“If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.”
—Stephen Colbert
September 2011
What is your opinion on 911 truth?
I’ve looked at the evidence and from what I have seen everything they’ve tried to pass off has been debunked.
Popular Mechanics actually did a really good debunking series.
This Morning Resembles Nothing So Much
lock:
as the morning of October 17, 2003. The only saving grace being that this morning—which began with a crushing hangover and the vague realization I had a meeting to attend in 15 minutes so I probably shouldn’t still be in bed—wasn’t quite as bad as that morning. No morning could be as bad as that morning.
October 17, 2003, was the worst morning of all time. The night before, Aaron Boone hit a walk-off home run to win Game 7 of the American League Championship Series for the Yankees. The night itself hadn’t been particularly great. Right after the Boone homer, one of our friends got in a brawl with Yankees fans outside the Riviera, where we’d watched the game. Car horns were honking and people cheering, and as I walked numbly towards the East Village, I started crying. Full-on open weeping. We stayed up until 3:30 in the morning playing Coldplay’s “Everything’s Not Lost” over and over again on the jukebox at Tile Bar.
The next morning I had to get to my job in midtown, which meant taking the 6 to Grand Central. I wasn’t at all prepared to deal with the reality of the Sox loss, so I trained my eyes to avoid all newsstands. But a block from my office, the front page of the Post or the News, in a vending box, caught my eye. It showed a photo of Aaron Boone, arms raised running towards first base. The headline: DESTINY. Perhaps even more than the home run itself, it was the worst thing I had ever seen.
At the office, everyone treated me as though a loved one of mine had just died: quiet murmors of condolence—or outright avoidance. Somehow made it to my office and shut the door. Checked email. More notes of condolence. Lots of kind words.
And then, from Andy Bernstein—my good friend, Pharmer’s Almanac co-author, and now the visionary behind Head Count—came this email:
From: Andy Bernstein
Subject: Just wanted you to know…
Date: October 17, 2003 11:02:02 AM EDT
To: Lockhart Steele… that while I’m not a huge baseball fan, I really got sucked into this series because I got off on the idea of the city of Boston and all of New England being frustrated and cursed by New York City.
I started thinking about all the New Englanders who can’t drive, have funny accents, and have this New York inferiority complex.
At that point I started pulling for the Yankees HARD.
And now that the entire city of Boston is on a suicide watch, and you undoubtedly are having a very rough day, I figured I’d rub some salt in your wounds, NEW YORK STYLE!
Today, there is only this: this morning is not as bad as that morning.
I still haven’t fully recovered from Wainwright’s hooking fastball, Glavine’s final day meltdown, and now I’m faced with the possibility of my favorite player since Piazza leaving town.
Sometimes I wish I didn’t care so much, I understand how people simply realize these teams are essentially major privately owned anti-trust protected entities run by, by and large, assholes. The players, as Sonny in A Bronx Tale succinctly put it…
If your dad needs money, go ask Mickey Mantle. See what happens. Mickey Mantle don’t care about you. Why care about him? Nobody cares.
You either relate to this or you think people like us are complete lunatics. We probably are but I don’t think I know how not to be.
How did you get Michael Bay's cinematographer to shoot your video interviews?
We have a large pyrotechnic budget. Thank you terminal business!
“The very idea that one can effectively battle Wall Street’s corruption and control by working for the Democratic Party is absurd on its face: Wall Street’s favorite candidate in 2008 was Barack Obama, whose administration — led by a Wall Street White House Chief of Staff and Wall-Street-subservient Treasury Secretary and filled to the brim with Goldman Sachs officials — is now working hard to protect bankers from meaningful accountability (and though he’s behind Wall Street’s own Mitt Romney in the Wall Street cash sweepstakes this year, Obama is still doing well); one of Wall Street’s most faithful servants is Chuck Schumer, the money man of the Democratic Party; and the second-ranking Senate Democrat acknowledged — when Democrats controlled the Congress — that the owners of Congress are bankers. There are individuals who impressively rail against the crony capitalism and corporatism that sustains Wall Street’s power, but they’re no match for the party apparatus that remains fully owned and controlled by it.”
—Glenn Greewald
Listen
Zola Jesus : Night
“
Well, there’s the thing about New York. New York is such a monolith that it’s pointless to have an opinion about it. It’s like bitching about the weather. It certainly won’t accomplish anything and it certainly won’t make you feel better about what you didn’t like. New York has a couple of characteristics that are undeniable and one of those is that it’s a magnet for assholes who couldn’t get any attention at home and decided that the problem wasn’t that they weren’t interesting but that there were all these squares around them in Dubuque or whatever and they need to go to some big cosmopolitan city like New York where people will appreciate them. So if you can imagine that scenario playing out within every city in North America and every one of those assholes with an opinion slightly outreaching his ability getting on a fucking Greyhound. You end up with a pretty good description of what’s annoying about New York is that it’s full of people whose self-image just ever-so-slightly outstrips their ability.
I studied painting under in college under Ed Paschke, who is dead now, he was a brilliant, brilliant educator. He was one of the only people in college who actually taught me anything. I mean, I learned a lot while I was in college, don’t get me wrong, but not a lot of it was academic and not much of it was taught to me, it was primarily stuff I learned on my own. But he was one of the few people that actually taught me anything. But at one point, and he was the first person to make me aware of this, of being in New York. He described it as the “catch-all of runners up.” And I think that’s probably what annoys me about New York when I’m annoyed by it. Whatever they’re doing at the moment, that’s not really them, in their minds. Like, I’m working in this bookstore but I’m not a bookstore clerk, I’m a writer. Or like, I’m working in the restaurant but I’m not a waiter, I’m an actor. There are all these people who are not the thing that they are doing at the moment and therefore feel demeaned by every second of their existence. And the chip on New York’s shoulder is the thing that keeps everything on the ground there. It’s the massive weight that causes all of the gravity that happens in New York.
Having said that. I’m going to do that English thing. Oh, he’s such a cunt. [Fake British accent] I mean that in the nicest way. [Laughter] I mean this in the nicest way really but he is just such a cunt, you know. Really I just want to murder him, I mean I love him, but I just want to murder him.
” —Steve Albini on New York (via neighborhoodr-newyork)
Play
“Seeing my sister navigate Twitter, I realized why it was so confusing to so many. For someone like me with a programming background who grew up using computers, adding an @ symbol to someone’s name is easy. For someone who did not, like 9o percent of America, it just doesn’t make sense. Our brain is not forced to do this in real life, why should it in digital life?”
—Nick Bilton
So that video you put up of the BBC with the guy saying the market was going to crash... I've got three questions: 1. do you think he is right that it is all about to crash? 2. Was he suggesting we invest in US Treasury Bonds? and 3. If the answer to the first two questions is yes, how does one go about buying US Treasury Bonds?
1. I don’t know, I am not a financial analyst. I do think everyone should take a bit more care and responsibility when it comes to investing, especially when it is your life savings. People take their 401k and retirement too lightly.
2. Don’t think he had any advice other than, stuff your money under your bed, or learn how to benefit from trading in a recession/depression like he does.
3. Ask a CFA, I haven’t a clue. I’d imagine you could at any bank.
“By focusing on problem selection, rather than rushing out an innovation no one wants like so many trigger-happy entrepreneurs, Parker put himself in position for the string of blockbusters that his critics blithely attribute to sequential luck. Napster was the transition between CDs and MP3s after the Internet made it possible to strip content from its container. Facebook was a vehicle to create a reliable identity in an anonymous online world. Spotify is an attempt to fix the very music industry that Napster helped break a decade before.”
—Steven Bertoni
“Has anybody been watching the debates lately? You’ve got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change. It’s true. You’ve got audiences cheering at the prospect of somebody dying because they don’t have healthcare and booing a service member in Iraq because they’re gay. That’s not reflective of who we are,”
—
President Barack Obama
Obama says GOP debates ‘not reflective of who we are’ - latimes.com
(via zainyk)
Don’t dismiss the Wall Street occupation →
blogs.reuters.com
My take on the whole affair. What do you think? Are they worth our attention? Should more of us be joining and supporting them?
