For the first time in my life someone got me with the whole “unscrew the salt shaker lid so when it’s next used they’ll dump it all over” trick, only they did it with a goddamn squeeze bottle of ketchup.

“Donald Trump: Because Charlie Sheen Isn’t Running”

kontextmaschine:

“Donald Trump: Because Charlie Sheen Isn’t Running”

Honestly I think the dude’s got a chance, not even just in the primary but the general. He’s an attention whore but an experienced one, knows how to wield it. (And I wouldn’t be much of a d'Annunzian to dismiss the potential of that.)

And honestly, a realignment around welfarist (white) nationalism has a lot of potential for the GOP - that was the FDR/New Deal brand that worked so well so long for the Democrats, and it could really scramble the electoral map, put PA, the upper Midwest, even OR in play at the risk of what? (correction from SC:) NC and AZ, accepting that VA’s gone, higher margins places they were never going to get? Then lock that in until and unless TX flips.

The barrier’s always been pols not wanting to risk their reputations or fundraising access among the donor class, but a billionaire narcissist’s a silver bullet for that.

Bored. Send me asks again.

Eugene McCarthy was a candidate in the 1968 Democratic presidential primary who drew a lot of youth support by challenging an “inevitable” establishment candidate from a boldly left position.

The election of a relatively young and tbh naive Democratic “culture hero” candidate 8 years earlier had raised hopes and even though the party had racked up some significant accomplishments since then, expanding the welfare state and drawing energy from a grassroots civil rights movement, this had more radicalized than satisfied the young activist base and they were looking for a candidate offering a more full-throated leftism, particularly in rejecting war and entanglement with the business establishment.

When it became clear that party insiders were actively trying, with ultimate success, to nominate anyone else for (ultimately futile) reasons of “electability” and interest-group logrolling clientelism, this caused significant disillusionment and further radicalization.

Nope, I’m a blank flank. Which is rare-unto-countercultural for a Portlander my age.

“Blank flank” isn’t a term from tattoo culture, I just repurposed that from My Little Pony because I liked how cute it sounded.

Some gauges but not all that many and I was tangent to the junglist rave scene in the ‘90s so I’m used to that. If you want to talk body mods that are in style around here but I find repulsive, septum rings.

scavengedluxury:

William Blake House, Soho. London, July 2015.

We’re going to win, all the things that get mistaken for signs of the eternal triumph of the bad guys are really just what it looks like when they’ve run off the cliff and haven’t looked down yet.

severnayazemlya:

thathopeyetlives:

sunbeargirl:

crotchetybushtit:

maatuultulivesi:

does no one realize that robin hood was a terrible role model for young kids? i mean you are stealing from people (illegal) and those people (usually) worked hard to get their wealth. it really demotivates people to succeed when they know they can get something someone else worked for.

is this what rich people worry about lmao

who knew the sheriff of nottingham had a blog

My impression is that children are not even exposed very much to the theft? I mostly remember the stories of various exploits.

After the HUAC Hollywood hearings, the Communist Party sent Hannah Weinstein, one of their members, to London, and gave her money to set up a production company to create a TV show in Britain for blacklisted Communists to write for, and sell it in America to get their work back on the screen.

The show was The Adventures of Robin Hood.

When Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was in production they had to change the name of the Morgan Freeman character. The writer had written it on the assumption that the Robin Hood legend had always included a Moorish warrior among the Merrie Men but it turns out that came from a 1980s BBC series and wasn’t in the public domain.

And now he’s part of the canon. Which is exactly how myths work.

rikerist:

this was one of the screensavers in “after dark,” a package of screensavers that was very popular around 1990. it cost like $30 and it was one of the top-selling pieces of software of its time

To the point where winged, flying toasters became iconic of personal computing for a hot minute.

raggedjackscarlet:

Gamergate is basically our generation’s “Mods vs. Rockers”.

how pathetic.

It’s a thin strip of beach between the sea and some well-weathered mountains north of the western edge of LA (plus a few canyons heading inland). It used to be close enough to Los Angeles (which actually grew from the fairly far-inland downtown westward towards the beach) to be easily reachable while far enough away to be an escape from civic society, kind of the Hamptons of LA. Celebrities started settling there in the 1920s in unassuming getaway shacks where they could get fucked up and fuck each other in peace.

Since then it’s gotten downright absurd, if you’re not initiated I can go “guess how much this costs” and from even asking the question you know it’s a lot and guess high and I say “nope, more” and you guess higher and I say “nope, more” and you’re like “holy shit”. If you can afford it it’s got a nice small-town feel in a place where that’s worth something though.

Oh that reminds me, did anyone else see Princess of Thieves, the 2001 Disney TV movie with Kiera Knightley as Robin Hood’s daughter with her father in the Maid Marian role?

It was fucking TERRIBLE.

I got it off Netflix when Netflix still came in the mail because Kiera Knightley with a sword in tight leather, rawr. That was kind of a dry run for her roles in Pirates of the Caribbean, playing a girl who could

1) outfight the male lead and

2) act directly against their commands if she saw fit

Which was hot for the Red Sonja reason that holy shit, she could force herself on you.

Which is to say I totally wanted 2000s Kiera Knightley to rape me. Well I guess “ravish”, which is what it’s called when honestly you really want it. In the butt, with a leather strap-on, maybe. That appeals to me, which is really inconvenient when you’re a straight guy.

(Inb4 the obvious, I’ve got a huge cis fetish. In the original sense of “fetish”, as a necessary component of sexual satisfaction.)

((I remember being maybe 8 and discovering the showerhead massager up my butt feeling surprisingly satisfying, for some reason I mentally glossed this as having a large couch in my living room. When I first got into PiV sex I mentally glossed it as using a wooden crane to offload crates of tea from a sailing ship. DUDE I DON’T EVEN KNOW))

I’m so eyerolling dismissive about people’s youthful sexuality play because I’ve been through that shit a long time ago and come out the other side. I fancied myself Kinsey 3 for a while because…

oh wait this is hilarious. Because back in the ‘90s my first regular porn source was off USENET, I forget even why but alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.cartoons(.moderated?). Fuckin’ Milo Manara and Spunky Knight and XXXenophiles and old Tijuana bibles and damn professional-grade (which in retrospect was probably from a professional doing doujin-style sidework) Gen13 fanart with Rainmaker on Freefall while Fairchild schlicked, and this one guy who just loved to draw girls and horses.

And there was one picture I came across that was like, a dude eating a girl out while a guy sucked him off, only they were blue foxes and grey coyotes, and for some reason that made a big impression and stuck with me.

I, Kontextmaschine, spent my teenage years thinking of himself as someone who would TOTALLY suck dick, looking forward to it even, because of a single piece of 1990s bisexual furry porn, maybe 92k and took 3 minutes to download. Truefax.

Then I finally got a chance and it wasn’t repulsive or anything just not actively attractive and without that the sheer physicality of it was just ridiculous and unappealing. Like trying to give someone a massage with your mouth while they choke you. And the reverse did nothing for me, so it was like “welp, guess I’m straight”.

Also you know I identified as female for a lot of elementary school. The classmates (this would be 3rd grade so 199…1? didn’t taunt me that I couldn’t be a girl but rather that how would I afford SRS, because the last Transgender Moment was still in live memory, Renee Richards and Wendy Carlos and all.

Every generation thinks it invented sex, I guess now apparently gender too.

In retrospect I think a lot of it was that I wanted to escape male expectations and be protected and appreciated for my delicacy and vulnerability. Which I look around tumblr now and game recognize game. Game recognize game.

And grass is always greener and now I appreciate that my female classmates weren’t exactly in a utopia, and those who commit to transition God knows that’s not the comforting welcome they get.

But I did go to school once in like 9th grade wearing that first girlfriend’s dress. This teacher who came off as harsh and conservative just stopped me in the hall, looked me up and down, and just said “nah, that doesn’t flatter you”. Which was probably the best counter possible, I realized girl clothes weren’t just culturally encoded but physically draped from tits and hips and butt I didn’t have.

Still for years I would maintain a ~joke~ about ~actually~ being a lesbian because I had declared the space around me to be the Floating Island of Lesbos, and I still default to female avatars in games. Also there’s a few disposable camera pictures of me out there somewhere from my Renn Faire years in full corset, dress, and makeup.

There’s a reason I stayed with moneycat even through her bullshit “political lesbianism + universal MtF transition” year.

Europe is blowing itself apart over Greece - and nobody seems able to stop it

antoine-roquentin:

Holy jesus motherfucker AEP just dropped the mother of all bombshells (and I think his source is Varoufakis, more explained below).

Greek premier Alexis Tsipras never expected to win Sunday’s referendum on EMU bail-out terms, let alone to preside over a blazing national revolt against foreign control.

He called the snap vote with the expectation - and intention - of losing it. The plan was to put up a good fight, accept honourable defeat, and hand over the keys of the Maximos Mansion, leaving it to others to implement the June 25 “ultimatum” and suffer the opprobrium.

This ultimatum came as a shock to the Greek cabinet. They thought they were on the cusp of a deal, bad though it was. Mr Tsipras had already made the decision to acquiesce to austerity demands, recognizing that Syriza had failed to bring about a debtors’ cartel of southern EMU states and had seriously misjudged the mood across the eurozone.

Instead they were confronted with a text from the creditors that upped the ante, demanding a rise in VAT on tourist hotels from 7pc (de facto) to 23pc at a single stroke.

Creditors insisted on further pension cuts of 1pc of GDP by next year and a phase out of welfare assistance (EKAS) for poorer pensioners, even though pensions have already been cut by 44pc.

They insisted on fiscal tightening equal to 2pc of GDP in an economy reeling from six years of depression and devastating hysteresis. They offered no debt relief. The Europeans intervened behind the scenes to suppress a report by the International Monetary Fund validating Greece’s claim that its debt is “unsustainable”. The IMF concluded that the country not only needs a 30pc haircut to restore viability, but also €52bn of fresh money to claw its way out of crisis.

They rejected Greek plans to work with the OECD on market reforms, and with the International Labour Organisation on collective bargaining laws. They stuck rigidly to their script, refusing to recognise in any way that their own Dickensian prescriptions have been discredited by economists from across the world.

“They just didn’t want us to sign. They had already decided to push us out,” said the now-departed finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.

So Syriza called the referendum. To their consternation, they won, igniting the great Greek revolt of 2015, the moment when the people finally issued a primal scream, daubed their war paint, and formed the hoplite phalanx.

Mr Tsipras is now trapped by his success. “The referendum has its own dynamic. People will revolt if he comes back from Brussels with a shoddy compromise,” said Costas Lapavitsas, a Syriza MP.

“Tsipras doesn’t want to take the path of Grexit, but I think he realizes that this is now what lies straight ahead of him,” he said.

What should have been a celebration on Sunday night turned into a wake. Mr Tsipras was depressed, dissecting all the errors that Syriza has made since taking power in January, talking into the early hours.

The prime minister was reportedly told that the time had come to choose, either he should seize on the momentum of the 61pc landslide vote, and take the fight to the Eurogroup, or yield to the creditor demands - and give up the volatile Mr Varoufakis in the process as a token of good faith.

Everybody knew what a fight would mean. The inner cabinet had discussed the details a week earlier at a tense meeting after the European Central Bank refused to increase liquidity (ELA) to the Greek banking system, forcing Syriza to impose capital controls.

It was a triple plan. They would “requisition” the Bank of Greece and sack the governor under emergency national laws. The estimated €17bn of reserves still stashed away in various branches of the central bank would be seized.

They would issue parallel liquidity and California-style IOUs denominated in euros to keep the banking system afloat, backed by an appeal to the European Court of Justice to throw the other side off balance, all the while asserting Greece’s full legal rights as a member of the eurozone. If the creditors forced Grexit, they - not Greece - would be acting illegally, with implications for tort contracts in London, New York and even Frankfurt.

They would impose a haircut on €27bn of Greek bonds held by the ECB, and deemed “odious debt” by some since the original purchases were undertaken by the ECB to save French and German banks, forestalling a market debt restructuring that would otherwise have happened.

“They were trying to strangle us into submission, and this is how we would retaliate,” said one cabinet minister. Mr Tsipras rejected the plan. It was too dangerous. But a week later, that is exactly what he may have to do, unless he prefers to accept a forced return to the drachma.

Syriza has been in utter disarray for 36 hours. On Tuesday, the Greek side turned up for a make-or-break summit in Brussels with no plans at all, even though Germany and its allies warned them at the outset that this is their last chance to avert ejection.

The new finance minister, Euclid Tsakalotos, vaguely offered to come up with something by Wednesday, almost certainly a rejigged version of plans that the creditors have already rejected.

Events are now spinning out of control. The banks remain shut. The ECB has maintained its liquidity freeze, and through its inaction is asphyxiating the banking system.

Factories are shutting down across the country as stocks of raw materials run out and containers full of vitally-needed imports clog up Greek ports. Companies cannot pay their suppliers because external transfers are blocked. Private scrip currencies are starting to appear as firms retreat to semi-barter outside the banking system.

Yet if Greece is in turmoil, so is Europe. The entire leadership of the eurozone warned before the referendum that a “No” vote would lead to ejection from the euro, never supposing that they might have to face exactly this.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission’s chief, had the wit to make light of his retreat. “We have to put our little egos, in my case a very large ego, away, and deal with situation we face,” he said.

France’s prime minister, Manuel Valls said Grexit and the rupture of monetary union must be prevented as the highest strategic imperative. “We cannot let Greece leave the eurozone. Nobody can say today what the political consequences would be, what would be the reaction of the Greek people,” he said.

French leaders are working in concert with the White House. Washington is bringing its immense diplomatic power to bear, calling openly on the EU to put “Greece on a path toward debt sustainability” and sort out the festering problem once and for all.

The Franco-American push is backed by Italy’s Matteo Renzi, who said the eurozone has to go back to the drawing board and rethink its whole austerity doctrine after the democratic revolt in Greece. He too now backs debt relief.

Yet 15 of the 18 governments now sitting in judgment on Greece either back Germany’s uncompromising stand, or are leaning towards Grexit in one form or another. The Germans are already thinking beyond Grexit, discussing plans for humanitarian aide and balance of payments support for the drachma.

Mark Rutte, the Dutch premier, spoke for many in insisting that the eurozone must uphold discipline, whatever the financial consequences. “I am at the table here today to ensure that the integrity, the cohesion, the underlying principles of the single currency are protected. It is up to the Greek government to come up with far-reaching proposals. If they don’t do that, then I think it will be over quickly,” he said.

The two sides are talking past each other, clinging to long-entrenched narratives, no longer willing to question their own assumptions. The result could be costly. RBS puts the direct financial losses for the eurozone from a Greek default at €227bn, compared with €140bn if they bite the bullet on an IMF-style debt restructuring.

But that is a detail compared with the damage to the European political project and the Nato alliance if Greece is thrown to wolves against the strenuous objections of France, Italy and the US.

It is hard to imagine what would remain of Franco-German condominium. Washington might start to turn its back on Nato in disgust, leaving Germany and the Baltic states to fend for themselves against Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a condign punishment for such loss of strategic vision in Greece.

Mr Lapavitsas said Europe’s own survival as civilisational force in the world is what is really at stake. “Europe has not show much wisdom over the last century. It launched two world wars and had to be saved by the Americans,” he said

“Now with the creation of monetary union it has acted with such foolishness, and created such a disaster, that it is putting the very union in doubt, and this time there will be no saviour. It is the last throw of the dice for Europe,” he said.

Today, the new Greek Finance Minister walked into a Eurogroup meeting with absolutely no new proposals, shocking everybody. He was photographed on the way out with a piece of paper on which he had written English notes, including “no triumphalism”.

Now maybe this is all one big scheme to smooth the path to SYRIZA forfeiting, just making sure that everybody believes they had no choice, but I trust that chaos is the law of the land far more than order. Tsakalatos’ face doesn’t look like a “>TFW”, it’s a “Oh god, we fucked up, what do we do”.

Now, this is not nearly the time to start planning a Grexit, which should have begun in January. It’s also not good that the battle plan was leaked, which means the ECB can take precautions (not that they probably haven’t already thought of it. They need to make sure Greece is dependent on humanitarian aid and has as few Euros in the country as possible to make it as pliant to Germany when the exit comes). But holy shit, it makes for exciting reading. 

Now, why do I think Varoufakis is the source? AEP has implied over and over that he has intimate dealings with high level Syriza figures who were privy to the negotiation process, yet in this case, nothing about Tsakalatos’ dealings leaked. Instead, we heard about things that happened before Varoufakis resigned. In AEP’s last article, he mentions outright that he had spoken to Varoufakis, and his tone seemed to have been similar to the sort of things AEP’s articles have been saying:

But then he was starting to harbour ‘dangerous’ thoughts. When I asked him before the vote whether he was prepared to contemplate seizing direct control of the Greek banking system, a restoration of sovereign monetary instruments, Grexit, and a return to the drachma – if the ECB maintains its liquidity blockade, forcing the country to its knees - he thought for a while and finally answered yes.

“I am sick of these bigots,” he said.

His fear was that Greece did not have the technical competence to carry out an orderly exit from EMU, and truth be told, Syriza has already raided every possible source of funds within the reach of the Greek state - bar a secret stash still at the central bank, controlled by Syriza’s political foes - and therefore has no emergency reserves to prevent the crisis spinning out of control in the first traumatic weeks.

He was putting out feelers for technical experts in London, targeting veterans of Britain’s ERM exit in 1992, though he was under no illusions that Grexit could ever be anything other than gruesome.

AEP’s been awfully kind to Syriza for somebody who calls himself a “Burkean conservative”, implying maybe there was a personal friendship. I think Varoufakis stayed around to give his last interview to AEP so he could drop this bombshell scoop.

Hopefully, Greece can fly in those experts very quickly. There seems to be almost no chance that an exit can be averted. Eurocrats have outright stated that if they don’t get a detailed proposal on a third bailout on Thursday to hash out through the weekend, then Sunday’s Eurogroup meeting will be all about the exit. 

“We have a Grexit scenario prepared in detail,” said Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European commission.

In no way is this legal, but neither were the first two bailouts, and that never stopped them. This is gonna be a wild week. Will our heroes ride off into the sunset?

Sitting in a bar, cat walks in through the open door, lazily looks around, flops down on the floor. I catch its eyes, beckon it over, give it scratchies. Hangs around a few minutes longer, lazily heads out.

Someone once said that the best clue to the character of a neighborhood was if the street cats trust people.

nah

kontextmaschine:

Roissy is our Dan Savage was our Ann Landers, isn’t he?

Here’s something you kids might not know, in the ‘90s Dan Savage insisted that all letter-writers address him beginning “Hey, Faggot”.

Or he rewrote them, or wrote them, like that. Agony aunts have always written their own letters. Hell, I write at least one in three of my asks.