Thursday, November 11, 2010

Clearly Life Is a Drag, by Which I Mean a Net That Keeps Pulling the Most Unsavory and Useful Boots We Either Put on Lamenting, or Eat with the Hooks of Some Big Idea Gripping the Sides of Our Mouths and Yanking Them Upward in a Conceptual Grimace

Please understand the following cuts:
  1. Raises the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare to 69.
  2. Cuts Social Security benefits.
  3. Ends the mortgage tax deduction.
  4. Ends the tax deduction for workers' health benefits.
  5. Freezes salaries for federal workers for 3 years.
  6. Establishes co-pays for veterans at VA health services.
  7. Raises fees to visit the national parks and the Smithsonian.
  8. Merges the Small Business Administration into an agency (Commerce) that has always prioritized helping bigger businesses, and cuts their budget.
  9. Eliminates the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools.
are not being proposed in spite of there being a sitting Democratic president but because there's a sitting Democratic president.

Fuck it, I don't have the will or energy to rework the fuckarrgh again today beyond noting Veterans' Day is an awesome day to promote cutting veterans' benefits (and if I was Corporate preparing for nastier, hopefully - if desperately - more profitable resource wars, I'd start lowering the labor costs too and I'd start making quality of life shittier in just those demographics most cannon fodder is already recruited from).

Besides, Friday is Neil Young's sixty-fifth birthday:


O! the new album works just fine for me:



  • Obama, nailed: His eloquence finds its natural key not in explanations but in statements of purpose. Obama wants credit for the highest intentions even when conceding that he lacks the will to fulfil them. The trouble is that a politician who says what he would like to do and then fails to do it leaves himself open to attack on both counts. You disappoint your supporters and at the same time give notice to your enemies that the thing they stopped you from doing was the thing you would have liked to do.
  • On austerity.
  • Reagan Revolution, Obama version.
  • It's on.
  • Exactly.
  • It's a shame Froomkin writes for HuffPo since I generally don't link to HuffPo (because I'm asked not to for very valid reasons, and if he wants to reiterate why for newer readers - and thank you - in comments, he's welcome), but this post on the Bowles-Simpson is worth reading.
  • Daily obamapostasy.
  • Daily obamapostasy.
  • When you've lost David Sirota..... 
  • Veteran's Day: fuck that shit.
  • Honoring veterans. See opening of post re: veterans.
  • Crawl of duty.
  • Betting 2012.  




     
    LITTLE VOICE

    Matthew Zapruder

    I woke this morning to the sound of a little voice
    saying this life, it was good while it lasted, but I just
    can't take it any longer. I'm going to stop shaving
    my teeth and chew my face. I'm going to finish inventing
    that way to turn my blood into thread and knit
    a sweater the shape of a giant machete and chop
    my head right off. The leaves had a green
    aspect, all their faces turned down towards earth.
    This is exactly how I wanted to act, but I didn't
    know where the little voice had hidden, and anyway
    who talks like that? What a loss, another tiny
    brilliant mind switched off by that same big boring finger.
    Clearly life is a drag, by which I mean a net that keeps
    pulling the most unsavory and useful boots we
    either put on lamenting, or eat with the hooks of some
    big idea gripping the sides of our mouths and yanking them
    upward in a conceptual grimace. Said the little voice,
    that is. I was just half listening, one quarter wondering
    what the little park the window looked onto was named,
    and one quarter thanking the war I knew was somewhere
    busy returning all those limbs to their phantoms.

    13 comments:

    1. <----- Big fan of Crystal Castles.

      ReplyDelete
    2. Non-Fleabus header. Nice Wire choice.

      ReplyDelete
    3. At 6:22 AM Friday, the header was a pic of a keyboard.

      HuffPo is a hotbed of anti-science--especially anti-vaccination--wackaloonitude. It is not credible, and it's a shame that many otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

      Eastern Shore: still a shithouse.

      I don't want them to build townhouses next to the MV golf course, either. That's because they should build the fucking M83, which has been in the fucking master plan for as long as the fucking ICC.

      The uniforms link is busted--I'll take a look at Steinz in a little bit and find it that way.

      Holding the excesses of various administrations against people who served in the military for reasons having nothing to do with those excesses is fucking ungracious, to put it kindly. I've always disliked that blog, and I'm a little startled that you chose to link to that post. It's fine that the asshole acknowledges that he set out to do a rude post, but that's a long way from acknowledging that is appallingly and deliberately ignorant of context.

      The ladypoverty piece, on the other hand, while a dense exploration of its own ass, is a much more measured and realistic acknowledgement of reality.

      ReplyDelete
    4. 7:08 AM (when I actually posted the comment, as opposed to when I started poking around and feeding Databoy while still fitfully composing the comment): still there. Wake up, slacker.

      ReplyDelete
    5. Keyboard? What are you talking about?

      I don't necessarily agree with what Silber says (though I do far more often than I don't), but he's always provocative.

      And JRB is a far nicer and more tolerant person than I am.

      ReplyDelete
    6. Sorry but I voted yesterday and not for United. For the Capitals actually.

      Landru, I completely agree with your perspective on HuffPo but persist in believing that some folks' opinions are worth reading regardless of the publisher. (FTR, this piece isn't one of them imo.)

      As for the Commission (which has no report, no consensus, and only a two person press conference) this is the piece that sums it up best for me. http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/11/deficit-commission-serious I find most analyses of what has been eeked out profoundly shallow.

      ReplyDelete
    7. Hey, unrelated to anything, one of mine here at the house did something to the PC monitor display, squashed it sideways and everything looks like shit. It's driving me fucking nuts, and I'm a dope and can't figure out from the control panel how to return it to original settings. Help.

      ReplyDelete
    8. Windows XP? Vista? 7?

      Try pointing to the background of the monitor (not to an app) and right clicking. There should be something about properties. Go there and play with the display tab. I'm guessing it the screen size/resolution but I don't have enough information.

      ReplyDelete
    9. 7. I've tried the right click and can't figure it out. And it's this PC - everything looks fine on laptop.

      Then, to prove my dopeness, I just went to see if it was Firefox or everything, and when I opened motherfucking IE I discover that youtubes don't load in IE on the blog. Heh.

      ReplyDelete
    10. Yea, that Catfood Commission was way out of line. You know, they've got to get the consensus of 14 out of 18 members, some of whom are elected. My guess: not much of that trial (lead) balloon is gonna' float. I wouldn't get too worked up over it. And besides, where the f is the Jobs Commission, huh?

      re PC: check your plugs & connections, etc. Reboot. Aren't there little buttons on the monitor front, side, or back that control that? Sorry, to help I'd probably have to be there and fool around with it.

      Wire. So cool. Crazy Horse. Hot.

      ReplyDelete
    11. Also, with regard to the Catfood Commission, I like this listing of some of the staff: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/10/AR2010111006850.html

      "one in four commission staffers is paid by outside entities, many of which have strong ideological points of view about how to tackle the deficit.

      For example, the salaries of two senior staffers, Marc Goldwein and Ed Lorenzen, are paid by private groups that have previously advocated cuts to entitlement programs. Lorenzen is paid by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, while Goldwein is paid by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which is also partly funded by the Peterson group. " -- more where that came from.

      As for the computer, there is always the 'throw a fit at whoever has been using it' method.

      ReplyDelete
    12. After a bunch of soft reboots I just hard rebooted the machine and it's fixed. Weird. I swear, next machine I'm looking long and hard at Mac (before probably buying another motherfucking windows).

      Catfood Commission is the beginning of the 2012 election cycle. Balloons and pollsters, marketers and propagandists.

      ReplyDelete
    13. I swear, next machine I'm looking long and hard at Mac (before probably buying another motherfucking windows)

      Hah, I'm in exactly the reverse position. I will tell you Macs are getting shittier by the day, nay, the hour.

      ReplyDelete