December 2010 archive

Late Night Karaoke

Obama to give America back to the Native Americans

Here’s the next month’s news today. The fastest rising meme on the right is now that Obama is an honorary Crow Indian he intends to give America back to the Native Americans. It’s all part of his left wing plot to destroy us. Fortunately, I am an anchor baby. So were my parents and three of my four grandparents.

I have no idea how they keep coming up with this shit but they do. And it never ends and they always top themselves! American Reality is a cosmic tragicomic absurdity written by morons for idiots with weekly Sunday morning critiques by flatulent gasbags who have learned to speak with their anal sphincters.

There’s a supposedly terrible movie made in 1978 called Americathon that is in danger of becoming reality. Actually, huge chunks of it have come to pass already. Here’s the Wiki on the people behind this and the premise:

Americathon (also known as Americathon 1998) is a 1979 American comedy film starring John Ritter, Fred Willard, Peter Riegert, Harvey Korman, and Nancy Morgan, with narration by George Carlin, based on a play by Firesign Theatre alumni Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman. Others credited in the film include Jay Leno, Meat Loaf, Tommy Lasorda, and Chief Dan George, with a musical performance by Elvis Costello.

The premise of the film is that, sometime in the then-near future (1998), the USA has run out of oil, and many Americans are literally living in their (now stationary) cars and either jog or ride bicycles to travel. The federal government, housed in “The Western White House” (a sub-leased condominium in Marina del Rey, California), is near national bankruptcy and in danger of being foreclosed by a cartel of Native Americans in control of Nike (which has been renamed “National Indian Knitting Enterprise”). President Chet Roosevelt (Ritter) hires television consultant Eric McMerkin (Riegert) to help produce a national raffle. Instead, they decide that the only way enough money can be raised to save America is to run a telethon, and hire TV celebrity Monty Rushmore (Korman) to host it.

The soundtrack features “It’s A Beautiful Day” by The Beach Boys, “Get A Move On” by Eddie Money and “(I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea” by Elvis Costello. Dorothy Stratten appears, uncredited, as one of the stage dancers. John Carradine was to have played “Uncle Sam” in this film, but his scenes were edited.

There is so much more:

The Facade Is Crumbling



2011: A Brave New Dystopia

Chris Hedges, December 27, 2010

Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement. Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.



[snip]

Our manufacturing base has been dismantled. Speculators and swindlers have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions from small shareholders who had set aside money for retirement or college. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus and protection from warrantless wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic services, including public education and health care, have been handed over to the corporations to exploit for profit. The few who raise voices of dissent, who refuse to engage in the corporate happy talk, are derided by the corporate establishment as freaks.

And the hopeful and cheerful truth is:

“Dear Afghanistan:” A New Year’s Call for Peace

From Kathy Kelly in Kabul:

While the US may be the world’s single super power in military terms, it faces another super power: the voices of war-weary millions who detest violence and killing. In Afghanistan, in the United States, and among the populations of countries whose governments have joined the NATO coalition, millions of people are calling for an end to war in Afghanistan.

On New Year’s Day, 01/01/11, people around the world are invited to raise their voices, through Facebook, Twitter, Free Conference calls, Skype, and blogs at several websites in a massive refusal to accept the Afghanistan war any longer. Let your New Year’s resolution be to stand for the people and end wars by sending a digital or spoken peacemaking message to people in Afghanistan.  By amassing millions of messages calling for peace, we can create yet another indication that ordinary people within and beyond Afghanistan have had enough of war.

Scope

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NATO patrol in Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan

Six In The Morning

Yes, Republicans Are And Always Have Been Hypocritical      



Earmarks Are Pork Barrel Spending So Let Us Pursue Them With Gutso

No one was more critical than Representative Mark Steven Kirk when President Obama and the Democratic majority in the Congress sought passage last year of a $787 billion spending bill intended to stimulate the economy. And during his campaign for the Illinois Senate seat once held by Mr. Obama, Mr. Kirk, a Republican, boasted of his vote against “Speaker Pelosi’s trillion-dollar stimulus plan.”

Though Mr. Kirk and other Republicans thundered against pork-barrel spending and lawmakers’ practice of designating money for special projects through earmarks, they have not shied from using a less-well-known process called lettermarking to try to direct money to projects in their home districts.

Mr. Kirk, for example, sent a letter to the Department of Education dated Sept. 10, 2009, asking it to release money “needed to support students and educational programs” in a local school district. The letter was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the group Citizens Against Government Waste, which shared it with The New York Times.

Muse in the Morning

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
Muse in the Morning

Time for a break from poetry…in order to create some art.

Case by case, we find that conformity is the easy way, and the path to privilege and prestige; dissidence carries personal costs.

–Noam Chomsky



Hollow 1

Late Night Karaoke

Heh

(h/t to Tom Garrett over at Archival Digital Issues.)

Sound familiar?

Karen Koyle sez:

Abstract

There is evidence that many individuals and organizations in the library world do not support the work taking place to develop a next generation of the library cataloging rules. The authors describe the tensions existing between those advocating an incremental change to cataloging process and others who desire a bolder library entry into the digital era.

Introduction

Libraries have lost their place as primary information providers, surpassed by more agile (and in many cases wealthier) purveyors of digital information delivery services. Although libraries still manage materials that are not available elsewhere, the library’s approach to user service and the user interface is not competing successfully against services like Amazon or Google. If libraries are to avoid further marginalization, they need to make a fundamental change in their approach to user services. The library’s signature service, its catalog, uses rules for cataloging that are remnants of a long departed technology: the card catalog. Modifications to the rules, such as those proposed by the Resource Description and Access (RDA) development effort, can only keep us rooted firmly in the 20th, if not the 19th century. A more radical change is required that will contribute to the library of the future, re-imagined and integrated with the chosen workflow of its users.

NYC has a splendid main public library (on 42nd Street) and good-ish branch libraries.  But I haven’t noticed any modernization in the past years, in the sense this writer is referring to.

Should Societal Judgment Be Time Limited?

The impetus for this post was a most unlikely subject. I’ve been recently deconstructing my own uneasy feelings towards disgraced NFL Quarterback Michael Vick. My partner, a native of Philadelphia, is a huge fan of the Eagles professional football team and is thrilled at the its recent success with Vick at the helm. When the dog fighting revelations surfaced, I admit that I wanted to see him banned from the league for life. Instead, Vick served nearly two years in jail, filed for bankruptcy, missed two full seasons, and was blackballed from his original team. His stunning return to form was highly unexpected. And as much I try to be a forgiving person, I simply cannot extend it to a player who is nonetheless a strong candidate to be eventually awarded the National Football League’s Most Valuable Player for a most impressive season.

Nano Thermite Makers!

Patents on nano-thermite!  Demolition companies!  Spy agencies that spy on the CIA!

Nothing to see here folks, move along.

Walmart University for Social Work

I’ve been researching just how deep the Corporate Hand has reached into the bowels of the Universities of America, and just how much it directs curriculum and policy thereof in preparation for my interview with Noam Chomsky.

Even a jaded cynic as myself found my flabber thoroughly gasted by what I have discovered. It goes far beyond the Economic or Business School’s infiltration one would expect. The right-wing Chicago Boys model has infiltrated even the traditionally most Liberal of Departments: Social Work.

The list of donor’s to Washington University – St. Louis’ Brown School of Social Work reads a who’s who list of Neo-Conservative Think Tanks,

Citigroup is on the lengthy list, as are the following: MasterCard, Levi Strauss Foundation, MetLife, the Federal Reserve Bank, Ford, the Kellog Foundation….and yes, that really is the New America Foundation on the list…the same NAF with ties to the Council on Foreign Relations and that is funded by fabulous characters like Goldman Sachs, Walmart, and Google–just to name a few.

Small wonder that the Chair for the Center for Social Development, Michael Sherraden, has concluded that the poor are only poor because they don’t invest enough in banks. Small wonder, funded by banks and insurance companies, that Timothy McBride PhD, health economist and associate dean for public health at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis recently opined that mandated health care purchase is a MUST to address social health problems.

“In particular, insurance companies need to know that everyone will be required to purchase insurance so that the insurance pools are large enough to cover those with pre-existing conditions who will be required to be covered under the legislation, without penalty for their health conditions.”



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Universities are churning out young men and women who at every level have been indoctrinated into “free market capitalism” (read predatory capitalism) as the only viable solution to society’s every woe.

And you wonder why we call them sheeple?  

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