This may be old news to some, but it's new news to me—and if you're down with custom-printed bumper stickers, the odds are good you'll find the notion of custom printed M&Ms just as groovy as I do.
At mymms.com you can roll-yer-own pack of M&Ms, with your choice of two of 17 color possibilities plus your a personalized message on the back. At a starting price of $35.00 for three 7oz. bags (although more expensive options will get you a better per-unit rate), I'm not in the market for any today. But the idea of some sweetoothed cyberpunk creating red-pill-and-blue-pill "Matrix M&Ms" does make me giggle.....
To properly grok the Housing Bust of '07 you have to understand it as the continuation of the Dotcom Bust of '01: Then, nobody had any money because their tech stocks were suddenly worthless. That sucked, so Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve acted to solve the problem by loading 10,000 cargo jets full of money and dumping their payload over America—which is the bottom line of the four magic words "Historically Low Interest Rates." They mean, "Making it ridiculously easy for people who don't have any money to sign a piece of paper so they can get it."
Everyone said, "Sweet, Money's Back!" And this time, rather than blow it on something abstruse and ephemeral and incomprehensible like tech stocks, they ran out and bought big, solid, physical objects that everybody understands is a real thing and can stub their toe against. In fact, they bought the biggest, most solid things they could find, a.k.a. houses. So many people bought houses that pretty soon they were buying houses just to sell them. We became a nation where the trade deficit didn't matter because we were running a booming business flipping each other four-car-garage places to live. It was another flavor of 1998 all over again.
In other words, our top banker banked on the notion that people who were stupid and careless with their own money would be shrewd and canny with somebody else's.
Now here's the real bitch of the nut of it:You can't solve a crisis caused by Historically Low Interest Rates by lowering interest rates. The new Fed is trying mightily, but you hear all this stuff about how lenders are tightening their guidelines and extra-scrutinizing applicants? That just means their charging higher interest rates, Fed be damned; You can always get a loan in America if you're willing to pay the vigorish. Don't believe me? Go down to the nearest pawn shop and try to swing a 1225% APR payday loan. If you're reading this, by definition you have access to an internet connection; You'll qualify.
Cutting interest rates won't fix the mess this time. Will the financial wizards figure another way? Maybe. But I'm banking that if they do, it'll be an even cheaper shenanigan than bribing reality. Then we'll be in the Fill-In-The-_____ bust of 2013. Eventually we'll hit the Shenanigan Bust and times should get really interesting:
(Where we conjoin the headline and last paragraph of the bylined articles in the A-section of today's New York Times.)
The Buddha says: "On the road to Enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After Enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. During Enlightenment: enjoy the archives."
We get to the bottom of the news so you don't have to!
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
10:20 PM
Doug Stanhope is on Television!
There's loads more o' Stanhope Goodness on the You Tubes—well worth a good, consciousness-bending, rainy afternoon if you check it out. Including many clips where he's sporting—is it? Yes!—a styling Bartlesville Bruins tee—me ol' alma mater. I checked around to see if Mssr. Stanhope might in fact be BHS' most notable graduate. Alas, no. The shirt was sent to him by a fan in advance of an Oklahoma City performance that was cancelled for reasons of propriety after the Alfred P. Murrah bombing, or so the internets tell me.
I don't know what this means, except that Stanhope has been a lone voice howling in the void of a Post 9/11 World since 1995. Or it sure seems like it, judging from the highway miles.
CAMBRIDGE — Two students at Central Kings Rural High School fought back against bullying recently, unleashing a sea of pink after a new student was harassed and threatened when he showed up wearing a pink shirt.
The Grade 9 student arrived for the first day of school last Wednesday and was set upon by a group of six to 10 older students who mocked him, called him a homosexual for wearing pink and threatened to beat him up.
The next day, Grade 12 students David Shepherd and Travis Price decided something had to be done about bullying.
"It's my last year. I've stood around too long and I wanted to do something," said David.
They used the Internet to encourage people to wear pink and bought 75 pink tank tops for male students to wear. They handed out the shirts in the lobby before class last Friday—even the bullied student had one.
"I made sure there was a shirt for him," David said.
They also brought a pink basketball to school as well as pink material for headbands and arm bands. David and Travis figure about half the school's 830 students wore pink.
It was hard to miss the mass of students in pink milling about in the lobby, especially for the group that had harassed the new Grade 9 student.
"The bullies got angry," said Travis. "One guy was throwing chairs (in the cafeteria). We're glad we got the response we wanted."
The nation's top anti-drug official said people need to overcome their "reefer blindness" and see that illicit marijuana gardens are a terrorist threat to the public's health and safety, as well as to the environment.
John P. Walters, President Bush's drug czar, said the people who plant and tend the gardens are terrorists who wouldn't hesitate to help other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties. Walters made the comments at a Thursday press conference that provided an update on the "Operation Alesia" marijuana-eradication effort.
"Don't buy drugs. They fund violence and terror," he said.
After touring gardens raided this week in Shasta County, Walters said the officers who are destroying the gardens are performing hard, dangerous work in rough terrain. He said growers have been known to have weapons, including assault rifles.
"These people are armed; they're dangerous," he said. He called them "violent criminal terrorists."
Walters, whose official title is director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said too many people write off marijuana as harmless. "We have kind of a 'reefer blindness,' " he said.
No arrests have been made so far in the four days of raids, the opening leg of what Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko has promised will be at least two straight weeks of daily raids.
He said suspects have been hard to find because their familiarity with their terrain makes it easy for them to flee quickly.
Although crews doing the raids are using Black Hawk and other helicopters to drop in on some of the gardens, Bosenko said they don't want to give the growers any warning of a raid.
"We try to move in under stealth," he said.
Also from the article: "The operation is named after the last major battle between the Roman Empire and the Gauls in 52 B.C. That battle was won by the Romans."
Always heartening when cabinet secretaries just come right out say We're basing America on the Roman Empire, innit?
My instinct was to make like US Weekly and stay away from this one.... But I caught a few of the snaps of Paris Hilton's release from jail and thought it worth remarking how they were the first images I've seen of her that weren't completley contrived, and, well, soul-crushingly dead behind the eyes. We Imperialist Americans have a sort of joking cliché that the Indians were afraid of cameras because "they'll away take your spirit"; I always kinda thought Paris was Exhibit A for that argument.
But look at her! The gal has at least one genuine, human emotion—even if it's only "Thank Sweet Jesus I never have to pick through another LA County Sloppy Joe again!" Completely indistinguishable from the Paris we've come to know on the left; it's not even close to being the same person. If she could turn it on-and-off, and cease being a megacelebribitch long enough to rob a bank, nobody could pick her out of a line up. She's actually, well, downright adorable.
Here's a few more cute-as-hell pics-o'-Paris here, here (it's news to Xinhua!), and you gotta click on this one. Though I'm betting Paris of 2007 will turn out to be as grateful for her freedom as Paris of 1944. Sounds like it from this article.
4:38 PM
They Say The One That Gets You Never Sees You....
Texas Deer Blinds Now To Be Fully A.D.A. Compliant!
More All American Email Goodness from our good friend, NRA Action Alerts:
Texas Governor Signs Disabled Hunter Measure!
House Bill 308, sponsored by State Representative Edmund Kuempel (R-44), was recently signed into law by Governor Rick Perry (R). HB 308 allows legally blind hunters accompanied by a sighted partner to use projected laser sighting devices in order to hunt more effectively and safely.
Before the passage of this new law, blind hunters were accompanied by a sighted person who helped to identify game, ensure that a safe shot is available and engage in the truly daunting task of gazing over the hunter’s shoulder and making a best guess as to whether the blind hunter’s rifle or handgun is properly aligned with the animal’s vital area in order to ensure a clean, humane harvest.
HB 308 makes great strides toward eliminating the guesswork for blind hunters and their partners -- guesswork that is never faced by sighted hunters.
Q: What's a blind hunter thinking when squeezes the trigger?
A: I have no eye deer....
((( If that one won't get me shot at, nothing will. Hey! I'm over here! )))
Can I just say this about Aqua Teen Hunger Force? The show eff-ing sucks. Don't get me wrong, if I'm Turner or Warner or whatever, I'm handing the guy who did the campaign a cush job and paycheck in an untraceable division of the empire two months after I shitcan his ass for netting me a $2 million fine (less than 50 % of what that guy will make in a year) for threatening to incinerate the City of Boston. That was a nice little stunt --- an infield homer of free ink! But man, I gotta tell ya, the product sucks.
Aqua Teen Hunger Force is not Brilliant. It's not even funny. There's nothing there --- it's the biggest waste of time in the universe. I asked people today: What do you actually think of Aquateen Hunger Force? The question startled them. Because it was about a subject of pop culture conversation, and yet it was completely out of the blue The best response I could come up with was "It's not really funny, but it's just something you can kind of zone out to, because, you know, you just want to zone." That's right, hook up your umbilical cord to the big glowy box and suck on that tittie from the inside for a little bit. That ain't a show folks, that's a sensation. That's an instinct. That's fullfiling a need.
Basically, Aqua Teen Hunger Force Is A Drug.
Which is perfectly fine by me. But I like my drugs to have a punchline.
South Park -- the one where they send Kenny into a persistent vegetative state? Genius. Mind blowing. The Simpsons -- Remember, there was a time, when the show was outrageous ---- Obscene.... parents groups complained about it, stations wouldn't show it, kids weren't allowed to watch it.... and the show hasn't changed in 20 years. I mean, it's grown, but it hasn't changed, and now Homer Simpson is a beloved national icon, a modern-day Paul Bunyon with his old blue-haired ox Blue? Think about it:
Nobody boos Homer Simpson.
Beavis and Butthead. A briefcase full of cash for a couple of college students and a truckload of "lite brites" (I liked that tuch) to shutdown Beantown, and a week later the Aqua Teen Guerilla Team can't even hit me with a You Tube short of the characters getting Frog Baseballed? The show sucks.
It's not that the hype ain't worth price of the ticket on the back end, it's just that, with a trick this cheap, you kinda resent not being asked to pay up front. You know, like when you're standing in line for a movie or something.
Update 01-07-07:Due to demand for stickers for laptops, we're now offering the best of the Barack series in packs six of 5"x1.5" short-size stickers. For the price of 1 bumper sticker, you can order six "Barack for the Futures," six "Don't Tell Mamas", six "Obama Oh-Eights", or two different mix'n'match packs!
Mix'n'match 'Barack Packs' (six 5" x 1.5" laptop stickers):
Will Barack run? Undoubtedly. Sure, the Land of Lincoln's Favorite Son Since Ditka may be playing it coy, but it's pure Progressive political theater, in the grand tradition of Mark Warner— err, Mario Cuomo— err, Warren Beatty&mdash err.... Hang on a second.
Will Barack run?
Here at Bumperactive, we say he damn well better. And to help make it happen, we've worked up a passel of "Draft Barack" bumper stickers, with a portion of proceeds benefitting the to-be-announced Obama campaign per our revenue sharing program. (And if he breaks our heart and ducks out, we'll forward the dough to the Democratic National Committee).
Of course, the critics have already started knocking Barack as a "blank canvas" onto which the swooning masses are projecting their own, unarticulated hopes and dreams. But take a look at the man's admittedly brief record, and there are some substantive things to like, a lot: Repudiating the Iraq invasion at a time (Oct. '02) when nearly every other Democratic contender was for the War before they were against it; the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (co-sponsored with Tom Coburn) is a nifty law creating a Google-like search tool of the recipients of fat government contracts; and waltzing into a conclave of 2,000 Orange County evangelicals to proselytize the virtues of condom distribution in the AIDS fight suggests the man has no short supply of cojones. And he speaks coherent English, with subject-verb agreement and everything — I'm 90 percent of the way toward wanting to have my Obama ballot miscounted already!
After these past years of titantic misrule, at the very least all of us aboard the Good Ship America deserve a fair chance to learn what kind of skipper Obama would make. Help chart the course of the discourse with a Barack Obama bumper sticker today!
Fast Food Nation is An Inconvenient Truth for people who don't need to be dragged screaming in chains to see An Inconvenient Truth. 93 out of 40 stars.
Rebecca MacNeice, an amazing filmmaker who's spent much of this year chronicling the peace movement, has her newest documentary short online at Truthout: A profile of activist Elaine Johnson, whose son Spc. Darius Jennings, 22, was killed in Iraq in November, 2003. In all, four soldiers have died in Iraq from Jennings' hometown of Orangeburg, South Carolina, population 14,460.
"Every time a soldier dies around my area, South Carolina, and Georgia, I pack up my truck and I go to that mother, and I comfort the mother. I go just because I know how it feels. […] I ask God during the holidays to stay with these families, help us get through the holidays, because family is supposed to be together. And those of us who have loved ones who won't be at that dinner table, for Thanksgiving and Christmas, just throw His arms around us." — Elaine Johnson
Celebrate the return of checks and balances to American governance with these unsigned, unnumbered, unlimited edition bumper stickers commemorating the Democratic takeover of the House -- and who knows, maybe the Senate, too. Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi (D-San Fran-Effing-Cisco) may have unequivocally stated "impeachment is off the table" on this new morning of the Republic, but she's third in line for the presidency now. If the past six years have taught us anything, it's that power absolutely corrupts absolutely. We say, urge Nance to bounce the war criminals and lunge for the brass ring with a fine "Draft Pelosi" bumper sticker, available in two attractive color schemes. A woman president in 2008, you say? Puh-leeze. That idea is sooooooo 2007....
Richie Farbman, 13, is raring to go, eager to warn others about the dangers of illegal downloading while adding to his more than 20 activity badges.
"I think it's really good to get the message out that it's bad," said the Redondo Beach Scout. "You can see your friends doing it and tell them why it's bad. I think if you're a role model, you can stop people."
But Richie said he knew his perspective wasn't shared by many of his classmates. "A lot of people don't think they're going to get in trouble," he said, "so they do it anyway."
Young Richie, 83-year-old Gertrude Walton is going to need your help crossing the street to the courthouse. Because she's dead.
The inspiration for the new badge came from Hong Kong, where the local Boy Scouts organization had its members pledge not to use or buy pirated materials. In addition, the Scouts agreed to search Internet file-sharing sites and turn in sites and users they see violating the law.
On the plus side, at least the shirts are already brown.
We here at Mondotees know only one thing. And that is- we CAN'T wait until this movie comes out. If you can't wait either, you can at least soothe your longing for eastern-block comedy by wearing your BORAT style thong swimsuit. Note- not responsible for you becoming immediately SEXY. This thong swimsuit is custom made to look just like the one in Borat! Made from 100% spandex, this suit is one-size fits all! Made in EXTREMELY limited amount, this suit will be THE Halloween costume this year...and every year.
Gee, ya ever post something just so you'll have to post a bunch more stuff 'cause you're embarrassed it's up there?
Cell phone chargers are getting smaller all the time—who's going to make the first one that's actually in the phone, with little flip-out prongs like my charger already has? I'd jump at the added size/weight/bulk of my current charger for the ability to just plug my phone into the wall. And I'm sure the cell geniuses could work out a way to make it even smaller, for like, an added $80. The only reason I can think why this hasn't already happened: I wouldn't have to buy a new charger every time I leave town and forget to pack it. I currently own one phone and three chargers—it's like an even more insidious version of the $40 ink cartridge for a $90 printer ploy. Even if this cost an extra $120, I'd be ahead of the game; time is money.
Go ahead and put a real pen-light bulb in it. I use the flouresecent glow of my display as a flashlight at least four times a week. Hey, this is almost it, a software solution, and it's only five bucks. Still want a real bulb though.... This idea sucks. I don't want a crappy mini flashlight I have to stick to my phone. This is someone who's excruciatingly close, but has the problem backwards—flashlight in charger (doh!). Though what's neat about it is it's a hand-crank charger, no batteries needed for the flashlight or your phone as long as you've got elbow grease ($22.99). Sounds like something I'd buy for my non-existent daughter when she goes off to college, if cell phones weren't by that time a). Happy Meal prizes, and b). nuclear powered. Ooh, now this is nifty: the cellphone-flashlight-stun gun combo (only $49.95!). Though from what I can tell, it's just a stun gun that looks like a phone. (But see, they put a flashlight in it—this idea has legs!). Can't wait for the first time somebody stuns somebody on an airplane with their cell phone stun gun. And then they ban phones on all flights for a month. And then the security guy makes you call him to make sure you're carrying a real phone....
Store voicemail on my phone instead of your cell tower. I miss the power of an old answering machine to screen and pick up. An ex calls to discuss how I'm emotionally unavailable, I probably want to remain unavailable. But if she's treed by wolves, by the time I get the little beep, call and punch in, she may already be down a few toes....
While your at it, give me two hours worth of memory to record my own calls. The NSA's already doing it, but FOIA requests take 20 business days.
Here's hoping somebody at Nokia Skunkworks Googles "Dream Cell" and gets cracking. dream mobile dream cellphone ideal phone perfect phone. I need all this stuff way more than I need to watch a two-inch high episode of Lost. I don't want any credit, just send me a free badass phone.
Speaking of Lost, a Bluetooth keychain that lets me call my phone from my keys and vice versa would be sweet. I can almost always find one or the other.
Twenty-two percent of each sale goes to Creative Commons according to our revenue sharing program. The design is downloadable from Goodger's site and available for all to use under the terms of CC license Attribution-NonCommericial-ShareAlike. Thanks, and nice work David!
After copy 1 of a sticker sells, 22% of the revenue from each subsequent copy is awarded to a cause of the designer's choosing, or to the designer him/herself.
