For decades, the de facto policy has been to confuse the culture industry with the source of creativity and largely to abandon the production, promotion, distribution and enjoyment of arts and culture to the dictates of the boom/bust marketplace. The result has been the spread of "lifestyle economies" that are merely new forms of monoculturalism and the rise of an environment increasingly antithetical to creativity. A wave of deregulation in the culture industry has consolidated distribution channels and destroyed local scenes, locked away sources of inspiration behind fences of "rights management" and copyright and favored a "blockbuster or die" approach that raises barriers to entry and creates diseconomies of scale. Call it the privatization of the imagination.

--The Creativity Stimulus from The Nation

That roll of the eyes is a key part of the psychology of Paulsonism. The state is now being asked not just to call off its regulators or give tax breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is intervening directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving the influence of the megafirms. In essence, Paulson used the bailout to transform the government into a giant bureaucracy of entitled assholedom, one that would socialize "toxic" risks but keep both the profits and the management of the bailed-out firms in private hands. Moreover, this whole process would be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of NASCAR dads, broke-ass liberals who read translations of French novels, subprime mortgage holders and other such financial losers.

...

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

--Rolling Stone - The Big Takeover

As a nation, and perhaps even as a world body, we have bitten off more than we can chew. The current economic crisis is not a temporary road bump on our way back to endless prosperity, but rather a paradigm shift in which we are given the opportunity to get back to a normal way of living. No, we will no longer be driving brand new cars every 6 months. No, we will no longer work modestly but live in miniature palaces. No, we will no longer own today and pay tomorrow. These days are over. It is now time to remember the important things in life: reading a decade old book from the library, taking our children to little league practice with half the team wearing their older brother's hand-me-down cleats, and tending a garden instead of microwaving a frozen bag of peas for dinner once again. We're all in this together, and we're all suffering the hangover of a bad lifestyle, one whose time has long since come. Allow this all to unfold naturally, and it may sting for a little while longer, but in the end we shall grow into better populace.

I have no desire to write today, so I'm going to try it anyway.

This is not a journey into sound, but rather a free formed, lack of inspiration, run of the fingers on keys. What will happen, noone knows, feed the hungry QOTSA. I hope I spellt that korrekly but hey, welcome to George Bush's America, where logic is for chumps and fallacy reigns supreme. Damn I just hiccuped madstyle, not in any physical manner, but rather the pause between this sentence and the last was not so much long as it was wholly empty, as if everything had left my mind and this experiment in senseless rambling was dead. But what is to be dead anyhow? My Grandfather is dead, has been for I do believe around 13 years now, so why in ungodly fuck would I bring it up? Well, I happened to drive by his last place of life (other than the hospital bed) for the first time today since . . . well, since I've ever driven a car actually. Completely by chance really, I was taking a shortcut on my shortcut from my Parent's House to my Fucking Job, but only because I noticed on a map some days back that yes, that little path back there might in fact carve 18 seconds off the total 20 minute journey (it did). So yes, I drove by the convalescence home. I was too young at the time FUCK someone just walked in for a business thing but now they are gone. Here I will give you my half of the conversation because it will be more interesting that way:

"blah blah blah"
"I don't remember that."
"blah blah blah"
"Oh yeah, that was stupid."
"blah blah blah"
"Okay, will do"
"blah blah blah"
"Fuck them."

So now my train of the thought is off what I was discussing and honestly, it would have been interesting, but alas! We move on, move on toward warter but without that pesky R that slipped in when nobody was looking (actually I was looking but SSSHHH!!! don't tell anyone). Plants are nice. Plants require water. Fuck you. Yes I'm talking to myself. That just revealed how substantially sized pile of POOP this particular stream of consciousness truly is. Plants are nice?! What the fuck kind of simple mind thinks that?! Well I'll tell you: the one that believes that world peace, or at least say, World Partial Armistice could be achieved with one simple addition to the lives of many, if not most: MORE PLANTS. Do yourself a favour next time you get a chance to be around a substantial quantity of leafy greens, whether it be in a park, your own yard, the neighbour's house where you snoop on their underage daughter, or wherever you are able. Stop, look up, stretch your arms out, and take the biggest breath you can. Repeat a few times, and if there is a breeze then see if it can give you a boner because baby, that is a magical feeling right there (the intake of fresh oxygen, not the boner, although of course having a gravity-defying erection can also seem magical on most occasions as well). After several diaphragm movements, quit your job and chase a cat. You'll feel a lot fucking better about life and so will I now that I've gotten you to engage yourself into two of the most fulfilling activities a modern human can engage theyself upon.

Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime
How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers

By Eliot Spitzer
Thursday, February 14, 2008; Page A25

Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders. Some were misrepresenting the terms of loans, making loans without regard to consumers' ability to repay, making loans with deceptive "teaser" rates that later ballooned astronomically, packing loans with undisclosed charges and fees, or even paying illegal kickbacks. These and other practices, we noticed, were having a devastating effect on home buyers. In addition, the widespread nature of these practices, if left unchecked, threatened our financial markets.

Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers.

Predatory lending was widely understood to present a looming national crisis. This threat was so clear that as New York attorney general, I joined with colleagues in the other 49 states in attempting to fill the void left by the federal government. Individually, and together, state attorneys general of both parties brought litigation or entered into settlements with many subprime lenders that were engaged in predatory lending practices. Several state legislatures, including New York's, enacted laws aimed at curbing such practices.

What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no.

Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.

Let me explain: The administration accomplished this feat through an obscure federal agency called the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The OCC has been in existence since the Civil War. Its mission is to ensure the fiscal soundness of national banks. For 140 years, the OCC examined the books of national banks to make sure they were balanced, an important but uncontroversial function. But a few years ago, for the first time in its history, the OCC was used as a tool against consumers.

In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.

But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation.

Throughout our battles with the OCC and the banks, the mantra of the banks and their defenders was that efforts to curb predatory lending would deny access to credit to the very consumers the states were trying to protect. But the curbs we sought on predatory and unfair lending would have in no way jeopardized access to the legitimate credit market for appropriately priced loans. Instead, they would have stopped the scourge of predatory lending practices that have resulted in countless thousands of consumers losing their homes and put our economy in a precarious position.

When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably. The tale is still unfolding, but when the dust settles, it will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders who went to any lengths in their quest for profits. So willing, in fact, that it used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on the side of consumers.

--Washington Post

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead

--Bob Dylan

Unique Rock/Metal band with production deal seeks bassist (Hollywood)

Reply to: XXXXXXXX@craigslist.org
Date: 2009-01-04, 8:30AM PST

Hey, we're a new band that formed and has been writing and rehearsing. We have 8 of the 12 songs for our album complete. We're going into the studio in a few weeks to record our first radio single. We've got photoshoots coming up and the investors told us to ditch our current bassist. If you like Metallica, Motley Crue, Bon Jovi, Led Zeppelin, Greenday, Queen, Black Sabbath - you'll probably like our sound. Please send an email with your age, a listing of your gear, a photograph or myspace and a telephone number. Be ready to rehearse almost every night of the week.

WASHINGTON – U.S. households, hit by declining home values and stock market losses, have cut back on their debt levels for the first time on record as loans remain scarce amid what appears to be a deepening recession.

The Federal Reserve on Thursday released it latest quarterly look at consumer and business finances showing that households reduced their debt levels by 0.8 percent at an annual rate in the July-September period, the first drop on records that go back more than 50 years.

The decline in household debt levels is evidence of the severe credit squeeze that is occurring as banks, saddled by billions of dollars of losses in mortgage debt, have tightened lending standards and made it harder for people to get loans.

--AP article via Yahoo

Nov. 7 -- General Motors Corp., the world's biggest carmaker, opened a $300 million factory in Russia as it looks to compensate for slumping sales in western Europe and North America.

...

U.S. auto sales may fall next year to the lowest level since 1991. GM, Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC have requested $50 billion in U.S. federal loans to help the companies weather the crisis.

--Bloomberg

Bailout a Done Deal, So What Happens Now?
Henry Blodget | Oct 1, 08 8:24 AM

Now that the government has been terrified into rubber-stamping the bailout, what happens now?

In our opinion, here's the most likely scenario:

* Hank Paulson & Co. survey the banking industry and decide who will stay and who will go. JP Morgan (JPM), Citi (C), Wells Fargo (WFC), and Bank of America (BAC) will stay. Goldman (GS) will probably stay. Morgan Stanley (MS) might stay. Everyone else in trouble could go. The government doesn't need to save all banks. It just needs to save some.
* Within a month or two, Paulson buys $250 billion of crap assets. He pays more than market value, but not an egregious amount more (because the public will be watching these early rounds). Over the next six months, he buys $700 billion of assets...and then he--or his successor--asks Congress for more money.
* Confidence improves modestly, but banks continue to hoard capital and credit markets stay tight. Loans stay expensive and hard to get. This keeps pressure on the economy.
* The credit crunch filters through to consumers: Credit cards, home equity loans, mortgages, car loans, etc., get more expensive, putting more pressure on consumers and forcing them to cut back further.
* The economic news continues to get worse: American consumers continue to pull back, housing continues to fall (as of July, the year over year declines were still accelerating), companies begin to cut back, which leads to layoffs--which puts more pressure on consumers.
* The global economy continues to weaken: Europe, Asia, and, eventually, emerging markets. This is already happen, and everyone else is later in the cycle than we are.
* The stock market continues to fall, as corporate earnings come under increasing pressure and hope for an early 2009 recovery fades. Analysts are still expecting huge growth in S&P 500 earnings for next year. These estimates will get cut by at least a third.
* The government enacts further measures to try to stop the fall in asset prices (stocks, houses)--including an expansion of the bailout plan--but these don't work. Governments always try to do this. They never succeed. All they do is delay the inevitable.
* A new round of white-collar prosecutions send a new posse of corporate villains to jail. Some will be guilty. Some won't. All will be hated.
* The government announces a new New Deal, finally investing in the country's infrastructure, in the hopes that this will stimulate the economy (which it will). Investments include broadband, green tech, wireless, physical infrastructure, et al.
* Eventually, asset prices will bottom: Housing down 40% in real terms, the stock market down at least 50%. With luck, this will happen by early 2010, so the recovery can begin. Warren Buffett loads the boat with stocks, but by that time, most people are too depressed (and poor) to follow him.
* Unlike Japan, we finally force our banks to write down assets as far as they need to be written down...and then recapitalize them. This is what we should have done in the current bailout, but we'll get it right next time (we hope).
* We gradually begin a long-term economic recovery, one in which consumers save a greater percentage of income, thrift and saving again become admirable qualities, we gradually begins to wean itself off international oil, and the bacchanalian decades of the 1990s and 2000s become an embarrassing memory.
* The stock market finally begins a new, long-term bull market, in which stocks once again return 10%+ per year. Unfortunately, most Americans will be so sickened by the stock losses they've sustained since 2000 that they'll miss many years of it.

--Clusterstock

In 1999 I found part-time work in the residential housing industry in order to fund the usual college beer supply. In 2000 I continued on with my new major: political science. Upon graduating in 2001, I began working full time for the same employer because it was good work with steady pay. In 2002 I got my own place, an entirely new type of freedom that came with some serious responsibilities. In 2003 I got my first major promotion and settled comfortably into American Life. In 2004 I had more debt than ever before, especially since I bought that Shiny New Car I had lusted over for many years, but I was happy. 2005 was the year I decided to buy a house, but after careful consideration I continued renting, even though I felt like a sap for doing so. 2006 brought new curiosities to the pending economic storm and I was glad to not be too far in over my head, but didn't change much about my life. When 2007 came I knew something was amiss with the world, but thankfully a new job in the same field enabled me to finally eliminate all my debt. In 2008 I was laid off along with a substantial portion of society, now I roam amongst this group that has been all but forced to fend for ourselves with little to no hope for improvement in the short (and possibly long) term. Welcome to Dick Cheney's America, the second half.

Contact Your Senator Today!

It's time to contact your senator. Here is contact information for Senators of the 110th Congress.

Phone or Email your Senators today. Tell them in your own words

Urge your senator to Filibuster any bailout legislation.
Emphatically state you do not want a bailout of any kind for anyone.
No Dictatorial power for Paulson or Bernanke
Taxpayers should not have to bail out banks making bad loans
Tell them that "The Fed" and Paulson are systemic risk".

Email AND Phone Senators Shelby, Bunning, Kyle, Ensign, Hagel

Whether Senator Shelby is your Senator or not, flood him with calls and emails asking for a filibuster and to stop the insanity. Senators Shelby, Bunning, Ensign, and Kyle might be sympathetic to the cause, based on past statements. I am taking a stab at Hagel.

Ask For A Filibuster

Please email and phone the following. Specifically ask for a filibuster and tell them to vote no to any bailout.

Tell them that anyone who votes for this bailout will never get your vote again.

Shelby, Richard C.- (R - AL)
110 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-5744
E-mail: senator@shelby.senate.gov

Bunning, Jim- (R - KY)
316 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-4343
Web Form: http://bunning.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.ContactForm

Kyl, Jon- (R - AZ)
730 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-4521
Web Form: kyl.senate.gov/contact.cfm

Ensign, John- (R - NV)
Washington D.C. Office
119 Russell Senate Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
Phone: (202) 224-6244
Fax: (202) 228-2193
Web Form: ensign.senate.gov/forms/email_form.cfm

Hagel, Chuck (R - NE)
248 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-4224
Web Form: hagel.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.Home

Please email and phone both of your senators as well.

I'm getting hundreds of emails – hate mail – but I'm responding to it all. People deserve a response.

You can rest assured that nothing anyone can say can make me feel worse than I already feel about my mistake on the fumble play. You have no idea ...

Affecting the outcome of a game is a devastating feeling. Officials strive for perfection – I failed miserably. Although it does no good to say it, I am very, very sorry.

Ed Hochuli

--Yahoo sports blog

German Coalition Sues Bayer Over Pesticide Honey Bee Deaths

FREIBURG, Germany - The German organization Coalition against Bayer Dangers today brought legal action against Werner Wenning, chairman of the Bayer AG Board of Management, by filing a charge against him with the public prosecutor in Freiburg.

The group accuses Bayer CropScience of "marketing dangerous pesticides and thereby accepting the mass death of bees all over the world."

The coalition filed the charge in cooperation with German beekeepers who claim they lost thousands of hives after poisoning by the Bayer pesticide clothianidin in May.

Since 1991, Bayer has been producing the insecticide imidacloprid, which is one of the best selling insecticides in the world, often used as seed-dressing for maize, sunflower, and rape. Bayer exports imidacloprid to more than 120 countries and the substance is Bayer's best-selling pesticide.

Since patent protection for imidacloprid has expired in most countries, Bayer in 2003 brought a similarly functionning successor product, clothianidin, onto the market, the coalition alleges.

Both substances are systemic chemicals that work their way from the seed through the plant. The substances get into the pollen and the nectar and can damage beneficial insects such as bees.

The coalition alleges that the start of sales of imidacloprid and clothianidin coincided with the occurrence of large scale bee deaths in many European and American countries.

Up to 70 percent of all hives have been affected. In France, approximately 90 billion bees died over the past 10 years, reducing honey production by up to 60 percent.

--ENS (click for entire article)

Last week, New York City unveiled a "Go Local" website that highlights free or inexpensive activities ranging from an African guitar festival in Brooklyn to the Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival in Queens. The city will dispatch street teams every Thursday for the next five weeks to distribute savings passes, weekly itineraries, and Go Local-branded stickers, temporary tattoos, and beach balls to residents.

"This is the first time that the city has actively called on New Yorkers to discover their backyard," says Christopher Heywood, a vice president for NYC & Co., the city's marketing and tourism organization.

New York joins a slew of cities engaged in similar initiatives. In an attempt to mimic the way people use pins to mark destinations on a map, Boston has installed 1,500-pound red pins at 10 city landmarks to reacquaint Boston-area residents with Beantown's charms. Visitors can send a text message at each pin to learn more about the location.

In Chicago, tourism officials are offering locals hotel packages that include theater tickets, and they're urging Chicagoans to recount their "urban adventures" on a special website.

Dubbing itself "fun central," Arlington, Texas, has created a "staycation" page on its website replete with adrenaline-pumping music and discounts on jaunts to the local Six Flags amusement park.

--Christian Science Monitor

SAN DIEGO - The line snaked through the Comic-Con floor. Hundreds of camera-toting fans jockeyed for position, barely able to contain their excitement.

They weren't trying to see the latest world-saving superhero or never-before-seen footage. They were waiting to see Carmen Electra and Kim Kardashian.

The two beauties made their Comic-Con debut Saturday, signing autographs to promote their new film, "Disaster Movie." Both wore formfitting, cleavage-bearing dresses as they posed for fans' photos.

For 18-year-old John Kilgore, attending the signing was the day's top priority.

"It's Carmen Electra," he explained. "What's not to like about a woman like that?"

Wednesday Andrea Curry-Demus, 38, called medics and was taken by ambulance to a local hospital carrying a newborn wrapped in a towel, complaining that the baby was still dirty from birth. She told the medics that the baby was hers but after tests were done it was determined the baby didn't belong to her so they notified the police.

After being questioned the woman finally admitted that she had a miscarriage in June and didn't want her mother to find out fearing it would upset her too much. Detective Rich Grande sad that Curry-Demus told him that she purchased the baby from a woman she befriended that was pregnant named Tina for the price of $1000. Fingerprint testing has ruled out a woman named Tina Carter as being the mother that is one of two other pregnant black women in the area that has been reported as missing.

Reporters trying to get a story went to Curry-Demus's Pennsylvania apartment and noticed flies and smelled an odor from the sidewalk below so they notified police. Once they entered the apartment they found a body tied up with her uterus cut open. The medical examiner said a placenta was found at the scene.

--The Source

Lou Pearlman, the man who created the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync, was sentenced Wednesday to 25 years in federal prison for engineering a decades-long scam that bilked thousands of investors out of their life savings.

It was the maximum sentence the boy band mogul could receive for allegedly swindling some $300 million from investors and banks since the early 1980s.
--Associated Press

California's top court overturns gay marriage ban

By LISA LEFF
Associated Press Writer

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- In a monumental victory for the gay rights movement, the California Supreme Court overturned a voter-approved ban on gay marriage Thursday in a ruling that would allow same-sex couples in the nation's biggest state to tie the knot.

Domestic partnerships are not a good enough substitute for marriage, the justices ruled 4-3 in striking down the ban.

Outside the courthouse, gay marriage supporters cried and cheered as the news spread.

--Associated Press

"It is time to turn the page on eight years of policies that have strengthened Iran and failed to secure America or our ally Israel. Instead of tough talk and no action, we need to do what Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan did and use all elements of American power — including tough, principled, and direct diplomacy — to pressure countries like Iran and Syria."
--Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.

The idea that oil companies are somehow 'to blame' for record oil prices and rising fuel costs is seductive but absurd. For all their power and profits, the international oil companies are in fact in trouble. They may still be swimming in cash, but no longer in oil. Despite vast investment in exploration and production, these days they generally fail to replace the oil they produce each year with fresh discoveries, or even to maintain current levels of output. Shell's oil production has been falling for six years, BP's seems to have peaked 2005, and this week even the mighty Exxon was forced to admit its output dropped 10% in the first quarter of the year.

None of this should come as a surprise since all the evidence now suggests the world is rapidly approaching "peak oil", the point when global oil production goes into terminal decline for fundamental geological reasons. Annual discovery of oil has been falling for over forty years, and now for every barrel we find we consume three. Oil production is already shrinking in 60 of the world's 98 oil producing countries – including Britain, where output peaked in 1999 and has already plunged by more than half. When an individual country peaks it only matters for that country – Britain became a net importer of oil in 2006 – but when global supply starts to shrink the effects could be ruinous for everybody.

--http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/05/03/do0311.xml

In June 2006, oil traded in futures markets at some $60 a barrel and the Senate investigation estimated that some $25 of that was due to pure financial speculation. One analyst estimated in August 2005 that US oil inventory levels suggested WTI crude prices should be around $25 a barrel, and not $60.

That would mean today that at least $50 to $60 or more of today’s $115 a barrel price is due to pure hedge fund and financial institution speculation. However, given the unchanged equilibrium in global oil supply and demand over recent months amid the explosive rise in oil futures prices traded on Nymex and ICE exchanges in New York and London it is more likely that as much as 60% of the today oil price is pure speculation. No one knows officially except the tiny handful of energy trading banks in New York and London and they certainly aren’t talking.

--http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8878

Press Release Source: Mervyn's LLC

Mervyns Mother's Day Sweepstakes Offers to Pay Mom's Bills
Tuesday April 29, 1:58 pm ET

HAYWARD, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mervyns, a family-friendly department store, announces the We’ll Pay Your Bills sweepstakes to give moms something they can really use this Mother’s Day – financial relief!

Mervyns will offer a chance to win one of the following prizes, which have a total value of more than $30,000:

* Grand prize: Three winners will receive free mortgage or rent for one month
* First prize: Ten winners will receive free utilities for one month
* Second prize: More than one-hundred-fifty winners will receive a $100 gasoline gift card

“Moms have one of the most important jobs in the world, and it usually doesn’t come with a paycheck,” said Susan Mesec, Mervyns senior vice president of marketing. “So to recognize their efforts, Mervyns created the We’ll Pay Your Bills sweepstakes to make this Mother’s Day memorable and ultimately help lighten the financial load for nearly 200 families.”

The promotion is valid April 27 - May 11, 2008. Entry forms will be in Mervyns stores. No purchase is necessary to enter. Winners will be selected on or about May 23, 2008 in a random drawing from eligible entries.

To clarify, you're not affected by the DTV transition if you have one of the following:

* A TV with a digital tuner
* A digital-to-analog converter box
* A cable or satellite TV subscription that's not connected straight to your TV set

The central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the Principles and form of our Constitution. I am an Enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but Coin. If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered.
--Thomas Jefferson

Devo - Gut Feeling / Slap Your Mammy

Something about the way you taste
Makes me want to clear my throat
There's a message to your movements
That really gets my goat
I looked for sniffy linings
But you're rotten to the core
I've had just about all I can take
You know I can't take it no more
Got a gut feeling
Got a gut feeling
Got a gut feeling, feeling
Centered 'round long time ago
On your ability to torment
Then you took your tongs of love
And stripped away my garment
I looked for sniffy linings
But you're rotten to the core
I've had just about all I can take
You know I can't take it no more
Got a gut feeling
Got a gut feeling
Got a gut feeling, feeling
Got a gut feeling
Got a gut feeling
Got a gut WAAAAHOOHOOHOO!!!
WAAAOOOOWWW!!!
Slap your mammy down
Slap your pappy down again
(Oh move it up and down now)
(Oh move it all around now)

But he said that probably the "most historically significant feature" of the declassified report was the retelling of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.

That was a reported North Vietnamese attack on American destroyers that helped lead to president Lyndon Johnson's sharp escalation of American forces in Vietnam.

The author of the report "demonstrates that not only is it not true, as (then US) secretary of defense Robert McNamara told Congress, that the evidence of an attack was 'unimpeachable,' but that to the contrary, a review of the classified signals intelligence proves that 'no attack happened that night,'" FAS said in a statement.

"What this study demonstrated is that the available intelligence shows that there was no attack. It's a dramatic reversal of the historical record," Aftergood said.

"There were previous indications of this but this is the first time we have seen the complete study," he said.

--http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080108/pl_afp/usvietnamintelligence512

Disowned by the Ownership Society

Naomi Klein

Remember the "ownership society," fixture of major George W. Bush addresses for the first four years of his presidency? "We're creating...an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property," Bush said in October 2004. Washington think-tanker Grover Norquist predicted that the ownership society would be Bush's greatest legacy, remembered "long after people can no longer pronounce or spell Fallujah." Yet in Bush's final State of the Union address, the once-ubiquitous phrase was conspicuously absent. And little wonder: rather than its proud father, Bush has turned out to be the ownership society's undertaker.

Well before the ownership society had a neat label, its creation was central to the success of the right-wing economic revolution around the world. The idea was simple: if working-class people owned a small piece of the market--a home mortgage, a stock portfolio, a private pension--they would cease to identify as workers and start to see themselves as owners, with the same interests as their bosses. That meant they could vote for politicians promising to improve stock performance rather than job conditions. Class consciousness would be a relic.

It was always tempting to dismiss the ownership society as an empty slogan--"hokum" as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich put it. But the ownership society was quite real. It was the answer to a roadblock long faced by politicians favoring policies to benefit the wealthy. The problem boiled down to this: people tend to vote their economic interests. Even in the wealthy United States, most people earn less than the average income. That means it is in the interest of the majority to vote for politicians promising to redistribute wealth from the top down.

So what to do? It was Margaret Thatcher who pioneered a solution. The effort centered on Britain's public housing, or council estates, which were filled with die-hard Labour Party supporters. In a bold move, Thatcher offered strong incentives to residents to buy their council estate flats at reduced rates (much as Bush did decades later by promoting subprime mortgages). Those who could afford it became homeowners while those who couldn't faced rents almost twice as high as before, leading to an explosion of homelessness.

As a political strategy, it worked: the renters continued to oppose Thatcher, but polls showed that more than half of the newly minted owners did indeed switch their party affiliation to the Tories. The key was a psychological shift: they now thought like owners, and owners tend to vote Tory. The ownership society as a political project was born.

Across the Atlantic, Reagan ushered in a range of policies that similarly convinced the public that class divisions no longer existed. In 1988 only 26 percent of Americans told pollsters that they lived in a society bifurcated into "haves" and "have-nots"--71 percent rejected the whole idea of class. The real breakthrough, however, came in the 1990s, with the "democratization" of stock ownership, eventually leading to nearly half of American households owning stock. Stock watching became a national pastime, with tickers on TV screens becoming more common than weather forecasts. Main Street, we were told, had stormed the elite enclaves of Wall Street.

Once again, the shift was psychological. Stock ownership made up a relatively minor part of the average American's earnings, but in the era of frenetic downsizing and offshoring, this new class of amateur investor had a distinct shift in consciousness. Whenever a new round of layoffs was announced, sending another stock price soaring, many responded not by identifying with those who had lost their jobs, or by protesting the policies that had led to the layoffs, but by calling their brokers with instructions to buy.

Bush came to office determined to take these trends even further, to deliver Social Security accounts to Wall Street and target minority communities--traditionally out of the Republican Party's reach--for easy homeownership. "Under 50 percent of African Americans and Hispanic Americans own a home," Bush observed in 2002. "That's just too few." He called on Fannie Mae and the private sector "to unlock millions of dollars, to make it available for the purchase of a home"--an important reminder that subprime lenders were taking their cue straight from the top.

Today, the basic promises of the ownership society have been broken. First the dot-com bubble burst; then employees watched their stock-heavy pensions melt away with Enron and WorldCom. Now we have the subprime mortgage crisis, with more than 2 million homeowners facing foreclosure on their homes. Many are raiding their 401(k)s--their piece of the stock market--to pay their mortgage. Wall Street, meanwhile, has fallen out of love with Main Street. To avoid regulatory scrutiny, the new trend is away from publicly traded stocks and toward private equity. In November Nasdaq joined forces with several private banks, including Goldman Sachs, to form Portal Alliance, a private equity stock market open only to investors with assets upward of $100 million. In short order yesterday's ownership society has morphed into today's members-only society.

The mass eviction from the ownership society has profound political implications. According to a September Pew Research poll, 48 percent of Americans say they live in a society carved into haves and have-nots--nearly twice the number of 1988. Only 45 percent see themselves as part of the haves. In other words, we are seeing a return of the very class consciousness that the ownership society was supposed to erase. The free-market ideologues have lost an extremely potent psychological tool--and progressives have gained one. Now that John Edwards is out of the presidential race, the question is, will anyone dare to use it?

--The Nation

     The following note is not an apology of suicide — it is the simple and sober description of a spiritual situation.
     The more lucid and overwhelming one’s belief in Providence, the greater the temptation to get it over with, this business of life, but the greater too one’s fear of the terrible sin implicit in self-destruction. Let us first consider the temptation. As more thoroughly discussed elsewhere in this commentary, a serious conception of any form of afterlife inevitably and necessarily presupposes some degree of belief in Providence; and, conversely, deep Christian faith presupposes some belief in some sort of spiritual survival. The vision of that survival need not be a rational one, i.e., need not present the precise features of personal fancies or the general atmosphere of a subtropical Oriental park. In fact, a good Zemblan Christian is taught that true faith is not there to supply pictures or maps, but that it should quietly content itself with a warm haze of pleasurable anticipation. To take a homely example: little Christopher's family is about to migrate to a distant colony where his father has been assigned to a lifetime post. Little Christopher, a frail lad of nine or ten, relies completely (so completely, in fact, as to blot out the very awareness of this reliance) on his elders' arranging all the details of departure, passage and arrival. He cannot imagine, nor does he try to imagine, the particular aspects of the new place awaiting him but he is dimly and comfortably convinced that it will be even better than his homestead, with the big oak, and the mountain, and his pony, and the park, and the stable, and Grimm, the old groom, who has a way of fondling him whenever nobody is around.
     Something of this simple trust we too should have. With this divine mist of utter dependence permeating one’s being, no wonder one is tempted, no wonder one weighs on one’s palm with a dreamy smile the compact firearm in its case of suede leather hardly bigger than a castlegate key or a boy’s seamed purse, no wonder one peers over the parapet into an inviting abyss.
     I am choosing these images rather casually. There are purists who maintain that a gentleman should use a brace of pistols, one for each temple, or a bare botkin (note the correct spelling), and that ladies should either swallow a lethal dose or drown with clumsy Ophelia. Humbler humans have preferred sundry forms of suffocation, and minor poets have even tried such fancy releases as vein tapping in the quadruped tub of a drafty boardinghouse bathroom. All this is uncertain and messy. Of the not very many ways known of shedding one’s body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abound in weird contingencies, and tragedy ought not to culminate in a record dive or a policeman’s promotion. If you rent a cell in the luminous waffle, room 1915 or 1959, in a tall business center hotel browing the star dust, and pull up the window, and gently — not fall, not jump — but roll out as you should for air comfort, there is always the chance of knocking clean through into your own hell a pacific noctambulator walking his dog; in this respect a back room might be safer, especially if giving on the roof of an old tenacious normal house far below where a cat may be trusted to flash out of the way. Another popular take-off is a mountaintop with a sheer drop of say 500 meters but you must find it, because you will be surprised how easy it is to miscalculate your deflection offset, and have some hidden projection, some fool of a crag, rush forth to catch you, causing you to bounce off it into the brush, thwarted, mangled and unnecessarily alive. The ideal drop is from an aircraft, your muscles relaxed, your pilot puzzled, your packed parachute shuffled off, cast off, shrugged off — farewell, shootka (little chute)! Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last instant of soft, deep, death-padded life, with the earth’s green seesaw now above, now below, and the voluptuous crucifixion, as you stretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body’s obliteration in the Lap of the Lord. If I were a poet I would certainly make an ode to the sweet urge to close one’s eyes and surrender utterly unto the perfect safety of wooed death. Ecstatically one forefeels the vastness of the Divine Embrace enfolding one’s liberated spirit, the warm bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown engulfing the minuscule unknown that had been the only real part of one’s temporary personality.
     When the soul adores Him Who guides it through mortal life, when it distinguishes His sign at every turn of the trail, painted on the boulder and notched in the fir trunk, when every page in the book of one’s personal fate bears His watermark, how can one doubt that He will also preserve us through all eternity?
     So what can stop one from effecting the transition? What can help us to resist the intolerable temptation? What can prevent us from yielding to the burning desire for merging in God?
     We who burrow in filth every day may be forgiven perhaps the one sin that ends all sins.
--from Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

"If we lose forests, we lose the fight against climate change," declared more than 300 scientists, conservation groups, religious leaders and others in an appeal for action at December's climate conference in Bali, Indonesia.

The burning or rotting of trees that comes with deforestation — at the hands of ranchers, farmers, timbermen — sends more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than all the world's planes, trains, trucks and automobiles. Forest destruction accounts for about 20 percent of manmade emissions, second only to burning of fossil fuels for electricity and heat. Conversely, healthy forests absorb carbon dioxide and store carbon.

"The stakes are so dire that if we don't start turning this around in the next 10 years, the extinction crisis and the climate crisis will begin to spiral out of control," said Roman Paul Czebiniak, a forest expert with Greenpeace International. "It's a very big deal."

--Associated Press, the rest of it

Why the fuck is it so complicated just to exist these days?

Because plastic is dumb. Everybody freaking out about the stock bullshit lately, bitching "I LOST ALL THIS EQUITY!!!" and I think "you didn't have it 5 years ago, however did you survive then?" I mean, I don't even like having a cell phone, the day I get myself around a good system of public transportation I sell the car and buy a Jeep to use only when absolutely necessary because the kids need more cat ear medicine, and hopefully I'll be living in a place where the roads aren't so much "roads" as they are "long stretches of inhumanity where nobody goes" because I'll reside in a land where only those who want MORE from life (more books, frequent sex, and better whisky) can, will, and do get by. Jesus piss.

FYI: this here Ulver tribute is really god damn good. Lots of atmospheric stuff on the second disc, and what is nice about this tribute is that it is more interpretive than most cover songs, which for a group like Ulver, should be expected. It's no longer available on that website (bandwidth reasons), so it is being uploaded right now. At the very least that way I can download to my home computer tonight. :)

This free album is way better than the free Radiohead, although I can think of a lot of things much better than said album. Case in point, the peanut butter and jelly sammitch I ate about an hour ago. Not that In Rainbows is bad, it certainly isn't, but to all the major league critics lauding it as something amazingly fresh, awesome, and new, come on! There's absolutely nothing about it that hasn't already been done before, and better, oftentimes by the same fucking group no less. Even Pitchfuck gave it a 9.3, I didn't think they gave ratings higher than 7.0 to anything shy of curing various forms of cancer while lowering worldwide gas prices via glockenspiel. I've listened to it about 40 times now, and it is perfectly good music, but there is absolutely nothing revolutionary about it. I guess Radiohead has become one of those "everyone loves them because everyone loves them" bands. What do I know about diamonds?

"If somebody has their wealth in dollars and they are going to buy consumer goods with dollars like a typical American, then the decline of the dollar, the only effect it has is it makes imported goods more expensive," says the dickface in charge of everyone's wallets.

--You Tube video of Berfuckne getting owned but too stupid to realize it

There is something quite alarming on the recently released “Blue Magic” music video.

The song, by the wildly successful rap artist and businessman Jay-Z, is on an album of songs accompanying/inspired by the Ridley Scott movie “American Gangster,” starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe.

But it wasn’t sex, drugs, violence or explicit language that shocked my conscience.

It was the Euros.

The Jay-Z video flashed large stacks of €500 Euros.

When I start seeing rap stars flashing euros instead of U.S. dollars, I know our economy is in trouble.

--http://www.chaskaherald.com/node/3010

Gisele Bundchen wants to remain the world's richest model and is insisting that she be paid in almost any currency but the U.S. dollar.

Like billionaire investors Warren Buffett and Bill Gross, the Brazilian supermodel, who Forbes magazine says earns more than anyone in her industry, is at the top of a growing list of rich people who have concluded that the currency can only depreciate because Americans led by President George W. Bush are living beyond their means.

--http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aCs.keWwNdiY