Ask George Smith e-mail: webmaster at dick destiny
The Race For The Presidency: Two New Yorkers (more or less) fight for the Presidency and the country loses. I tend to agree with the four more years chorus but that ain’t happening. Really, what we have is two septuagenarians fighting over which privileged white asshole will run the country.
“You don’t seem to understand. I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with me!”
Permalink Comments off
“Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen!”
Permalink Comments off
“What is it that American police officers lack? Racial tolerance, common sense, empathy? Well, all of those things, plus something else: A sacrificial sense of duty that can override self-preservation. Their first thought on encountering a person with a gun, toy gun or cellphone should not be ‘how am I going to protect myself?’ but ‘how am I going to handle/defuse this situation with minimal harm to everyone?’ We do not send firefighters into burning buildings to see whether they can get out alive.” — Barbara Ehrenreich, 07/11/16, FB
Permalink Comments off
Do you need fashionable doorstops? These Tom Clancy books are the perfect answer for your home, heavy at 600 pages and with shiny and colorful quality jackets. Better still, Clancy’s audience and publisher don’t even seem to have noticed he died in 2012. $1.99 each. Now that’s a bargain.
Permalink Comments off
As badass fashion statement, really hard to beat. From many years ago.
Permalink Comments off
You knew this was coming.
Follow it most excellently with “Red Zone Barbecue.” “Everysing’s all right!”
Permalink Comments off
If you’ve been bombing them for fifteen years, playing cover tunes in toady countries isn’t spreading good will.
Our men are seriously deluded:
“Until you see what we do, it’s hard to really understand the mission impact music can have,??? Senior Master Sgt. Ryan Carson said in a phone interview from Doha, Qatar, where his Air Force rock band, Max Impact, is deployed. (They can’t even think of a band name that isn’t a grim joke to everybody else on the receiving end.)
“In recent months, he and his five band mates have played in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and a number of what he called “undisclosed locations,??? performing popular songs in Arabic for foreign dignitaries, troops and children, as well as globally recognized American rock anthems by groups like Journey and Bon Jovi.
“We are allowing people to relax, connect, have meaningful interactions. For a lot of these people, it leaves a really lasting, positive impression of our country and our military,??? he said.
And these are not tunes played by the public relations brigade of the American Wehrmacht. Listen, guys, you don’t rock, you never will, no way. It was never about dressing up and doing glee club in the Vichy cities of the Middle East.
Once there may have been a good and noble purpose for military bands. Heck, I saw them when I was a kid. A US Army rock band came and played my high school in Pine Grove. They did James Brown to Jimi Hendrix. But, jeezus, they’ve obliterated all that. What a disgrace, an affront to music. Hang your heads in shame.
Achtung Musikband soldiers. (Note old dude who thinks it’s bullshit and has to be ordered to sing.)
Permalink Comments off
“People want more power over their own lives. They want to feel some connection to society. Most particularly, they don’t want to be dictated to by distant bureaucrats who don’t seem to care what they’re going through, and think they know what’s best for everyone …
“These are legitimate concerns. Unfortunately, they came out in this past year in the campaign of Donald Trump, who’d exposed a tiny flaw in the system.
“[Self-congratulating] cognoscenti could have looked at the events of the last year and wondered why people were so angry with them, and what they could do to make government work better for the population.
Instead, their first instinct is to dismiss voter concerns as baseless, neurotic bigotry and to assume that the solution is to give Washington bureaucrats even more leeway to blow off the public. In the absurdist comedy that is American political life, this is the ultimate anti-solution to the unrest of the last year, the mathematically perfect wrong ending.
“Trump is going to lose this election, then live on as the reason for an emboldened, even less-responsive oligarchy.”
In related matters, this sneering and very successful video from Comedy Central:
Thought experiment from the Listen, Snob desk: Do you think someone engaged in pulling the wings off flies for purposes of entertainment is teaching a lesson in civics at the same time? Or just someone who pulls the wings off flies for money? (Shooting fish in a barrel also cost effective as analysis.)
If you think watching cable comedians picking gobbets of flesh off the bodies of selected volunteers from the American polity to studio laughter in 2016 is brilliant work, we’re on different sides of the fence.
Permalink Comments off
I see Trump and Brexit supporters being sniffed at by sober commentators for being “anti-expert,” as if that were proof of insanity. I’ve been anti-expert since the 1970s, when feminists took on the medical profession for various forms of unnecessary surgery, hazardous contraceptives and other abuses of women. In fact, it’s my anti-expertism that turned me against Hillary, whose idea of “health reform” in 1993 was to gather a bunch of guys in suits for secret deliberations, which of course led nowhere. — Barbara Ehrenreich, on FB
As an aside, those sniffing at “anti-expertism” 98 percent of the time are guilty of believing only people of their immediate tribe and pay grade are smart enough to be them.
For as long as I’ve read her, Barbara Ehrenreich has been an — ahem, expert — on the increasingly lethal character of the American way of life.
From above:
“A certain cleaning staff would go through the garbage to find the Chinese food containers left behind by Harvard students that still contained sme food in them because you could take them home to your kids … whoah. Meanwhile, at the other end at Harvard you had a guy named Greg Mankiw, who was an economics professor, who made it his mission to point out why low wage people couldn’t have higher wages. It would destroy the economy, pure and simple.
“I always debated him on the radio. And in the years since 2002, traveling around the country talking about these issues on different college campuses I began to get the impression the whole purpose of economics departments was to teach kids that whatever is going on in the economic status quo is perfect and how it has to be, so shut up.
“Some fresh guy [would] stand up, ‘Well, we learned in economics, you can’t raise wages.” But [you] can make $100,000 or whatever.
“I began to get really impatient and even, in some places, to go so far as to say, ‘What the hell do they teach at this university?’ Because if they taught math you could figure out that on six dollars/hour you’re not going to live anywhere in the environs of Cambridge, Mass., or any property of any other major university. That’s simple.”
Permalink Comments off
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »