Archive for December, 2009
How is this possible?
I was moving a bunch of junk the other day using a Toyota pickup (from ZipCar!). I had to drive about 30 miles, both highway and city, to get back to my apartment.
When I started unloading, I noticed that the two locks I had set down on the side of the truck (then promptly forgotten about) were still there, unmoved. I don’t know what gods I pleased or how many laws of physics I violated, but I thought it was pretty incredible.
Filed under hack : Comments (3) : Dec 30th, 2009
JibJab’s 2009 year in review
It may be corny.
It may be kitschy.
But damn it if the team at JibJab isn’t consistently funny and spot-on the mark.
Filed under culture, sites i like : Comments (0) : Dec 29th, 2009
Marshalls destroyed by post-Christmas shoppers
I walked through Marshalls today on my way back from Target. It was a wreck. Most aisles had merchandise strewn about the floor and haphazardly stacked on shelves. It was as if the stocking crew had gone home for the year.
It reminded me of a great Onion article from a year ago: Difficult To Tell If T.J. Maxx Hit Hard By Recession
This pull-quote sums it up nicely
Financial analysts, observing more than 100 locations nationwide, cited large quantities of off-brand and wildly scattered merchandise as evidence that T.J. Maxx has either been devastated by the economic downturn, or is carrying on as usual in spite of it.
God bless America’s shopping fetish.
Filed under culture, economics : Comments (0) : Dec 29th, 2009
Obama’s Big Sellout
It’s official. Between the Democrat’s wholesale capitulation on health care reform, the rampant cronyism with Wall Street, and taxpayer-funded handouts to realtors, home builders, auto makers, and of course bankers, I’ve lost my faith in the “Change” we voted for last November. I was duped.
(Not that the McCain/Palin ticket was any more promising, but I still feel like a shill.)
Not convinced yet? Read more about Obama’s Big Sellout from Rolling Stone.
Filed under economics, politics : Comments (0) : Dec 15th, 2009
Chomsky gets it.
From an interview with Noam Chomsky, the best description I’ve seen yet for how to understand the contemporary conservative populism:
So take right now, for example, there is a right-wing populist uprising. It’s very common, even on the left, to just ridicule them, but that’s not the right reaction. If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real grievances. I listen to talk radio a lot and it’s kind of interesting. If you can sort of suspend your knowledge of the world and just enter into the world of the people who are calling in, you can understand them. I’ve never seen a study, but my sense is that these are people who feel really aggrieved. These people think, “I’ve done everything right all my life, I’m a god-fearing Christian, I’m white, I’m male, I’ve worked hard, and I carry a gun. I do everything I’m supposed to do. And I’m getting shafted.” And in fact they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have stagnated or declined, the social conditions have worsened, the children are going crazy, there are no schools, there’s nothing, so somebody must be doing something to them, and they want to know who it is. Well Rush Limbaugh has answered – it’s the rich liberals who own the banks and run the government, and of course run the media, and they don’t care about you—they just want to give everything away to illegal immigrants and gays and communists and so on.
Well, you know, the reaction we should be having to them is not ridicule, but rather self-criticism. Why aren’t we organizing them? I mean, we are the ones that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. Hitler was appealing to groups with similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at least they were answers; these groups weren’t getting them anywhere else. It was the Jews and the Bolsheviks [that were the problem].
I mean, the liberal democrats aren’t going to tell the average American, “Yeah, you’re being shafted because of the policies that we’ve established over the years that we’re maintaining now.” That’s not going to be an answer. And they’re not getting answers from the left. So, there’s an internal coherence and logic to what they get from Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the rest of these guys. And they sound very convincing, they’re very self-confident, and they have an answer to everything—a crazy answer, but it’s an answer. And it’s our fault if that goes on. So one thing to be done is don’t ridicule these people, join them, and talk about their real grievances and give them a sensible answer, like, “Take over your factories.”
Sadly, I doubt that any of the current Democratic leadership will either read or grasp the meaning of Chomsky’s analysis.
Filed under culture, politics : Comments (0) : Dec 13th, 2009
