Fuck you, Perry Farrell, for selling your band's greatest song to those Republican buttpuppets. But then maybe you're being "ironic" by selling it. "Cash in".
***
The R. Crumb museum. According to a guy on this discussion board, Crumb recently told a story about
the first time he took acid. He dropped 600 micrograms of sandoz that he got from his psychiatrist in 1965 and he puked on his wife's face. She felt warm gooey vomit spread and drip down her body and she thought she was being born. He seemed genuinely happy telling that story.
Ahh, it didn't all die with Hunter Thompson, y'all.
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Negativity is healthy! Witness the all the vapid fucks who are perpetually positive; they're bullshit ought to be enough to make you consider alternatives. Yes, be a contrarian. I really like what Kunstler has to say, and how he says it. His arguments against "techno-hubris" are excellent because so common-sensical; an alternative to the ultra-radical John Zerzan, and one doesn't imagine Kunstler eating handfulls of soil as he writes. And anyone who would write
Tierney invokes the ideas of two libertarian crazies currently functioning as chief shills for the status quo: Randall O'Toole and Peter Huber. O'Toole, of the one-man Thoreau Institute, has been inveighing against railroads and the New Urbanism in recent years. He regards motoring as the ultimate libertarian right and public good and any attempt to modify America's extreme car dependency as an "elitist" plot.
Huber, author of the remarkably snotty and idiotic book Hard Green, argues that virtually all modern ecological activism and policy have been not just a waste of time but have produced only negative results. Huber writes: "We discern no ineluctable tie at all between nature's decline and humanity's."
That the New York Times would pimp for the positions of these two assholes demonstrates our culture's desperate determination to resist change that circumstances will impose on us whether we like it or not. After all, Tierney, O'Toole, and Huber's notions about the wonderfulness of our entropic lifestyle are based on the assumption that it can continue.
is instantly on my good side. Everyone is so scared to smack these short-sighted hedonist fucktard libertarians around, afraid to look like a party-pooper or back-to-nature hippie or bunkered millenialist. Fuck that. One can be an urban (and urbane) person and still point out what blind fools these ideologues are. They're the real squares in the sense that they are the reactionaries, seeking only to conserve neither life nor resources but their shitty religion of consumerism.
These fucks have nearly forgotten that the entire Green Revolution in agriculture is entirely due to petrochemicals. It couldn't last forever; we're still progressing but the returns become ever more diminshed and that's aside the coming fact of Peak Oil. Nevermind, they say, technology will find a way. And it may. But they also presume that the transition will be seamless. Sorry, it can't. And the longer they keep their idiocy up, the more painful the changeover will be. The charm of pollyannas is that their naivete is so total and so pure. Not so with these creeps; their greed and audacity make them throughly charmless.
I also recommend Kunstler's Architectural Blunders series.
***
The Asexual phenomenon. A really interesting read. Thanks to poly for the link. And it's not without its funny moments:
This sexually inactive group could include people from happily celibate nuns to those who are too sick, poor or unattractive to form a relationship, and who do not want to pay for sex or have a casual fling. Others may fear intimacy or have been put off sex by repressive parental attitudes.
They could be Virgin Ben. Ya think? Wasn't it Updike in more sexist days who gave A's to all his male students on the grounds that a college man's main occupation is getting (or trying to get, if you're Jonah Goldberg) laid? Of course, women have no different sex drive than men; Updike was biased, as everyone now knows. Anyway, I imagine that for some, male or female, it must be a relief to quit trying, and not just because they may be as homely as Goldberg or as fucked-in-the-head as Virgin Ben. More seriously, many writers have noted that there is a certain sweetness when they reach the age that they are no longer slave to the hormone. I can see that.
Look, I can see an etic explanation here which would argue that as homosexuals and asexuals become more accepted by Western society, it is entirely due not to some macro moral transformation (and we know better than that, anyway, don't we? Thanks, ya fuckin monotheists), but to practical concerns: child-rearing is expensive in the western world, and as resources become more scarce, that trend will continue. Of course child-rearing can be and is done on a huge level, but single or no child families are more common than they were, and the simple fact is that to function in Western society, most women must sacrifice many of their primo child-bearing years to college and career if they desire the lifestyle the culture values highest.
Also, I'd say it was inevitable that we'd find out about asexual people as a bloc because the right has already been reacting to them. Though homosexuality still gets cultural reactionaries steamed, it's become more mainstream. Now those "soft" reactionaries who may tolerate other people having warm caring gay relationships are going after those people who are straight, but won't breed, dammit, because we're losing demographically to the heathens!
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I took all the old personal posts down because, mostly, they are embarassing. I didn't have as clear an idea of what I was going to do with this blog at the time, and now that I do, out they go. Unethical? Whatever.
***
Poland sets date for Iraq pull-out. One less "willing" member of the "coalition". Actually, it never was willing so much as a junior partner giving a quid and hoping for a quo; it hoped in mostly in vain, it turns out. And now that elections are coming soon, the government hopes to cut the ballast. The war was never that popular in Poland and became dramatically less-so after the Pope condemned it. Link via River City Mud.
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Hahah. The fun in this is determing which is worst. Any decent person would wish both of them from the face of the earth, but what if you could only pick one?
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Norbizness has fun with batshit David Horowitz's database. Man, I really want to make that list one day. And I deserve it! Since Horowitz obviously doesn't know what the word "network" means, he needs my special help. Crazy Davey, I promise to make you that much less of a liar if you add me to the list. How? By holding seances with the likes Rachel Carson. Come on, David. You need me!
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Juan Cole tells us what we already know: that The New Republic is a terrible magazine. It doesn't hurt to repeat it, though. His links, especially to Alterman and to Michelle Goldberg, are good reads.
***
I can imagine the look on serial Wal-Mart apologist digamma's face when he sees his "heroic" company joining forces with (another) monolithic evil, Rick Santorum. I viewed this as inevitable. Evil attracts evil, after all. It took, like, a million monoliths to destroy Jupiter; why shouldn't Santorum and Wal-Mart likewise join forces to destroy America? One thing's for sure, I'll never think of Ol' Roy the same way.
*Edit: fixed some errors, mostly grammatical.
posted by RETARDO MONTALBAN @ 5:44 PM
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