Thursday, June 30, 2011

Who Needs Illegals Anyway? Oh wait.. We Do.

Who Needs Illegals Anyway? Oh wait.. We Do.

So Georgia is facing a little bit of a problem. No, it's not illegals. They actually cleared that up and ran off all those pesky illegals that were taking the jobs of locals. The problem now is that those open jobs working in the fields are ones that no one in their right True-American mind actually wants.
State officials reaping what they have sown
Jay Bookman; Staff

After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.

It might be funny if it wasn't so sad.

Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars' worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they've done to Georgia's largest industry.

Barely a month ago, you might recall, Gov. Nathan Deal welcomed the TV cameras into his office as he proudly signed HB 87 into law. Two weeks later, with farmers howling, a scrambling Deal ordered a hasty investigation into the impact of the law he had just signed, as if all this had come as quite a surprise to him.

The results of that investigation have now been released. According to a survey of 230 Georgia farmers conducted by Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, farmers expect to need more than 11,000 workers at some point over the rest of the season, a number that probably underestimates the real need, since not every farmer in the state responded to the survey.

In response, Deal proposes that farmers try to hire the 2,000 unemployed criminal probationers estimated to live in southwest Georgia. Somehow, I suspect that would not be a partnership made in heaven for either party.

As an editorial in the Valdosta Daily Times notes, "Maybe this should have been prepared for, with farmers' input. Maybe the state should have discussed the ramifications with those directly affected. Maybe the immigration issue is not as easy as 'send them home,' but is a far more complex one in that maybe Georgia needs them, relies on them, and cannot successfully support the state's No. 1 economic engine without them."

According to the survey, more than 6,300 of the unclaimed jobs pay an hourly wage of just $7.25 to $8.99, or an average of roughly $8 an hour. Over a 40-hour work week in the South Georgia sun, that's $320 a week, before taxes, although most workers probably put in considerably longer hours. Another 3,200 jobs pay $9 to $11 an hour. And while our agriculture commissioner has been quoted as saying Georgia farms provide "$12-, $13-, $14-, $16-, $18-an-hour jobs," the survey reported just 169 openings out of more than 11,000 that pay $16 or more.
In addition, few of the jobs include benefits --- only 7.7 percent offer health insurance, and barely a third are even covered by workers' compensation. And the truth is that even if all 2,000 probationers in the region agreed to work at those rates and stuck it out --- a highly unlikely event, to put it mildly --- it wouldn't fix the problem.

Given all that, Deal's pledge to find "viable and law-abiding solutions" to the problem that he helped create seems naively far-fetched. Again, if such solutions existed, they should have been put in place before the bill ever became law, because this impact was entirely predictable and in fact intended.

It's hard to envision a way out of this. Georgia farmers could try to solve the manpower shortage by offering higher wages, but that would create an entirely different set of problems.

If they raise wages by a third to a half, which is probably what it would take, they would drive up their operating costs and put themselves at a severe price disadvantage against competitors in states without such tough immigration laws. That's one of the major disadvantages of trying to implement immigration reform state by state, rather than all at once.

The pain this is causing is real. People are going to lose their crops, and in some cases their farms. The small-town businesses that supply those farms with goods and services are going to suffer as well. For economically embattled rural Georgia, this could be a major blow.
In fact, with a federal court challenge filed last week, you have to wonder whether state officials aren't secretly hoping to be rescued from this mess by the intervention of a judge. But given how the Georgia law is drafted and how the Supreme Court ruled in a recent case out of Arizona, I don't think that's likely.

We're going to reap what we have sown, even if the farmers can't.
Besides having a good number of terrific farming puns laced through out the article, you have to really notice the stats for health insurance and workman's comp in the article.

If you haven't read it, it's well worth the however long it takes you to read an article. It makes you really wonder if you can actually use racism as a weapon in the war against capitalism. I believe we can make it happen.

But I wonder why the unemployed don't want to do crushingly difficult manual labor for far less than minimum wage with no benefits? Clearly they're all just lazy assholes.

What did they think was going to happen? Did they assume that low wages and terrible work conditions would drive people running for the jobs in droves? Why yes, sub-par wages picking fruit, c'mon ma! We gotta pack up the wagon and git before the other okies get wise!"

It's also difficult to envision a way out of this for the state. Georgia farmers could, you know, try to solve the manpower shortage by offering higher wages and all, but that would create an entirely different set of problems, wouldn't it?

Americans finally won. The immigrants have stopped stealing your jobs, so get working already! It's amazing that people are so fucking shocked that no one would be willing to work these farms for the pay they're offering without the constant fear of deportation.

I can't stop laughing at how remarkably dumb the governor comes off in this article. "Well, now that the bill's passed and it's having disastrous effects, we're calling on a study to find out what this bill will actually do."

But hey, it's not like John McCain literally said that the reason illegals immigrants came here was because we didn't want to do farm work.



Why yes.. we might actually have to raise wages from.. well, from barely survivable levels. This just shows that agriculture literally isn't profitable without the use of free labor. Apparently labor cost are only 8% of the total price of food. It's good to know so there's no reason not to pay people a living wage then.

But it also shows that the people of Georgia are bitterly divided over whether Latinos or Blacks are worse. Now wont the native Georgians know the wonders of hard work in the fields in summer. The good thing about working on a farm in the south is that it's so hot that you'll sweat, but so humid that it will have no cooling effect.

Though if native Georgians are working in the fields, who will be working the meth labs?

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

A Little Late On The Photo Trigger

A Day Late and A Dollar Short.

Not really much substance to this one, I just thought it was rather interesting to see a slightly different angle or a moment or two before/after those images of history that are now forever embedded into your mind.



Because really, the only difference between some of these shots and the ones you've seen in our pop culture and history is just a couple of seconds. Makes you wonder. Just look at the before and after of this famous scene.



And... how about a minute later.



Yeah, those two pictures weren't as memorable as the one picture just about everyone has seen. What others can you figure out from the following?










And to get a bit more light hearted. This one just seems like the photographer was just a minute too early for their own good.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Fuck The (World) Police

Fuck The (World) Police

Fuck.. fuck.. Fuck da police! Okay, that's a pretty bold statement but by the end of this blog post I'm hoping you will also join me in saying Fuck da poe-poe! So let's start off small and grow out to the world..



Lesson learned from all this? Don't call the cops about something unless you're okay with that person and possibly other people and pets being shot for no reason what-so-ever.

Maybe you just shouldn't call the cops at all...

Just think, that woman called the police for help and they murdered her dog and her son. I know that

What gets me even worse is listening to that police union rep.
"Listen, these situations have a lot of dynamics, specifics, specify dynamics, and dynamic specifics, so we can't be sure what really happened"
Jesus fucking Christ, really? Oh, and even worse is he bust out the fucking "Bad apples" argument that was used unironically.

Let me clue you in on one thing. It's not even 'a few', the phrase is actually "one bad apple spoils the whole bunch" LEARN IT, MOTHER FUCKRS! I know he's a union rep but he's defending the murderer by questioning the non-murderer cop's testimony. Does this guy represent cops or just killer asshole cops?

Though my anger subsided at that news report when I saw how that local news station actually did a piece called "Cops and colo" that actually talked about how cops are racist assholes. Add that with the fact that the union rep is total scum and we have ourselves a bizarro world.

"I don't have all the facts, but I'm going to slavishly defend this fat murderer until he's convicted by a justice system that sees him as an infallible ubermensch"

Add in that if you're a police union advocate, your most common enemies are you own department's internal affairs people, it's pretty slimy of a job if you think about it.

Cops are shit at just about everything except not killing people. Cops also routinely get away with literal first degree murder in every single jurisdiction in America bar none, this will be no different.

I'm not even going to go into detail about how a Mom of boy Tasered in high school cafeteria files lawsuit, But you can see that the cops have had a lot of legal problems and aren't helping themselves out here.

But when you say fuck the police.. or at least when I say it, we should extend that feeling to the World Police - NATO

Because there's no other police that fucks the people over like NATO does. Just look at this shit.
Pro-democracy fighters have made fresh advances in both the east and the west of Libya, gaining ground against forces loyal to the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, reports say.

Late on Tuesday, NATO resumed bombing the Libyan capital with strikes hitting the east of the city.

Libyan state TV said the bombings had struck military and civilian targets in Firnag, one of the biggest neighbourhoods in Tripoli, and Ain Zara. It said there were casualties.

In the west of the country, the fighters managed to to force government troops into retreat from the town of Kikla, about 150km southwest of the capital, Tripoli, on Tuesday, news agencies said.

And in the east, they launched more attacks against Gaddafi forces near the oil town of Brega, where fighting on Monday killed at least 25 fighters and wounded dozens more.

The wounded were transferred to a hospital in Ajdabiya, 160km south of Benghazi, the de facto capital of the rebels who have been fighting to overthrow Gaddafi since mid-February.

The rebels have spent months trying to seize the strategic oil hub of Brega, which would open the road to Sirte, the Libyan leader's home town, and from there to Tripoli.

They're bombing residential neighborhoods and "civilian targets" in an attempt to terrorize Libya into surrendering its oil. Luckily nobody cares enough about the Libya anymore to consider all these things together, though thanks to Anthony Weiner and Charlie Sheen or whatever white noise pointless news piece - Say for example some Jackass crashing and burning.

At the very least Boehner is calling out Obama on the war powers. Though who knows how little that will actually do for the whole shit.



On a side note, it's funny that people still use caricatures of Gordon Brown because that's just how irrelevant the UK is in any foreign matter.

Obama is now more or less playing the giving aid and comfort to our enemies card with congress to get them to stop making pesky arguments as to why the war is illegal. This situation is far worse than it ever was with Bush.

Yeah, that's right.. I said it, this is far worse than Bush.
The White House has told Congress that President Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack H. Obama has the legal authority to press on with US military involvement in Libya and urged sceptical lawmakers not to send "mixed messages" about their commitment to the Nato-led air war.

Delivering a detailed report to Congress on Wednesday to justify Obama's Libya policy, the administration argued he had the constitutional power to continue acting against Muammar Gaddafi's forces even though lawmakers had not authorised it.

Tensions in Washington over Libya reflected growing unease over US entanglement in a third conflict in the Muslim world in addition to costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and pressure for Obama to clarify the US mission in the north African country.

The 32-page response to lawmakers' complaints followed a warning on Tuesday from House speaker John Boehner that Obama was on thin legal ice by keeping US forces involved in Libya for nearly three months without congressional approval.
That's our Nobel Peace Prize winner Barrack Obama there. Firing missiles and bombing somewhere and having it not qualify as "hostilities".

Then of course there's Yemen
Both the Wall Street Journal and the Washington post report today that the Obama administration is planning to exploit the disorder from the civil war in Yemen by dramatically escalating a CIA-led drone bombing campaign. In one sense, this is nothing new.

So yeah, Fuck the police.

Monday, June 27, 2011

Fuck Video Games - I'm Too Old For This Bullshit

Fuck Video Games - I'm Too Old For This Bullshit

A week or so ago a good friend of mine wrote his post-E3 sum up of what he felt was the problem with the gaming industry these days. He made some valid points and I figured I would jump on and attach my viewpoint of the state of the industry behind his.

I can tell you one thing that I see as the problem with the industry... we grew up while it didn't. In fact, quite the opposite. You know how in most video games they start you off small so you can learn how the world is like and then the task become increasingly more difficult. A sort of leveling up and what not.

Well, it seems like games today are designed in the opposite direction. They start you off and it becomes increasingly stupid as it goes along. It's not that gamers are fundamentally stupid, it's just that's what game designers actually believe.

Take the classic first person map design of the olden days and compare it to the ones now:


Your modern FPS has much more scripted shit than ever before. It's utterly insane how much of a straight path you have to go through in order to keep that cinematic feel going and what suffers and dies is what you were playing video games for in the first place - The ability to explore a new world.

Maybe it's not that the game designers think we're stupid. Maybe it's just that game designers themselves have become stupid. I mean, look at who is creating the video games you are playing...



So it really shouldn't come to a surprise to anyone that the modern games are made for and by retards.

You would think that programmers wouldn't be able to actually make a video game like that, but if you will even watch any amount of this Duke Nukem walk through from Giant Bomb.. Which I feel terrible for having to play this piece of shit.

Jump to that 11:40 mark and just watch..



If you couldn't make it past a couple of minutes I don't blame you. Their assessment is dead on. At this point, 12 years later,

ever since i tried to watch e3 but couldnt take it i've been having Deep Thoughts about how 80 years from now people are going to examine this era's cultural products and feel pity for such a wretched existence. there's a lot of really really dark stuff goin on in peoples brains

Oh, and if you couldn't tolerate the video for more than a few seconds, I don't blame you but this is all you need to know about Duke Nukem Forever...



Maybe I should just feel worse for the programmer. Can you imagine being the guy who had to animate that wall of tits? Just think of his resume.
resume:

1997 - 2011 (14 years): chief wall tits slapping officer
Yup, seems like it makes sense.

But maybe I'm just not hitting the mark here. These dumb games sell because they are dumb. Much like how the films that look like total shit make gangbusters in bucks at the theater, these games appeal to the widest demographic. It could very well be a case that the smart games aren't selling and so they don't make them as often....

But then that leads to the idea that what comes first the chicken or the egg. Will people flock to those fun/smart games if more of them were out there? It's much like health food. It's more costly to buy an apple in most places than it is to buy a bag of chips. Which one is healthier and which one is just cheap and filled with delicious chemicals that want you to eat more.

In this case I don't want to ever play Duke Nukem. Nor most of the other games hitting the scene. But maybe it's simply because I grew up from ever enjoying your average video game and became a crotchy old man about it.

Sunday, June 26, 2011

American Health Care - God Fucking Damn It

American Health Care - God Fucking Damn It

Take a look at the Groupon deal that was posted and tell me that the American health care system is not completely fucked beyond belief.

My first reaction was to not believe it existed. Cause really, Jesus fucking Christ, America. I'm so sorry for the state that we are in when you literally have to buy a Groupon to hold on to in the case of an emergency.

Health for the rich... Why yes, that's a good platform. Their awesome health will trickle down, you see. It all works in the end. Besides, with this coupon for a $150 valued visit or a pre-appointment assessment appointment meeting, they should be properly covered, right?

Soon even the insured will choose to die instead of jumping through the insurance hoops that we make people go through for over priced health care. It's going to be cases where people will baby a sprained wrist for three weeks in hopes that they can get a coupon to have it checked out.

There's third world countries with better health care than the U.S. In Turkey car insurance companies have to cover stray animals hit by cars now. Stray fucking animals literally have better coverage in a 3rd world country than humans do in the U.S. I hope you have a pipe and some hash ready because this whole groupon coupon is perfect smoking material to remove yourself from how surreal this shit is.

Then again, my city often gets 50% off of pole dancing classes. So perhaps this groupon is a better health care plan. Or maybe not. One would hope that those using the pole dancing coupon don't get dance fever or pole infection.

It's utterly disgusting how flippant the description is. Someone actually got paid $9 an hour and absolutely worthless health insurance to actually write the copy in this ad.
The human body has the remarkable ability to heal itself, unless someone replaced your Cheerios with grommets and your stomach feels like a spasmodic washing machine. Hire a healing hand in emergency situations with today’s Groupon: for $70, you get a basic office visit to Urgent Care Manhattan (a $150 value).

Urgent Care Manhattan is a private practice established by board-certified emergency doctors that assesses and tends to patients experiencing minor emergencies who need immediate care seven days a week. Although no replacement exists for an emergency room in the case of a life-threatening situation, the doctors at Urgent Care Manhattan will expertly address ailments, injuries, and infections that interfere with daily life, without requiring patients to wait several weeks for an appointment or a pre-appointment assessment appointment meeting. Drs. Melrose and Shipley may write a prescription or recommend treatment to resolve medical issues or prevent future ones, or they may discern a quicker route to recovery to mitigate the impact of the situation on a patient’s lifestyle, work, or competitive whittling career.

Broken bones and sprains spring back toward recovery under the physicians’ wise tutelage, and screenings identify HIV and rare strains of strep to the unyielding demands of medical science. People of all ages may come in for an office visit, guaranteeing treatment for pediatric, elderly, and paleolithic patients.
By golly, it's a good thing the state of Illinois literally gave Groupon $300 million to hire skilled labor at minimum wage. How it works is if you want to work for Groupon you have to write a long writing sample that a group of people will look at and decide if you're wacky and unpredictable enough to work there.

In short - Death to America. Death to Capitalism.

Saturday, June 25, 2011

This Is Your Brain On Drugs

This Is Your Brain On Drugs

If you ever wanted to know what it's like to be totally shit faced high or completely drunk off your ass at 3 in the morning with the TV on. Well, let me introduce you to my world.



You can't unsee this stuff. Yes. You have just tripped balls and walked that crazy line.

Friday, June 24, 2011

Wal-Mart Has Fucked More Women Than You Will Ever Dream About

Wal-Mart Has Fucked More Women Than You Will Ever Dream About

As every day goes on my hatred for the supreme court grows with it. Just look at this latest Supreme Court Ruling

The Supreme Court put the brakes on a massive job discrimination lawsuit against mega-retailer Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., saying sweeping class-action status that could potentially involve hundreds of thousands of current and former female workers was simply too large.

The ruling Monday was a big victory for the nation's largest private employer, and the business community at large.

The high-profile case– perhaps the most closely watched of the high court's term– is among the most important dealing with corporate versus worker rights that the justices have ever heard, and could eventually impact nearly every private employer, large and small.


The thing that most people don't realize about the supreme court is that the "justice" in their title is actually ironic. Sort of like a hipster type of thing.

Fuck every single supreme court judge especially the ones who voted against this for not raising a stink about how awful and corrupt this supreme court is. Because really, how many 5-4 decisions have they've made lately that completely fucked the average American? Oh, this was a 9-0 decision? Well then Fuck everybody even harder then.

Though I can't say I was at all surprised by this latest news piece of fucking the common man. Because it doesn't come as a surprise that capital won yet again against all odds. After citizens united, the court won't even pretend to hear cases with corporate parties involved. They'll just summarily move in favor of the corporation

I'm still not sure how the justification for this is actually that the case was just too large. What the fuck does that even mean? Is it literally "Yeah, widespread sexism and illegal discriminaiton might be an issue... but that it's just way bigger than we can handle so fuck it, let it ride!

Maybe their too large class action lawsuit might not have gotten negged so hard if it lost a few pounds, am I right? Besides, the whole notion that the corporate policy says that they don't discriminate, and so they clearly must not in any shape or form discriminate must be right..

I can't wait for the day that an immovable object meets an impenetrable force. It'll be a day to remember when the supreme court spontaneously collapsed into a black hole as the unconquerable paradox presented itself; a case in which both sides were major multi-trillion dollar multinational corporations.

Faced with the prospect of actually having to decide a case on the merits and dangerously risking the precedent that no matter which side was ruled for, a case would be decided against a corporation, the supreme court was unable to cope and imploded from the strain only to collapse endlessly inward for eternity.

Don't believe me that corporations get a major favoritism?
Though the current Supreme Court has a well-earned reputation for divisiveness, it has been surprisingly united in cases affecting business interests. Of the 30 business cases last term, 22 were decided unanimously, or with only one or two dissenting votes. Conrad said she was especially pleased that several of the most important decisions were written by liberal justices, speaking for liberal and conservative colleagues alike. In opinions last term, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and David Souter each went out of his or her way to question the use of lawsuits to challenge corporate wrongdoing — a strategy championed by progressive groups like Public Citizen but routinely denounced by conservatives as “regulation by litigation.” Conrad reeled off some of her favorite moments: “Justice Ginsburg talked about how ‘private-securities fraud actions, if not adequately contained, can be employed abusively.’ Justice Breyer had a wonderful quote about how Congress was trying to ‘weed out unmeritorious securities lawsuits.’ Justice Souter talked about how the threat of litigation ‘will push cost-conscious defendants to settle.’ ”
Clearly we can't think about making things difficult on companies in this economic climate, can we? Anyone in the country who works for a private entity must now submit to a arbiter paid by said private entity for every kind of civil grievance whatsoever. Sounds pretty awesome, right?

Apparently the best legal protection you can get in the US is to incorporate yourself. This court ruling basically implies that a company can discriminate as they please so long as their official policy claims they do not. As if they would ever write something down that would qualify as discriminatory practices.

Yup, America sure is an awesome place to be... if you're a corporation. Cant I just point this out:
A lower US court ruled that the case could go to trial, but Walmart appealed to the supreme court. If the class action had been accepted it could have set a precedent for gender discrimination at many corporations, with companies such as Microsoft and General Electric writing to the court expressing their concern.
How the fuck is this even legal? The law is totally fucked because those very same assholes who benefit from this are the ones who are writing it.

More to the point, why would you even try to take Wal_Mart to court? I mean, really?
"Hmmm, let me just sue the Pharaoh, supreme ruler of all that exists, for working me overtime, finally justice will be served!"
-a slave
Also annoying is comments like this from the article:
Red Pison
I was against this from the start because while I am for equal rights if a woman cannot do the same workload as a man, then she should not earn as much or more than a man who would have to work twice as hard to pick up her slack. Ladies, you cannot get your cake and eat it too. You want even more special privileges, not equal rights.
June 20, 2011 at 10:44 am | Report abuse | Reply

Yeah, dicks. How about this finding about female Wal-Mart employees:

d) Women have more years employed at Wal-Mart than men overall, in salary
jobs, and in hourly jobs. Women have been working at Wal-Mart longer
than men in the same job, for 97% of jobs with at least 1000 employees in
2001.

e) Women have higher performance ratings in hourly jobs than men, on the
average in 2001. The average performance rating is higher for women than
men in the same job, for 75% of hourly jobs with at least 1000 employees
with ratings in 2001.
Male manager said women only made store manager to meet a quota. Fuuuuuuck. That women should be home barefoot and pregnant and women weren't qualified to be managers because men had an extra rib.

In short - Fuck Wal*Mart. Fuck the Supreme Court. Fuck This Gay Earth. Death To America.

That is all.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Obama's Pulling Out!

Obama's Pulling Out!

So Obama took to the airwaves yesterday to announce some sort of news of us pulling out of Afghanistan.


But it was more like when you're with that hot girl you're with and you sort of work your way to just have sort-of-sex and say something along the lines of "Just the tip". Yeah, that's how much we're pulling out. Because really, Obama's announcement that we're pulling out 10,000 troops from Afghanistan is just stupid.

Mainly because Obama added somewhere between 50k and 70k worth of troops to Afghanistan since his becomig President. So this "drawdown" doesn't mean shit really. But since Petraeus only wanted a couple to withdrawn, Obama's now acting bold and decisvely against MIC.



I simply can't wait for the "Bringing our boys home" campaign ads. I can hear the music swelling already. Of course those troops will just be marching into Pokystan soon, so it's not like it matters anyway.

Hell, did you even listen to that speech? The Prez pretty much made it sound like it was alright to just bomb the shit out of brown people in Libya simply because it's not considered a war. To him, the moment we put troops on the ground then we're in war. But we can avoid that by simply bombing the shit out of them.

He also added some talking points that by 2014, Afghanistan will be responsible for themselves. So they'll have to find a way to bomb their own brown people by then, I guess.



Let's look over the list of goals for this Obama presidency for the people.

1) Full Employment
2) Medicare for All
3) Civil Rights/Human Rights/Civil Liberties
4) Fair Trade

5) End the Wars Now

6) Environmental Stewardship
7) Campaign Finance Reform
8) Regulate of the Constitutional Rights of Corporations
9) Peace
10) Living Wage / A Real Social Safety Net (tie)

A committee is now at work, relating these platform points to the existing platforms of other Progressive groups, some members of which sit on the NPA Steering Committee. It's sad that these used to be the basis for the democratic party's platform and now they are considered "far left" goals...

Now that I mention it, is there any economic metric by which Americans are better off now than they were right before Obama started presidenting? Aside from the one-percenters, I mean. Because all it seems to be is a case where these are in:

* more foreclosures than any time since the depression
* black U-3 rate higher than overall U-6 for the first time ever
* more Americans on food stamps than at any other point in history
* record early withdrawals from retirement savings, in spite of the tax penalty
* 85 percent of new grads moving back in with 'rents
* record number of people priced out of health insurance
* record low prosecution rate for white-collar crime

And it's not just economic stuff. He's got a worse record than Bush on civil liberties, military expansionism, prosecuting whistleblowers, and non-transparency. Even though his platform was for more government transparency, oddly enough. I honestly can't think of one metric, offhand, by which Americans are better off than they were with Bush. And to me that is really really sad.

How about the field of education and how far it will take you...
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Getting a degree used to be a stepping stone to limitless career opportunities. Now it's more of a hiatus from living under your parents' roof.

Stubbornly high unemployment -- nearly 15% for those ages 20-24 -- has made finding a job nearly impossible. And without a job, there's nowhere for these young adults to go but back to their old bedrooms, curfews and chore charts. Meet the boomerangers.

"This recession has hit young adults particularly hard," according to Rich Morin, senior editor at the Pew Research Center in DC.

So hard that a whopping 85% of college seniors planned to move back home with their parents after graduation last May, according to a poll by Twentysomething Inc., a marketing and research firm based in Philadelphia. That rate has steadily risen from 67% in 2006.


Ha! You have to laugh at working without health benefits, as that seems like the damn norm these days. Not to mention boo freakin' hoo. Little lord fauntleroy with his MFA in creative writing ahd to take a job at Lady Foot Locker back at home where the jock who beat him up after 4th period geometry during Junior year is now his assistant manager.

What are you going to do about it anyway? Besides vote for Obama in 2012 with a little less enthusiasm. It's not like you're going to vote 3rd party or anything. But if you were, it has to be a lot better than not voting at all. Because at least the third party egts subsequent access to funding and ballot placement from your votes towards them.

Or you could be like me and write in Nader. Because it's really the only thing that pisses off democrats more than voting republican.

Obama makes, essentially, the greatest Republican ever. Just look at how every speech he uses the fake dichotomy of "those on the left say... those on the right say" even though solid majorities of voters of all stripes are saying to get the fuck out of that shit hole pointless war already.

But then again, maybe I should feel torn about all this. If there is a pull out, there will be fewer troops on the ground to kill, but fewer troops to do the killing as well.

But hey, when the car's already in the ditch, you don't put it in reverse, you just put it into drive! Am I right? There was an old dem outfit polled that in-the-ditch metaphor was pretty silly, in it, it came in dead last for effective messaging but Obama went on to use it in every 2010 fundraising event from them on.

Shit like "Stay the course", "Can't change horses mid race", "Don't rock the boat" and "We can't change presidents in a middle of a.... WAR!" all scream as solutions to get another term as fucking president of this shit hole country.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

It's The Second Day Of Summer!

It's The Second Day Of Summer!

Did I miss the summer solstice this year? God damn it! Well, might as well wrap up spring cause summer officially started.

But what would summer be without having it start off with a classic? Here's a sweet groove from America's most wholesome rappers.



Yeah, that's right. Bust out those tank tops cause it's summer time! It's just a shame that I missed out any summer solstice celebrations. I wanted to get down with my pagan homies and use a lot of faux mysticism and appropriation of native rituals.

But what am I talking about, let's get back to the summer time sounds.







Awww yeah. Time to get summer rolling.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Amy Adams And Jason Segel's Boring Romantic Comedy

Amy Adams And Jason Segel's Boring Romantic Comedy

I mean, really, do we need yet another sappy romantic comedy that has been done a million times over? Boy meets girl, girl falls in love with a boy, boy messes it up and then, well, I'm sure you can see what I mean with this poster...



And if that wasn't enough, just look at this trailer for the film. I mean, can they get anymore formulaic?



I mean, just look at this. How inoffensive can you get with this film? Half of those actors look like they have a hand up their ass... wait.. muppets?! What the fuck?

As my favorite muppets would say, this movie doesn't look half bad...

Doesn't look half good, either! oh ho ho!



Yeah, I gotta admit I'm really excited for this film. Much like Segel, I'm a huge Muppet fan and he's one of the biggest contributors to this film. So I really can't think of anything other than awesome that this film will contain.

Jasan Segel busted into tears when they brought Kermit in for the first table read. It's silly to say that there's not at least a lot sincerity that's going into this one with him behind the wheel.

Though my one hope is that Pepe the King Prawn is not in this for much time. He was a late add on to the characters and even though I love eating shrimp, I really don't give a shit about his character.

Over all, finally a romantic comedy I actually care about. Now I only have seven months to convince the girlfriend to go see a movie about muppets. Maybe the fact that Brett from Flight of the Conchords will be writing an original song for this flick will convince her.

I mean, Jim Henson has always been a little off, so it makes perfect sense as the music choice here.






But sure enough, the marketing department for this is on the ball. Just look at the latest trailer that is a parody of The Hangover 2.

Monday, June 20, 2011

Too Bit To Fail - Bitcoins and Internet Fake Currency.

Too Bit To Fail - Bitcoins and Internet Fake Currency.

The average worth of a Bitcoin is now .01 cent. Yeah, that's right. The price went down to a cent each. I have to say, I love the world and everything in it cause I'm laughing my ass off.

For something that's supposed to point out the flaws in central banking and flat currency, Bitcoin isn't really earning its keep. Imagine if your currency lost half its value every weekend. It would cause riots on a daily basis. The most comical aspect of all this is that people on Bitforums are complaining that there should have been some kind of central authority to stop all this from happening.



Wait, I'm giving away the ending before the story ever begun. You're probably wondering what the fuck is all this fake internet money called Bitcoins, right?

Take a look in your wallet for a moment and tell me what you see. Is there dollar bills in there? What the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you still using those dead presidents as a method of paying the debt of goods and/or services?

You gotta burn all that money right now because it is utterly useless. What you got to do is get yourself some Bitcoins. It's the internet's latest thing! Wait, you probably aren't aware of this newest form of proclaiming your social economic status. So for those of you who are wonder what a Bitcoin is, look at this handy and helpful video:



Does it make sense now? Bitcoins are a form of virtual currency that is produced by running your computer program. You're probably wondering how someone running four computers all make that "Easy money" off this?

Basically to mine Bitcoins you have to offer computing services for processing transactions. It's like SETI or Folding@home. These research companies used your computer's power to run whatever they needed to run.

The important part to know about all this is that it's a fiat currency that is not backed by any government or organization with assets, and initially allocated to users based their on available idle computing power. If you're not sure why people would use such a silly thing, you're really not alone. The biggest question that comes up is exactly what can you buy with Bitcoins?



Wired magazine did put out a news story about how you can buy drugs with Bitcoins online. So if you're a shut-in dork who can't find a decent connection on the streets, I guess you can use Bitcoins to score your hit.

Though you sort of have to be mentally retarded to have drugs mailed to your home. Wait, you also have to be sort of mentally retarded to go in for a currency that is not backed by gold or anything else for that matter. So the answer to that is "Fake internet money to buy drugs"

So how is it that you buy weed and cocaine using Bitcoins?
Silk Road is a peer-to-peer commerce website like eBay, with a few important differences: it's only accessible through the anonymous network Tor, purchases can only be made with the digital currency Bitcoin, and much of the trade is in drugs
I guess it's not so useless now, is it? Well, that was till the news went full blast on that side of bitcoins and then that pretty much went away. But Silkroad was a marketplace where drugs could be traded for bitcoins. Though that shouldn't surprise anyone as whenever there's a currency in whatever form, drugs will be one of the first things sold through it.

Who wouldn't like to use their Bitcoins on some dude coming by and throwing weed through your open window at night?



This is all thanks to Gawker. God damn Gawker. Now that you have reported on it, that means that the site must be gone. Sure enough, it's gone. And here I was going to say goodbye to my alcoholism and hello to heroin addiction. Besides that, heroin addiction is much healthier in pretty much every way but your poop. Maybe a buttcoin currency will help with that.

Sure enough, when the nightly news covers it, it's a given that it's a dead duck.. So it's too late now to buy anything before it was wiped out of existence. And some of you are wondering about the level of quality in bitcoin drugs. I mean, what if the dude mixes in rat poison with your cocaine?

Well, you would die and one one would have any legal recourse on the matter. Then again, why would you care? You'd be fucking dead. You can't, with your dying breath, leave someone with negative Silk road feedback. Besides that, nobody has much in the way of legal recourse if you die rom cut coke or fent-laced heroin you bought off the street. If anything, this gives more people the idea to just sell bad drugs and dandruff on the internet for fake currency.

I can't blame Gawker for letting the cat out of the bag though. You would have to be a fool to think that the Feds didn't already know of it. They are, after all, the biggest drug cartel around. They know their competition and will crush it.



If you take my suggestion though, in that you shouldn't get hooked or depend on street drugs. You could have a perfectly socially accepted drug problem with prescription variety of drugs. Though you would have to deal with a lot of white people for all that.

Though you can also use this to buy shit from nerd stores online. In fact, now that I think about it, this entire economy is basically built on Thinkgeek gift vouchers. And before this unstable drop to shit, you could probably also buy groceries online with it. But if you were thinking that buying your Dad a Father's Day gift of investments in Bitcoins, perhaps you should have reconsidered that rather wise investment, don't you think?

Yeah, you people laugh now, but who will be laughing about Bitcoins in 30 years? Well, no one because no one will remember that flash in the pan poniz scheme.

Another thing you can use it for is to buy shit off Newegg with Bitcoins!... well, sort of.
How does it work?

1) Browse Newegg.com and add any desired products to your cart. You do not need to login or create an account.
2) Click "View Shopping Cart." Rather than check out, click "Email Cart."
3) Enter newegg@bitspend.com in the "To:" box and provide your email address in the "From:" box.
4) Provide a name, shipping address, and desired shipping method in the "Personalized note" section.
5) Click 'Submit.' Via email you will receive a quote in BTC and a unique bitcoin payment address. Use the bitcoin client or another client/service to send to the specified bitcoin address.
Don't you see, Bitcoins isn't all about buying drugs. It's also about inconvenient methods of shopping for normal shit as well. Not too long ago someone bought out all of Newegg's stock of miner ATI cards. The end result is something like this being created.



With a bit of creativity these could be so much more. If nobody sees the tragedy in that... well, it's like putting your twelve beautiful daughters to work in a brothel during their prime, when they should be studying art and the humanities, for shame.

But you see there, that's money.. fake internet money that you could use to buy drugs, of course. Apparently the yield is supposedly about 72 bitcoins per day.Though yield efficiency has been going down over time for everyone.

Don't they realize that with the more people who are "mining" with more powerful equipment for the sole purpose of getting fake internet money, they're just driving yields even lower because only a fixed number of new bitcoins are issued per day.

At this rate, you're better off flipping real estate. In fact, all of you with real estate licensees should just buy foreclosed homes near hydroelectric damns. Preferably in the mountains with cold climates, your electricity is 50% cheaper than other parts of the country so for maybe $8 of power you can be generating $75 in Bitcoins with free heating. Just make sure you open a window though, you don't want to be that one idiot who passes out due to heat.



That guy must probably be bummed that the hospital wouldn't consider taking his Bitcoins for the service rendered. I have to repeat it again, would permanent minor brain damage make him stop mining for them? I would have really thought the reverse would be true in that instance.

Anyone with half a brain, even a heaatstroke retarded one, would have had reality sink in on the matter.

Wasn't it a big red flag that Bitcoins may not have been all that if the person selling Bitcoin shirts didn't actually accept Bitcoins because:
"Bitcoins are too precious to spend anyway with their value rising so fast."
Why no, by no means is that possibly a warning sign of some type. Then again, this was just another opportunity for speculation and there certainly aren't enough of those going around these days.

What I'm waiting for is for someone to pull off a Bitcoin investment scam... It's like a-no wait, it would be a ponzi scheme within a ponzi scheme. If only people realized that you can't escape capitalism by creating a new currency and running away.

It is odd that before the .01 mark, everyone could plainly see that the bubble was coming, but they kept on going with it. It's like playing musical chairs or something.



Though the nice thing about this market bubble bust is that there's going to be a lot of people who want out of this stupid thing and they're going to flood the market with their useless overclocked video cards for pennies on the dollar.

It's just funny to see what people were willing to do for fake internet dollars. Look at this hired hitman...



Or maybe you should call him a Bitman for hire? Though the catch phrases could be pretty sweet. "Prepare to die, shitface! I'm about to write *puts on sunglasses*... your o-BIT-uary".

Assassin's Creed: Bitcoinhood. But what happens if he pussies out and/or gets arrested? Do you get your bitcoins back? No?! What a rip off!

Buying overclocked video cards, drugs and maybe groceries? Perhaps one should sell everything, mortgage a house out, sell their children into slavery and invest it all into Bitcoins and a gun with one single bullet for when the bubble burst. It would be the ultimate interesting option in life.

They should totally make it worth whoring yourself out for... Oh wait, Bitcoinbabes actually exist.. or should I say existed.



I say that because of the way the market fluctuated over the popularity of this piece of shit currency. And because of what happened yesterday.

You see, the price of Bitcoins went up from $7 when I first heard of them to peaking around $30. Then over the course of a few days it started slipping under $27. The other day it was at $17 and in a crazy turn of events it went from $17 to $0.01 in a day...

Basically, the Bitcoin market just crashed like a car hitting a tree.



So what exactly happened? Well, the moment someone posted "SELL SELL SELL" on the internet it caused the prices to come crashing down. How about them apples. Who doesn't want a currency that is dependent on the fickle nature of people on the internet? Though to be fair, that right there is the sound of a classic speculative bubble bursting.
You would think that the price would have hovered around $5-10 as that's about how much it cost in electricity to mine the suckers. But nope!

Perhaps the whole purpose of all this was to show that capitalism was attributing value of insanity and that the market economy is in essence the equivalent of magic men making up shit off the top of their heads.

Or maybe perhaps that Obama needs to take steps to bail out the Bitcoin.

For a while there I was thinking that it must be nice to be that one lucky son of a bitch who had $1000 in bitcoins when they were only $0.05 each. What a wild ride he took as they went up to $28 each, only to come crashing down to $0.01. Well, at least he doubled his investment. That is unless he spent it all on internet heroin.



It's just funny to me. All of it. It's as if they want to buy a one way ticket out of this capitalist system but they've paying with Bitcoins. Trying to escape and yet falling for a transparent speculative venture. Why hey, I always said that capitalism could use a bit more capitalism!

Speculation is awesome if you're the guy putting it on so you can leave just when the crash triggers. Even funnier is that by simple virtue of you leaving, you're the one that triggers it. Who wouldn't want to be a speculator? They make billions in one day and literally rob the bank with no penalties



And from what I hear, someone sold 261383 BTC @ 0.01 USD at mtgox. Apparently all those were stolen bitcoins. It's the first and last recorded bit heist. And it may very well have caused this house of cards to come crashing down.

I guess the only question left is how does one jump out of a basement's window? The comical thing to all this is that when all those GPU's get ebayed, it's going to temporarily destroy the high-end GPU market as well.



So the breakdown of bitcoin history is basically this:

October 2010 - Nerd scammer created a fake online currency, uses leftover trading card game site for middle schoolers whose parents wouldn't let them play dungeons and dragons as exchange.

October 2010-May 2011 - Currency steadily gains value as it flies under the radar, entrepreneurs figure out it makes for good laundering for drug sales.

Late May 2011 - Corporate media catches on to drug trade aspect, sensationalizes internet libertarian fake currency scam in simple language the average wired reader can comprehend

June 2011 - Ensuing bubble from new attention attracts people concerned with potential vulnerabilities in system, inevitable crash happens with massive currency dumping to the point that it's only worth 1 cent.



Maybe folks should reconsider any future currency that is tied to a past expenditure that cannot be recovered or transferred. Though if that sentence made sense to you, you probably are smart enough to not fall for stupid shit like Bitcoins anyway. You can add yet another form of mining that is completely a waste of time.The other being minecraft, in the event that you were wondering.

I really hope this isn't the end of Bitcoins. Mainly because so far each disaster has outdone the last and also the suffering of the stupid is my sustenance. Besides, I haven't had a laugh like this at the hands of others expense in such a long time. It's nice and refreshing.

After all,t his is a currency that has swung by as much as 200% in a matter of days. A currency which bubbled in value by over 3000% in less than one year. A currency where, reportedly, people have had hundreds of thousands of "dollars" stolen from them electronically without any legal or financial recourse. Most of all, it was a currency that was only ever propped up by speculators, scam artist and morons hoping for easy money on the internet....

Clearly this couldn't have lasted long. In fact, the idea that it lasted this long to begin with is god damn hysterical in itself. It's not that Bitcoins as a currency are dying, it's that they were always still-born. It's only a question on how much of a puppet show they will play with the corpse of this rotting bloated body of a currency.

I'm not even entertaining the idea that with the CPU power that they are using to mine Bitcoins, that instead they could have used that CPU power could have gone towards Folding@Home and helped with potentially finding a cure for cancer..

Just food for thought.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

The Junk Shot

The Junk Shot

On this father's day what better topic is there than the one of finding ways of avoiding this Holiday altogether.

Yeah, that's right. This is a blog about not having any reason to celebrate today. Well, besides saying hi to your own pop. But the main topic here is to avoid being the center of attention today by not being the father..



If only there was a way to prevent that from ever happening. I mean.. if only. Oh wait, there may possibly be a method and all it takes is One junk shot and that's all you need to be baby free for 10 years.

One Saturday in January 2010, Devendra Deshpande left his home in the Delhi suburbs and drove into the city to get a vasectomy. He was 36 years old, married with two young kids, and he thought it was time.

He arrived at the hospital around midday and met Hem Das, then the hospital’s chief vasectomy surgeon. Das had an interesting question for Deshpande. Rather than receive a traditional vasectomy, would Deshpande like to be part of a clinical trial for a new contraceptive procedure?

Das explained that the new method did not have some of the drawbacks associated with a regular vasectomy. First, sperm would still be able to escape Deshpande’s body normally, which meant he would be free of the pressure and granulomas that sometimes accompany a vasectomy. More important, it could be reversed easily, with a simple follow-up injection.

“I am normally not adventurous when it comes to getting myself operated on,” Deshpande deadpans. But the new method sounded good to him, and according to the published studies he read on his smartphone in the waiting room, it seemed safe. He gave his wife, Vinu, a call, and although she sounded nervous on the phone, she said she was fine with it. Deshpande decided to try the experimental method.

When his turn came, he lay down on the table, and an orderly draped his lower body with a green surgical cloth that covered everything but his scrotum. Then Das moved in with a needle containing a local anesthetic. Once the drug had taken effect, Das gathered a fold of skin, made a puncture, and reached into the scrotum with a fine pair of forceps. He extracted a white tube: the vas deferens, which sperm travel through from the testes to the penis. In a normal vasectomy, Das would have severed the vas, cauterized and tied up the ends, and tucked it all back inside. But rather than snipping, Das took another syringe, delicately slid the needle lengthwise into the vas, and slowly depressed the plunger, injecting a clear, viscous liquid. He then repeated the steps on the other side of the scrotum.

The procedure is known by the clunky acronym RISUG (for reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance), but it is in fact quite elegant: The substance that Das injected was a nontoxic polymer that forms a coating on the inside of the vas. As sperm flow past, they are chemically incapacitated, rendering them unable to fertilize an egg.

If the research pans out, RISUG would represent the biggest advance in male birth control since a clever Polish entrepreneur dipped a phallic mold into liquid rubber and invented the modern condom. “It holds tremendous promise,” says Ronald Weiss, a leading Canadian vasectomy surgeon and a member of a World Health Organization team that visited India to look into RISUG. “If we can prove that RISUG is safe and effective and reversible, there is no reason why anybody would have a vasectomy.”

The idea that's out of left field in this is that society and science maintained this notion that it's a lot harder to figure out how to stop a billion little sperms from reaching an egg than it was in trying to find a way to just make the egg not capable of taking the sperm. But it seems that this scientist in India has managed to develop an injection for men that has so far proven to be 100% effective... and more to the point, completely reversible with no side effects with a single other injection.

Want to see this in action? Why the fuck not..


Yeah, it's a needle to your balls.. so that alone will probably scare away a lot of people. But let's be real, it's a small gauge needle and topical pain killer, so it's not going to hurt by any significant amount. It'll probably feel like getting acupuncture.. you know.. with some pliers to your white tube.

Besides that, women have to endure far worse pain on a regular basis. In a sense we've become really big pansies in all this. We're not getting pap smears annually. So this is a pretty damn reasonable solution for monogamous couples who do not want kids.. or any more kids. Besides all that, don't you want to never have to worry about showing up on Maury in future shows like this:



Sign me the fuck up! No more worrying about broken condoms or missed birth control pills. The very idea of not having to ever wake up in a cold sweat in some fear that you have to pay 18 years of child support and not appearing in those episodes will make your life a whole lot less stressful.

And don't think this is just for those losers and dead beats out there who just can't afford a jimmy hat or are too dumb to put one on. Think of our ex-Governor or John Edwards. Where would their careers and popularity be if this scientific breakthrough was around for their time of crisis?

All those baby free/I'm late phone calls will be a thing of the past. No longer will you wonder if Aunt Flow will be showing up or if you somehow screwed it up in screwing up. You will walk with a stride to your step knowing that your boys, while they can swim, aren't carrying any payload that you need worry about.

And not to sound like an anti-feminist for any moment, but on the contrary, this makes the miracle of birth an equal power item now. Before women had the final say on the life of a child. Now you don't even have to get to that bridge anymore as it was burned down.

Not to say that women are trifling minx or anything, but there has been many situations where a child was born because the girl decided to not take her birth control in an attempt to create a "save our relationship" baby. In that thinking that a baby will be the answers to a bad relationship that is on the way to failing.

Now that I think about it, it really does turn the power completely around on this whole situation. For too long women were in charge of all this stuff, but now men can cut them off at the knees here and really be sneaky in making sure that they don't have children. Then if they go somewhere else to get knocked up under the assertion that it's yours.. the guy can say "Nope, my boys aren't active - here's a doctor's note saying exactly that!"

Wow, can't this medicine come out sooner? I wouldn't want it to be pre-mature or anything, but this is all sorts of excitement in the world of birth control.

Oh yeah, Happy Father's day... Baw ha ha, the numbers of those celebrating that day may soon be way down.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Even Indy Is Out of a Job

Even Indy Is Out of a Job

In this modern economy no one's career is safe. Not even an archeologist. Indiana Jones may be standing in the unemployment line pretty soon as finding the hidden buried past just got easier.

Apparently a U.S. Egyptologist discovered an entire cache of pyramids hidden underground in Egypt using only thermal GPS imagery. In total they found 17 pyramids, 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements.
Seventeen lost pyramids are among the buildings identified in a new satellite survey of Egypt.

More than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements were also revealed by looking at infra-red images which show up underground buildings.

Initial excavations have already confirmed some of the findings, including two suspected pyramids.

The work has been pioneered at the University of Alabama at Birmingham by US Egyptologist Dr Sarah Parcak.

She says she was amazed at how much she and her team has found

"We were very intensely doing this research for over a year. I could see the data as it was emerging, but for me the "Aha!" moment was when I could step back and look at everything that we'd found and I couldn't believe we could locate so many sites all over Egypt.

"To excavate a pyramid is the dream of every archaeologist," she said.

The team analysed images from satellites orbiting 700km above the earth, equipped with cameras so powerful they can pin-point objects less than 1m in diameter on the earth's surface.

Infra-red imaging was used to highlight different materials under the surface.
17 pyramids, 1,000 tombs and 3,000 settlements all in one find. This has to be the equivalent of winning the lotto for you dirt diggers.

This may very well be the biggest archeological find in Egypt's entire history. But given the extent of today's technology, and it's application in modern archeology, I shouldn't be surprised by all this.

As much as this may kill the adventure seekers like Indiana Jones, I guess he should still get his hat, as someone is going to be needed to go de-trap the pyramids.

You have to admit that it's pretty cool that we're able to uncover all these hidden treasures. Though there is a couple of things to be concerned about. First off, the Egyptian government isn't in the best state. So one concern is that these locations might end up getting leaked to the looters

The second concern is... how the hell is The History Channel going to utterly destroy this news with stupid shit.

I've only seen a few episodes of Ancient Aliens, but it's probably at the top of my list for the most intellectually disingenuous show I have ever seen in my life. First of all, you have this giant tool who doesn't own a hair brush.



Every time they bring up any mention of ancient civilizations, this asshole keeps on bringing it up how man back then were monkeys who couldn't possibly do any of that. God forbid that ancient man, who was every bit as intelligent and resourceful as we are today, do some amazing things with a somewhat limited technology and large groups of workers.

Fuck you and your hair, Giorgio Tsoukalos! Aliens had NOTHING to do with ANYTHING! I can't help but want to beat him every time I see his mug on screen.

Over all, I'm interested to find out what dynasty this find is supposed to be from. And if they were buried, or covered over, there's a strong possibility of finding sites completely intact. The biggest problem of Egyptology is that many of the structures survive, but they've been completely gutted of anything valuable over the thousands of years of looting.

But hey, there's always the comedy option that there's some Aliens and Predators hiding in there that we probably should leave it alone or face their wrath. And hey, if they don't find any of those, then I would hope that they would find at least one Stargate under there. Otherwise I'll be completely let down by all of that.

Friday, June 17, 2011

Video Killed The Public Radio Star

Video Killed The Public Radio Star

On August 1, 1981 at 12:01am MTV was born and the first music video that aired on the airwaves was ironically enough this Buggles song..



These days MTV doesn't play much music videos. In fact, the only time you can see music videos on the music television station is in the late hours of the night/morning. Which makes this next bit of news all that much more stranger.

MTV is indeed doing a repeat in killing the radio star. In this case, the former KCRW music director Nic Harcourt has decided to leave the Santa Monica public radio station to focus his energy on a full time position as music supervisor in residence at MTV.



There he will helm music supervision for select shows during the coming year. According to his statement, Harcourt's "work as a music supervisor for TV, film, and advertising came about as an extension of his work hosting KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic, which he stepped down from -what is it, two years and some change ago?

He was at the station for more than a decade and he most recently hosted a three hour segment of music on Sunday evenings from 6 to 9 p.m. Which, if you missed the last show, it can be streamed right below this sentence for how ever long they want to keep it up.



This news is pretty shocking. To be honest, while I loved Jason Bentley's Metropolis and listened to it practically every week day, as well as listening to his work on KROQ's After Hours on Saturday nights, I thought that Jason's move to replace Nic as host of Morning Becomes Eclectic has been pretty lackluster and never recaptured what Nic brought to the table.

Nic's Sunday show was rather enjoyable every time I tuned in. There was enough classic good songs as well as a sprinkling of new stuff that I hadn't heard before and appealed to me enough to warrant me looking up the play-list and I would search for more of that artist.

So for Nic to leave KCRW altogether and not have any connection there, not even a measly three hour show once a week is the end of an era for me.



Not to mention it's confusing as fuck. So you mean that I'm only going to hear his impact in the background music they choose for Jersey Shore and Skins or whatever the fuck else MTV is pushing in terms of fake reality TV shows? How fucking lame.

If this move was to perhaps inject some Nic type eclectic music into MTV in terms of adding more actual stand alone music to the show then that would be one thing. But this is just lame on all accounts.

Oh well, end of an era. I guess it's not too bad for Nic in terms of commutes either given that he was just going to the other side of the 10 freeway for KCRW and will now just make a right off the highway to the MTV studios in Santa Monica.

Though I wonder if he's ever going to be able to inject some class to the sinking morality ship we call MTV. What next? Jersey Shore Becomes Eclectic?

You were awesome on the radio, Nic, and you'll be greatly missed.