Fuck its silent in here.......

[Gilgamesh]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/is-missouri-about-to-secede-again/255980/

Did you know that Missouri is (again) thinking about seceding from the Union? Neither did I until I stumbled across SJR 45, a wince-worthy measure introduced earlier this year by Tea Partyist Brian Nieves, a Republican state senator whose anti-government rhetoric is strident even by today's grim standards. The proposed state constitutional amendment -- it would have to be approved by voters even if it makes it by the politicians -- is patently unconstitutional but remarkably candid in expressing the seditious level of dissent circulating through some state legislatures around the country.

Missouri didn't properly secede in the first place, correct?

[Bort]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/is-missouri-about-to-secede-again/255980/

Did you know that Missouri is (again) thinking about seceding from the Union? Neither did I until I stumbled across SJR 45, a wince-worthy measure introduced earlier this year by Tea Partyist Brian Nieves, a Republican state senator whose anti-government rhetoric is strident even by today's grim standards. The proposed state constitutional amendment -- it would have to be approved by voters even if it makes it by the politicians -- is patently unconstitutional but remarkably candid in expressing the seditious level of dissent circulating through some state legislatures around the country.

Missouri didn't properly secede in the first place, correct?

There's only one state that properly seceded. The rest were just copycats.

[CT III]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/is-missouri-about-to-secede-again/255980/

Did you know that Missouri is (again) thinking about seceding from the Union? Neither did I until I stumbled across SJR 45, a wince-worthy measure introduced earlier this year by Tea Partyist Brian Nieves, a Republican state senator whose anti-government rhetoric is strident even by today's grim standards. The proposed state constitutional amendment -- it would have to be approved by voters even if it makes it by the politicians -- is patently unconstitutional but remarkably candid in expressing the seditious level of dissent circulating through some state legislatures around the country.

Missouri didn't properly secede in the first place, correct?

There's only one state that properly seceded. The rest were just copycats.

South Carolina must be destroyed.

[Bort]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/is-missouri-about-to-secede-again/255980/

Did you know that Missouri is (again) thinking about seceding from the Union? Neither did I until I stumbled across SJR 45, a wince-worthy measure introduced earlier this year by Tea Partyist Brian Nieves, a Republican state senator whose anti-government rhetoric is strident even by today's grim standards. The proposed state constitutional amendment -- it would have to be approved by voters even if it makes it by the politicians -- is patently unconstitutional but remarkably candid in expressing the seditious level of dissent circulating through some state legislatures around the country.

Missouri didn't properly secede in the first place, correct?

There's only one state that properly seceded. The rest were just copycats.

South Carolina must be destroyed.

Better drunks than you have tried.

[Tinker to Evers to Chance]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/is-missouri-about-to-secede-again/255980/

Did you know that Missouri is (again) thinking about seceding from the Union? Neither did I until I stumbled across SJR 45, a wince-worthy measure introduced earlier this year by Tea Partyist Brian Nieves, a Republican state senator whose anti-government rhetoric is strident even by today's grim standards. The proposed state constitutional amendment -- it would have to be approved by voters even if it makes it by the politicians -- is patently unconstitutional but remarkably candid in expressing the seditious level of dissent circulating through some state legislatures around the country.

Missouri didn't properly secede in the first place, correct?

There's only one state that properly seceded. The rest were just copycats.

South Carolina must be destroyed.

Better drunks than you have tried.

That really isn't fair.  You're talking about one of the greatest drunks ever.  None of us can measure up.

[Tinker to Evers to Chance]

DPD.

[R-V]

Librul blogger Atrios has been compiling a list of the biggest media wankers of the last decade. Yesterday he revealed the winner - The Moustache of Understanding, Tom Friedman.

Friedman possesses all of the qualities that make a pundit truly wankerific. He fetishizes a false "centrism" which is basically whatever Tom Friedman likes, imagining the Friedman agenda is both incredibly popular in the country and lacking any support from our current politicians, when in fact the opposite is usually true.

Truly great wankers possess a kind of glib narcissism, the belief that everything is about them while simultaneously disavowing any responsibility for anything. The important thing about an issue is whether it proves Tom Friedman fucking right, but if it doesn't we can just move on to the next big thing that will prove Tom Friedman fucking right. If you advocate for wars that go a bit bad, well, it's not your fault. If only Tom Friedman had been in charge everything would have been great.

Such wankers are impervious to criticism because they're always doing battle with straw critics. They never remember what they said last week, and assume you won't either.

As if on queue, the Moustache's latest column is about...drafting Michael Bloomberg as a third party candidate to save our souls, because his cell phone dropped some calls, and an escalator was broken.

I had to catch a train in Washington last week. The paved street in the traffic circle around Union Station was in such poor condition that I felt as though I was on a roller coaster. I traveled on the Amtrak Acela, our sorry excuse for a fast train, on which I had so many dropped calls on my cellphone that you'd have thought I was on a remote desert island, not traveling from Washington to New York City. When I got back to Union Station, the escalator in the parking garage was broken. Maybe you've gotten used to all this and have stopped noticing. I haven't. Our country needs a renewal.

And that is why I still hope Michael Bloomberg will reconsider running for president as an independent candidate, if only to participate in the presidential debates and give our two-party system the shock it needs.

[Bort]

I sure hope hating Friedman is a bipartisan deal, because I think this is a great chance for both parties to reach across the aisles and slap the shit out of him.

[Brownie]

I sure hope hating Friedman is a bipartisan deal, because I think this is a great chance for both parties to reach across the aisles and slap the shit out of him.

It pretty much is. I think his PRC fetish (the government there really knows how to get things done), and his enjoying/aggravating travel note of the week like the one RV/Atrios pointed to are reasons I want to punch him in the mustache.

[Tinker to Evers to Chance]

I sure hope hating Friedman is a bipartisan deal, because I think this is a great chance for both parties to reach across the aisles and slap the shit out of him.

It pretty much is. I think his PRC fetish (the government there really knows how to get things done), and his enjoying/aggravating travel note of the week like the one RV/Atrios pointed to are reasons I want to punch him in the mustache.

Don't forget how every couple of months, he writes some masturbatory column about how we need a third party built around everything he believes in.

[morpheus]

I sure hope hating Friedman is a bipartisan deal, because I think this is a great chance for both parties to reach across the aisles and slap the shit out of him.

It is indeed.  Let's all join hands and celebrate his doucheness.

[J. Walter Weatherman]

I sure hope hating Friedman is a bipartisan deal, because I think this is a great chance for both parties to reach across the aisles and slap the shit out of him.

According to libertarian firebrand Radley Balko:

http://twitter.com/radleybalko/status/192388935056506881

If anything can unite left, right, and libertarian in unanimous, harmonious agreement, it is this. http://www.eschatonblog.com/2012/04/one-true-wanker-of-decade.html

[SKO]

I had to read The World is Flat my freshman year at Bradley. I can't imagine reading him on a weekly basis. Get bent, Friedman. Oh, and this guy too.

[R-V]

#Americans need to prepare themselves as the probability of our country uniting in bipartisan mocking of Tom Friedman continues to increase.

[J. Walter Weatherman]

Time to revisit a classic...

http://prospect.org/article/datsun-and-shoe-tree

I was changing planes at the new airport in Jakarta the other day, on the way to Stockholm from Vladivostok. Three young Bangladeshi boys sat in the passenger lounge, watching The Power Rangers on satellite TV. Their mother--garbed in the traditional sari--talked to her cousin, a migrant worker who sold German-designed Walkman knockoffs in Hong Kong, on a shiny new Samsung cell phone. Sitting to one side of them was a young Chinese émigré on his way to Toronto to work for a software company, and on the other a business-suited Rastafarian making a connection to Bratislava. Meanwhile, a couple of Tuareg tribesmen sat cross-legged in front of the ticket counter, cooking yams over a flaming mound of ticket stubs.

What's my point? I don't actually have one--but opening my columns with strings of clichéd cultural juxtapositions really cuts down my workload. You see, since the Cold War ended, we've gone from superpowers to spreadsheets, Pershings to Pentiums, the Berlin Wall to suburban sprawl, olive trees to Lexuses. Are you ready? Because the whole world is changing. Unless you are one of the eight-tenths of humanity who at this moment are either hungry, illiterate, or field-stripping an AK-47, in which case I'll get back to you in some future column.

Nothing is local anymore. It's all global because the Internet makes everything local, which is the same as everything being global, because nothing has to be local when everything's global. Especially the local. For instance, I was talking to the guy who cleaned the toilets in my suite at the Bombay Hilton, and he told me, "If only I had a computer! You see, toilet-scrubbing in Bombay is really a local business, but with a laptop and a modem, I could maybe branch out into e-commerce services."

He gets it. He knows how the world works. Other people who understand how the world works are my good friends Ehud Barak, Haydar Aliyev--you know Haydar, the president of Azerbaijan?--Vladimir Putin, Kofi Annan, my book club, Strobe, Jim Baker, and the rest. I'd quote one of these guys here, but everyone's over at the Trilateral Commission's annual in London. (Did I mention I'm a member?)

But there are still many people who just don't seem to get it--and not just those stupid hippies in Seattle and D.C. For instance, I was recently on an author tour in Botswana promoting the Bantu-language version of my new book, having just returned from Uzbekistan via Khartoum. They had built a huge stage for me in the stadium at Gaborone, set up with lots of audio equipment and what looked to be a drum kit. There was a crowd of thousands, and they all kept shouting "Thrill-her! Thrill-her!" and "Mike-all!", which I believe is Bantu for "We love Freetrademan." (As my friend Nelson Mandela always likes to say, those crazy Botswana!)

Anyway, I picked up a microphone and explained why global free trade would eventually make everyone better off, even if some people would suffer in the short term. But they just looked confused. Eventually some husky men in SECURITY T-shirts escorted me back to my limo. Such are the forces aligned against progress.

But that was months ago. And in this ultrafast, hyperlinked, World-Wide-Webbed world of ours, that may as well be decades. When the speed of computer processors doubles every 18 months, old ideas and ideologies can become obsolete in weeks, even days. For instance, I once made up something called "The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention," which held that no two countries that have a McDonald's franchise have ever gone to war. Then the USAF bombed Belgrade. Oops!

But that just proves my point; like an inefficient Korean chaebol, I was forced to come up with a new theory. It's called "The Post-1989 Western Democracy Theory of Conflict Prevention," which holds that no two industrialized democracies in Western Europe and North America have ever gone to war since the fall of the Berlin Wall. And if that one fails, there's always my "Post-Hapsburg Lichtenstein-Morocco Theory of Conflict Prevention," which holds that no two remnant European city-states have ever gone to war since the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Anyway, the world out there is changing fast. We have to change with it--whether we are ready or not. But imagine the world as it could be if we finally tore down those walls. We could have a computer in every home, an Internet connection in every classroom, a Big Mac in every stomach, tortured metaphors in every paragraph--and a brilliant, free-trading, celebrity foreign affairs columnist in every newspaper.