Mountain Xpress Forums

Pat Tillman

2009-11-08T13:55:42-05:00

I just started reading John Krakauer’s new book Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, and I started thinking about how he was (and still is- ESPN is airing a story on him right now) being used by the government as a propaganda tool. What the book is painting a picture of is a deeply conflicted man who had objections to what his country was doing in the middle east.

I guess what I’m wondering is how do those out there who supported the war (I think Thunder Pig was a supporter of the war in Iraq) feel about the man and what happened to him after his death.

Also, I don’t want this to turn into a thread about the war. There are plenty of other places for us to talk about that.

This morning I went to the grocery store…

2009-10-18T15:47:57-05:00

This morning I went to the grocery store to pick up some bananas. When I got to the check-out counter I was met with the all-too-common person: A service-industry employee who seems to be going out of their way to broadcast how bored, miserable, and unfulfilled they are with their job. Oh, she said all the things she was supposed to say (“How are you?”, “That’ll be $1.63”, etc) and nothing more, but the way she said them would make you want to slit your wrists. When she got to the “Have a Nice Day” part, she didn’t even come close to making eye contact, preferring to stare into space like a zombie on quaaludes.

During my brief encounter with her I tried to think of something to say that would brighten her day, something that could relieve the drudgery of her existence, something that wasn’t just another stupid cliche, not just for her benefit but for mine as well. But as usual I just didn’t have the mental energy to come up with anything. So I walked out of the store feeling worse than when I walked in. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t her intention, but it’s the often inevitable result.

As I was walking back to my car I got to thinking about deadend low-wage jobs in general and all the people who are stuck in them, living those “lives of quiet desperation” Thoreau wrote about. And I was reminded of some recent TV news segments I’d seen featuring the latest batch of “success gurus”. One of their favorite mantras is: “Do what you love and the success will follow”. Another one is “Love what you do and you will never work a day in your life”. It’s the same old bullshit they were peddling decades ago. But with this current economic downturn, the sharks are coming out in droves to prey on the increased supply of desperate suckers.

Do what you love and the success will follow, huh? Tell that to the 95%+ of musicians, bands, and singer/songwriters who have barely made a penny doing what they love. At best they can keep their music as a hobby on the side while they pay the bills doing something else, something for which “love” probably isn’t too dearly felt.

Do what you love and the success will follow, huh? If this were truely a realistic option for everybody, then who would be left to clean our public toilets, remove our garbage, or wash our dishes when we eat out at a restaurant? And even if all these jobs could be automated or done by robots, where would that leave all the people who used to do them? Can they all achieve success just by doing what they love?

Hmm, let’s see: I love watching movies, listening to music, eating Ben & Jerry’s, playing Wallyball (it’s so fun!), travelling to other countries, and oh yeah, having sex (who doesn’t?). But I’ve yet to think of a way to get paid for doing any of those things. In fact, they usually cost money. (insert sex joke here)

Another problem is that even if you’re good at something you love, that’s not enough to be successful at it. Here’s why: You know those handful of jobs you would love doing? Guess what: They’re the same jobs everyone else would love doing. So you can’t just be good. You need to be really, really, really good. You need to be better than almost anyone else at it. And then, just maybe then, you might be able to have a sustainable career doing what you love. And you’d be one of the lucky few.

What these asshole success gurus always leave out of the equation in this ######-up “free-market” capitalist system is the simple fact that for one person to be at the top, someone else needs to be at the bottom. (uh, insert sex joke here?) No matter what field you’re in, there just isn’t enough room for everyone who enters it to be successful. Most of us are eventually gonna have to end up settling for something less than what we had hoped. And it isn’t because we were lazy and didn’t try hard enough. It’s because we just didn’t have what it takes. Nature dealt us an inferior genetic hand. Despite what the success gurus and self-help con artists try to tell you, we can’t all be the Alpha.

So where does that leave us? In a pit of despair and hopelessness? I don’t have all the answers, but one thing I would do is to recommend we follow the example of what has worked very well in most Western European countries. You know, those places where people live longer and healthier, have far less crime, are better educated, and homelesness and poverty are virtually non-existent.

Remember that news story a couple years ago that found Denmark to be the happiest country on earth?
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/comments?type=story&id=4086092
They found that one of the reasons for their contentedness is that the Danish just don’t expect much. There isn’t this relentless desire and push for everyone to be rich and famous and have more than the other guy that is so engrained in our “American dream” mentality. People who fail to make six figure salaries aren’t scorned as “losers”. But even more importantly, the people in Denmark who do get stuck doing the crap jobs that eveybody hates get paid far better than we would and have to work less hours. Duh!?! It’s so obvious. This should be a no-brainer. When you combine miserable jobs with miserable poverty-level incomes, the people who do them are going to have lives that are….....miserable. The Danish could figure this out. Why can’t we?

But, you ask, if we pay the people at the bottom more for working less hours, where will the extra money to pay them come from? There are plenty of ways to do this. Off the top of my head, how about an extra penny or two in sales taxes? Personally, I’d be more than happy to pay a couple extra cents for my bananas if it meant that next time the lady at the check-out counter is actually smiling, actually looking me in the eyes, and actually means it when she says “Have a Nice Day”.

Two Clueless women

2009-11-19T00:14:23-05:00

So, i was reading up on the Prejean thing (thanks to tv pigs little video—i had never heard of her prior to that) and i think the whole thing was planned by trump from the get go. i mean, he hired that perez hilton dude to sit on the panel, right? and i bet he planted that gay marriage question, knowing carrie was a clueless rural christian and would answer predictably. so, the pageant gets great publicity and perez gets great publicity, and even prejean gets great publicity, not to mention a bunch of paid speaking appearances. so everyone’s stoked. things like this dont happen on accident.

And then, i was watching the trainwreck that is sara palin’s book tour the other night, and i got me to thinking about how she is all image and no substance, and how that serves everyone so well, because the media gets to either bash or revere her, despite her having absolutely no political/economic ideology whatsoever, and how the republican party wins because she serves as a great distraction while they lay low and see how to play out the next few years as they cultivate an ACTUAL candidate.

But here’s the thing, i don’t think either of these naive social conservative (hot) clown-ettes have any idea they are being used. Not a drop of a clue. so they prance around playing their roll and serving their overlords, who they may or may not even be aware of existing, all the while thinking they are in control of something much, much bigger than them. it’s like reality teevee, but in reverse.

so, just a cynics perspective. what sayeth thou?

Keeping up with Portland

2009-11-15T08:20:04-05:00

I just read on The Daily Beast where Portland is opening the countries first cannabis bar….. It is a private club where where you pay $25 a month and they give you pot over the counter.
Now wouldn’t that be something ground breaking for A-ville?

We kicked their ass (per capita) on the beer thing….. now we gotta get with the program on the pot thing.

yes.

2009-11-17T21:28:33-05:00

TVPigs Comedy Sketches

2009-05-21T00:10:44-05:00

Short animated comedy sketches by Carter MacDowell.

Strange Quasi Fascism

2009-11-18T10:26:04-05:00

For some reason I woke up this morning thinking about who the field was running for President all the way back in 2007, and I remembered that Tom Tancredo was one of the dudes. I knew nothing about him, and so I decided to do a rather superficial once over of who he was on wikipedia.

According to that page, Tancredo is the honorary Chairman of the Youth for Western Civilization. This group is kind of weird.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_for_Western_Civilization

The group opposes what it views as “radical multiculturalism, socialism, and mass immigration” and a “poisonous and bigoted leftist campus climate”.

YWC opposes multiculturalism and affirmative action on college campuses and supports a return to the study of, and pride in, Western culture. Their views have been characterized by some as hate speech.

YWC portrays itself as a more conservative and issue-specific alternative to groups such as the College Republicans (CRs), though many of its leaders and active members are also involved in the CRs, and YWC was prominently represented at the 2009 National CR Convention.

I don’t think this group is dangerous or anything- it’s probably just a group of white baptists who feel threatened when anything different is introduced to them and think the word “Mexican” is an insult, but their logo is strange and pretty fascist looking.

Something about this troubles me. I mean, I guess Western Culture does exist, but it doesn’t exist in the way most “champions” of western culture think it exists. I have come to realize that if we mean western culture as in the US and western Europe (UK, France, Germany, maybe Iberia- though usually not- and Scandinavia) then it does not exist at all. Nor does a “European” culture exist, at least not if you don’t include all of Europe, including the whole of the Mediterranean.

I guess what I am arguing is that if we take culture to mean a social process, then yes, a Western Culture exists, but it includes all of German, Latin, Greek, Slavic, Celtic, and Semitic Europe/Mediterranean—all the societies that have been totally interdependent for centuries. It also overlaps with other cultural spheres so heavily that eventually trying to draw circles around them gets impossible. There can be readily identifiable cultural processes—a friend and I were talking about different attitudes toward suicide, definitely a cultural process. But other things cant be neatly wrapped up… what culture can claim the banjo, or Plato, or olive oil?

If we take culture to be a monolithic, little-changing essential characteristic (or set of characteristics) of an ethnic group, then it doesn’t exist. It is a camouflage for racism.

Now that I got my rant out of the way, I guess what I’m wondering is what is the point of this group other than some quasi nationalistic, semi racist bullshit? Why is it that in 2009 a former Governor would let his name be attached to something with fascist overtones?

Anyone?

The FBI is more invasive of your privacy than you think

2009-11-10T19:15:04-05:00

I’m so angry right now I can hardly think straight enough to type out this post coherently.

The FBI recently requested the IP address of EVERY PERSON who visited the Indymedia website to read news on a particular day.

As someone who not only uses Indymedia as a main source of unfiltered, non-corporate news, but who has worked as a journalist with Indymedia in the past, I find this beyond disturbing.

From an excellent article at the EFF.

In other words, the government was asking for the IP address of every one of indymedia.us’s thousands of visitors on that date — the IP address of every person who read any news story on the entire site. Not only did this request threaten every indymedia.us visitor’s First Amendment right to read the news anonymously (particularly considering that the government could easily obtain the name and address associated with each IP address via subpoenas to the ISPs that control those IP blocks), it plainly violated the SCA’s restrictions on what types of data the government could obtain using a subpoena. The subpoena was also patently overbroad, a clear fishing expedition: there’s no way that the identity of every Indymedia reader of every Indymedia story was relevant to the crime being investigated by the grand jury in Indiana, whatever that crime may be.

So….

The only reason we even know about this is because some brave soul at Indymedia contacted EFF. I wonder how often this happens where nobody complains and just hands over the info.

So, better start using TOR if you wanna read the news from any source deemed unacceptable by the government. Otherwise, the very fact that you read ‘Green is the New Red’ could, and probably would, be used against you in a court of law.

####### FASCIST #####!

What say ye? Am I once more just getting way overheated about nothing?

Or are you as upset about this as I am?

Irish priest kidnapped in Philippines released by MILF

2009-11-12T13:03:22-05:00

Rats ... this isn’t some sexy S&M story about a hot mom. But it does bring into question whether or not the Christian Science Monitor[/i has a prankster writing their headlines.

Filipino militants released an elderly Irish priest late on Wednesday night after holding him in captivity for 32 days. Father Michael Sinnott had worked in the Philippines for nearly 33 years when six armed gunmen kidnapped him from a gated compound in Pagadian City on Oct. 11. He was released into the custody of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which turned him over to government authorities on Thursday morning.

Although militants released a video in November in which Fr. Sinnott said his captors would release him in exchange for $2 million, the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs says that he was released without any ransom payments.

Michael Martin, Ireland’s foreign affairs minister told reporters that refusing to pay any ransom was in line with his country’s policy to discourage future kidnappings, reports the Guardian. Paying kidnappers would set a precedent that endangers Irish citizens and “jeopardised the vital work of aid workers and missionaries around the world,” he said.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1112/p99s01-duts.html

Letterman: Sex Maniac Gone Wild

2009-10-03T11:19:57-05:00

10,000 lovers? In a bombshell announcement on Thursday night’s edition of “Late Show with David Letterman,” the 62-year-old host said that he had been the target of a $2 million extortion attempt by an unnamed individual who had threatened to reveal that the talk show host had had sexual relations with members of his staff.

What has recently been revealed by unknown sources is that Letterman is a sex maniac..” He requires that everyone that comes on his show has to at least give him a hand job”. an anonymous guest stated.

As 1000s, of exlovers come forward with their sordid stories, one common thread among the angry hoard is not so much that Letterman traded air time for sex, but that not one of his lovers ever achieved an orgasm.

Insiders say he is a major chubby chaser..( pic below is one of his after show orgies)

Letterman could not deny his abhorrent behavior.

“My response to that is, yes I have [had the relationships]. Would it be embarrassing if it were made public? Perhaps it would,” he said. “I feel like I need to protect these people - I need to certainly protect my family.”

Many of the women he has had relations with have produced offspring..Yesterday the babies were set on his lawn and left for his current wife to take care of.
“Let those little bastards suck on your tits”.was his wife’s response to the demonstration.

He has insisted they all be named Dave Jr.