05.12.08
Passive-aggressive male behaviors?
It’s always something. Gotta score those points, gotta edge in on the territory of the next male over. Take a clue from the video. Enraged males may charge.
04.30.08
Spitzer’s escort: the saga continues
Remember when Joe Francis was going to offer Eliot Spitzer’s favorite escort a ton of money to feature in a sleazy video, but he withdrew the offer when it turned out she had participated in one of his “girls gone wild” spring break special parties? He already had all the footage he needed. All he had to do was burn it to a dvd and release it.
Except for a small and inconvenient detail - that she was 17 when she was talked into signing that release form. Now she’s suing him for a cool $10 million.
Go for it, girl. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. You deserve that money a lot more than he does.
04.14.08
Bitter — or outraged?
When I heard Obama make the original “bitter” remark, I said to myself, “Yeah. People are bitter about how life’s been treating them, especially when the people in power have made all the rules and don’t seem to be suffering a bit.” But then the HRC machine took over and put spin on it, as though the average middle-class and working-class Americans are pleased as punch at how things have been going for them and the country in particular.
Obama had a response for this, which was characterized by his “Annie Oakley” comment in this speech in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania doesn’t even seem to feel that being called “bitter” is some kind of an insult. Story They’re plenty bitter at how things are going, and they’re not in a state of denial.
But here’s another perspective, from a blog posting in the Daily Kos by One Pissed Off Liberal. Do all Americans feel exactly the same way? Nope. Guess what? We are still able to think for ourselves, in spite of the actions of the national propaganda machines that the media have become.
The person who wrote this is not “bitter”, he’s outraged at what this country has become, and what has been perpetrated in our name.
How do I feel? Bitter? A bit. Outraged? We’re getting closer. How about, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take anymore.” Getting closer…
11.30.07
Whose personal responsibility?
I have been trying to find a hook for this for quite some time. It began with the hearings where Yahoo executives “took responsibility” for handing over the identity of a Chinese dissident to the Chinese government, which promptly locked him up and threw away the key. First the execs apologized—a lot of good an apology does in a case where damage cannot be undone—and then they paid off the relatives of the incarcerated dissidents. But they’re still in jail, ya know?
It wasn’t exactly an overexposed story, but I wanted to weave it into a commentary on insincere apologies, where people “apologize” for something they knew they weren’t supposed to have done in the first place—something I have observed a lot lately. I feel like shaking them by the shirt collar. “You knew you weren’t supposed to do it in the first place, but you did it anyway, and for sure you’ll do it again next time. Saying you’re ’sorry’ at this point is meaningless. Bogus.”
Anyway, then we moved on to the Scott McLelland book previews. Yet another Republican political insider has left the sinking ship we call the current administration and written a book claiming no responsibility whatever for collaborating with White House lies and crimes. No. It doesn’t work that way. If you had the ability to stand up for what is right and moral at the time—but chose not to—you have no right to assert innocence now.
Now we move on to a bizarre little blog I found called the Mordant Traditionalist. In a little post called “The end of the era of Personal Responsibilty and Accountabilty” the author ascribes to Democrats the end of personal responsiblilty as we know it, completely ignoring that Republicans seem to have been doing more than their share of corrupting and being corrupted during the current administration. Like dogs in a dumpster can full of rotting garbage, they can’t get enough, caught one after another. It boggles the mind.
But amazingly enough, the story linked to has nothing really to do with personal responsibility or Democrats except maybe peripherally. It’s a general story on Congress is considering giving judges the option of relieving oppressive home mortgage terms, in the same way they (apparently) already had the discretion to bail out investors and vacation home owners.
Hmm… We could revisit the subprime mortgage issue. Recall that originally the lending industry was regulated so that people who were not in a position to be able to understand complex financial documents could not be taken advantage of by unscrupulous lenders. It’s called “Lending Responsibility”. That’s where you don’t offer a loan to someone who can’t afford it. And you also don’t do things like offering them a loan that they can afford now, but they clearly won’t be able to afford later. You don’t offer them a crappy deal that you know they won’t be able to afford later instead of the standard fixed-rate mortgage that they actually were qualified for, and then lie about it and tell them it’s the best deal you could find them.
There was no such thing as a “subprime” mortgage until after the lending industry realized it would be a GREAT way to end up owning a lot of property without buying it themselves, and lobbied for regulatory changes that would allow them to use these.
The neocon take on this is, of course, that lenders are free to rip off borrowers however they please, and it’s up to the potential borrower to understand and realize that it’s not a good deal. They would have to hire an accounting firm to see if the paperwork is in order. And probably a private detection firm to see whether the operators are legitimate businessmen, shady characters, or Russian gangsters, I suppose.
It’s the lending industry that has dropped the ball on personal responsibility. It isn’t companies that write bad mortgages and pitch them to financially unsophisticated borrowers. It’s people. People who are hiding behind the names of internet lenders and fly-by-night companies that have crashed our housing market with their unbridled greed. To say that we should bail out corporations who were trying to make windfall profits from the housing markets and not homeowners who were outright lied to and robbed—and now face homelessness—is the nadir of personal morality. The bar is so much lower than it has ever been before, and dropping out of sight fast.
Put your money where your mouth is.
09.30.07
The greatest telemarketer prank
I’m not usually into telemarketer pranks. I used to work for a marketing research company, where we’d call people at home to try them to take surveys or take part in (paid) focus groups. A lot of times people would try to pull stuff on us, and it was dumb, not remotely creative or funny. Then they’d hang up, thinking they’d got the better of us, and we’d be telling the person on either side of us about the moron we just spoke to.
Seriously, of course we called people at home in the evening. That’s when they were home. People would ask for my home phone number so they could “call me during dinner”, and I’d flat out tell them that I didn’t get dinner, I had to work—but they could call me at work. Or I’d give them the phone number for the main switchboard at the local police department.
If somebody was abusive enough, I’d take down their number in reserve, in case I ever wanted to give it to another idiot so the idiots could call and abuse each other. That never actually happened, but it could have. These people didn’t realize that the fact that we had their phone numbers meant that if they pissed off somebody who was really crazy, they were not protected by anonymity.
But anyway, on to the video. I was laughing so hard on this one I could hardly breathe.
09.29.07
Is it Khalid Sheikh Mohammed…
Looking through some old newspapers, I noticed that photo of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and I was struck by his resemblance to Ron Jeremy.
“Well!” said I to myself, “I’ll write a funny blog entry showing that they are twins separated at birth.”
Turns out there’s already a cottage industry of people who’ve made the connection (or others) and have been busy photoshopping other people’s heads onto KSM’s hairy body. I guess I’m going to need to get caught up on my newspapers and stay caught up if I want to keep ahead of these trends. Click on the photo below
to read about the connection between the two of them.
09.23.07
Hu’s on first?
In case you’re not familiar with Who’s on first, by Abbott and Costello, you should listen to it now.
If you’re not familiar with baseball, then I’m sorry, but there’s nothing that can be done here and now in this blog to help you understand this take on Americana.
09.15.07
About male aggression, cultural conditioning, and baseball
The video pretty much shows it all. This is what a brawl looks like at a Japanese baseball game.