COME TO THE CHE FOR SNUFFING

i knock the stuffin off dat english muffin



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Merry CHRISTmas

Man, I can't believe it's only been 6,000 years since man and dinosaurs walked god's glorious earth together! I guess time flies when you're blessed with the power of Christ!

A Fresh Take On Disney

And last but best:

This guy's YouTube channel is fucking gold, and I've been doing nothing than watching these since Magical Fuckers showed me them. Go here and check it all out. One caveat should be mentioned, however: this guy has a pretty horrific user name.

Huxley Vs. Orwell

Spoiler alert: they were both kinda right.

(via Reddit)

If the image below doesn't work out for you, go here.

BERNIE FUCKING SANDERS

"[The] top one percent has seen a tripling of the percentage of income they earned since 1970s. Top one percent owning 23 percent of all income, more than the bottom 50 percent. Top one percent now owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. That’s not the foundation of a democratic society; that’s the foundation for an oligarchic society."

giving up christmas

it's real good

http://givingup.castlemorbius.com/christmas.html

Keith Olbermann on Obama's Capitulation

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Olbermann here brings up a good question, one that I couldn't even imagine raising on this day two years ago: should President Obama even be re-nominated in 2012?

Things I Liked In 2010

- Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

- WikiLeaks

- Night Catches Us

- The awkward, mid-speech photos of Sarah Palin that every article on the Huffington Post about her uses.

- The NBC comedy Community (Thursday nights at 8)

- Enter The Void

- Women - Public Strain

- Nicole Krauss's Great House

- Antoine Dodson

- The Austin, Texas Whole Foods

- Alan Grayson's visual aides

- The internet

- Swans's don't-call-it-a-reunion reunion

- Everything Kanye West

- Zola Jesus

- Boardwalk Empire

- The episode of Mad Men entitled "The Suitcase"

- Marcel The Shell With Shoes On:

- Colum McCann's Let The Great World Spin, which actually came out last year, but I read this year.

- The National - High Violet

- Other things, probably

PIANO SHOP DECEMBER 18TH!!!!

OR ELSE

Some art to lighten up your bummer

HORROR VACUI vs STROOMHUIS vs MARTYN from Jeroen Erosie on Vimeo.

I got these from a really cool art blog called Booooooom, which you should keep an eye on.

BUMMER TUESDAY

This is the biggest bummer of a Tuesday that I can remember. There were two gigantic bummers that occurred this morning.

First bummer: President Barack Obama capitulated to almost every Republican demand concerning tax cuts, most odious among these the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for the top 2% of earners. For reasons why this is a serious bummer, look at two of the last three posts here, and also look to this article from Robert Reich. And here is Obama himself, in a press conference this morning, being condescending as fuck talking about this country being founded on compromise:

Dude, you are totally missing the point. The reason that us liberals, for which you apparently have a growing distaste, are so upset is that YOU'RE COMPROMISING BEFORE THE FIGHT EVEN STARTS. This process illustrates it perfectly. As far as I can tell, Obama worked exclusively with Republicans on this deal, forgoing Democratic input entirely. And when the bill ends up looking like some Republican, power-subservient wish list, he expects Democrats to simply get in line because he OK'd it and still believes that he's "our guy." It's time to discard this fallacy once and for all. This president does not work for the people that Democrats are supposed to be working for. He works for the rich and the powerful, just like almost any other politician. His policies thus far have looked at every turn like Republican policies. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

Secondly, Julian Assange was arrested in the UK this morning, and despite numerous people coming forward willing to put up bail money, was inexplicably denied bail, even though he has been completely cooperative since his arrest warrant was issued, including turning himself in. Not that you would know this with the media claiming his detention to be the end result of an "international manhunt." In related bummer news, Visa joined Mastercard today in refusing to allow people using their credit cards to register opinion on the matter by donating to WikiLeaks. The only way that anyone can donate to the organization now is through wire transfer.

I know everyone (myself included) has been seemingly talking about nothing but WikiLeaks the past couple of weeks, but I honestly think that this is one of the most important and revealing things to happen to this country in our lifetimes. I have never seen those in power this disturbed, even threatened, by civilian action before. Be it the political, financial, military, or media elites, everyone in power has been absolutely losing their shit over this. The sheer number and force of lies and the desperate attempts by politicians to make it seem like what they are doing is anything other than a gross violation of the rule of law is something unseen since the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Sure, you could bring up any number of human rights violations that have occurred and been exposed in the interim, but none of those have had even close to the level of nearly unanimous support that the witch hunt of Julian Assange has received. Nevermind that those such as the editorial board of the New York Times who have been leading this crusade would by any standard be just as complicit in any alleged wrongdoing on the part of WikiLeaks since they are the one's who actually published the documents.

In light of this crusade against free speech and free press that the elites have embarked upon in recent weeks, this release by the State Department today is absurdly laughable:

The United States is pleased to announce that it will host UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day event in 2011, from May 1 - May 3 in Washington, D.C. UNESCO is the only UN agency with the mandate to promote freedom of expression and its corollary, freedom of the press.

The theme for next year’s commemoration will be 21^st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers. The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals’ right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.

So, yeah, Bummer Tuesday.

Edit: Thank goodness

The Book Bloc

This is more or less a re-post from the Verso Books Blog, which is itself taken from the blog of Italian "band of authors" Wu Ming as well an an interview with the latter conducted by the Italian daily paper Il Fatto Quotidiano.

Apparently at one of the protests against Berlusconi's proposed education cuts, a group of students formed a "Book Bloc," using crude plastic representations of various works of literature and philosophy to shield themselves from the police. A photographic depiction:


Among these works was a novel written by some of the authors in the Wu Ming group under an earlier pseudonym, Luther Blissett, called Q (visible at the very left of the photograph), which dealt with events surrounding the Protestant Reformation and the Peasant Uprising in Germany in the 16th century. In the interview, Wu Ming offered their rather fanciful interpretation of the titles represented in the bloc:

Boccaccio's Decameron, which is about people sharing stories while waiting for the plague to end; Asimov's The Naked Sun, which is the description of a world where humans no longer touch each other; Melville's Moby Dick, which is an epic tale of obsession; Cervantes' Don Quixote ie the story of a proud, noble man led astray by an obsolete ideology (the chivalrous one); Petronius' Satyricon—that is, the description of a greedy, decadent power; Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer—that is, a piece of 'auto-fiction', a scandalous mix of autobiography and fiction; Lenin's What Is To Be Done?, which deals with the problem of organization; Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaux—that is, the theme of nomadism, the nomadic war machine.

Shall we summarize?

Our world is infected by the plague (Decameron); the plague is the atomization of social relationships (The Naked Sun). Those who refuse this state of things are often prey to an obsession that cripples their initiatives (Moby Dick), that is to say: the obsession with 'Him,' Silvio the Malignant Whale, this 'berluscocentrism' affecting the public discourse; this obsession becomes an ideological barrier and causes us to attack windmills that are put in front of us as baits (Don Quixote).

The risk is to be mesmerized by the scene of an outraged, sex-addicted, ever-carousing power (Satyricon). We will avoid such risk only if we find a new story, a narrative of ourselves that will break into this world as a real scandal (Tropic of Cancer), as opposed to all the fake scandals we see in the media. The emergence of a new, unified, conflict-bearing subjectivity would be the only truly intolerable scandal. “For it must needs be that scandals come,” says the old maxim [Matthew, 18,7].

Hence the problem of organization (What Is To Be Done?) And, perhaps, the need to re-read Lenin: rejecting what is to be rejected, revamping what can be revamped. Of course, today the process of organization can no longer aim at building the party of the proletariat as in the 20th century: organization must take into account the enemy's superior mobility, it must make us able to fight in an ever-changing situation, a scenario of constant deterritorialization (A Thousand Plateaux).

However, without a narrative, without stories to be told in the night around the campfire, any guerrilla warfare in the desert is doomed to failure. And so we return to the first book, the Decameron: it is thanks to the stories we tell one another that we can prevent the spreading of the plague ...

Well, Q is the only book in the 'Book Bloc' whose authors are still living. Should they have chosen only dead writers? We might say that Q represents the 'here and now' of the struggle: the need to act now.

Trickle Down Economics' Idiocy 4 Dummies

As an addendum to the post below, Rachel Maddow spelled out why people REALLY need to stop talking about this theory like it's a credible thing on her show tonight:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Also, this, from the New York Times:

"Senior Senate Republican aides said that an extension of all the income tax cuts was a foregone conclusion, but that a deal on jobless aid was possible if Democrats agreed to cover the cost. Democrats expressed indignation that Republicans were insisting on finding spending cuts to offset the unemployment benefits while being perfectly willing to add to the national debt the $700 billion cost of continuing the tax cuts on the highest incomes for the next decade."

Honestly, if Obama doesn't at least put forward an argument to the public against extending the Bush tax cuts, can anyone possibly defend him on any front? If he is so cowardly as to not point out (as Rachel Maddow did above) that these tax cuts are opposed to the interests of all but the richest Americans, as well as America itself, then there's really no reason to keep pretending (if you still are), that he's a "champion of progressive causes" on any front.

"The same process occurs, and has always occurred, in every prevalent morality and religion: the reasons and purposes for habits are always lies that are added only after some people begin to attack these habits and ask for reasons and purposes. At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they add lies."

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

TAX CUTS

Total fucking badass. This woman really represents what the Democrats ought to be, and indeed, what they purport to be. There's no cowardice here, nor any of the usual patronizing and condescending platitudes about "compromise." Also pertinent here is this November 24 headline from Democracy Now!:

New government data show U.S. corporations made record profits in the third quarter, earning at an annual rate of more than $1.6 trillion. That’s the highest figure since the government began keeping track 60 years ago. Overall corporate earnings are up 28 percent from the same time last year. Companies, however, have not been using the record profits to hire more workers. The Federal Reserve is predicting that the nation’s official unemployment rate will remain over 9 percent for at least another year.

Trickle down indeed.