30 September 2008
25 September 2008
Kill Your Students
Tonight, I contemplated taking a hit out on a student. Thus, it's all Charlie Rich and Flat Duo Jets. Sad, lonely men singing to a sad and lonely guy, boo hoo.
24 September 2008
23 September 2008
From youaredumb.net, my new favorite website...
Memo to the Bailout Barons: YOU ARE CRAZY.
I will freely admit that I am not an economics expert. For quite some time, I've pretty much kept all my money in commodities - specifically, fake plastic instruments and slightly upscale sandwiches. I think it's safe to say that I have at least as good an understanding of financial markets as John McCain, and while that's in no way impressive or worthwhile, it'll have to do.
That said, I've spent some time and done some reading, and I think I have a pretty good grasp of what's been going on with the current financial crisis. Let me give it a shot.
First, Ronald Reagan got elected. This served a a signal to start dismantling every single part of the United States regulatory system they could get away with. Since then, most of the rules put in place since the New Deal that kept rich people from either taking people's money, or inventing exciting new ways to pretend they had money, vanished. Republicans called this "creating wealth", because it was a hell of a lot easier than, say, creating actual things actual people actually wanted to buy.
The most recent example of this was the housing bubble. How it works is this. Someone loans you $200,000, on the promise that 30 years later, you'll give them $400,000. That person then turns to someone else and says, "Hey, I have $400,000. If you give me $250,000, you can have the $400,000." Person C agrees, then turns to persons D through ZZZ inclusive and says, "Hey, I've got $400,000. If you all chip in and give me $300,000, you can have the $400,000."
This continues until Person Z to the Zth Power suddenly realizes that they don't have $400,000, they have a set of keys in a mailbox outside a boarded up house filled with squirrels and/or meth addicts. But they don't want meth, they want $400,000. In fact, they NEED $400,000, because their entire life revolves around telling people they've got $400,000, and if they DON'T have $400,000, then they are fucked.
Now multiply that by billions. That's where we are right now.
And as far as I can tell, here's what Bush, McCain, Paulson, and Bernanke are proposing. The government will hand the desperate people $400,000 and get, maybe, if they're lucky, a few stashes of meth and some acorns in return. This will allow the people who lied about having $400,000 to suddenly prove they had $400,000 all along. This will also allow them to feel a great sense of relief for having escaped the consequences of thinking they had $400,000 the whole time.
Making sure these people don't experience those consequences will cost one trillion dollars, but we have to do it and we have to do it RIGHT NOW because if we don't, we will all die of starvation or shot for the gold fillings in our teeth. And we know this because the Bush Administration, with its amazing track record of picking dangers to eliminate with a trillion dollars, says so. The trillion dollars will just be added to the pile we owe China, because raising taxes is wrong.
Oh, and if you think any of this is in any way rushed or suspect, eat shit and die. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!
"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." - From the proposed bailout legislation. That's the Secretary of the Treasury, by the way. Oh, and if you think that perhaps, in exchange for spending a trillion dollars on a monumental pile of nothing, perhaps the government should exert some control over the people they're handing the $400,000 to, eat shit and die. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!
"We need this to be clean and to be quick, and we need to get it in place. We don't want to make it punitive." - Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who gets to buy all the meth houses he wants and you can't say a goddamned thing about it when he's done. Oh, and while I'm here:
"There are a lot of well-meaning, well-intentioned ideas out there, but they don't need to be part of this package. We don't need 535 members of Congress adding their best ideas to this bill." - House Minority Leader John Boehner, continuing his incredibly successful 18-year-long fight to keep good ideas out of Congressional legislation.
Eat shit and die. It's THIS close to being literal. Wall Street have shit themselves, and Bush has decided that if all of us eat some of the shit, his friends who shit themselves won't have to eat any of it. And next year, when President Obama takes a stab at maybe providing some half-assed health care reform to uninsured Americans, it'll be "Whoops, sorry, there's no money, we have to be fiscally responsible". That's where the dying comes in.
This would be an awful, awful idea no matter who proposed it. But when the least trustworthy motherfuckers in the history of motherfuckery are proposing it, trusting them on this plan's urgency, efficacy, or the typeface it'll finally be printed in is madness, and anyone in Congress who goes along with it is insane.
I will freely admit that I am not an economics expert. For quite some time, I've pretty much kept all my money in commodities - specifically, fake plastic instruments and slightly upscale sandwiches. I think it's safe to say that I have at least as good an understanding of financial markets as John McCain, and while that's in no way impressive or worthwhile, it'll have to do.
That said, I've spent some time and done some reading, and I think I have a pretty good grasp of what's been going on with the current financial crisis. Let me give it a shot.
First, Ronald Reagan got elected. This served a a signal to start dismantling every single part of the United States regulatory system they could get away with. Since then, most of the rules put in place since the New Deal that kept rich people from either taking people's money, or inventing exciting new ways to pretend they had money, vanished. Republicans called this "creating wealth", because it was a hell of a lot easier than, say, creating actual things actual people actually wanted to buy.
The most recent example of this was the housing bubble. How it works is this. Someone loans you $200,000, on the promise that 30 years later, you'll give them $400,000. That person then turns to someone else and says, "Hey, I have $400,000. If you give me $250,000, you can have the $400,000." Person C agrees, then turns to persons D through ZZZ inclusive and says, "Hey, I've got $400,000. If you all chip in and give me $300,000, you can have the $400,000."
This continues until Person Z to the Zth Power suddenly realizes that they don't have $400,000, they have a set of keys in a mailbox outside a boarded up house filled with squirrels and/or meth addicts. But they don't want meth, they want $400,000. In fact, they NEED $400,000, because their entire life revolves around telling people they've got $400,000, and if they DON'T have $400,000, then they are fucked.
Now multiply that by billions. That's where we are right now.
And as far as I can tell, here's what Bush, McCain, Paulson, and Bernanke are proposing. The government will hand the desperate people $400,000 and get, maybe, if they're lucky, a few stashes of meth and some acorns in return. This will allow the people who lied about having $400,000 to suddenly prove they had $400,000 all along. This will also allow them to feel a great sense of relief for having escaped the consequences of thinking they had $400,000 the whole time.
Making sure these people don't experience those consequences will cost one trillion dollars, but we have to do it and we have to do it RIGHT NOW because if we don't, we will all die of starvation or shot for the gold fillings in our teeth. And we know this because the Bush Administration, with its amazing track record of picking dangers to eliminate with a trillion dollars, says so. The trillion dollars will just be added to the pile we owe China, because raising taxes is wrong.
Oh, and if you think any of this is in any way rushed or suspect, eat shit and die. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!
"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." - From the proposed bailout legislation. That's the Secretary of the Treasury, by the way. Oh, and if you think that perhaps, in exchange for spending a trillion dollars on a monumental pile of nothing, perhaps the government should exert some control over the people they're handing the $400,000 to, eat shit and die. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!
"We need this to be clean and to be quick, and we need to get it in place. We don't want to make it punitive." - Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who gets to buy all the meth houses he wants and you can't say a goddamned thing about it when he's done. Oh, and while I'm here:
"There are a lot of well-meaning, well-intentioned ideas out there, but they don't need to be part of this package. We don't need 535 members of Congress adding their best ideas to this bill." - House Minority Leader John Boehner, continuing his incredibly successful 18-year-long fight to keep good ideas out of Congressional legislation.
Eat shit and die. It's THIS close to being literal. Wall Street have shit themselves, and Bush has decided that if all of us eat some of the shit, his friends who shit themselves won't have to eat any of it. And next year, when President Obama takes a stab at maybe providing some half-assed health care reform to uninsured Americans, it'll be "Whoops, sorry, there's no money, we have to be fiscally responsible". That's where the dying comes in.
This would be an awful, awful idea no matter who proposed it. But when the least trustworthy motherfuckers in the history of motherfuckery are proposing it, trusting them on this plan's urgency, efficacy, or the typeface it'll finally be printed in is madness, and anyone in Congress who goes along with it is insane.
MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant in Fiction goes to...
Chimamanda Adichie is a young writer who illuminates the complexities of human experience in works inspired by events in her native Nigeria. Adichie explores the intersection of the personal and the public by placing the intimate details of the lives of her characters within the larger social and political forces in contemporary Nigeria. Dividing her time over the last decade between the United States and Nigeria, she is widely appreciated for her stark yet balanced depiction of events in the post-colonial era. In her most recent novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Adichie unflinchingly portrays the horror and destruction of the civil war following the establishment of the Republic of Biafra. Using multiple narrative voices, a precise movement back and forth in time, and prose that is at once witty and empathetic, she immerses the reader in the psyches of her characters, whose loyalties to each other and their ideals are tested as their world gradually falls apart. In humanizing the Biafran tragedy, Adichie’s novel has enriched conversation about the war within Nigeria while also offering insight into the circumstances that lead to ethnic conflict. A writer of great promise, Adichie’s powerful rendering of the Nigerian experience is enlightening audiences both in her homeland and around the world.
22 September 2008
I am looking for...
a videographer (what a stupid word) to shoot a brief 1-2 minute video of a soon-to-launch commercial product. If any of you sluts know a man or woman with such skills (Tuna's cellphone videos do NOT count) let me know. We've got a budget $500-$1,500 for this.
21 September 2008
A bit of history
More than 500 years ago, a Jewish woman in Prague gave birth to a bear.
The bear ran around the room, scratched behind its ear, and promptly died.
The bear ran around the room, scratched behind its ear, and promptly died.
18 September 2008
My new favorite Chilean is this chick...
Rocio Romero who builds prefab houses in MO and sells them for around $36,000. I'm gonna charge one on my credit card and set it up on a vacant lot on MLK.
17 September 2008
Not titling posts since 2005
Here is a hint of the weird joys Mad Men provides- today's Newsweek asks, "What do Women Want?" In a first season episode of MM, main man Donald Draper asks his boss that very question relating to a campaign. The response: "Who fucking cares? Get me a drink."
And you wonder why you can't relate to your father...
And you wonder why you can't relate to your father...
Nice to see that in my absence...
this place has retained its mantle as a gathering place for jaded poets and craftsmen. As for what I can tell you about four weeks off the grid, let me put it in blogspeak, ie a list of recommendations. lists rule!
The Aegypt Cycle - John Crowley's 4 novels totaling 1750+ pages concerning the present life of one Pierce Moffet and the past life of one Giordano Bruno might be the best reading experience of my life. Kudos to my sister for funding the venture.
I'm Alan Partridge - if you're feeling down and want to laugh rent either season 1 or 2 of this BBC classic with Steve Coogan as Partridge, the dimest git this side of Hugh Grant, and laugh for hours.
State of Play - Paul Abbott's 6 part BBC thriller/miniseries is the second best thing they've ever put out, after Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. You'll wish you worked for a newspaper.
The Relic and Cousin Bazilio - I was turned on to Jose Maria de Eca de Queiroz by a friend a long time ago and that Portuguese madman is worth every minute of your time. Get down and get with it.
Wall of Hits by Slade - been listening to this way to much. Best band ever. Not really, but Noddy Holder looks like your grandma whoever she is.
A Dance to the Music of Time - just starting Anthony Powell's 12 novel cycle, because, well because one should, ya know?
Shit fuck cock piss cunt balls.
Sucks about DFW. I mean really. So sad.
Cheers,
Dr. Dee
The Aegypt Cycle - John Crowley's 4 novels totaling 1750+ pages concerning the present life of one Pierce Moffet and the past life of one Giordano Bruno might be the best reading experience of my life. Kudos to my sister for funding the venture.
I'm Alan Partridge - if you're feeling down and want to laugh rent either season 1 or 2 of this BBC classic with Steve Coogan as Partridge, the dimest git this side of Hugh Grant, and laugh for hours.
State of Play - Paul Abbott's 6 part BBC thriller/miniseries is the second best thing they've ever put out, after Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. You'll wish you worked for a newspaper.
The Relic and Cousin Bazilio - I was turned on to Jose Maria de Eca de Queiroz by a friend a long time ago and that Portuguese madman is worth every minute of your time. Get down and get with it.
Wall of Hits by Slade - been listening to this way to much. Best band ever. Not really, but Noddy Holder looks like your grandma whoever she is.
A Dance to the Music of Time - just starting Anthony Powell's 12 novel cycle, because, well because one should, ya know?
Shit fuck cock piss cunt balls.
Sucks about DFW. I mean really. So sad.
Cheers,
Dr. Dee
13 September 2008
12 September 2008
05 September 2008
Cal gets go-ahead for sports training center
19:19 PDT BERKELEY -- A state appeals court refused Thursday to block UC Berkeley's plans to build a sports training center next to Memorial Stadium, denying a request from oak tree advocates and a neighborhood group for a new order stopping the project.
The court's action came after an Alameda County judge last week lifted her order preventing the university from beginning construction in a grove of trees occupied by protesters opposed to the campus' plans for the $124 million center.
"As far as we're concerned, we're clear to begin construction," said campus spokesman Dan Mogulof, who added that he did not know when the university will act. "The state Court of Appeal ruled quickly and decisively on this, and for us that's extremely significant."
Any action at the grove adjacent to the stadium will almost certainly bring a confrontation with four remaining tree-sitters who've been living in the grove. University officials called Thursday for the protesters to come down.
The court's action came after an Alameda County judge last week lifted her order preventing the university from beginning construction in a grove of trees occupied by protesters opposed to the campus' plans for the $124 million center.
"As far as we're concerned, we're clear to begin construction," said campus spokesman Dan Mogulof, who added that he did not know when the university will act. "The state Court of Appeal ruled quickly and decisively on this, and for us that's extremely significant."
Any action at the grove adjacent to the stadium will almost certainly bring a confrontation with four remaining tree-sitters who've been living in the grove. University officials called Thursday for the protesters to come down.
03 September 2008
02 September 2008
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