Into the Void

“My mother always said democracy is the best revenge.”
– Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, son of assassinated Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto, quoted in Time Magazine, January 14, 2008

2008 handsome priests calendar - Calendario Romano

Not just for kids any more - now you too can have your own hunky priest… calendar.

Piero Pazzi’s Calendario Romano features handsome Roman priests and beautiful Vatican churches. The calendar helps raise funds for London HIV charity The Food Chain.

No hope for help… | Oddly Enough | Reuters

“I have a message for every homeowner worried about rising mortgage payments: The best you can do for your family is to call 1-800-995-HOPE,”

… Bush said after a White House meeting with administration officials and lenders on a new plan to help.

Unfortunately he was a couple digits off, it is actually 1-888-995-HOPE(4673) . That gets you through to the Homeownership Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit group which offers free housing counseling for homeowners.

The article above gave me a giggle.

The “subprime mortgage” problem is being beaten to death on the news, and I have no intention of beating it to death here. If you can’t afford a house, look for a cheaper one. When determining whether you can afford a house, you don’t count future increases in income or expected appreciation of the property into the equation. And if you’re a bank buying mortgage notes from mortgage brokers, please check the financials of every single mortgagee before you use my savings to buy it.

Simple.

It’s the American dream, again. Anyone can be a homeowner.

Never mind the incalculably bad political decisions that have led to this situation. Let’s see: unemployment is up, salaries aren’t increasing, making it difficult to adjust to balloon payments. The value of houses is dropping, evaporating home equity.

And now, foreign investors are pulling their money out of the whole industry. The public debt? That’s owned by foreign investors. It increases every time a bank forecloses on a mortgage - the bank can only get pennies on the dollar in a sheriff’s sale. The investors are pulling their money out, destabilizing the stock market. Our money is worth much less in the world market, giving many Americans the mistaken impression that everyone in the world is greedily charging us more for things like oil and clothes. It’s not greed, folks. It’s called the “Exchange Rate.”

We are so screwed, even those of us who aren’t on the verge of losing a house we shouldn’t have been allowed to buy in the first place.

The Zucchini Patch » A Slave to Cigarettes

Jessica of The Zucchini Patch wants to quit smoking. This is my comment. It deals mostly with the money aspect of smoking. They don’t talk about that much in the anti-smoking ads. They talk about cancer only in very vague terms. They show little pictures of the particulate matter that coats the lungs. They don’t talk so much about the reality of drowning in your own putrefying lungs.

Oddly enough, they also don’t talk about the 20% of women with lung cancer who never smoked at all. The politics of the anti-tobacco movement is another story for another day.

Wow. I remember in 1979 saying I’d quit when cigarettes reached 75¢ a pack.

Let’s see…
$3.50/pack × 2 packs/day × 365days/year?
Thats over $2500 a year!

So your first year’s savings are the down payment on a new subcompact car. Each monthly savings after that is the car payment.

Not sure how much daycare costs. Save your savings in a college fund for Marco. In 15 years at 9% interest, the long-term average growth for the stock market, you’d have $65,536.67. (Don’t worry, he’ll get loans and grants for the rest of the cost.)

Or how about taking a week-long yoga retreat at the Omega Institute? Mmmmmmm… :-)

A trip to Paris even with the abysmal exchange rate!

20 steak dinners. Real, digestible steak, not the USDA Choice shoeleather they sell at the supermarket. If you don’t eat meat, give the steak to the dog and enjoy a decadent dessert, a mango souffle perhaps. Heck, fly me up there and I’ll eat your steak. I’m not proud.

See, this is what the cigarette habit is denying you.

I’m having a brain bubble over where you live. I’ll do the tax numbers based on my locale. Federal tax on cigarettes is 39¢ a pack so I’d pay around $280 a year. I wonder whether I can deduct that on my income tax? If Congress manages to raise the tax to $1 a pack (to fund children’s health insurance, they claim) then I’d be paying $730 a year. Hey, it’s “for the chillrun.” My state cigarette tax is $1.35 per pack, for a whopping $980 or so per year. My state income tax is less than that!

Does it seem to you that if the government actually banned cigarettes they’d be losing a big source of income? Hmmmm… almosts makes you want to think. ;-)

Ok, now for the real problem with quitting smoking. Nicotine is a powerful anxiolytic and antidepressant. When you quit, you’re not only back to your pre-smoking anxiety levels, but you also have a rebound effect. The HedWeb Good Drug Guide has a lot of excellent information on brain chemical tweaks in general, and nicotine in particular. Here’s a good place to start:
Biopsychiatry.com:: Antidepressants : Nicotine

Both major depression and depressive symptoms are associated with a high rate of nicotine dependence, and a history of major depression has an adverse impact on smoking cessation.

In other words, when you quit smoking it will feel as if you’ve quit psych meds cold turkey. Have you ever made that mistake?

So please don’t beat yourself up if it takes several tries for you to quit. It’s not a moral failing, it is brain chemicals. I’d wait until after the stressful holidays to quit.

I could go into the nuts-and-bolts of how I finally quit in 1986 or so - lots of crying, mostly - but there is plenty of good information available on the web. Email me if you want to hear about it. :-)

State senator sues God - Peculiar Postings - MSNBC.com

Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers has had it up to here with the terroristic threats God makes against His creations, not to mention 5000-plus years of floods, famine, plague and pestilence.

Since God is everywhere, He can be sued in Douglas County, Nebraska for the untold psychological damage His irrational actions have done to Senator Chambers’ constituents. Chambers is seeking a permanent injunction forbidding God to engage in further terroristic activities.

“Baseball bats are now the preferred weapon for many drug gangs and others who have a business need to administer behavioral reminders. They’re cheap, lethal, legal, untraceable, and hey! it’s the national pastime.”
— George Carlin

Cheney/Satan 2008 Bumper Sticker

It’s here, the first must-have bumper sticker of the election cycle. Get ‘em while they’re hot.

Thanks to Max for the excellent photoshop work.

presidential election Cheney political humor satan Dick Cheney religion bumper sticker

Homeland Stupidity Threat Advisory System

Homeland stupidity threat:

Note: The site moved. This one is too good to let get away.

My take on the sixties:

I was born in 1957, 12 years after WWII The Big One ended. The Korean conflict came between the two events. As far as I can tell, I’m being labeled “Baby Boomer” only so that folks my age will fund the real boomers greedy retirement plans. Even as we speak, they are quietly moving their funds are from investments that have become UNSAFE due to their profit-taking. They don’t leave their money in the stock market as they get older. My group still does, and it will be disastrous. Stock Market “adjustments” are seen as inevitable, but when there is an adjustment it means that somebody is taking somebody else’s money. Who do you suppose it is? The poor? Not bloody likely. I used to think the stock market was a gamble. Now I realize that the game is fixed.

Many of these boomers were, as young adults, the hippies about which my friends speak so glowingly. The hippies headed for the hills when things got tough. Most of what you read about the culture of the ’60s was invented by students at Ivy League colleges who never knew the difficulties of living off handouts in the city. Free love was a farce - it wasn’t anything near free for the women - or girls - who got pregnant.

The Beatles brought a small vision of the world to public view, but they weren’t at the forefront. Not EVEN. They were Pop Icons at the tail end of the whole mess. The whole hippie thing had become a farce by the time the Beatles rolled out Sergeant Pepper’s.

So as a kid I heard many Great Ideas from my friends’ older, college-age siblings. Age of Aquarius, be-ins, freedom, evolution, revolution. But I watched the body counts in Viet Nam rise night after night on TV. I saw minorities fighting to be recognized not even as equals but as human beings. I saw the cops beating Blacks and college students and pretty much anyone they didn’t like the looks of to a pulp out in the streets. I lived in the aftermath of three assassinations. The Great Ideas vanished into thin air, leaving my generation with an intellectual wasteland.

The media doesn’t let that kind of information interfere with big business these days. There was even a ban on showing the rows of coffins from the Afghanistan and Iraq dead. I would watch that. Someone has to bear witness.

I suppose I should get more proactive. I’m too easy to silence, I’m mentally ill. I can be taken against my will into a hospital, drugged, zapped, whatever. Just say the word “anosognosia.” There are no political prisoners, no prisoners of conscience, only mental patients. My only recourse is to donate to the charities that are doing the real work. I don’t fool myself into thinking that throwing money at the problems will fix them. Money only generates more money - if the problems were solved, the charities would be out of business. I can only hope that they help a little bit.

Duck and cover, they told us as children. There was the constant threat of nuclear annihilation brought on by the hatred of my elders for folks just like us on the other side of the world. In the ’80s they told us to dig a hole in the backyard, lie down in it and cover yourself over if there’s a nuclear strike - dig your own goddam grave. “With enough shovels” was the slogan. This stupidity was successfully imitated in the aftermath of 9-11 Homeland Security told us to seal off a room with plastic and duct tape to protect ourselves from terrorists. I don’t think it will protect you, but it will definitely keep the smell down. Fear is a great strategy for controlling the populace.

I sat at work one night at 12 or 14 years old with a gun on the desk in front of me and the simple instructions: “If any <n -words> try to break in, shoot ‘em.” Camden was burning just a few blocks away. It was happening in cities across the country, the black people were looking for a better life. The owner left me to mind the store. The only <n -word> who showed up was a business associate that I’d known since I was a baby. He sat with me until the boss got back then ripped him a new asshole for leaving me there alone.

“Backlash, Backlash, Who do you think I am? You raise my taxes, freeze my wages, And send my son to Viet Nam. You gimme Second-class houses, And second-class schools, Do you think all colored people are just Second-class fools? Mr. Backlash, I’m gonna leave you with the blues, yes I am.” – Langston Hughes, Nina Simone “Backlash Blues”

Backlash Blues didn’t get much airplay when it would have mattered. Now it’s used in a Lexus commercial to sell luxury automobiles. Langston Hughes would have seen the irony of it. A better life, indeed. I’m not sure whether a commercial with a good-looking African-American man grooving on the blues is supposed to be targeted for African-Americans. It motivated me to run out and get some Nina Simone CDs. I don’t want an SUV, thankyouverymuch.

So when I was a kid the air was bad, the rivers were full of poisons, raw sewage, and rotting fish. The Potomac river, backdrop to so many National Monuments, was so polluted that if you fell in the cops would take you off to the hospital. Rivers caught fire, the bald eagle was in danger of extinction. Our food was full of pesticides. The drug companies gave pregnant women Diethylstilbestrol (DES) and Thalidomide. Every species was manifesting serious anomalies from teratogens in the environment. EVERY species. Much later, William S. Burroughs drew attention to the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl with typical brutal honesty in an interview in 1986 in which he said, “Let me ask you one question, Doctor: You want your daughter born with two cunts?” He was referring to a condition known as “uterus didelphys.” Being born with two vaginas is also a side effect of maternal DES use.

The erstwhile hippies didn’t notice. If they did, they didn’t give a rat’s ass.

The Space Program, it turned out, wasn’t about our destiny among the stars. It was a non-war strategy for beating the Russians by outdoing them technologically. Reagan continued the strategy with space weapons programs in the ’80s. “Star Wars” was all about bankrupting “The Evil Empire” as he called the U.S.S.R..

Reagan also invented “trickle-down economics” which, as far as I can tell, involved giving all the money to the wealthy and the large corporations so that they can piss on the workers.

My generation lost hope long before Reagan came along. We smoked pot and listened to music. At the tail end of the boom, we were overcrowded everywhere we went and there were few jobs. On top of that, periodically there were gas crises with far-reaching economic effects, including stagflation. Stagflation is the situation I quoted above, where prices increase but salary doesn’t. More and more, we either lived at home until we were 30, in roachtraps in the city, or in group houses with four or more people. We were occasionally chased out of town with new zoning laws by the former hippies, but that’s another story for another day.

The American Dream has always been about taking care of the kids born right after WWII The Big One. It was used, along with religion, for keeping us quiet and obedient, at least until we figured out that it was all a big scam.

Suddenly the ’60s have become this Utopia. They are being totally rewritten. It’s very hip these days to pine for a Golden Age that never was, whether you pine for the ’60’s or for the post-war enthusiasm of our grandparents generation or for a mythical pre-industrial garden.

Maya, the world of illusion. Insanity is being able to see through the illusion. Insanity is rejecting the false values of your elders. So they tell us. It’s up to us to keep looking for the truth no matter how much they tell us to turn back to a glorious past that never was.

Technorati: politics music Nina+Simone The+Sixties baby+boomers hippies

Huffington Post: John Neffinger, Glynnis MacNicol, and Drew Westen| Dem Iowa Debate LiveBlog!

Debate? Not much of a debate, just a bunch of Dems comparing their talking points. Really, business as usual. The Democratic Party slinked off with their collective tails between their legs because they couldn’t come up with a response to the “soft on terrorism” card, and they’ve never really come back from that. I am almost ashamed to be a Democrat, but there is no better choice.
Biden was able to joke about saying stupid things, a reference to his “articulate and bright and clean” comment about Obama. Obama is good, he’d still be “articulate and bright and clean” by comparison if he were white. Compare him to our current Prex!
A Clinton-Obama ticket is not going to lure over any middle-of-the-road Republicans. Unfortunately, to win 2008 that’s what the Dems have to do. I hope they don’t forget.
I think Biden’s wife is going to get fired from her teaching job after his comment on school administrators.
Teachers are probably the only professionals who don’t get pay incentives for competence and effectiveness. Apparently the folks in the debate have no insight into punishment and reward. Throw all the money in the world at our schools, but if there is no incentive for teachers to further their own educations and to improve their job performance, they aren’t going to bother to improve, not for any amount of collective bargaining. I don’t think the teachers should get more money and benefits than engineers, no matter what the folks in the debate seem to think.
Throw money into a school system and you’ll see that it doesn’t go into computers and books. I’m not sure where it goes. New lights for the football field maybe?
No Child Left Behind? Hasn’t the major result of that been an increase in the dropout rate? “Get out, kid, you’re screwing up the numbers.”
The question about honesty was good. The Dems have to issue a blanket statement that they all voted to go into Iraq because the folks in the White House are evil. That way individual Democratic politicians won’t have to waste time explaining their vote when they should have been saying, “If I’m dishonest and I get caught, I’ll be in deep doo-doo. So I have to be honest.” Face it, the occasional transgression is forgivable. Lying about it is perjury.
As for honesty, with his Grecian Formula hair how can Kucinich pretend to be honest?
Did anyone else notice the fly in Dodd’s hair during his last answer?
Edward’s hair was perfect as always.
Hillary has porked out a bit. She could use some time away from the desk. A darker suit would hide it better until she’s president and has her own private gym.
Ok, ok, that was catty. I think Clinton would have done better to say, “What he said” when she spoke after Obama instead of taking time to paraphrase him. That way maybe she could have told us something we don’t already know. I think Clinton has some great ideas. If only she’d tell us how she can make them work. Maybe she doesn’t want the Republicans to steal her recipes?
The one thing these folks have to remember is that anything they say about one another now will be played as soundbites by the Republicans when Judgement Day, errrr, the Presidential Elections are at hand.
I feel as if the future of the world depends on the Dems playing this right.