From a friend...
"If you haven't, be logged into facebook, and then head over to http://www.washingtonpost.com and look at the right column. You will see that it automatically loads all your friends, what they're reading and linking."
"The privacy issues are downright frightening. Its a friggen 2 way connection between the website and facebook. You now have to manage privacy at both ends, multiplied by however many sites have the new tech (which will be ubiquitous im sure), and people are gonna have pretty much anything that facebook and websites want shared with the world, or more specifically, corporations and government snoops."
Oh... and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn't believe in privacy either, so, umm... yeah... it is time to seriously consider getting off that thing
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Friday, April 23, 2010
Treats That Turn Him On
I went to the Safeway to buy 6 bagels for $1.99 and a donut for whatever it cost and while I was waiting in the checkout asile where the human hadn't been replaced by a machine yet I noticed this thing:
Being Cosmopolitan Magazine, it of course is advertising the exact same titillatingly sensual headlines as EVERY OTHER Cosmopolitan Magazine ever released ever since before I was alive. It has been about a decade since I'd flipped through one so I thought I'd give it a look to see just what of His Burning Sex Need or Orgasm Tricks they are teaching girls these days.
I opened it up and found the page number of the article that most resembled the words on the cover I wanted to read more about and then I went there and it looked like this:
Oh.
Yeah.
You spending money on a bunch of fucking chemicals in bottles is what turns us on. Totally. That's the first thing I look for in a woman- I try and figure out what kinda smelly, oily gunk invented by scientists and tested on imprisoned animals she's decided to cover her skin in. Totally. I read Cosmopolitan a lot to make sure I know what the right brands are to figure out if she is a keeper or not.
Ladies...
What turns us on is that you have a pulse and one or more penetrable orifices and your personality is tolerable for at least an hour. A "Treat" might be that you look cute, you are intelligent enough to have a decent conversation with, you are independent and self confident, you have your life together, your middriff or the backs of your thighs are exposed, you have cute hair, you are not mental, you say nice things to us, you have a personality, you wear short skirts and/or sexy underwear, you enjoy sex, you don't try and change us or make us feel like your pet project, you don't make us buy you drinks all the time and you are willing to take turns buying dinner or maybe you buy it sometimes, you have similar interests as us, your vagina does not have small bits of toilet paper stuck on it...
It's not really that hard. At all. You do not need to buy anything out of a bottle or that is advertised in Cosmopolitan Magazine in order to satisfy His Burning Sex Need or be a Treat That Turns Him On. You need to be YOU... be engaging, interesting, able to contribute to our lives without oppressing them, and, yes... having a body that is nice to look at helps. That doesn't mean you have to be a super model or starve yourself. Anorexia is not attractive. Look healthy... eat decent food, not processed fast food junk and canned sugary syrup. Go for a walk once in a while or be part of some kinda sport or hobby that involves taking your body out of a chair and exercising it. Look naked like a woman. Not a 12 year old boy. Curves are fine. Minor quirky deformities can even be charming. It all depends on your attitude and how you carry yourself. Be an interesting human. Do cool stuff. In the long run that'll make you a lot more interesting to talk to, learn from, and grow with. At the same time it'll probably improve your over all image, stature, shape, and confidence to have interests, personalities, quirks, activities you do regularly, and the rest of it...
The Great Misfortune, however, is that no woman who actually reads Cosmopolitan Magazine with any degrees of rigorous consistancy is likely to be reading this. Ever.
Being Cosmopolitan Magazine, it of course is advertising the exact same titillatingly sensual headlines as EVERY OTHER Cosmopolitan Magazine ever released ever since before I was alive. It has been about a decade since I'd flipped through one so I thought I'd give it a look to see just what of His Burning Sex Need or Orgasm Tricks they are teaching girls these days.
I opened it up and found the page number of the article that most resembled the words on the cover I wanted to read more about and then I went there and it looked like this:
Oh.
Yeah.
You spending money on a bunch of fucking chemicals in bottles is what turns us on. Totally. That's the first thing I look for in a woman- I try and figure out what kinda smelly, oily gunk invented by scientists and tested on imprisoned animals she's decided to cover her skin in. Totally. I read Cosmopolitan a lot to make sure I know what the right brands are to figure out if she is a keeper or not.
Ladies...
What turns us on is that you have a pulse and one or more penetrable orifices and your personality is tolerable for at least an hour. A "Treat" might be that you look cute, you are intelligent enough to have a decent conversation with, you are independent and self confident, you have your life together, your middriff or the backs of your thighs are exposed, you have cute hair, you are not mental, you say nice things to us, you have a personality, you wear short skirts and/or sexy underwear, you enjoy sex, you don't try and change us or make us feel like your pet project, you don't make us buy you drinks all the time and you are willing to take turns buying dinner or maybe you buy it sometimes, you have similar interests as us, your vagina does not have small bits of toilet paper stuck on it...
It's not really that hard. At all. You do not need to buy anything out of a bottle or that is advertised in Cosmopolitan Magazine in order to satisfy His Burning Sex Need or be a Treat That Turns Him On. You need to be YOU... be engaging, interesting, able to contribute to our lives without oppressing them, and, yes... having a body that is nice to look at helps. That doesn't mean you have to be a super model or starve yourself. Anorexia is not attractive. Look healthy... eat decent food, not processed fast food junk and canned sugary syrup. Go for a walk once in a while or be part of some kinda sport or hobby that involves taking your body out of a chair and exercising it. Look naked like a woman. Not a 12 year old boy. Curves are fine. Minor quirky deformities can even be charming. It all depends on your attitude and how you carry yourself. Be an interesting human. Do cool stuff. In the long run that'll make you a lot more interesting to talk to, learn from, and grow with. At the same time it'll probably improve your over all image, stature, shape, and confidence to have interests, personalities, quirks, activities you do regularly, and the rest of it...
The Great Misfortune, however, is that no woman who actually reads Cosmopolitan Magazine with any degrees of rigorous consistancy is likely to be reading this. Ever.
In All My Negative Jadedness of Being
Yeah, I guess that is the album I meant... Psalm 69 is the name of the song on it, but it is called "The Mind is A Terrible Thing to Taste". Man we are getting senile in our old age with forgetting names and now we got these god damned whipper schnapper youngins to deal with too grr....
Well today was the last day of the building job... I have a bit of money saved... if the new river job works out I should have enough by the fall to get some studio space for a few months, a good electric guitar amp, the nord back, and a good mic for recording acoustic... if there is money we could do another album and maybe some shows... but if the job fucks up then this will all maybe not transpire so neatly and well planned but I'll at least get to eat some beans among the sage brush and wander somewhere pretty while the moog rots in storage... You bug me sometimes but having to be a center of attention lead singer bugs me even more. Playing the keys and ignoring the audience is a lot more comfortable.
I heard two things that were cool recently... one was called art through adversity, where when two or more people are arguing back and forth about art they are able to identify and attack and whittle away the weaknesses in each other's opinions and thus the result is a stronger finished product. This is more fancily called "Dialectics" in philosophy talk.... anyways, I think our epic arguments, particularly with regard to mixing, really helped music happen... I mean, we were still new artists and some of the mixing after ALL THAT FUCKING HELL is still bad (I still love how the voice samples are way louder than your vox in Disintegration, SUCKER!!!... yeah that was kinda a fuckup) .... but... fuck... I was making a point... oh yeah... epic arguments tended to help us each arrive at an artistic or political truth a bit better. But perhaps just as or even more importantly, they pissed us off enough to keep the level of fanaticism and dedication high enough and it is hard to do that when you are a solo artist or your bandmates are lame about getting practice together or albums done....
The other thing I liked was when Mr. Key was telling me how he thinks it is kinda cool when someone is doing some kinda art or music, and it's not completely natural and easy, but they are sort of having to fight with it and there's maybe a bit of dramatic frustration on their face or something, and... that's pretty cool. Hell, that's all the Aint it Dead Yet video is... guys looking like they are pissed off and fighting with the settings on their f/x processor, or banging that oil drum thing.... Dwayne at least looks kinda calm... but he might have been on Heroin?
I think another conclusion I have about music is something from what I've been absorbed with in all my negative jadedness of being a broke ex-musician who is nonetheless still part of a SHALLOW, image obsessed scene of fashion, sex, narcassism, trends, and increasingly bad music... Hell even the fucking hipsters. I hate the fucking hipsters with a passion. But worst of all, despite everything terrible about them... what I share with them is the doomed futility of trying to be artistic and musical in an impoverished jobless age of pixelated hypnosis and political irresponsibility where everyone is a musician, music is no longer "cool" or "special" or "unique" or "rare" ... and despite all the hype, myspace friend requests from unknown bands to other, annoyed, unknown bands... financial losses, and similar insanity.... we keep banging ourselves against this wall for reasons we all must deep down admit originate in the shallowest vanity of drama queens and male peacocks.... even though you may recall there were no hookers, and no mountains of cocaine, in that frozen-to-death forest.
A useful alternative to this is to move to the desert and play the acoustic guitar for the scorpions, burrowing owls, sunsets, and Green River Shale. If however some fucker is dumb enough to give me money... going on tour, climbing a couple mountains along the way, impressing the Wyoming gas station attendants with unusual hairdos, and inflicting my own pain on others through the music I've manipulated them into being subjected to is about as good a way to spend one's time as any, I reckon.
Hello... I don't even write blogs anymore, but now cause I interacted with the world I just wrote a buncha crap and I might as well post it as a blog cause at least it makes good reading. See what I mean now about ART through CONFLICT and INTER-ACTION?
(conversations, 04/2010)
Well today was the last day of the building job... I have a bit of money saved... if the new river job works out I should have enough by the fall to get some studio space for a few months, a good electric guitar amp, the nord back, and a good mic for recording acoustic... if there is money we could do another album and maybe some shows... but if the job fucks up then this will all maybe not transpire so neatly and well planned but I'll at least get to eat some beans among the sage brush and wander somewhere pretty while the moog rots in storage... You bug me sometimes but having to be a center of attention lead singer bugs me even more. Playing the keys and ignoring the audience is a lot more comfortable.
I heard two things that were cool recently... one was called art through adversity, where when two or more people are arguing back and forth about art they are able to identify and attack and whittle away the weaknesses in each other's opinions and thus the result is a stronger finished product. This is more fancily called "Dialectics" in philosophy talk.... anyways, I think our epic arguments, particularly with regard to mixing, really helped music happen... I mean, we were still new artists and some of the mixing after ALL THAT FUCKING HELL is still bad (I still love how the voice samples are way louder than your vox in Disintegration, SUCKER!!!... yeah that was kinda a fuckup) .... but... fuck... I was making a point... oh yeah... epic arguments tended to help us each arrive at an artistic or political truth a bit better. But perhaps just as or even more importantly, they pissed us off enough to keep the level of fanaticism and dedication high enough and it is hard to do that when you are a solo artist or your bandmates are lame about getting practice together or albums done....
The other thing I liked was when Mr. Key was telling me how he thinks it is kinda cool when someone is doing some kinda art or music, and it's not completely natural and easy, but they are sort of having to fight with it and there's maybe a bit of dramatic frustration on their face or something, and... that's pretty cool. Hell, that's all the Aint it Dead Yet video is... guys looking like they are pissed off and fighting with the settings on their f/x processor, or banging that oil drum thing.... Dwayne at least looks kinda calm... but he might have been on Heroin?
I think another conclusion I have about music is something from what I've been absorbed with in all my negative jadedness of being a broke ex-musician who is nonetheless still part of a SHALLOW, image obsessed scene of fashion, sex, narcassism, trends, and increasingly bad music... Hell even the fucking hipsters. I hate the fucking hipsters with a passion. But worst of all, despite everything terrible about them... what I share with them is the doomed futility of trying to be artistic and musical in an impoverished jobless age of pixelated hypnosis and political irresponsibility where everyone is a musician, music is no longer "cool" or "special" or "unique" or "rare" ... and despite all the hype, myspace friend requests from unknown bands to other, annoyed, unknown bands... financial losses, and similar insanity.... we keep banging ourselves against this wall for reasons we all must deep down admit originate in the shallowest vanity of drama queens and male peacocks.... even though you may recall there were no hookers, and no mountains of cocaine, in that frozen-to-death forest.
A useful alternative to this is to move to the desert and play the acoustic guitar for the scorpions, burrowing owls, sunsets, and Green River Shale. If however some fucker is dumb enough to give me money... going on tour, climbing a couple mountains along the way, impressing the Wyoming gas station attendants with unusual hairdos, and inflicting my own pain on others through the music I've manipulated them into being subjected to is about as good a way to spend one's time as any, I reckon.
Hello... I don't even write blogs anymore, but now cause I interacted with the world I just wrote a buncha crap and I might as well post it as a blog cause at least it makes good reading. See what I mean now about ART through CONFLICT and INTER-ACTION?
(conversations, 04/2010)
SEC Staffers Watched Porn as Economy Crashed
Ahh... the days of being dismissed as a naive, hotheaded young radical by my neo-liberal economics teacher, and his beloved regulatory agency. Hmmm... wasn't that the same guy that said Green Capitalism would solve our environmental problems? hmmmm.... At least this shit never happens...
(From Yahoo News ).
SEC staffers watched porn as economy crashed
By DANIEL WAGNER, AP Business Writer Daniel Wagner, Ap Business Writer 2 hrs 42 mins ago
WASHINGTON – Senior staffers at the Securities and Exchange Commission spent hours surfing pornographic websites on government-issued computers while they were being paid to police the financial system, an agency watchdog says.
The SEC's inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press.
The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed.
The staffers' behavior violated government-wide ethics rules, it says.
It was written by SEC Inspector General David Kotz in response to a request from Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.
The memo was first reported Thursday evening by ABC News. It summarizes past inspector general probes and reports some shocking findings:
• A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign, an earlier watchdog report said.
• An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as "Sex" or "Pornography." Yet he still managed to amass a collection of "very graphic" material on his hard drive by using Google images to bypass the SEC's internal filter, according to an earlier report from the inspector general. The accountant refused to testify in his defense, and received a 14-day suspension.
• Seventeen of the employees were "at a senior level," earning salaries of up to $222,418.
• The number of cases jumped from two in 2007 to 16 in 2008. The cracks in the financial system emerged in mid-2007 and spread into full-blown panic by the fall of 2008.
California Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said it was "disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at porn than taking action to help stave off the events that put our nation's economy on the brink of collapse."
He said in a statement that SEC officials "were preoccupied with other distractions" when they should have been overseeing the growing problems in the financial system.
An SEC spokesman declined to comment Thursday night.
About 16 percent of men with Internet access at work admit to looking at online porn while at the office, according to a 2006 survey by Websense Inc.
Former SEC spokesman Michael Robinson said he shares the public's outrage about SEC staffers who enjoyed porn on the taxpayer dime when they were supposed to be keeping the markets safe.
"That kind of behavior is just intolerable and atrocious," said Robinson, now with Levick Strategic Communications. He said he expects SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro and her team are "very focused on" the issue.
Schapiro has had other worries in recent days. She has been parrying Republican attacks after announcing civil fraud charges Friday against Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Agency officials had hoped the charges would mark a new era of tougher oversight of Wall Street. They followed high-profile embarrassments including the failure to catch Ponzi kings Bernard Madoff and R. Allen Stanford.
But soon after Goldman charges were filed, Republicans began questioning the timing of the announcement. The news came as the Senate prepared to take up a sweeping overhaul of the rules governing banks and other financial companies.
Republican lawmakers also accused the SEC of being influenced by politics. The SEC's commissioners approved the Goldman charges on a rare 3-2 vote. The two who objected were Republicans.
Schapiro is a registered independent who has been appointed by presidents of both parties.
___
Associated Press writer Christine Simmons contributed to this report.
(From Yahoo News ).
SEC staffers watched porn as economy crashed
By DANIEL WAGNER, AP Business Writer Daniel Wagner, Ap Business Writer 2 hrs 42 mins ago
WASHINGTON – Senior staffers at the Securities and Exchange Commission spent hours surfing pornographic websites on government-issued computers while they were being paid to police the financial system, an agency watchdog says.
The SEC's inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press.
The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed.
The staffers' behavior violated government-wide ethics rules, it says.
It was written by SEC Inspector General David Kotz in response to a request from Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.
The memo was first reported Thursday evening by ABC News. It summarizes past inspector general probes and reports some shocking findings:
• A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign, an earlier watchdog report said.
• An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as "Sex" or "Pornography." Yet he still managed to amass a collection of "very graphic" material on his hard drive by using Google images to bypass the SEC's internal filter, according to an earlier report from the inspector general. The accountant refused to testify in his defense, and received a 14-day suspension.
• Seventeen of the employees were "at a senior level," earning salaries of up to $222,418.
• The number of cases jumped from two in 2007 to 16 in 2008. The cracks in the financial system emerged in mid-2007 and spread into full-blown panic by the fall of 2008.
California Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said it was "disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at porn than taking action to help stave off the events that put our nation's economy on the brink of collapse."
He said in a statement that SEC officials "were preoccupied with other distractions" when they should have been overseeing the growing problems in the financial system.
An SEC spokesman declined to comment Thursday night.
About 16 percent of men with Internet access at work admit to looking at online porn while at the office, according to a 2006 survey by Websense Inc.
Former SEC spokesman Michael Robinson said he shares the public's outrage about SEC staffers who enjoyed porn on the taxpayer dime when they were supposed to be keeping the markets safe.
"That kind of behavior is just intolerable and atrocious," said Robinson, now with Levick Strategic Communications. He said he expects SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro and her team are "very focused on" the issue.
Schapiro has had other worries in recent days. She has been parrying Republican attacks after announcing civil fraud charges Friday against Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Agency officials had hoped the charges would mark a new era of tougher oversight of Wall Street. They followed high-profile embarrassments including the failure to catch Ponzi kings Bernard Madoff and R. Allen Stanford.
But soon after Goldman charges were filed, Republicans began questioning the timing of the announcement. The news came as the Senate prepared to take up a sweeping overhaul of the rules governing banks and other financial companies.
Republican lawmakers also accused the SEC of being influenced by politics. The SEC's commissioners approved the Goldman charges on a rare 3-2 vote. The two who objected were Republicans.
Schapiro is a registered independent who has been appointed by presidents of both parties.
___
Associated Press writer Christine Simmons contributed to this report.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Gaza Avatar
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150090641800603
Amazing how closely human beings in The West can identify with the plight of fictionalized alien characters in a science fiction movie while ignoring the exact same processes, motivations, and disparities members of their very own species right here on this planet are enduring.
Amazing how closely human beings in The West can identify with the plight of fictionalized alien characters in a science fiction movie while ignoring the exact same processes, motivations, and disparities members of their very own species right here on this planet are enduring.
Tired Thoughts on Teachers in a Nutshell
"I'm can't wait till my last day at the school I'm teaching. I'm so over it. I like teaching but this school is a disaster. I feel like some of what I teach these kids goes in one ear and out the other. Their are good children in inner city schools but honestly most of them are way way way behind. It's depressing."
-Anonymous 27-Year Old Teacher on Facebook
The Ultra-Dedicated-Teacher-as-Parent is neo-liberal capitalism's way of dealing with the fact that material changes in our economy over the past 40 years have created a very different set of options and consequences for parents (and children) than used to exist. That, and the continued existence of segregated, low income neighborhoods along with white flight to the suburbs after the civil rights movement have tended to leave inner city schools with very poor tax bases that are unable to provide the sort of education that better funded suburban and private schools can. The neo-liberal solution to this neo-liberal problem? Blame the teachers. Introduce merit based pay and fire them for not teaching the hungry kid with a single mom or dad in jail as well as the suburan, private school teacher was able to teach kids from a nice house with books in it and with stably employed, professional parents. Thus blame and dispose of professional, veteran teachers. Replace them with super-caring, super dedicated idealistic teacher-parents fresh out of college/ grad school who will work off the clock and pay out of their own pocket for teaching materials (easier than raising school budgets!) and eventually burn out and quit in 1-3 years.
Who wins? In the short term... probably wealthy people who don't have to be taxed more, the military-industrial complex whose salaries and pet projects and imperial pipe dreams continue to be subsidized at the expense of domestic living standards, capitalists generally who no longer pay one worker an adequate wage to have a home, raise a family, and either allow their spouse to stay home and raise the kid or afford decent child care... In the long term? Probably the ruling classes of China, India, Brazil, and other newly-industrialized countries, who are able to bring themselves and increasingly something resembling a placated middle class into the 21st century on the basis of 20th century jobs and wages countries like ours began abolishing in the 1970s for the sake of the bottom line.
And the domestic pleebs? Give 'em walmart, Mcjobs, juggalos, gangsta rap, fast food, a couple tours in Iraq, meth, weed, and payday loans at 400% interest. God willing the combination'll kill em off faster than they can figure how to build a third party.
The Struggle Continues...
-Anonymous 27-Year Old Teacher on Facebook
The Ultra-Dedicated-Teacher-as-Parent is neo-liberal capitalism's way of dealing with the fact that material changes in our economy over the past 40 years have created a very different set of options and consequences for parents (and children) than used to exist. That, and the continued existence of segregated, low income neighborhoods along with white flight to the suburbs after the civil rights movement have tended to leave inner city schools with very poor tax bases that are unable to provide the sort of education that better funded suburban and private schools can. The neo-liberal solution to this neo-liberal problem? Blame the teachers. Introduce merit based pay and fire them for not teaching the hungry kid with a single mom or dad in jail as well as the suburan, private school teacher was able to teach kids from a nice house with books in it and with stably employed, professional parents. Thus blame and dispose of professional, veteran teachers. Replace them with super-caring, super dedicated idealistic teacher-parents fresh out of college/ grad school who will work off the clock and pay out of their own pocket for teaching materials (easier than raising school budgets!) and eventually burn out and quit in 1-3 years.
Who wins? In the short term... probably wealthy people who don't have to be taxed more, the military-industrial complex whose salaries and pet projects and imperial pipe dreams continue to be subsidized at the expense of domestic living standards, capitalists generally who no longer pay one worker an adequate wage to have a home, raise a family, and either allow their spouse to stay home and raise the kid or afford decent child care... In the long term? Probably the ruling classes of China, India, Brazil, and other newly-industrialized countries, who are able to bring themselves and increasingly something resembling a placated middle class into the 21st century on the basis of 20th century jobs and wages countries like ours began abolishing in the 1970s for the sake of the bottom line.
And the domestic pleebs? Give 'em walmart, Mcjobs, juggalos, gangsta rap, fast food, a couple tours in Iraq, meth, weed, and payday loans at 400% interest. God willing the combination'll kill em off faster than they can figure how to build a third party.
The Struggle Continues...
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