Your power to coerce only endures as long as your ammunition supply.
1) Tightly rolled sleeves that make your veins pop out. You need a buddy to pull a blouse off of you. My room mates and I even came up with a ditty:
Elbow locked, chest on fist. Pinch-pull, eeeaaassse off the arm.
2) Skoal or Copenhagen. I wouldn’t know, since dip is nasty.
3) East Coast or West Coast. The old debate between hills and sandfleas. I do know that West Coast MCT had weekends off, the bastards.
4) Hurry up and wait.
5) Alcohol sans hydration.
6) dear god Monster energy drinks
Sweetness and Light: Glory days are back again. -
I’m in DC for the first time in almost a year, and it’s strange and familiar all at the same time. What’s definitely strange is that I’ve been hit on three times since I got here yesterday, despite almost never getting catcalled while living here. (One guy called me “snow bunny” because I had my…
I bet it’s a black dude that said this. A “snow bunny” is a white chick into black guys. Hope you’re down with the swirl.
tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?
Visting the Queen Mary in Long Beach CA, when I was 3.
I hate populism. I hate the empty, vacuous chatter that emanates from populist rabble.
“We hate big government spending. We want to protect America. We’re getting taxed to death!”
These simpletons are oblivious. What are the 3 largest components of the federal debt (quite apart from the profligate spending of the average citizen)?
1) Entitlement spending such as Medicare/Social Security
2) National Defense
3) Debt payments
Obviously we can’t just decide not to pay our debts on schedule. And will these rabid tea partiers be able to stand cuts in national defense? No, of course not (on this point, I actually agree with them.)
This leaves the govt insurance that medicare and social security amount to. Obviously the cretins have no wish to cut this either, what with their squeals for the government to “take its hands off my medicare.” Of course, it’s worthwhile to note that Medicare was greatly expanded by a Republican controlled congress under a Republican president.
As for their shrill screams about “socialism”…what did they want, for Wall Street, the heart, soul, and brain of American capitalism to collapse onto itself? Are they insane? It’s as if they wantonly desire to strive against the forces of order.
Right now, federal spending is 25% of the economy. Under Reagan it reached a high of…23.5% Of course we weren’t spending money on a stimulus or two major wars at the time so it makes one wonder.
As for the whole “taxed to death” bull shit…tax cuts were a third of the stimulus. Personal income taxes are at their lowest levels since the 1950’s.
As for our supposedly weak, anti-American President, not only did he inherit two wars, he actually expanded our military presence in Pakistan, Yemen, and Africa and signed off on a $700 billion defense budget. The military has so many applicants it’s turning people away. In the first 18 months of his Presidency, Obama ordered more drone strikes on terrorist and Taliban targets than his predecessor did in 8 years.
What is remotely socialist about this man? He has aggressively defended American interests abroad, through massive military force and saved the skeletal score of our capitalist system. But no one gets credit for staving off the terrible what-might-have been.
Of course, we have massive, underlying problems that have culminated in the present economic crisis. Since the 1970’s, when it became impossible to back the dollar with gold, when much of rest of the world began to catch up with us in prosperity, when we became dependent on foreign sources of energy, we, as a country, have been living beyond on our means. We have shifted from industrial based to debt-finance based growth.
It’s not the end of the world. It’s not like there’s anything to replace the dollar, and if we wished, foolishly, to persist on this past, the rest of the world would probably continue to foot our bill since there is really no other option (China has it’s own problems that in many ways exceed our own.)
I do not like the left. I detest its contempt for the greatness of the United States. I detest the way it grovels to foreign tyranny and certain European tendencies; I detest its warped view of history (of course the right distorts history in its own way) and its deluded fetishes of progressivism and “social justice”.
But the right, in its present incarnation is so…utterly repellent. Meanwhile, the National Review praises the putrescent drivel that is the Overton Window:
That? Oh, it’s just a visual representation of my father’s life philosophy. He thinks law and order, the Statue of Liberty, can only take a society so far. Because at some point law must be replaced by militarized force, the Colossus of Rhodes, for any true progress to be achieved.
Dear God.
I watch Fox News in the chow hall and the general paranoia and delusion about everything from the financial bail out to the mosque construction reinforces my contempt for the right.
But when I see how the left reacts so gleefully to the wikileaks scandal with disgusting moral relativism, I can only despise them for it.
I’m not really sure what I believe in or where I stand anymore. It seems to me that the great debates in this country were settled a long time ago, but like 5th century fanatics we squabble over slight variations of the generally accepted doctrine. Especially when one compares it to societies where there is an ideological struggle between elements of liberal democracy and those of theocracy or other authoritarian/totalitarian impulses the arguments in our own country seem so crude in comparison.
I’m an American patriot. But I don’t want to choose between hubris and self-loathing. As I read more and more history, I become more and more pessimistic. I used to believe in the “inevitable march of progress”-what a terrible delusion this was in retrospect! Of course there’s been material progress since the end of the Renaissance, but it’s not as if it was some sort of steady process since hominids were banging rocks together.
One only has to read The Republic or the Arthashastra to realize that individual morality hasn’t really changed or progress-human standards of right and wrong have been pretty stable over the millenia.
I’m probably being overly pessimistic, but two words I can’t get out of my mind are bleak and grim.
“When we saw these countless hosts thus deliberately collected for the conflagration of the Roman world, and directed to our own immediate destruction, we despaired of safety, and sought only how to end our lives gloriously, as we all desired.”
-Ammianus Marcellinus, on the Siege of Amida, 359 AD
And Constantius being exceedingly elated at the exquisite taste of this adulation, and thinking that he himself for the future should be free from all the ordinary inconveniences of mortality, now began to depart from the path of justice so evidently that he even at times laid claim to immortality; and in writing letters with his own hand, would style himself lord of the whole world; a thing which, if others had said, any one ought to have been indignant at, who laboured with proper diligence to form his life and habits in emulation of the constitutional princes who had preceded him, as he professed to do.
For even if he had under his power the infinities of worlds fancied by Democritus, as Alexander the Great, under the promptings of Anaxarchus, did fancy, yet either by reading, or by hearing others speak, he might have considered that (as mathematicians unanimously agree) the circumference of the whole earth, immense as it seems to us, is nevertheless not bigger than a pin’s point as compared with the greatness of the universe.
Twentynine Palms is hot, dry, dusty, sparse and bleak. Everyone who comes here is forced to confront the arid reality of a rugged and fairly inhospitable landscape teeming with rattlesnakes and unpleasant arthropods. I guess that’s why so many people hate it here and why I like it. It inspires a sense of ascetic virtue ,as if some immense and quiet force says to you, “Control yourself.”
The starkness of the landscape stirs something in my soul and my shabby photography does it no justice.
You can’t jelly your dick into someone’s mouth.