Respect Authority

What race am I? You don't know! No one knows!

Like anyone who’s read the data reports from the 2000 census for fun, I’ve been annoying all of my loved ones with the pop-scientific version of this article for the longest time.  

In case you weren’t aware, immigration rates and interracial marriage will radically transform ethnic and cultural identity in America 25 years from now — rendering race relations utterly unidentifiable by today’s standards, by mid-century.

Articulately, Hua Hsu imagines what white culture will be like when whites, the majority race who’s majority is ever-narrowing, can claim the majority with as much legitimacy as Bush in 2000. They’re both kinda the winner but they still lost the popular vote — think Asians from Rockaway wearing Abercrombie and Fitch.

It’s important to think about, and fittingly the article is really thought-out. Basically, it wonders out loud if whiteness — as the skeuomorph that defines the culture of the American majority — will survive the decline of the WASP American and the diversification of affluence. And, I agree with Hua — I think there’s room in the future for the white stereotype of a NASCAR-loving Larry the Cable Guy fan and the white stereotype that makes black Frasier funny.

In any event, by 2015, 30 Rock will stop winning awards because the Hollywood Foreign Press, et. al. will finally realize racial irony is lazy comedy. A realization that will be a symptom of an America to come; full of strange inevitable things like Millennials birthing beige children and Barack Obama’s last year in office. It’s like accurately forecasting the perfect storm bound to devastate Tina Fey — you can’t imagine it actually happening but you know its going to.

Racial equilibrium is coming. While it isn’t quite harmony, there will still be a hint of progress in the unification of the Rock and Flavors of Love into simply, Strippers Competing To Win The Chance To Date A Moderately Wealthy Musician Popular 30 Years Ago… Of Love.

[The Atlantic]

P.S. Kira has watched an entire season of a celebrity dating show hosted by two contestants who lost a celebrity dating show hosted by a woman who lost two consecutive seasons of a celebrity dating show hosted by Flavor Flav, who was, of course, famously dumped by Brigitte Nielsen — a member of Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew’s first-season cast. Less like a vicious circle and more like a death spiral I think.

"You know the difference between you and me? I make douchey shirts look gooood."

Once marginalized as an uppity Internet liberal truth Nazi, the perennial correction of the talking point “9/11 led to the Iraq War” finally scored a victory.

Today, the independent Senator from Vermont - Bernie Sanders - wrote to his local Smithsonian and got them to change the caption under the official Bush portrait.  The original caption read:

Bush found his two terms in office instead marked by a series of catastrophic events: the attacks on September 11, 2001, that led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq…

…and the Smithsonian in response to the complaint decided to “delete ‘led to’”. 

Bravo, Smithsonian.  Thank you for making historical accuracy cool again… and also making sure two words don’t mislead 22nd century scholars - who will only have your ruined collection to piece together pre-apocalyptic history.

[TPM Election Central]

President Hoover in a car, with a black man and people in turbans... which of these things doesn't belong?

Union busting and fiscal “conservatism” aside, if it’s considered neo-Hooverist to question the premise of throwing gargantuan sums of money at an industry that’s been failing for more than a generation and expecting a different result… then maybe neo-Hooverism isn’t such a bad idea after all.

It’s about time I admit that I don’t really understand how anything can be too big to fail. As I understand it, a country is a fairly big and important institution, and yet they fail all the time (Argentina more often than most). Propping up any industry, white or blue collar, is dumb. Governmental intervention in the failure of a major industry shouldn’t be approached with a bailout paradigm - it’s the wrong metaphor. Read More ›

Last Winter shit shit
My bank collapsed, vote for change
This Winter fuck fuck

And for good measure…

Oh yes on Prop 8
My gays, haven’t you heard that
opposites attract?

Look who's saving who now!

During a press conference Sunday afternoon, on Bush’s last trip to Iraq, an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at the President and shouted, “This is a farewell kiss, dog.”

The news is so interesting lately!

[nytimes.com]

"I will eat the fucking book then throw my shit in your face."

Patrick Fitzgerald, the son of a Manhattan doorman, grew up in Midwood, Brooklyn. He got his start in 1988 as an assistant US attorney who helped prosecute John “I’m totally in the Mafia” Gambino. A few years later, Fitzgerald led the case against the fellows who carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

In 1996, after successfully prosecuting foreign terrorists involved in an attack on US soil, Fitzgerlad was assigned to a special team of prosecutors investigating Osama Bin Laden. Several years later, he was nominated to become the US attorney for Northern Illinois. Immediately after his nomination was confirmed, Fitzgerald proceeded to rip the caked up shit out of the hairy asshole that is greater Chicago.

When he wasn’t harassing Mayor Daley or indicting members of Illinois gubernatorial staff on any given weekday, Fitzgerald was investing the closest thing to treason the executive branch could be pinned for. Fitzgerald famously indicted I. Lewis “I’m an effeminate yes man who lets my boss call me Scooter” Libby, while he was on Alberto Gonzalez’s chopping block during the infamous Department of Justice political firings. Balls, my friends… balls.

Without batting an eye, Fitzgerald has now taken down probably the most comically corrupt politician in modern American history. And as an added bonus, Fitzgerald may very well have positioned himself as the only man in America that Obama’s categorically terrified of. God forbid he starts an investigation on Blue State Digital and Obama’s grassroots fund raising - it may knock the change right out of him.

"I can derelict my own balls."

Ever feel the Earth heave under you? Yeah? Was it when you were reading recent financial news instead of doing something productive? Me too.

Stag-deflation people. Read that word again because its gonna mean something for you very soon. Apparently some crazy guy has been popping out articles since mid-summer about some sort of doomsday scenario in which the economy waddles about while the price of things steadily declines.

Have no idea why that matters? Me neither. But for what it’s worth, we’ve been living with its evil twin - stagflation, the art of increasing the cost of living while plateauing wages - since 1965. Although that sounds like a shitty situation, the “problem” has already been addressed. By using credit cards in order to live paycheck to paycheck, plus floating your cell phone bill, you’re able to free up your one-time bonus in order to put a down payment on a house that gets you the equity loan you need to pay your cable bill.

So how can the price of goods going down with a economy expanding at about the same rate as an ingrown nail hurt you and me?

As far as I can decipher, stagdeflation is a vicious global cycle that decreases confidence, decreasing demand, which decreases value, then production, and finally the labor that produces the worthless shit that no one wants to buy anymore. Basically if no one wants to buy things with money they can’t get, they lose their jobs producing shit to sell to other people who feel the same way. All the while the only sector of the job market that’s actually growing is Arianna Huffington’s unpaid corp of meltdown bloggers. Long story short: Great Depression II. Read More ›

"Behold! The future... where women have been rid of opinions and blacks have penises of a length and girth more appropriate to their social position."

The Large Hadron Collider’s world swallowing first particle smash has been “delayed” again to sometime in 2010, marking the umpteenth setback after a magnet quench lead to a debilitating nitrogen leak in early September.

CERN, in complete denial of the forces at work behind their technical difficulties, has vowed to get its machine working.

While I completely understand lots of money and reputations have been put on the line in the pursuit of this endeavor, I think its time these European geeks admit that they’ve been the victims of temporal sabotage.

All signs point to time travelin’ tomfoolery: an anomalous mechanical failure that cascades into a systemic crash which perpetually retards any effort to recover… barring a complete redesign of the entire system hinting at an omniscient understanding of the schematics that would have taken years to develop, and nerds.

Now, I’ve tried to imagine how we could recover from a scenario in which the LHC was turned on, the Earth destroyed by a Switzerland sided black hole, with all (if not most) of Earth’s population annihilated. In said situation, who would be our time traveling saviors? The crew of ISS Expedition 17 that’s who. They were in space when it happened, used their rocket boosters to fly into a solar flare and/or orbit the Earth backwards at an incredible rate, traveled back in time then snuck their way back onto terra firma embarking on a Ocean’s 13 style mission of scientific sabotage/Nazi art scalping.

You can forward your thank you notes to Astronauts Sergey Volkov (not American), Oleg Kononenko (not American), Garrett Reisman (American), and Gregory Chamitoff (also American).

[CNet News]

I have an awkward question: does President-elect Obama have enough economic insight and instinct to lead us (as a people, of course) away from complete financial ruin?

For the past two days, Obama and his rag-tag team of second-hand economic advisors have outlined their hopes and dreams for the economy.  But what’s conspicuously absent is any address of the underlying crisis behind our budding Great Depression II.

Obama’s adorable insistence that the bailout isn’t working because of its “Main Street” negligence is naive. Yes, Americans are suffering but it isn’t because Paulson is throwing money into Wall Street’s black hole as opposed to the black holes in our wallets. The economy is tanking because we’re running out of bubbles to prop it up with.

In the 20s we had an inventory bubble, in the 80s we had a dollar-backed security bubble, in the 90s we had a fucking pets.com bubble, two years ago we had the housing bubble and now we have the CDS bubble - the final and most absurd bubble in our series of economic downturns.
Read More ›

A while ago, I overreacted to a snarky MTA ad that I felt infringed on my sensibilities. I don’t mean to beat a dead, debt ridden horse to death but what the fuck:

Et tu Bank of America? Not only is this unnecessarily sarcastic, it also attacks the very philosophy behind “bailouts” and paints them as utterly futile in an inescapably fucked world.

While I agree with the spirit of the ad, I don’t need the biggest bank in America and lead contender for “Last Bank Standing” reminding me that life’s depressing and its little hiccups, insurmountable. So you know what, Bank of America? I will sign up for your transit rebate; I’ll take that $10 back on every $100 I spend on Metrocards and just to fucking spite you, I’ll also ignore everything else that’s wrong with the city.

I won’t make fun of the homeless man who panhandled then attacked the “hypocritical blacks” on the train who didn’t give him money. I won’t write about 12-year-old Lashanta who stormed onto my train last week and announced that she’s “a princess” and that she’s “going to sing for [us] and [we're] going to give her money because [she's] a princess”. No, I won’t complain because ten bucks back actually is great in spite of all the other shitty things around me.

[Get Your Money Here People]

LOL I WAS 31 WHEN MY STATE BECAME REAL

In Alaska’s defense, in the end, they did narrowly vote in the favor of reason and saved themselves the embarrassment of being the first state to have their newly reelected senator expelled by his peers and eventually arrested. My quip in the beginning of this post was a little misleading: Alaska’s election took a long time because Stevens adorably tried to steal it from the illiterate Alaskans. When they sort-of caught him, with the help of annoying bloggers, Stevens pulled the, “I’m 85 years old and I’m confused” bit and let the inbred committees count the other third of the ballots that had him barely losing against his opponent. I must admit, I’m more shocked Alaska went through the trouble of ensuring the legitimacy of their election than I am by a black man being elected president.
Read More ›

And it blew. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like it left me wanting for mindless grinding and visualizers featuring the venerable President-elect. Instead, I came to the sobering realization that he’s just a fucking fancy DJ.

It was surreal to watch people scream and cheer for truncated samples of music. I felt retarded for cheering on a guy hunched over a laptop covered in scotch tape. I was embarrassed every time he knocked his computer over, revealing that the old man in the sound booth was really in control of the pre-mixed sets of gangster rap and 80s pop.

I can appreciate that it was a party. The point was and should be to just go to a huge room and drunkenly “dance” to a Girl Talk mix; but after the 10th minute of Mr. Girl Talk slowly head-banging to a loop of a drum beat, I began to deeply resent him and the two young ladies onstage from Mother Cabrini High School.

In the end, of course the music was great — it’s very unlikely anyone could go wrong with a series of hits from the past 30 years mashed together. (Which goes to show that if no one does another creative thing ever again we’ll be fine so long as someone can work Garageband and has access to their parent’s CD collection). But a concert? That felt silly. Especially since iTunes will be able to do the exact same thing in five years.