A Clean Suspensory Every Morning
"A Clean Suspensory Every Morning?" Sounds good.
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December 30, 2009
December 22, 2009
Over Smoked
December 18, 2009
Keeping Score
Enhance That
This Film Cost $500 To Make
The director has since gotten $30 million to make a bigger, better film involving robots blowing stuff up.
December 17, 2009
How Soon Is Too Soon...For Cola?
Hahaha. Look back at the old timey time advertisements and how corporations just blatantly lied to people with a complete disregard for human health. Such stupid primitives we were! Oh, wait...
December 11, 2009
Shi Jinsong
Shi Jinsong's work takes baby strollers and carriages to a whole new level.
December 10, 2009
Don't Mock The Tea Party
An interesting conversation with Noam Chomsky (which is kind of repetitive), which is all worth reading -- but specifically the bit where he discusses this new breed of faux populism encompassed by the "tea party" movement:
"So take right now, for example, there is a right-wing populist uprising. It's very common, even on the left, to just ridicule them, but that's not the right reaction. If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real grievances. I listen to talk radio a lot and it's kind of interesting. If you can sort of suspend your knowledge of the world and just enter into the world of the people who are calling in, you can understand them. I've never seen a study, but my sense is that these are people who feel really aggrieved. These people think, "I've done everything right all my life, I'm a god-fearing Christian, I'm white, I'm male, I've worked hard, and I carry a gun. I do everything I'm supposed to do. And I'm getting shafted." And in fact they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have stagnated or declined, the social conditions have worsened, the children are going crazy, there are no schools, there's nothing, so somebody must be doing something to them, and they want to know who it is. Well Rush Limbaugh has answered - it's the rich liberals who own the banks and run the government, and of course run the media, and they don't care about you—they just want to give everything away to illegal immigrants and gays and communists and so on.These are people upset at the same things you are (mostly), but they've had that anger hijacked by used car salesmen.
Well, you know, the reaction we should be having to them is not ridicule, but rather self-criticism. Why aren't we organizing them? I mean, we are the ones that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. Hitler was appealing to groups with similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at least they were answers; these groups weren't getting them anywhere else. It was the Jews and the Bolsheviks [that were the problem].
I mean, the liberal democrats aren't going to tell the average American, "Yeah, you're being shafted because of the policies that we've established over the years that we're maintaining now." That's not going to be an answer. And they're not getting answers from the left. So, there's an internal coherence and logic to what they get from Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the rest of these guys. And they sound very convincing, they're very self-confident, and they have an answer to everything—a crazy answer, but it's an answer. And it's our fault if that goes on. So one thing to be done is don't ridicule these people, join them, and talk about their real grievances and give them a sensible answer, like, "Take over your factories."
December 09, 2009
Mark Mawson
Pretending To Be Dumb
Stanford, Oxford grad does her best "aw shucks" routine as part of Fox News faux populism.
December 08, 2009
Warren Ellis On Children
Bill Hicks may be dead, but for my money comic author Warren Ellis does his share of heavy lifting to keep the "nihilist alcoholic outer shell protecting an ingenious if not broken humanist" culture intact. From a question on children in the latest issue of Filament (never heard of it) magazine:
Q "At what age is it best to crush a child’s dreams so that they have an easier time stepping in to the status quo?"A:You fool. You do not do such things to children. A child is like a poison missile you aim at the Future. You encourage, fund and resource their dreams to the fullest extent of your capability, knowing that your reward will be the pain and misery of generations yet unborn."
December 04, 2009
And Good Will To Men...
Except if you're an illegal immigrant, according to the Salvation Army:
"The Salvation Army and a charity affiliated with the Houston Fire Department are among those that consider immigration status, asking for birth certificates or Social Security cards for the children. The point isn't to punish the children but to ensure that their parents are either citizens, legal immigrants or working to become legal residents, said Lorugene Young, whose Outreach Program Inc. is one of three groups that distribute toys collected by firefighters."We're not punishing the children, we're just terrifying their parents and possibly having the family exported -- for SANTA. Nothing quite says Christmas like OVERWHELMING FEAR.
December 02, 2009
Andrew Sullivan
Blogger Andrew Sullivan is finally quitting the Conservative party, and I guess I'm supposed to care. This is a guy who, as a homosexual, has supported a party that fundamentally thinks he's an abhorrent deviant and societal scoundrel because of his sexual preference, and it took him this long to intellectually theorize that perhaps this isn't the political droid he was looking for:
"I cannot support a movement that claims to believe in limited government but backed an unlimited domestic and foreign policy presidency that assumed illegal, extra-constitutional dictatorial powers until forced by the system to return to the rule of law.Blah blah blah. Good job, Andy.I cannot support a movement that exploded spending and borrowing and blames its successor for the debt.
I cannot support a movement that so abandoned government's minimal and vital role to police markets and address natural disasters that it gave us Katrina and the financial meltdown of 2008.
I cannot support a movement that holds torture as a core value.
I cannot support a movement that holds that purely religious doctrine should govern civil political decisions and that uses the sacredness of religious faith for the pursuit of worldly power.
All are, you know, solid points. But again, you know, I can't quite get my head around the fact he played part-time cheerleader for a party that believes he should be lobotomized and placed into a work camp because of his choices in the bedroom. He also makes the "revelation" after a decade and a few million dead "dark skin folks," so excuse me if I don't give a shit about his belated intellectual epiphany.