"‘To imply that those currently at the top - the Warren Buffets and Roman Abramoviches of this world - are the very best, the nec plus ultra of humanity, is a kind of hate speech toward the species. Dignity demands that we refute it.’"
Richard Seymour, The Meaning of David Cameron (via rejectamentalist manifesto)
Reblogged from tentacular with 18 notes
Telephone conversation between Nixon and Kissinger on 16th September 1973, five days after President Salvador Allende shot himself during the military coup d’etat led by General Augusto Pinochet.
N: Hi Henry.
K: Mr President.
N: Where are you? In New York?
K: No, I am in Washington. I am working. I may go to the football game this afternoon if I get through.
N: Good, good. Well it is the opener. It is better than television. Nothing new of any importance is there?
K: Nothing of very great consequence. The Chilean thing is getting consolidated and of course the newspapers are bleeding because a pro-Communist government has been overthrown.
N: Isn’t that something. Isn’t that something.
K: I mean instead of celebrating. In the Eisenhower period we would be heroes.
N: Well we didn’t — as you know — our hand doesn’t show on this one.
K: We didn’t do it. I mean we helped them… created the conditions as great as possible.
N: That’s right. And this is the way it is going to be played. But listen, as far as people are concerned let me say they aren’t going to buy this crap from the liberals on this one.
K: Absolutely not.
N: They know it’s a pro-Communist government and that is the way it is.
K: Exactly. And pro-Castro.
N: Well the main thing was — let’s not forget the pro-Communist — it was an anti-American government all the way.
K: Oh, wildly.
Nick Griffin’s real dream in life is to become the next Susan Boyle. Since he saw his Australian counterpart Pauline Hanson Dancing with the Stars he’s used every small gathering of twats political rally as an excuse to sing pop songs to choreographed dance steps. As this photograph shows, BNP Crusaders is simply a front to audition prospective members of his boy band. And it’s a lot harder than you think to go from fascist to showbiz whilst staying true to your inner bigot. Hanson is even emigrating to Britain to advise Griffin on how to smile just hatefully enough so all the immigrants in the audience know he’s not smiling at them.
Nazi Arsewipes of today and tomorrow.
Bored? The BNP has set up ‘BNP Crusaders’ - a Facebook site for deluded young racists to come together to no doubt share the joys of stuffing faeces through letter boxes, firebombing mosques and cowering in terror when vastly outnumbered by anti fascist demonstrators. Please feel free (and encouraged) to subvert and sneer via here. Get that internet personation going!
Come on though, aren’t you in awe of the physical perfection, charm and beauty of the Master Race?
I want to take a red pen to it and correct all the spelling, punctuation and grammar.
Reblogged from feastingonroadkill with 20 notes
alwaysunpresentable:retrostarwars:
PLEASE REBLOG:
The original Lars homestead as it stands today in the Tunisia desert. If nobody intervenes, the structure will be destroyed by nature and lost forever. Luckily, a group of truly dedicated fans have started a website called savetheigloo.info. A complete restoration of it can be accomplished for a mere $3000. They’ve already raised $900, and I myself just donated $5 this morning (measly I know, but it’s all I can afford for the time being). Please check out the site and consider donating. It’s always been a dream of mine to make it out to the Tunisia desert, and I will be truly devastated if the homestead is in ruins before I can make it. You can also join the group on facebook here.
George Lucas should get his wallet out and save this. It won’t earn him forgiveness for the prequels but he should still do it.
Reblogged from i-malwaysunpresentable with 747 notes
![thisistheglamorous:
imremembering
Since I was tipped off to this tumblr, I visit it once in awhile but it really doesn’t do much for me. That’s not to say the person who puts it together doesn’t do a great job of culling great pop culture artifacts from the time I was growing up, but I don’t want to fetishize my childhood too much. I like things in my life right now. I don’t need to hold on to toys from when I was a kid. But this motherfucker right here, Castle Grayskull, oh boy.
My parents were very anti-gun. My mother especially. No toys I had were allowed to have guns or be gun-related in any way. (Note: there were exceptions made, most notably squirt guns back when they looked like actual guns [I had a pump action shotgun squirt gun that would get me shot by very real guns if I still had it today] and Lazer Tag [which I got after bugging the crap out of my parents for a year and finally relented when Toy World on the corner of Liberty and 38th where Cohen’s Carpeting is now had them on sale.]) So, my parents allowed Masters of the Universe because it was primarily sword-based. Once Castle Grayskull came on the scene, I wanted bad. My parents, probably spending way too much money on action figures as is, flatly said no. After harassing them endlessly, my mother suggested that if I saved up my money from birthdays, holidays, and doing chores, they would happily drive me to the store and get it, but they weren’t spending the roughly $40 for Castle Grayskull.
When I made the proclamation that I was getting this piece of plastic awesomeness, my father promptly took my wallet for safe keeping. I had a plastic wallet with a silk-screened cowboy on a bucking horse on the front circled with a rope that closed with an impossible-to-close zipper. It was a cheapo prize you could get with your Skee-Ball and Tic-Tac-Toe ball game tickets from the arcade at Waldameer. I never had more than pocket change and a few dollars in it, but my father made it clear that if I was to save up for Castle Grayskull all the money I saved should go into the wallet and the wallet should stay with him. And so it went, I would get $20 for Christmas from a relative here, a couple of dollars from my Grandma for probably doing some yard work half-assed there, and after about six months I had the $40 to buy Castle Grayskull. That’s when my father basically tried to talk me out of it.
The speech went something like this: “David, I know you really want this, but do you think in a year or two you’re really going to still play with it?” The correct answer was of course, no, I would play with it for about a year and never touch the thing again. But, in my seven year old mind, this would be an heirloom that would provide a never-ending fountain of play, signifier of my awesomeness to everyone around me, and would be passed down through generations of my family like a holy relic. Then came the second part of the argument, “You know, I can hold on to this money for you and you can save even more…” While I’m not blaming my father for my issues of self-gratification and improper spending habits, this is the first instance I can think of where I basically vocalized, ‘That’s my money, I can do whatever I want with it, and you aren’t the boss of me.’
So off I went on a rainy day with my father to Dalkemper’s to go get this piece of plastic awesome. For those unfamilar with Dalkemper’s, it was a local department store where I grew up. What made it different from basically every other department store was its catalog. In its stores, there was a station where they had their catalog. When you saw something you wanted either on the floor or in the catalog, you filled out an order sheet on a clipboard, put it on the conveyor belt that went up into the ceiling, and someone would appear with that item and lead you to the cashier. My father took me to the toy department, verified that they did in fact have Castle Grayskull, let me fill out the order sheet by myself, and a few minutes later, a man was handing me this gigantic box. At the cashier, my father handed me my plastic wallet, I paid the kind woman, and in the rain I clumsily carried that giant box to my parents’ car happy as can be.
Within a year, I never played with it again. Flash forward to my freshman year of college. For some reason (more than likely dumping all my dirty clothes on my mother to clean when I was visiting home) I was in my parents’ basement and noticed that Castle Grayskull was not in the usual heap of saved toys. I asked my mother what happened and she let me know she gave it away. I’ll admit I freaked out. In my mind, I paid for it and they just callously got rid of it. But, my mother pointed out they save my Miami Heat trash can that I adorned with stickers I purchased in the parking lot of the Star Lake Amphitheater in Pittsburgh going to see Lollapalooza after given the hard sell by some patchouli-smelling hippie who was creeping the shit out of me. Thanks Mom, but that doesn’t soothe the stinging betrayal of tossing out Castle Grayskull.
The last time I was home, my mother asked me if I wanted anything from my father. I promptly said, “Yes, I want his socks.” Not that my father’s socks held any type of sentimental feelings but they were mostly my socks. My father had a habit of seeing something that was mine, enjoying it, and just taking it. When I lived with my parents, since all the wash was going to the same place, my socks would constantly disappear. At first I thought my mother didn’t know which socks went where until I realized that my father was doing the wash most of the time. (God forbid I do any of the wash.)
My father’s sock drawer was also the mid-level security bunker for his private things. In his dresser, the sock drawer was on the top shelf. When my sister and I were little, the only way to get to that shelf required adult help or a ladder so all the things of importance that needed quick retrieval went into the sock drawer. Over the years, I became more than able to reach in there so the items went from truly important to more of a private nature. (The day I went into my parents’ bedroom to steal a pair of socks from my father and discovered his Viagra both horrified me, because who wants to think of their parents actually doing something that conceived you, but it also led to my father and I forever having a very private but funny dialog about why he needed it, his age, and ‘I don’t know why the hell I even have this; it’s not like your mother even wants to do it.’)
So, as I was grabbing all the socks from his drawer, I found my plastic cowboy wallet that apparently my father was still holding on to for safe keeping. Inside was no money but had the receipt for my Castle Grayskull from the long since shuttered Dalkemper’s.
It takes me an absurdly long time to catch up with my instapapered items but I do eventually. And identifying with the pain of having your Masters of the Universe toys given away (and ThunderCats too, dammit) means a reblog is in order.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l2qfwc2UNH1qb3mmfo1_400.jpg)
Since I was tipped off to this tumblr, I visit it once in awhile but it really doesn’t do much for me. That’s not to say the person who puts it together doesn’t do a great job of culling great pop culture artifacts from the time I was growing up, but I don’t want to fetishize my childhood too much. I like things in my life right now. I don’t need to hold on to toys from when I was a kid. But this motherfucker right here, Castle Grayskull, oh boy.
My parents were very anti-gun. My mother especially. No toys I had were allowed to have guns or be gun-related in any way. (Note: there were exceptions made, most notably squirt guns back when they looked like actual guns [I had a pump action shotgun squirt gun that would get me shot by very real guns if I still had it today] and Lazer Tag [which I got after bugging the crap out of my parents for a year and finally relented when Toy World on the corner of Liberty and 38th where Cohen’s Carpeting is now had them on sale.]) So, my parents allowed Masters of the Universe because it was primarily sword-based. Once Castle Grayskull came on the scene, I wanted bad. My parents, probably spending way too much money on action figures as is, flatly said no. After harassing them endlessly, my mother suggested that if I saved up my money from birthdays, holidays, and doing chores, they would happily drive me to the store and get it, but they weren’t spending the roughly $40 for Castle Grayskull.
When I made the proclamation that I was getting this piece of plastic awesomeness, my father promptly took my wallet for safe keeping. I had a plastic wallet with a silk-screened cowboy on a bucking horse on the front circled with a rope that closed with an impossible-to-close zipper. It was a cheapo prize you could get with your Skee-Ball and Tic-Tac-Toe ball game tickets from the arcade at Waldameer. I never had more than pocket change and a few dollars in it, but my father made it clear that if I was to save up for Castle Grayskull all the money I saved should go into the wallet and the wallet should stay with him. And so it went, I would get $20 for Christmas from a relative here, a couple of dollars from my Grandma for probably doing some yard work half-assed there, and after about six months I had the $40 to buy Castle Grayskull. That’s when my father basically tried to talk me out of it.
The speech went something like this: “David, I know you really want this, but do you think in a year or two you’re really going to still play with it?” The correct answer was of course, no, I would play with it for about a year and never touch the thing again. But, in my seven year old mind, this would be an heirloom that would provide a never-ending fountain of play, signifier of my awesomeness to everyone around me, and would be passed down through generations of my family like a holy relic. Then came the second part of the argument, “You know, I can hold on to this money for you and you can save even more…” While I’m not blaming my father for my issues of self-gratification and improper spending habits, this is the first instance I can think of where I basically vocalized, ‘That’s my money, I can do whatever I want with it, and you aren’t the boss of me.’
So off I went on a rainy day with my father to Dalkemper’s to go get this piece of plastic awesome. For those unfamilar with Dalkemper’s, it was a local department store where I grew up. What made it different from basically every other department store was its catalog. In its stores, there was a station where they had their catalog. When you saw something you wanted either on the floor or in the catalog, you filled out an order sheet on a clipboard, put it on the conveyor belt that went up into the ceiling, and someone would appear with that item and lead you to the cashier. My father took me to the toy department, verified that they did in fact have Castle Grayskull, let me fill out the order sheet by myself, and a few minutes later, a man was handing me this gigantic box. At the cashier, my father handed me my plastic wallet, I paid the kind woman, and in the rain I clumsily carried that giant box to my parents’ car happy as can be.
Within a year, I never played with it again. Flash forward to my freshman year of college. For some reason (more than likely dumping all my dirty clothes on my mother to clean when I was visiting home) I was in my parents’ basement and noticed that Castle Grayskull was not in the usual heap of saved toys. I asked my mother what happened and she let me know she gave it away. I’ll admit I freaked out. In my mind, I paid for it and they just callously got rid of it. But, my mother pointed out they save my Miami Heat trash can that I adorned with stickers I purchased in the parking lot of the Star Lake Amphitheater in Pittsburgh going to see Lollapalooza after given the hard sell by some patchouli-smelling hippie who was creeping the shit out of me. Thanks Mom, but that doesn’t soothe the stinging betrayal of tossing out Castle Grayskull.
The last time I was home, my mother asked me if I wanted anything from my father. I promptly said, “Yes, I want his socks.” Not that my father’s socks held any type of sentimental feelings but they were mostly my socks. My father had a habit of seeing something that was mine, enjoying it, and just taking it. When I lived with my parents, since all the wash was going to the same place, my socks would constantly disappear. At first I thought my mother didn’t know which socks went where until I realized that my father was doing the wash most of the time. (God forbid I do any of the wash.)
My father’s sock drawer was also the mid-level security bunker for his private things. In his dresser, the sock drawer was on the top shelf. When my sister and I were little, the only way to get to that shelf required adult help or a ladder so all the things of importance that needed quick retrieval went into the sock drawer. Over the years, I became more than able to reach in there so the items went from truly important to more of a private nature. (The day I went into my parents’ bedroom to steal a pair of socks from my father and discovered his Viagra both horrified me, because who wants to think of their parents actually doing something that conceived you, but it also led to my father and I forever having a very private but funny dialog about why he needed it, his age, and ‘I don’t know why the hell I even have this; it’s not like your mother even wants to do it.’)
So, as I was grabbing all the socks from his drawer, I found my plastic cowboy wallet that apparently my father was still holding on to for safe keeping. Inside was no money but had the receipt for my Castle Grayskull from the long since shuttered Dalkemper’s.
It takes me an absurdly long time to catch up with my instapapered items but I do eventually. And identifying with the pain of having your Masters of the Universe toys given away (and ThunderCats too, dammit) means a reblog is in order.
Reblogged from thisistheglamorous with 173 notes
Documents reveal multimillion-dollar funding to journalists and media in Venezuela | Postcards from the Revolution
US State Department documents declassified under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) evidence more than $4 million USD in funding to journalists and private media in Venezuela during the last three years. This funding is part of the more than $40 million USD international agencies are investing annually in anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela in an attempt to provoke regime change.
No one ever high-fived me when I didn’t have stitches in my hand. They’re not doing it sadistically, they don’t realise, but Sod’s Law has ensured that it’s been the salutation of choice this last week. And I’m loath to decline a good high five. The pain!
“Conceived as a solution to the interpersonal anguish and awkwardness of layoffs, the Career Track Tunnel eventually had connections to white-collar offices across the continental United States. Employers would instruct unsuspecting employees to meet them at the end of the tunnel in a few minutes for a conversation of grave importance. Many walked for days, and many never reached the end of the tunnel; those who did came upon a construction crew in the process of extending it. They were given a shovel and told to get to work.”
—”Career Track Tunnel,” The Printed Wikipedia Vol. III: Bzubul-Cechenoid
Reblogged from hatethefuture with 83 notes
I came across the Anne Sellors ‘woman who urinates herself’ imdb entry last September and felt the need to share the discovery. Since then it seems a lot more people have felt that deep need within themselves and have put me to shame with their efforts, considering it’s now developing into something of a meme in its own right and the opening topic of this Awl article.
And that is a sweet double rainbow, you must admit.
Reblogged from hatethefuture with 25 notes
More on US Imperialism in Latin America. Former ‘economic hit man’ John Perkins discusses his role in empire by economics. And assassins if that doesn’t work. (Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5)
Jaime Roldós Aguilera, President of Ecuador 1979-1981, and Omar Efraín Torrijos Herrera, leader of Panama from 1968-1981.
Roldós increased the minimum wage, reduced working hours to 40 a week, and signed the Charter of Conduct with Venezuela, Colombia and Peru, establishing the principles of universal justice and human rights and signalling that humans rights were more important than non-intervention. Washington took this as pretext for Soviet influence in the region and, shortly after Reagan’s inauguration, condemned what it called the “Roldós doctrine”. Meanwhile Roldós raised taxes on US hydrocarbon companies operating in Ecuador, threatening them with nationalisation if they didn’t ensure that the Ecuadorian people benefited from Ecuadorian resources.
Torrijos was considered the first Panamanian leader to represent the interests of the majority. He opened schools and expanded opportunities for the poor through social and economic reforms and land redistribution. He negotiated the Torrijos-Carter Treaties over the Panama Canal, transferring sovereignty from the US to Panama. Negotiations with Japanese business interests over a proposed larger sea-level canal did not meet with approval in Washington as Reagan took office in January 1981.
On May 24th 1981 Roldós died when his plane crashed into Huairapungo Mountain. Torrijos gathered his family shortly after to tell them he would probably be next. He dreamt of being on a plane hitting a mountainside. Two months later on July 30th Torrijos died when his plane crashed in the hills of Santa Marta.
