January 2012
December 2011
Play
2012: A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy As the Human World Breaks Apart →
wonkette.com
So I wrote my year-end piece for Wonkette, and it’s basically a very long Mayan Apocalypse/2012 rant that ends up yelling at Radiohead for being frauds, because they wouldn’t go play their guitars for 10 minutes at Occupy Wall Street.
On one hand, doomsday predictors have always been wrong. On the other, they only need to be right once.
"It's not at all out-of-line to say that Tumblr has become to Occupy what Facebook was to Egypt or Twitter to Iran." →
theatlanticwire.com
Finally we are approaching a national, adult discussion of what “class” means in this country… on Tumblr.
Play
“Though it was promoted as a sitcom, Seinfeld wasreally a commercial designed to promote the city as the rightful home for the elite. With the threat of class war vanquished, the rulers determined thecity to be the most effective device for delivering goods, showcasing products and inculcating thepopulation with “the Joneses” – the desire to live up to the standard set by the fashion, beauty, andluxury industries.
The city was reborn as the super mall, its allure augmented by its storied history, born of the diversity which would be abolished. Cheap white labor, in the form of aspiring artists, could be lured via this history, mythologized in books which marketed the city through the very idiosyncratic or marginal character its advertisers had helped to systematically exterminate.
The city’s new privileged inhabitants would wear their city’s outlaw image as a badge of honor and even venerate it with fervor, fiercely proud of a history they had never experienced, let alone contributed to - like suburbanites living on a Civil War battlefield and boasting about Pickett’s charge.
In a sense, though, they earned bragging rights: the city’s premium rents and boutique prices came with this fantasy narrative. Ethnic cleansing would be accomplished via eviction: the mass deportation that had worked so well on the Native Americans.
The indigenous city people, who had survived urban blight, gangs, systemic unemployment, police brutality, the state-sponsored crack epidemic, and PCP, finally met their match when faced with Seinfeld Syndrome.”
-Ian Svenonius, The Psychic Soviet
For FY 2011, the Observer Media Group will post a profit for the first time in its 24 year history. →
nypost.com
Been dying to let that cat out of the bag for a while now.
“If he’s making money, I’ll eat my hat in front of Macy’s window,” scoffed one rival.
Have you tried the Asian Salad at McDonald’s?
Play
“In sum: the President can kill whomever he wants anywhere in the world (including U.S. citizens) without a shred of check or oversight, and has massively escalated these killings since taking office (at the time of Obama’s inauguration, the U.S. used drone attacks in only one country (Pakistan); under Obama, these attacks have occurred in at least six Muslim countries). Because it’s a Democrat (rather than big, bad George W. Bush) doing this, virtually no members of that Party utter a peep of objection (a few are willing to express only the most tepid, abstract “concerns” about the possibility of future abuse). And even though these systematic, covert killings are widely known and discussed in newspapers all over the world — particularly in the places where they continue to extinguish the lives of innocent people by the dozens, including children — Obama designates even the existence of the program a secret, which means our democratic representatives and all of official Washington are barred by the force of law from commenting on it or even acknowledging that a CIA drone program exists (a prohibition enforced by an administration that has prosecuted leaks it dislikes more harshly than any other prior administration).” —Glenn Greenwald
