The latest “victim” of the bad economy appears to be actor Nicholas Cage, but before you start feeling too sorry for him, this story from The Daily Beast might make you feel a little less sympathy. And don’t miss the slideshow featuring a few of his mansions, fancy cars, and other “necessities”.
At least he wasn’t hoarding stockpiles of swine flu vaccines like these criminals.
If you want me, I’ll be out sharpening my guillotine. Eventually someone’s going to need to use it.
How To Be Rich: A group of wealthy Germans led by a doctor named Dieter Lehmkuhl have put together a proposal to the German government to increase the taxes on the rich to help increase government revenues. Why would anyone want to ask the government for HIGHER taxes? Because, the group says, the rich have more money than they can possibly ever spend. They estimate the German government could increase tax revenue by 100 billion Euros annually by raising taxes, and that if the did this for TWO YEARS, they could erase their budget crisis. This BBC article has a great pull-quote from the petition:
“The path out of the crisis must be paved with massive investment in ecology, education and social justice,” they say in the petition.
Those who had “made a fortune through inheritance, hard work, hard-working, successful entrepreneurship, or investment” should contribute by paying more to alleviate the crisis.
How NOT To Be Rich: Yesterday’s Boston Globe had this immensely sad and appalling article about former Boston Celtics star Antoine Walker, who has pissed away his $110 million fortune on gambling, cars, and buying bling-bling for himself and his hangers-on and is presently facing trial for writing bad checks to several casinos to pay for hundreds of thousands of dollars in gambling debts.
This being America, most people see absolutely nothing wrong with what Walker did with his money, and look at the Germans as if they were crazy. We really, really need to turn the world right-side-up again, kids.
Sarah Silverman has figured it out…all we need to do is sell the Vatican!
While we’re at it, we also should be taking every last penny of the $21 billion bonus pool that Goldman Sachs has stolen and spend it all on clothing and housing and feeding as many people as possible in THIS country.
Some shining examples of the utter cluelessness and total contempt for humanity that propel the engines of capitalism:
The 2009 baseball season has entered its last phase, and by now we have all heard about the exorbitant luxury section at the new Yankee Stadium, but this feature piece on ESPN.com really drives the point home: it’s not that the rich can’t AFFORD $2500 seats, they don’t want to be SEEN sitting in them. (thanks to MetaFilter for this link)
Similarly, Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi has a hell of a paragraph about the new Cowboys Stadium, as quoted by Professor E. Wayne Ross on his blog (because the RS piece itself is not online yet):
Dallas’ opening home game against the Giants, in which their hideously commercialized mall palace known as the new Cowboys Stadium was unveiled to the world, was a genuinely terrifying broadcast event of a kind not seen since the premiere of Triumph of the Will. This was like a debutante ball for America’s new idiot fascism. Still, there was something weirdly compelling about seeing 100,000 Texans cheering historical footnote George W. Bush as they christened what promises to be about 490 years of municipal sales-tax payments, all so that Jerry Jones can see a 160-foot wide image of his own surgery-tightened face on the world’s biggest HDTV. At the home opener, ticket-holders got to see Tony Romo throw three interceptions against the backdrop of multiple corporate billboards lining the field. Then there was the specter of 100,000 people watching a giant taxpayer-funded TV while sitting at the live event. If this is the future, could America be any more fucked?
This morning’s New York Times lays out the latest brainstorm from Disney now that their management has been completely assimilated by the Borg…revitalized by Apple: they bought back their dying mall retail stores and are going to spend $1 million per store to turn them into “interactive theme parks”. Killer pull-quote:
“The world does not need another place to sell Disney merchandise — this only works if it’s an experience.” — Jim Fielding, president of Disney Stores Worldwide.
Meanwhile, in Louisville KY, 10,000 unemployed workers recently showed up to apply for 90 job openings at a General Electric factory, and in Detroit over 65,000 people have applied for a federal aid program that will only be able to give the aid to 3,500 (again, thanks to various posters at MetaFilter for the links).
It’s too bad Barack Obama isn’t an actual Socialist, because then maybe he’d be doing something about this instead of looking the other way while he collects his Nobel Peace Prize.
Reporter: What do you think of Western civilization?
Gandhi: I think it would be a very good idea.From the Department of “U R Doin’ It Rong”, Mumbai Branch:
Luxury pen maker Mont Blanc has designed a limited-edition pen featuring the likeness of Mohandas K. Gandhi in rhodium on the nib, a saffron-colored opal on the clip, and an engraving of Gandhi’s signature on the barrel, all for the low, low price of $25,000. Mont Blanc has made a donation to the Gandhi Foundation, but is otherwise not donating proceeds from sales to any charity. Realizing that the $25,000 price tag puts this pen out of the reach of all but the richest collectors, Mont Blanc has issued a much more reasonably-priced ballpoint pen that will only set you back about $3500
Sidebar: Here is a piece by George Orwell about Gandhi written around the time of the Partition, shortly before Gandhi’s death, in 1949. During his lifetime, Gandhi was not as globally revered and publicly sanctified as he would become after his assassination, especially in Britain. That air of British suspicion that Gandhi was just another scheming wog pervades the essay, even as Orwell tries to distance himself from such suspicions (without much success, I’d say).
Western adoption of Gandhi as a saint-like personage came in steps, especially as 1960s counterculture looked for non-Western role models to shake up centuries of Great White Men, culminating in the 1980 film by Richard Attenborough that gave American audiences the boiled-down idiot version they needed to grasp his significance (provided they could sit through the whole movie). Reading a piece written by a contemporary, especially someone who would come to earn his own political significance after his own death, is a good way to strip away some of the perhaps-unearned deification. Buying a $25,000 pen is not.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — The Declaration of Independence
If it isn’t clear to people by now that when Barack Obama said “Change you can believe in”, he really meant nothing of the kind. He meant “we’ll just keep on doing it the way we always have”, and most Democrats have been okay with this because the ones in power benefit from having it be their turn and the ones who aren’t powerful seem to be satisfied that he’s not George Bush and that’s all they really cared about in the first place. Which is really, really, really disgusting, when you think about it.
So what can you do? Well, the deck is so stacked against any attempt to bring change to the rotten two-party system that the consensus seems to be that the only way to effect any change is to “nut up” (as that ad for the new Woody Harrelson movie says), and settle in for the long haul of trying to bring genuine change to the Democrats, who are the lesser of the two evils. The Republican Party was transformed through the slow process of seeding people at the bottom 25-30 years ago and now those wackjobs and wingnuts have successfully turned that party into a very scary political entity indeed. This long, but well-written, post at The Seminal (which has been folded into the political site Fire Dog Lake) by Bill Egnor outlines exactly wht a long and arduous task it will be. If you don’t have a quarter-century to devote to it, it’s going to seem insurmountable.
And maybe it is insurmountable. Maybe our political system is so ossified and thoroughly corrupt that it can’t be changed through even the most diligent of grass roots activism. Maybe it’s time to “nut up” and shoot it out. It’s my distinct impression that there are quite a few people on the right preparing for this very solution. It’s becoming my opinion that the left should begin thinking the same way. If you want me to believe in “change”, then you’d better be intended to actually change something.
Not being a follower of professional sports, I’ve heard these sort of stories for years and never known whether to believe them or not, but this Sports Illustrated article is pretty convincing: 78% of retired NFL players go broke within 2 years of leaving professional football. For NBA players, it is 60% within 5 years. According to the article, for most of them, the greatest financial loss comes from divorce — apparently all those insanely hot women who marry athletes really ARE just in it for the money. The rest of it comes mainly from bad investments made because guys who are pro athletes aren’t too great at paying attention to lots of boring math ‘n’ shit.
It’s always a little discouraging to discover that the worst stereotypes of a particular group of people — in this case, stupid, spoiled, and overpaid athletes — are really the truest ones. When I was a sophomore in college, I lived in the dorm where the football team ate after practice, and well remember them being ushered to the door of the dorm in big black limousines, often being accompanied by..ahem..professional young women, and generally being treated like superstars, even though Northwestern was the worst team in college football at that time. After all that pampering in college (and I have to imagine it is only worse at schools where the football teams are actual contenders), and all the easy money in the pros, no wonder they are clueless and ready to be taken to the cleaners.
Just the other day I posted about a young man from Nepal who was trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records as the shortest man in the world. He’s only 22 inches tall, compared to the 29-inch tall He Pingping of China, who is the current record holder. Well, WAS the current [...]
boobcheese tickle fights child actor suicides Betty White Zombie Farrah Fawcett Canadian pissing habits that milkaholic Lindsay ChatRoulette whatever half-assed thing Google did this week out-of-control Toyotas
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, [...]
I recently posted about the use of menhaden in making fish oil dietary supplements and the potential risk that poses to the entire Atlantic Ocean ecosystem. One of the alternatives to using menhaden for omega-3 supplements is algae oil, because algae is the primary diet of the menhaden and is actually the source of [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT.
Since you cannot click a [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and [...]
This week Barack Obama committed the United States to at least two more years of war, 30,000 troops in harm’s way for no other reason than saving face, and umpteen billions of dollars wasted FOR NO GOOD REASON WHATSOEVER and we are inundated with: Tiger Woods proving he knows how to put it in the hole GateCrashGate Meredith [...]
Nowhere near enough responses to fill in all the blanks on the Mad-Lib Post game, so I guess we’ll chalk it up as a loss and try it again some other time. Maybe I’ll try it on Facebook instead.
More additions to the list: Levi Johnston Carrie Prejean Blue Dog Democrats The Entire Lohan Family The 2012 Apocalypse The Republican “Comeback” “ordinary heroes”
More effluvia: Those Northwest Airlines pilots Zombie Michael Jackson Sexy ____________ Halloween Costumes (in fact, anything to do with adults and Halloween) Celebrity Twitters Balloon Boy and His Crazy Dad (thankfully, this one has already faded quite a bit)
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