As another working week draws to a close, a few words from Uncle Milty, circa 1979 (a much grimmer year than effulgent 2009, despite your leaders’ fear-mongering):
Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?
There’s something in the air, my yanqui friends. Still saying you want your revolution? Perhaps now’s the right time to revisit Alexis de Tocqueville:
In revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part is to invent the end.
Who’s to say one revolution won’t spark a second, radically different one?
What’s that sound? Perhaps only civilisation’s discontents . . . I won’t tell you the sky’s falling till I’m standing on top of clouds.
In the meantime, I’m absorbing the disquiet with Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz. Some find it atonal and challenging. They’re wrong; but they probably don’t listen very well.
Between 1996 and 2005 alone, the federal government issued more than 30 major rules requiring new financial disclosure protocols . . .The SEC’s public document database, Edgar, now catalogs 200 gigabytes of filings each year—roughly 15 million pages of text—up from 35 gigabytes a decade ago.
Fat lot of good that did, eh? Yet another example of woeful government inefficiency. This type of regulation is a fascist fantasy rammed down your throats by your fascist overlords, the yanqui government, whether led by asses or dumbos. This isn’t your grandfather’s fascism; this is 21st century “the government knows best” fascism, made all the more insidious by the willing support of the voting public, sheep being led to the abattoir bleating their politician’s praises.
The greatest trick the government ever pulled was convincing citizens it was there to serve them.
Are you a rich yanqui? Well, if your household brings in more than US$250,000 per year, your president thinks you are.
If your family earns less than $250,000 a year, a quarter million dollars a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.
I suppose US$250,000 is a lot of money if you live in Natchez, Mississippi. If you live in Manhattan, however, that US$250,000 doesn’t stretch nearly as far. And I suppose if you earn US$250,000 a year you probably came by it unethically or immorally, so any new taxes levied should be considered just punishment.
Give me a pen and I’ll show you how easily government programs and agencies can be cut. Starting with the FDA. By the time I’m done democrats and republicans will be fighting cage matches over the last dollar.
Couldn’t have asked for a better result at the Bernabeu, especially with Gerrard on the bench, Torres still not 100 percent, and then all that crap concerning Rafa quitting gushing out of the gutters this morning.
The Champions League, sadly, is the last competition Liverpool have a real shot of winning this season. I doubt Real are looking forward to the return leg at Anfield.
Initially, the ‘bring on the recession’ cheerleaders were from the environmentalist lobby. For them, a reduction in people’s spending power can only be a good thing, since it will mean having fewer cars on the road, fewer washing machines, fewer fridges and fewer cheap flights. Austerity should be welcomed because it will shrink people’s ‘carbon footprint’ and help tackle global warming. Some critics of this toxic green dogma have rightly pointed out that concerns for the environment merely provide a new intellectual justification for old-fashioned class snobbery.
I’m beginning to sense some of that bitterness, hatred, and envy for people with money here in the US and that’s a woeful thing, my yanqui friends. Or have you nowhere else to place your hatred in these post-racial times?