The No Ones MIA car show! This was a bitchen show with lots of hot rods and rat rods. Check out the hot pinup contest hosted by Chiksonthehill.com and music performance by Buck Wild.
I figured I would write this week about the holiday's meaning and memories. But I think New Year's Eve has lost its allure with me.
I tried to amp myself, but finally accepted the reality: This holiday seems to come around too often, too soon for me.
Years ago, the holiday seemed like a shimmering reminder of new possibilities. Now it feels more like a reminder that time is slipping away from me.
Research shows that the older we get, the faster the years seem to go by. And it's not just fear of our own mortality that troubles us.
Professor Meck blames the brain's "neural conduction velocity" slowdown. Our brains pulse more slowly as we get older, and we rely on those pulses to calculate the passage of time. That (paradoxically, it seems), creates the sensation that life is speeding up.
Another theory relies on the mind's mechanics. Our brains record new experiences in exquisite detail, then carefully preserves them in our memory. But when a similar experience occurs again, the brain recognizes it and responds with a quick sketch that is crammed into an overstuffed drawer.
So milestones dominate our memories. The Technicolor moments of youth persist, while recollections of the mundane fade. That's why later years — sprinkled with fewer vivid first-time experiences — can seem to pass in a blurry haze: quickly, with less to hold on to.
I'm casting my vote for the milestone theory, because the last New Year's Eve I clearly remember was the night the 21st century began. I gathered that night, a decade ago, with family and friends in my living room, champagne glasses poised for celebration and flashlights at hand for the catastrophe that Y2K was supposed to bring.
Today it seems unfathomably quaint that we believed a programming glitch could have unraveled our computerized country. And yet we have come undone, instead, in ways we couldn't have foreseen then.
We mastered the technology, but in the decade that followed, we were vanquished by old-fashioned demons — greed and hubris and inattention.
So it seemed right to skip the party this year. I'm not sure if this is one I'll remember, but it's one that I will fully enjoy—on my couch, with my dogs, a blazing fire and a glass of merlot—and my eyes closed as I try to adjust my mind's perception and try my best to slow down time.
New Orleans: Get out of FEMA trailers or pay $500/day
So let's make with the bubbly already; 2011's going to be just too weird.
Now that the agenda in Washington for the next two years will be driven by the far right wing of the Republican party, you might think economic issues have trumped cultural issues in the public mind. After all, this is the bunch who have taken over the House based on promises to slash the federal debt and shrink government.
Perhaps you have figured out by now that the Tea Party is a sham— a gigantic ball of self-serving, self-righteous faux outrage bounced back and forth by Republicans. After two years of marching and bellowing — of dressing up in stupid costumes with three-cornered hats and carrying misspelled signs—-of going apoplectic at town halls about the mountains of debt and deficit spending that are “destroying our children’s future,” the Tea Party finally had an opportunity to display their fury, wrath, and indignation. When Republicans fought for and voted almost unanimously to add $858 billion to the budget deficit by extending the Bush tax cuts, the Tea Party was quieter than little church mice. There wasn’t even a whimper of an outcry. Confirmed was what we already knew — they are hypocrites for hire.
This “movement” has never really had anything to do with making serious fiscal policy change — no, the Master Thespians of the right wing are simply tools who were bought and paid for by the billionaire Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, and Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks for the explicit purpose of Bringing the Crazy and distracting us yet again with—you guessed it—a culture war!
The Tea-publican game plan will go like this: While John Boehner, Mitch McConnel, and other GOP professionals are making sweeping and symbolic but completely inconsequential points about fiscal responsibility, Michelle Bachmann, Rand Paul and the Tea Party will use proposals on moral and social issues to divide, distract, and divert by convincing some Americans that they are real Americans and that other Americans are their enemies.
Like a scene in Groundhog Day, the GOP will keep giving us their failed trickle-down economics while the birthers, death-panelists and the “Obama is a Muslim/Hitler/Socialist/Fill in the Blank”crowd have a field day calling for government shutdown based on sanctimony and vilification of their imagined enemies. They will finally have the chance to fight the war they have really wanted for two years — the one that will help them make good on their claim of taking the country back—- all the way back to the days of Herbert Hoover.
Happy Fresh Hell New Year!
Fuck all the birthers,
Teabaggers and born agains.
It's our country too.
From 1992
Now, on New Year's Eve, rude readers provide you with laughter, tears, and genital excitement:
From Paul H.:
Boehner’s Boner
Obamacare’s a
Pre-existing condition
For John’s erection
From Kevin McV.:
Palin Of The North
Frontier woman brave!
How empow'ring it must feel
To kill Bullwinkle.
From Phil K.:
Qualifications
To be a Fox news anchor?
A skull full of shit!
Let's ring this shit to a close with just a moment of defiance:
From Dave N.:
Give It Up
Fuck all the birthers,
Teabaggers and born agains.
It's our country too.
Despite a few victories in the lame-duck session of Congress, Democrats and progressives should be under no illusion about the new flood of know-nothingism that is about to inundate the United States in the guise of a return to “first principles” and a deep respect for the U.S. Constitution.
Yet, while the Tea Partiers and the Right have embraced a mythical view of the Constitution as some ideal document that opposes federal power to tax, borrow and pass laws that improve “the general Welfare,” they have been less interested in the document’s protection of civil liberties, especially when the targets of abuse are Muslims, Hispanics, blacks and anti-war dissenters.
So, it seems the country is in for a new round of crazy while the voices for sanity stay largely mute.
The Tea Party GOP Gets Ready to Talibanize the US Constitution
Instead, I strongly suspect, they read and "understood" the constitution in the same way they claim to have read and understood the Bible; they began reading it knowing what they knew and what they wanted it to say, so that must be what it says.
But on a more serious note, there is something quite real going on with all this. The far-right has decided to do to the text of the US Constitution what al Qaeda has done to the text of the Koran - twist it to fit their political/social agenda then use it as a bludgeon to get their way.
We're getting older. But in the gay community, that's a relatively new phenomenon. There weren't millions of openly gay people before now in American history. But all of those who came out in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s are getting older now. It's something that really has never happened before - having a large number of openly gay seniors.
If there was ever a mortal sin that could be committed purposely, keeping your children ignorant is it.
From the terrible Supreme Court decision that started the year to the shocking grace notes that ended it, sometimes it's just better to say less than more about the tumultuous times. Through haiku, perhaps?
Citizens United
Ironic name, no?
For the new destruction of
Our United States?
Last Minute Good News
At least gay men and
Lesbians can freely die
For our lost causes.
What will happen to the US economy in 2011? If you're referring to profits of big corporations and Wall Street, next year is likely to be a good one. But if you're referring to average American workers, far from good.
The big disconnect between corporate profits and jobs is likely to continue because America's big businesses are depending less and less on U.S. sales and U.S. workers. Their big profits are coming from two sources: (1) growing sales in China, India, and other fast-growing countries, and (2) slimmed-down US payrolls.
In a typical recovery, profits lead to more hiring. That's because in a typical recovery, American consumers head back to the malls — and their buying justifies more hires. Not this time. All the hype about Christmas sales over the last few weeks masked the fact that American consumers demanded bargain-basement prices. And the price-cutting dramatically reduced sellers' margins. In short, profits aren't coming from American consumers — and profits won't be coming from American consumers in 2011.
Most Americans don't have the dough. They're still deep in debt, can't borrow against their homes, and have to start saving for retirement.
The 2010 P.U.-litzer Prizes
Smell Something Rotten? 2010 P.U.-litzer Prizes recognize the worst of U.S. journalism
Every year at this time, my friend Andy sends out a highly excitable e-mail asking about a dozen of his most rabid, music-obsessed friends -- sound engineers, club promoters, DJs, designers, anyone for whom music is less a casual dalliance and more like lifeblood -- to compile their personal lists of the year's best music, so we can all discover something new and/or gently mock each others' weird tastes in African banjo disco, kazoo jazz funk or ambient doom metal.
Rather amazing year for superlative glitchy electronica chill-out...
Opium daydream white-boy falsetto hip-hop one-man-and-a-MacBook masterwork of faraway weirdness and dreamy faded washes, so unusual in tone and timbre yet so instantly impressive in its singularity of vision that it makes you wonder what the hell you've been doing with your meager little life.
Ultra-premium rainy day/sigh at the moon/sip your whisky/wallow in the bathtub/ponder the Endtimes/crave a warm companion/nurse your wounds/ache for a simpler time/masturbate slowly for an hour and then go to bed and dream of navigating a small boat through a quiet storm of existential angst music.
...channels Elvis on a heroin porn binge, and try not to smile a dark and dirty smile. Unevenly produced, terrible artwork, who the hell cares. Turn it up, slam your firewater and curse the gods. Awesome.
This record is badass incarnate and you don't dare roll your eyes until you've heard it like, 10 times, naked and drunk and clawing at the moon.
AP reports that "federal authorities have opened a criminal probe of Delaware Republican Christine O'Donnell to determine if the former Senate candidate broke the law by using campaign money to pay personal expenses."
...
As an American expat living in the European Union, I’ve started to see America from a different perspective.
...
The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane.
...
... Isn't it better to invest in a social safety net than in a large criminal justice system? (In America over 2 million people are incarcerated.
Political opinions are considered choices, and in Western democracies the right to choose one's opinions -- freedom of conscience -- is considered sacrosanct.
But recent studies suggest that our brains and genes may be a major determining factor in the views we hold.
A study at University College London in the UK has found that conservatives' brains have larger amygdalas than the brains of liberals. Amygdalas are responsible for fear and other "primitive" emotions. At the same time, conservatives' brains were also found to have a smaller anterior cingulate -- the part of the brain responsible for courage and optimism.