The honorable pastor Manning...

The real life uncle ruckus.

New season of Boondocks starts May 2nd.

Read this fucking shit. tell me if it's good

This is my "FINAL FUCKING PROJECT" of college in regards to my Urban Studies Minor, and I want to post it on the Internet. Internet is always capitalized. Sad.

So there it is, you friends of mine who give a crap.

Also, download Eric's album. It is the greatest piece of music he has made. It is real and is part of the whole sad universe always.

"Turn off the TV" -President of the USA

There is a profound problem with the societal conversation in America. I could probably attempt to tie tons of different elements of opinion on how a healthy society communicates with one another, and James Madison's "factions" or interest groups and how each working to serve their own purposes creates a potentially disastrous fracturing of cultural opinion, and so on, but I would rather talk about the irony of this moment in the history of human civilization, the modern state, and the United States.

The presidential position is one that implies a position of some element of control over the whole "union" of the USA. As head of the federal government, presidents have varying degrees of control over political and social discourse. National structures, such the media, corporations, and federal systems such as the military or social security are the things that allow Americans of many different regional and cultural backgrounds to find commonalities through uniting in a common message or understanding. As President Obama currently attempts to press for difficult reforms at a national level, the issue of how to communicate these proposed changes becomes the whole "issue."

What am I trying to say? I think that the president is screwed because the previous methods that have been used to communicate are becoming lost in a fractured partisan environment that may have reached its "natural" conclusion. In other words, maybe a strong federal government in a place as vast as the United States has its limits, and frustrated statements by our president reveal this difficulty.

Statements that we should go out and "talk to folks" are interesting, but I don't know if anyone really can do this through an objective lense. People are always "talkin' to folks," and reach some pretty innovative solutions on a small but potentially useful scale, but faced with the size of a governmental or corporate structure, little can be done with those conclusions or ideas.

The structures that define the modern state are inherently indifferent to the "talking to folks" level of social interaction. But at the same time, the national media is not allowing any kind of honest discussion of the merits of certain reforms to take place. In the end, giant corporate interests control the conversation, and individuals and small local groups are left feeling hopeless and apathetic. I don't know what happens next.

A very ugly ape...

Robert Sapolsky:



He starts speaking about 6 minutes into the video. He's one of the most entertaining lecturers I've seen. After watching you'll understand what it means to be a human a little better.

Natural Thinking 101

Simplify any topic of discussion so that you can incorporate any talking point to make a strong statement about life.


walk naked in airport.

If you thought politics couldn't get any worse...

Corporate free speech has been unleashed. I suppose this is just the logical progression of the American political system.

For some background, to understand the case, watch the Bill Moyers Journal.

The New York Times:

Bitterly divided, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that big business can spend its millions to directly support or oppose candidates for president and Congress, a decision that sharply reverses a century-long trend to limit the political influence of corporations and labor unions.

EJ Dionne:

Substantively, supporters of this decision say it is about free speech. It's not. Corporations are not individuals, as Congress recognized when it first limited the role of corporate money in politics back in 1907. Corporations are created by law, and they should not be treated the same as we treat live human beings. "The court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote said in his dissent. He's right.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Second, it has long been a staple of conservative thought to criticize “judicial activism”—the practice of unelected judges imposing their own policy judgments to overrule the will of the people’s elected representatives. But it is hard to imagine a more activist decision than the Citizens Union case. Congress passed the McCain-Feingold law, and President George W. Bush signed it, in the knowledge that the Supreme Court had repeatedly blessed restrictions on corporate political activity. But Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion blithely overturned Court precedent, and rejected the work of the elected branches—all in service of the bizarre legal theories that (1) corporations have the same rights as human beings, and (2) spending money is the same thing as speaking. This was judicial activism of the most egregious kind. Indeed, it wasn’t as much a judicial opinion as it was Republican talking points.

One Year

New Yorker reflections
George Packer:

But the fundamental reason why the soaring emotions of the inauguration have soured just a year later goes beyond anything that Obama can do. The country is in deep trouble, not just with ten percent unemployment (though that accounts for a lot of unhappiness), but with chronic, long-term social and economic problems. Whatever responsibility George W. Bush and his Republican Party might bear is almost forgotten; in the age of the iPhone and cable news, that was half a century ago. These problems, which can be summed up as the decline of the American middle class, have been so resistant to solutions that the readiest and most reasonable stance is profound skepticism. It is so much harder politically to do something affirmative than to stand in the way and say it can’t be done. Obama has made his job all the more difficult by trying to do something—and in some cases succeeding—without offering much of a challenge to the people standing in the way. So he pays the price, and they do not.

Hendrick Hertzberg:

Absent only the filibuster...Obama by now would have signed landmark bills addressing health care, global warming, and financial regulation, and a larger, better-designed stimulus package, too.

Obama came into office with a slightly better-than-average electoral mandate, but he was immediately faced with difficulties of a size and type that his post-mid-century Democratic predecessors were not: a gigantic economic emergency whose full effects weren’t felt until halfway into his first year; two botched wars in chaotic Muslim countries; an essentially nihilistic opposition party dominated by a pro-torture, anti-intellectual, anti-public-spirited, xenophobic “conservative” movement; and a rightist propaganda apparatus owned by nominally respectable media corporations and financed by nominally respectable advertisers. Excuses? Maybe. Good ones, though. Sometimes excuses actually excuse.

Junot Diaz:

All year I’ve been waiting for Obama to flex his narrative muscles, to tell the story of his presidency, of his Administration, to tell the story of where our country is going and why we should help deliver it there. A coherent, accessible, compelling story—one that is narrow enough to be held in our minds and hearts and that nevertheless is roomy enough for us, the audience, to weave our own predilections, dreams, fears, experiences into its fabric. It should necessarily be a story eight years in duration, a story that no matter what our personal politics are will excite us enough to go out and reëlect the teller just so we can be there for the story’s end. But from where I sit our President has not even told a bad story; he, in my opinion, has told no story at all.

Philip Gourevitch:

Obama’s gentlemanly refusal to engage in the bare-knuckle partisanship that his opponents delight in means that it is easy for the public—war-weary and buffeted by economic insecurity—to see him as responsible for the catastrophes he is trying to ameliorate. And this is ultimately the puzzle that his presidency poses: he lacks in office the inspirational ability to connect to a broad public that made him a star to begin with.

And Paul Krugman, from the New York Times:

The Obama administration’s troubles are the result not of excessive ambition, but of policy and political misjudgments. The stimulus was too small; policy toward the banks wasn’t tough enough; and Mr. Obama didn’t do what Ronald Reagan, who also faced a poor economy early in his administration, did — namely, shelter himself from criticism with a narrative that placed the blame on previous administrations...But he didn’t. Maybe he still dreams of bridging the partisan divide; maybe he fears the ire of pundits who consider blaming your predecessor for current problems uncouth — if you’re a Democrat. (It’s O.K. if you’re a Republican.) Whatever the reason, Mr. Obama has allowed the public to forget, with remarkable speed, that the economy’s troubles didn’t start on his watch.

James Surowiecki:

I never understood the somewhat messianic qualities that certain voters ascribed to him: Obama has been exactly the kind of President I expected him to be (and the kind of President I hoped he would be), namely rational, pragmatic, thoughtful, and even-tempered. But clearly many voters—even, oddly enough, some of those who didn’t vote for him—expected a miracle worker. When they got a problem-solver instead, one with little authority over Congressional Democrats and no authority at all over obstructionist Republicans, they were disappointed. Still, I don’t know that there was a way to avoid this—campaigning is, to some extent, always a matter of getting people to believe you'll make more of a difference than you actually can. And I don't think people’s disappointment should obscure what has been accomplished: if you had told people in March of last year, when predictions of complete doom were rampant, that the economy would be growing at a four-per-cent clip in the first quarter of 2010, few would have believed you. As has been pointed out numerous times, “Bad as things are, they would have been much worse without me,” isn’t exactly inspiring. That doesn’t make it any less true.