Rush Limbaugh succinctly describing Sarah Palin and her Ohio speech:

"Babies. Guns. Jesus. Hot damn."

Prudent Bear - The Great Consumer Crash of 2009

The debt induced spending that occurred from 2001 until 2007 accounted for virtually all the GDP growth over this time. Without the mortgage equity withdrawal, the U.S. would have had less than 1% average GDP growth for the entire period.

Consumers used their credit and debit cards to buy $51 ( Read more... )

Entranced little Nyx swatted at a 3 legged cricket yesterday. It’s perplexing how a 3 legged cricket could make it up 12 stairs to the top floor. I shooed kitty and scooped cricket and took it down to the computer/gecko/books all over the floor room and tossed it into the terrarium. Only after placing the little guy on the sand did I wonder ( Read more... )

Dmitry Orlov -The USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US

It even has slides. It's a relatively quick read.

Dr. Doom

Robert Jensen - AlterNet

What I thought was the smell of marijuana was instead incense. At 4 am we pow wowed with the guy that looks like Andrew Weil. He smoked. Only a cigarette. The fair circuit has seen a bad year. Andrew knows a vendor who ordinarily hauls 30k at some big renaissance fair and this year took all of 8k. Another renaissance festival went under ( Read more... )

It took a sustained glance inside the booth at Mom’s Milk Shack for the pieces to click. Stool, blankets, lotion, wet wipes…The silhouettes on the booth drapery were in fact not just artistic interpretations of featureless Fisher Price people, but a mother breastfeeding. The baby feeding booth is located across from the John Deere seller and ( Read more... )

The temperature alarm on the gyro seller’s freezer went off around 2 am. Because I thought there is a brotherhood among fair folk, I left it on. My theory: Someone would hear it in the morning and contact the gyro people; if I shut it off, and trusted a note to convey the alarm’s harping, who is to say the freezer contents wouldn’t spoil long ( Read more... )

Time To Start Worrying

Since I hate this island, a little bit of sweat on paradise dwellers brows pleases me. Not a lot, but fleetingly at least.

I worked 9pm to 5 am. Last night. This morning. I tried to talk politics to a recently graduated economics major. It was after 4 am. I don’t think either one of us was overly lucid. It was like drunk talk only sleep deprivation the excuse for voicing - and poorly - my internet sourced dismay ( Read more... )