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Topics - Xavier_Onassis

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466
3DHS / Socialism comes to Washington
« on: September 08, 2008, 11:35:08 AM »
Now the government is taking over Sally Mae and Freddie Mac, previously private banking institutions. We, the taxpayers, will get to pay for this, or more specifically, the Chinese will lend more money for this from the profits they made from $3 a day slave labor, and we will get to pay it off plus interest, along with the stupid Iraq War and the entire planeload of cash that got heisted shortly after Baghdad fell.

The GOP mandate: Borrow and squander, borrow and squander as usual, plus Now Improved with Lemon Socialism!

468
3DHS / Wait until this hits the fan.
« on: September 04, 2008, 04:45:41 PM »
Core conservatives are smitten with the 44-year-old governor, who opposes abortion in all cases, including rape and incest. And millions of dollars in donations have poured in.

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Suppose your daughter gets raped by an escaped deranged convict from an entirely different gene pool from your own. Suppose she gets pregnant. Turns out the kid is going to be born some kind of deformed moron that no one will ever want to adopt.

And Sarah Palin has stuck fool on the Supreme Court that agrees with her 100%: Your daughter MUST bear the child, and support it.

Just how many Americans will agree with this scenario? I'm thinking maybe fourteen, possibly counting Kramer.

People with extreme positions about what others must do with their bodies are dangerous and have no business as leaders.

469
3DHS / Back from South America
« on: August 27, 2008, 06:02:33 PM »
I got home from Buenos Aires at 4:55 this AM, and made it through customs and got home on the city bus at 6:00 AM. I kept a journal of all my travels, from Montevideo, Uruguay, across by bus Uruguay to Salto, then across the Uruguay River to Concordia on a ferry, and again by bus to Corrientes, a city of maybe 1.5 million on the S. Bank of the Parana (which by the way, is about five times wider at where it joins the Rio Paraguay than the Mississippi is at New Orleans), and then on to Ituzaingó, where I did the official PR tour of the Yacyretá dam project which has boat locks as well as elevators for fish, and then to Posadas, in Misiones province, Argentina, a totally agreeable laid-back place, and then across the Paraná to Encarnació,, and another bus to Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, out across to Eastern Chaco to Pozo Colorado, and back to Concepcion. I stayed with the owner of a model farm, called El Roble, run by a very inventive and well educated East German who bears a resemblance to Crocodile Dundee who puts up tourists, grows nearly all his own food and sells it in his own store in Concepcion.

I kept a journal, which is about 90 handwritten double-spaced pages, took over 180 potos, and am planning to put it up in Spanish and English, including neat topics such as why coatimundis and toucans are not really great pets, but perhaps carpinchos (capybaras) are.

470
3DHS / Leaving on vacation tomorrow
« on: August 05, 2008, 11:48:05 PM »
Tomorrow night I am planning to fly to Montevideo, and will probably stay there fot threee or four days, then take the bus to Salto, and cross into the Provincia de Entre Rios, Argentina, and then take another bus up to the Yacycretá Dam and go on into Paraguay. It is early Spring there, so it will be nice not to deal with this 90 degree Miami heat. I am planning to visit Asunción, Concepción, some of the ruined Jesuit  missions and parts of the Chaco. The money in Paraguay is the Guarani, and exchange rate is around G4000 to the dollar. You can be a millionaire for about $250. Paraguay is a fascinating country and I have always wanted to visit there.

My sister worked for TWA and AA for years, and I will fly space available. I will fly back through  through Buenos Aires. I spend two weeks there in 2005.

So have fun while I am gone.






471
3DHS / The odds: How you will die
« on: August 05, 2008, 10:49:15 AM »
A morbid topic, but interesting nonetheless.



http://www.russellheimlich.com/blog/stats-on-how-i-will-probably-die/


472
3DHS / Annoying virus message
« on: August 05, 2008, 10:46:11 AM »
When I was having trouble logging on to this site yesterday, I tried using IE rather than Foxfire. This was unwise, as some asshole program called ASC (AntiSpyCheck) refuses to stop sending warnings that can't be closed out, and loom on the middle of the screen, other than by removing it with the CNTR ALT DELETE technique. Of course, it tells me about all the evil viruses it has found, but then thinks I should send money to remove them. I never signed up with this POS program and will not send them a dime.


It comes back, too. Suggestions are welcome.I am using AVG free and a hardware device called Stingray, and that has worked well for years. Obviously IE is to be avoided.

473
3DHS / McCain, Richer than God, won't care about you
« on: July 31, 2008, 01:07:06 PM »
RICH OUT OF TOUCH ELITIST
The Nation, by Christopher Hayes


Ben Smith says I'm "yawning" at McCain's $520 loafers. I can see why he said that. My post on the topic was excessively arch.

So let me take off my irony hat and say this earnestly:

John McCain is an insanely rich individual. He is insanely rich because he married a woman who was insanely rich, who in turn inherited that insane wealth from her parents. They own more houses than I have pairs of shoes. Seriously. They have a super fancy credit cards that they carry a $225,000 balance on. He wears expensive shoes. I'm sure his suits and ties cost a lot, too. Whatever. That is what it is.

But, importantly, John McCain simply has no connection to working people on a personal level, and most likely hasn't for most of his political life. The only working class people he encounters are those who come to his campaign events, those who serve him at restaurants, and the small army no doubt employed to clean his ten houses. And, more importantly, he's the head of a political coalition that while managing to win millions of working class votes, does not have any real representatives of working America calling the shots in the party's upper echelons. His top economic adviser spent his entire career trying to stick it to the middle class and enrich the banking industry, which he later lucratively joined. Now that the very policies he pushed for helped create a massive ponzi scheme that is collapsing on the heads of the middle class he sniffs at the rubble and calls those people whiners. Whiners.

Now, if John McCain's policies were crafted to aid working people, to restore some basic fairness to our economy at a time when inequality is undeniably growing, wages are stagnating and a perfect storm of disparate factors have blown lots of middle-class folks precariously close to the edge of real financial disaster, I wouldn't really care that much about the fact that marrying a rich heiress has made him fabulously wealthy.

But John McCain's policies have been crafted explicitly to enrich rich people like himself: he is going to take money from the government and put it in his wife's bank account, and I mean that quite literally. (Look at this chart, via Matt Y) This has been the signature Bush/Norquist tax policy of the last eight years and the policy McCain wants to continue.

It is upwards redistribution. It is taking from the many and giving to the few. Under his plan you get a foreclosed home, an oil rig off the local public beach and some busted keds: he gets another house, another SUV and a shiny new pair of $520 Ferragamo loafers.

That may sound hyperbolic, but it's true. My ironic point was that we have the perfect makings of a full-fledged campaign narrative here: you have a super rich guy who got super rich not through any of his own genius or hard work (obvious proviso here about his undeniable courage and heroism in Vietnam, but that has nothing to with his net wealth). This super wealthy guy who has married into a family of millionaires flits around in private jets to his many houses while campaigning on an economic policy that tells working people that the economy is great, and if they don't think it's great they're whiners. Meanwhile he's pushing a tax code that would make him, his wife and his rich donors much richer.

At what point does it begin to set in that this guy is just another business-as-usual, out-of-touch rich guy?

Comments (0)

474
3DHS / McCain pays visit to Internet,
« on: July 26, 2008, 09:56:09 PM »
Daring visit by septagenarian to Internet.
Obama releases list of approved Obama jokes.
Cindy McCain to get new head.


http://www.borowitzreport.com/article.aspx?ID=6897

476
3DHS / Phun with Photoshop
« on: July 23, 2008, 10:59:40 AM »

477
Culture Vultures / Wall-E
« on: July 11, 2008, 10:56:07 PM »
Wall-E is a great Pixar film. Lots better than cars, at least as good as Nemo, Monsters, Inc and Toy Story I and II, as always, with humor, satire and a message. A very imaginative film with great characters and almost no dialogue for the first half of the film.

The magician and rabbit toon at the beginning is also a riot.

478
3DHS / Why I'm voting Republican
« on: July 03, 2008, 03:30:38 PM »

479
3DHS / Yugdown is on at yugster.com
« on: June 30, 2008, 12:47:07 PM »
The yugster.com website item for today is a 2 gif Samsung MP3 recorder MP3 for $15.95. A laptop bag is for tomorrow, and in addition, there is a yugdown (like a wootoff) of previously unsold items. It could be worth your time, or not.


480
 The book is "The Family", by Jeff Sharlet.

The National Prayer Breakfasts started with Eisenhower, who didn't like them, but felt he owed them one.
They are fond po calling congressmen and senators and telling them that they do not represent the people who elected them, they represent just one man; Jesus.

Their goal is to make the entire world Christian, in their definition of the word.
Jesus was hardly a political strategist and had few opinions on modern issues: he said nothing about wind power, could not imagine a cure for leprosy other than by a laying on of hands, believed that insanity was caused by demons (and could be cured by moving said demons to suicidal swine), and besides all that, has been dead for around 20 centuries and mute as well, and though he promised to return soon, well, hasn't. This makes it easy for the Family to put whatever words in his mouth they wish with no need for spin or reinterpretation.

It would be nice if we elected a president that would tell these clowns to just f*ck off, but I don't see that happening.

They are obviously a part of the oligarchy shadow government that actually runs this country, along with the Bilderbergs and the Bohemian Grovesters.

http://www.infowars.com/bg1.html

Jesus was a nice guy, but he is dead, and he does not run my country. 
   
67 of 71 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Important now, and for years to come, June 1, 2008
By    Peter Manseau
The Family is the best book available on the Christian right precisely because it unpacks the ways in which the people often described as such are neither Christian nor right. I don't mean that in the bumper sticker sense - I don't buy (and Sharlet does not suggest) that this elite group of religiously motivated power players are not real Christians because of their political interests (even if the group itself sometimes prefers not to use the word). Rather, he makes the case that such easy categorization does not do justice to, or sufficiently warn against, their actual influence and reach. The story we are often told - that there are "fundamentalists" and "evangelicals" who are easily understood because they are somehow separate from the world the rest of us live in, hidden in megachurches making megaplans -- is not found in this book. Instead, like a carpet expert explaining the patterns in an intricately woven Persian rug, Sharlet shows us how strands of fundamentalism have been woven into the fabric of the nation's history.

As a journalist, I know and have worked with Jeff Sharlet, but then everyone who writes about religion does or should. His work is particularly popular among writers who cover religion because he tells a story that many wish they were allowed to tell. The history recounted in The Family is one most media outlets deem too complex for the average reader. (What in the world does union busting have to do with religion? A lot, in fact.) Sharlet does not regard complexity as something to be avoided, however, and his true talent is in finding just the right key for unlocking it. He frames keen-eyed analysis and impeccable research within a gripping narrative that lets readers with even a passing interest in the ways religion has influenced American life and politics understand it in a nuanced way.

In an election season in which religion again and again rears its head, this book is particularly relevant. Yet its importance will not fade any time soon. The Family is a hundred year history that shows how we got to this strange place where candidates are forced to damn or defend pastors and everyone must genuflect to the idea that God is a part of the political process. The use of the word "secret" in the subtitle might imply to some that Sharlet is describing a hidden reality. After reading the book, signs of the Family's influence will be obvious to anyone with eyes to see.

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