So, NPR, Rush Limbaugh, and magical thinking:
This is one way in which conservative journalism is actually far more sophisticated than mainstream news journalism. Conservative pundits, while usually slanting their account in highly partisan and often misleading terms, do a fairly good job of grasping and explaining the fact that the two parties fundamentally disagree on the causes of and solutions to the economic crisis and the long-term deficit. In this sense, a Rush Limbaugh listener may well be better informed about the causes of the impasse than listener of NPR or other mainstream organs. The former will have in his mind a wildly slanted version of the basic political landscape, while the latter's head will be filled with magical thinking.
Yay teams! Magical thinking? I'm watching the USMNT versus Mexico friendly, here's magical thinking: USMNT and Mexico will never win anything of importance, settling for automatic bids into World Cups and the occasional advance out of group play to lose in the round of sixteen, until CONCACAF and CONMEBOL merge, both club and country, making the Western Hemisphere equal to if not superior to UEFA!
All of us compete to be the biggest dick in this (and every) glory hole, dancing not as Corporate designed but as manipulated by Corporate which understands our design and markets Coke and Pepsi to keep us addicted to dancing on sugar water. Knowing I'm a cog doesn't make me not a cog; trying not to be a cog makes me a different kind of cog. Do you think it's an accident we scream the same things at each other with the assistance of Corporate's digital encouragement?
Daily Gaddis:
In the hall, where he stopped in the communal toilet, he was troubled again by the problem in arithmetic penciled on the wall there. Someone had multiplied 763 by 37, and got 38,321. He had checked it, idly, two years before; then carefully, at every sitting since. Who had made the mistake? Was it too late to find them and tell them? 10,000... what? Had this person gained it? or lost it? Was it too late? Stanley looked at his wrist watch. He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this rhetorical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?
- The terrible community of financial capitalism. (h/t)
- Your approval is irrelevant.
- Inside the British riots.
- Anatomy of a riot.
- Hatred of the poor is the true cause of the riots.
- Up against the wall(s).
- On the above.
- Roosting hens.
- Bachmanns' christerism.
- In defense of crackers.
- Related.
- Obama and neocontinuity.
- Calling a shot in 2016. This is the reason why I think Obama wins in 2012 - Corporate needs the Democrats to finish the sapping only they can do before handing the keys to GOP demolition in 2016.
- On the historical novel (apologies if I posted this already).
- Mining the audio motherlode.
HEAT
Denis Johnson
Here in the electric dusk your naked lover
tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth.
It's beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin,
Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover,
streaming with hatred in the heat
as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin
to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones,
and such a last light—full of spheres and zones.
August,
you're just an erotic hallucination,
just so much feverishly produced kazoo music,
are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night,
this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion,
the bogus moon of tenderness and magic
you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?
