"Beneath It All, The Desire For Oblivion Runs"

I've always been annoyed by my rightward leaning co-worker's tendency to take every bitterly cold winter day as a refutation of global warming, yet, when things heat up a bit they grow strangely mute.

I realize that localized weather patterns amount to little or nothing when isolated from the total picture, but that seems to be a realization that escapes those of a Republican flavor.

Still, one has to wonder, when Moscow & Europe bake in unprecedented heat waves, what exactly is going on with Mom.

MOSCOW — It's so hot that women in bikinis are sunbathing in Moscow.



A heat wave across much of Europe is also causing crops to wither, forest fires to ignite and roads to melt, while refrigerators and fans are buckling in the searing sun.

From Russia's Urals mountains to western Germany, a week of temperatures hovering stubbornly in the mid-90 degrees has baked northern parts of Europe, which are usually spared the heat of the Mediterranean — and forecasters are warning of more to come over the next week.

People were finding ways to beat the heat. There was the rare sight of women in bikinis sunbathing Thursday in Kolomenskoye park in Moscow, while other people tried to cool off by soaking themselves in fountains and playing in water jets in the Russian capital, Belarus and other parts of Europe.

But it hasn't been all fun and games. The air conditioning systems on board the high-speed trains of Germany's national rail operator Deutsche Bahn broke down several times. With locked windows, dozens of passengers were afflicted with heat exhaustion after spending hours trapped in temperatures of up to 122 degrees.

Russia's worst droughts in a century have destroyed almost 25 million acres of crops in central and European areas, authorities said. A state of emergency has been declared in 18 Russian provinces, where fire has engulfed more than 64,000 acres of forest.

The situation has been described as serious by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, who oversees the agriculture sector. But he said authorities have the resources to cope. Various officials have tried to reassure the public that the country has enough grain stockpiled to rule out imports.

Germany's Potato Industry Union, meanwhile, says it expects losses of 30 percent in this year's harvest.

"The situation is worse in many places this year than in the drought years of 2003 and 2006," said Martin Umhau, the head of Germany's Union of Potato Industry.
Mikhail Metzel / AP
Youngsters cool themselves in a fountain outside the Kremlin in Moscow.

The Chamber of Agriculture of the Czech Republic estimates the grain harvest could by down by 10 percent compared with 2009.

Meanwhile, drowning deaths were up in Eastern Europe as people flocked to seas, lakes and rivers in search of a break from the blistering heat. More than 230 people died in the last week alone across Russia, with 21 perishing over two weeks in Latvia, according to officials, who lamented the tendency of heavy drinking while sunbathing. Last year, about 3,000 people drowned in Russia.

Blood reserves were dropping in Germany, with fewer donors able to travel to blood banks.

"We now only have reserves for one to three days," German Red Cross spokesman Friedrich-Ernst Dueppe told the news agency DAPD.

Heat hits transportation
The heat also took its toll on transport, with roads damaged and railway operators suffering.

A major highway from Prague to Germany had to be closed for several days of repairs, and the Vodochody international airport north of Prague stopped accepting passenger flights after heat damage to the runway.

In the Baltic state of Estonia, several churches were being used as heat shelters, particularly for the elderly. A major grocery store in the capital, Tallinn, reported that all of its refrigerators containing dairy and meat products had succumbed to the heat. Local municipalities have closed public woodland areas in order to lower the risk of fire.

Stores in Finland, which reported a 75-year record of 93.5 degrees, were quickly running out of fans and air conditioners. The same happened in Germany and Hungary, where the mercury hit 99 degrees.

Europe's scorching weather comes on the heels of a record heat wave stifling much of the U.S. Eastern Seaboard.

Philadelphia, Newark and Trenton, New Jersey hit 100 degrees last week in weather that caused scattered power outages throughout the region. The heat hampered train travel, forcing nursing homes with power problems to evacuate and buckled highways.

To underscore this baffling conundrum, & explain it all in that special way the delusional have of taking their explanations & hurtling with them, right off a cliff, comes Ann Coulter who has just informed me that "environmentalists are evil" because if you read the Bible, it shows that "God made us masters of the Earth" and we can "do with it as we please." If we destroy it, "God will just give us a new one."

Hmmmm...what a uniquely toddlerish attitude.

Let's translate into toddlerese:

HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! I can bweak my widdle toy if'n I wanna, Daddy will just buy me a new one."

Time to grow up Annie.
Responsibility is a heavy fucking burden.
I know.
But you're a little overused for diapers
& this "suckling Satan's pecker like it was my momma's tittie" act is getting a little fucking old.

Really.

I've Upchucked Into My Lap

I've just finished skimming ABC's daring expose on Obama's View appearance. It was truly enlightening. PA Governor, Ed Rendell, said that the President should only appear on "serious" shows. Much to my disappointment, he didn't expand on his criticism by directing interested viewers to these ever elusive & mythical "serious" news shows.

Maybe he meant shit like this:



Or maybe this one.

Honestly, is there really any serious journalism anywhere on TV?

And if there were, would your average American yahoo tune in for more than a nanosecond?

It's time to face facts, serious died an ugly death long ago. Serious is an obsolete concept. Serious is for adults, not a nation of stunted adolescents obsessed with appearing "cool" or "hip" or "hot."

Anyway, if "serious" was on your average TV journalist's agenda, the discussion wouldn't revolve around the appropriateness of the president's venue choice. Instead, they would take what he says & apply that to reality.

Like this bit:

The Sherrod incident added another wrinkle to an administration already burdened by the slow pace of the economic recovery, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Gulf oil spill. While acknowledging that the country has gone through a tough stretch since he took office, Obama said he remains optimistic about the direction the U.S. is headed.

"What has been satisfying is just seeing how resilient the American people are," he said.

We're resilient, eh? Is that a euphemism for the passive acceptance of a good fucking?
If so, then I agree with Herr Obama.

Otherwise, I think the President is completely full of shit.

1 ) 83% of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1% of the people.

02 ) 61% of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49% in 2008 and 43% in 2007.

03 ) 66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.


04 ) 36% of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.

05 ) A staggering 43% of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.

06 ) 24% of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.


07 ) Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32% increase over 2008.

08 ) Only the top 5% of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.

09 ) For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.

10 ) In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to 1.

11 ) As of 2007, the bottom 80% of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.

12 ) The bottom 50% of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1% of the nation’s wealth.

13 ) Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17% when compared with 2008.

14 ) In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.

15 ) The top 1% of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.

16 ) In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.

17 ) More than 40% of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.

18 ) For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.

19 ) This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.

20 ) Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16% to 7.8 million in 2009.

21 ) Approximately 21% of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.

22 ) The top 10% of Americans now earn around 50% of our national income.

Now, be honest, don't you think that The View is the perfect venue for a presidential tube of toothpaste whose election campaign was able to do this:

The campaign that drove Barack Obama to victory in the US presidential election has claimed two top awards at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Awards.

The campaign, submitted by Obama for America, has been hailed as a masterful combination of new media, door-to-door and community grass roots campaigning with a clever tactical use of traditional TV advertising.

The campaign won two grands prix in the Titanium and Integrated Lions categories.

To win the Titanium grand prix, a campaign must involve a breakthrough idea that is "provocative, challenges assumptions and points to a new direction".

"Titanium celebrates work that causes the industry to stop in its tracks and reconsider the way forward," according to the rules set out by the Cannes organisers.

The integrated prize is awarded to a campaign using three or more media – such as TV, press and the internet - that is "high standard and state-of-the-art".

Coincidentally, this video



is making the rounds on the Intermesh & TV. I see it as the perfect metaphor for life in America. It encompasses all aspects of American life. You have the "elite" 1%, featured prominently in the video, as they are in most aspects of American life.
Cameras always seem to zero in on "the elite," don't they?

Of course, the rest of us are there too. Floating just below the waterline.
& while we may all be anonymous, just look at how "the elite" are driven to a frenzy by our very presence. And talk about "resilient." Nothing is quite as resilient as a food supply, is it?
It has to be, for no other reason, then to come back, again & again, to be eaten.

OK, now it's time to throw my boxers in the laundry.

Cheers.

Night Of The Living Bush

I knew it would happen. It was as inevitable as a Glenn Beck weep-athon or a UTube video catching Sarah Palin tripping over her own tongue. In a country like America, one that is overflowing with attention span challenged, brain damaged yoo-hoos, it was only a matter of time till George The Lesser was resurrected from the dead.

From Paul Krugman's latest op-ed I give you:

There’s now a concerted effort under way to rehabilitate Mr. Bush’s image on at least three fronts: the economy, the deficit and the war.

On the economy: Last week Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, declared that “there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy.” So now the word is that the Bush-era economy was characterized by “vibrancy.”

I guess it depends on the meaning of the word “vibrant.” The actual record of the Bush years was (i) two and half years of declining employment, followed by (ii) four and a half years of modest job growth, at a pace significantly below the eight-year average under Bill Clinton, followed by (iii) a year of economic catastrophe. In 2007, at the height of the “Bush boom,” such as it was, median household income, adjusted for inflation, was still lower than it had been in 2000.

But the Bush apologists hope that you won’t remember all that. And they also have a theory, which I’ve been hearing more and more — namely, that President Obama, though not yet in office or even elected, caused the 2008 slump. You see, people were worried in advance about his future policies, and that’s what caused the economy to tank. Seriously.

On the deficit: Republicans are now claiming that the Bush administration was actually a paragon of fiscal responsibility, and that the deficit is Mr. Obama’s fault. “The last year of the Bush administration,” said Mr. McConnell recently, “the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product was 3.2 percent, well within the range of what most economists think is manageable. A year and a half later, it’s almost 10 percent.”

But that 3.2 percent figure, it turns out, is for fiscal 2008 — which wasn’t the last year of the Bush administration, because it ended in September of 2008. In other words, it ended just as the failure of Lehman Brothers — on Mr. Bush’s watch — was triggering a broad financial and economic collapse. This collapse caused the deficit to soar: By the first quarter of 2009 — with only a trickle of stimulus funds flowing — federal borrowing had already reached almost 9 percent of G.D.P. To some of us, this says that the economic crisis that began under Mr. Bush is responsible for the great bulk of our current deficit. But the Republican Party is having none of it.

Finally, on the war: For most Americans, the whole debate about the war is old if painful news — but not for those obsessed with refurbishing the Bush image. Karl Rove now claims that his biggest mistake was letting Democrats get away with the “shameful” claim that the Bush administration hyped the case for invading Iraq. Let the whitewashing begin!

Again, Republicans aren’t trying to rescue George W. Bush’s reputation for sentimental reasons; they’re trying to clear the way for a return to Bush policies. And this carries a message for anyone hoping that the next time Republicans are in power, they’ll behave differently. If you believe that they’ve learned something — say, about fiscal prudence or the importance of effective regulation — you’re kidding yourself. You might as well face it: they’re addicted to Bush.

I've no doubt that they'll succeed. They did it with Reagan & they can do it with GW.
I don't know, maybe Americans, lacking any appreciable brain matter, think they'll be immune from the rabid hoards of blood thirsty brain eating Republican zombies that are milling about in malls & Sarah Palin book signings, just waiting for an opportunity to sink their capped & bleached teeth into fresh meat.





See what I mean?

Personally, I have to blame the Liberal media & their misleading portrayals of zombie cuisine choices.



The idea that they'll stop with our brains is just so 80s.
The 21st century Republican zombie knows Americans don't have any brains left.
We've made that fact glaringly apparent over the last decade.

1st, they gave us this:



& this:



Then we gave them this:



Then they gave us this:



& watched as we blamed someone else:



Gee, where have I seen this before?

Oh yeah:



So, nibbling on American brain pate can't be the impetus anymore.
Then again, do zombies really need a reason?

Hell, I think good old fashioned zombies would be refreshing.
Instead, what we'll get is this:




Remember, you have been warned.

Woo Wednesday

"The tragic thing about human beings is that they need pain & hardship. Otherwise they'd die of boredom...That's because man's half dead...Make life unpleasant for him and he'll appreciate it when you stop-for ten minutes. Threaten him with death, and he'll be grateful for life-for ten minutes. But give him pleasure, and he's bored with it in ten minutes. That is the strangest thing about human nature-our capacity for pain is infinitely bigger than our capacity for pleasure. Where pleasure's concerned, we're all like rich men who overeat-a little of it gives us indigestion. No man is a judge of what's good, but every man knows what's bad. Never believe a man who tells you he knows what he wants out of life. The only thing we know is what we don't want. The only time a man knows what he wants is when he's suffering. Then he knows he wants it to stop. Apart from that, we're all blind & deaf."
Colin Wilson

After BP inserted its throbbing, purple veined plug into the oil leak, and then the damn thing appeared to be working, I gained some uncomfortable incite into myself. Instead of leaping up & down & yelling YIPPEE over & over, I was actually disappointed.


Evidently I'm not interested in solutions to problems as much as I'm interested in problems to complain about.

Now is that fucked up or what?

So this Negative Nora has prescribed himself a heaping helping of "positive, encouraging" K-LOVE radio as punishment for his negative nabob-ness.

In the meantime, I'm surfing on the Interwoo Highway.

Come along...

Today, my woo search led me to the land of "mirror filtered speech."

At first, I was intrigued. The technique, proselytized by a man named Jon Kelly, involves feeding human speech through something he calls "a mirror filter" which supposedly uncovers the "hidden meaning" in our words.

Here is an example from Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider.

Here's BP's Tony Hayward getting the same treatment.

Al Gore's rape accuser getting a good mirror filtering here & here.

Now that you've heard them with no prompting, here's what you're supposed to here:

1. Nicholson supposedly says "The mark. A new Babylon. The ion whirlwind."

2. Hayward's inner voice says “Give us a saucer in the, in the black wars.”

3. Gore's accuser first says “We’re with Langley." She then says, “He’s the guy we’re trying to convict.”

4. There's even an Obama link that I'm much to lazy to type out where he says "The saucers" in one of his speeches.

OK now, are you enthralled?

There appears to be one problem though, "mirror filters" seem to be optically related techno gizmos that do things like remove IR interference from digital cameras.
I can find nothing called "a mirror filter" that is audio related.

Ya wanna why?

Because the fucker doesn't exist.
A mirror filter is popularly known as "playing shit backwards."

This guy:



is, I am sure, quite familiar with playing shit backwards.
Halford's Priest song supposedly said "Do it," which wouldn't be so bad if, say, a young hottie contemplating blowing me was listening to it. A bit embarrassing when it's those disaffected hormone depressed teen-agers who are spinning the vinyl.
Others in the backward message category are ELO with: "He is the nasty one, Christ, you're infernal, It is said we're dead men, Everyone who has the mark will live"

& Styx: "Satan move through our voices"

& Black Oak Arkansas: "Satan Satan Satan, He is God, He is God, He is God"

& Jefferson Airplane: "Son Of Satan."

(Wow, "Son Of Satan." I used to read that comic too.)



Now, when someone purposely creates backward phrases, that's known as "backwards masking." But when someone plays human speech backwards that's known as "revealing our inner voice."

Wow, isn't bullshit great?
You can make all kinds of neatly meaningless phrases that almost make one sound like one knows things.

That's why my cadre of wieners here at DickCentral just loooooooooooooove bullshit.
It's so malleable. Like Play-Doh.

Anyway, what is even more astounding than my love for bullshit is that there are businesses who actually get other businesses to pay money for this bullpoop.

Here's a website specializing in listening to shit backwards. You can find examples & training courses & contact info in case you're in the market for a career change.
Although, for some reason, Weird Al's "I Remember Larry" kept playing in my head. Luckily, it was playing backwards and I got to hear Al harmonize with my inner voice. The two of us kept saying, "Wow, you must have an awful lot of free time on your hands" over & over.

I don't really know why.

It is kind of neat how conspiracy/ufo folk hear conspiracy/ufo messages while Christians are blessed with those backwards Revelations about Satan.
It almost looks like you'll hear what you want to hear doesn't it?

Gee, let's try a little experiment.
I'll take my favorite porn queen:



and play one of her porn flicks through my magic reverse speech Dick-o-meter & see what happens.

Oh man, I wish you folk could hear this. Buried there, amongst the random moaning & slurping & other assorted sounds of sexual moistness, she's saying "Oh my Dicky...wouldst thou plant thy hunk of man meat betwixt my tender titties? I long to be thy submissive sex slave..." over & over & over...

Holy shit, there might be something to this "listening to shit backwards" hobby after all...

"Everybody move to Canada
Smoke lots of pot
Everybody move to Canada
Here's how we do it:
Bum rush the border guard
before he's & dog ever knew it."

Bend Over Grandpa...It's Time To Get Your Wrinkly Ass To Wal-Mart

Don't you just love when a plan goes off without a hitch?

For example, this bit about the IMF:

A few years back, there was a fear in some parts about black UN helicopters that were supposedly taking part in the planning of an invasion of the United States. While there was no foundation for this fear, there is basis for concern about the attack of another international organization, the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Last week, the IMF told the United States that it needs to start getting its budget deficit down. It put cutting Social Security at the top of the steps that the country should take to achieve deficit reduction.

seques nicely into this:

WASHINGTON – The federal deficit has topped $1 trillion with three months still to go in the budget year, showing the lasting impact of the recession on the government's finances.

In its monthly budget report, the Treasury Department said Tuesday that through the first nine months of this budget year, the deficit totals $1 trillion. That's down 7.6 percent from the $1.09 trillion deficit run up during the same period a year ago.

Worries about the size of the deficit have created political problems for the Obama administration. Congressional Republicans and moderate Democrats have blocked more spending on job creation and other efforts. Republicans also have held up legislation to extend unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless because of its effect on the deficit.

Another failed effort would have provided cash-starved states with money to help avoid layoff of public employees and finance the Medicaid program for the poor and disabled.

It's almost looks like the world follows a script, doesn't it?

Oh well, I'm sure all the seniors were growing bored with retirement anyway.
Who, in their right mind, would want to relax & enjoy life when the humiliation of a low paying menial job is just waiting for a body?

Hopefully, this will be the first step to a brighter tomorrow, when all the useless eaters, liberal whiners, & lazy sickly grandmas can be safely rounded up & marched off to the nearest McDonald's & shoved into Big McSoylent Macs & tasty McSoylent Nuggets. Once we begin utilizing all that juicy long pig that's just lying around wasting tax dollars, I'm sure we won't even miss all that oil damaged sea food.
Wouldn't you choose a finely toasted Down's Syndrome money waster over a creepy crawly ocean bug any day of the week?

C'mon, be honest.

Bummer

CLEVELAND – Comic-book writer Harvey Pekar (PEE'-kahr), whose "American Splendor" was made into a 2003 film starring Paul Giamatti, has been found dead in his Ohio home.

Coroner's spokesman Powell Caesar in Cleveland says an autopsy will be performed. He had no details on the death of the 70-year-old Pekar.

Cleveland Heights police Capt. Michael Cannon says officers were called to Pekar's home by his wife about 1 a.m. Monday. Cannon says Pekar had been suffering from prostate cancer, asthma, high blood pressure and depression.

Pekar's "American Splendor" comics, which he began publishing in 1976, chronicle his grousing about work, money and the monotony of life.

American Splendor was one of the few "comic books" I still read. Pekar was an innovator in the comic field who demonstrated that comics could be so much more than dipshit superheroes running around in their long underwear. Pekar's comics were slice of life narratives about his job, co-workers, & neighbors in Cleveland that were as artistically valid as any novel.

While Pekar spent many years churning out his stories in almost complete obscurity, working a day job as a VA file clerk, he did find one media home on the old David Letterman show. To Pekar's credit, he never appeared to kiss Letterman's ass, often peppering Dave with uncomfortable questions & oodles of attitude.







Harvey, you will be missed. It's a pity the comic field never followed your lead, preferring to milk the pocketbooks of stunted middle aged adolescents who have never been able to dispense with their Batman addictions.

Rest In Peace.

Don't Worry, Be Happy

Kimberly Kindy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 6, 2010

In the 77 days since oil from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon began to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has skimmed or burned about 60 percent of the amount it promised regulators it could remove in a single day.

The disparity between what BP promised in its March 24 filing with federal regulators and the amount of oil recovered since the April 20 explosion underscores what some officials and environmental groups call a misleading numbers game that has led to widespread confusion about the extent of the spill and the progress of the recovery.

"It's clear they overreached," said John F. Young Jr., council chairman in Louisiana's Jefferson Parish. "I think the federal government should have at the very least picked up a phone and started asking some questions and challenged them about the accuracy of that number and tested the veracity of that claim."

In a March report that was not questioned by federal officials, BP said it had the capacity to skim and remove 491,721 barrels of oil each day in the event of a major spill.

As of Monday, with about 2 million barrels released into the gulf, the skimming operations that were touted as key to preventing environmental disaster have averaged less than 900 barrels a day.

A Belated Independence Boom Bang Boom

FREEDOM ISN'T FREE!!!!!!!!!!


I bet you didn't know that did you?

Here's a nauseatingly insipid video that drives that home quite nicely.



(Sorry, but the blog doesn't come equipped with air sickness bags. You're on your own.)

I bring this up because my local news channel had an equally insipid news piece about a parade held yesterday to honor some Sgt. killed in Afghanistan.
They inflated the piece with endless interviews with parade attending local yokels who spouted the same annoying bullshit over and over and over.

"Freedom isn't free."
"Freedom isn't free."
"Freedom isn't free."
"Freedom isn't free."

So, is everyone a complete idiot?
How, I wonder, did this yutz actually protect "our freedom?"

Does the Taliban have a Navy?
An Air Force?
ICBMs?

Fuck no.

Afghanistan is a poverty ridden lump of rubble.

So how could the Taliban possibly infringe on "our freedom?"

The short answer:

They couldn't.

Ever.

I wonder why none of these red white & blue imbeciles can't find the brain cells to apply the same "free isn't free" logic to something useful like the concept of "free markets?"

They're not free either. They have costs. Quite huge, community ruining costs, that none of these flag waving dipshits ever seem to notice as they champion the utter joy of capitalist consumer cult-ure.

Why is that?