MISREAD

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=097a31f3-c440-4b10-8894-14197d7a6eef&p=1

good god. kirsch got it wrong, all wrong.

i think im going to retire, early.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1945960.ece

200th post party

unfortunately, itll be underwhelming.

ratemyprofessor.com and the death of the university

which teacher is the easiest?
which teacher is the hottest?

shows what we value.

anyway.

the skinny jeans of our youth

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2008/11/14johnston.html


i love mcsweeneys and i also love zizek. what more can i ask for. quite alot actually, as johnston falls kinda short. its still an A+ though. i got so happy reading this its really quite disturbing. only one post until my 200th post party. ill make it especially epic.

Ut pictura poesis

kinda

a paradox

this one is on composting

we compost (ideally) what we dont eat.

do we not feel some guilt for not eating that though?

we understand that we compost what isn't fit for further consumption

Who is to make that claim though as biomass is biomass

Anything that is biotic is basically edible

It just might make us kinda (very) sick

we can even eat abiotic things

like mcdonalds

or water





yay i made a normal distribution from words

i might stop with titles

so the somali coast guard caught a saudi tanker violating territorial waters today. should play out interestingly. hillary as secretary of state? ill talk more on that when i can.



for some reason i can only embed 30 seconds. solve that problem on your own time

i cant get enough. the show is growing on me. in fact a new mega- (meta-?) blog is in the works. the ambiguity of the band name and how it leads to how the listener 'views' the music. should be a doozy, think about it. no age.

zizekey

http://www.lacan.com/article/?page_id=3

my friend slavoj weighs in.



yay wolf parade

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/74ab11da-b415-11dd-8e35-0000779fd18c.html

and the money wins again.



so awesome.

teen creeps

one of the 10 best shows i ever seen

concept shows

so snl last night was all about prop 8, which i found fun.



etc.

kleinmeister

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081201/klein

woody

''
The day before his senior year as a playwright student at the University of North Carolina, Joe Pug sat down for a cup of coffee and had the clearest thought of his life: I am profoundly unhappy here. Then came the second clearest.

Pug packed up his belongings and drove the longest route possible to Chicago. Working as a carpenter by day, the 23 year-old Pug spent nights playing the guitar he hadn't picked up since his teenage years. Using ideas originally slated for a play he was writing called "Austin Fish," Pug began creating the sublime lyrical masterpiece that would become the Nation of Heat EP.

The songs were recorded fast and fervently at a Chicago studio where a friend snuck him in to late night slots other musicians had canceled. He was short on money, but his bare-boned sincerity didn't require much more than a microphone and it dripped off of each note he sang.
''

john is post- post-

can such a thing a post-partisanship exist? no, because it merely rearranges already-existing partisan behaviors into new basins. an individual's marginal viewpoint may lead them to conclude the system moving above partisan politics, but it is merely an illusion,for such a total destruction is not possible. more here but im le tired.



yay lou.

john feels like a poor spielberg flick

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1085059/Pictured-The-robot-pull-faces-just-like-human-being.html

its like gigolo joe

voting with your feet

ive been distracted recently by things that warrant my attention only if i choose to accept a certain path. thats the problem with it all really, isnt it? we know where we want to be, we're quite sure of a path that leads there, but we are often much too completely tied to our status quo. what is the reason for this? i would of course argue that it is that Sisyphean complex, the comparable tranquility that comes from the assurances of the burden of repetition. but tonight id like to challenge one self-evident conviction with another.

The story of NYC's The Walkmen is one of particular interest for us in this search for meaning. Born out of the 'next big thing' Johnathan Fire*Eater, the walkmen became obsessed over the recording process, believing that the creation of the art lay in the manipulation of the sounds, rather than the creation of the sounds in and of themselves. Holed up in a self-owned studio (Marcata) in Harlem, full of vintage and analog devices, the Walkmen set out to create something unique, but traditional. the climax of that album the track 'Everyone who pretended to like me is gone'

constructs a motif that may come to define the walkmen-one distinctly of loss and alienation, but from a perspective often untold. for the protag in 'everything,' he has been, as is often the case, thrown out of a relationship. the difference here is that part of him returns to the 'ship, not just mentally, but physically. the protag returns, against his own best advice to the other, but not to resurrect the relationship-that is clearly dead, but merely for some tortured pleasure. 'i made the best of it' refers not to the time spent in the relationship itself, but to also encapsulate the return.

The single off of the follow up to their debut, a song called 'the rat', presents something not altogether dissimilar, but not to alike. The walkmen are plagued by a shortcoming of many bands-the lack of two lead singers. The rat is sung by leithauser, but structurally it is a dialogue between two, with each line alternating speakers.

the song tracks the progression of an argument, one of those finger-pointing arguments, where each party blames the other. Going out, that ritual of concession and diminishing returns, has taken its toll. they still are 'going out' or have been until just recently, but the awkward silences have taken toll on this couple, acouple that is one of those that keeps only to themselves. 'that' couple, the couple of the single dates and generally 'antisocial' behavior. the curious piece is that the couple still maintain some affection towards one and other, though it is likely born out of a stubborn refusal and fear to end things totally. the choice is not going out alone, going out in the couple, or not going out at all. rather it is going out as usual, coupled, and being alienated from the other. maybe it is that this fear is only short term, judging by the way the music, dark and bothered, still offers hope-especially after the refrain. both parties will not leave or end the thing completely, as shown by them beating on both sides of the door/wall. the door and wall are different in that they are located in separate places in the apartment, though of course on the same plane. picture one party inside banging on the door, the other outside banging on the wall, unhappily, but necessarily, in order to preserve the Thing. they would both rather have the one come inside. What have the walkmen done? compile a complex dialogue of a relationship approaching end? No, too much hope is offered. What could this song refer to then? This dialogue/course of events happens regularly, monthly even.

http://wonkette.com/404283/bill-kristol-relaunches-warlord-club-website

oh noes

executive orders

bush used them, and it was creepy and undemocratic

obama will use them, and it will be to shorten the process (it would pass both houses, dont you know?) and have be thought of quite positively.

whatever. democracy, pfft.

thetres

http://wonkette.com/404220/fat-hated-burnout-considered-leading-candidate-for-treasury-secretary

and so it begins.

four moreyears. four more years.

beg

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/opinion/06whitehead.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

vanity-obssessed,consumption-driven society.

rackem

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081117/kvh

i might make my own tonight. or i mgiht not.

karl rove is back

yay karl rove, err david axelrod. the quietman of the campaign. the ? factor. the big mystery.

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/11/05/o-rahm-ba.aspx


UH OH. looks like we got some fun times ahead.

i love wonkette. bbc america- archaic tea sippers with glasses on crooked try to make sense of our, as they candidly point out, quite absurd electoral process.

'we have a poll close in 9 minutes time in nevadar, which im told is pronounced nevadah, where the desert as well as las vegahhs, reno, and utah are located.' no lie.

bbc america's hologram 'green box' is way cool. it has like a bridge and such. too bad no one is watching bbc america.

bbc reminding us, along with john bolton!? that they dont actually count absentee military votes unless they feel like it. call this another american electoral question.

why is john bolton on the bbc? a said day for the neocon.

fun

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/11/04/shenanigans-r-us.aspx


wonkettes live blog is gold

fox news election day edition parte uno

http://www.jambase.com/Articles/15681/If-Mos-Def-Were-President

http://wonkette.com/404120/a-childrens-treasury-of-todays-hilarious-fox-news-clips#more-404120

watch these, thyll mmake your day. wait for 10pm though, when sean hannity will surely slit his wrists on air. according to wonkette.

black panthers, theyre still around? badass.



heres a better one. street justice. indefatigable. don't fuck wit it, ya here. the woman shouting 'obama' in the background is classic. street promotion.


1.15 hours to go.

not much too write about tonight (which means ill write for 2 hours). i do have a thing or two to say, however. it feels like the night before xmas from one of my earlier years. tomorrow should be a funny day. john judis of tnr has picked a cabinet, which to me is reflective of the sheer 'obamaness' of this whole thing. condi rice to stay on as sec o' state? (judis clearly considers it) does she not hold the title of neoconservative/neorealist in chief? romney? thats would remove the 'socialism' stigma, but in so doing will show that obama never wanted anything close to socialism. al gore! id like it. it would likely give me a bureaucratic job.

i want to put in like 20 election songs and be all cool like that, but instead






1998-2005 british indie may be one of my favorite era's of all time.

wake up

political system as a market- without a doubt. they finally figured out we could consume it for 3 years and really never tire of it. allows governmentality and affairs to operate behind a thick veil. fuck.

part II

alex cockburn- the nation friend of t. may's via 'counterpunch'


stole it from the nation's subscription side


against obama


A climate of intolerance? An ugly mood at the McCain/Palin rallies? Ever alert to the brownshirt menace, liberals read press reports from Ohio and Wisconsin with a frisson. So where have they been these past few months? Try going into a typical progressive household to make an argument against Obama and for a Nader vote. A couple of lifelong radical friends of mine whisper to me that in their homes and workplaces they've given up straight talk about Obama altogether and feel free to talk, sotto voce, only in public parks.


In these last days I've been scraping around, trying to muster a single positive reason to encourage a vote for Obama. Please note my accent on the positive, since the candidate himself has couched his appeal in this idiom. Why vote for Obama, as opposed to against the Palin-Wurzelbacher ticket?

Obama invokes change. Yet never has the dead hand of the past had a "reform" candidate so firmly by the windpipe. Is it possible to confront America's problems without talking about the arms budget, now entirely out of control? The Pentagon is spending more than at any point since the end of World War II. In "real dollars" the $635 billion appropriated in fiscal 2007 is 5 percent above the previous all-time high, reached in 1952. Depending on how you count them, the Empire has somewhere between 700 and 1,000 overseas bases. Obama wants to enlarge the armed services by 90,000. He pledges to escalate the US war in Afghanistan; to attack Pakistan's sovereign territory if it obstructs any unilateral US mission to kill Osama bin Laden; and to wage a war against terror in a hundred countries, creating for this purpose a new international intelligence and law enforcement "infrastructure" to take down terrorist networks. A fresh start? Where does this differ from Bush's commitment to Congress on September 20, 2001, to an ongoing "war on terror" against "every terrorist group of global reach" and "any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism"?

Obama's liberal defenders comfort themselves with the thought that "he had to say that to get elected." He didn't. After eight years of Bush, Americans are receptive to reassessing America's imperial role. Obama has shunned this opportunity. If elected he will be prisoner of his promise that on his watch Afghanistan will not be lost, nor the white man's burden shirked.

Whatever drawdown of troops in Iraq that does take place in the event of Obama's victory will be a brief hiccup amid the blare and thunder of fresh "resolve." In the event of Obama's victory, the most immediate consequence overseas will most likely be brusque imperial reassertion. Already Joe Biden, the shopworn poster boy for Israeli intransigence and cold war hysteria, is yelping stridently about the new administration's "mettle" being tested in the first six months by the Russians and their surrogates.

After eight years of unrelenting assault on constitutional liberties by Bush and Cheney, public and judicial enthusiasm for tyranny has waned. Obama has preferred to stand with Bush and Cheney. In February, seeking a liberal profile in the primaries, Obama stood against warrantless wiretapping. His support for liberty did not survive its second trimester; he aborted it with a vote for warrantless wiretapping. The man who voted to reaffirm the Patriot Act declared that "the ability to monitor and track individuals who want to attack the United States is a vital counterterrorism tool."

Every politician, good or bad, is an ambitious opportunist. But beneath this topsoil, the ones who make a constructive dent on history have some bedrock of consistency, of fidelity to some central idea. In Obama's case, this "idea" is the ultimate distillation of identity politics: the idea of his blackness. Those who claim that if he were white he would be cantering effortlessly into the White House do not understand that without his most salient physical characteristic Obama would be seen as a second-tier senator with unimpressive credentials. As a political organizer of his own advancement, Obama is a wonder. But I have yet to identify a single uplifting intention to which he has remained constant if it has presented the slightest risk to his advancement. Summoning all the optimism at my disposal, I suppose we could say he has not yet had occasion to offend two important constituencies and adjust his relatively decent stances on immigration and labor-law reform. Public funding of his campaign? A commitment made becomes a commitment betrayed, just as on warrantless eavesdropping. His campaign treasury is now a vast hogswallow that, if it had been amassed by a Republican, would be the topic of thunderous liberal complaint.

In substantive terms Obama's run has been the negation of almost every decent progressive principle, a negation achieved with scarcely a bleat of protest from the progressives seeking to hold him to account. The Michael Moores stay silent. Abroad, Obama stands for imperial renaissance. He has groveled before the Israel lobby and pandered to the sourest reflexes of the cold war era. At home he has crooked the knee to bankers and Wall Street, to the oil companies, the coal companies, the nuclear lobby, the big agricultural combines. He has been fearless in offending progressives, constant in appeasing the powerful.

So no, this is not an exciting or liberating moment in America's politics such as was possible after the Bush years. If you want a memento of what could be exciting, I suggest you go to the website of the Nader-Gonzalez campaign and read its platform, particularly on popular participation and initiative. Or read the portions of Libertarian Bob Barr's platform on foreign policy and constitutional rights. Cynthia McKinney is now making nutty claims about 5,000 post-Katrina executions; otherwise I'd include her.

Do you really want to be on the same side as Alan Dershowitz, Colin Powell and Christopher Hitchens?

the racist white folk/whatever happened to iraq/national security edition

im fairly certain i could vote at least 3 times in this election. early voting- thank god theyre doing it, and hopefully its being done in the right places (racist). if there have been 10 hour waits for voting in the last several days, then what should we expect tuesday? is this true though? could it rather be to discourage?

to my point though-

they show endless lines of predominately african american voters talking about '10 hour waits' etc etc. On tuesday, my dad (state officer) only gets 2 hours off to vote. hourly-wage workers? will they be able to afford time off? if this election was closer (of course polls can be wrong) we could be (are) at serious risk for severe voter disenfranchisement and fraud. if obama loses, rodney king would look like kids stuff, you can be sure. and i may well join in. 1 million expected in grant park, chicago, for obama's election night rally. who knows what could happen?

we really do everything we can to make voting (and the whole electoral process) completely nonsensical. How to make it work-national holiday, and you get your thumb dipped in 2 week paint. its not like we havent thought up such a procedure before; because, if i remember correctly, we instituted that in iraq.

for a visual rhetoric exercise, watch cheney's ''endorsement'' of mccain. its well known the two of them hate each other.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081117/klein

yay






I done spent my last three cents
Mailing my letter to the president
I didn't make a show, I didn't make a dent
So I'm swinging over to this independent gent

Stetson Kennedy
Writing his name in

I cain't win out to save my soul
Long as Smathers-Dupont's got me in the hole
Them war profit boys are squawking and balking
That's what's got me out here walking and talking
Knocking on doors and windows
Wake up and run down election morning
And scribble in Stetson Kennedy

I ain't the world's best writer nor the world's best speller
But when I believe in something I'm the loudest yeller
If we fix it so's you can't make money on war
We'll all forget what we're killing folks for
We'll find us a peace job equal and free
Dump Smathers-Dupont in a salty sea
Well, this makes Stetson Kennedy the man for me

-woody guthrie
channeled by bragg and wilco

eh stupid american

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/01/masked-avengers-prank-cal_n_140023.html

tra la la