I got it - offensivetoyou is poor.

This is the most compelling reason, that he is one of the losers that he describes, for such stridency.

Also, the wish to harp on overpopulation, this sounds like the fantasy of the man of genius held back by the rabble.

offensivetoyou - you can always post your income details to prove me wrong. Or pictures from your fishing holidays with Warren Buffet.

I'm betting buying a Jimmy Buffet CD is as close as you've got to Warren.

Posted at July 3, 2008 3:04 PM in response to Class Warfare and the New Gilded Age

Look at the guy, you can see why he's breaking out his billfold to play hide-the-salami.

Posted at March 10, 2008 5:13 PM in response to How The "Emperor's Club" Probe Started

Above the Law, Beneath Contempt.

Also, ass-kissing genuinely powerful people does not make you a powerful person anymore than cheering on a sports team makes you an athlete.

Any influence Goodling had was recompense for how much trouble she could land her superiors in.

The other guy has a website - well done, he's practically an Oppenheimer or a Hilton then.

The photos are appalling in a way that only white Americans can achieve, a superhuman stiltedness that speaks of their deep love for one another.

Posted at February 27, 2008 3:47 AM in response to Goodling Gets Hitched

yes, i thought much of this is aligned with Chomsky. as Chomsky has pointed out, America's democratic institutions are excellent, if only there was anything democratic going on within them.
democracy is such a great cover for the invisible hand. election cycles are great for cleansing the institutions in the mind of the populace. "phew, thank god we got rid of that lot. let's elect another lot from exactly the same social strata, with exactly the same forces operating upon them. surely things can only get better."

it's like sticking your head in a bucket of boiling water every four years, and each time thinking "this time it will be okay"

Posted at May 1, 2006 12:52 PM in response to Hostile Takeover: The World Pulled Over Our Eyes to Blind Us From the Truth

that was the great power of the first Matrix film, that at the end Neo walked off basically into "our" world. the following films dissipated this by going down a Star Wars type route (the thing that bemused me most in the second film was that after lived in a world of absolute authority over an individual's reality, the first thing the survivors did was set up a hierarchy, presided over by old white men)

one interesting idea in the matrix is that consensus is actually part of the problem, which david touches on in this post. it is not just a task of finding what we agree upon, but also of exploding those "accepted truths" that limit the terms of debate. of course, at the very very heart of this, and david's argument, is that there is just one party, Big Business, cut in half, red half, blue half.

it alarms me to see how much faith people have in what a Democrat victory will deliver, i think it will deliver very little, other than making life harder for the Administration.

i will buy david's book, ive been reading his blog for a year or more now, and he's committed and he pushes ideas that attack the problem, the System (or the Combine, to use the term in the novel "One flew over the cuckoo's nest").

with regard to the battery in the Matrix, for its reversal of man's position with regard to technology, and for the notion of man as something that is harvested (like human organs are harvested in china's jails), it's a good image. it also feeds right back into the central fact that figuratively, that is the position we are already in.

as bill hicks used to say, "Go back to Sleep America, here, here's American Gladiators, here's a 150 channels full of crap, go back to sleep, America."

poor Bill, much missed

Posted at May 1, 2006 12:48 PM in response to Hostile Takeover: The World Pulled Over Our Eyes to Blind Us From the Truth

bollocks? you practise a high level of debate, obviously.

"China executes more people each year than all other countries combined. The actual figure is a state secret, but Amnesty International estimates that at least 3,400 executions were carried out last year and as many as 6,000 people were sentenced to death. The total could be as high as 10,000, according to some estimates."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1846366,00.html

there are no free political parties in china. embracing the market does not equate to being a democracy, or even to moving in the direction of democracy.

"Human rights organizations have also documented the absence of free assembly in China, torture, arbitrary arrest, psychiatric abuse, and coercive birth control. There are also numerous reports of organ harvesting, or the sale of organs removed from executed prisoners or terminally ill patients without their consent."

http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-04-19-voa34.cfm

censorship of the internet is also widespread. where is the basis for claiming China is moving towards democracy? see if you can answer without using your swear words.

Posted at April 25, 2006 12:37 AM in response to Being No. 1 Is Causing Us Trouble

even the notion of a democratic china is a joke. high-tech totalitarianism is all they are developing in china, their human rights record is the worst on the planet.

nobody would see dysfunctional regimes such as iran or warring african states as being standard bearers for democracy anytime soon, so why people continually place such hopes upon china escapes me. china is continually able to get away with their abuses simply by virtue of their size.

we didn't see george bush make any move to ask china to stop counterfeiting CDs, even though the RIAA in the US is zealously prosecuting teenagers who fileshare.

unfortunately, mr bush's flawed policies have sent debt spiralling and china are proving the main beneficiaries. mr bush has done more for the chinese people in 6 years than the american. thoughts of continued US primacy will lay in tatters in a hurry if this keeps on.

Posted at April 23, 2006 9:31 PM in response to Being No. 1 Is Causing Us Trouble

mr greenbaum, you seem to be the most opinionated man in america. not sure why you mention marx.

i was referring to the annexing of resource-rich areas, such as iraq, and the use of military force and civil unrest to keep other countries and their corporations at bay. it is quite clear that the shocks delivered to the price of oil by the iraqi treasure hunt have delivered huge profits for certain US corporations.

it now looks as if disrupting iran's infrastructure will provide another boost to big oil's profits.

the argument about dictator's is wide of the mark. the US prefers/preferred illegitimate heads of state because they could also be toppled by the same illegitimate means that brought them into power, or easily isolated by the international community if they misbehaved.

dictators also facilitate the pursuit of US business goals accomplished without oversight, just as much for the stability they provide.

but i take it this doesn't matter much to the opinionated daniel greenbaum, whose romance of his own voice will no doubt resume imminently.

Posted at April 23, 2006 9:21 PM in response to America's "Security Trap"

"Nations that are in chaos will not be attractive to trading partners or lenders."

But isn't there another philosophy that flies in the face of such a statement, where US military power is used to plunge a resource-rich state into anarchy/civil war, to generate profit by shocking global markets and by the fact that the deteriorating system on the ground means that only US corporations can operate with any measure of confidence in that state.

ellen makes good points, it is not the drive for "human rights" that drives these interventions in anything but name. but the cause of human rights is a good cover for the Bush-style treasure hunt version of foreign policy.

it is arguable that the "security trap" is part of an ideology that directly equates any threat to corporate profit (which also now includes the potential profits lost by NOT acting militarily) with the nation's security. are these two things truly one and the same? what policy changes would disentangle the two to a greater degree?

Posted at April 23, 2006 9:36 AM in response to America's "Security Trap"

Thanks for this article. I find myself in broad agreement. It brings home the fact that the form of this administration as much as its content is proving a profound threat to the practice of politics. It is no good swinging from one-party rule to one-party rule every few terms, as that leaves the only thing separating the US from being a one-party state, the fact that it holds free elections (of course, how free these elections are is another issue).

Posted at April 18, 2006 9:05 PM in response to False Symmetry