Wednesday, March 25, 2009

It's over — we're officially, royally fucked.

No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Go twit yourself

I think this pretty much sums up how I feel about the most ridiculous fad since Beanie Babies. I strongly implore you all to get a life.

http://current.com/items/89891774/supernews_twouble_with_twitters.htm

Thursday, March 12, 2009

The Nicolas Cage Movie Plot Generator:

JUST THE FACTS:

1. Nicolas Cage is an Oscar winning Hollywood movie star who abruptly quit acting at the height of his abilities.

2. He has starred in dozens of films since that time.

3. Cage is one of the youngest actors ever to enter the "Seriously, I Don't Give a Shit" stage of his career. And while actors like Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro have perfected the art of phoning-in a performance, nobody has quite matched Cage's ability to make us wonder if he's fucking with us.

4. Post giving a shit, Cage films are plotted in much the way burritos are ordered at Chipotle. By choosing different combinations from a small, fixed menu, Cage has been able to release an endless variety of barely different films.