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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
pure juice's LiveJournal:
| Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 | ||
| 6:42 pm | Chicken Coop/Foxes It bothers me that Geithner felt that a serious part of his job was enlisting the encomia of two big investment management firms, BlackRock and Pimco. It results in a headline above the fold on the NYT this morning: Rescue Plan, With Fine Print, Dazzles Wall St. Call me an ignorant slut, but somehow my mind goes directly there: that the plan was hatched with their active participation and collusion. How else could they be persuaded to sign on? I have had the sense all along that what Wall Street thinks, or how the stock market reacts, is completely irrelevant, and now the BSD's are coming out and saying the same thing. I've heard a senior reporter (Nocera, I think it was) and Krugman, the Nobel laureate, both say in the past 24 hours that what Wall Street thinks, and how the market reacts, simply is neither important nor relevant. Meanwhile, Krugman is putting into words what I've always thought about the two schools of thought -- one, the Geithner/Obama/unspeakable Summers, that the banking system just needs to be slapped in the face, and two, that it needs to fail and disappear, be brought to justice, and to be replaced. What this all means, is, it ain't rocket science. And for former campaign chair David Axelrod to go around saying people aren't sitting around their kitchen tables thinking about AIG is not only wrong, not true, and bearing no resemblance to reality, it is monumentally insulting. Has Axelrod, whose political instincts in the Obama campaign were nearly beatified, noticed, for example, that 10 out of the perhaps 25 jokes Jay Leno tells every night in his monologue, are about AIG? Or that Cuomo and Blumenthal, the AGs respectively of New York and Connecticut, are staking their political future on identifying the boni and getting 15 out of the 20 to return the boni? You don't need to be a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows. This boring but important blog post on the discrepancy in the talking point about the importance of AIG to White House flacks and to the President himself suggests that Obama actually does get it, and goes around after Axelrod and Geithner shovelling up shit. Even if they don't get it. And he has been in this place before with these characters, and has turned his campaign around. One final thing, the colloquy of BSDs last night on Charlie Rose (Nocera, Sorkin, Krugman) said....that the Geithner TARP plan may basically be based on the political calculation that no bailout plan proposed as legislation could pass Congress. This is worth thinking about, and may explain the stupid and cynical and spurious affect it exudes. I can easily see the Best and the Brightest, with the unspeakable Summers at the top of the list, outwitting themselves. This is just another bonus for unscrupulous speculators -- with $500 billion of our money. (4 juiceboxes | squeeze) | |
| Monday, March 23rd, 2009 | ||
| 10:50 am | You Read It Here First: Obama's Katrina Moment Has Arrived Here. Obama's Katrina moment has arrived, not least with the deployment of the unspeakable Larry Summers, explicitly because he's totally tone-deaf. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/opini Geithner totally doesn't get it either, and needs to resign. ( Read more... ) (4 juiceboxes | squeeze) | |
| Thursday, March 19th, 2009 | ||
| 6:43 pm | Leafy 'Ghan  It's great for a beginning knitter not to have to knit leprosy bandages. Which I really did enjoy; as a result I can really knit tiny stitches now. http://www.bevscountrycottage.com/banda I love this pattern from Eaton's 200 Ripple Stitches, and I love finally finding a friend willing to teach me how to do it. PSSO was the mystery word. http://www.amazon.com/200-Ripple-St I'm doing it with the wool left over from the Clun Forest ghan. http://www.touchstonefarm.org/tf/defaul My plan is to practice on this, then get some homespun farmers' market yarn from upstate New York for the second 'ghan in the home ground series. The Clun Forest ghan yarn was from sheep near where I was born; I'd like a leafy ghan from sheep near where my mother's family lived. http://www.localharvest.org/store/searc I think this yarn is just about enough for an 18-inch doll Aran sweater. http://www.abc-knitting-patterns.com/10 (squeeze) | |
| Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 | ||
| 9:48 am | Chicken Coop/Foxes So I heard on TV, I can't remember where, so it really must be God's own Truth, that the FDIC has in place a mechanism whereby contracts are abrogated when they come in and relieve a bank of its assets. And Geithner and Summers are pretending they never heard of this? They're pretending they have to re-invent the wheel. Geithner's solution, that he's going to deduct the boni out of the next disbursement is actuarially correct and spiritually out of line. They, and not we, are to be brought to account. I'm looking to NY AG Cuomo to get some retribution here, for his own nefarious purposes, obviously, but I don't really care about his motives. The AIG exec bonus deciders are not the only heads that need to roll. This farce of having the perfectly odious, down to his fucking toenails, unrepentantly politically tone-deaf, Summers on the Sunday pundit shows expressing his righteous outrage over the boni is revolting, as is their apparent practice of letting the O man enact the outrage -- I'm choked up with anger, which he famously never is -- of the Little Man. Cynical and manipulative arrogance doesn't fucking play when the ship's going down. And I'm tired of Obama's rock star thing. Jay Leno? This is your Marie Antoinette idea of a riposte to a populist uprising? They sound increasingly trapped in the twittering smoke and blue mirrors world. Give me a break. Godammit. (squeeze) | |
| Saturday, March 14th, 2009 | ||
| 9:45 am | Daddy's Shade Garden There are two different aspects of what I've been calling ritual labor which may represent the two aspects of materialism. The Intelligent Craftafarian is the great scholar of crafts and Americanist materialism, and has recommended books on same, if not exactly copping to a Marxist thing, that I am far too foolish to comprehend. Still trying. I've been calling the two threads here "ritual labor" and "everything I know I learned getting lost on the 405", and it strikes me that the first is about the intransigence of matter and the second is about its tractability. (Is that what I mean? I must go Google tractable, mutable, biddable....) Yes, all those things, including the nuances of willing itself to be influenced and deceptive shape-shifting. Mutatis mutandis! Ritual labor has in it aspects of odium and terror which attend the big medicine of the motives -- propitiating the gods, acting for the honor of the ancestors, aligning one's self with the flow (?) -- ( Read more... ) (2 juiceboxes | squeeze) | |
| Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 | ||
| 10:14 am | (squeeze) | |
| Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 | ||
| 10:12 am | Afghanistan  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/w Nadia, 17, who has been living in Ms. Akrami’s long-term shelter since 2007, recounted that to avenge a dispute he had with her father, her husband cut off her nose and an ear while she was sleeping. She has undergone six operations and needs more, Ms. Akrami said. The one thing I can do to fight the jihadis, and this is who they are, is to send all my spare change to RAWA. I hope you will too. They need new or used digital, three mega pixel minimum, cameras, also. These brave women are the ones who document the abuse of Afghanis by the Taliban, and who took the photograph of the public execution of Zarmina which is the icon here.  http://www.rawa.org/beating.htm (2 juiceboxes | squeeze) | |
| Monday, March 2nd, 2009 | ||
| 4:10 pm | ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} auntysocial's Walking Tour of L.A.........just keeps getting better and better. Check it out. http://www.flickr.com/photos/auntylauri (1 juicebox | squeeze) | |
| Saturday, February 28th, 2009 | ||
| 4:55 pm | My Existential Questions 1. Can you use metallic pens or ink on Shrinky Dinks and not have them blow up the oven, A, or B, emit killer gases, and, most important, C, maintain their metallic glimmer once baked? 2. Anybody used Krylon Plastic Paint? Does it really fuse to plastic? Can I use it on fused plastic shopping bags for a pillow cover? Ie., the paint won't come off on the sofa or somebody's butt? How about Duplicolor from the auto store? http://www.duplicolor.com/products/viny If so, I will A, be able to fabricate Godzilla shaped sequins one-quarter inch high, and, B, custom-colored eyelet out of upcycled, fused, plastic shopping bags. (2 juiceboxes | squeeze) | |
| Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 | ||
| 9:50 pm | (squeeze) | |
| Friday, February 13th, 2009 | ||
| 1:38 pm |  http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/outpost Please donate to the effort to rescue the animals burned in the Australian wildfire. Estimates for animal deaths are in the millions. Or, please donate here. (2 juiceboxes | squeeze) | |
| Thursday, February 12th, 2009 | ||
| 10:11 am | Female Sexuality The longer I live, the less I know about it, and the more disinclined I am to judge. I still do judge people who sleep with too many people, and people who have, or make, let me put it that way, more than two children, but I have nothing but empathy and fear even for them. (Hmmm, those Duggar people make me sick, actually.) Which brings us first to Nadya Suleman, octomom; second, the most amazing sex dream I ever had, which was last Wednesday night; and third, the two 60s groupies bios I'm just finishing up. I'm not sure I'll be able to get out everything I think about all these things at one sitdown, so I'll probably be editing this post all day. I just wanted to get the forest down. I can fill the trees in later. 1. Nadya Suleman, octomom. In a locked entry niyabinghi picks up on what's missing from the Suleman discussion. Apparently she's huge with all the right-wing pundits, who are slashing her. This is the sign of something big and bad.Binghi wishes there were such a thing as a mandatory high school course in something like "Biological Counselling" -- just the facts on how powerfully girls' hormones want to make babies, what the hormones of pregnancy and post-partum and sex make you think, and do. And how there is a possibility that compulsions, obsessions, addictions can result from what you think are "God-given" ideas -- they could even throw something in there about the hormone which makes you think God is present. Over at Jezebel, they're feeling very bad for Suleman, going through the stages of grief, even as they document apparent scamming on her part, and the possibly racist backlash. Best coverage of all the issues on the net -- the Suleman intvu on Dateline secured its highest ratings -- 11 mill -- since Lauer intvued Prince William and Prince Harry -- so our obsession with her is a genuine fad. I think the Suleman story is a story about female sexuality and the fear and anger unleashed when it is untrammelled, when a woman alone makes decisions about her sexuality, when there is no man making these decisions with her and she is independent of men. The anti-abortion bloviators are the same ones excoriating Suleman. Suleman could be the wacked out saint of femme secession, and the rage over her being a welfare queen -- seven in vitro pregnancies and 14 children is the 21st century version of Reagan's bogey, a big black woman picking up her welfare checks in a Rolls Royce -- is, for the wangnuts, disapproval of her independence of men. This is what bitches be like with no man to punch them upside the head. Well, yes. I think there's also a racist -- in addition to the sexist -- thing happening. Her married name was apparently Gutierrrez (I think she's delusional, so all this info I think I have to take with a grain of progesterone) and so a number of California commenters on the octomom intarnet discussions have fastened on the falsehood that she's an Hispanic illegal. Once they get over that, they're going to start with the Iraqi stuff (her father is reportedly Iraqi, and she was reportedly born here). They're already theorizing that her father is the sperm donor, based on runic readings of some Hebrew translations of ....who knows. Unleashed female sexuality. Frankensteinian tots, cerebral palsy the mark of Cain. Scamming plastic surgery, $100,000 worth of in vitro treatments, a house and all the bills her mother is paying. Recession. Global warming through overpopulation. Iraqi terrorists. That whole Israeli eugenic bullshit about how one Palestine would be overrun by a huge Islamic baby boom. Suleman is the poster girl for all of this. The rage, I would wager, is based on the female sexuality aspect. (30 juiceboxes | squeeze) | |
| Friday, January 9th, 2009 | ||
| 5:09 pm | Writer's Block: Comfort Food Please remove these unsolicited questions from our home pages. We provide our own content. (2 juiceboxes | squeeze) | |
| Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 | ||
| 9:08 pm | Buh-Bye I'm moving over to Blogspot. You can find me here: http://purejuice.blogspot.com/ Edit: Insane Journal seems to be the consensus. You can find me here: http://purejuice.insanejournal.com/prof (32 juiceboxes | squeeze) | |
| 10:27 am | Writer's Block: Doctor Who?
Instead of firing tech staff, why don't you get these intrusive, insulting, and unsolicited prompts off our home pages? | |
| Monday, January 5th, 2009 | ||
| 7:59 am | Writer's Block: Bird by Bird Please take these unsolicited questions off our individual home pages. They're intrusive and insulting to all of us who provide our own content. | |
| Sunday, January 4th, 2009 | ||
| 3:51 pm | Writer's Block: Church and State Take these unsolicited queries off our home pages now. | |
| Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 | ||
| 11:17 am | Writer's Block: From A to Z
Please remove these foolish and unsolicited questions from our home pages. We provide our own content and community, which is what you all paid for, not these Tri-Delt drinking game queries. | |
| Friday, January 2nd, 2009 | ||
| 11:07 am | Writer's Block: Starting Out Fresh Please remove these intrusive and shallow questions from our homepages. We provide our own community and content. The idea that you can, by corporate groupthink, encourage participation, is the kind of community killer that eminent domain or network television is. You're killing the spirit of LJ with these cattle prod prompts. No one who provides the real content for the community wants to read, or write these posts. Cut it out. (3 juiceboxes | squeeze) | |
| Thursday, January 1st, 2009 | ||
| 1:17 pm | Writer's Block: Resolved These intrusive questions that you insist on implanting on our home pages, without our permission, are beginning to sound like the very bored and very polite dinner table conversation of an impoverished elderly relative. I am thinking of the little old man on the ferry to Death in Venice, flirting with all the boys, whose makeup begins to melt. Please remove these uncalled for, unwanted, intrusive and, frankly, kind of crabby, queries from our home pages. We can provide our own content without your buzz kill interruptions. (2 juiceboxes | squeeze) | |
