Our Local Rag, Newsday seems to be on a terminal course. I hadn’t really noticed it until this week, when the paper finally dwindled down to less than 70 pages on most days (keep in mind that this is the only daily paper for all of Long Island).
None of it really surprises me. It’s not like I buy the thing. And the paper’s track record of being remarkably anti-teacher has never impressed me all that much. But still, it is noteworthy that a staple of my entire life is finally departing this earthly existence. I’m sure it will stick around for at least a few more years, but the writing seems to be on the decreasing pages.
Rush just keeps on giving the Democrats gold. Apparently today he spent a bit of time alluding to Ted Kennedy’s imminent death (with all of his trademark tact). What a classy bitch.
But seriously, the Democrats should really move away from the whole “Rush as leader” thing. I don’t have any self-describing Republican friend who even listens to the guy. Understandable, as he is very hard to listen to.
(Thanks to PZ Myers for bringing this one to my attention)
Here’s a story about a 9-year old girl who was raped by her stepfather, conceived twins, had an abortion and…condemned by the Catholic church.
Then the church excommunicated all of the doctor’s involved in the procedure and the child’s mom, sparing the child as she is too young (and presumably knows not what she did).
One person who was spared excommunication was the step-rapist. Here is the justification offered by Gomes Sorbrinho, the archbishop in charge of the Brazilian area where this occurred:
“He committed an extremely serious crime. But that crime, according to canon law, is not punished with automatic excommunication.”
In defense of the Catholic Church, they are demonstrably in favor of the sexual abuse of children.
Why does anyone give a shit about what such a morally corrupt organization has to say about anything? How difficult is it to see that any ethic that allows for child rape, but disallows for aborting the fetus that results is completely and utterly devoid of anything resembling compassion?
We have a snow day on all of long island. You know we’re getting nuked when even my district cancels school for the day (that’s not typically how we roll).
It’s blizzard time.
If you’re in a similar situation, enjoy the extra bonus day.
Let me say at the outset that I consider myself a seasoned and broadly exposed listener to all things musical. I think my auditory taste is as refined as any that I am normally exposed to. Which is what makes my experience with Animal Collective all the more bothersome.
Several years ago, my good friend/ex-roommate told me that he had found a new sound. It is not uncommon for us to trade music back and forth and I was intrigued with the exuberance that the gentleman in question had for his new find. Two discs came in the mail and I put them into my rotation. So it was that I first heard Animal Collective.
Listening to Animal Collective is a particularly odd experience. The “songs” are not anything that even remotely approaches the mainstream conception of the term. Tracks on their many discs (nine full length albums and three EP’s have been published in the past eight years) are densely layered audio collages containing a myriad of noises from disparate places, typically replete with vocals that best embody what Frank Zappa once described as “pitched mouth noises.”
In short, it is not an easy group to wrap one’s head around.
Anyone who can stomach a sound like the one given forth by Animal Collective will find themselves forced to admit that they don’t understand all of it and they completely understand that what they are listening to is, on some level, brilliant. Animal Collective is the rare group that has defeated me. The idea that any of it can be played live is outside of my understanding of the Universe.
For the new year, we are presented with “Merriweather Post Pavilion” (site of a personally famous episode involving lost tickets and redemption). The album is quite possibly the most easy Animal Collective experience for the listener. One has to take note of the reception that the album has received. It is the highest rated new release of 2009 so far according to metacritic, engendering such praise as “one of the landmark American albums of the century so far.”
And so it is that I am in the wholly unfamiliar position of not understanding something that seems to be great. Hopefully, the wheels will finally click into place after several more listenings. But if they don’t, it’s always refreshing to know that music continues to find a way to astound and stupefy even this most jaded of listeners.
We conservatives have not done a good enough job of just laying out basically who we are, because we make the mistake of assuming that people know. What they know is largely incorrect, based on the way we’re portrayed in pop culture, in the drive-by media, by the Democrat party.
I know that Mr. Limbaugh is a remarkably fat, arguably racist, (assumedly) former oxycontin addict who makes multiple millions of dollars a year encouraging a sector of the American public to hate another sector of the American public.
2. Bobby Jindal cannot fathom why the government would want to spend millions of dollars on volcano monitoring.
Again, I can’t help but notice that the Democratic version suggests that the speaker is dumb, but the Republican version suggests an assumption that the people watching are dumb. See the point of distinction there?
Fuck you, lava covered people! Go dial the internet for some help.
I know we’ve been doing a lot of politics around here recently, but there’s a lot political to be done. I was particularly taken by this story about six governors who plan to refuse part or all of the federal stimulus money. The Governors (Republicans, all) of six of the most forward-thinking states in our union (Louisiana, Idaho, South Carolina, Mississippi, Texas and…Alaska!) seem to have problems taking money to help the poor/unemployed at the expense of raising taxes on businesses.
One particularly overt theme runs through the story:
Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana announced Friday that he would reject a portion of expanded unemployment benefits that would eventually require the state to raise taxes on businesses.
Fuck you, poor people. An especially notable stance for Mr. Jindal, a man not particularly notable except for the fact that he is a medical doctor who believes in exorcism and the virtue of intelligent design (putting him high in the running for the Pod’s coveted “World Class Fuckwit” award). It really takes some elephantine balls to refuse money for your entire state because slightly more than half of your citizenry voted for your crazy ass. It’s not like Louisiana is particularly decimated, anyway…
Mr. Jindal said he would reject $98.4 million in federal incentives to expand unemployment coverage, or 2.5 percent of the $3.8 billion that Louisiana stands to receive in all, on the grounds that it would force a change to state law to cover more unemployed people.
Fuck you, poor people.
Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi has also focused on the unemployment provisions, saying that of $54 million offered to his state under the bill, only $4 million would be available unless Mississippi changed its law to expand eligibility to part-time workers.
Fuck you, poor people.
Some governors objected even to the no-strings-attached $25 a week increase in unemployment benefits, saying it would raise expectations that would be difficult to manage when the federal dollars dry up.
Fuck you, poor people.
“I never imagined that Congress would tell the state of Idaho that they have to spend $5.5 million on bike paths or pedestrian lanes,”
Fuck you, fat people. We wouldn’t want to encourage Americans to exercise or use some mode of transportation other than a car. It’s like I tell my students: if you think before you speak you have a much higher likelihood of saying something intelligent.
So we congratulate the six, solitary Governors on their highly principled decision to screw their citizenry because they still cling to a failed ideology related to taxes and the sacrosanct nature of business. Hopefully they will be steadfast and not waffle from their course and hopefully the citizenry will do the correct thing and throw these motherfuckers out of public office, where they will no longer be able to hurt people.
Finally, we hope that the Republican membership of congress will exercise the same courage of their convictions and refuse any stimulus money for their states/districts as well. After all, they didn’t vote for the thing.
I just saw my first high fructose corn syrup commercial by the corn lobby (I don’t watch a lot of commercials these days). A quick perusal of youtube suggests that there are more than the one that I just saw, which is this one:
In the commercial’s defense, I do believe that is what they say about HFCS. “Nutritionally the same as sugar” is a basically meaningless phrase. And what exactly isn’t “fine in moderation?” Ricin, I guess. Apparently there’s another commercial where the well crafted point that “it’s made from corn” is made. Hard to argue with that one, either.
But why the need to make these commercials? Is HFCS really under so much undue criticism these days that we need to make ads defending its virtue? Last time I checked, the shit was in everything, so we’re all eating it and we all seem to be doing fine. Besides, it’s not as if the increasing amount of HFCS in our diet has directly correlated with increasing rates of obesity and diabetes in the citizenry or anything…
For the record, my complaints against HFCS have much more to do with our current trend of monoculturing so much of our grain supply with corn and forcing the stuff to jump through so many hoops to make it become a good source of disaccharides. That crap takes energy. Plus, I just don’t think it tastes as good as real sugar (nutritional similarity notwithstanding). And then there is the whole corn lobby thing (you know, the kind of people who would make obnoxious commercials about a perceived malignment of a food additive).
