The Craic

To America, with love, from Dylan Moran…

Tagged: USA

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10th February 2012

So Much for Good Old Obama's Healthy Table Initiative →

On the development and proliferation of Neotame into all sectors of the food industry as a ubiquitous toxic sweetener?

Perhaps it has to do with the fact that Michael Taylor was appointed in 2009 by President Obama to the newly created post of Senior Adviser to the Commissioner of the FDA. Michael Taylor, noted ‘food safety expert’ has long history of boucing between jobs as lawyer to Monsanto, working for Monsanto, being a lobbyist for Monsanto, a position at the USDA, and going back and forth from there to the FDA.

Am I sounding paranoid, or am I just paying attention?

…more HERE

Tagged: USA culture

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27th January 2012

Photo reblogged from this isn't happiness. with 902 notes

nevver:

Occupy Everything

Tagged: occupy USA

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Source: nevver

25th January 2012

Post with 95 notes

What A Great Title. Next up, “Fire up the Ovens, Soylent Green Retirement Opportunities Await”.

“The current recession is a ‘forever recession’ because it’s the end of the industrial age, which also means the end of the average worker.”

From the article: “If You’re An Average Worker, You’re Going Straight To The Bottom”

Do you agree? Or does this just mean with fair salaries we wouldn’t be able to get 96oz. of Sludg-O from Walmart for 99¢? Because I’d gladly pay a buck-thirty-five if that’s what it takes.

This guy pissed me off at first with his annoying picture and agro quote, but he may have a point. Or not?

According to the Daily Show, whose fact checkers I’m actually inclined to trust at face value, we only get about a 23-25% savings from factories with conditions like Foxconn.

So, let’s review:

Suicides and indentured servitude VS. paying an extra $40 for my iPhone? We all know where this is going. Fuck it. I’m moving to India to be one of those guys who rolls across the country for donations. Better that than a Kardashian.

Tagged: culture USA labor

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24th January 2012

Photo with 5 notes

I support any organization that embraces the tough, but fair opinion that everyone should have a place at the table.

QUICK RAP:
Girl Scouts in national controversy over accepting a transgender kid into their ranks. Other girl scout in California creates video protest (more than likely at the behest of politically minded star-fucking parentals). Furor ensues. Bandwagoning hate group the “Family Research Council” joins the fray saying the Girl Scouts “promote radical gay agendas”, — ps. I’m SOOOO interested to know what that is, by the way— abortion, and they “support the United Nations anti-population agenda”. More of that drivel can be found here.

Who do you support?

Let the Girl Scouts know they did the right thing. Buy some cookies. Reblog this. Make a poster. I am sincerely impressed with this organization’s adamantly progressive stance, particularly in light of so many others who back down in the face of the blowhard small-mindedness of fearful idiots for fear of fiscal or cultural blacklisting.

“If a child identifies as a girl and the child’s family presents her as a girl, Girl Scouts of Colorado welcomes her as a Girl Scout,” said the Colorado Girl Scouts, in a statement to a CNN affiliate. (source)

GO GS!

Tagged: culture USA

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19th January 2012

Post with 6 notes

It’s A Question of Who

In the bar tonight they have autographed cameo portraits of Tom Selleck and David Hasselhoff.

“With Love,
David”

“Cheers,
Tom”

The stereo begins to play “On Some Faraway Beach” And all, somehow, is well with universe.

Tagged: USA

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15th January 2012

Photo reblogged from Bankrupting America with 433 notes

Pick a despot, any despot…

The kind of stuff that gets email chains fired up round the world. First they’re trying to cancel Christmas, then they’re out kissing in the streets: two men!! And now they’re obstructing capitalism.

Just relax, everybody.

We call this dialogue in our fair city.

bankruptingamerica:

Via Understory:

Bank of America ATMs In San Francisco Turned Into Truth Machines
RAN activists took to the streets of San Francisco last night and turned every Bank of America ATM in the city into an Automated Truth Machine.

The activists used special non-adhesive stickers designed to look exactly like BoA’s ATM interface. But instead of checking and savings accounts, these new menus offered a list of everything BoA customers’ money is being used for, including investment in coal-fired power plants, foreclosure on Americans’ homes, bankrolling of climate change, and paying for fat executive bonuses.

Go here to see a handy map showing all 85 ATMs we made a little more truthful last night.

The stickers also encourage BoA customers to “Stop doing business with Bank of America until they start behaving responsibly” and have the URL to this here blog (BankruptingAmerica.tumblr.com), which RAN launched along with New Bottom Line.

We’re using Bankrupting America to track all the ways BoA is bankrupting America, hence the name. We’ve received so many submissions it’s clear to us that this website was badly needed. There are lots of grievances to be aired with regard to how Bank of America is conducting its business these days, as it turns out. (Not that that’s terribly surprising.)

Feel free to submit if you’re so inclined.

Tagged: culture USA

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Source: understory.ran.org

12th January 2012

Photo reblogged from Gallery Star with 6 notes

Oakland Museum::

Marveling at this Push-Button History box, and thinking I could use one of these by my bedside.

Here’s to Version 2.0 coming with a Hot Coffee & Scone button…

gallerystar:

Many interactive exhibits at the Oakland Museum. Wonderful places to sit and look and add your thoughts.

Tagged: culture USA

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Source: gallerystar

11th January 2012

Photo reblogged from NPR with 506 notes

The (Incredibly Sane and Lucid) Case for a 21-hour Work Week: [via NPR & FastCompany]

Bertrand Russell was the original 20-hour work week hipster. Proposing this way back 30’s. Long before being a slacker was cool.

…But there is something to this whole principle of enjoying life while you’re living it, rather than just consuming stuff for your own egyptian themed temple of the dead with a slightly contemporary twist.

So:

JOIN THE GLOBAL RESET…

and start living your life with your shoes off a bit more. [And preferrably you don’t have a thing for sandals like this guy, or Micatin is going to be selling a whole lot more foot powder.]

But SERIOUSLY… READ on…

fastcompany:

There is nothing natural or inevitable about what’s considered a “normal” 40-hour work week.

The Case For A 21-Hour Work Week

It would create jobs and stop the unsustainable cycle of rampant consumerism. Sure, it would also require a wholesale reordering of our economy, but that might happen whether we like it or not.

Read on->

Tagged: culture USA

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Source: fastcoexist.com

9th January 2012

Post with 2 notes

“Swiping the Thigh” : My TSA Experience

My intention was not to fall asleep at all. But I was infected with Vegas, filled with its ridiculousness. And I was three quarters into an oversized pint of Johnny Walker Red and just coming back from having a joint outside on the street and eventually wandering (or was it escaping?) out to the only place I felt safe, the grassy area beneath the tall hotel street sign.

But I did fall asleep; and woke confused to my alarm an hour later. And at 6AM I put on my coat and kissed her goodbye and stumbled out into the fluorescent hallway, dragging my luggage behind me. In the taxi on the way to the airport, I ate in desperation the other half of a leftover 1AM club sandwich purchased in the all night American Diner- her last hurrah, but not mine.

And then struggling to the gate. At least check-in was easy and clear.

I get round then into the cattle call and spot the machine. The millimeter microwave scanner. Otherwise known as “The Penis & Titty Cam”. The giant, imposing thing that looks like a portable gassing station for a lot of very well justified reasons.

And I don’t mean to sound like an asshole, or a liberal, or anything thereafter in between, but personally I like to trust the large number of the world’s preeminent scientists when they draft a minimum of two letters to US Science Advisor, John Holdren, to halt the use of these machines until further testing is done. What I am not inclined to trust is a political agenda.

So I see that there’s two lines, one for the regular metal detector on the left and one for the millimeter panic machine at right. I maneuver it just so, hesitate a moment while the person ahead of me moves forward, and shuffle forward into the left hand lane. But at the very last minute, after I’ve de-shoed, and my tubs are filled with open laptop and the contents of my pocket, she looks at me and tells me to go to the right: to the other machine, the millimeter wave. I jump. My gut sinks. On looking back, I have to laugh, because my first reaction is to act completely guilty, saying, “No, I want to go through that one,” and trying to push through to the traditional metal detector.

She rises to meet me, to block my passage with her hand. Her gaze, too, changes. I’m glad I got to see that. The flexing of some muscle, even in this woman- especially in this woman!- the result of: training, or empowerment, or the true nature of the threat these people do indeed face everyday? Because god knows I wouldn’t want their job.

Suddenly, her partner, a black woman who is working the other machine, is stepping in on my right.

“Sir,” she’s saying, “Sir, please come over here and go through this machine as the other TSA agent has instructed.”

“No,” I keep saying, “I wan’t to go through this machine.”

“Sir, you have to follow the instructions of my fellow TSA agent. You cannot go that way.”

“Sir, you CAN’T go this way. SIR!”

Until finally, I say- like speaking the magic words- “I’d like to opt out.” And it’s as if time has stopped. They wind down. Back up. “That’s exactly what we needed to hear,” the black woman says.

“We got a Manual over here,” she shouts. “Can I get a Manual over here at C5?”

They speak into walkie-talkies, the line backs up like a snag in a rope. They take my luggage, walk me through the proper metal detector anyway. People are grumbling, and I am absolutely not looking back, lest I greet that kind of negativity in my hungover state. I just want to get on the plane, to my family vacation, and hope to find the least uncomfortable position to fold myself into for a two hour crashout. But now I’ve become a ‘Manual’.

I am led to an unused scanner lane and told we will wait here for another agent, this one a small Filipino man who soon approaches. “How you doing?” the first agent says, stepping back. The Filipino man is donning latex gloves beside me.

“You all good here?” says the first one.

“I’m all good,” the second says, stepping in, snapping the gloves tight as he speaks this appropriated phrase. “Okay,” his voice rings, slightly sonorous in a way that makes the encounter all the more surreal. “Okay, here first I will ask you to spread your arms.”

Other traverlers are passing through the lanes. I’m looking back at the ones looking at me, at the line of near parishioners attendant to that despicable machine.

I don’t like it.

“Okay, I am looking at your arms now.” He’s sweeping them. “I am moving onto your torso. Okay. Okay.” He’s moving about my waist, feeling my waistband in and out. “Okay. I’m going to be sweeping the thigh now,” he says, and I know that that is straight out of some training manual:

“Sweeping the thigh…”

“Moving on,” he says, afterwards. He clears one leg at a time. Once he’s done with the right, he works his way up the left until one more round of “Sweeping the thigh. Okay. Sweeping. The. Thigh” His hand is going up and down my leg. Me: hungover, tired, waiting just to plop down into that airplane seat.

Soon he is finished. My things have been brought over. I am allowed to dress at my own pace, refitting the brace I have on my wrist, and slowly tying my shoes.

You go, get drunk, dance your head off, and when you’re ready to fly out, you get your balls felt up right before you board the airplane.

What happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas?!

Yet they have not embarrassed me, as was (perhaps only arguably) their intention. And I didn’t have go through that fucking sketchy ass machine- which was certainly mine.

I still feel it there, in the back of my mind: “Sweeping the thigh. Okay… Just here now: sweeping. sweeping. sweeping the thigh…”

Tagged: USA commentary prose

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23rd December 2011

Post with 15 notes

Las Vegas, America, USA

I think it was Hunter S Thompson that said the American Dream is alive and well in Las Vegas, NV. That’s why it reminds one so much of a giant video game stage, with you as the Jedi Space Marine abandoned on a distant planet of wanton bestiality and an overgrown consumer reflex, ready and waiting at any moment for a horde of zombies or a mutant dog beast to come lumbering around the vacant corner of these giant conference complexes.

They used to have it at the MGM Grand that you walked through the mouth of a lion to get inside the casino. This turned out to be an offensive and unpalatable experience for many of the Chinese tourists, of which the Strip relies on heavily. And so the facade was remodeled to have a normal front door and a lion merely to the side. Imposing, but not directly, and unluckily, consuming.

What is it about Las Vegas that calls to mind this quote by the old mad bastard genius? It’s the raw pursuit of the experience above everything, above humanity, above convenience, and even sometimes above even fiscal sanity.

Donnie and Marie are still playing every Tuesday night at the Flamingo. And for some reason there’s an over abundance of all things Australian as far as other entertainment choices are concerned.

Things are not built for the human stage in Las Vegas, they are built for some archeology project of the future, that seeks to uncover and try somehow to make sense of this odd, outsized dream that we once claimed solely as our territory but which we have now realized bears international, and universal, provenance.

Tagged: USA prose commentary

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23rd November 2011

Photo with 4 notes

Crab Fishermen United in Strike;

Crabs Pretty Cool with That Too…

I wrote about this in the 2004 season, and glad to see even the rogue fisherman John Dooley, who defied the strikers and set off on his own that year, has come round and is holding firm with the rest. If there is any lesson to be learned, it’s that if you speak with one voice you will be heard. It might take awhile, and you may piss off some holiday crab feasters, but pretty soon someone will relent.

Think of it. I have never been crabbing, but I imagine that here in the Bay, while not something straight out of Alaska’s Deadliest Catch, it is still hard work. What would you say to someone who refused to pay you $2.50 per pound for your trouble?

At a certain point, we have to put value on our labor, or soon enough half of us are going to be working for free while the other half aren’t working at all…

[source]

Tagged: economy USA commentary

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19th October 2011

Photo reblogged from We Are the 99 Percent with 7 notes

I know the guilt, the struggle, the story. I know it gets better once you go for years without health insurance and slowly learn that it’s not your fault and that you have to pick yourself up by the bootstraps and move on. I know that a mountain of debt like a giant standing wave tsunami really will just hang there above your head like some delicately perched rock formation, as you all the while make your home beneath it / use it to cover your encampment when the rain storms set in… BUT I KNOW IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS… I KNOW THAT I WASTED YEARS AND COUNTLESS GRAY HAIRS WORRYING… I am not terrified anymore. I am merely the 99%…

Tagged: culture occupy USA submission

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Source: wearethe99percent

5th September 2011

Photo reblogged from kateoplis with 4,750 notes

I’ve had this post in the queue for ages; the date marking the anniversary of our most truly damaging crisis of homeland security has now come and gone. At this point, its more like the 150th anniversary of a dumbstruck mid-September and the beginnings of a hard winter and an even longer Reconstruction.

For awhile I liked the image but I didn’t know what I was going to say about it. The brightness of summer kept me from relating to it, perhaps. But there was something so beautiful/haunting about it that kept me hanging on to it every time I passed it in the queue; something about the shot, if only its soothing yellow hue.

And then I had a reading at Burnt Ramen over the weekend. And after walking from the end-of-the-line last BART station, through a chain-link maze, turning left through those projects that look more like model homes and that’s what makes them more unsettling, to the crossroads that begins the barrens; walking with the train tracks on one side and the ramshackle homes falling apart on the other, walking along one border of the Iron Triangle to get to the show; it occurred to me, the morning after:

THAT looks more than a little bit like Richmond, CA…

And here I found this while searching for more on what they call the “Iron Triangle”. It’s some damn good journalism, and I suggest you click through:

RICHMOND — There is a stretch of this city cut off from the rest of the world, forgotten over time by the architects of progress. The air seems vacant, broken up on moon-lit nights only by the echoes of passing trains and the faint scent of chicken being cooked on a fireplace.

Its residents, many of them poor and jobless, sit in the neighborhood’s raunchy parks or empty lots, or behind windows guarded by iron bars. The parks and lots are covered in garbage, and many street corners have been converted into shrines for murder victims.

…

The police force has been cut by one-third and Richmond was recently named the 12th most dangerous city in the country, thanks largely to the 17,000 times the police responded to calls in the Iron Triangle last year. In a city struggling through 40 years of economic decline, this neighborhood – once the center of a powerful ship-building boom and a place where Sunday shoppers used to stroll into Bloomingdale’s – may best embody the despair. With Richmond facing a $35 million budget hole, it may be a long time before the Iron Triangle can fight its way back.

[more]

Here, too, a more recent article, from Aug 11, 2011, about the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts that teaches ballet, dance and music and is still going strong…

kateoplis:

Ruins on the Canal Basin, Richmond, Va, April 1863

The 150th Anniversary of the Civil War

Tagged: culture USA

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Source: kateoplis

More People Like Us

The Craic

So Much for Good Old Obama's Healthy Table Initiative →

Am I sounding paranoid, or am I just paying attention?

What A Great Title. Next up, “Fire up the Ovens, Soylent Green Retirement Opportunities Await”.

So, let’s review:

I support any organization that embraces the tough, but fair opinion that everyone should have a place at the table.

Who do you support?

GO GS!

It’s A Question of Who

Pick a despot, any despot…

We call this dialogue in our fair city.

Bank of America ATMs In San Francisco Turned Into Truth Machines

Oakland Museum::

The (Incredibly Sane and Lucid) Case for a 21-hour Work Week: [via NPR & FastCompany]

Bertrand Russell was the original 20-hour work week hipster. Proposing this way back 30’s. Long before being a slacker was cool.

JOIN THE GLOBAL RESET…

But SERIOUSLY… READ on…

“Swiping the Thigh” : My TSA Experience

Las Vegas, America, USA

Crab Fishermen United in Strike;

Crabs Pretty Cool with That Too…

[source]

THAT looks more than a little bit like Richmond, CA…

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