, which can be paraphrased as "I'm not a racist, I just keep saying racist things." What characteristics, do you suppose, could possibly identify a person who was indeed a racist? You think maybe that saying racist things might be a fairly reliable clue?

Funny; I've heard something like that somewhere very recently....

I think it's called a "bigoticon"

Ah, more pure, unadulterated bigotry (PDF). Nice to know by screening comments the Pathetic Ignorant Little Man maintains the highminded tone of the blog! And so nice to see what submissions he posts!

But I have a particular fondeness for the "I'm winking at you while I'm saying this" "emoticon" he uses on that last comment there to let us know what he thinks. There should be a special term for that!

Science is bunk, too!

Remember, now, true believers: you've gotta keep sucking up stuff like this, or you won't get more of this....

But ya gotta love the honesty. I mean, Clarey would have to consider himself a "scum bucket parasite" for having received a taxpayer subsidized higher education. But he's an honest guy so he always makes sure to show you, he doesn't really have what you'd consider an "education."

And still more Euripedes...

Now, over here at the Clareywatch we know nothin' about "Dave Thompson" other than that he lets "Captain Capitalism" Aaron Clarey sit in for him a lot, and is much admired by same, from which we feel it's safe to conclude, Thompson is a ridiculous, boneheaded troglodyte.

A-and.....yep. Guess you can tell a lot about guys from their associates after all.

A useful litmus test

Need to know if you're a pathetic, repulsive, subhuman cretin? Easy as pie!

Does this woman move you to compassion, or contempt?

Guess which side the Klever Klarey Krew comes down on!

For chemists only...

We're engaged in energetic internal debate as to which of these people is the second stupidest. I'm betting, no-ozone-hole guy. But from a strictly technical standpoint, the guy with "IR causes electronic excitation of carbonyl pi bond which is easily coupled into kinetic energy modes" is pretty off-the-charts, so I admit it's close.

Why do I believe in human-activity-caused global warming?
One third because of the freakishly smart people who are trying to convince me of it. Two-thirds because of the utter cretins arguing against.

Ask Karnak the Magnificent

Pathetic Insignificant Little Man Aaron Clarey has been awing himself with his ability to predict the actions of Hugo Chavez. Well, that's nothing, I tell you, nothing. 'Cause here at the ClareyWatch we made this statement about just how repulsive Clarey's views on, well, trying to be a decent human being are. And months later, he comes up with this and this. That first one's almost verbatim!

We'll be spending the rest of the afternoon moving pencils with our minds, thank you very much. There is no spoon, there is no spoon, there is no spoon...

Like Shaq, except short, talentless, and stupid!

In honor of Chinese New Year it's probably time to point readers to this little piece of brilliance (PDF). NBA stardom, look out for Aaron Clarey!

For some, a lack of education is their El Guapo.

Our apologies to those in the fanbase who are wondering, why no posts? There just hasn't been that much to work with. There's a kind of "sweet spot" to making fun of Aaron: when he gets too stupid, there's not really anything there. I mean, look at something like this: he doesn't understand just how ideologically broad the pressure on Bush is, nor that among the White House's not-necessarily bad arguments against acting is the need to maintain intelligence cooperation from a fundamentalist Islamic government with ties to terrorism (and he even throws in something to boot to show he doesn't get Iraq either). I just can't make fun of that: it exceeds even the level of stupid I expect.

But that makes me kind of rapturous. I mean, too much is said about how the Internet gives average schmoes access to great information: you can read about international affairs from the very well traveled, get war commentary from people with a lot of respect for the military, learn history and economics and science from respected, published masters in those fields, and so on. Look, all that's garbage, man. What's amazing about the internet is you can do exactly the opposite of all that stuff - in Clarey's case, all at one site: the rise of the idiocracy, brought to you in one-stop shoppng! Amazing! Look at it this way: sure, when a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters for a thousand years produce a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls, that's impressive. But if you really want to impress me, start with stupid monkeys.

Consider all the bloviation lately over there on global warming. Now, there's a very small minority of people who know a lot about this stuff that don't believe in it, and of those there's even a couple without conflicts of interest. But the idea some moron using data
generated and interpreted by those very people, and saying, they just don't get the big picture -- now, that's laughably wonderful. And the proliferation of these little video gaming weenies talking about how the same people argued exactly the reverse in the late '70's -- hey, man, I was around in the late '70's. I remember those stories. And it wasn't nearly the same level of worry: and anyone who doubts it, can easily confirm it by scanning the scientific literature. There's just not a huge record of peer-reviewed 1970's studies concluding "global cooling" compared to what you're getting now. These are people who are utterly ignorant about how any kind of study is done, and yet claim to understand economics and history -- fields where the data are even noisier and the experiments less clear. And they're throwing up their hands and saying, oh, yeah, this system is so complex you can't pretend to understand it at all? Excellent! These are "capitalists" with a fundamental lack of faith in the very flexibility and innovation which makes capitalism desirable, who seem to think the whole system will collapse if it has to accommodate physical reality. Wow! These are the monkeys to impress with.

Anyway: sorry for the absence of stuff. Maybe we'll try a clever idea out in the next couple weeks.

UPDATE: We hesitate to put this up here because it's smart, but somebody sends us to this gloriously awake understanding of climate change and the stupid part of the right, written by the smart part of the right.

Free Aaron Clarey, you crooked evil Venezuelan mastermind!

So, there's a lot of hyperventilation on "Captain Capitalism" Aaron Clarey's website about Hugo Chavez. And that's sort of understandable because it's the strangest thing that the tinpot leader of a poor country should have become such a player internationally, a kind of proxy for America-bashing fools. I mean, the guy should be sort of a nonentity, and (at least until his legislature gave him new powers a couple weeks back) he's not even so much a dictator as a crude government bully and is hardly among the planet's worst such - so something is way screwed up that anyone pays so much attention to the guy.

But I don't get the repeated assertions that somehow Chavez is the darling of the American left. You can't find any love for Chavez in mainstream left-wing papers like the New Republic or the American Prospect. Even the Nation doesn't have much good to say about Chavez. Mainstream left-wing sources don't much like the guy and even the most repulsive of far left writers like those at Daily Kos seem to've gotten the whole thing about right, for a long time. Then again, liberal sources don't seem to care much about Chavez: it's the right-wingers who write so much about him.

Which suddenly makes sense, right? I mean, Latin America is now full of countries which have decided that the bits of financial aid Chavez doles out are worth more than any support from America (the sole exception, for obvious reasons, being Colombia). Even the President of Chile is willing to support Chavez' anti-US bid for a Security Council seat - and that's bad. And it's a gift, not from the left, but the right, which basically doesn't seem to have a Latin America policy. Which, in fact, got excited and sat on its hands during a coup d'etat, which really brought Chavez to prominence (this seems to be the only time I can find a lot of left-wing support for Chavez: when writers bashed the administration for failing to condemn the coup. Problem for the Clarey Crew is, the right came around to agreeing with them.) Because frankly, no amount of oil money should be enough to convince anybody in Latin America that the US isn't interested enough in the place, to be worth courting.

So suddenly I get this brilliant idea: maybe he's nationalized the right wing turkeys somehow? I mean, he gets all his press from the Aaron Clareys of the world. And they're the ones who seem to've decided that they just don't give a rip about the American sphere of influence in South America. So maybe he's made them all property of the Venezuelan government somehow? One moronic comment from Pat Robertson, means another round of international junkets for Hugo.

Well, we won't stand for that, Hugo! Free Aaron Clarey! Let our people go! We're wise to your little game.

[Not that there aren't topics about which those silly leftists and turncoat rightists go on and on about that Aaron never seems to consider interesting: like say prisoner abuse....]

No Reservation Required!

Hey, some good fellow went and followed the link below to read that racist post from Aaron Clarey on Indians. And I guess he then asked,

How do you know it was Native Americans that stole your car???!!!!Pretty presumptuous on your part!

to which the Pathetic Ignorant Little Man answered, gracefully,

Uh, because the cops recovered it on an Indian reservation.

No, i just surmised it must be a group of Indian kids because that's the mood I was in.

Any other stupid questions?

And, hey, that does clear it up! Because there's no chance that, say, some white kids that stole a car and are wondering where to go with it, might not want to go where they've heard they can buy smokes and sixes for cheap, and where there aren't so many cops on the ground. No, it's much more likely that whoever stole the PILM's car drove straight home with it, that being of course the whole point of a joyride, and having the additional benefit of letting people know who stole the car, which can help if they're particularly thick radio-host-types.

So rest assured, it's NOT some odious little man making a characteristically racist assumption and then broadcasting it as true from his soapbox.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

So, quite often someone from the Great Out There will email us more instances of public racism from "Captain Capitalism" Aaron Clarey. Usually, we ignore them, because the Clareywatch is not a customer-service oriented outfit. Then all of a sudden when we check one out, we find a little gem like this little racist item (PDF) from the Clareyster. Let's look at it.

He's unloading scorn on an outfit he's heard about on the radio called MUD, which stands for Metro Urban Indian Direction, an "initiative to help educators reach out to Indian kids." So as always it's like there's a wall of stupid between Clarey and information, since we're told that the organization, MUID, is actually the Metropolitan Urban Indian Directors, an umbrella organization for Indian organizations in the area which does a number of things including advocate for afterschool and educational programs and safe neighborhoods. He makes fun of the fact that he can't learn anything about them on the Internet - presumably because he's looking for information on whatever made it through the wall of stupid, not what actually exists - and I guess that "libertarian light" insists that every NGO, even little ones which basically just coordinate separate entities, employ its own web guru.

And he ends with these pearls of wisdom:

they're referenced as some kind of initiative to help educators reach out to Indian kids.

Maybe they could reach out to the scum bag Indian kids that stole my car and punch them for me.

Oh, I'm sorry, white males aren't supposed to display anger. We're just supposed to bend over.

So take note of the wisdom of Aaron Clarey, all you darkies! Keep all yours in line, 'cuz there ain't no reason we should be doing shit for any of you! No, we should instead by hunting down your kids for joyriding, which white kids don't. And beware the wrath of the white males, man. They are the sleeping dragon, the dark horse, the X factor.

Y'know, truthfully, we can't figure out why Clarey gets so hostile when people point out that he's a racist. I mean, you'd think he takes some kind of pride in it. He writes like he learned everything he knows from some kind of Archie Bunker correspondence course, with the exams proctored by Timothy McVeigh.

A bit of J school

Hey, it turns out that, life being unfair and all, we got an additional fifteen minutes! Fact is, because of the holidays and stuff, we just found out about it here. But we have a lot of little quibbles with the story presented.

Perhaps most striking was the assertion that "Captain Capitalism" Aaron Clarey "shines a libertarian light on politics." Now, funny thing, but libertarians don't actually advocate national ID cards, or celebrate when an authoritarian government seizes private property for big public works projects, or bitch and moan when women and families make their own economic decisions, or advocate increased government control over the borders or scrutiny of firms' hiring practices or... Heck, for that matter they probably don't launch big lawsuits against free speech, no? Especially not when they don't even allege a penny of monetary damage in the complaint, which you'd'a thunk the reporter had read, no? Surely that's not "libertarian."

Well, look, that's actually sort of irresponsible of the writer. If Aaron Clarey is a libertarian, I'm a giant panda.

Now, you might try "conservative." Except, well, conservatives don't talk smut about women and children and the elderly or make fun of the religious or suggest minimum wage COLAs or attack Larry Summers' suggestion that affirmative action to recruit women into technical fields might be fruitless (admittedly, Aaron seems confused about what he's commenting on there), or celebrate when dictatorships build obstacles to keep people from fleeing torture under Communist regimes, or...

And neither label really conveys Aaron's bizarre need to keep up - but to hide! - speech which is nothing but a long racist attack on Latinos, or which harasses Americans who've lost their homes and families in a natural catastrophe, or tells us that gays are unmanly, or the bizarre insistence that the Nazis under Hitler were left-wingers, or...

Mr. Reporter, "libertarian" is dishonest. I think the words you're looking for are bigoted, offensive, jingoist ass.

Hope that's helpful!

UPDATE: But ya gotta love the "Perils of Pauline" sound of "this guy's not getting away with it." It makes one feel so...nefarious!