Brad’s new plan for economic recovery
Say, how’s the bailout going?
Some bailout holdings down $9 billion
Stock intended to eventually earn taxpayers a profit as part of the Bush administration’s massive bank bailout has lost a third of its value — about $9 billion — in barely one month, according to an Associated Press analysis. Shares in virtually every bank that received federal money have remained below the prices the government negotiated.
Most of the Treasury Department’s investments since late October have been in preferred bank stocks, more than $180 billion worth, with investments in giants like Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, and many small community banks. But the government also negotiated options to buy up to 1.2 billion shares of common bank stock that was valued at $27 billion.
The Treasury Department said it did not expect these common stock options to be profitable immediately and negotiated them so taxpayers could share in the wealth if the bank stocks recover.
Now, however, the value of that common stock is worth less than $18 billion. If the government exercised all its warrants to purchase the stock today, it would lose money on 51 of its 53 agreements. Taxpayers would be out $9.1 billion.
Oh.
You know, it’s nice that we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars to keep rich people from feeling bad about themselves, but I think I’ve come up with an even better plan: we take all the money left over in TARP and we set it on fire.
Just think of all the homes we could heat with that money. Imagine how much better this country would be if we converted all our cars to run on currency. After all, could there be any greener fuel than cold hard cash?
I’m not saying this solution would be perfect — I mean, burning $350 billion of our money supply doesn’t sound like a healthy way to grow an economy — but it’s better than what we’re doing now.
UPDATE: Alternatively, we could just use the money to prop up a pile of worthless shit and tell people that it’s the most valuable commodity in the world. Since the late ’90s, our economy has run entirely on this principle (e.g., that mortgage derivatives and pets.com shares would keep growing in value forever), and I see no reason to change that now. List your ideas for worthless commodities that we can use taxpayer dollars to prop up in the comments. My vote goes to…
…POGs!
…the person in the comments who suggested Beanie Babies has the right idea. This could be balanced out by reviving the Furby as well.
UPDATE II: Atrios tells me that:
Just under 10% of all mortgages are delinquent or in foreclosure.
My solution: let people get kicked out of their homes. We can then move them into new apartment complexes constructed entirely from POGs. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
GAVIN ADDS: And there’s also the shocking unemployment news today, sure.
See, everyone’s getting so excited, but this is just one of those high-spirited George W. Bush practical jokes that we’ve come so well to appreciate.
Remember when he got to the White House, and his people made up a story that the Clintons had trashed the place, removing ‘W’ keys from the keyboards and writing on the bathroom walls, and all that? That was a good one!
Now with the $8.5 trillion in bailouts, when Obama gets to the White House, all the money will be gone from the US Treasury, and stuffed into the pockets of the same arrogant bubbleheads responsible for cratering the economy, who will then squander it in short-sighted and selfish ways designed to give each of them a short-term advantage over their competitors, in effect taking a leaf blower to it all and blowing it into a giant, blazing fireplace of Fail — after which everyone will agree to act surprised.
It’ll be like, “Here’s your US Government, Mr. Obama. We took the dollar signs off the keyboards.”
At least burning $350bn isn’t rampantly inflationary.
At least burning $350bn isn’t rampantly inflationary.
It’s true. It would, in fact, have the opposite effect. And then we could just print more money to make up for the money we burn. I’m certain that the international currency traders wouldn’t at all think this was insane.
Why isn’t all this money being slipped into the remaining clothing of strippers?
Perhaps we could create a Hedge fund that shorts money ash in case it doesn’t all get burned to mitigate our risk. I’ll sell you a share for eleventy Kabillion dollars and a Hotel on Boardwalk.
America is the new Argentina.
Dude, where’s my recession?
If they really wanted to improve the economy, they should have just distributed the 900 gazillion dollars to the American people. Watch the economy boom then!
But, sadly, no.
If they really wanted to improve the economy, they should have just distributed the 900 gazillion dollars to the American people.
But then we’d miss out on the Great POG Boom of 2009! And who would want to miss that?
Worthless “commodity” = AMERICAN NEOCONSERVATISM.
Oh, wait a minute – no one’s gonna buy that brand from us…damn!
I vote we go back to Beanie Babies. They have to come back sometime, and what better time than when I have shelves of them collecting dust value as we speak? Anyone for a Princess Diana bear?
and a hearty FYWP, that strikeout tag worked fine in the preview.
I admit POGs are a lovely choice, but I’d nominate Truck Nuts.
I said dude, where’s my recession?
Why don’t we just combine America’s two favorite activities: revenge and reality shows. I call it ‘Bloodmoney’.
The gist is this; multi-million dollar exectives are detained and have their assets seized. Then, they’re sent to an island arena, a la Battel Royal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Royale_(manga) to fight to the death in a no-rules, no-way-out setting.
The losers have their savings and possessions liquidated and dispersed among the people. The winners also get their possession liquidated and dispersed, but that get to live. And they get to keep their previous job. At severely reduced pay.
It’s far from perfect, but it seems considerably more productive then the current, “keep stuffing the dyke with money” plan.
I say we create a flash mob to decide.
According to this clever guy, a million dollars in $100 bills weighs about 20 lbs or 9 kilos.
A billion is 1000 million, so 20 * 1000 = 20,000 lbs.
20,000 * 350 = 7,000,000 lbs or 3,500 tons of $100 billls.
By weight, that’s roughly 116 tractor-trailers stocked completely full, or 35 train boxcars full.
We’re gonna be at this for a while.
My solution: let people get kicked out of their homes. We can then move them into new apartment complexes constructed entirely from POGs.
Sub-prime loan: The Ultimate Slammer.
NRO needs MetroCards
Teh Wankee needs a new grill
Malkin needs meds
Riehl needs literacy
I need scotch
“keep stuffing the dyke with money”
This may be the most unintentionally funny thing I’ve ever read.
Banks, insurance companies, automakers – I say let them all borrow from the mob. Gives them some incentive to try to pay it back.
Barbie dolls? Comic books? Dungeons & Dragons figurines?
What’s the asking price of a Tickle-Me Elmo these days?
The last act of scoundrels is to loot the treasury.
Egyptian cotton futures, maybe?
The Republic is over, bitches!! Better learn ya some fuckin’ Chinese!!!
“keep stuffing the dyke with money”
The Melissa Etheridge bailout plan?
(Except maybe to pardon them on the way out the door)
Hey, some guy, I think you’re on to something. Thumbs up!
Legalize, I’ve tried Scotch. It only works for one night.
You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of Bumper Nuts, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of POGs.
I can haz moeny for Beeniez? Kthx.
OK OK OK I’ve got it – let’s invest in a scheme to auction off the rights to a video tape of Michelle Obama snorting coke off of Louis Farrakhan’s erect penis.
And then we could just print more money to make up for the money we burn.
We’ve already been doing that.
No currency, and nothing upon which it may be based, has any inherent value. Seems like intrinsic meaning attaches to whatever a culture, even a globally defined culture, decides has worth. Printed-up pieces of paper are only as meaningful as the representation we decide to give them.
Having said that, I wish I had some.
I don’t understand why we can’t just pretend we’re rich like we’ve been doing for decades. Why back it with anything?
Also, I think we should set Beatles memorabilia as the new gold standard. I’d be RICH!! RICH, I say!!
Remember the Depression?
It’s back.
In POG form.
“Remember ALF? Well now he’s back … in POG form! And he’s your house!”
Some economics professor guy on the NPR last night was saying the Fed needs to lower rates for new home purchases to 4.5%.
The Housing Bubble Part Deux: the Bubbling.
Someone stole my slammer joke! Damn it!
The Housing Bubble
PartFartSwatches. Rainbow stickers. Smurfs. Smurfs wearing swatches putting Rainbow stickers on your Yugo right next to the unicorn.
“Some economics professor guy on the NPR last night was saying the Fed needs to lower rates for new home purchases to 4.5%.”
One of the main problems with discourse in this country is that when someone says that, no one on the radio probes their logic. Either ‘respectfully’ or by hitting them upside the head with a fish.
Also, all the losers who said there was no recession still get to talk on the radio. Why is this? Shouldn’t they at least be forced to have a laugh track added?
Fire Water Burn
Jim-
Epic.
Or cabbage patch kids.
Welcome to the dollhouse.
$350 billion would also be approximately 115,500,000 tons of pennies.
That’s a lot of zinc which could be used to galvanize other metals which could be used to build stuff if it weren’t evil and socialist and market-interfering to do so.
I say tulips. Environmentally-friendly tulips!
Ah, yes! Why didn’t we think of that?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
That’s a lot of zinc which could be used to galvanize other metals which could be used to build stuff if it weren’t evil and socialist and market-interfering to do so.
That’s what I’m talking about. Bimetallism, bitchez!
Ok, ok I have it!
What do we have too much of? Unemployed people and carbon.
We need to bring back the sedan chair! Think about it, it solves so many problems all at once:
1) It puts people back to work,
2) Deals with the obesity problem.
3) Takes cars off the road.
With a little ingenuity we could develop sedan buses and bring back the slave galley to put even more
losersunemployed workers back on their feet, so to speak. That’s where the fifty-leven billion dollars left from the bailout should go.Wait, you mean it’s not turnip mania?
Oh, goodness. . .I’m going to have to make a few phone calls. . .
Unemployment, you say? US Jobless Figures Worst Since 1974. But Barrack Obama is going to be Jimmy Carter apparently, history’s greatest monster and America’s worst ever President… bar one.
In the 1950s America produced the world’s tulips. Now, foreign tulip producers dominate the market. We must not permit America to suffer a tulip gap.
Alternatively, we could just use the money to prop up a pile of worthless shit and tell people that it’s the most valuable commodity in the world.
How about literal s***?
You could use it as a heating source, as fertilizer, you could polish it up (thank you Mythbusters) and sell it as art, or you could dump it on paper and sell it to the American people as great foreign or economic policy.
i believe john maynard keynes said it best: “if you owe your bank a hundred pogs, you have a problem. but if you owe a million, it may block your slammer with a slam frizz.”
I love the sedan chair idea. Three people could own the company, and take turns paying each other to get carried around. Capitalism at it’s best.
(sorry, “its” not it’s). Public school, don’t you know.
Comrade Dread’s comment made me think about Alkon’s brilliant wit. Let’s put the unemployed to work digging shitmoats.
I could suggest many comic books which would be appropriate, but I have no idea how many folks here would understand the references. No offense.
There was one I remember we gave out as a freebie at a SF convention, something called “Plastic Forks” or something like that. I think there’s STILL a full box or two stored away, even twenty years later.
> I love the sedan chair idea. Three people could own the company, and take turns paying each other to get carried around. Capitalism at it’s best.
Better yet, have each sedan chair company owned by 1000 people. Every minute the owner switches to another one of the 1000, he/she get carried around by 10 people.
The benefits are endless.
*) Lawyer employment for all the legal paperwork, esp. switching ownership every minute.
*) 990/1000 people get vacations (only a few minutes long, but in this economy, that would be good)
*) money velocity reaches Cat 5 hurricane level, making the GDP skyrocket
*) the aforementioned health benefits, obviating the need for health insurance and thus saving those costs
*) the mental benefits of feeling like a king (if only for a minute, but in this economy, yadda yadda yadda
> There was one I remember we gave out as a freebie at a SF convention, something called “Plastic Forks” or something like that
Sounds like those comic books they gave away at Big Boy.
I just lost my job, I can haz bailout pleaze?!
Sadly, no…I iz not Patrician.
My Kamandi collection will bail out a small government agency, such as the Federal Weights and Measures Service or the Arctic Research Commission.
The obvious solution is to legalize marijuana and use the bailout money for rolling papers.
If our economy’s going in the crapper anyway, why not just get high?
Why did you stop the treatment?
Without maintaining proper levels of the medication in your system, it can’t work. It is in that respect, very similar to anti-biotics, see.
Time for the Acupolco Gold Standard?
We are looking for something worthless to spend this on? If you just give it to me, I promise not to build a steel plant or fix bridges or green technology or anything. I promise it’ll be Cinnibons, video games, and porn all the way.
You’re not going to get a better offer than that!
Now that’s a Fairness Doctrine I can believe in!
I think we should hire all the unemployed to make the lives of the rich as annoying as possible.
They could knock their hot coffee into their laps, smear their doorknobs with vaseline, and sprinkle itching powder on their toilet paper.
It creates jobs, stimulates the economy, and ups our Secret Mirth Level.
Sell blood plasma, buy liquor. The liquor works better that way.
Oh, and in the “Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Guy” department:
Bwahahahahahaha!!!!eleventy!PLUS
I know! Why don’t we put on a show?!
My dad will let us us his barn!
OT, but hey,
Is there no fucking end to this bullshit?
Mom can sew costumes!
Kenga is right. Studies show that scotch levels need to be maintained in the blood system for it to exhibit its cure-all qualities. This requires a steady committment to scotch. Scotch does not fail the user. The user generally fails scotch.
We need to convert our ecomony to a scotch-rolling paper-tulip-sedan chair economy.
Think of all the work for the lawyers! Ok, I’ll think about that part quietly to myself.
Uncle Mickey will let us borrow his goats!
Let’s ask Ron and the Paulbots! They’ll know what to do.
My solution: let people get kicked out of their homes.
Hoovervilles are SO underrated. They really fostered a sense of community, a feeling of “we’re all in this together” unity. And don’t underestimated the bonding that occurs as everyone warms their hands around the trash-can fire. Really!
:-0
Ah hah it all falls into place.
The Sedan chair people take clients to Strip clubs and they put the freshly photocopied money into the G-strings of the strippers. The customers then become the carriers and take their clients to new strip clubs to put more “money” into G-strings of more strippers. There are snacks and drinks stands at the strip clubs as well as cloak rooms and er…cleaners.
Sometimes the strippers will be allowed to go home so there will have to be a certain number of people who are qualified to be strippers and carriers, this will make them more in demand thus raising their wages.
Once a day the hottest game show in town “The Eleventiest Gazillion’ will pump more money into the economy via deserving writers at conservative websites.
It can’t fayle.
And while you people are obsessing over trivial shit like a collapsing economy and stupendous administrative incompetence, you’re missing the really big news – Fred Thompson has announced that he will no longer seek elective office. Knowing that, why even bother to save America?
As a child of the seventies, I think we should prop up the Pet Rock and Mood Ring markets.
Snorghagen: I’ve communed with my inner Paulbot, and the answer is TRANSACTIONAL GOLD!!!
Well, I gotta admit it’s mighty damn retro … but I can’t believe nobody suggested a Pet-Rock-based economy yet.
Fun aplenty!
The super-rich have bled the economy into anemia & they STILL want to get richer, you say? Well, now, my idea would make that both easy & enjoyable. Give the elite exactly what they deserve – aim for the crotch.
As a child of the fifties I don’t think we should forget glow-in-the-dark hula hoops. This would also take care of the obesity epidemic. (Well, the hula hoops and the fact that nobody can afford to buy food any more…)
A few weeks ago, Robert Reich said in his blog that up to a third of the bank bailout money distributed so far had been used to pay dividends to bank shareholders. He didn’t include a citation for that, unfortunately. Anyone have any idea if it’s true or not? If so, it’s the kind of thing that has me thinking of putting my savings into ammunition and Guy Fawkes masks.
http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2008/11/bottom-up-bailout-rather-than-trickle.html
Damn – 5 minutes off.
Smeg.
cur said,
December 5, 2008 at 18:15
Fire Water Burn
Thank you, cur. My late mother is in that vid, on the left @ 3:43 & exiting w/ the band member in the red shirt @ 4:34. Gray wig. Never seen it before.
Remember, remember the 5th of scotch.
For continuity sake, tieing the last thread to this one, Bush and the whole administration are textbook examples of Dunning Kruger effect. Dunning Kruger os one of those “so obvious why didn’t anyone ever lay it out before” things. D-K effect is all about incompetence. [I just misspelled ‘incompetence’. sheesh]
The only part for which they fail to supply evidence is
Also, I’m sticking with my “CIA: Drug dealer to the world” plan.
What do we have too much of? Unemployed people and carbon.
I have said this before and I’ll say it again (and again):
If life gives you carbon, make Beef Carbonade.
Since the late ’90s, our economy has run entirely on this principle (e.g., that mortgage derivatives and pets.com shares would keep growing in value forever), and I see no reason to change that now. List your ideas for worthless commodities that we can use taxpayer dollars to prop up in the comments.
Aren’t you supposed to cite Daniel Davies, who was promoting this idea a few years ago [and a few weeks ago in CT], to prove your awareness of all internet traditions?
A guy in my neighborhood (who wasn’t hit with over $35k in health expenses this year like I’ve been) tried to argue with me this summer that we’d never go into a recession because women out here are too into manicures. Uh huh.
Can I go tell him “I told you so” now? I’d also call him a pog…..
Wow, pogs….forgot about those altogether. Good use of them though, cheap apartments. Or car interiors for CEOs. All pog all the time.
You don’t understand my Scotch difficulties.I can only stomach single malt and my health insurance allows reimbursement for generics only!
I am surprised nobody has mentioned the flesh of children as a valuable and tasty commodity.
Not everyone is as swift as RB in that matter.
AGREEMENT:
Whereas, the government, specifically the executive branch of the United States of America has assisted members of the Financial Services industry in increasing their cumulitive net worth generally and individually
Whereas these individuals have made large fortunes while involved in Financial Trading Schemes deeply detrimental to the economic well being of the United States of America
Whereas, when said individuals massive wealth was put at risk by the resulting fallout from their destruction of the normative processes generally recognized as a necessary part of a healthy, functional economy
And Whereas, the government, specifically the executive branch of the United States of America has, notwithstanding the forgoing and without reference to or regard for previous actions, transferred approximately 8 Trillion dollars of American assets to these same individuals mentioned in the foregoing
By affixing my signature to this agreement this 5th day of December, 2008, I hereby agree that upon any mention or discovery that precisely None of these funds will ever be returned to the taxpayers through any mechanism, I will at all times act greatly surprised, to the point of making it clear that no one could have anticipated such an unfortunate outcome.
Signed:_____________________________________
Lex,
Yes you may.
All my money’s in the Soylent Green market. By next xmas, I’ll be rich, I tell you, RICH!
Fucking A!!!
Gee, it’s almost like money is not a value in itself, it’s just a representation of value. So if Americans need to have money that’s worth anything, Americans need to actually make or do things of value to other people.
And not, you know, trade promises of maybe having something of value someday. Which are based on if other people trade promises based on promised SALES of other promises.
Who’d have thunk it, except every single American who’s ever actually made anything for a living?
I’ll be in my bunker with the 4 years of beans and new rifle collection I just bought on Ebay.
You could’ve sent Gun Counter Gomer the business.
Where is your sense of community responsibility?
No scotch, you dirty furriner lovers!!
All-American, made from New World corn Bourbon only!! (And you needn’t worry about single-malt/multiple malt.)
Mmmmmmmm…malted.
Surely there is money to be made in the war on Xmas. Maybe we can get that up and running again.
I’ve got a shitload invested in Obama Tape futures. Come 2012, I’ll be lighting my hand-rolled cigars with ultra rare misprinted Darth Vader on Yoda’s background POGs.
Oh, and if I may – WTF is this latest crap I heard on CNN – that they don’t even know how much they handed out and to whom, because they handed it out so quick???
Like they can’t look at their bank statements?? Like they just waddled over to wallstreet with dufflebags of T-Bills, got drunk, and woke up in Vegas with a sore ass?
Among the many, many reasons why it wouldn’t go down like that: some people who are walking by on the street who *aren’t* CEO’s might get some of the money.
I know why the news is reporting this nonsense with a straight face – they’re corporate. My question now is – how?? How is it possible for even a trained actor to repeat crap like that, and not convulse in laughter?
I have to concur with M. Anything made by these guys is inherently suspect.
(NSFW)
I am worried that I will be forced to consume bourbon instead of scotch and scotch-related ice cubes clanging around at the bottom of my empty glass. That is the true sign of a depression (mine!)
I am selling weapons to both atheists and elves.
Heh heh that’s an oldie but a goodie. It worked in Iraq too.
Whereas, the government, specifically the executive branch of the United States of America has assisted
membersthe heads of the Financial Services industry in increasing their cumulitive net worth generally and individually…FIFY.
Like trickle-down economics, trickle-down bailouts is a myth. Ask the 3500 people at WaMu who just received their notices (Merry Christmas!)
“I am selling weapons to both atheists and elves.”
I’ve decided to arm the other side. Boob Owens tells me that the moran market is hopping right now.
How about Regnery books? There’s got to be warehouses full of ’em.
Three Slanders equals one Liberal Fascism.
We doan need your steenking weapons. We’ll make our own.
Also, WordPress is getting an elf-spear up it’s fundament for Xmas.
er, ‘its’
petrock.com futures.
Like they just waddled over to wallstreet with dufflebags of T-Bills, got drunk, and woke up in Vegas with a sore ass?
Wow, so I’m not the only one this happens to?
We may have located the Scotch-Related Program Activities we’ve been so concerned about.
They’re concentrated right around mikey’s living room, and to the north, south and west…
mikey
“Wow, so I’m not the only one this happens to?”
No, no…that’s been pretty much happening to all of America. At least the waking up with a sore ass and an empty wallet part.
sagra said: “The obvious solution is to legalize marijuana and use the bailout money for rolling papers.”
Exactly what I was telling my partner last night. Someone would have to grow it, harvest it, process it, package it, brand it, advertise it and sell it. That’s a lot of taxable income.
The obvious next step is to legalize the sex industry.
However WordPress should be outlawed as a public nuisance.
We need to bring back the sedan chair!
Snakefinger was a head of his time.
Flax script.
All you need is flax script and a good game of Sink.
I think that we should follow the example of our Chinese financial masters and house displaced former homeowners in unused warehouses and put them to work as gold farmers. Plus, they could level up my gnome warlock while I’m out fighting crime.
Don’t think that I haven’t noticed that NONE of this bailout money is going to dental floss farmers like myself. As a small businessman (I’m 4’6″), I’ve worked hard to be fiscally responsible (well, ok, so I splurged on a zicron-encrusted tweezers for floss harvesting, but that’s a legitimate business expense) and yet I’m supposed to somehow deal with this DEMONcrap caused Obama Depression? It’s time to get government off of the back of small businessmen, at least until the GOP gets back in power again.
Um, I don’t think anyone expected to make a profit on the stock in the short term. I figured it would be more the 5-10 year time frame.
The stocks lost value. This should not be a shocker, as the financial mess and recession are still ongoing.
I am surprised nobody has mentioned the flesh of children as a valuable and tasty commodity.
Acidic Jews have recipes for how to cook goyem babies, in the Proctology of Elderly Scions, their cookbook.
I should mention, however, that ladies fingers are a delicate and delicious treat.
might i suggest my blog?
i believe that with an injection of a mere 175 billion USD (that’s right folks, just one half of what is on offer), i can expand my content to include witty missives written by such luminaries as vs naipaul, toni morrison, neil stephenson, william gibson, plus several short form videos by spielberg, zack snyder, the ghost of andrei tarkovsky, orson welles’s corpulent corpse and so on. all of that would cost around 100 million or so. then salaries: me, 3 SVP’s of development and production, 2 VPs of development, 3 directors, 2 story editors, 12 assistants plus 3 runners…shit, what are we up to know? that adds up to another 20 mill annually let’s say. well, the remaining billions would go into a fund to purchase both whores AND cocaine, hopefully enough to keep every sadly no reader in cups for several millenia.
i call this…the aristocrats!
It’s a cookbook! A COOKBOOK!
Gustatus Similis Pullus
How can that Scotsman be sitting right next to Her Majesty, nothing between his caber & her but air & her clothes, & NOT be all hot & bothered? Skirt-wearing fairies!!
Here in Manhattan, there are thousands of Wall St. executives, as well as thousands of streetlight poles with no one swinging from them by the neck. I sense employment opportunity.
You bellowed?
You rang?
I don’t bellow, I rant & rage!!
Yeah. That picture with the queen is Classic.
Is anything worn under the Kilt?
No m’am it’s all in perfect working order. -Milligan (1980’s)
If you have been on teh eBay recently, then surely you know that the economy is based entirely on Webkinz.
A billion is a million million.
Therefore 300 billion is 300 million million.
So they could have given everybody in the US a million bucks and saved money overall.
Hmmmm…..
“A billion is a million million.”
No, in the US it’s a thousand million.
A million million is a trillion.
Pfft. Like it matters.
“Snakefinger was a head of his time.”
Whoever mixed that should be forced to pull a pedicab full of Arkansas pork bellies up Lombard Street in San Francisco…forever.
Whoever mixed that should be forced to pull a pedicab full of Arkansas pork bellies up Lombard Street
Produced by The Residents, I think.
A Million Million is a fucking drop in the bucket.
“Produced by The Residents, I think.”
It does not surprise me that The Residents and Snakefinger would be connected, somehow. Nor does it surprise me that Smut would know of The Residents.
Oh, please, enough will all this stuff about the economy. You’re just distracting everyone from the most important thing in the world: Obama’s fake birth certificate. By know it should be clear to everyone that not only is Obama lying about his birth but his parents, way back in 1961, were clearly part of the conspiracy to place Malcolm X and Bernadine Dohrn’s love child in the White House. Clarence Thomas is only person with the guts to stand up to the Black Power Manchurian Stalin we’ve “elected”. Please, stay focused.
The Caroliner counter.
M.Bouffant
Cool that you Mom’s in the vid. Also featured in the vid is the Suburbs tuke.
A blast from the past of my youth in Minnesota.
Caroliner look like Cthulu puked up his breakfast on the stage.
freeper protest video!!!
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Demonstrators_pray_Supreme_Court_will_invalidate_1205.html
Parodies are generally supposed to be funny.
Just a thought.
What British folks call a billion we call a trillion in the U.S.
The British word for our billion (10 to the 9th power) is a thousand million or a “milliard” (and no I didn’t believe it either the first time I heard it).
The only question I ever got Tom and Ray to use on Car Talk related to the differences thereof.
I know what the point is, but there’s something of an equivalence problem there.
I live in Canada, and right now we have dogs to make the snow yellow. I figure can do that, and we can eat the dogs. No money required plus you can try writing your name.
You can eat the pogs. Very good for you. Will you share the snow? I’m starving. Ran out of pogs.
freeper protest video!!!
We mustn’t snicker at the power of Freeper prayer, after they got Obama’s acceptance speech rained out and all.
I can’t believe no one has mentioned Pokemon cards as a basis for currency. They even have a slogan appropriate for today’s Wall Street robber-baron mentality:
Gotta catch ’em all!!!
Yes, that Ben Shapiro article from a few posts down just hit LGF II with loads of praise….heeheehee. Dammit, I love that site.
Well if you’re going to do card trading, ya gotta do Magic: The Gathering. Ya gotta!
Also: Super Geek League
I put everything I got into my no portfolio 401k
The good life is mine.
wtf?
Treasury raided and depleted. I’d say “mission accomplished” if someone hadn’t beaten me to it. Damn you, W.
wtf?
The correct reaction is to blame in on WordPress, cur.
We mustn’t snicker at the power of Freeper prayer, after they got Obama’s acceptance speech rained out and all.
thats true, lets see they’re like 0 for 10 this cycle
That typo, of course, was totally WordPress’ fault.
Gav gets the win for that closing line.
FUWP
I can’t believe no one has mentioned Pokemon cards as a basis for currency
My son will own the central region of the United States.
[Mr Burns ON] Exxxcelllllent [Mr Burns OFF]
Here are some interesting but troubling stats that distinguish Bush II from Nixon-Ford. We old farts thought we all thought we had it bad over 30 years ago. But I don’t think anyone could’ve seen Bush coming.
But I don’t think anyone could’ve seen Bush coming.
And really, who would want to?
CCGs make me sad, because they’re fun, social and marginally less geeky than roleplaying games, but they’re also an evil money-making scheme that will suck you dry. Especially Magic: The Gathering, which seemed to release a new overpowered expansion set every five minutes.
All I’m saying is that I wasted way too much money in middle school on M:TG booster packs, when I should have been spending it on weed.
Hey! There’s people eating lunch here.
And other people drinking lunch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Quid
The KLF already did this. Man! They really *were* ahead of the game.
That was brilliant! I hope that catches on.
What, they wouldn’t take The One off the keyboards?
If, as everyone expects, the Supreme Court decides not to hear the case challenging Obama’s citizenship, it’s unlikely this crowd will be satisfied. The citizenship skeptics may become the 9/11-was-an-inside-job crowd of the Obama era.
Oh FUCKING GREAT, just what we need. As if the Truthers ain’t bad enough.
case was not accepted; freepers refuse to accept nonacceptance
Apparently not. The good news is, the Fed is hiring.
The Truthers are irritating in that they are peeing on a grave. I’m not so worried about anyone peeing on a president.
Throwing money on the financial fire is the solution. You just have to do it very quickly. Throw it slow, and it just burns up; but throw a shitload of it very fast, and it will smother the fire.
Can’t we all just pee on Truthers?
mikey
It’s take 2 by Upright Citizens Brigade:
No, in the US it’s a thousand million
Oh, here it’s a million million and a trillion is a million million million (or ten to the 18th).
So all your billionaires aren’t really billionaires then. Interesting.
Hmmmm.
Criminy Keeristy. Even TPM has succumbed to the hysteria:
Exclusive Hawaii beachfront sire chosen for Obama’s holiday stay with family, friends
The TPM thing is just a wire-service feed.
Can’t we all just pee on Truthers?
mikey
I’d be up for that.
The thing is, you guys should switch to our billion. That way, you aren’t wasting as much money and everybody would feel better. Just change the scale.
Plus, I admit, I was deliberately being a douche. I know the US thinks a billion is a thousand million and was therefore being calculatedly obtuse.
I’m willing to bet this bailout scam is just another heartwarming example of good old Bush Clan oneupmanship at its finest … I’m picturing the Bush Xmas feast:
W – “So, Pappy, about that whole S&L’s deal – you only took them for a measly half a trillion, & it took you YEARS to pull it off? Not to mention some of your buds wound up under indictment? So THAT’s where the expression Bush League comes from! Hee hee hee!”
Pappy – (scowls)
But hey – at least W’s willing to do whatever it takes to satisfy the guardian-angel of the Bush Clan, Chang teh mystical warrior, eh?
The thing is, you guys should switch to our billion.
Done!
Everything all fixed now?
Sign me the fuck up, brosephino.
Are you kidding? Do you think some mild, innocuous, non-murderous myth like “Obama’s not a citizen” will be the right wing revanchists’ fully developed cri de merde?
No, the “citizenship skeptics” will be at best the training Huggies for the adult sh*t yer pants brigades.
It’s their usual backwards logic. They feel in their hearts that Barack Obama cannot possibly be our legitimate President, so they come up with “facts” to support it.
They’ve been making up “facts” for eight years now, because, hell, reality is only what they tell us it is.
If enough blogs written by enough wankers say it’s so…
Secret Agent Flowbee’s place has a championship fact-making-up competetion on every single thread.
Among other things, I’ve learned the following from Flowbee’s regulars: 1) Hillary Clinton was robbed, robbed I tell you, when Obama stopped her name from being entered into nomination at the Dem convention. Meanwhile, 2) It was totally bogus the way that they stopped the roll call before completion – a roll call vote they were holding because there was, you know, more than one name in nomination. Also, 3) It was Obama and his evil minions who stopped a full “legitimate” vote count, which was in fact occurred with a motion for nomination by acclamation by Clinton herself. And 4) Even after Clinton made the motion, Obama should have opposed that motion, even though he wasn’t in the hall and the rules require that motions come from those in the hall. All of this was done because 5) Hillary, who was losing by a margin of 1500+ to 300+ when she moved to nominate by acclamation, after 42% of the vote had been cast, would have totally kicked Obama’s ass if only, only the vote had been “fair”.
Oh, and also? One of Obama’s first plans that will be implemented will be to re-design the US flag, to include his likeness. Because, of course, this will help unite the entire country to face the challenges ahead.
At Flowbee’s, they subscribe to the theory that if you stack it high enough, no one will ever be able to navigate their way out of the shit-thicket.
They’ve been making up “facts” for eight years now, because, hell, reality is only what they tell us it is.
Longer than that.
How many people have the Clintons assassinated, now?
~
“My vote goes to…”
Thomas Kincade paintings.
How many people have the Clintons assassinated, now?
Why, imagine the masses of dissenters who will be exterminated by Obama with Hitlery herself at his side!
*snort*
PUMAS R ANGRY!
~
“Why isn’t all this money being slipped into the remaining clothing of strippers?”
The most intelligent solution to this problem proposed thus far. I volunteer to distribute.
PLEASE?
The thing is, you guys should switch to our billion.
Oh, no, you don’t! You furriners tried to invade us with metrics in the seventies. We threw ’em out then and we can do it again!
Thomas Kincade paintings.
Ooh! Good choice. Several denominations, too – the prints, the prints with a bit of paint daubed on by a flunky, the prints with a bit of paint daubed on by Kinkade himself, and so on, up to the full Kinkade-painted canvas that he marked with his own urine.
We remain resolutely on guard against the threat posed by international metricism.
The Kinkade saga is so wild and woolly it’s either a Don Delillo novel, or actual fact.
And, guess what? He defrauds people under the cloak of his Christianity.
And, of course, the gratuitous whizzing incidents.
I admit I just don’t get it. He’s a famous painter, a rich painter, and he could kick back at any time. Instead, he enjoys fraud and getting obnoxiously drunk.
Maybe this is why I’m not rich. I wouldn’t know how to behave!
And, dear heavenly FSM, there’s this nugget, which I was unaware of and now must put dark glasses on my inner eye:
…oh, the metrics will get you when you least expect it
(“what’s that millimeter doing there?”)
1) See, this is why occasionally I’ll let this shit go for a while. I know the fort is being held down.
2) Djur and I have as an inside joke Hot Houseboy, this horrible 70s gay porno (by contrast to ‘gay porn’ – ‘porno’ is the kind of stuff you’d consent to being arrested for beating off to). In addition to treating cut-off jeans as a gay uniform (? – literally EVERY character wore them, ALL THE TIME), it had an increasingly creepy fixation on what was at the time gonzo sex – e.g. light BDSM, urolagnia, etc. ‘But alec’, you might say, ‘My daughter’s preschool has Ilsa, She-Wolf Of The Pi-SS fridays!’ Well, yes, but that was a more repressed time.
In one particular episode, they lured a pizza boy into the house (I believe at one point they stipulated that most delivery-boys were gay) and tied him up while deciding what to do with him. Quoth the older character to the younger, “Let’s not piss for a while. I’ve got a feeling we can really soak the kid.”
Read that in a ridiculous Irish accent. It’s Oscar material, I tells you.
3) I forget where I was going with this. Something to do with a Foley catheter, I think.
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/photoshop-phriday/paintings-light-part.php?page=1
horrible 70s gay porno
A friend of mine censored gay porn for a living. It’s true! Anyway he assembled a really terrific tape of excerpted dialogue without the sex – well, there was Batdude banging away at that twink Throbin for a minute – and it was captivating. There was one guy standing on a mountainside preparing to masturbate while addressing the camera with a speech about how “it’s like you’re a part of the fucking landscape man” that I will never forget. Especially when I am masturbating on mountainsides.
mohammed coming to the mountain?
A comp tape of porno dialogue.
Awesome , or AWSOMEST!!11?
Porn in general doesn’t have the desired (ha!) effect on me; instead of being turned on, I almost always find myself laughing to the point of holding my sides and trying to catch my breath.
I remember one movie where this woman lay in bed all day, having sex with various random people who just wandered in through her unlocked door. One of them was a pizza delivery guy. I believe he took the pizza with him when he left, too. He ripped off a piece and she didn’t even get a slice! A tragedy in ten acts – at least.
Especially when I am masturbating on mountainsides.
As shown in this artist’s impression.
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/photoshop-phriday/paintings-light-part.php?page=1
One of those could easily become this year’s advent calendar for Doktorling Sonja.
I’d make some crack about the world being spread out at his feet, but it seems too obvious. I know, I know, when did that ever stop me?
In my own defense, I must say that I am extremely high on hydrocodone. I was eating peanut brittle earlier and chipped a molar. It didn’t hurt but I thought a little preventative medication was in order. Now it really, really doesn’t hurt! I think I’m going to go buy a metal nail file tomorrow and see if I can take the edge off the break. I don’t have any dental insurance – or any medical insurance at all, for that matter – so a trip to the dentist must wait until I secure my internship or until my next infusion of student aid, in January. Oh, well. Life in these United States etc., etc.
I went out to do some shopping tonight and it was like a ghost town. It was a little unsettling. Bed, Bath and Beyond, Circuit City, Linens and Things (which is going out of business and having a sale), Home Depot, Old Navy. Every store the employees outnumbered the customers.
I don’t have any dental insurance – or any medical insurance at all, for that matter – so a trip to the dentist must wait until I secure my internship or until my next infusion of student aid, in January.
I recommend investing in a lotta mouthwash. Helped stave off pain from a perpetually botched root canal for quite a while, I assume by killing off the bacteria feeding on the rotting nerve my useless dentist couldn’t seem to scrape out.
psychedelic santa – I took my teen to the Apple store at the Big Ass Shopping Mall and Hell Facsimile this afternoon. I wouldn’t call it a ghost town but the parking lot was mostly empty, not at all what you’d expect for this time of year.
Welcome to hard times! Wuxtry, wuxtry read all about it!
Last night in class it was so cold several students kept their parkas on. One guy even left his gloves on. Prof said she’d complained and they basically told her to shut the fuck up and get used to it. I’ll admit I’m enjoying this a little bit. I’ve been bitching for years about people who think they need to be able to wear shorts around the house in the winter. I grew up in an old Victorian with grandparents who lived through Teh Depression and you wore long underwear in the winter and just got used to having feet that were cold all the time. And you kids get off my lawn!
Leone – That’s a good idea. I’ll give it a shot.
Lot’s of whiskey probably help too, but I can’t afford that either. Old Grandad, maybe, but I think I’d prefer pain.
I think Candy is onto something here, if everyone bashed out all their teeth and left them under the pillow the incoming cash flow might just solve the problem, especially if the tooth fairy has increased prices with inflation over the years…
ZOMG Euripides, I never thought of that! (runs to fetch hammer).
Tagging stray mp3s: who did this song besides the Kingston Trio? Did they fake an accent?
Are you sure the story about the Clintons trashing the White House isn’t true?
After all, all the conservatives were repeating it over and over again, and I’m sure The Troof will vouch for it.
After all the teeth are gone, the masses can then be employed by the state to teach grannies to suck eggs. Replacement teeth can be made from POGS.
If this fails, we will be forced to consider privitisation of ‘TEH STOOPID’
Also, clove oil/chewing a clove for toothache.
I saw that Clinton White House trashing story repeated as truth somewhere just recently, on a liberal site where the person should have known better. I can’t remember where I saw it. I was a bit surpirsed that anyone still accepts it as truth, but as Hoosier X just pointed out, repetition = veracity.
Mmmm, clove. I love the smell of clove.
Remember, you can’t spell clove without love™.
Candy:
Tea Tree Oil is good for eliminating bacteria in the mouth & on wounded teeth. Good luck.
Yes, Candy, good luck with the tooth. I broke one recently by biting my nails, damn me. It’s fixed now but I lived for quite a while with a good third of one of my teeth missing and that, well, bit.
Thanks, all. At least the break seems pretty shallow. As long as the filling doesn’t start to crumble it should be okay for a while. That rough edge is gonna drive me batty, though.
A self-produced movie about Kinkade, Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage, was released on DVD in late November 2008. The semi-autobiographical story looks at the motivation and inspiration behind his most popular painting, The Christmas Cottage. Jared Padalecki plays Kinkade and Marcia Gay Harden plays his mother. Peter O’Toole plays young Kinkade’s mentor, who tells him “Paint the light, Thomas! PAINT THE LIGHT!”
I’m guessing Mr. O’Toole had to be stinking drunk for that gig — like his character in a similar situation in “My Favorite Year.”
Here is a prior post, edited to reduce the apparent likelihood of my being misidentified as a spam bot.
Good Lord, man, crossing the nature-porn wire and the German romantic wire will doom us all!
Trust me, this is pretty common whether or not you’re into whatever the hell it is. Porno plots are so ridiculous it actually makes people vaguely nostalgic for the horrible, horrible product of the Betamax era.
–
Oh, narcotics. Is there anything you can’t do?
Exact same boat here – we’ve both got horrible problems, although thankfully we’ve got relatives who make that less completely fatal. (I’m lucky in that mine are largely congenital and predictable – so I’ve kind of got a binary choice between a succession of increasingly powerful and addictive painkillers for the rest of my life or crippling joint pain and occasional literally crippling joint problems (one knee in particular used to go out so violently it overwhelmed my vagus nerve and produced a sensation of freezing cold along with the searing pain, and later on started just locking up for days at a shot. Fun!); she has ovarian problems mixed with a family history of benign but aggressive cysts.) And with any luck, in January we’ll hoodwink some insurance company and get her issue taken care of. Mine I’m less optimistic about, but such is life.
Careful about alcohol + opioid. Even the mouthwash might be pushing it – some kinda antibacterial drug and/or hydrogen peroxide would be a better idea.
NSAIDs are your best friend in this kind of situation: NOT tylenol (they make nor© by adding it to the active ingredient – rather like the additives in DXM, the idea is to make people horribly sick if they take a large but safe dose of the more entertaining drug – primarily because American society is diseased and obsessed with mortification of the flesh as a good and purifying idea), but ibuprofen’s pretty good. (We both use a different opioid for anti-inflammatories and ibuprofen only VERY occasionally, and it’s actually a lot cheaper than norco if you’ve got some kind of Medicaid D coverage (c.f. [next post] – probably saved the two of us thousands of dollars so far)) If the recommended 2/dose don’t work, 4/dose is feasible for a few days followed by a week and a half off it.
IANAD, just a hideous, swollen wreck fortunate enough to be close to one.
Clove’s also a decent anesthetic, and you can’t go wrong with Oragel.
–
UNLV policy has generally been lately to make life completely unlivable for everyone outside of the gaming studies and business departments, including firing competent professors and refusing to have any new hires (we had one of the best professors I’ve ever encountered in tentatively to do a class on South Asia, and in spite of having a gaping vacancy in Asia-studies faculty for a fucking decade, the school decided to cancel her contract at the last minute. Hooray!). In spite of that – and their beautiful decision to host two fucking rodeos a year which just coincidentally fill the campus with the smell of dogshit and the traffic crush of faux-Texan idiot accountants from Cal-i-for-nay-aye ON FINALS WEEK – they felt compelled to raise tuition by 25%. (What was that? Reduce the Tarkanian-legacy salaries for our various worthless coaches so each one is only making as much as twenty non-tenured professors? Surely you jest!) The student body got pretty infuriated about that.
God willing, the next couple of election cycles will see the realignment of Reno sink in to a greater degree, and the ruling party and their pet fucking chimp in office now will be out on their asses faster than you can say (as I certainly enjoy doing) ‘cheat on his wife, beat on his mistress’.
Gol-durn it: ‘tram’ as in what you ride, ‘a’ as in the article, and ‘dol’ as in the kind of doll that doesn’t go to Hell.
And the website would be [are ex] [say no to – singular] card dot com.
Hooray for late-service capitalism ruining everything!
“I’ll admit I’m enjoying this a little bit.”
Candy,
It’s one thing to hear people complain about having to wear long underwear, it will be quite another when they are picking food out of garbage cans. Maybe it won’t get to that point, but I’m not so sure.
Oh, and back when she had a filling fall out, Sam went to the nearby CVS and got a medicated (including clove) paste for it. Dentemp, I think – it’s pretty expensive – $6 for a tiny little cup – but it works decently well.
Yoyo the Africanized bee just died defensively. When the coroner opened Yoyo up he found a guitar amp lodged inside Yoyo’s nose. I’m sure you know an Africanized bee asks for invention but I had no invention left.
“The crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe”
Well, if we’re down to semi-random quotes:
“Dust My Pumice.”
Hey Rugged, you ever go to Mr. Greg’s Hair-Styling & Sheep-Rental Salon in [open sheep imitation]Buuuuuuutte, Montaaaaaana[close sheep imitation] where you can strap on the sheep of your choice in the back room?
Oh, sorry, that should be “RUGGED,” shouldn’t it?
I like the idea of the Pet Rocks but only as a commodity to be traded for the public stonings in the afternoon.
I recommend investing in a lotta mouthwash.
I must confess that an attempt to deny a tooth issue was the beginning of my life-long love affair with akvavit. In the end it did not save the tooth, but it taught me the pleasures of the denial strategy.
akvavit = Smut.
My current economic plan is that the hair-loss fairy will leave $2 under my pillow for each square centimetre of exposed scalp.
I was looking for Lee Perry’s Straight to the Capitalist Head on Youtube but found this instead. The Truth, this is for you.
I’ve been ignoring a tooth for awhile due to lack of insurance. Over Thanksgiving it made the whole side of my face swell up so that my breathing and vision were constricted. Fortunately I found a walk-in clinic in a Mexican neighborhood that wrote me prescriptions for antibiotics and painkillers. They had an a la carte menu of basic medical services – “insurance not required or accepted!”
The happy news is that I finally did find a job with benefits, starting Monday. The sad news is that there were a lot of people in that clinic.
Non-WASP dental clinics are getting hot, thanks to their low prices & still good service and techniques from what I hear.
Helped along from a trend by many dentists to peer into one’s mouth and speculate how many luxury cars this might mean…
I can really get behind technology that is able to implant a titanium device in one’s mouth that can handle 400 foot pounds; I have one from better days.
But when people are so strapped they can’t get a filling replaced… come on! I tried to save money at one point by skipping x-rays, wound up with a tooth that had to be “destroyed in order to save it” so we all get messed over, one way or another.
I am sick of our Wingut Overlords.
The happy news is that I finally did find a job with benefits, starting Monday. The sad news is that there were a lot of people in that clinic.
The other sad news is that I’m not aware of any dental insurance coverage that will pay more than 50% for any “major” procedure like crowns or root canals, and then only after you’ve been on the plan for over 12 months. I had my own dental issues earlier in the year – still not fully resolved (never get 3 crowns at the same time, especially on opposite sides of your mouth. It takes literally months to get your bite straightened out). And it cost almost $2500. If I had been carrying the dental insurance for the past 3 years (dropped it when I left a job in 2005), by the time this work was done I would have paid $1800 in premiums, for $1250 worth of coverage. Helluva deal there!
What I want to know is why the fuck “dental insurance” is separate from “health insurance.” An abcessed tooth is a health problem, period. A dental condition that can lead to an abcess is a health problem, period.
The obvious:
Onion News Network: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?
My current economic plan is that the hair-loss fairy will leave $2 under my pillow for each square centimetre of exposed scalp.
Hey, I could get behind that plan, being equally scalp-superfluous. Cripes, I could probably retire ocmfortably on that.
Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?
Of course!
If they keep doing it, there’s a chance they’ll put out the sun at the center of the Earth, and then what?
My plan is to spend every penny I still have left, and avoid the devastation of the up-coming record-setting inflationary cycle.
I started this week by having my cat diagnosed with liver cancer, attempted cure and euthanasia ($1,000), having my ‘fridge conk out ($1,100), getting my teeth cleaned (pockets dug out w/novocaine: $1,300) and getting a new transmission on the 18 year old Volvo ($1800).
Success!
The fact is, you liberals have already destroyed America’s economy by electing Osama to the White House, which he will soon paint black and put minarets around.
The happy news is that I finally did find a job with benefits, starting Monday.
Congratulations, pedestrian! I’ve been looking for one of those my own self.
Obama’s going to paint the White House black, because… he’s black?
Say what you will about our president-elect, but I don’t think he’s that cartoonishly literal-minded.
When the coroner opened Yoyo up he found a guitar amp lodged inside Yoyo’s nose.
Who gives a fck about the painter of light?
I want the painter of Janus!
which he will soon paint black and put minarets around.
Gar, I like your vision.
itwasntme: I’m so sorry about your cat.
Damn. And I thought MY week was bad.
Thanks MzNicky, spouse also having surgery on 22nd, so helping the docs with McMansion mortgages, plus, ya know, Merry Christmas.
electing Osama to the White House, which he will soon paint black
It’s like Nineteen Naughty Three all over again. Except a fascist version. Nineteen Naughty Four, perhaps.
Forgot to mention need to pay estimated taxes due IRS for business in 2009…
…and attorney for lawsuit against MGM…
…and Mom’s retirement place just upped the rent by $500 a month…and
Couldn’t we just put it on a pallete and ship it off to a third world country?
“Couldn’t we just put it on a pallete and ship it off to a third world country?”
The money or the furbies? Because I have a couple stashed in my basement closet. Every once in awhile when I’m rummaging around in there for something one of them starts up and scares the shit out of me. Jake wasn’t there a football player here or something with a name like yours? Or was that Jake the Plumber? I’m not very good with football.
Rusty Shackleford (not that one) said,
December 6, 2008 at 18:51
Obama’s going to paint the White House black, because… he’s black?
Say what you will about our president-elect, but I don’t think he’s that cartoonishly literal-minded.
I wish he was.
My house is a pinkish beige. With hair.
I wish he was.
Me too. Imagine the millions of wingnut heads that would simultaneously explode if he would just only use SHAFT as his inaugural theme music. It would solve the problem with unemployment in one fell swoop.
So sorry about the cat, itwasntme.
The past several years, I’ve actually spent more on my three cats dentally, than me!
But I’m sure that can’t last.
I’m just wondering.
Where does the Goddam Cop come down on The Goddam Batman, Minister?
mikey
My house is a pinkish beige. With hair.
I would dearly like to illustrate that with Kliban’s cartoon of the Orifice Building, but my google-fu is not strong enough to find it on the interducts.
That sucks,itwasntme, I hope 2009 is better.
WH paint should be dark purple with golden stars and crescent moons. They should move to follow the planets to show that Obama is the President of Looovvvvee, baby. (You know what those people are like eh, Ruprecht)
I think we should take up an intert00bz collection for Herr Smut to use to purchase twenty petabytes of online storage so he can save ALL disturbing images locally, so as to have them instantly available whenever the situation requires them.
He could then utilize his encyclopedic knowledge of the subject to write the definitive book, “Disturbing Imagery Down Through the Ages, or how to keep mikey creeped out for a fair number of consecutive YEARS”….
mikey
Get him something like Mac’s Spotlight or Linux’s Beagle and God help us all.
WearBear: which can’t last much longer – your teeth or the cats?
Losing cats is very much like having teeth pulled, so, toss up?
I’m just saying I need a cap right now, but I’m hoping things will turn around to the point I can afford it.
Yes, I hate losing cats.
“Disturbing Imagery Down Through the Ages
“The Atrocity Archives”? No, wait, that’s been used. How about “Enclydopedia”?
In anticipation of the new disturbing-imagery-based economy, I am stockpiling Bellmer prints and Gloeckner images.
which he will soon paint black and put minarets around.
I gotta admit, that’d be pretty awesome. I can only hope that he’d follow up by gutting the interior and install a gigantic Kaaba. I salute our caliphate overlords!
All this talk of fillings and crowns brought these dental x-rays to mind.
which he will soon paint black and put minarets around.
I was under the impression that Obama’s plans for the White House involved putting a pair of golden arches on top, in return for corporate sponsorship.
Come to think of it, anything by Wim Delvoye is probably incompatible with Mikey’s sound digestion and piece-of-mind.
He shoulda put some dice in there. That would be art!
You wanna talk disturbing art? DOGS CANNOT PLAY POKER.
Keith Jarrett is really really awful. I cannot believe that The Köln Concert ever sold a copy except to folks who were itching for Kenny G to fill a void in their lives.
I went to bed early last night and slept in this morning. That’s my excuse for commenting on a comment way, way upstairs.
for alec, Djur and anyone else that might give a shit: My “hubby” has a thing for 70’s porn, I guess because that’s when he first experienced it. Anyway, there’s an entire movie called “Pizza Boy – He Delivers.” It’s one of our favorites due to the gawdofffal (even for a dick flick) dialogue; both words and delivery. Best line: “Huh? Shower? Duh, Okay.” Imagine the worst actor ever saying that.
Buit then, as my hubby points out, they aint hired for their acting ability.
Wingnut Response: OMG, what you are actually saying is Jesus was a RAT!! More anti-christian descrimination!!
PETA Wackjob Response: OMG, you actually NAILED a rat to a cross and irradiated even more rats? Twenty years in prison for you!!
Stoner Response: Whoa. That’s cool.
PUMA Response: Well, it’s clear that rat is supposed to represent Hillary. I’ll be forced to vote for Sarah Palin. How unfortunate.
Michael Vick Response: Umm, dood. Think you could make ’em FIGHT?
OJ Response: Those are MY GODDAM RATS!!
Tom Friedman Response: Every now and then you gotta find a BIG rat and nail it to a cross while x-raying the whole process. The world is flat. Suck. On. This.
mikey
I apologize that the following post does not have the humor in it you were looking for, but I’m not feeling that funny at the moment. Besides, I have not played POGs and I’m not very much fun at parties.
When the Bush administration could not con Americans into giving up Social Security to Wall Street, which would have been a seven to eleven trillion dollar injection of tax payer dollars, (interesting that we are only a trillion to a few trillion dollars from that figure with the bailout,) they had to come up with a different method of stealing Americans’ money; the bailout is that method.
If one chooses not to believe this take note of how the big three automobile manufacturers came to Washington unprepared to argue for their share of the money. One might suspect that they knew what the swindle was and believed it was their turn in line for some big bucks. Remember, the plan during the Bush administration was to steal Social Security funds and hand them over to Wall Street. The only reason they did not get away with stealing Social Security funds is that the right wing and its think tanks, especially the CATO Institute were over-confident about their ability to sell the train wreck to taxpayers. Their sales pitch was weak and even the dumbest of the dumb were not buying into the swindle.
Of course, many right wing ideologues proclaimed the value of Americans making such a stupid move, because they are addicted to the privatization of everything. Even though no good argument existed for handing over the money to Wall Street, they racked their brains to invent their own justifications for doing so.
The problem with all of this deceit is that in the process of attempting to game Americans they screwed themselves and this is only one of the reasons for the bailout. The other more important reason is to accomplish their long-term goal of breaking the middle class in America. The way these greed-heads see it is that it is better to break the middle class in America than it is to force our trading partners overseas to raise their standards. This is the reason that our trade agreements include provisions for ecologically safe manufacturing, workers rights, retirement pensions, unemployment insurance, a living wage, etc., but are never enforced.
If one is foolish enough to believe that the current economic crisis is not just another swindle to lower the standard of living for Americans so that the rich are better able to compete in the global market, where most countries could do not care what happens to their employees, I have dunce caps in all sizes that you can order from e-bay and wear around to impress one’s fellow Americans with how obedient a fool one is.
Ron Paul response: we have to dismantle the Federal Reserve
Libertarian response: more, faster, harder, purer.
If one is foolish enough to believe that the current economic crisis is not just another swindle to lower the standard of living for Americans so that the rich are better able to compete in the global market, where most countries could do not care what happens to their employees, I have dunce caps in all sizes that you can order from e-bay and wear around to impress one’s fellow Americans with how obedient a fool one is.
As always, I am suspicious of this kind of argument. But I’m open minded. What I don’t understand, and need you to explain, is HOW they executed this. Did they recognize that they needed to create the worst recession in recent history? Did they create the subprime mortgage market and the deriviative instruments already KNOWING what would be the outcome? Did they have a methodology for driving up the price of energy and commodities?
You couldn’t have the bailout without the extant economic conditions that we see today, whether you believe it was actually necessary or not.
Explain to me how, after SocSec privatization failed, they planned and executed this scheme…
mikey
As with all high fat content foods, the contraindications of eating the rich (14% suet by weight) may include gout and/or atherosclerosis. Please revolutionize responsibly.
Smut Clyde said,
December 6, 2008 at 21:12
My house is a pinkish beige. With hair.
I would dearly like to illustrate that with Kliban’s cartoon of the Orifice Building, but my google-fu is not strong enough to find it on the interducts.
============================================================
I tried, Mister S.C. But it seems the Kliban estate is protection their intmalectual property rights, but good.
We can only nibble on some mousies.
~
Yeah, and you’ll have to get two lap band surgeries and quit blogging forever. Totally not worth it.
Yeah, and you’ll have to get two lap band surgeries and quit blogging forever. Totally not worth it.
That’s despicable. Like me!
As with all high fat content foods, the contraindications of eating the rich (14% suet by weight) may include gout and/or atherosclerosis.
I’m more worried about second-hand consumption of the souls of the oppressed.
two lap band surgeries
This phrase is new to me, so I assume that ‘lap band surgery’ is some kind of simultaneous lap dance and operation. With live music. Unless it is simply an up-market term for the venue where lap dances are performed.
The American plutocracy is a one-trick pony, and that trick is slavery. The current economy has pretty much passed the point where there is anything productive to be gained by making first-world workers’ lives more miserable (America is pretty much alone outside of the invisible majority of Earth’s population that labours at the global north’s idleness in having a steadily declining standard of living.)
To be brief, which I almost never am so savor it, evil can only get you so far before it brushes up against stupid, and this is a prime case of that. Detroit gutted the single progressive issue Clinton had – health care – for the sake of a few thousand dollars for the bosses and satiating a monkey on the financier class’s back. In exchange, they steadily got to the point where they would be losing money per employee if their workers paid them to manufacture cars.
What we’re witnessing is a contingency plan. The upper class has been carefully trained to display basic managerial competencies as camouflage for ruthless selection by ideological programme; as a result, we’ve got people responsible for millions of jobs who graduated ahead of and were promoted over better managers, better thinkers, and even better bullshitters on the sole basis of their being more tenacious on Milton Friedman’s shitbox. Make reciting all the lines the yuppies watching Wall Street didn’t understand were making fun of them obligatory for business, and you’re going to get a bunch of amoral empty suits, Marxists of the master class who live only to bilk their serfs out of an honest wage.
Mix that with the aspirational hyper-volitive twelve-step Christ-sorcery we have as a dominant moral mode, and you’ve basically got a recipe for people who honestly see no problem of business unsolvable with enthusiasm, no problem in society unsolvable with charismatic bullying, no geopolitical problem unsolvable with hustle. Gordon Gekko kicks black man down pit. Applaud.
This is Sparta.
The other sad news…
Yeah, I’ll be working for my teeth from here on out. Its like having kids, only they don’t look cute smeared in chocolate.
Thanks MzNicky! I think that I may have gotten mine by flirting a little bit. Hard to tell.
Smut, L. Band Surgery is for fat AmiKKKan pigs (like me). It cuts off their stomach so they can’t stuff themselves, but have to vomit if they overeat. Who knows how it’s done but it’s s’posed to be quick. Revolting enough for you? Good X-Ray Art subject though. It is advertised all over the radio here for some reason. (Oh, ’cause most radio listeners are total & fat losers.)
I suppose w/ all that socialist medicine down there you’ll never have a chance at one, either, unlike our glorious high-cost market.
I shall go on imagining it as the title of an ELP album, with appropriate cover art by Giger.
electing Osama to the White House, which he will soon paint black
With Teh Rolling Stones playing at the inauguration.
B. S.Surgery, you mean?
BTW, FYI, ETC., as I was checking my sad little sitemeter last evening I noted that someone from Edinburgh had been Googling you under your other pseudonym, clicking to read a comment you had left. Just so you know.
If one is foolish enough to believe that the current economic crisis is not just another swindle to lower the standard of living for Americans so that the rich are better able to compete in the global market, where most countries could do not care what happens to their employees, I have dunce caps in all sizes that you can order from e-bay and wear around to impress one’s fellow Americans with how obedient a fool one is.
Hm. Don’t most of the plutocrats in the U.S. make more money when U.S. consumers by bigger, more expensive crap? If so, how would lowering Americans’ standard of living do them any damn good? If we duncelike sheep (or are we sheeplike dunces?) can’t afford to buy Hummers and iPhones, who will? Look at the spending information reflected in this NY Times chart. The U.S. spends more than twice what any other country does in any of the five categories noted.
So while it might save corporations some money if workers had to settle for less money, those workers would no longer be able to afford the crap the corporations need to sell us. So I don’t see how wiping us out would actually serve the nefarious purpose you’re attributing to the current economic crisis.
You know, I just went and looked up what “lap band surgery” was. I figured it was something that had to do with the gout that Kim du Toit has/had, and out of all the awful things those awful people did (e.g. trip around the world with $60k debt), needing surgery in such a financial situation seemed somewhat sympathetic to me. Now I find out it’s just another variant of stomach stapling, e.g. he’s a fatass.
Jesus, you really can’t buy class, can you?
Simba, are you suggesting that people FART in those cool Herman Millers?
mikey
Showing out, showing out, hit and run
Boy meets girl where beat goes on
Stitched up tight, can´t shake free
I need that lap band surgery…
You can always buy “classy” though.
You don’t fart in a Herman, you fart through it. Which is why they’re so cool.
Words of Wisdom
The third installment of the Pitchfork Cobaggery Quatrology, Trapped Inside the Emu, finds Pinko Punko and The Uncanny Canadian stretching out their posts. Where the first two parts employed short bursts of heavily distorted snark to attack critical cobaggitation, part three uses layers of non sequiturs and downtuned praise to create an enveloping Wall of Meh. Working mostly in harmony, the final cut features a sharp, surprising discord between the two artists reminscent of the Biblical struggle of Jacob and Essau. Like Kevin Shields playing Loveless inside a giant Beard Papa cream puff, it’s a thick, rich, sweet experience that makes you want keep devouring more until you’re so sick, you’re begging Claus von Bulow for an insulin shot that won’t arrive until part four. If Trapped Inside the Emu does not make your nipples erect with excitement, you don’t have nipples. Apocryphal.
“James Lileks”
==========================================================
3Bulls haz random? comment post feature.
me likey.
~
Speaking of Claus, Sunny just died.
It was gonna go down before it goes up, but…
…Do you think that the transactions made before the oversight was approved could be, I dunno, refunded or put a lien against the assets of those who took the money?
I want some cold, hard, economic revenge.
…Because I can tell ya, I paid over $6K more in taxes this year that a het couple wouldn’t have, I’m pissed.
The results of this search are surprising, except not.
You’d think someone else would’ve said that phrase before, but apparently not.
I feel pride when I see Sadly, Non! tops the list of search results, Simba.
~
On the balance, the laws Whitey writes are not particularly well-tailored to giving Whitey his come-uppance.
You remember how Fox News spent all November making Prop 8 about horrible no-good bigoted darkies? They were only trying to help.
mikey,
I should have stated that the attempt to “sell” Social Security privatization to the public failed. Never the less the Bush administration included the money in a recent budget to begin the transition to privatized Social Security. Privatization has failed in Chile’ because retirees did not put aside enough money for retirement. Sweden’s privatization did not fail, because it made contributions to pensions mandatory as well as providing a trust for additional voluntary contributions to be made.
As far as answering the question of how “the crisis” could be deliberately implemented, I have to ask a few questions first.
Have you read “The Money Game” by Adam Smith, not Adam Smith who wrote “The Wealth of Nations?” Have you read a more recent book titled “Liar’s Poker?” Both give insights into the psychology of the players. Both were written with intellectual integrity as well as street knowledge. Do you believe that life is fair or unfair? I believe that life is neither. It just is. People are fair or unfair. It’s a choice. Do you believe that people are basically evil, (“we are all sinners,”) or do you believe that people are basically good? I believe people’s actions are basically conditional. It is the arbitrary nature of humans that makes oversight and accountability a necessary control over men and women with great power and wealth. Do you believe that the Wall Street gamblers do not know the difference between a risk ratio of 3:1 vs 40:1, and the inherent dangers of wagering or investing at the higher ratio? Do you believe in “infinitely expanding markets”? Do you believe in the Ponzi scheme that is the capitalist economic theory? Do you believe that capitalism is an economic science? Karl Marx did not believe in communism; he proposed a theory. Socialism is an economic theory. Have any of these theories been practiced exclusively in a given society or does reality reflect more of a “whatever works for the wealthy and powerful” theory of economics throughout history? I am trying to establish a foundation upon which to answer your initial question, because without them it would require a book length answer to your question of “How?” The comments section of this blog is obviously not the proper forum for such a discussion. Besides I’m too busy trying to figure out how I am going to be the “life of the party” at tonight’s gathering of friends.
I think that I may have gotten mine by flirting a little bit.
pedestrian: You slut! 🙂
Unfortunately for me, the days when that worked are long gone. Now I must get by on my wit and abilities. Unfortunately for me.
M. Bouffant said,
I noted that someone from Edinburgh had been Googling you under your other pseudonym,
Suspicion falls on the highly disreputable Flying Rodent, as the only blogger I know in Edinburgh.
you’re begging Claus von Bulow for an insulin shot
Talk about your timing.
Rats. Now I see M. Bouffant beat me to it.
So was everyone aware that this picture was of the du Twats? I had seen the picture before but I never connected it with them.
Yikes. Wow.
My only question was, you stated unequivocally that “…the economic crisis is a swindle…”. This indicates to me that you believe it was planned and executed. That a group of people in a position to create this very condition so the bailouts would happen. Seems to me the burden is on you to provide SOME support for this rather serious belief.
In fact, no. I haven’t read any of the literature you referenced. Unlike most people here, I never even went to college. But here in the valley of silicon, concrete tiltups and venture capital, we have a saying. If you can’t explain it to your grandma in one minute or one paragraph, you have no idea what it is you’re proposing.
So if your position is that I don’t have enough economic background to understand the answer to my question, well, that’s a little different than most conspiracy theorists who tell me I’m “naive”, but it sounds pretty much the same. So whatevs, onion. But allow me to offer a recomendation. You might want to start thinking about the factual basis for your accusations, because dumb old me isn’t the only person gonna ask you for some reason why they should just believe your statements outright.
mikey
If you can’t explain it to your grandma in one minute or one paragraph, you have no idea what it is you’re proposing.
It’s amazing how true this is. I can speak both from seeing others and from my own personal experience.
My point, in short, is that a plutocracy that selects for ability to sell timeshares in the Everglades may be evil – in fact, it’s difficult to imagine it being anything else – but it’s going to be pretty damn far from able to understand or predict, let alone more than casually exploit, climate change putting the rest of the state underwater.
1929 followed a decade of plutocratic decadence and public hardship. Was there a system in place basically designed to funnel cash from small investors (not to mention the existing social pyramid scheme that is wage labor generally) to big ones? Yes. The big investors still wound up decorating Wall Street come November. We’re dealing with jumped-up short-con men, not grand manipulators. This is perhaps the most important thing to remember – because the jumping-up has always been part of the con. You buy into it, and they can pull all sorts of shit on you.
Nobody questions that it was greed and venality that got us here. Lots of smart, buzz cut MBAs in really nice suits recognized a million and one ways to make a LOT of money. But almost certainly, every one of them thought “damn, this shit ain’t good for the overall economic well being of america, but I’m just one tiny cog in the system, and I’m making seven figures a quarter, surely SOMEBODY will step in and prevent it all from going completely sideways”.
The problem is they ALL thought that and nobody was willing to say “stop it, you’re fucking up a perfectly shitty system”. So you had a million suits scrumming for individual wealth, certain that nobody would allow the entire system to crash, and nobody ever was willing to take that role of grownup. Least of all the bushies…
mikey
Well, he gets points for style from me.
’70’s porn is the ne plus ultra of the art form, a crossroads where the lifting of cultural restrictions met the wild-assed corruption of Swinging London style that had aged a decade, more like cheese than wine. And garnished with unashamed body hair.
If you want to get turned on (if that works for you) and laugh yer ass off, accept no substitutes.
My former roommie would watch ’70’s gay porn in the living room. I have never, ever, EVAR! seen such ridiculously large wangs.
We would chuckle at them and pretend that we weren’t turned on.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always found porn more, er, effective with the sound muted. Every thing the actors say is silly. The very instant it’s poked in does not create loud moaning. We actually KNOW this. Loud moaning, like so many other of life’s little rewards, is to be WORKED for, not delivered at the command of some coked-up director.
*AHEM*
Even with YouPorn vids today, I’d rather choose the soundtrack and leave it a purely visual experience.
mikey
I’d rather choose the soundtrack
Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ suits all occasions. ‘Valse Triste’ is not so versatile.
Awe come on, Mikey, you don’t like the porn star moaning “Oh yeah, oh yeah. Harder baby!” while staring dead-eyed into the camera?
That’s just so hott.
Gabe Fenton watches squirrel porn!
With ‘Hunters & Collectors’ playing in the background!
Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ suits all occasions. ‘Valse Triste’ is not so versatile.
Oddly, Tesla’s “Mechanical Resonance” is a very good choice.
Roger Clyne’s “The bottle and fresh horses” works well too.
Always hard to go wrong with “Excitable Boy”.
Offspring’s “Smash”, Counting Crows “August and Everything After”, Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks”, The Dead’s American Beauty, Belly’s “King”, hell, man, there’s LOTS of choices…
mikey
O/T, but I’m watching “House” and the patient is a black senator WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT! And the show originally aired in ’05! I smell a conspiracy!
I’d rather choose the soundtrack and leave it a purely visual experience.
mikey, once again…heh, well, the less said the better but I’ll just leave it at, “I hear that”.
It’s the swearing I find so offensive.
That’s one advantage of porn from the Czech Republic — because one can’t understand what they’re saying, the dialogue sounds much more naturalistic. Um, not that I’ve ever watched any.
From hot money to moneyshots in 325 comments.
Mikey, I think that maybe what Orange was trying to say. Maybe we are where we are because this kind of thing is a feature of the system of capitalism not a bug. The participants in the system may be good, bad or indifferent, as individuals but this has no bearing on the outcome.
From the wikipedia article on wage slavery;
1 – In hierarchies there’s an incentive to not be completely honest with one’s superior and to tell him/her want s/he wants to hear. This lack of honest communication builds up the higher it goes up the hierarchy and is reflected once again onto the society by those powerful enough to exert influence – primarily the elite who, having a lot to lose, have strong incentives to subordinate and atomize the general population by spreading untruths.
2 – It becomes easier to abuse people when one has power over them.
3 – Human beings often numb their independent sense of morality when they subordinate themselves to arbitrary decree from above (one can dismiss one’s complicity in a destructive system by simply saying “I’m just following orders” or “I’m just doing my job, earning my bread,” “My superiors are good and know what they are doing” etc).
4 – Under authority people tend to become instruments of someone else, instead of free agents directing their own destiny, discovering and gaining a taste for more freedom. This entails that even when the outcome of actions is positive, the framework in which they’re undertaken will remain to a large extent amoral and fortuitous. From this point of view, hierarchical structures like the state and capitalism foster dependence and a lack of personal responsibility vis a vis humanity and the environment—allowing those on top to influence the lives and thoughts of society, and corrupting human behavior.
Well, here’s my short take, and I’ve been saying it for years:
If you make your money from selling things, and try to make more money by lowering employees’ wages, how long before you don’t have anybody who can afford to buy anything?
Autumn 2008?
one advantage of porn from the Czech Republic
1. I won’t come in the mail.
2. The Czech’s in your mouth.
Also for that to work for a long time, WereBear, you have to convince the consumer to consume things that they don’t want or need. If you can convince enough people that happiness is keeping up with the Joneses it is possible.
When the system breaks down, and no-one at the bottom can afford ‘luxuries’ any more you can always make them work for their own sustinence. After all you have a family to clothe, feed and look after, and beggars can’t be choosers.
OH SHIT! Wow. Yeah, I know that sign.
That’s one advantage of porn from the Czech Republic — because one can’t understand what they’re saying, the dialogue sounds much more naturalistic.
How do I verify that this is true?
There’s the fifties in a nutshell, and the several decades after that. After the thirties and forties were demarcated by poverty and deprivation, the pent up desires met the advanced mass production–and we have the American Way!
It’s greed. And I find it instructive. When money is the only thing in your life, there can never be enough.
It applies to any single obsession; we are multi-faceted. We must be multi-sated.
God, that old story about the Clinton administration trashing the White House as they left. Is that still going around? (Who am I kidding? Of course it’s still going around.) In 2005 I had a brief exchange of e-mails with David Limbaugh (yeah, the brother).
He reiterated the claim in a Townhall article, and I wrote him and said, “This is a lie. The outgoing Clinton administration did not trash the White House. This is not only a lie, it is a very old lie. A lazy lie….”
He wrote back and said “Is not!” Really: “It is not a lie. Clinton’s people pretended it was a lie and it was not. And even though it was not and the Clinton thugs then mouthed off even after Bush let them off free. Byron York I believe wrote a revealing, instructive piece on this.”
So I replied with chapter and verse, including the link to the GAO report on the allegations, concluding: ” Read the GAO report, then please consider dropping this misleading, discredited, really annoying, and totally whiney complaint about ‘Clinton thugs’.”
He was so very magnanimous in his reply: “I will check it out and, if I remember it, send you Byron York’s article — if I am correct that it was Byron York. At least you are being fairly cordial — and I appreciate that. Thanks, David”. The end.
Good times. I know, I’m pathetic. But still, for moi, good times.
There’s the fifties in a nutshell, and the several decades after that.
You must admit the impressive efficiency with which the word “atomic” has been superseded by a little “i” in front of everything.
There’s the fifties in a nutshell, and the several decades after that
And the mid-80’s, late ’90’s and the post 9/11 Naughties.
’70’s porn is the ne plus ultra of the art form, a crossroads where the lifting of cultural restrictions met the wild-assed corruption of Swinging London style that had aged a decade, more like cheese than wine. And garnished with unashamed body hair.
Heh. A couple of years ago I had my crew working on remodeling a bathroom in an apartment built in the early 70’s. And when the plumbers went into the wall to re-plumb, they found a stash of 70’s porn and other magazines, presumably left by the plumbers or drywallers who worked on the building when it was being constructed. Although my plumbers were too “gentlemanly” to show it to me, they weren’t too gentlemanly to tell me about it, or to show me the men’s fashion ads they found in there with it. It was absolutely hysterical hearing the lead plumber describe it – he was having a hard time – and said it “looked weird”. What do you mean, I asked, bad production values, cheesy, what exactly was “weird” about it? “Well,” he said, “the men all had funny hairstyles, and big sideburns and stuff. And the women’s breasts looked strange.” I totally cracked up. I told him, well, DUH, that’s because they were REAL!!! There haven’t BEEN any REAL breasts in porn for over 20 years now!
Now that you mention it, though, I’m sure the body hair probably freaked them out too – that was one of those things they just didn’t feel comfortable telling me about.
Oh, Jennifer, that is hilarious and strange, and I think maybe 70s porn might should be required reading/viewing, if only to show today’s young men (and women) that what they think is reality isn’t, and that their girlfriends aren’t weirdly deformed, they’re human, and that it’s okay, and that happiness is still possible. Maybe not inevitable, but possible.
Hoosier,
Henry Ford understood that he had to pay his workers enough so that they could afford the new products of mass production.
Bless his Jew-hating heart!
Henry Ford understood that he had to pay his workers enough so that they could afford the new products of mass production.
Anyone who wasn’t a complete retard could have seen this coming almost 30 years ago, when Reagan started trumpeting the glories of a “service-based economy”. Though only a high-school kid at the time, I thought to myself, “WHA???? If you don’t MAKE anything, what do you have to trade or sell?” Somehow, this glorious “service-based economy” for an emerging global marketplace didn’t look too competetive to me – or anyone else not completely munching down on the shit sandwich of ideological-based explanations offered by the enablers in the financial press – for the simple reason that dudes in China and India weren’t going to commute over here for a McDonald’s Happy Meal – their money was going to be spent a lot closer to home. My brother and I coined a term for it way back then: strip-mining the economy. And you know what you get from 25+ years of strip mining? All the goods with value gone and nothing left but a huge fucking godawful shithole mess.
Hoosier,
I did not write that Ford was not a racist, only that he understood a simple principle of economics.
Jennifer,
Yes, making money by pushing paper with only hot air to support the scheme turned out to be a very bad idea. Who would have thunk it? I argue that not only did the Wall Street gurus know the swindle titled the “financial crisis” was coming, but some of them helped it along for their own reasons, but for the most part for nothing less than the absolute right, (without consequence,) to screw over the American people whenever and wherever they choose.
Ah yes, seventies porn. One can only reflect on those glorious days of innocense when Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones among other classics were “popular”. There was a small theater in the fashion section of town where it was a social breakthrough when young couples could be seen standing in line to see “Debby Does Dallas” and other “art” films.
There were some European films made for the American market that attempted to pass off the porn as marital enhancement lessons, psychological studies of sexual behaviors, or an anthropologist’s observations provided to the public at a nominal fee, intended to bring a scientific perspective to obscene and gross rites and practices from around the world, People who enjoyed this sort of thing were titilated by the pictures of topless African women in “National Geograhic” when they were six to ten years of age.
A few mainstream American films attempted to shed light on concepts such as lesbianism. Shirley McClaine starred in a film, (in which she played a teacher in a lesbian relationship,) that was sympathetic toward the trials the women faced when a mean little bitch student of the boarding school whispered her shocking knowledge about her teacher to her visiting parents.
The school’s faculty were dutifully shocked by the discovery and there was going to be hell to pay if the accusations were true. Hell to pay, I tell ya’, yup, hell to pay. The film has an ending to satisfy conservative critics. The film serves as a warning that one cannot even afford to be thought of as gay or she will face a terrible social cost similar to that of the two teachers who rented a house together in the film.
Here we are today, and what…?
mikey,
Do you believe that certain principles about human behavior as described by D.H. Lawrence, Tolstoy, the founders and many others are not relevant to the question? Some human behavior is predictable, ask anyone in law enforcement, the military, Wall Street, the arts, and politics; some of it is not, but that which is should be recognized as a given.
Sorry to read about the grandmother who can only absorb a minutes’ information at a time
So you can’t actually answer my question about YOUR theory, huh?
Figured as much. Although I have to say I’m impressed by your complete lack of spittle. That is deeply appreciated…
mikey
Sounds like an excellent economic plan. Mine is to put new songs about the newly unemplyed from my Ice and Snow CD to work :
PSA: For Immediate Release
12/08/08 with song sample links.
Re: Singer/songwriter/shrink will “work” for the unemployed.
New Christmas CD features over 20 original modern rock and country songs. Recurrent theme is economic crisis during the holidays.
Psychologist, Dr. Bruce L. Thiessen, aka Dr. BLT, is working on a CD that will raise awareness, and, hopefully, money, for those most directly impacted by economic crisis.
I’m looking for sponsors and charitable organizations to serve as recipients so we can turn songs like these and others from the CD, Ice and Snow, into charity-generating Christmas jingles:
Billy Wants a Job 4 Christmas
Dr BLT
words and music by Dr BLT copyright 2008
http://www.drblt.net/music/BillyWantsAJDemo2.mp3
Children of December
Dr BLT
words and music by Dr BLT copyright 2008
http://www.drblt.net/music/ChildrenOfDecDemo2.mp3
For more information on the CD, visit:
http://www.drblt.net
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
Dr. BLT
drblt@drblt.net
I can haz pitchfork time plz?
OK…
@purpleOnion: I remember as a kid watching the occasional Socially Aware show (maybe a TV movie, maybe an episode of a TV series) with a tragic ending. I always understood it as a matter of underscoring the urgency of the matter and appealing to viewers’ sense of justice, rather than pleasing conservative critics, but I guess it didn’t really work that well. Maybe it just deepened the sense of despair.
What gets me about the remodeling crew is how they thought ’70s stuff “looked weird”. When 35-year-old stuff looks “weird” instead of merely outdated, that’s how you know you’re dealing with an esthetic conservative. And that carries over to the rest of how s/he sees that period. I’ve always maintained that the biggest mistake the cultural left-of-center made was embracing “retro” esthetics, even “ironically”, in the “new wave”/post-punk era–“yesterday’s thing for tomorrow”, so to speak, which is really just another way of saying “conservatism”. End game: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in his Slightly Updated Old-Time Money-Man costume (because that’s what it looks like to me).
OK, so what to do?
1. Renegotiate whatever mortgages are possible to renegotiate.
2. Wait on the foreclosures–let people get out of their mortgages if necessary and move into smaller homes that they can afford as long as they commit to getting their present houses sold. Better to wait a few months for more money.
3. Pay out on credit default swaps only for the actual value of the houses in question. If you took out five credit default swaps with five different companies on the same house, tough. You get the value of the house and that’s it.
4. Allow for worker representation on the boards of GM, Ford, and Chrysler. (What others have said about the government buying stock in these seems fine to me.)
5. Soak the rich. (Well, duh.)
OMG this blog can really start a long controbersy! I’ll have to catch up with it.
Good afternoon. I guess we’d be living in a boring, perfect world if everybody wished everybody else well. Help me! There is an urgent need for sites: kitchen islands. I found only this – Building a kitchen islands. Hotels, airfare, cars, condos, vacation, cruises, tours, tickets, travel guides. Immediately upon seizure of airline tickets, the seizing agency should notify the issuing carrier of the government intention to forfeit and determine. Thanks for the help :confused:, Damek from Liberia.
Hi all. A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. Help me! Could you help me find sites on the: . I found only this – order diflucan with amex. Just follow the alkaline list and the alkaline chart and you will be on your way to a healthy and balanced diet. With the shampoo rinsed from the feather, it can be left to dry overnight or a hairdryer can be used on its lowest setting. Thank 😎 Maikl from Saudi.
I cherished up to you’ll obtain carried out right here. The sketch is tasteful, your authored subject matter stylish. nonetheless, you command get bought an impatience over that you want be handing over the following. unwell undoubtedly come further beforehand again since precisely the similar just about very regularly inside case you protect this increase.