Today's Internets.

Umbra Wynterdarque

Headline of the day: The Arrest of Japan's Most Wanted Troll Leads to Cute Cat Pic

Pope Benedict XVI to Resign - WSJ.com: "Pope Benedict XVI, 85, said on Monday that he plans to step down at the end of this month because of his deteriorating physical strength, a move that hasn't happened in the Roman Catholic Church in centuries and that is likely to pave the way for a new pontiff by Easter."

Read that news this AM, and knew there was a joke to be made there, but all I could think is that this meant the end of the Pope/Emperor Palpatine jokes...

Of course, I should have known the internets would not fail me...

Political failure modes and the beige dictatorship - Charlie's Diary: "...we've somehow slid into a developed-world global-scale quasi-police state, with drone strikes and extraordinary rendition and unquestioned but insane austerity policies being rammed down our throats, government services being outsourced, peaceful protesters being pepper-sprayed, tased, or even killed, police spying on political dissidents becoming normal, and so on. What's happening? Here's a hypothesis: Representative democracy is what's happening. Unfortunately, democracy is broken. There's a hidden failure mode, we've landed in it, and we probably won't be able to vote ourselves out of it...

So the future isn't a boot stamping on a human face, forever. It's a person in a beige business outfit advocating beige policies that nobody wants (but nobody can quite articulate a coherent alternative to) with a false mandate obtained by performing rituals of representative democracy that offer as much actual choice as a Stalinist one-party state. And resistance is futile, because if you succeed in overthrowing the beige dictatorship, you will become that which you opposed."

Refuse to Lose.  No Sleep Till Brooklyn.

Watch Chuck D, LL Cool J, Tom Morello, DJ Z-Trip & Travis Barker's Beastie Boys Tribute at the Grammys - XXL: "Last night, LL Cool J ended the 2013 Grammy Awards the only way he knew possible. Gathering Chuck D, Tom Morello, DJ Z-Trip and Travis Barker, the group performed “Welcome to the Terrordome,” which originally appeared on 1990’s Fear of a Black Planet. The crew then went into “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” right after. LL Cool J, who hosted the ceremony, is preparing to drop his upcoming album, Authentic."

Video LL Cool J and Chuck D performance Refuse... by dm_5118ca9ddce82

Losing My Internet Connection Is Like Going Deaf | VICE: "...an actual Maniac Cop is running around California with drones chasing him and I’m telling you now, that if those drones are armed then Afghanistan just came to America and the United States just broke through into a scary, new future, and also we all now know what the inevitable Rambo remakes will look like..."

DOJ kill list memo forces many Dems out of the closet as overtly unprincipled hacks | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "This past week has been a strangely clarifying political moment. It was caused by two related events: the leak of the Justice Department's "white paper" justifying Obama's claimed power to execute Americans without charges, followed by John Brennan's alarming confirmation hearing (as Charles Pierce wrote: "the man whom the administration has put up to head the CIA would not say whether or not the president of the United States has the power to order the extrajudicial killing of a United States citizen within the borders of the United States"). I describe last week's process as "strange" because, for some reason, those events caused large numbers of people for the first time to recognize, accept and begin to confront truths that have long been readily apparent.

Illustrating this odd phenomenon was a much-discussed New York Times article on Sunday by Peter Baker which explained that these events "underscored the degree to which Mr. Obama has embraced some of Mr. Bush's approach to counterterrorism, right down to a secret legal memo authorizing presidential action unfettered by outside forces." 

...Baker also noticed this: "Some liberals acknowledged in recent days that they were willing to accept policies they once would have deplored as long as they were in Mr. Obama's hands, not Mr. Bush's." As but one example, the article quoted Jennifer Granholm, the former Michigan governor and fervent Obama supporter, as admitting without any apparent shame that "if this was Bush, I think that we would all be more up in arms" because, she said "we trust the president". Thus did we have - while some media liberals objected - scores of progressives and conservatives uniting to overtly embrace the once-controversial Bush/Cheney premises of the War on Terror (it's a global war! the whole world is a battlefield! the president has authority to do whatever he wants to The Terrorists without interference from courts!) in order to defend the war's most radical power yet (the president's power to assassinate even his own citizens in secret, without charges, and without checks)..."