Monday 25 January 2021

Exclusive New Offer from WordJam: The Joe Biden Action Figure!

If you've been watching the news since Joe Biden's inauguration, chances are you'll know he's the greatest thing to happen to humankind since a humble carpenter's son from Galilee decided to poke his nose into other people's affairs in an attempt to make the world a better place. 2000 years later, no one can even remember that man's name - but everyone's heard of Joe Biden. That's why it's so disappointing to see toy stores insist on selling action figures of second-rate 'heroes' and 'icons' like Batman, Captain America and Barbie while Uncle Joe doesn't even get a look-in.

Well, not any more. WordJam proudly presents our new, seven-inch, fully-poseable Joe Biden action figure with a range of exciting accessories, available exclusively through this blog!

1. 'Made America Great Already' Baseball Cap. Helps Joe heal a divided nation by celebrating the complacency of the American political establishment while simultaneously shitting all over his defeated opponent's core campaign slogan.

2. Bifocals of Truth. Allows Joe to focus on two things at once, like reading through the latest policy proposals drawn up by his chief advisors while surreptitiously eyeing up the tits on that cute little blonde intern pouring the coffee.

3. Face Mask. Joe won't leave the office without it, even if the World Health Organization has yet to prove their efficacy in protecting against coronavirus. That doesn't matter, though; Joe wants to make them mandatory and that's all there is to it. Get with the program, murderer! [Warning: choking hazard]

4. Bust of César Chavez. Placed prominently in the Oval Office, this tribute to the late American labor leader and civil rights activist reinforces Joe's committment to progressive, left-leaning causes. Opens just above the hairline, making it a neat place to hide all those well-thumbed copies of Milton Friedman's Free to Choose and Friedrich Hayek's Individualism and Economic Order.

5. Copy of Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility. Now Joe can litter his speeches with hip, pseudo-sociological newspeak about 'internalised whiteness' and 'racism-adjacency' to show off just how in tune he is with the social justice movement. Plus it distracts from the punitive justice reform legislation he helped usher in during the Clinton and Obama administrations, disproportionately affecting any number of African-Americans.

6. Fountain Pen of Executive Justice. The Democrats may currently have control of both the House of Representatives and the senate, but sometimes Joe will want to pass bills into law without the monotony of debate or putting them to a vote. Now he can do just that with this beautiful, gold-plated accessory! Ideal for wiping out 60,000 jobs in the oil and gas industry, or carelessly signing away women's sex-based rights without a second thought.

7. 'Special Pills.' Includes blank label for you to write your own diagnoses and prescriptions.

8. Adamantium Claws. Lets Joe tear down half-built walls on the Mexican border. Or shred awkward letters from son Hunter.

9. Nuclear Football. Those pesky Russians, Chinese, Iranians and North Koreans better start behaving now Joe's got his finger on the button! Not that he'd ever use it, of course, because he's such a saint, but it sure makes you feel safe knowing that a hawkish, geriatric champion of American exceptionalism holds your life in his hands. Doesn't it-?

10. Barack Obama's Shoes. We now know there was absolutely nothing wrong with the Obama administration, so all those accusations of Obamacare pricing many Americans out of health insurance, the escalation of conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East, working people being left to carry the can after the 2008 financial crash, the clampdown on press freedom and ramping up of surveillance operations are all fake news. And what better way to symbolically erase the fall-out we've seen from this over the last four years than for Joe to don good ol' Barack's shoes and pretend everything was hunky dory before Fascist Orange Man turned up! [Note: shoes will fall apart after four years]

So don't delay:

Dial 07771622582 now to order your 

Joe Biden Action Figure!

RRP. $29⁹.99

[Calls cost $300 from a landline. Mobile charges will be considerably higher and may require you to remortgage your house. By using this service you automatically agree to receive promotional literature for the Democrats and your right to vote for other parties will be revoked.]

Thursday 14 January 2021

WordJam Message Board: Special Discussion

Today's Topic: Should Donald Trump be removed from Home Alone 2?

JUstinBieberLover39888655592 - January 14, 17:23
I did nt think he was that bad in it

KarenKilla - January 14, 17:24
It's cos he's a FASCIST, asshole. #CutTrumpFromHomeAlone2

JUstinBieberLover39888655592 - January 14, 17:27
Oh I did nt notis that

Biden2024 - January 14, 17:42
I heard they were thinking of replacing him with CGI, like Kevin Spacey in that Ridley Scott flick. Totally on board with that. HA2 is one of my all-time favourite holiday movies and it pains me having Orange Man Bin Laden soil it with his cameo.

MelGibsonIsGod - January 14, 17:51
They should replace him with Jesus. Kevin asking Our Lord The Way would fit the Christmas theme really well.

RussiaBot1917 - January 14, 17:56
Why would he ask Jesus the way to the lobby?

MelGibsonIsGod - January 14, 17:59
Jesus knows all.

RussiaBot1917 - January 14, 18:01
But it's not his hotel, is it? Kinda kills the gag when you think about it.

justiceleague11939 - January 14, 18:15
Bruce Wayne would make more sense. They could digitally change the name of the hotel to keep the joke.

RussiaBot1917 - January 14, 18:22
How would people know it was Bruce Wayne?

justiceleague11939 - January 14, 18:27
They could get Christian Bale in to do it. Then after he tell's Kevin the way to the lobby Michael Caine could make a cameo as Alfred and say something like "The Batmobile's ready, sir"

WhoWatchesTheWatchmen9/11 - January 14, 18:29
(((They))) will probably replace him with (((George Soros))) or (((Louis Farrakhan)))...

RussiaBot1917 - January 14, 18:30
Pretty sure Farrakhan isn't Jewish.

WhoWatchesTheWatchmen9/11 - January 14, 18:32
I didn't say he was Jewish... Why are *you* saying that?

RainbowPrincess456 - January 14, 18:47
Jesus and Batman?!? PUH-LEEEEEEZ!!!! If they replace him with anyone it should be a well-known figure from the BAME and/or LGBTQIA+ community, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elliot Page or RuPaul. It would add some much-needed diversity to an otherwise boring, white supremacist, cishet movie.

MAGA1776 - January 14, 19:06
They'll come after Reagan next. Bedtime for Bonzo won't be the same without The Gipper.

Biden2024 - January 14, 19:10
Have fun desecrating the Capitol, TERRORIST?

MAGA1776 - January 14, 19:12
Have fun rigging the election, COMMUNIST?

RussiaBot1917 - January 14, 19:18
Why remove him, anyway? Even Alan Dershowitz said his Capitol speech was protected by the First Amendment, and he's not exactly on Team Trump...

WhoWatchesTheWatchmen9/11 - January 14, 19:19
(((Dershowitz)))

RussiaBot1917 - January 14, 19:20
@WhoWatchesTheWatchmen9/11: Oh fuck off.

Biden2024 - January 14, 19:23
@RussiaBot1917: I don't care. I hope your precious Trump goes to jail and gets raped by Harvey Weinstein.

KarenKilla - January 14, 19:45
@MAGA1776, @RussiaBot1917: I've had it up to here with you nazi-enabling SOBs. You just want freedom of speech without consequences. You better pray I never find out who you are and where you live cos I'll send my Antifa homies round to seriously fuck you up.

BLM4EVA1865 - January 14, 20:11
@RainbowPrincess456: This doesn't end with Trump. They need to replace Macaulay Culkin too. I didn't see him on any Black Lives Matter marches last summer.

KarenKilla - January 14, 20:24
Fuckin A. Culkin is white privilege incarnate. #CutTrumpAndCulkinFromHomeAlone2

RussiaBot1917 - January 14, 20:58
What about Gary Coleman as Kevin?

KarenKilla - January 14, 21:32
Oh, you are SOOO dead, Trump scum. BELIEVE.

BLM4EVA1865 - January 14, 22:04
Will Smith as Kevin.

KarenKilla - January 14, 22:06
And Martin Lawrence to replace Trump, not just as a cameo but as a full character! They could make it a Bad Boys prequel!!!

AllCopsMustFry - January 14, 22:18
Who directed Home Alone 2? Chris Colombus. And who's he named after? The Spanish explorer who invaded America, killed all the natives and set up a slave empire. Coincidence?

KarenKilla - January 14, 22:23
With or without Trump this film is EVIL. #CancelHomeAlone2

Biden2024 - January 14, 23:37
@KarenKilla: 100% this. Always hated this movie.

JustinBieberLover39888655592 - January 14, 23:52
They cud jus black Trump up an put him in a dress. That wuld teech him for bein a fashist

Thursday 7 January 2021

Capitol Punishment, or "The City on the Hill Has Lost its Shine"

This week, Richard casts a grammatically-suspect eye over recent events in Washington and braces himself for the backlash.

"It's not protest," Biden said. "It's insurrection."

That's funny: it was a different story in Ukraine, wasn't it? Not to mention Serbia, Libya, Iraq, Venezuela, Bolivia, Belarus, etc, etc.

It's also funny how the mainstream media - who were happy to act as a mouthpiece for the State Department in decrying "rigged" elections in other countries and cheering on "color revolutions" - are now nailing themselves hands and feet to the narrative that US elections cannot be anything other than honest and open... Y'know, despite four years of telling us the last one was hacked by the Russian State. They even refused to give up the ghost after the Mueller Report and subsequent inquiry, which practically collapsed the Steele Dossier, failed to come up with the goods. But cast that from your mind because you're not supposed to remember any of this now they've got the right result. "Biden won fair and square!" they keep telling us, pausing only to snigger contemptuously at Trump's fraud claim and his supporters' dubious allegation that the Democrats were aided by the CCP. "That's just a conspiracy theory!" they spit back. "There's not a grain of truth in it whatsoever." A certain idiom about pots and kettles leaps to mind.

Biden as pictured on the BBC News website's report on the siege. Note the not particularly subtle halo effect.

But it doesn't actually matter whether or not Biden won this election legitimately. What we're seeing is the US political establishment's worst nightmare: a home-grown color revolution being played out right in the centre of power, and neither the Democrats or Republicans have a fucking clue what to do about it.

Over the last 30 years, both parties have pushed western-style liberal democracy abroad, engineering coups that paradoxically terminated any chance of a comparable system occuring naturally in countries the State Department deems problematic. "We came, we saw, he died!" Hillary Clinton famously whooped after Gaddafi was killed by western-backed rebels in Libya, presumably invoking Julius Caesar rather than Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters. Ten years later, Libya is little more than bandit country where those self-same rebels sell black Africans in slave markets for $400 apiece. "O brave new world that has such people in it," eh?

Clinton after receiving news of Gaddafi's death.

Then there was the Euromaidan, where we witnessed the shameful spectacle of Victoria Nuland handing out cookies to "pro-democracy protestors" (ie. far-right militants) while John McCain took to a makeshift stage flanked by burly men in balaclavas to make a rallying speech about freedom and liberty. Conveniently missing from these happy scenes, dutifully captured by American news media, were said demonstrators throwing molotov cocktails at police officers, violently forcing staff onto the roof of the Russian embassy building and President Yanukovych having to flee Kiev amid a hail of bullets. Eight years on, Ukraine has still yet to be granted EU membership, leaving them isolated from both western Europe and Russia. But then, that was the plan all along. The Obama administration declared it a watershed moment in bringing democracy to a country that had long been seen as nothing more than a glorified satellite state when, in reality, they simply wanted access to Russia's border. Still, at least Ukraine got Zelensky out of it, they tell us - and everybody loves a celebrity turned politician who confuses patriotism with nationalism, right-? And at least he isn't that nutjob Poroshenko. When you've got a President who's a cross between Roderick Spode and General Jack D. Ripper it's hard to keep up the illusion of democracy, regardless of how many Washington Post and New York Times op-eds try to convince you otherwise.

Victoria Nuland handing out cookies in Maidan Square.

But things aren't looking too peachy these days in the good old US of A either. Last year, lockdowns across the United States saw basic constitutional rights all but abolished, leading to sweeping changes in electoral practices that were promoted to better serve the interests of "democracy." Unable to express their frustrations against a system they felt had been rigged against them, is it any wonder disgruntled voters followed the example of the politicians and media who smugly promoted US-style democracy overseas by taking their grievances straight to the heart of government itself? Who else was going to fight their corner: the newspapers who made no secret that they buried the Hunter Biden story because they didn't want to damage Sleepy Joe's chances, or the tech giants in Silicon Valley who treat even mild criticism of Covid restrictions as political extremism?

Lest we forget, this is the same media establishment who accuse Trump of white supremacist dog-whistling when he's explicitly condemned all forms of racism in no less than 38 public addresses. The fact that he increased funding for African-American colleges and reformed the appeals process in the penal system allowing prisoners serving excessive jail terms for minor offences to have their sentences reviewed (going some way to repairing the damage from the punative legislation introduced by Biden under the Clinton administration, a bill that dispropotionately affected African-American males) doesn't seem to matter. "He's a fascist!" they cry. "And if you voted for him, that makes you a fascist, too. You're out of touch with reality. Don't you understand that everything he says is a lie?!" But where was their incessant "fact-checking" in their coverage of the DNC when Michelle Obama slyly accused the Trump administration of building the "cages" on the Mexican border? Or when Biden repeated it during the second Presidential debate? They know damn well who drew up this policy and put it into operation. (Clue: Michelle wakes up with him every morning.) But no, gotta keep that narrative rolling - and it's been rolling along ever since 2016 when Clinton made her "Basket of Deplorables" speech, characterising half of Trump's support base as unreconstructed bigots instead of people who felt betrayed and left behind by the neoliberal excesses of the Obama era. Add Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Trump Accountability Project to the mix and you're looking at a very, very combustible situation.

Now I ask again: after four years of this, is it any wonder why these people went to Capitol Hill?

Just to be clear, I don't condone Trump riling up his supporters with baseless accusations of electoral fraud, and I don't support their anti-democratic means of trying to overthrow the election result. But when it comes down to it, what is the difference between Trump encouraging his followers to march on the Capitol and McCain tacitly cheering on violence in Maidan Square? Or the way CNN and MSNBC fawned over Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó because it was seen as, to coin a phrase, 'politically correct'? Only one: it's not happening thousands of miles away. Today it's in the Capitol, tomorrow or the day after it'll spill out into the streets. This is a pampered, privileged system happy to turn a blind eye to the violence it exports around the world only to recoil in self-righteous horror when that same violence lands on its own doorstep. This isn't a bunch of disorganised fanatics showing disrespect to the Constitution, it's the snake eating its own tail. And the way things are going right now, it's going to keep eating until it chokes.

In his essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Boneaparte, Karl Marx famously wrote that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. If that's the case, what we're seeing in the US right now is Fawlty Towers 2.0. It's time for the Shining City on the Hill to get its affairs in order instead of imposing its own hegemonic blueprint on the rest of the world.

Friday 1 January 2021

2020 is Dead...

 ...but the memories will last a lifetime. Remember when I joked this time last year that 2020 looked nothing like Blade Runner or Godzilla: Final Wars? Okay, so we didn't get homicidal androids running around the place and prehistoric mutants laying waste to whole cities, but you've got to admit that by April it did start to feel like we were living through a generic sci-fi disaster movie - albeit one where you're sat on your arse the whole time waiting for the plot to kick in. Oh, it was quite the novelty at first: even those of us who had doubts about the efficacy of lockdowns played along, taking in the hysteria and counting down the days until we could walk down the street again without being harassed by a police officer one Mars bar away from a coronary. So, we waited and waited, but that much longed-for moment of grace never came. Instead, mud-slinging, guilt trips, financial penalties, prosecutions, missed diagnoses, business closures, job losses and evictions became the order of the day, and soon the prospect of having to endure indefinite house arrest to combat a virus with a 99.7% survival rate no longer felt like a tolerable inconvenience. This, we were constantly told, was The New Normal. Some even called it The Great Reset, although others were quick to point out that's just a conspiracy theory.

Well, whatever the hell's going on - and something clearly is - I'm personally finding it hard to look on the bright side. In fact, as 2020 expired I decided to pay tribute to this fallen year by listening to an appropriate piece of music - one that, I felt, allowed for personal reflection while also taking in the uncertainty that lies ahead:

© UMG/Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

Never let it be said I lack a sense of grandeur. But apart from coronavirus, of course, 2020 also gifted us another shock to the system that few of us sensed was coming. Here's how most of the media covered it:

Click to enlarge

Okay, WordJam has been critical of Trump in the past, but I'm not playing along with this insufferably righteous, not to mention blinkered, view that his Presidency was an abomination. Like Brexit, Trump's victory in 2016 was a message to the political establishment from voters who were no longer willing to sacrifice their aspirations and allegiances on the altar of neoliberalism. Far from being the racist dog-whistle that many on legacy and social media have claimed over the last five years, 'Make America Great Again' was a rallying cry for a return to pride in your work, your community and your nation: in short, pride in yourself as a citizen of the United States. Far from being exclusionary, this message unites race and class. So I ask you, when you turn on the news and see something like this:

are you looking at a nation united in support and solidarity against alleged wrong-doing, or isolated incidents being seized upon by Democrat-affiliated groups to smear the incumbent political party and further a dishonest narrative? If it's the latter, then it's even more disturbing how they insult your intelligence by pretending it's not what it looks like. As a matter of fact, it reminds me of something but I can't think what...
 
Oh, yeah:

                                                           © Paramount Pictures 

But, what do I know? I'm just some hack who takes potshots at a world he finds increasingly moronic and incomprehensible. All I'm saying is don't expect this divisive and deceitful rhetoric to disappear now the Oval Office is about to be occupied by a creaking, septuagenarian career politician whose whole campaign was predicated on stoking racial tension, exploiting a public health crisis and emphasising that he's not Trump. After all, as the old saying goes, you reap what you sow - and as I see it, once those seeds grow they'll be so tangled and knotted that the harvest won't come soon enough.

Anyway, leaving the misanthropy and cynicism aside for a moment, I'd once again like to take this opportunity to wish all my readers a very happy new year and thank you for continued support. I don't post as much as perhaps I could, and sometimes my content is a bit on the esoteric side, but if it amuses, interests or entertains then that in some way at least makes up for the irregularity. Either way, make sure you stay tuned to WordJam: the greatest blog on the etherweb. But don't take my word for it - check out these endorsements from some high-profile page visitors:

Taylor Swift:

"Your faithless love's the only hoax I believe in..."

Robin DiAngelo: 

       "Did ya miss me, Richie? 'Cos I missed you... Now float, you beautiful racist!"

Mike Pence:

"Richard English is a morally bankrupt, self-serving prick with a streak of snot where his brain should be..."

Antifa:

 
"Oh, you better believe we're coming for you, you Wagner-loving, Nazi bastard..."

...Onwards, folks