anyway, there is one aspect of the roman empire that most people don't know about or gloss over. that is their penchant for pedophilia and pederasty. felini tastefully portrays this in one of his masterpieces - 'satyricon.' two men fight over the affection of a seventh grader and guess what, nice guys do finish last.
in thinking about all the trouble certain catholic priests have gotten themselves into regarding them having sexual relations with little kids, i had an epiphany. these are all priests > priests of the catholic church > priests of the roman catholic church > the roman catholic church being living remnants of the holy roman empire > the holy roman empire being a remnant of the pagan roman empire. i mean, the catholic church inherited roman polytheism in it's worship of saints, why wouldn't it have inherited it's pedophilia?
i thought about this after cruising through my chinese neighborhood and realizing that i never hear about this sort of thing coming from their ethnic group, though it could be under-reported. dunno.
i can’t imagine how that could be confirmed. possibly examining data on rates pedophilia across the globe and if those folks were raised by europeans and if those people were and so on. there would be room for error in that many places probably don’t even acknowledge it. so i would imagine that it’d be pretty much impossible. just a theory at this point.
in the passing of time these neutered events can seem even comical. mel brooks was able to satirize nazis long after the fact. something that was not possible while it was happening. we can all laugh at the people who refused to accept that the earth wasn't flat or the center of the universe, where we couldn't then, or we'd ostracized or even murdered in the name of man's invention - god. we should be laughing at the people who deny evolution, but oddly we are still in the midst of it, though we don't face harsh consequences for that.
global warming is the new evolution, is the new round earth theory, is the new earth is not the center of god's universe theory. folks who deny it's existence or man's part in it feel that they can pick and choose which aspects of science they will believe in though science rules every aspect of their lives - their automobiles, cell phones, plasma screen tvs, bibles on their iphones, the genetically modified and irradiated foods they eat, the shampoo they wash their hair with - all things that are the products of science and scientists. their denial has major consequences for all future living things on this planet. these people are even comical now, and yet wield so much power. the power of denial.
i am wary of science myself, only in which exponential amount of power it brings us humans - us humans who are selfish and untrustworthy, but i cannot argue with scientists, who have spent their lives researching these sorts of things and have conclusive data to back up their claims.
history will reveal that these people are the new flat-earthers. and future generations can all laugh at them. or be angry at all of us for not having done anything.
there were many parties in that the area. every weekend in the summer brought on either trance parties or mashup parties or whatever the latest abrasive music was current.
one of these parties was manned by a crew of fixed gear hipsters. these short-panted daredevils loved the mash-ups.
now, instead of these kids bringing their bikes into the common area, they for whatever reason decided to lock their bikes up on the street on meserole. there is not a single bike rack on meserole and there are very few signs, so locking up a bike is a bit of a problem. there were however, two newly planted saplings directly in front of the building. i had to take chibbles out for a walk, so i saw several bicycles attached to each tree.
the party ended at around 3am. and i heard a bit of commotion in the back yard, but couldn't care to figure out what the situation was.
the next morning i found out what it was.
one of the idiots, in the course of their drunken evening had lost the key to their lock. now when this happens, logic dictates that you leave the bike there and then call a locksmith after your hangover wears off. but that's not what happened. what happened was the fucktard actually cut the tree down and left it sitting on the sidewalk in front of the building. so there's a stump and half a tree sitting out there for all the locals to use as further evidence of our collective stupidity.
very few things shock me, but the idiocy of this act did. the only consolation i have is that people with this magnitude of selfish behavior, who ride fixed gears, never stop at lights or stop signs and get run over all the time.
apparently it cost the tenant who's party it was $1000 to replace the tree.
speaking of hubris - that reminds me of a story about some fixie girl who slammed into somebody in carroll gardens. the person who was struck started yelling at the girl and what does she do? she starts crying. she’s tough enough to ride around brooklyn with no brakes and helmet, but she can’t take being told what a turd she is.
boo hoo, poser.
i firmly believe that everyone, and i mean EVERYONE has the right to voice their opinion in this country, and by that i mean white power, black power, brown power, pink power, right wing religious nut-jobs, whatever, so long as what they are saying doesn't relate to violence upon other americans, as should any american patriot. but this pathetic attempt to snuff out all discussion reeks of the violation of freedom of speech. you heard it right. not only do these "patriots" hate americans, but they don't believe that we should be able to discuss issues that we feel are important.
the only item i've heard from the opposition that was coherent was the concern that the bill was too expensive. ok, i can get with that. if it's too expensive, then this needs to be looked at. but simultaneously, if this is going to save us money in the long run, which i believe it is supposed to do, then maybe we need to overlook this.
the other squawk i heard was about how this is socialism. government administered medicine is indeed part of the socialist model, as is medicare. yes, MEDICARE IS SOCIALIST. i don't hear people shouting the national anthem and flying their flags, demanding that we remove socialized medicine for old people. say goodbye to your voter base, morons.
the irony is that while the opposition runs around with flags and sings the national anthem, making it know what great patriots are, they could give a shit about a large segment of the american population. something like 40 million people. what kind of patriot is that? they only give a shit about the haves and that is why we are one nation, under god, hopelessly divided...
the city is obviously beautiful, it impresses pretty much anyone who comes into contact with it's architecture and geography. in addition to it's beauty, the city is remarkably intact. things work here. because of these things and others, it is a place for which europeans despise americans 10% less.
another thing i appreciate about it is people's take on body issues. nothing is more nauseating than the way in which new yorkers present their fear of people's bodies and all the things associated with them. feet especially. new yorkers hate looking at your feet if you aren't a woman, with a pedicure, wearing some tootsi plohound, or prada open toed platforms. i've literally seen new yorkers cringe or wince at the sight of a man's feet. all they have to do, if it bothers them is not look, if they know they will be offended. yet they look anyway. it's as if they want to be offended and show everyone how offended they are.
anyway, there is one aspect about san francisco's lax body attitude that i ran into trouble with last week, when seeing luke hess and mike huckaby at the end up. the aspect i'm talking about is farting on the dance-floor. i embody sf's(california's) relaxed attitude about bodies, except when it comes to this. i had forgotten about this. as soon as i experienced it, i remembered an episode of south park, you know the one, it's true! i ran into 4 or 5 farts in about a 2 hour span.
please don't make me smell your rectal gas. go fart in a corner, or go outside to fart. i don't care that you ate some great meatloaf at blue plate earlier in the evening and want to show it off to everyone. relish the fact that you ate a $60 meal alone, please.
there is nothing more annoying than tearing up the dance-floor to a hard-hitting detroit track and then having a gust of san francisco go up your nose, which, unfortunately overwhelms detroit. it's like rock, paper, scissors. fart beats music. you can't escape.
so, if you read this and live in sf, if you see someone dancing like mad, obviously getting into the music, with a widow's peak and glasses, go and fart on somebody else.
the ad consisted of a caddy, driving at excessive speeds, through some random city, at night. lots of streaking lights and a smiling female driver goading on all the macho gi joe loving breeders, if i remember correctly.
the thing that stuck out about the ad was the music that was obviously chosen by some antiquarian marketing people attempting to evoke a feeling of patriotism(guilt). the music started in some vaguely generic electronic sort and, in true trance fashion, reached a crescendo, immediately kicking into good, old fashioned, american, guitar driven cock rock. it toyed with electronic music and needed some guitars to get the job done right. mission accomplished.
for the uninitiated, the united states, following world war II and leading up to our recent apocalypse, sometimes forcibly "encouraged" the rest of the world to disregard it's established traditions and accept a system, which was during this time period, analogous with the united states: an entity without tradition; brand new; not bogged down by nostalgia.
what's ironic is that the rest of the world has beaten us at our own game. i mean it's pretty obvious, but more and more apparent.
how has ford responded to adversity? build faster mustangs. chevy? a new camaro. more muscle cars for a nation of people that weren't even alive during the era of muscle cars. it's clearly a plea for a nostalgia that isn't even there. people in the age group, who would have originally bought and remembered muscle cars are almost senior citizens. kids now want what's new, like muscle cars were when they originally appeared.
and now it's answer to crushing competition is a desperate attempt at maintaining and ever diminishing status quo - an affront to the capitalist tenet of innovation that was given to europe, japan and everywhere else.
further evidence of the decline.
what if this "stimulus" doesn"t work?
obama is concentrating on freeways and ignoring everything else at a time when people are using alternative transportation in record numbers. if his pick for transportation secretary gives us any insight into the future of this administration, the only "change" we will receive is a shift from 1980s mindset to the 1950s. not quite the "change" people were expecting.
roads and freeways are already less congested due to the decline in the economy, while buses and rail are overcrowded. regardless of which side of the fence you stand on in terms of public transportation(love it or hate it), the motto, squeaky wheel gets the grease should apply here. the squeaky wheel is obviously alternative transportation, not undercrowded freeways.
i'm surprised, especially since biden is such an Amtrak dude, but that may be a good thing, a vice prez with too much influence can be a bad thing, from what i understand.
Then there's the "stimulus."
According to jim berard, a spokesman for one of the politicos involved in the stimulus, "we like the environmentally friendly way of doing things but the charge we were given was to come up with something that can happen quickly ... we can’t lose sight of what the primary goal here is, and that is to put people to work."
no shit. But jim, I don’t have a ph.d. and have never served in office and even I can see how shortsighted this is.
this goes against his promise to "stimulate" alternative energy usage and such. that money could go to industries such as solar and wind power, which would eventually become fully self-sustaining, keeping people employed for much longer than the freeway construction industry, which depends almost entirely on it’s next government handout to survive.
while I am a fan of the old "new deal", simply to enact a clone of this, in this day and age is suicide. The "new deal" was aimed squarely at blue collar workers. during the depression, blue collar folks were the people out of work. all you had to do was give someone a pickaxe and suddenly they weren’t living out of a car and could feed their family, which was all they needed back then. whereas now, the richer, better educated, white collar people are out of work and not pumping their wealth through the economy. the circumstances of this economic disaster are completely different. you can't give an out of work banker or web designer a hardhat and pair of overalls and expect them to operate a backhoe.
in essence, all he's doing is putting money into projects that bush neglected for 8 years, this is barely stimulating and hardly the shot in the arm that this economy actually needs to move forward.
if the "stimulus" is nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction to keep people working and things continue downwards and all his projects become the same ill planned reactions, they will fail. And in the end, all we'll end up with is more debt.
he said that things would get worse before they get better, well put he should put his money where his mouth is - in things that will take time to develop into things that can eventually sustain themselves.
this is a 20th century solution to a 21st century problem.
until now, parking a bicycle in new york city has been pretty easy. parking meters littered the streets, providing plenty of opportunities for easy parking. this is now changing. new york has followed european trends and is now replacing individual parking meters with a single parking station for each block. this represents a loss of thousands of places to park our bikes.
technically, attaching a bicycling to any municipal furniture is illegal, but parking meters have been generally accepted as acceptable for this important function, as the number of bicycles needing places to park dwarfs the number of legal places to do that.
the avenues have the vast majority of metered parking spaces. one side of a single avenue block has room for 9 cars and meters. this means that for an entire block - east and west sides of the street, there are 18 meters available that can fit 2 bicycles each. there are also at least 4 street signs, indicating parking regulations for that block - one on each corner. this brings the total to 44 parking spaces per block. this isn't counting street lamps, which will only allow chain locks that can fit around them as most bicyclists use u-locks for their bikes as chains are awkward and cumbersome to carry.
this could mean the removal of over 75% of available bike parking. after doing a very unscientific bit of research and math1, it would appear that for manhattan, if all parking meters were to be removed on the avenues from 14th street to 125 street2, we'd see a reduction of somewhere around 40,0003 parking spaces for bikes.
imagine the fallout if new york decided to shed 75% of parking spaces for automobiles. this simply isn't possible, even in a city where less than half the people drive. even still - in a borough where less than 10% do.
now, we have no other option than to attach our bikes to light-posts and street signs, which more often than not, are already occupied by cannibalized bicycles.
this wouldn't be a problem if the city had a plan in place to ensure that every street had available legal bicycle parking, as it does for cars, but this is certainly not the case. in order for a bike rack to be installed, a business owner must contact the city and ask them to install one. the city doesn't require business owners to call the city and ask for parking spaces to be installed in front of their businesses.
while i find the reduction of street obstacles aesthetically pleasing and clean, on a preactical level, this is really fucked. on the way to work, up park avenue the other day i saw several blocks without even a single bike rack and bicycles fallen to the ground, waiting to be run over by the next delivery truck or escalade.
taxation without representation.
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1. i took a single block - 1st avenue between 13th and 14th street, which has no bus stop or yellow/red zones and used this as my base.
2. assuming that each of these blocks have the full 18 spaces available, which i know isn't true, but since i don't have days/weeks/months to count every parking space, i am estimating.
3. 12 avenues and 111 blocks equals 1332 blocks. subtracting central park's missing 153 blocks means a rough total of 1219 blocks. both sides of the street of these blocks equals 2438 whole blocks. 2438 times the 18 parking meters renders the total - 43,338. i've removed the 3,338 as a possible way to make up for lack of bus stop and red/yellow zone data in my calculations.
thank you mr. paulson.
thanks for using money that was meant to be spent on things like the installation of systems that would prevent disasters like what happened in los angeles recently, to bail out corporations who willingly participated in the fucking of our economy. they will never have to suffer consequences for their irresponsibility. nothing to see here. thanks for giving aig the money to pay it's 3 month old ceo his $7 million exit package, while i have to fear for my life without proper bike lanes and fear for my bike being stolen because there are no bike racks anywhere, all because of a lack of available tax revenue. thanks for bailing their asses out, while california can't even pay it's bills, mta service gets worse every day, and our nation's infrastructure is stuck in the 1950s.
what happens when aig never pays this "loan" back? just what are you going to do then? play hardball? at that point, does it become congress', or the new president's problem? what could possibly be done?
is it actually in your authority to be handing over billions of tax dollars to corporations? where the fuck is congress in all of this? $85 billion is a significant amount of money. this brings the bailout bill to around $300 billion.
oh, and thank you too, george bush. going out with a bang, i see.
true love always,
americans
