Time for a PAB update. The old template has been hacked for the last time; we needed a framework that was more WordPress-current.
Everyone hates change, but I dig the sleek new look and hope you do, too.
New look
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009Polanski arrest worse than Nazi aid
Monday, September 28th, 2009A woman named Joan Z. Shore from Belgium founded an organization called Women Overseas for Equality. Sounds like a good thing, right? I mean, I tend to be for equality whether or not you and I are separated by large bodies of water, but unless she’s straight-up old-school colonialist about it, I can endorse being concerned about the combination of Women, Equality, and Oversea-ness.
Now, last I checked, America was overseas from Belgium. And it has women in it. And sometimes those women are raped by famous movie directors who flee the country when a judge catches that person acting like an a-hole after making a plea deal that will get him off scot free.
Now, I could be completely hammer-to-the-head insane, but doesn’t it seem like “equality” is meant as a synonym for “justice,” and that justice for a woman who is raped is, at the very least, to see her attacker brought to justice? I realize Polanski’s victim just wants the case gone, but there’s also the question of the broader social implication of just letting rape go if you’re famous and rich enough to evade the law for a couple decades. That doesn’t seem like much equality to me.
Apparently Joan Z. Shore disagrees. But before we get into that, let’s be clear about something: The Swiss used to be cool.
I used to admire [The Swiss] — their clean, orderly, decorous way of life. Their stubborn independence and self-reliance. I forgave them for the years they never joined the United Nations, and even now, not joining the European Union.
I always love talking about a nation’s people like they’re identical beings popped right off the national assembly line. Who doesn’t love the Borg?
There was so much affection wafting from Shore towards the Swiss that she even waived the Wand of Dismissal o’er the Swiss collaboration with Nazi Germany:
When I learned, years ago, that they had blithely allowed German military trains to transit their country during the Second World War, while claiming Swiss “neutrality,” I was shocked, but tried to excuse them on grounds that they were protecting their country from invasion and armed warfare.
But now? This Roman Polanski extradition is, objectively, the most heinous act in the history of the multiverse.
Arresting Roman Polanski the other day in Zurich, where he was to receive an honorary award at a film festival, was disgraceful and unjustifiable. Polanski, now 76, has been living in France for over thirty years, and has been traveling and working in Europe unhindered, but the Swiss acted on an old extradition treaty with the U.S. and seized him!
So, we have understandable Nazi compliance, but “disgusting and unjustifiable” extradition of an admitted rapist escaping punishment. This seems like a clear-headed view of the situation.
Making this an even more sensitive equivocation by Ms. Shore, Polanski was a Holocaust refugee. I wonder what he’d say if you put this question to Polanski himself: is it easier to forgive a country for turning over a wanted criminal or for letting the Nazis ship troops and supplies on its railways?
I won’t answer for him, but I will say this: Switzerland may be brought to their knees by Shore’s uber-classy, enlightened call to action.
I suggest, in the finest American tradition, we protest this absurd and deplorable act by smashing our cuckoo clocks, pawning our Swiss watches, and banning Swiss cheese and chocolate.
And let them yodel all they like.
Sounds like a person totally invested in equality to me.
Democrats: We have the greatest mandate in modern American history. We just don’t want to do anything with it.
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009Al Franken seems like a good dude. He’s certainly written many punkass-style dressing-downs of the powers that be, and even though he’ll inevitably be coddled into the sleepy state of going with the corporate flow, I was happy to see him declared the winner.
And I was dreading Harry Reid’s reaction.
The good lord loves a concise defense brief
Monday, May 18th, 2009Does it make you feel better or worse (h/t Samhita’s tweet) that they may have really believed this shit?
Nice guy(tm) Randolph Schmid has a bit of a one-track mind
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009So, let’s say you’re an Associated Press writer and you hear about a tribe of people in Ecuador. And let’s say this tribe had the highest homicide rate ever recorded by anthropologists. And let’s say that researchers discovered, among other things, that the most murderous of the tribe members didn’t always get the most wives and stuff.
Is this how you would write your opening paragraph?
Apparently the bad boy doesn’t always get the girl. At least in a South American tribe with the highest known murder rate, it turns out that the most aggressive guys end up with fewer wives and children than milder men, according to a report in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Randy’s article suggests that the report discussing the lives of these people covers a lot more than who got laid the most. Thus, proving the “bad boys” wrong seems like an odd thing to fixate on… almost as bizarre as equating our American conception of a “bad boy” with an Ecuadorian tribesman who murders a lot.
Hey Randy, I’m really sorry some 19 year old with a camaro and an almost-mustache was dating the girl you liked in Social Studies class, but trying to tell that person today that he’s going to have less sex than you by pointing to a tribe of people who have absolutely no shared context with our lives in the developed world is an enormous fucking stretch. And ethnocentric. And rooted in sexism. And soaked in weak sauce.
He can’t hurt you anymore, dude.
Secesh
Friday, May 1st, 2009When I was a kid growing up in Dallas, I thought all the talk of Texas seceding was kind of adorable. It was just party talk, something I would hear adults laugh about over a beer and see kids mimic in school. Having spent my early years in Iowa, I’d never really encountered state pride on the level of Texas’, and it seemed kind of cool to be living in a state that thought it was that badass.
Then I turned, like, 16 and stuff, and realized that:
1) There was more to life than weekend sleepovers playing Techmo Super Bowl for 18 hours at a time, and
2) There were some people who weren’t kidding about that secession business. And they were fucking crazy.
That was the late 80s/early 90s. Now? There are even more secession nuts. They’re still fucking crazy, but they’re popping up all over the South. And unfortunately for everyone, their numbers are going to go waaaay up over the next 5 years. In other words, the whole secession thing’s just getting started.
Holy crap, I can’t believe anyone thought this image was posted earnestly. Here at punkassblog, we post shit that seems insane to us. And if it’s alarming, that’s the point. This is the southern patriarchy’s wet dream. It’s absurd. It’s awful. It’s the type of shit we address here.
Amazon: The Funopoly!
Friday, April 17th, 2009Hi everyone!
Amazon.com here. After the recent concern expressed here and the tweetageddon resulting from our itty bitty but totally adorable if you think about it what were we talking about again? Probably one of our awesome SALES SALES SALES where you can get all the It items your barren soul craves for way cheaper than you should.
Anysmiles, we thought we would stop by a few places where the grumperdoodles have emerged to remind everyone of all the great things about us. First of all, we have everything. Literally everything ever. From the latest Girls Gone Wild DVDs to the Shroud of Turin, you can find every item conceived or created on Earth (coming soon: Amazon Galactus!) within our virtual walls. And all of it is obscenely cheap — so cheap that it almost seems like there’s no way anyone could be making a profit on the sale, and certainly way cheaper than some fleshbag in your analog town could sell you the item. Oh, and we have free shipping on all kinds of stuff! So you get it right to your door with minimal exertion, which avoids disrupting your streak of barely moving a muscle.
How can we make the world this perfect for all of you? One word: volume. We’re the middle men on so much stuff that we can move merch at razor thin profit margins. When you think of a book or a CD, your brain thinks AMAZONAMAZONAMAZON. More and more, when you think of movies or electronics or furniture or crude oil futures your brain is also thinking AMAZONAMAZONAMAZON. Why? Because we’re a funopoly!
That’s right — like Google and Microsoft and Ma Bell before us, we’re so good at what we do that you don’t need anyone else. And that means you’re subject to any of our awesome whimsies or poorly conceived fantastideas, and all you can do it shout your love of our deathgrip on literature and battery powered devices to the interwebs via blogs and twitter. Because even when you want to rank us as 1 star in your heart, you’ll still come back for that new Twilight paperback. Every fucking time.
*giggle!*
Adventureland
Friday, April 3rd, 2009Hi. I’m a 21 year old white male. I just graduated from Oberlin College and will be attending Columbia’s graduate program in journalism next fall. My still-married parents have paid for everything in my life to the point where I’ve not had to hold a single job. Ever.
BUT YOU REALLY NEED TO FEEL SORRY FOR ME BECAUSE I’M A SHY VIRGIN AND MY DADDY DRINKS AND MY PARENTS MAY NOT PAY FOR MY SCHOOL OR MY NEW YORK APARTMENT AND I LIKE THIS GIRL WHO HAS THE GALL TO BANG SOMEONE ELSE EVEN THOUGH I WAS JUST TOTALLY BROKEN UP OVER SOME OTHER GIRL I DATED FOR 11 DAYS LIKE 2 WEEKS AGO AND ALSO OTHER GUYS PUNCH ME IN MY NUTS OVER AND OVER AND I JUST TAKE IT SO NOW I’M WORKING AT AN AMUSEMENT PARK WHICH IS LIKE WHAT POOR PEOPLE HAVE TO DO WHILE I READ HENRY MILLER AS A STATUS SYMBOL AND MY FRIENDS ARE UGLY.
I need another movie about a depressed well-to-do white boy like I need someone to rip out my teeth with pliers. Enter Adventureland, one of the most tone-deaf comedies I’ve ever seen. If you like feeling sorry for privileged Nice Guys(TM) chasing cardboard cutouts of actual women, check it out.
.jpg)
Two thumbs up. Its own ass.
Bank anger. Bankger. Banger?
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
No soup for you! This is reserved for those who need it. Like Goldman Sachs.
All Americans are certainly gettin took in the patoot by the big banks. Looks like some folks are taking to the streets about it around the nation, if you’re interested: A New Way Forward Demonstrations. I expect I’ll be out with my video camera in Austin, and I’ll post footage here if anything interesting turns up.
Matt Taibbi and Paul Krugman are awash in despair, and when those two canaries go down for the count, you know we’re facing some sinister corporate shenanigans.
GM has been told to dump its CEO and will be given plans on how it will restructure itself according to the desires of the government. Banks, meanwhile, continue to get hundreds of billions of dollars with nothing more than a “pretty please” attached to it to make sure that money gets in the hands of people who do not have their own private jets.
Sadly, we all know that trickle down economics is a joke, and it’s been disappointing (though not shocking, as many hardcore-in-denial liberals seem to feel) to watch the Obama administration continue the Paulson Cash Dumptruck Plan of 2008. Lesson to GM: More campaign contributions next time, sucka.
In the meantime, protests may kind of matter again, because this administration has shown before that they pay attention to the public and the media. Now, that may include the disclaimer “only when not in direct conflict of massive donors” but at least we know it’s worth a try.
So if you’d rather see the big banks nationalized, broken apart, and thrown back out into the world as smaller institutions regulated by harsh antitrust laws, then let your voice be heard, eh?
And if this isn’t your thing, we can protest whatever that is next.
Best of SXSW 2009: Punkass MP3 Edition
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009Work for trade — that’s how I got into South By Southwest this year. I shot a full day for them with my video type stuff and in return they gave me a badge. So, for the first time in a decade, it was fully on for me at SXSW.
No, that’s not me. But it kinda looks like me. Unfortunately.
Three things I took away from a week of hanging out with the cool kids from your town and mine:
1) Dance pop rules all.
As public acknowledgment of the developed world’s impending demise grows, one might predict the music scene would turn dour and coat itself in funereal flannel. Instead, it appears we’ll be bootyshaking our way down the 6-lane highway to hell.
2) Indifference is dead.
As a corollary to #1, bands seem to have eschewed ennui and affected boredom for pure enthusiasm. Everyone I saw (except possibly the Vivian Girls, who also wore flannel now that I think about it), was incredibly positive and gracious to the audience. I was thanked at least 9465 times last week for my attendance.
3) You need no official gear to have a blast at SXSW.
All you need to do is get here. There is so much free music, and free food+booze, it’s astounding. Nobody I know without a badge or wristband had any less of a glorious week than I did, though the ability to get into DEVO alone made it worth the ugly neck garb/lame status symbol of the badge. Anyway, point is, just come. It’s awesome.
I’d been feeling my mp3 collection getting stale lately, but the haze of 20+ shows in 4 days certainly cured that. In the interests of sharing, I thought I would present an mp3 sampling of the bands that blew me away. I hope a few of these rock your world, too. If any band wants their song taken down, just say the word…
Losers like you need to read this
Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
Hey-hey! Free Market Capitalism here, and I’d like to set the record straight.
Jealous hovel-dwellers have been up in allllll arms about annoying little hangnails like this:
Merrill Lynch secretly accelerated bonus payments and gave at least $1 million to each of nearly 700 employees as the brokerage was amassing billions of dollars of losses, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said in a letter to Rep. Barney Frank.
God! Finally a company acts in the best interests of its employees — aren’t you commie-humping unionizers always jacking it to that fantasy? — and somehow that’s being painted as proof that deregulated big business will always screw everything up.
I don’t understand the problem. People who do a good job should get rewarded, that’s the merit system, and I LIVE AND BREATHE the merit system. So, Merrill Lynch had 700 good employees, and they got a million freaking dollars for being awesome. Wouldn’t you love it if you got a million bucks at your job when your performance eval had a gold star on it? Yeah, you would. The Free Market sees all.
Now, some welfare-addicted hippies might take the hookah pipe out long enough to say that there’s no way those people deserve the money because their company was failing, but was that their fault? Typically, when a business goes under, it’s either the fault of the janitorial staff or the temps — in both cases, they’re always moving crap around and/or accidentally throwing away the document that would’ve saved the company.
Should the Dudley Do-Rights at the top of Merrill Lynch have suffered because the peons failed to bring home the bacon? My Free Hand spoke, and it declared nay. These forward-thinking, ambitious, and no doubt philanthropic visionaries simply had the foresight to recognize the coming storm, and they took what was rightfully theirs before it all went up in smoke. Why was it rightfully theirs? Because they took it. Now you’re starting to think like the Free Market!
The way I see it, this whole economy thing is just a chance to reorganize, to streamline, a.k.a. to get more money in the pockets of people who deserve it — like CEOs. Because if you’re clever enough to get people to pay you millions of dollars so you can give the thumbs-up to dumbed-down memos filled with other people’s ideas, you deserve everything you can get.
I’ve had close family members die from cancer; why haven’t I been consulted on the cure?
Saturday, February 7th, 2009Losing someone you love sucks mighty bad. I feel sorry for all loss going on everywhere in the world now and into the eternal future. Plus everything in the past. But just because someone you love died because of something doesn’t make you an expert in stopping that something.
Apparently, the 9/11 families still disagree:
After an emotional, private meeting at the White House with President Barack Obama , survivors and victims’ relatives of two al Qaida attacks said Friday that the president quelled some of their fears about closing the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba detention center, promised them an “open-door” policy and a hand in shaping anti-terror policies, and said he is considering a modified military commission system to try detainees.
Recently