the atomic punk

Dear Journal:

After much anticipation, I finally get chance to hear English super-hit “Der Kommissar.”  At first I honored, considering I am Kommissar of largest city of East Germany and, naturally, I assume “hey, this song about me!”  But after listen to lyric I am sad. This Kommissar they speak of is bad man!  He have all the power, not the citizen.  He make the people die faster if they live, something I cannot understand.  But, most trouble of all, this Kommissar clearly have some problem with comrades turning around.  In fact, strangely named singers After the Fire so scared they say many time “don’t turn around” merely because the Kommissar happen to be in the same town!  Truly, this Kommissar is terrible man!

Turning about on heels is natural act!  In fact, it comrade’s duty to turn around if comrade hear, say, May Day celebration, or Lenin body traveling past, or sound of nuclear missile being launch at imperialists! In this case it crime to not turn around yes?  And I challenge any comrade to resist the turning around when he catch the whiff of fresh borscht or pass a beautiful fraulein with the onion shape hinterteile!  No man — not even this evil dictatorial Kommissar of pop music fame — could resist such temptations!

Of course — like speaking and thinking — every freedom must have limits.  Did not Lenin himself say every tenth man should be shot because of idleness?  And what is turning around if not wanton idleness?  Indeed, if every comrade were to turn around for no reason, this would result in the citizenry turning about all the days!  This lead to serious injury and hurt fellow comrades, yes?  In fact, I think it correct to say that unfettered liberty to turn around make City into mayhem!

So, in concludes, I think this Kommissar was indeed correct and maybe misunderstood.  In fact, I will institute new rule tomorrow forbidding this wanton, lustful, capitalistic turning about whenever one thinks it right to do so.  This act will greatly promote our great socialist system and enhance the might of our state!

Unless, of course, it is to witness the passing of a shapely fraulein with the onion shape hinterteile, that never could be crime….

Usually this site is just pure frivolity. Yeah, I said it. But this Economic Stimulus Plan has got me, in the words of Ed Anger, “pig bitin’ mad.” It is ill-conceived, it is counter-productive, and it is at least one other descriptive term that involves a hyphen. Here is Nobel prize winning economist George Akerloff explaining why:

There are four problems with the so-called stimulus package. The first is that it creates deficits so large that one cannot even contemplate how we are going to pay for our governmental needs but especially our promises to the elderly — Medicare and Social Security, programs that have been extraordinarily popular and for very good reason.

Second, because the tax cuts are long term and permanent, it’s very likely that instead of being a stimulus, they will act as a damper on the economy. If the tax cuts are implemented, they will cause deficits, which in turn will raise long-term interest rates, which will actually cause an economic contraction. The net effect is likely to be negative rather than positive.

The third reason to vote against this package is that since it’s going to result in higher long-term interest rates, that will increase the deficits even more. Higher long-term interest rates will increase the interest payments on the national debt. The additional debt repayment burden means that the current estimates of the government deficits are far too conservative. They have to be multiplied by a very large factor. Say the government has approximately $5 trillion worth of debt. Higher interest rates resulting from that very deficit will massively increase the repayment on that debt.

Lastly, the redistributive aspects of the package are extremely worrisome. It seeks to redistribute wealth in the wrong direction, in a very big way, to the very wealthiest end of the spectrum. The people who least need a tax cut in the U.S. economy are those whose major source of income is taxable dividends. The average tax dividend dollar will go to people who are already indeed quite rich. In terms of redistribution of income, this is probably one of the worst possible places to give money.

Krugman chimes in too, as is his penchance:

If this description is correct, the stimulus bill will be a real disappointment. As I pointed out in an earlier post, economic theory — Milton Friedman’s theory! — suggests that if we want stimulus funds spent, they should go to people in temporary economic difficulty who are likely to be liquidity-constrained. But it appears that most of the measures that would do that — benefits to the unemployed, food stamps, aid to state and local governments — are being bargained away. Even the tax credit is apparently not fully refundable, so those who need it most, and are most likely to spend it, won’t get the full amount.

You can blame the Bush administration, whose hostility to helping those in need is now getting in the way of good economic policy. But I’m also disappointed with the Democratic leadership, for not standing up more forcefully.

In other words, this plan sucks. As with everything Bush does, it’s little more than a tax cut to the rich in po’ folk’s clothing.

(That analogy was a little strained, wasn’t it? Sorry. Let me try again, this time with a little Bush-friendly spin on it…)

*****

The 30 Pieces of Silver Judas got for betraying Jesus was considered an insult — the price paid for a slave in the day — but it wasn’t zero. Judas could have driven a harder bargain perhaps but there’s no question the money was sound and spendable. Forget the metaphors for a minute; Judas sold out Jesus so he could have some cash-money in his pocket.

Ignoring wage slaves and inmates, slavery is outlawed today; so we need to be a little more creative to figure out the appropriate parallel. Hmmm, what, today, is analoguous to a slave and runs about $600?

• A 24 inch flat panel TV?
• A fully loaded Xbox 360 or a grey-market Wii?
• Some rims for your lowered Hyundai?
• How about a botox session?

Whatever, I hope you like it. It’s the deal you accepted for agreeing to sell out your future.

I love the euphemism generator. I spent the fair part of an hour messing around with the damn thing.

Here are the best results:

#5:  Hey! Who’s been torching the paisley bucket?!

#4:  This is not an appropriate place for angering the trouser groceries.

#3:  As the kids say, she was spreading the activity.

#2:  Needless to say, I promptly began painting the legendary pork Volvo

And the best of them all…

#1:  It’s not ‘buying votes,’ it’s an economic stimulus package!”

The toaster poaches your egg, toasts your bread, and cooks bacon at the same time. Freaking sweet ass toaster I tell you what.

Egg-and-Muffin Toaster and Poacher

I came across this sniglet on TMQ’s website and decided to buy this book:

Yale’s Secret Weapon: Harvard has so much money because it’s Harvard; Stanford has a mega-endowment because the school was in on the ground floor of Google stock. Why does Yale have so much money? Because its endowment is run by remarkable money manager David Swensen. Yale’s endowment has returned almost 16 percent per annum since Swensen took over in 1985, a much better long-term track record than that of any hedge fund or similarly hyped investment vehicle. In fact, it’s a much better return than the investments made by places such as Merrill Lynch, where the executives award themselves hundreds of millions of dollars for their supposed astonishing expertise. Swensen is even a decent human being, paying himself far less than he could earn on Wall Street. A decent human being in the money-management profession, how did that happen? Swensen’s 2005 book “Unconventional Success” is also the best personal-investment guide on the market. Unlike the phony junk in the get-rich-quick aisles of bookstores — “How to Become a Billionaire in Twenty Seconds with Nothing Down” — Swensen’s advice is specific and practical. I commend “Unconventional Success” as containing all that most people need to know about rational investment decisions and retirement saving.

Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment

This is my favorite idea yet on the Intersnets: Delete Your MySpace Page day.

If you need me to explain this you are a moron.

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The Smithsonian recently selected their list of the 28 Places To See Before You Die. It’s the standard fare: the pyramids, a bunch of lakes, Lindsey Lohan’s bedroom, etc. If you’ve got the next four years off and $300,000, it’s probably a good idea.

I’m more into the places not to see before you die. Or, as I have so ineloquently labeled this piece…

10 Places You’d Rather Die Than Visit

10. Shangba, China

Like cancer? Then welcome friend glorious Shangba!

Between 1990 and 2005, there have been 127 confirmed cancer deaths in a village of just 3,300 residents. Cancer — notably of the digestive system and liver — has been the cause of death for 80% of the villagers. Many villagers also suffer from kidney stones and skin diseases.

That’s Shangba for You. They don’t call it the “Village of Death” for nuthin.

9. The U.S. Steel Works at Gary, Indiana

Creating steel is a complex process that involves heating up different types of ores then dumping the resulting hazardous chemicals into pristine waterways. In this case, the waterway is Lake Michigan, primary drinking water source for the City of Chicago. And the chemicals? Oh just nitrates, cyanide, and ammonia. It’s called capitalism you pussy. Read this account at Sprol.net.

 

8. Grozny, Chechnya

AKA “The Most Destroyed City on Earth.” Here’s an actual picture taken by a tourist. It pretty much tells you what you need to know.

As if the rockets weren’t enough, you gotta deal with the pathetic local populace. Check out the old dame selling sodas.

7. Pitcairn Island

Pitcairn Island is home to the descendants of the HMS Bounty Mutineers. Which sounds pretty cool frankly: an island founded by swashbuckling rogues who lived out their days screwing beautiful, uninhibited Polynesian hotties. What more do you want? Unfortunately, as swashbuckling rogues are wont to do, they kind of fucked it up. See, instead of creating a tropical utopia, they started a culture whose primary pastime is raping young girls. Ruh-roh Raggy:

A study of island records confirmed anecdotal evidence that most girls had their first child between the ages of 12 and 15. “I think the girls were conditioned to accept that it was a man’s world and once they turned 12, they were eligible,” Tosen said. Mothers and grandmothers were resigned to the situation, telling him that their own childhood experience had been the same; they regarded it as just a part of life on Pitcairn. One grandmother wondered what all the fuss was about.

Pitcain Assault Trial

The grossest part of the story isn’t the underage sex, it’s where the screwin’ went down. Evidently the Islanders’ favorite place to do it is in outhouses.

6. Branson, Missouri

Here’s a picture of one of Branson’s most popular groups, the “Duttons,” performing their “famous song” where they all “play each others violins.” In case you don’t know, “playing each others violins” is Branson entendre for “performing musical pieces on violins held by persons other than themselves.” That’s Branson for you, always with the nuttiness.

Want more proof a-how crummy ol’ Branson is ya scoundrel? Why then have a looksee at the “Baldknobbers!”

5. Mecca, Saudi Arabia

Mecca is the holiest City in Islam. The devout go there to walk around a black rock, kill sheep, and get trampled. In their off time they eat goat meat and practice up on their trampling. Other than that, there’s nothing to do. You can’t drink, you can’t smoke, and you won’t get laid. Oh yeah, if you ain’t Muslim and you try to sneak in they will kill you.

BTW, here’s a first person account by a white guy who managed to do it. It confirms everything I said above.

4. Precious Moments Park, Missouri

If you’re surprised that little ol’ Missouri snagged two spots on this list then you obviously haven’t seen their primary tourist attraction, the Arch. It’s a large arch. It is pointless. The best thing about it is riding to the top only, when you get to the top, you realize “hey, this is fucking Missouri, it’s flat up here and there is nothing to see. Please take me back down.”

Amazingly, however, there’s something even worse than the Arch and the Branson: “Precious Moments Park.” “Precious Moments” are those creepy little angel kids with alien eyes that are inevitably clutching one another as if in love or fearful of their fans. Ah, here they are:

We Wuv You Gwamma!

Just in case grandma spending your inheritance on these goofballs isn’t enough, they built an Amusement Park in their honor: Precious Moments Park. The PMP is a visitor center/chapel/gardens adorned with millions of these pygmies. I haven’t been to the PMP but I can pretty much guess the clientele: obese moms, perverts, and religious zealots. Have fun!

3. Compton, California C-A.

It’s a bad sign when the residents of a City consider it a “good day” merely because there are no dogs barking, the air is relatively smog free, and their Mom cooked a pork-free breakfast. But the true test of civic pride is a city’s recreational facilities. As you can see, they are pretty bad…

No way is the rim on this shopping cart regulation.

2. Turkmenistan

For fifteen years Turkmenistan was run by a megalomaniac named “Turkmenbashi.” He’s nuts:

Not long after the Soviet collapse, in 1991, a former Communist Party hack named Saparmurat Niyazov became President-for-life, dubbed himself Turkmenbashi—Leader of All the Turkmen—and commenced building the strangest, most tragicomic cult of personality on the Eurasian landmass. Doctors there now take an oath not to Hippocrates but to Turkmenbashi; the month of January is now called Turkmenbashi; and in the capital, Ashgabat, there is, atop the Arch of Neutrality, a two-hundred-and-fifty-foot gold statue of Turkmenbashi that, like George Hamilton, automatically rotates to face the sun.

Turkmenbashi died a few years ago but no one seems to have noticed. Either that or they’re so scared of the Man that they figure it’s worth staying loyal to make sure he doesn’t rise from the grave tod get his stab on.

1. North Korea

Theoretically you can go to North Korea but you aren’t going to have fun. There’s no electricity, the starving citizens spend half their day gnawing on their arms, and the only tourist activity is praying to giant busts of Dear Leader. Unless you’re a nuclear scientist or a doctor they won’t let you eat. And the law says you’re required to dig at least four graves before you leave.

The worst part, however, is the amusement park — Disnoy Land — where the featured attraction is “Kim Jong Il’s Wild Ride.”

Don’t go.

Yes he was an anti-American, anti-semitic, asshole. But the man did things that few have accomplished. Not the least of which was dominating the chess world in a time where the Russians were trained from birth and America was a chess backwater. I don’t know much about chess — I’ve just picked up the game — but his antics were both legendary and fascinating:

“When I was a kid, I’d go to the Marshall [Chess Club] early in the morning, and Fischer would be there. There was a cabinet of filed games from the 19th century, thousands of games that someone, maybe a lot of people, had put on index cards and diagrammed by hand, and Fischer would be playing them, one at a time. I couldn’t understand why he was doing it. These were games using discarded ideas — the King’s Gambit and so on.”

The King’s Gambit — an opening strategy in which White sacrifices a kingside pawn to get a quick attack — had long been dismissed as too risky and romantic, seductive only to the blindly attack-minded.

Bobby Fischer, along with his contemporaries, favored other strategies, known by names like the Sicilian Defense (the epitome of a sharp counterattack by Black) or the Ruy Lopez (a slowly building game of maneuver for White). “But Fischer’s argument was that the old ideas were not necessarily bad ideas,” Mr. Pandolfini said. “They had merely fallen out of favor, and by injecting new thinking into an old idea, you created state-of-the-art logic.”

New York Times Obit.

Saying Tom Cruise is an idiot is like saying Paris Hilton is … well an idiot frankly. Anyway, you get the idea, it’s obvious. Just in case you disagree, however, I feel obliged to present the evidence:

6. He Married An Alien.

Scientologist hate aliens; like Xenu, the megalomaniac who stuffs people into volcanoes. Nevertheless, in a shocking turn of events, the Cruiser married Nicole Kidman: card carrying alien and all around freaky lady.

Nic n’ Me
5. He Refused to Make Cocktail 2.

Sources have it that Bryan Brown was practically begging him to make the sequel to Cocktail (tentatively titled Cocktail 2: Coughlin’s Punishments). The script filled in the “lost years” between Young Flannigan’s start at Fridays and the job at that crappy nouveau bar where people spouted off bad poetry. While this may not seem like much of a plot setting, the script did allow Coughlin to make a crapload of new “Coughlin’s laws,” including these gems:

• “The pickled pig’s feet are for the okies, stick with the beer nuts!”

• “Salt the rims! The Salt makes em’ thirsty. If they’re thirsty they’ll drink more. That’ll make em drunk. And when they’re drunk, they’ll screw.”

• “Remember when I said ‘beer is for breakfast’? Well for lunch I like a hot cup of bisque.”

Look, the laws need work but the movie would have been awesome. Plus old BB could have used a few extra bucks in his pocket before he retired to Dobie-Ville or wherever it is he’s from. Fuckin’ Cruise.

4. His Real Last Name is Mapother.

If my middle name was Cruise and last name was “Mapother” I’d probably change it too. But at age 12? At age 12 I thought going to garage sales and wearing black socks with tennis shoes was cool because that’s what my Dad did. Meanwhile the Cruiser was telling his Dad to get bent by dropping the family name.

3. Terrible Priorities

Instead of boning every hottie in LA or making his fans’ dreams come true by giving out Bugatis, the Cruiser spends his time taping crazed rants like this:

Look, Tom Cruise is Being All Nutty Again!

(Yes, I spent the last week watching Seasons 2 and 3 of Entourage, get off my back).

2. Now I’m Not Saying He’s Gay But…

…a straight Tom Cruise should have a better roster than this:

• Mimi Rogers. She was kinda hot back in the day but certainly not “Risky Business” hot. We’ll give him a C+.

• Nicole Kidman. Stop defending her genius work in Cold Mountain. She’s a peanut-head, abandoned alien with an irritating, haughty accent. C.

• Penelope Cruz. A- Okay, she’s legit. So why the minus? Cause she’s the one human on Earth with an even more annoying voice than Kidman.

• Katie Holmes. Bad actress. Mediocre cute. Certainly not worth jumping up and down about (literally in Cruise’s case). C.

Look — gay or no gay — people should think the biggest star in Hollywood has boned a more quality line-up. If he can’t screw em on account of his sexuality religion, he should have at least make up a few stories. It’s laziness I tell you.

1. He’s Fostering L. Ron Hubbard’s Sperm.

L. Ron was a bad writer, a worse prophet, and an ugly man. That’s bad enough. Toss in his love of sailor’s caps and the dude flat irks.

Yo Cruiser, if you must foster-sperm a weird, cap-loving, ugly man’s offspring at least make it somebody cool. Like, you know, David Lee Roth or Abe Lincoln or something.