substitute: (smartypants)
Approved by the League of Women Honkers, the Tofu Hut Corporation, and Yoyodyne LLC, here is the only guide you'll need to California's propositions. Courtesy [livejournal.com profile] kafkateer I present: Election FEVER!
substitute: (chinatown drive)
Could everyone please tone down the crazy a little bit with regard to the influenza?

Strains of influenza virus like this show up. It's happened before and will happen again. This one might go big and cause a lot of suffering, and probably won't. The WHO and national agencies are doing a good job of coordinating and sharing information. All you can actually do right now is hope things go well and not cough on each other, and wash your hands regularly. That's it. Really.

Conspiracies, fakes, government-created viruses, the national politics of your country and others, the bad behavior of pharmaceutical companies, and the current oncoming worldwide financial depression are possible but unlikely sources of the problem. None of these exciting things are necessary to explain an influenza outbreak.

Conspiracies do exist, and many are successful. They are boring, and unsurprisingly they don't show up on CNN. Fat white men in suits conspire to start wars, fix prices, steal natural resources, poison people, and crush the rights of individuals. They get away with it most of the time. Keep your eye on those bastards.

These guys don't need to create an influenza pandemic, or fake 9/11's plane crashes, or kill Princess Diana, or hide the UFOs. Those are things that happen in movies where our heroes run in slow-mo from an explosion at the end.

In short, it's very unlikely that the swine flu is engineered by some shadowy cabal. It's much more likely that it's an outbreak of a nasty flu strain.

But almost everything about your daily life is in some way made worse by those fat white men in suits cutting deals with your birthright. Maybe they deserve more of your attention.
substitute: (pogo)
Obama is the liberals' Reagan.

As someone who had to put up with it from the other side, I have this to say to the currently freaked out right wing and/or actual conservatives:

1. I feel your pain.

2. Neener, neener.

3. It's all part of life's rich pageant.
substitute: (dubbya)
You know, the one that's being passed around in email, the one your dad wants you to watch, the "chicago tea party" thing?

It's poorly concealed astroturf from the usual billionaires. Just so you know.

EDIT: It appears that the Playboy article, which has now been pulled from their site, was at a minimum poorly researched and may have been slanderous. The Koch connection has not been proved. Please see my later entry.
substitute: (network)
We're hardly into the new era, and already the honeymoon is over. Broken promises, failed reforms, and betrayals of principle have crushed my dreams of this so-called "change." To summarize:
  • Plastic clamshell packaging has not yet been banned.

  • I and several other friends have dry, painful skin and a recurring cough.

  • Nothing, not even a plan, to replace our nation's dilapidated traffic cones.

  • Open punditry is still tolerated and even encouraged.

  • The President-Elect cannot cure the King's Evil by touch, nor has he called his men to horse against the Dragon, as it was foretold in olden times.

  • Just like his predecessor, he has not protected us from the Manimals. I am already on record here and here and yet I hear nothing from Mr. Obama.
Welcome to another eight years of tyranny and incompetence. WON'T GET FOOLED AGAIN!
substitute: (atticus)


From youtube because 236.com's embedding blows.
substitute: (atticus)
The "fun" starts at about 2:40

substitute: (lopan)
mark & richard

We're trying to figure out if they're okay and whether they were arrested.
substitute: (Default)
This is a good day to read those Page 14/third page of "more news" stories, because it's a great day to bury something you can't completely hide.

I'm just saying.
substitute: (network)
http://www.sfgate.com/webdb/prop8/

My own donations aren't there yet! Harrumph. I did notice that the Very Nice Lady 65 year old high school cheerleader across the street voted for it, and the parents of the coolest kid in my childhood piano class voted against it. I'm just saying.

None of the businesses are ones I would be involved with anyway.
substitute: (dubbya)
pale, in paws, see

Plus additional hilarity in the comment thread at [livejournal.com profile] ugly_crap
substitute: (legion badge)
RESEARCHERS FIND LARGEST YET SUBPRIME NUMBER

WASHINGTON, DC (AP) — Economists working at the United States Department of Treasury and top Wall Street banks announced the historic discovery of a very large subprime number, the biggest yet seen.

The group, working in secrecy for years and using banks and real estate holdings worldwide as a laboratory, found the gigantic number some time in the last year and is only now releasing the information to the public.

"This is a win-win," said Gary Leukotomakis, the Treasury's Chief New Economist. "We've shown that subprime numbers far beyond anything previously imagined are now possible, and even likely." Subprime numbers, which may seem esoteric to the typical American, are used in complicated financial transactions such as derivatives, credit swaps, REITs, "Jumbo loans," nonconforming loans, and spectacular, heart-stopping international financial crises.

Thad Labbé, a senior economician at Goldman Sachs, credited new financial technologies for the breakthrough. "We had always theorized about the power of a regulatory vacuum, but when we were able to produce one in the field everything took a quantum leap," he enthused. "Everything else we needed — weightless real estate, risk-free quantum risk, low-viscosity greed-through liquidity, and unpoppable Hyper-Bubbles — all of that stemmed from this revolutionary new postregulatory paradigm."

"In layman's terms," said Labbé, "it was like free money. But forever, because it's government science."

Tiara Hampton, a professor of Freedom Science at the Guthy-Renker Institute for Postscientific Study, agrees. "This proves what we've been saying all along, what naysayers have pooh-poohed. There actually is no hard limit to a subprime number, and the actual risk to researchers is nil." "In fact," she remarked, "risk in this quantum environment is entirely reversed, so that it's not possible to suffer consequences from so-called financial risk unless you're unrelated to the experiment completely."

Sources close to the team estimated the subprime number as nearly 700 billion, but cautioned that this number was not exact. "You have to understand," said one source with first-hand knowledge, "that the actual number will be the product of rectal extraction for some time. The important thing is that it's big, and bigger by a big number than the last big number."

Spokesmen for the research group said they did not yet know what would produce the next large subprime number, but that they were confident it would be discovered in much the same way.

The research group, which until now had been working behind a veil of secrecy, was funded by the Freedom Science Foundation, the Goldman-Sachs/Treasury Revolving Door Society, and subscribers like you.

(tip o'the hat to [livejournal.com profile] mcbrennan for the inspiration)
substitute: (dubbya)
M*A*S*H

Maybe it could be a series of billboards and skywriters, or sound trucks blaring, or a daily TV spot, but it's necessary. People in my country are arguing about the most ridiculous things right now — particularly in an election year, but just generally — and while we all have this big food fight there's a ghost at the party.

It's the war. Nothing comes before stopping it. Please remember that.
substitute: (winnebago man)
It's official; we've broken the stupid barrier now. I just read about 10 different opinions about the U.S. election and each one made my head hurt worse than all the rest. Identity politics, personality politics, talk radio victims, Orwellian doublespeak, fuck all of it.

I have my vote made up and the rest is just noise now. I'm not going to pay attention to anything anyone says, including what I say to myself. As St. Jack Rebney said in the Book of Winnebago:

I DON'T WANT ANY MORE BULLSHIT ANYTIME DURING THE DAY. FROM ANYONE, THAT INCLUDES ME.

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