Perhaps the most galling characteristic of the banksters -- aside from their utter lack of common sense or basic empathy -- is their sheer cluelessness. It was already obvious that they couldn't care less that their shenanigans have wrecked millions of lives so far, cost families their only homes and incomes, and all that. But they don't even seem to comprehend why those people might resent having to pay them for the privilege of having their lives wrecked. It's truly puzzling. You know, insult to injury.
(I've called them thieves all year, and I stand by that. The smoking gun in the linked article is in the beginning -- A.I.G. execs didn't even want their own stock as compensation, "worthless" in their own words even though it was trading at $40/share at the time. Does anyone still need a fucking diagram on this?)
Maybe let's illustrate the comprehension gap in Spoiled Douchebag Connecticut-ese to these bastards: Let's say the pool boy at your vacation home in the Hamptons is porking your trophy wife. You don't mind as a man so much, since you are a spineless, dickless dweeb who can't satisfy her anyway, and it keeps her off your back, so she can just go shopping and leave you to swapping made-up war stories with your trader buddies.
The thing is, the pool boy has been throwing his back into it as of late, and your trophy wife is clearly starting to think about how she can take your dumb trader ass to the cleaners, and collect six-figure alimony while she and Taylor fuck all day and drive your Cayenne around. Not cool, bro-ham!
So Taylor the cuckolding pool boy orchestrates a slip-and-fall on your pool deck, and your coke-whore trophy wife -- for whom you screwed over your first wife to cover up your insecurities at being a paunchy, balding closet case -- simultaneously hits your monkey ass with papers, requesting divorce and that mid-six-figure alimony you were dreading.
Both cases get to court. The kid that's tapping your wife gets everything he's asking for, grinning like a rube that poured cooking oil on the floor of a supermarket and pulled a sack of dog food on himself, and got fucking paid for it. And your cunt trophy wife gets twice the alimony she was asking for. And custody of the kids. And the vacay house.
Okay, Mister Banker Asshole -- how you feel about those judges, is how 99% of America feels about you. Hope that clears things up.
"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
Thursday, December 31, 2009
The Power of Prayer
Oh, hey, no doubt, Rush Limbaugh has certainly been in my prayers as well. Yet still he continues to draw breath. Same with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the Horst Wessel gang. Might as well pray for a suitcase full of Franklins to land in your backyard.
Love the crybaby conservatard comments there, by the way, excoriating japing libruls. Hey, motherfuckers, where were the tears and outrage at the barrage of Chappaquiddick jokes at Ted Kennedy's demise, or Tom Coburn imploring his pagan goatwhore daemon to smite a colleague for him? I gots your incivility right here, son.
(And what sort of twee mezzofanuc wears "blue jeans, an argyle sweater and a tweed jacket with elbow patches", as Coburn apparently does? Sheesh. Nearly as retarded as Coburn, Brownback, and DeMint -- nary a hundred IQ points among the lot of them -- gathering to pray for the defeat of the neutered health-care bill. If prayer worked, those three certainly wouldn't be standing.)
Love the crybaby conservatard comments there, by the way, excoriating japing libruls. Hey, motherfuckers, where were the tears and outrage at the barrage of Chappaquiddick jokes at Ted Kennedy's demise, or Tom Coburn imploring his pagan goatwhore daemon to smite a colleague for him? I gots your incivility right here, son.
(And what sort of twee mezzofanuc wears "blue jeans, an argyle sweater and a tweed jacket with elbow patches", as Coburn apparently does? Sheesh. Nearly as retarded as Coburn, Brownback, and DeMint -- nary a hundred IQ points among the lot of them -- gathering to pray for the defeat of the neutered health-care bill. If prayer worked, those three certainly wouldn't be standing.)
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Writes of Passage
What Ed said. This has been a huge pet peeve of mine for some time. I love the way technology has democratized and facilitated our ability to communicate freely and easily. But it's sad to realize that so many people who have absolutely nothing to say, nor the skills to competently say it, have been empowered and enabled by these toys.
It's not about the linguistic lepidopterist's cri de coeur to faithfully preserve any and all conventions of spelling and punctuation, it's about what a moron's failure to observe those simple conventions communicates. At risk of stating the obvious -- but I seriously doubt it would be obvious to a preening halfwit like Sarah Palin -- the way a person writes is not only a function of the way they speak, but of the way they think. And what Palin communicates in her climate change twittering -- aside from the fact that she apparently does not know the difference between "ions" and "eons" -- is that she does not actually read, much less think about, the things she writes.
What you end up with is a shitload of people who don't bother to inform themselves about much of anything in any real depth, pontificating on subjects they know very little about. And since they don't read in general, they don't understand the fundamentals of composing an argument with coherence and structure and narrative heft. You get these stupid little word-salad blips that mean whatever the hell Miss Thang wishes they meant. But that's not writing; hell, it's not even typewriting.
In terms of intellectual honesty and probity, Palin is the equivalent of an illiterate, drug-addled dipshit on a sidewalk with a crayon and some cardboard, scrawling half-formed trifles of thought for the bemusement of unfortunate passersby. CNN, true to form, stenographs her nonsense uncritically, in fact casting her yet again as a scrapper unafraid to take on The Man. I mean, for fuck's sake.
Let's cut to the chase about what the climate change dispute is really about: exactly how many people around this benighted planet can achieve the American way of life, of consumption and indulgence, before it exacts a permanent, catastrophic price on a substantial part of the earth's ecosystem. We have it, they want it, and now that they have all the manufacturing jobs we used to have, as well as the technology to attain that goal, it becomes a number-crunching exercise.
Let's do some quick back-of-the-envelope calcs to illustrate. Figure that the most advanced industrialized economies -- North America, Europe, Japan -- total around 900 million people, out of roughly 7 billion total population. Figure also that the two most rapidly rising economies, China and India, have about 2.5 billion people just between the two of them. Each country has enormous seething underclasses and infrastructural gaps which will require attention in order to maintain their domestic stability.
The scale of just those two countries in comparison to Europe and the U.S. is amazing. Nothing Sarah Palin has ever tweeted or babbled about any subject indicates that she remotely comprehends any of this, that China and India each have lower classes far larger than the entire population of the United States. To bring them up to the same level that even the American underclass has would require efforts of a scope and scale that guarantees serious environmental consequences.
And yet we cannot continue to sit smugly at the top of the heap and deny to everyone else the creature comforts we take for granted. There is some sort of equilibrium that must be sought, or what we've seen just over the past decade -- the poles melting, mass mammalian extinctions continuing apace, clear-cutting everything in sight -- will be just a prelude. It can't be solved at some bien pensant circle jerk in Copenhagen, certainly, not with a bunch of douchebag private-jet limo libs smugly dictating terms for the peons, and overbreeding Third World shitholes refusing to take responsibility for their own demographics. But the dribbling buffoonery emanating from the denialists, who mindlessly chant "drill baby drill" without considering all the externalities of such endeavors, is far more destructive.
Perhaps this would be more readily apparent to a society that hasn't already done every conceivable thing it can to undermine its own capacity for reason and critical thinking. Dean Wormer was an optimist.
It's not about the linguistic lepidopterist's cri de coeur to faithfully preserve any and all conventions of spelling and punctuation, it's about what a moron's failure to observe those simple conventions communicates. At risk of stating the obvious -- but I seriously doubt it would be obvious to a preening halfwit like Sarah Palin -- the way a person writes is not only a function of the way they speak, but of the way they think. And what Palin communicates in her climate change twittering -- aside from the fact that she apparently does not know the difference between "ions" and "eons" -- is that she does not actually read, much less think about, the things she writes.
What you end up with is a shitload of people who don't bother to inform themselves about much of anything in any real depth, pontificating on subjects they know very little about. And since they don't read in general, they don't understand the fundamentals of composing an argument with coherence and structure and narrative heft. You get these stupid little word-salad blips that mean whatever the hell Miss Thang wishes they meant. But that's not writing; hell, it's not even typewriting.
In terms of intellectual honesty and probity, Palin is the equivalent of an illiterate, drug-addled dipshit on a sidewalk with a crayon and some cardboard, scrawling half-formed trifles of thought for the bemusement of unfortunate passersby. CNN, true to form, stenographs her nonsense uncritically, in fact casting her yet again as a scrapper unafraid to take on The Man. I mean, for fuck's sake.
Let's cut to the chase about what the climate change dispute is really about: exactly how many people around this benighted planet can achieve the American way of life, of consumption and indulgence, before it exacts a permanent, catastrophic price on a substantial part of the earth's ecosystem. We have it, they want it, and now that they have all the manufacturing jobs we used to have, as well as the technology to attain that goal, it becomes a number-crunching exercise.
Let's do some quick back-of-the-envelope calcs to illustrate. Figure that the most advanced industrialized economies -- North America, Europe, Japan -- total around 900 million people, out of roughly 7 billion total population. Figure also that the two most rapidly rising economies, China and India, have about 2.5 billion people just between the two of them. Each country has enormous seething underclasses and infrastructural gaps which will require attention in order to maintain their domestic stability.
The scale of just those two countries in comparison to Europe and the U.S. is amazing. Nothing Sarah Palin has ever tweeted or babbled about any subject indicates that she remotely comprehends any of this, that China and India each have lower classes far larger than the entire population of the United States. To bring them up to the same level that even the American underclass has would require efforts of a scope and scale that guarantees serious environmental consequences.
And yet we cannot continue to sit smugly at the top of the heap and deny to everyone else the creature comforts we take for granted. There is some sort of equilibrium that must be sought, or what we've seen just over the past decade -- the poles melting, mass mammalian extinctions continuing apace, clear-cutting everything in sight -- will be just a prelude. It can't be solved at some bien pensant circle jerk in Copenhagen, certainly, not with a bunch of douchebag private-jet limo libs smugly dictating terms for the peons, and overbreeding Third World shitholes refusing to take responsibility for their own demographics. But the dribbling buffoonery emanating from the denialists, who mindlessly chant "drill baby drill" without considering all the externalities of such endeavors, is far more destructive.
Perhaps this would be more readily apparent to a society that hasn't already done every conceivable thing it can to undermine its own capacity for reason and critical thinking. Dean Wormer was an optimist.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Vulgar Display of Pouter
For Peggy Noonan, this little jeremiad almost qualifies as a head-fake or a rope-a-dope. After some mild pseudo-populist clucking about how the economy's travails have deflated 'murkin's natural optimism and begun turning them against Obama (for, you know, essentially continuing Bush's economic and financial policies without missing a beat), she abruptly scoops up a couple armloads of hay from the barn floor and valiantly attempts to construct a nice strawman.
Forget the hip waders, bring a hazmat suit. It's gonna get thick. So thick that Nooners has even given her hunch a name, the "Adam Lambert Problem", which is apparently like the Alan Parsons Project, but more flamboyant and destructive to Our Culture, which is what?
Seriously, if any of these harrumphing "culture" bozos can pin down exactly what that is, in the monolithic sense they imply, and without lamenting the demise of I Love Lucy, I've yet to see it. Indeed, Nooners never quite gets around to identifying any cultural benchmarks of which she approves. She just knows that people in flyover country are easily startled, yet apparently not quite enough to just change the fucking channel.
It goes on like this, and of course Nooners, per usual, misses the damned point.
Uh-huh. All these things we are protecting our children from that pollute the airwaves, the sexual references, the language, the obnoxious behavior, the ill-treatment of others. Raise your hands out there if you learned about all those things at school, rather than teevee.
The core problem with culture vultures is that their social concerns are somewhat at odds with their economic sensibilities. Is America more coarse and vulgar than fifty years ago? Of course. Could being marketed to relentlessly, endlessly, everywhere we go and everything we see, constantly being pushed to spend money we don't have on shit we don't need, encouraged to borrow at usury rates for impulse purchases, self-actualizing through fuckyoumobiles and electronic gadgets, commodifying all and filtering through only the prism of desire and pure id, could any of that have to do with that coarseness and vulgarity? How about being rendered powerless and cynical by ever-growing economic disparity, a culture that unironically insists that greed is good, maybe that plays a part in this?
I mean, all those things require a concerted effort to turn sentient beings into dullards, and thence easy marks for whatever bridge is sold to them by telemarketers, self-help hustlers, SUV manufacturers and such like. It makes sense that their entertainment and activity choices would reflect that; you can't actively encourage masses of people to be spoon-fed morons and then expect them to seek quality in their choices for visual and auditory stimulation.
There's actually a few points in Nooners' essay with which reasonable people can agree, but it's particularly offensive that she chooses to prioritize it above ordinary citizens' genuine concerns about their economic viability. You want vulgar and coarse, how about banksters turning the finance system into street-corner numbers racket, then expecting the peons to pay for it and insisting on fat bonuses for their trouble.
I suppose there might actually be a few addled 'tards out there who really are more het up about Adam Lambert than they are about getting their jobs shipped overseas, or their house foreclosed on, or being a medical problem from utter destitution. But as always, those folks get precisely what they deserve.
I don't like Adam Lambert either. That's why I don't watch brain-and-soul-sucking crap like American Idol or The American Music Awards, whatever the fuck that is. It really is a free country, Peggy, and as such, people are free to turn the goddamned teevee off and, hell, read a book or take a walk or play a board game with their family, instead of this constant "the food is terrible and the portions are too small" whinging, especially in contrast with the truly vulgar bastards that have wrecked this country's economy, its optimism, and very likely its future.
But something tells me this isn't all about money. It's possible, and I can't help but think likely, that the poll is also about other things, and maybe even primarily about other things.
Forget the hip waders, bring a hazmat suit. It's gonna get thick. So thick that Nooners has even given her hunch a name, the "Adam Lambert Problem", which is apparently like the Alan Parsons Project, but more flamboyant and destructive to Our Culture, which is what?
Seriously, if any of these harrumphing "culture" bozos can pin down exactly what that is, in the monolithic sense they imply, and without lamenting the demise of I Love Lucy, I've yet to see it. Indeed, Nooners never quite gets around to identifying any cultural benchmarks of which she approves. She just knows that people in flyover country are easily startled, yet apparently not quite enough to just change the fucking channel.
It goes on like this, and of course Nooners, per usual, misses the damned point.
America is not prudish or closed-minded, it is exhausted. It cannot be exaggerated, how much Americans feel besieged by the culture of their own country, and to what lengths they have to go to protect their children from it.
Uh-huh. All these things we are protecting our children from that pollute the airwaves, the sexual references, the language, the obnoxious behavior, the ill-treatment of others. Raise your hands out there if you learned about all those things at school, rather than teevee.
The core problem with culture vultures is that their social concerns are somewhat at odds with their economic sensibilities. Is America more coarse and vulgar than fifty years ago? Of course. Could being marketed to relentlessly, endlessly, everywhere we go and everything we see, constantly being pushed to spend money we don't have on shit we don't need, encouraged to borrow at usury rates for impulse purchases, self-actualizing through fuckyoumobiles and electronic gadgets, commodifying all and filtering through only the prism of desire and pure id, could any of that have to do with that coarseness and vulgarity? How about being rendered powerless and cynical by ever-growing economic disparity, a culture that unironically insists that greed is good, maybe that plays a part in this?
I mean, all those things require a concerted effort to turn sentient beings into dullards, and thence easy marks for whatever bridge is sold to them by telemarketers, self-help hustlers, SUV manufacturers and such like. It makes sense that their entertainment and activity choices would reflect that; you can't actively encourage masses of people to be spoon-fed morons and then expect them to seek quality in their choices for visual and auditory stimulation.
There's actually a few points in Nooners' essay with which reasonable people can agree, but it's particularly offensive that she chooses to prioritize it above ordinary citizens' genuine concerns about their economic viability. You want vulgar and coarse, how about banksters turning the finance system into street-corner numbers racket, then expecting the peons to pay for it and insisting on fat bonuses for their trouble.
I suppose there might actually be a few addled 'tards out there who really are more het up about Adam Lambert than they are about getting their jobs shipped overseas, or their house foreclosed on, or being a medical problem from utter destitution. But as always, those folks get precisely what they deserve.
I don't like Adam Lambert either. That's why I don't watch brain-and-soul-sucking crap like American Idol or The American Music Awards, whatever the fuck that is. It really is a free country, Peggy, and as such, people are free to turn the goddamned teevee off and, hell, read a book or take a walk or play a board game with their family, instead of this constant "the food is terrible and the portions are too small" whinging, especially in contrast with the truly vulgar bastards that have wrecked this country's economy, its optimism, and very likely its future.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Deep Thought
Remember when Rahm Emanuel was like this hyper-bad-ass back-room enforcer who was, like, gonna make the most of that huge electoral majority and keep party discipline and make those Republitard biznitches cry uncle with that Krav Maga shit he learned in the Mossad? Yeah. Good times.
Stop, Democrats. Please, just stop. It takes real patience and practice to cultivate the level of mind-numbing ineptitude required to actually make the American health-care system worse than it already is.
Stop, Democrats. Please, just stop. It takes real patience and practice to cultivate the level of mind-numbing ineptitude required to actually make the American health-care system worse than it already is.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Consider the Asshole
[apologies to David Foster Wallace]
Leave it to the Wall Street Journal, presumably between weekly Karl Rove 'rhoid-poppers, to delicately understate the unearned role of prominence Senator Lieberputz (I-Massengill) has taken in the putative health-care-reform process.
Even a source, such as the WSJ, that would seem to have some inherent antagonism to Democrats and/or Holy Joe, fails to properly limn the obvious issue -- why Lieberman would continue to retain any sort of relationship at all with the Democratic Party. When he lost the '06 primary, he petulantly quit the party and ran against -- and beat -- the Democratic candidate, thanks in at least some part to campaigning by the current preznit. Since that time, he has shown his gratitude to both the party and Obama by ratfucking them at every possible opportunity, just for the sheer fum of it at times.
The fact that there is still a relationship to deteriorate is testament to the utter lack of sack in the Democratic Party. They're a bunch of cowards, hypocrites, and pussies, and they will continue to be so until they stop letting this hump push them around.
Yeah but, whaddaya gonna do about it, Ponyboy? You think these clowns haven't calculated a squawk factor into all this? Politically, it costs them less to play ball with Lieberdouche because they know the MoveOn crowd ain't goin' fuckin' anywhere. And until that factor gets changed, by action rather than merely the threat or mention of action, it'll stay exactly that way. There's just too much money on the table. You can't say that, senatorially, the insurance and pharmaceutical companies don't get what they pay for.
Bullshit, the relationship gets more and more symbiotic with each passing feint at a vote -- and all this drama for a meaningless, industry-written bill that does not address actual costs, but merely front-loads them. It will not improve the health-care system in this country one iota, it will merely grease the payment skids, because even though science, education, infrastructure, and all that are slipping away, one thing this country stands firm on is executive compensation and eight-figure bonuses taken out of the backs of the peons.
It should be clear by now that the Democrats need Lieberman just as much as he needs them. He provides them a convenient foil, always somehow managing to single-handedly prevent them from Doing The Right Thing. Funny how a dweeb with the voice and countenance of a cartoon character, who can't even ride in a car on Fridays, is thwarting this illustrious bulletproof majority we've been hearing so much about. Seriously, fuck you, Democrats. You lose because you deserve to.
I dunno, maybe it really is time to heighten those contradictions. The dime's worth of difference has gotten old, and life's too short to keep trudging to the booth to vote for Lucy with the football one more time.
Leave it to the Wall Street Journal, presumably between weekly Karl Rove 'rhoid-poppers, to delicately understate the unearned role of prominence Senator Lieberputz (I-Massengill) has taken in the putative health-care-reform process.
Sen. Joseph Lieberman's use of his swing vote to help quash a proposed expansion of Medicare marked the latest act in his deteriorating relationship with the Democratic Party.
Even a source, such as the WSJ, that would seem to have some inherent antagonism to Democrats and/or Holy Joe, fails to properly limn the obvious issue -- why Lieberman would continue to retain any sort of relationship at all with the Democratic Party. When he lost the '06 primary, he petulantly quit the party and ran against -- and beat -- the Democratic candidate, thanks in at least some part to campaigning by the current preznit. Since that time, he has shown his gratitude to both the party and Obama by ratfucking them at every possible opportunity, just for the sheer fum of it at times.
The fact that there is still a relationship to deteriorate is testament to the utter lack of sack in the Democratic Party. They're a bunch of cowards, hypocrites, and pussies, and they will continue to be so until they stop letting this hump push them around.
The liberal group MoveOn.org held rallies outside the White House and Mr. Lieberman's Hartford office Tuesday to protest his role. "It is absolutely absurd that after months of work, President Obama and the Democrats are letting one senator, Joe Lieberman, gut the health-care bill," said executive director Justin Ruben.
Yeah but, whaddaya gonna do about it, Ponyboy? You think these clowns haven't calculated a squawk factor into all this? Politically, it costs them less to play ball with Lieberdouche because they know the MoveOn crowd ain't goin' fuckin' anywhere. And until that factor gets changed, by action rather than merely the threat or mention of action, it'll stay exactly that way. There's just too much money on the table. You can't say that, senatorially, the insurance and pharmaceutical companies don't get what they pay for.
Many Democrats wanted to retaliate by stripping Mr. Lieberman of his Homeland Security Committee chairmanship, but the senator made an emotional appeal to his colleagues, and Messrs. Obama and Reid argued that punishing him would only hurt the Democrats.
Bullshit, the relationship gets more and more symbiotic with each passing feint at a vote -- and all this drama for a meaningless, industry-written bill that does not address actual costs, but merely front-loads them. It will not improve the health-care system in this country one iota, it will merely grease the payment skids, because even though science, education, infrastructure, and all that are slipping away, one thing this country stands firm on is executive compensation and eight-figure bonuses taken out of the backs of the peons.
It should be clear by now that the Democrats need Lieberman just as much as he needs them. He provides them a convenient foil, always somehow managing to single-handedly prevent them from Doing The Right Thing. Funny how a dweeb with the voice and countenance of a cartoon character, who can't even ride in a car on Fridays, is thwarting this illustrious bulletproof majority we've been hearing so much about. Seriously, fuck you, Democrats. You lose because you deserve to.
I dunno, maybe it really is time to heighten those contradictions. The dime's worth of difference has gotten old, and life's too short to keep trudging to the booth to vote for Lucy with the football one more time.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Patriot Games
As bad as the Raiders have been this year (aside from last week's upset in Pittsburgh, which was easily the best game this team has played in at least five years), it is always gratifying to see another article on what a punk and a quitter Randy Moss is.
Yes. Yes. That's the Moss I remember, the guy who picked Al Davis' pocket for $15 mil and dogged it like a practice-squad scrub for two fucking miserable years. The guy who didn't give two shits about the team or the fans, but never gave back a paycheck. You deserve him, massholes. Choke on it. It's why he'll never get that ring, nor does he deserve it.
Randy Moss finished today with a single, 16-yard catch, which led to a fumble. Brady's interception was intended for Moss.
And if you asked the Panthers what their gameplan was, it's simple. They helped whoever was covering Moss early on in the game with a safety. Then, once he was frustrated, they no longer needed to. Because by then, it was Game Over for No. 81.
"We knew he was going to shut it down," Panthers corner Chris Gamble told me after the game. "That's what we wanted to do him. That's what we did. ... He'd just give up a lot ... Slow down, he's not going deep, not trying to run a route. You can tell, his body language."
Gamble continued ... "I know everyone who plays against him, they can sense that. Once you get into him in the beginning of the game, he shuts it down a little bit."
Yes. Yes. That's the Moss I remember, the guy who picked Al Davis' pocket for $15 mil and dogged it like a practice-squad scrub for two fucking miserable years. The guy who didn't give two shits about the team or the fans, but never gave back a paycheck. You deserve him, massholes. Choke on it. It's why he'll never get that ring, nor does he deserve it.
Requiem for a Wet Dream
Paul Samuelson sounds like he was a pretty decent egg. It's a damn shame that apparently he was unable to communicate to the motherless Wall Street fucks -- including his nephew Larry "You Gonna Finish That?" Summers -- that sense of Depression-era mores he informed his own work with. Then again, Samuelson seemed at least to understand the difference between "economist" and "bookie", a distinction that is far lost on the current gang of underwritten thieves. Keep up the awesome work, Preznit Hopenchange!
I consider it a privilege to pay for their manses and bonuses, and I will gladly take turns heaving the blade when it's their turn at the block, should a sufficient amount of 'murkins turn off their dancin' shows and decide to do something about their pockets being picked. I dunno, maybe if Tim Geithner was fucking Kate Gosselin or something, some attention might be paid.
I consider it a privilege to pay for their manses and bonuses, and I will gladly take turns heaving the blade when it's their turn at the block, should a sufficient amount of 'murkins turn off their dancin' shows and decide to do something about their pockets being picked. I dunno, maybe if Tim Geithner was fucking Kate Gosselin or something, some attention might be paid.
News of the World
Soooo....anything new happen with Tiger Woods' cock that I need to be apprised of? Because it is apparently of the utmost necessity that I know where he's been sticking that thing. Jesus, and we thought the coverage of Michael Jackson's death was ridonkulously over the top.
Incidentally, should the need ever arise for the planet to know everywhere mine was during my twenties, I'm working on a spreadsheet.
Meanwhile, the banksters' pillaging of the shell of the nation continues apace. We should all have been related to Bob Rubin, I guess, if we were expecting a fair shake.
Incidentally, should the need ever arise for the planet to know everywhere mine was during my twenties, I'm working on a spreadsheet.
Meanwhile, the banksters' pillaging of the shell of the nation continues apace. We should all have been related to Bob Rubin, I guess, if we were expecting a fair shake.
Saturday, December 05, 2009
The Song Remains the Same
Big thanks to The Vile Scribbler for steering me to this little gem. Basically an updated iteration of Steve Albini's classic screed on record-industry accounting. These people are vipers, always have been. No one will miss them.
Music industry weasels always liked to congratulate themselves that Zeppelin, for example, got treated well because Ahmet Ertegun loved them. Bullshit -- Zeppelin got paid because they had Peter Grant for a manager. Ertegun loved them because they made him lots of money. People can chicken-egg that shit however they like, it always comes down to money. But, you know, people will buy pretty much anything if you push it on them hard and often enough, as if the continued existence of Lady Gaga isn't proof enough of that.
So it's particularly telling that in the case of Too Much Joy, the major labels really haven't learned a damned thing from what's happened to them over the last decade. They took their shoddy promotional and accounting practices into the digital realm, that's all. They give crap bands like REM $80 mil, bully it out of the hides of all the other bands on the label, and wonder why no one thinks twice about fucking them over on LimeWire.
In another 5-10 years, the majors will either be gone or transformed. There's really not much use for them anymore, at least for production, distribution, marketing, or swag. Maybe fronting money and scheduling shit for some short-bus band that can't figure it out for themselves. But the payola stranglehold these assholes shared with radio is done, and good riddance. There's more bands than ever, and more good bands than ever, and the music's cheaper and more plentiful than ever.
A truly free market -- the predatory capitalist's worst nightmare.
Music industry weasels always liked to congratulate themselves that Zeppelin, for example, got treated well because Ahmet Ertegun loved them. Bullshit -- Zeppelin got paid because they had Peter Grant for a manager. Ertegun loved them because they made him lots of money. People can chicken-egg that shit however they like, it always comes down to money. But, you know, people will buy pretty much anything if you push it on them hard and often enough, as if the continued existence of Lady Gaga isn't proof enough of that.
So it's particularly telling that in the case of Too Much Joy, the major labels really haven't learned a damned thing from what's happened to them over the last decade. They took their shoddy promotional and accounting practices into the digital realm, that's all. They give crap bands like REM $80 mil, bully it out of the hides of all the other bands on the label, and wonder why no one thinks twice about fucking them over on LimeWire.
In another 5-10 years, the majors will either be gone or transformed. There's really not much use for them anymore, at least for production, distribution, marketing, or swag. Maybe fronting money and scheduling shit for some short-bus band that can't figure it out for themselves. But the payola stranglehold these assholes shared with radio is done, and good riddance. There's more bands than ever, and more good bands than ever, and the music's cheaper and more plentiful than ever.
A truly free market -- the predatory capitalist's worst nightmare.
Journography
Sully quite rightly gets it that the glee club at Politico specializes in verbal rub-and-tugs, yet there's something slightly off about the verb tense:
"Increasingly". "Has become". How about "are" and "have been for quite some fucking time"? Hell, I was referring to Allen as "Open Mike" several years ago, back when Politico was just a goopy stain in Pool Boy Vandehei's board shorts. This is the same breed of dipshit that was transcribing any and every paranoid Clinton invention throughout the '90s with halfhearted rebuttals at best (not that they would have had the presence of mind to avoid printing rumor and conjecture in the first place).
Seriously, what journalist in their right goddamned mind has to bother with slobbering Dick Cheney's knob? Yet Pool Boy and Open Mike do exactly that, not because of any dark conspiracy, but because they're housebroken by now. It doesn't even occur to them to call bullshit anymore. The best you can hope for is some pseudo-Gawker "as if" tone attesting to their postured skepticism.
Besides, one never knows when the next opportunity will come along for the yearbook society to fawn over the cheerleaders:
Hi-yooooo! Look, I get it -- the Gridiron dinner and the press corpse dinner in the spring, that's supposedly where these mutual antagonists get to set aside grievances and roast each other. Haw haw. Oh, it is to laugh.
And that's precisely my point -- these two sets of people are supposed to be mutually antagonistic. They're not supposed to get together for palsy-walsy no-camera strokefests. But these jerkoffs go the same parties all fucking year.
The media assholes pretend not to realize that for the politicians, they are the coveted "get".
Without constant, barely skeptical coverage and dutiful transcription, Sarah Palin would disappear from everyone's radar. Ya know? She's pimping a crap book for the sort of morons whose last book finished was The Secret, getting a fat little retirement fund off it, while the lies she told and the shenanigans she engaged in back in her politically inbred little state get forgotten.
Ditto Cheney; the guy left office as one of the most universally despised people in American government, and unless he's being brought to trial, there's not much reason to talk to him. As the saying goes, every word out of his piehole is a lie, including "and" and "the".
The press likes to strut around, pretending they're shining klieg lights on the dark recesses of governance, when in fact it's just a camera light with a gauzy soft-focus lens. It's not mutual antagonism, it's symbiosis.
Increasingly, these journos see themselves as conduits for politicians, not as independent actors determined to get at the truth and hold the powerful accountable. There are no follow-ups any more; and when you see how Palin was insulated from real questioning in the campaign and book tour, you realize how corrupted the MSM has become....These people are not checks on power; they are increasingly its willing accomplices.
"Increasingly". "Has become". How about "are" and "have been for quite some fucking time"? Hell, I was referring to Allen as "Open Mike" several years ago, back when Politico was just a goopy stain in Pool Boy Vandehei's board shorts. This is the same breed of dipshit that was transcribing any and every paranoid Clinton invention throughout the '90s with halfhearted rebuttals at best (not that they would have had the presence of mind to avoid printing rumor and conjecture in the first place).
Seriously, what journalist in their right goddamned mind has to bother with slobbering Dick Cheney's knob? Yet Pool Boy and Open Mike do exactly that, not because of any dark conspiracy, but because they're housebroken by now. It doesn't even occur to them to call bullshit anymore. The best you can hope for is some pseudo-Gawker "as if" tone attesting to their postured skepticism.
Besides, one never knows when the next opportunity will come along for the yearbook society to fawn over the cheerleaders:
Palin spoke for 11 ½ minutes, poking gentle fun at the media.
“Sometimes you just gotta trust your instincts,” she said, “and when you don’t, you end up in places like this.”
But it had some value: “At least now I can put a face to the newspapers I do read.”
Kidding aside, sort of, “It's good to be here though, really, in front of this audience of leading journalists and intellectuals,” Palin said, “or as I like to call it, a death panel."
Hi-yooooo! Look, I get it -- the Gridiron dinner and the press corpse dinner in the spring, that's supposedly where these mutual antagonists get to set aside grievances and roast each other. Haw haw. Oh, it is to laugh.
And that's precisely my point -- these two sets of people are supposed to be mutually antagonistic. They're not supposed to get together for palsy-walsy no-camera strokefests. But these jerkoffs go the same parties all fucking year.
The media assholes pretend not to realize that for the politicians, they are the coveted "get".
Without constant, barely skeptical coverage and dutiful transcription, Sarah Palin would disappear from everyone's radar. Ya know? She's pimping a crap book for the sort of morons whose last book finished was The Secret, getting a fat little retirement fund off it, while the lies she told and the shenanigans she engaged in back in her politically inbred little state get forgotten.
Ditto Cheney; the guy left office as one of the most universally despised people in American government, and unless he's being brought to trial, there's not much reason to talk to him. As the saying goes, every word out of his piehole is a lie, including "and" and "the".
The press likes to strut around, pretending they're shining klieg lights on the dark recesses of governance, when in fact it's just a camera light with a gauzy soft-focus lens. It's not mutual antagonism, it's symbiosis.