Author: Aaron Weber

Dude, it’s obvious

It’s so obvious. He lives in a pineapple under the sea. A pineapple. He’s not tough or brave or mean. He’s obviously promoting the homosexual agenda of, um, being nice to people and wearing ugly pants. Or something.

Every once in awhile we hear “such and such icon of childhood is destroying our youth,” followed by “young adults between 18 and 25 are moving back in with their parents and can’t hold jobs.” And people buy it every time. Next thing you know, people will be shocked by the way teenagers are dancing, and by the fact that people have sexual intercourse. After that, we’ll notice poverty or cults, or a new drug– my guess is betel nut or toads.

All Consuming!

I’ve got some shirts on order from Threadless, which is also in charge of OMG Clothing (slogan-oriented t-shirts). Then I remembered Preshrunk.info, the t-shirt blog. And there, I came across things like 80s tees — which also inclues an anti-80s section with a shirt that says “Retro Sucks” in a big fat retro font. My personal favorite right now is Sharp as Toast with its Propaganda Panda. Or maybe Tiny Factory, which has some great designs and funny political things too. I had to restrain myself– but I am now sure that my t-shirt idea from a year or so back was brilliant, and if I had only followed through, I would have a very expensive and time-consuming hobby on my hands.

Frizzante?

This is a serious resource on housing markets and the potential for a market bubble. I mean, I post the occasional link, but this is like, several essays and newsfeeds and what else who knows.

Links to: The Fed plays down a house-bubble, and on the other hand mortgage requests are down. Most notable, the ever-gloomy Stephen Roach points out that the US savings rate is approximately zero, and that “if it feels like a bubble, acts like a bubble, and looks like a bubble…”

I just like the feeling that someone is going to get hurt. I think it’s what drives people to tune in to American Idol.

Stoopid

The conspiracy theorists in the tax-denial movement remind me a lot of the right winger nutters, like, say, Phillys Shclafly (did I spell that right?) who was opposed to the equal rights amendment because paying fair wages to women would cause communism. Or something like that. Her logic wasn’t clear but it had something to do with free day-care for young children being socialist, unlike free education for kids over six, which is to be expected.

Anyway, “The Hearts of Men” told me a lot about what economic policy should be to achieve fair and just wages for women, and explained that the early-20th-century ideals of the “family wage” and the male breadwinner are basically gone, or at the very least can’t be relied on as instruments of social policy any more (if they ever were reliable). But it didn’t tell me anything about the nature of committed relationships or how to keep a man or anything like that.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

I’m reading Nickel and Dimed author Barbara Ehrenreich’s (and how hard is that name to spell, by the way?) book The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. So far she’s covered the expectations of men in the 40s and 50s (become the sole supporter of a wife and children; women’s work was not valued and wives were regarded as economic parasites; neither men nor women were very happy with this arrangement as we all know by now) and how the Beats rejected the “responsibility and maturity” required of men; and how the sixties counterculture rejected not only the “responsibility and maturity” model of masculinity but also masculinity itself, especially for its destructive, violent impulses.

So where is she going with this? I can’t tell. Does Barbara Ehrenreich know what evil lurks in my heart? And will reading her book help me understand my dreams and flight from commitment? I mean, I’m not a sole provider, I don’t have to support a family, and I’m not the only income in my household, but… I still fear the same sort of sacrifices the grey-flannel conformists of the fifties feared (and made anyway). What’s in my heart? Aside from fear and resentment and selfishness, I mean. And red blood cells. That doesn’t count. I wish I knew.

Choose Death

Bookdwarf is at an event tonight with Jared Diamond, where he discusses his new book, Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed. His book is about how societies collapse and die: Rwanda, for example. Or Easter Island. When some guy chopped down the last tree on Easter Island, what was he thinking? Or that Viking settlement in Greenland which starved to death without eating any of the abundant fish in its waters. These societies chose a cultural imperative over survival. Whether it was creating giant stone statues, or sowing salt into the earth of a rival tribe, or killing all the Hutus around, or just plain refusing to compromise on the taboo against fish, they more or less chose to die.

I decided not to go to the event. I know, looking at our consumer products, that we have already chosen death.

Oooh, want to see something funny? Here are some of the top Google results for “Choose Death:”
Weird art site about death aesthetics
Anti-abortion screed

Good news, bad news, fake news

Good: One church refuses to marry anyone until gay people can marry equally. They are encouraging all heterosexual couples to postpone marriage until marriage is free for everyone. (Well, they say they will encourage all of the average of five straight couples that get married in that church each year…) It’s a step.

Bad: One village in Acheh is apparently just… gone: all but one of the houses is and around 80% of the people have completely vanished. The house in best shape has only two walls standing; the rest are brae foundations. And the inhabitants? They haven’t even found bodies.

And Bookdwarf pointed me to the fake news: Armstrong Williams, when he appeared with Cheney to complain about biased, unethical media coverage was actually a paid shill for the administration. Now, while it might sound like a great idea to get paid by two people for doing one job, it’s usually too good to be true. In fact, it’s probably right there in the contract or rule book– it certainly is in my case. You know, the employee handbook. The one they gave you when you got hired? You didn’t read your contract or terms of employment or any of the company policies did you? No, you didn’t. I bet you didn’t even sign up for the 401(k) and stuck with the default health insureance. Dumbass. You’re too stupid to live, let alone be a journalist.

Demo

Anybody (not working with me) who wants a demo DVD of Novell Linux Desktop, let me know and I’ll mail you one. If you work with me, you can get it internally.