Archive for 2010
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Patriotic In Pink: Jodie Evans vs. Karl Rove
[ Comments Off ]Posted on April 19, 2010 by admin in Politics
Monday, April 19th, 2010Pink is the new Red White and Blue
 I’m sorry, but Karl Rove must be gay if being handcuffed by Jodie Evans of Code Pink frightens him that much. |
What’s balding, hideously ugly, and cries like a schoolgirl at the sight of women in pink hats? No, not Sméagol from Lord of the Rings. The correct answer is of course Karl Rove, one of the first people not named Dick to be enough of one to earn his place on Dickipedia. Although while hidden in the fortress of White House security for eight years, he seemed a powerful and confident man eager to endanger America’s own intelligence agents for purely political reasons and hide behind executive privilege when held in contempt by congress, when left to depend on his own manliness, he tends to react like a frightened – if rather ugly – little bunny. As evidence, view the video clip below in which Rove leaps back from the table at a book signing when redheaded, freckle-faced, Midwestern-mom-type Jodie Evans presents him with a set of handcuffs suggesting that she’s going to arrest him for war crimes. In spite of the fact that I am in 100% support of the anti-war efforts of the group Evans co-founded, Code Pink, Evans herself comes across as almost as nutty on the other end of the partisan spectrum. I guess when you’re going after Napoleonic pathological liars whose best friends call you Turd Blossom, more extreme measures are required to achieve your ends. For the record, George Bush isn’t the only person who loves Karl Rove, see iLoveKarlRove.com, a site run by Kat Kinsman until December 2009. Perhaps Kinsman’s love for Rove faded when she found out that he was not only married, but gay. Read the rest of this entry »
Is Facebook Over?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on April 18, 2010 by admin in Technology
Sunday, April 18th, 2010There are still no animated sparkly unicorns saying “THANKS FOR THE ADD”, but it IS “gettin’ all MySpacy up in that biach”
I was a little surprised – especially given the recent launch of Buzz – that Google didn’t seem to think so. Doing some quick googling, I found a lot of two and three year old pouty blog posts like this and this that seemed to reflect the writer’s ennui or desire to be ahead of the curve more than anything else. Or articles from the Washington Post or New York Times that likewise seem more a reflection of a narrow demographic’s hip intellectual consumer restlessness, always wanting the next big thing before the current one has run it’s course. Personally, I think the fact that the 35-54 crowd on Facebook grew 276% in 2009 is a resoundingly loud answer to the question “is Facebook over?”, at least in terms of being hip. The first person who friended grandma should get a special award as the vanguard of the paradigm shift. But is Facebook “over”? I hardly think so. It managed to pull off something we don’t see too often in the tech world: it became a utility. If your network of friends is anything like mine, Facebook managed to dislodge e-mail, texting, and casual phone calls for informal communication in pretty short order. What I have seen in terms of user exodus though, is a certain type of person (myself included) that exhausted the “classmates.com” aspect of Facebook that helped us re-connect with old friends, and then grew tired of the “fun” sort of communication that Facebook engenders. We’ve found most of our old friends, we figured out which ones are worth reconnecting with, and now we’d like a better platform for staying in touch. As anecdotal evidence I’d offer the several dozen LinkedIn requests I and my friends have received over the last couple of months. I secretly hope that the Facebook crew will recognize this, and figure out how to retain users like us. Because although there are still no animated sparkly unicorns saying “THANKS FOR THE ADD” it IS “gettin’ all MySpacy up in that biach”, as a friend joked recently. Mostly thanks to all the late adopters who only recently figured out why no-one had friended them on MySpace for a year. Facebook isn’t going away any time soon, but I’m looking for a change if it doesn’t evolve in the ways I need. What about you? Read the rest of this entry »
Bright Green Environmentalism?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on April 17, 2010 by admin in Clean & Green
Saturday, April 17th, 2010Bright green is the new black.
 The NGO I work with is pretty bright green. And even cheetahs know that bright green is the new black. |
So you think you’re pretty green. But are you dark green, bright green, or in between? We’ve asked how green you really are before, but this remains an interesting question in such a technology-driven society, because a lot of our choices have such far-reaching and difficult to trace consequences. The books vs. eBooks debate or drinking bottled water are classic examples. And then there’s that first question. You might not have even known the terms bright green and dark green existed. Yes, green is the new black; it’s hip to be environmentally conscious. But what then is your strategy? I’ve worked on media material for a non-profit called Amara Conservation since 2001. One topic that often comes up when working on press material in the non-profit world is positive vs. negative messaging. Do you strike terror in people by painting end-of-the-world scenarios, or simply focus on the positive work being done? It’s a tricky balance, because frankly, things are pretty bad in many sectors. In the case of Amara’s conservation and education work, you simply can’t overlook the fact that lion and elephant populations are dwindling at a shocking rate. But it’s a little ignorant to try to approach the problem strictly through laws and wildife management programs, it’s almost more important to help the people better understand how they win if wildlife thrives, and lose big time if wildlife fails to survive. And Amara is proof of how this works, doing education and conservation work with low financial overhead, and proven impact. Which is why I focus on the “bright green” side. I’ve always been a bit befuddled by the fact that, for instance, people have to be told that oil is running out, the world is flooding, and the fish we like to eat will all be gone in 50 years before they’re motivated to take action. Can’t a more efficient car, clean fresh air and simply managing resources be motive enough to use technology more intelligently? Bruce Sterling put it pretty well when he said “Nature is over. The twentieth century did it in… From now on, ‘Nature’ is under surveillance and on life-support. A 21st century avant-garde has to deal with those consequences and thrive in that world” I personally believe that future can be pretty bright, and that technology can be the solution rather than the problem. Read the rest of this entry »
White Trash Pride
[ 6 Comments ]Posted on April 16, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Friday, April 16th, 2010Why are rednecks and hillbillies always trying to co-opt my heritage and ethnic identity?
 We’re still struggling with the White Trash brand, as you can see. |
You know America has really gone to hell when a self-respecting white supremacist can’t attend a tea party rally without getting harassed by some elitist intellectual teabagger type. We suggested a while back that the country may be headed for some kind of red vs. blue civil war, but this thinking was based on the pretty narrow evidence of two-party voting behavior during a national election. Now that we’ve had a chance to see America showing its true (mostly white) colors, we’re rethinking things a bit, and think the real civil disorder will be just that: civil disorder. And mostly amongst the hard-to-define factions known as rednecks, hillbillies, and white trash. Yes, while American spatial mobility seems to have slowed around 2007, we’re still left with a lot people from different American subcultures transplanted to a variety of urban areas. And as the old saying goes, “you can take the boy out of the country” yadda yadda. I was reminded of how powerful these subcultural influences can be recently when I used the term “white trash” in mixed company. And by “mixed company”, I mean a group of white people from various parts of the country, some of whom are only spittin’ distance from their more rural roots. I really thought that in an age when so many oppressed groups of people had reclaimed the power of words used against them – i.e.: gay men calling themselves fags, black people calling themselves niggers, etc. – that my reference to my white trash background was pretty safe. How wrong I was. The hilarious arguments that ensued regarding what the differences were between rednecks, hillbillies, and white trash inspired me to do a series of utterly unscientific pop-anthropology overviews of the distinctions. Since my snuff-dippin’ grandmother from West Virginia always bragged about how the main thing that made her not a redneck was the fact that her family fought for the Union during the civil war, that’s the first line I’m going to draw. The strongest image in the redneck brand seems to be the confederate flag, so I’m going to assert that since grandma didn’t come from the hills, and wasn’t a redneck, she must have been white trash. Which gives me license to claim a certain expertise on this group. We’ll go into more detail in upcoming pieces (besides, we already covered how to talk like a hillbilly) , but I figure we’ll cover some basics right now. First of all, you’ll need a name. An awful lot of my white trash (see how comfortably I use the term now?) ancestors had that familiar “billy bob” or dotty mae” theme going on, so I highly recommend this white trash name generator. Two other fundamentals in life are food and housing. As a culinary guide, I can comfortably recommend White Trash Cooking
Where Do Your Tax Dollars Go?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on April 15, 2010 by admin in Politics
Thursday, April 15th, 2010Great. You paid your taxes again. So what is Uncle Sam doing with your money?
 This is the simplest and most accurate chart, in our opinion. |
If you’re old enough, you’ll remember a time in America when if someone said they were having a tea party, they were probably under ten years old, and pretending. I guess things haven’t changed that much; these days if someone’s talking about having a tea party, they probably have the intelligence of someone under ten years old, and I suppose being delusional is kind of like pretending. It’s pretty amazing that we get so riled up about taxes at all, we pay significantly lower taxes than most of the world. It’s arguably because of our revolutionary roots, but I think we’ve lost sight of an important detail: American revolutionaries weren’t just protesting taxes, they were protesting taxation without representation. If a contemporary tea partier had a better grasp of that fact, they would have been just as angry at the last (or last several) administrations as they are at the current one. The thing is, the vast majority of these angry people are really just that – angry people. Today’s New York Times Polling the Tea Party survey highlights that fact in an odd way; the majority of tea party supporters are Republican, white, male, married and older than 45. Sounds like a recipe for being angry to me, especially when a black man with an apparent sense of humanity is in office. Respondents also openly expressed that they believe the president is a Muslim socialist. Apparently they’ve never met Rahm Emmanuel or other rabidly capitalist key White House staffers. And in my opinion, the fact that the poll also suggests that many tea partiers are college-educated highlights nothing more than a failure of the educational system. Heh. Had to get that one in. So in honor of you having paid your taxes once again this year, we thought we’d help you figure out where your money went. There are lots of clever graphs and charts out there like Death and Taxes (2.4MB jpg!), which is a little too pictographic for my tastes, but is probably cool to have on the wall to ponder over time. There are also annoyingly distorted charts like this one from Turbotax that not only makes it look like your company’s CEO pays all the taxes, but uses the color pink for the defense budget. Personally, I found this info from the National Priorities Project to be the most straightforward, and they also clarify who’s paying the taxes, not just where your income tax dollars go. Read the rest of this entry »