As you might know from the Facebooks, I got burgled last week on Easter. Burgled. Ransacked. Pillaged. Crunked. All I can do is try and recreate it in my mind the way you imagine someone else’s story. Completely insufficient details. Vague and blurry images of quick footed individuals (kids? trolls? terminators? baby Jesus?) kicking in a door, confronting the stillness of an unprotected house, adrenaline, real-time assessment of valuables, the thrill of the job culminating in the absurdist gang-banger defacing of a sofa with lemonade and coke…possibly urine? Back door and refrigerator left open, an inexplicable pile of items resting by the fence in the backyard: guitar, korg, two pairs of jeans, two cans of frozen apple juice concentrate. The aftermath is like my own personal natural disaster.
The very next night I was confronted by a hooded man as I rode my bike up to a friends gathering, on the other side of Grant Park. I ignored the sketchy dude who minutes later pulled a gun and grabbed two girls purses.
Today I was pulled over for running a stop sign outside my fucking house. Simply on the way to buy a new front door, to better secure myself against the wildlife that the Atlanta police obviously cannot control. The police officer didn’t see the irony in my situation for reasons that probably made her a police officer. Atlanta has a serious crime problem, one that is obvious and undeniable to anyone living in the city limits. It is far worse than it was a year ago, or two years ago. It is quickly spiraling out of control. I don’t know what the wisest course of action is. Seems that Atlantans Together Against Crime is a start, and will at least draw media attention. Whispered words from an officer put both the mayor and the police chief to blame, for what it’s worth.
Dude, if you haven’t checked out the latest Mastodon masterpiece, Crack the Skye, then you needs to get a checkin’…this shit is EPIC. If you don’t like metal than beat it, pussy. (Apologies for the MTV embed with 15 sec commercial, couldn’t find it without.)
One would think that shiny interwebs technology would have created a revolution in event calendaring technology to some degree. But even with sites like upcoming.org, so many clubs (most!) fail to offer their show listings as some sort of subscribable feed, even something as simple as an RSS feed on their website. 529, the latest greatest addition to the EATL club scene has a website with just what you need: a google calendar feed of events. Why all clubs don’t do this is beyond me. It’s called facilitating business. Help me get to your club to see music and drink drinks. Help me help you make money!
As an advocate of disaster tourism, culture hacking, and the special olympics, I fully support the heckling and harassment of the AIG’s high echelon criminals, and the free market blowback rage that is currently threatening their lives. Relax, right? All laissez-faire economists should realize this is simply how the market corrects itself. Fuck with the people’s money and the people fuck you back. Eventually. We NEED to send this message, Godfather style. I’m talking horse head in the bed, ears and fingers of loved ones in the mail, flaming piles of shit on the doorstep, whatever. All of it.
A message to AIG from the Godfather:
On a side note it kills me how the media is labeling all of this public outrage as some sort of “populist” revolt. Since when has demanding accountability become synonymous with populism?
I have latched on to the GOP-are-statist-hypocrites meme and I am not letting go. I fucking love it when Libertarians rip on the GOP! If the Republitards were in power right now we would have a similarly sized stimulus package with a different name. Something like, “Heterosexuals, Guns n’ Freedom- Why Do You Hate America Act?”
Under Bush and a Republican Congress we had an explosion of growth on all fronts: spending that put Lyndon Johnson to shame, huge deficits and a doubling of the national debt, corporate bailouts, further centralization of education, protectionism, expansion of Medicare, increased regulation, undeclared wars, civil-liberties violations and other unchecked executive power, and more. Bush did not veto a single spending bill in eight years. His cutting of tax rates in 2001 and 2003 has to be judged in the context of growing spending. Milton Friedman pointed out that the level of spending, not taxation, is the truer gauge of the government burden. The money has to come from somewhere. Removing it from the economy through borrowing is as economically damaging as taxation — more so when you figure that the government will perpetrate inflation to manage the debt.
That was bad enough, but the Republicans added rank hypocrisy to the mix by claiming to favor free markets.
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