That 15 year old boy child’s response to ‘ohhh Miss Marple is on’ is ‘sweet!’

I don’t understand people who cling to failed philosophies. That’s not true. I do understand that they all think that their own brand of special little snowflakeness will make them king of the castle if only they didn’t have to follow these stinky rules. But it does make them look like 30 year olds making wish lists for Santa.
Libertarianism fails every hard and soft science. It fails economically (see Iceland for a microcosm of libertarian failure). It fails physics because unlike the universe economies cannot expand pepetually. It fails biology because every single selfish aspect of it is diametrically opposed to how we actually evolved, through cooperation. It fails anthropologically for the same reason. And it fails mathmatically. If you don’t pay your slaves, or erm employees, enough money to feed themselves then they die of starvation, but without minimum wage laws there is no incentive to pay them better. The numbers in libertarianism add up to death. Add that to your wish list.

I finally watched Hard Candy. Holy fucking shit batman. I don’t know if men could understand how much the world changes for little girls. I can’t even nail down the threshold. For some of us it’s when you first get boobs, for some earlier. But suddenly you’re public property and men put their hands and mouths in places they shouldn’t. Men, old enough to be your father, start saying things about how they could split you in half.
So i loved Hard Candy. 11 year oldme wanted to do the same thing to the family friend who thought my having breasts meant he coud stick his tongue down my throat. 15 year old me wanted to do the same thing to the male teachers who looked down my shirt and then made me ashamed because they got hard.
This movie should be on the horrible/awesome list and Ellen Page’s character is my new favorite vengeful girl. There’s even a Polanski reference. If you inner teenage girl is feeling a bit bruised and silenced, and your stomach can take it, you should watcht it.

Seems like a simple question, right? It’s worth 100 pennies. But dollars aren’t real things. I mean the paper and ink they a printed on are real, but their value is made up.
Think about what you can buy with a dollar. Roma tomatoes are about 2 bucks/lb right now. 4 toms are about 1/2 a pound. So all the seeds, dirt, water, the labor to plant and pick and ship, the gas for the tractors and trucks, the floor space in the store, the stockers and the clerks, even the plastic bag that you put your toms in are worth less than a buck (gotta leave room for profit). Or for a more simple example, if you pay 1000 bucks a month for 200 hours of childcare (Less than minimum wage at 5 bucks an hour but a good average) a buck is worth 12 minutes of childcare.
Have you ever wondered why we hold things that are crucial to our existance, like food and clothing and childcare, to such a low value but give much more weight to people who do jobs that aren’t crucial to our existence?

You might think from the title that this is an anti religion post. It’s not.
I am gobsmacked on a daily basis by folks who think that things like national borders and money are real, concrete things. They are no more real than the words i am typing are. These words are symbols, they represent an unspoken agreement between you and i in order to share ideas. But that doesn’t make them real. I could type the word sportscar or steak or toothbrush, but none of those things will appear. You can draw whatever lines on a map you want, but it wonk make an impenatrable crack in the earth appear. If people think the piece of paper with a dead president on it is just a piece of paper, then it won’t spend anywhere.
Perhaps that is the point. If we hold on to magical thoughts like ‘i have x amount of money’ or ‘my country, sweet land of liberty’ then they don’t have to admit to the giant con game we’ve all been played by.

I dreamt that i was the mayor of a small town in the post apocalyptic south of france. It was all going pretty well right up to the point that i had to explain to the former white collar workers that yes, they were required to do farm labor too. Even in my dreams the creative class is a bunch of lazy, whiny blowhards.

So i’m watching this thing onwitch hunting in the 16th century. Here’s how you spot a witch: if she’s slutty, and/or if she’s poor she’s obviously made a pact with the devil and is responsible for terrible ecological disasters.
sounds like the platform of both political parties to me.

you all might know my feelings on the treacly shit holiday known as mother’s day. But i’m nothing if not redundant. Mother’s day is where we hand out flowers and hallmark cards so we can prentend like we actually give a shit about the women who literally are the only reason the human race exists. Throughout the world, women in general and mothers in particular do 90% of the work yet own only 10% of the wealth. Domestically, mothers face a much wider wage gap than any others group and only 30% of single mothers receive child support.
So thanks for the brunch, but i’d rather be treated like full human being than a sacred cow worshipped one day a year and milked for the other 364

The kid in seattle who got to be a superhero for a day and the phoenix suns becoming los suns for a game in honor of their latin@ fans and reruns od the gilmore girls i have a wee bit more faith in humanity today. Will resume regular bitching and cynicism tomorrow.

I’ve heard a mountain of disdain for people who shop at Walmart, and buckets of contempt for poor people who breed in this world of over-consumption. All the pressure to change the way we live so as to tread more gently on the earth seems to comes down squarely on the backs of the poor, the brown, and the female. But the truth is, the real things we need to change the system have little to do with the average family’s commitment to “reduce, reuse, recycle”.

You can’t look at a tiny slice of the system, the slice of the system with the least ability to change the system, and pin all the responsibility on that slice. You have to look at the system as a whole.

For example, rage all you want about the Walmartification of the world, but are you screaming just as loud about the depressed wages that make Walmart’s cheap goods the only way to feed and clothe a family with less than the median income? You gan grouse all you want about obesity and poor eating habits, are you also looking at the way those same low wages that make Walmart attractive also make a virtuous diet of locally sourced organic meats and produce a possibility? When whinging about overpopulation do you stop and think that those brown women in poor countries who “just need to be taught about family planning” are leaving a miniscule carbon footprint compared to your comfortable first world life?

I prefer my environmentalism without the stank of classism, racism, sexism and outright ignorance that I see coming from most faugressive whingebots. I think the world would be a much better place if manufacturers were required to to build end-of-life usage into their products and if companies like Halliburton and BP had to shell out the extra 500K in order to avoid damaging the entire gulf coast in a massive oil spill. I think a better way to combat overconsumption is to require living wages for workers both here and abroad. If things are more expensive, people will buy less of them. And if people make more money, they can afford to buy better goods.

You can keep recycling and composting and doing whatever it is you do to make the world a greener place, but you should probably recognize that your willingness to do the work of sorting and rinsing and hauling (or putting that work off onto your female sig. other) makes it easier for companies to avoid taking responsibility. You’ve just performed free labor for whoever you buy your shit from. I’d prefer to see people paid living wages or better to sort our recycling. It’s a valuable job, and much like child rearing, we should pay well for it.

I know that it makes you feel a wee bit better to do something, anything. And I know that we all love to be a wee bit condescending whenever we can (cause you all know I’ve been doing my best snob dance about Obama’s decision to allow offshore drilling in the wake of the oil slick tragedy) but your condescension is perhaps a wee bit misplaced when you level it at those who already occupy the bottom of society. And it’s certainly not going to actually fix the problems.