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The Library of Discontent

The Scorpion and The Frog

When you look at the sales pitch for Capitalism and how it’s supposed to function, it feels to me as though it were crafted in order to conjure up fictitious images that reflect the undisclosed desires of an individual.   They want it to sound empowering and even morally righteous.  They will tell you with hard work, you’re going to be rich!  I’m sure, for the most part, that everyone is familiar by now with how the sales pitch goes.   It’s usually something about the free market.   A little about how anyone can be rich if they come out with a really great product.   Something along those lines.  Typically it doesn’t pan out like this.  Hell even the pointless right-leaning version of Wikipedia acknowledges that, and they have a near 50-page long article about how homosexuality is the root of all sorts of social diseases.  Consider this:

“One self-regulating feature of capitalism is competition, which helps maintain fair market value for goods and services. However, unrestrained or pure capitalism may sometimes create a positive feedback loop in which a small number of individual accumulations of capital grow ever larger, eventually becoming so few as to limit effective competition, thus ceasing to strictly be free-market capitalism. In this regard, pure capitalism is unstable.”

It’s not really unstable.  It’s how the system was designed to work.   You start a business, it gets big, you become a corporation in order to function at higher and higher levels economically, with one real goal in mind.   The only goal of a corporation is to increase profits for it’s shareholders.   That’s absolutely it.  That’s essentially the nature of the beast, and it shouldn’t be really surprising when corporations begin interfering in politics.   When you have the money, you can influence the power, and with the money and the power you can begin to stack the deck against anyone else coming to take your piece of the market.   You can begin to eliminate competition, and you can ensure that only the people who play by your rules ever get to experience what it’s like to be one of them.   Wealthy.  Keep in mind that when I refer to wealth, I’m not talking about a couple of million.   I’m referring to the type of money that grants you political power.   That’s not something that’s obtainable, except on a small scale, to anyone but a corporate entity.

When a corporation’s activities negatively or positively impact a society they actually have crafted a term for this so that when they speak of it, anyone but those familiar with the term, will be unaware as to what they are referring to.   This is an important function of what I have started to dub ‘corp speak.’  The purpose of corp speak, is to obfuscate the meaning of what they are saying so that the layperson will not be able to actually comprehend whatever point they are making.   The particular term, in this case, is an ‘externality.’  Wikipedia defines an externality like this.

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Popularity: 20% [?]

Right Wing, Left Wing Parasites.

On my voter registration card is an acronym, it says ‘NPA.’   No Party Affiliation.  There’s a reason I don’t support any political party, and that’s because it makes the most sense to me not to put my faith in the hands of complete idiots.  Seriously, spend half a day watching house and senate meetings on CSPAN and you’ll see what I’m talking about.   These are supposedly the best of the party, the winners, the people in charge of making laws to improve our collective lives.   So why is it that the speaker from Tennessee or Alabama or one of those bible belt states is wasting the House’s time requesting that everyone stand up and sing ‘God Bless America’ and those that are opposed should be put on record as ‘hating America?’   Because he’s an idiot that’s why, and so is every single person that voted for him.   Then some democrat from up north, I think New York gets up and starts singing it before whoever is in charge of this ship of fools stops this lame political stunt in it’s tracks.

These are the people responsible for passing bills and reforms folks, a room full of feeble old people who spend most of their time obfuscating every issue and delaying any progress to make some half-assed protests or to try and score some political points for their re-election campaign.   That’s all it is really, these are career politicians.   They have awesome health care (at taxpayer expense), their pockets are lined with so many backers and lobbyists, that to think that people in circumstances like that actually give a damn what happens to anyone else is almost laughable.   That’s just rhetoric though.

It’s just humorous to me to see what these people do exactly.   For example, just now I was watching this guy from Texas, one, John Carter, go on a speech in the House.   This man, who looks like my grandfather, went on about the forefathers, and how they founded a ‘republic’ for blah blah blah morals blah blah blah.  This went on for about three minutes.  First, I don’t think the House needs a damn history lesson that serves as little more than an attempt to assert your party is right by simple virtue of the fact the forefathers founded a republic so republic-ans must be the chosen ones.   Right, okay, whatever.   Second, I’m not sure what this has to do with the purpose of the hearing, which apparently was to talk about the federal bailout money and where it went.   I know why he said it, to fluff his point.  To give whatever argument he’s about to present the presumption of correctness rather than actually making a point that’s significant enough to stick.

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Popularity: 10% [?]

Porn Industry Requests Bailout – Congressional Response Flaccid

Recently the porn industry has suffered, much like the banks and automotive industries. Of course with the porn business, at least they could legitimately say the reason their businesses were failing is was not associated with greed, incompetence, or corruption. They were just busy fucking.

Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis said Wednesday they will request that Congress allocate $5 billion for a bailout of the adult entertainment industry.

Francis said in a statement that “the US government should actively support the adult industry’s survival and growth, just as it feels the need to support any other industry cherished by the American people.”
“People are too depressed to be sexually active,” Flynt said in the statement. “This is very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex.”

“With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind. It’s time for congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America. The only way they can do this is by supporting the adult industry and doing it quickly.”

So far, there has been no congressional reaction to the request.

I feel that the flaccid response from congress shows the true impotence of the elderly congressmen in being able to form a rock solid plan for giving cold hard cash right into the backdoor of the porn business and keep the nations sacred porn industry erect.

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Popularity: 22% [?]

Eye candy

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