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First in for Friday LULZ
4/11/11 01:13![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
dreadfulpenny81.livejournal.comCheck out these poor kids when they find out their parents ate all their Halloween candy...
4/11/11
dreadfulpenny81.livejournal.com
telemann.livejournal.com
Some extremely bad news on the climate change front. The U.S. Dept of Energy released a report indicating that total C02 output world wide increased by six percent within one year, setting a record. The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago. In 2007 when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its last large report on global warming, it used different scenarios for carbon dioxide pollution and said the rate of warming would be based on the rate of pollution. Boden said the latest figures put global emissions higher than the worst case projections from the climate panel. Those forecast global temperatures rising between 4 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century with the best estimate at 7.5 degrees. "It's a big jump," said Tom Boden, director of the Energy Department's Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center at Oak Ridge National Lab. "From an emissions standpoint, the global financial crisis seems to be over." Boden said that in 2010 people were traveling, and manufacturing was back up worldwide, spurring the use of fossil fuels, the chief contributor of man-made climate change. [1]
( It gets worse )
(no subject)
4/11/11 02:19gunslnger.livejournal.comSince the topic of forgiving student loans has been mentioned here a couple times recently, I figured we should get an expert opinion on the issue.
Forgive Student Loans? Worst Idea Ever.
So, can you think of a reasonable rebuttal to one of the 5 reasons not to do it?
ETA: In my opinion, forgiving student loans is a pretty bad idea, for at least the reasons given. If you want to hand out free money, give it to the people who need it first, determined by actual need; don't use an unconnected metric of "went to college" to determine where it should go.
Forgive Student Loans? Worst Idea Ever.
So, can you think of a reasonable rebuttal to one of the 5 reasons not to do it?
ETA: In my opinion, forgiving student loans is a pretty bad idea, for at least the reasons given. If you want to hand out free money, give it to the people who need it first, determined by actual need; don't use an unconnected metric of "went to college" to determine where it should go.
squidb0i.livejournal.comA quote from Greer, and thoughts on same.
"When the neoconservative movement burst on the American scene in the last years of the 20th century, some thinkers in the older and more, well, conservative ends of the American right noted with a good deal of disquiet that the "neocons" had very little in common with conservatism in any historically meaningful sense of that word. In the Anglo-American world, conservatism had its genesis in the writings of Edmund Burke (1729-1797), who argued for an organic concept of society, and saw social and political structures as phenomena evolving over time in response to the needs and possibilities of the real world. Burke objected, not to social change—he was a passionate supporter of the American Revolution, for instance—but to the notion, popular among revolutionary ideologues of his time (and of course since then as well), that it was possible to construct a perfect society according to somebody’s abstract plan, and existing social structures should therefore be overthrown so that this could be done.
By and large, Burke’s stance was the intellectual driving force behind Anglo-American conservatism from Burke’s own time until the late twentieth century, though of course—politics being what they are—it was no more exempt from being used as rhetorical camouflage for various crassly selfish projects than were the competing ideas on the other end of the political spectrum. Still, beginning in the 1920s, a radically different sense of what conservatism ought to be took shape on the fringes of the right wing in America and elsewhere, and moved slowly inward over the decades that followed. The rise to power of the neoconservatives in 2000 marked the completion of this trajectory.
This new version of conservatism stood in flat contradiction to Burke and the entire tradition descended from him. It postulated that a perfect society could indeed be brought into being, by following a set of ideological prescriptions set out by Ayn Rand and detailed by an assortment of economists, political scientists, and philosophers, of whom Leo Strauss was the most influential. It called for a grand crusade that would not only make over the United States in the image of its ideal, but spread the same system around the world by any means necessary. It argued that bourgeois sentimentality about human rights and the rule of law should not stand in the way of the glorious capitalist revolution, and went on to create a familiar landscape of prison camps, torture, and aggressive war waged under dubious pretexts. Neoconservatism, in other words, was not conservatism at all; it was to Communism precisely what Satanism is to Christianity, a straightforward inversion that adopted nearly every detail of the Third International’s philosophy, rhetoric and practice and simply reversed some of the value judgments."
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/11/choice-of-contemplations.html
It's difficult to imagine a better Soviet double-agent against capitalism than Ayn Rand, Norquist, et al.
By spreading the memes that laissez faire should be taken to absolute extremes instead of capitalism kept functioning with counterbalances, that the state should be 'drowned in a bathtub' and the 'beast starved' instead of used to advance the common good and the free flow of goods, services, and capital, the worst aspects and excesses of the capitalist system are emphasized with predictable catastrophic effect.
"Adam Smith himself is critical of government and officialdom, but is no champion of laissez-faire. He believes that the market economy he has described can function and deliver its benefits only when its rules are observed – when property is secure and contracts are honoured. The maintenance of justice and the rule of law is therefore vital. " http://www.adamsmith.org/the-wealth-of-nations/
More Smith:
http://www.adamsmith.org/adam-smith-quotes/
And here we are today.
Corporatocracy has usurped the Republic.
Corporations are considered people, my friend.
All branches of government are for sale to the highest bidder.
Mainstream media is owned by those very same bidders, bought and consolidated and un-accountable, with 'entertainment' put ahead of facts and analysis, leaving only propaganda.
As a capitalist, this is anathema to me.
As a citizen, this irresponsible experimenting with critical systems infuriates me.
As one who leans libertarian, the enshrining of power in money instead of the empowerment of the individual (in the name of big-L Libertarianism, no less, and funded so transparently by said big money interests) is a perversion.
"When the neoconservative movement burst on the American scene in the last years of the 20th century, some thinkers in the older and more, well, conservative ends of the American right noted with a good deal of disquiet that the "neocons" had very little in common with conservatism in any historically meaningful sense of that word. In the Anglo-American world, conservatism had its genesis in the writings of Edmund Burke (1729-1797), who argued for an organic concept of society, and saw social and political structures as phenomena evolving over time in response to the needs and possibilities of the real world. Burke objected, not to social change—he was a passionate supporter of the American Revolution, for instance—but to the notion, popular among revolutionary ideologues of his time (and of course since then as well), that it was possible to construct a perfect society according to somebody’s abstract plan, and existing social structures should therefore be overthrown so that this could be done.
By and large, Burke’s stance was the intellectual driving force behind Anglo-American conservatism from Burke’s own time until the late twentieth century, though of course—politics being what they are—it was no more exempt from being used as rhetorical camouflage for various crassly selfish projects than were the competing ideas on the other end of the political spectrum. Still, beginning in the 1920s, a radically different sense of what conservatism ought to be took shape on the fringes of the right wing in America and elsewhere, and moved slowly inward over the decades that followed. The rise to power of the neoconservatives in 2000 marked the completion of this trajectory.
This new version of conservatism stood in flat contradiction to Burke and the entire tradition descended from him. It postulated that a perfect society could indeed be brought into being, by following a set of ideological prescriptions set out by Ayn Rand and detailed by an assortment of economists, political scientists, and philosophers, of whom Leo Strauss was the most influential. It called for a grand crusade that would not only make over the United States in the image of its ideal, but spread the same system around the world by any means necessary. It argued that bourgeois sentimentality about human rights and the rule of law should not stand in the way of the glorious capitalist revolution, and went on to create a familiar landscape of prison camps, torture, and aggressive war waged under dubious pretexts. Neoconservatism, in other words, was not conservatism at all; it was to Communism precisely what Satanism is to Christianity, a straightforward inversion that adopted nearly every detail of the Third International’s philosophy, rhetoric and practice and simply reversed some of the value judgments."
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/11/choice-of-contemplations.html
It's difficult to imagine a better Soviet double-agent against capitalism than Ayn Rand, Norquist, et al.
By spreading the memes that laissez faire should be taken to absolute extremes instead of capitalism kept functioning with counterbalances, that the state should be 'drowned in a bathtub' and the 'beast starved' instead of used to advance the common good and the free flow of goods, services, and capital, the worst aspects and excesses of the capitalist system are emphasized with predictable catastrophic effect.
"Adam Smith himself is critical of government and officialdom, but is no champion of laissez-faire. He believes that the market economy he has described can function and deliver its benefits only when its rules are observed – when property is secure and contracts are honoured. The maintenance of justice and the rule of law is therefore vital. " http://www.adamsmith.org/the-wealth-of-nations/
More Smith:
http://www.adamsmith.org/adam-smith-quotes/
And here we are today.
Corporatocracy has usurped the Republic.
Corporations are considered people, my friend.
All branches of government are for sale to the highest bidder.
Mainstream media is owned by those very same bidders, bought and consolidated and un-accountable, with 'entertainment' put ahead of facts and analysis, leaving only propaganda.
As a capitalist, this is anathema to me.
As a citizen, this irresponsible experimenting with critical systems infuriates me.
As one who leans libertarian, the enshrining of power in money instead of the empowerment of the individual (in the name of big-L Libertarianism, no less, and funded so transparently by said big money interests) is a perversion.
sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com
To me the choice is simple, we can prop up a cabal of brutal dictatorships that kill homosexuals, keep women as second class citizens, and don't care if they destroy the environment.
Or we can by our oil from Canada.
To be explicit, if you object to harvesting the Alberta oil sands you are an objectively misogynist, gay bashing, Gaia raping hypocrite.
;P
Friday lulz: Silly Africa!
4/11/11 13:57abomvubuso.livejournal.comFirst of all, let's all give one huge collective salute to our newest, and tenth, mod, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nairiporter! 10 is a good round number, innit? See, Nairi is a teacher. Elementary school teacher, at that! PERFECT. Sooo, we figured we better finally have someone who'd slap us across the wrists whenever we got too silly. Nuh uh huh. I said that word.
Speaking of which, silly animals galore! Africa is so full of them. Giraffes, rhinos, big cats, buffalos, springboks YOU NAME IT!!
( I GOTS MOAR!!!1 )
nairiporter! 10 is a good round number, innit? See, Nairi is a teacher. Elementary school teacher, at that! PERFECT. Sooo, we figured we better finally have someone who'd slap us across the wrists whenever we got too silly. Nuh uh huh. I said that word.Speaking of which, silly animals galore! Africa is so full of them. Giraffes, rhinos, big cats, buffalos, springboks YOU NAME IT!!
( I GOTS MOAR!!!1 )
underlankers.livejournal.comThis is a link to the full Up With the Star timeline as per where it currently is. This is the alternate history timeline I keep mentioning in various Friday LULZ threads. With the point of divergence that Ben Butler becomes Abraham Lincoln's Vice-President in 1864, giving command of the Army of the James to David Hunter, a real soldier, I created an alternate universe where Grant's 1864 campaign produces the capture of Lee by the 41st USCT at the Battle of Hanover Junction and the Confederacy unravels by November of 1864. By the 1980s, starting from an obscure Civil War political general becoming Veep instead Russia's on the verge of an alternate-universe equivalent of the 1991 coup and rules the 1914 boundaries of the Tsarist Empire (sorry Poland and Finland, ya'll don't exist in this world, Russia's a Space-Filling Empire ;P) under a fascist regime about to disintegrate and the Romanov Tsar Alexander IV. China's in political turmoil from the death of the Fascist leader Ma Bufang, the Ottomans control Romanian and most of the Middle East's oil under one state (and thus everybody else is looking for green energy), Botswana and Somalia are the most peaceful parts of Africa.....and Iran has an infamous, lethal revolution in the 1960s that topples the Shah and produces a Tudeh dictatorship, setting in motion the disintegration of fascism just in time for Communism to show up.
Oh, and a WWII with fascist Russia under G.K. Zhukov and Tuchachevsky waging a nuclear war with the Central Powers as big wheel in the Eastern Alliance that sees every belligerent nuked except Fascist Italy, which in the alternate universe is on the brink of an implosion. In addition a USA with two black Presidents and a dynamic Japanese-American President. Not to mention President Nathan Bedford Forrest III, World War II veteran and the man who ends the other-universe version of segregation. Oh, and I might add as well that the most prosperous, least-paranoid, least-militarized continent in the other universe is South America.
http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=184722
Oh, and a WWII with fascist Russia under G.K. Zhukov and Tuchachevsky waging a nuclear war with the Central Powers as big wheel in the Eastern Alliance that sees every belligerent nuked except Fascist Italy, which in the alternate universe is on the brink of an implosion. In addition a USA with two black Presidents and a dynamic Japanese-American President. Not to mention President Nathan Bedford Forrest III, World War II veteran and the man who ends the other-universe version of segregation. Oh, and I might add as well that the most prosperous, least-paranoid, least-militarized continent in the other universe is South America.
http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=184722