We Are So Dumb

They've been playing the shit out of this commercial here in FL during the insomnia hours. Best. Announcer. Ever.



So yeah.

How bad must Obama's "stimulus" plan be if a dude from fucking Brookings is calling it bullshit that will just lead to more urban sprawl? Ugh.

“It’s a lot of more of the same,” said Robert Puentes, a metropolitan growth and development expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington who is tracking the legislation. “You build a lot of new highways, continue to decentralize” urban and suburban communities and “pull resources away from transit.”

Also, even Phoenix, (one of the worst cities I've ever spent time in) has successfully launched its light rail program. (Fucking Vegas crooks and the monorail, could have built light rail. What a bunch of dicks. And the fucking cab drivers union blocking it from running to the airport. Oh yeah, and Florida. First election I ever voted in. High-speed rail, eh? Fucking politicians, crooks, and bureaucrats.)

While we're at it, you should really read Kunstler's 2009 predictions.

I am waiting to see whether Mr. Obama will undertake a restoration of passenger railroad service. I've said enough about this in the past, but it's worth reiterating that a failure to get comprehensive passenger rail service going will be a sign of how fundamentally unserious we are as a nation.

I wouldn't hold my breath.

Well, that's about all I have. Blah.

***
Oh, and Jimmy Soller is published again at Japan Today. Nice work, my man. And good comments, too.

His article was more fun when it was still about the U.S., but oh well. Japanese editors. (Still should have taken the rest of my edits though, dude. Seriously, "avoid XX like the plague"? Unh uh.)

Nice conclusion:

The solution can be found in smaller, regional markets, sustainable planning and an understanding that consumerism is not an end in itself. We don’t have to live in caves, but spending less time shopping and being content [with] less material possessions will not bring any harm to any of us. In fact, it may make many of us healthier, better educated and more in touch with the community around us. The future may pose a difficult readjustment for many of us, but we can adapt with innovation, creativity and education.

Stoners Are the New Gay

I'm just gonna repost this entire dealie from IOZ here:

Sois sage et travaille bien

Some gay dude is telling Barack Obama to put some meat on the bone. I usually want a guy to buy me a beer before I let him fuck me in the steam room, but hey, some people just aren't into all that preliminary romance. Oh, hey, it's the head of the Human Rights Campaign. Well, that explains his charmingly moronic naïveté. The HRC is one of those bland vehicles through which queers made themselves one more stripe in the dull rainbow of coalition politics, repudiating any radicalism or activism in favor of public-policy-speak and mid-American respectability. While I'm skeptical of the broad utility of protest, at least the dudes and dykes in ACTUP accomplished something other than getting urban Democrats to put little equality stickers on their Priuses. Why should Barack Obama, or any politician, go out on a limb for a constituency that's going to keep voting for him and keep raising money for him and keep manning the phones for him regardless of what he does? Man up, you queens. Why don't you try to infiltrate the inauguration. Throw some fucking shoes. Whip out your dicks. This kind of writing isn't outraged, it's pathetic.

So, um yeah. For fucking real, yo.

I have a lot to add to this topic, but actually think I'm gonna keep my mouth shut for once.

PS - Do you guys know how fucking hard I just looked to find a scan of Bruce McCulloch's "billboard" from the Kids in the Hall Poo-Guy sketch? How is that not on the internet?

Hilarious

So, "Democrats Try to Lower Expectations," eh? Isn't that like their slogan or something?

Now I Know This is a Total Fucking Waste of Time...

But just come the fuck on.

"I've been traveling today but sitting on the Acela and reading your emails and pondering the Warren pick, I've found myself both better understanding Obama's gambit politically and feeling more betrayed at the same time. I fought against the Christianism of Bush for this?" - Douchebag's original emphasis.

Doesn't this shit ever get old?

Goddamn, Andrew Sullivan is just. the. worst.

Ugh.

See, again, this is where my old archives would be useful, so I could point to a post I barfed up in late 2007 or so, ranting about how Obama was really pulling out all the stops since he had a chance to take out that vile woman (wait, forgot, she's cool now that she's in the cabinet. It's hard remembering who is the pseudo-liberal Goldstein for the week). 'Member when he was palling around with everyone's favorite ex-gay buddy, that reprehensible Donnie McClurkin dude that he was using as a warm-up act for the NASCAR set while he, his lame fucking surrogates, and every other prog-blogger was screaming about those vile racist Clintons? You don't? Fuck it, memory hole, whatevs. Anyways, here's Dan Savage commenting on an interview with the singing turd:

So McClurkin isn’t anti-gay or anything. He simply believes homosexuality is a curse, gays and lesbians lack character, and we got this way because we were abused and molested—oh, and we’re trying to kill your children. But I’m sure when you these statements are placed in their proper context there’s nothing offensive about them at all. Sorry, no. Unless McClurkin qualified each of these statements with, “I’m an idiot, I don’t know what I’m talking about, please don’t listen to me, someone turn off this mic, dammit!”, then McClurkin’s a bigot and his buddy Barack Obama is a tool.

- that shit's Matt's emphasis.

A friend of mine and I were talking yesterday about how Andrew Sullivan is actually a construct, a group of people really just having an enormous joke on all of us, a facsimile, a facade, uh, a whatever the fuck, like Wonkette.

There is just no-fucking-way he can actually be a real person, right?

Thanks for the Link, Zaney-Poo!

FOTC season premiere online:

Season 2 Online Premiere - Flight of the Conchords (US Only) - watch more funny videos

Matt Knows People

Homeboy Jimmy Soller in Japan Today, on tourism, winter sports, and the value of the yen in Hokkaido.

Greece, Riots, Burning Cops, Etc.

Hot tip from the Luddite Robot, and a good reminder that although the Evil Empire monopolizes most of my anxiety, it's a good idea to look outside the borders of the Amerikan imperium every once in a while. Riots in Greece, read about 'em here.

Now He's About as Dumb as Einstein...

Way to go, Einstein!

Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies

Ugh, politics and finance.

I hate it.

I hate it.

I hate it, hate it hate it hate it.

Why did I decide that this was the career path I wanted to follow? Ugh. That was a severe miscalculation.

So, thinking about blogging again. Am also thinking about the "Useful Activism" site; I know that there is something there, but haven't figured out what yet. In the meantime, may as well blawg a bit, as IOZ would say.

Writer's block is hanging around. Once it goes, the floodgates may open.

This is one of the best articles I've read in quite some time. Chew it over.

Quote 1:

“You needed the occasional assurance that you weren’t nuts,” she says. She wasn’t nuts. The world was.

I'm not crazy, and fuck you to anyone who says I am. In fact, I've got a card in my wallet that says I'm not crazy, so how 'bout that shit?

Quote 2:

Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA.

But he couldn’t figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. “I didn’t understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold,” he says. He brought some of the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for a visit. “We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says. (Matt's emphasis)

Total clownshow. And fuck it, we deserve it.

I assume that most of the few readers I had before I shut this fucker down this past spring thought that I was being an unhelpful griper. I disagree. I kinda wish I hadn't deleted my archives and tried to "disappear" my writings, so I could point to my productive and helpful output. Well, fuck all that anyways. You wanna see negativity?

Fuck Barack Obama. Fuck Democrats. Fuck anyone who deluded themselves that electing "More and Better" Democrats would do anything but hasten the collapse. Especially fuck those who lied to the people who had doubts about Obama and the Dems, brushing away any and all legitimate criticism of the Bullshit Artist in Chief with "anything would be better than McCain, and could you imagine Palin one heart-beat away from the presidency? The horror!" And fuck the people who lied to themselves, knowing who Obama and the Democrats really are, and still pulled the lever for these reprehensible motherfuckers. And fuck everyone (even usually very sharp motherfuckers) who are saying to hold off on criticizing the greatest con-man in American political history, "just give him a chance, he hasn't even taken office yet, he's got some super-cool shit planned, totally liberal and progressive and shit, I promise." And especially, especially, goddamn motherfucking cocksucking especially fuck the progressive blogosphere.

Lamest motherfuckers ever.

Fuck you all. You may not have "broken" the country, but you sure as shit didn't give a fuck when smart people were trying to be helpful and come up with ideas on how to "fix" it (or at least address the problem in terms of actual fucking reality).

I've been accused of rooting for the collapse this past year. I really, truly didn't. I was scared shitless of the future, and what it holds for all of us. I wanted to have hope, I wanted to think that somehow, maybe we would start living our lives like adults and open our fucking eyes.

Now I embrace it. Let it burn, baby.

And like MC Ready Red always said:

Fuck the motherfuckin' critics, fuck newspapers, fuck the radio-stations, and fuck your Parents Against Rap. We buried you fucking cockroaches.

Don't blame me. I voted for fucking nobody at all.

PS - I love me some of this shit. Do more drugs, for real, yo. Goooooooo collapse!

ScaryShit: Useful Activism?

Fuck nah, dog.

Go here instead.

www.usefulactivism.blogspot.com

My new digs. Update your bookmarks, bitches.