The Masters of the Universe are Assholes.

Stay classy, fuckers.

Chemical Pie. Why World, Why?

Chemical Apple Pie.

Apparently if you cook this filthy list in a pie tin it tastes like apple pie:

2 cups sugar

2 tsp. cream of tartar

1-3/4 cups water

Zest and 2 Tbsp. juice from 1 lemon

1 pkg. (14.1 oz.) ready-to-use refrigerated pie crust (2 crusts)

36 RITZ Crackers, coarsely broken (about 1-3/4 cups)

2 Tbsp. butter or margarine, cut into small pieces

1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon

I gather that this is a WWII or earlier recipe designed to taste like delicious fruity pie without actually containing any apples made prohibitively expensive due to rationing and shortages, but sweet fucking Jesus tits, why would you eat it now?

h/t to The Awl

We're fucked.

A Diebold voting machine can be rigged for 20 fucking dollars. Surprise, surprise. I wonder what President-elect Al Gore would have to say about that?

We may actually be doomed after all.

Actual economist says "job creators" destroy jobs too!

From an NPR interview with professor Justin Wolfers from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania:

WOLFERS: Small businesses, firms that are just starting out, a bunch of them succeed, and a bunch of them fail. If we only count the success, which would be the wrong thing to do, we'd say they create an enormous number of jobs. But, you know, how difficult it is to start a successful small business. And so sure, they're doing a lot of hiring in total. But they're also doing a lot of firing as well.

BLOCK: Interesting, too, that a lot of small businesses are so small that it's essentially one person. It's maybe an independent corporation, or someone who's self-employed could be a small business?

WOLFERS: Yeah. And so this is actually one of the parts where the rhetoric of small business, I think, really leads us astray. If you actually look at the data, what we mean by small businesses, what they actually are, they're things like real estate agents or my hairdresser. They're lawyers; they're doctors. You talk to these folks, do they have any interest in innovating or bringing new products to market or any of the things we think of as being the engine of economic growth? The answer is no. My dry cleaner likes to take my clothes and then give them to me four days later. Most small businesses don't even have ambitions of being the engines of economic growth, or the engines of jobs.

Gee, I thought that the all powerful John Galt like Job Creators™ could do no wrong and were the engine of the economy and that we should all bow down before them like the groveling serfs we really should be.

Or... maybe there is nothing inherently righteous in running a business. Oh, yeah. Business is about making money, not creating jobs.

Hypocritical Republicans!

From our house minority leader comes this fun graph:



I know. Assholes.

Breaking news: the United States is still a profoundly religious country despite all rational evidence for other belief systems.

From Crooks and Liars:

Some people profess to know with absolute certainty that our moral code was dictated by an all-powerful space ghost, who sculpted us out of magic clay, and transcribed on stone by a mountain-climbing desert-hobo who looked a great deal like Charlton Heston.

Whole article:
Thoughts on Troy Davis: Americans Confuse Morality with Religion.

Englishmen spend 4 years hungover. How long are they drunk?

From the Daily Mail: "The Average Briton Spends Four Years Hungover."

Researchers found we struggle with a splitting headache and nausea for 24 days a year, which equates to 1,452 days during an average adult lifetime.

The survey of 2,000 adults, by YorkTest, found while Saturday and Sunday were the most common 'sorehead' days, one in 10 said they were often hungover on a Monday.

Sweet christ. That is, conservatively, 5 percent of someone's life, in some cases, more like 7-8%. I get hangovers too, but not like that. Unless that's why I fucking hate the morning.

Also, it's just occurred to me that the average Briton must spend something like 8-10 years drunk. Sounds like a capital idea!

My future senator.

Muy bien!

The reason America is fat is becuase hardly anyone smokes anymore.

I knew it! Smoke 'em if you got 'em friends, and we'll all stay skinny together.

From the Atlantic:

The sidewalks are getting crowded. Today, about 30 percent of Americans are obese -- not fat, obese. That's a roughly 100 percent increase from just 25 years ago, according to a working paper released this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). As the country sheds manufacturing jobs and more Americans move from blue-collar positions to white, jobs are becoming more and more sedentary. With the economy in tatters, food stamp use (and, with it, the consumption of unhealthy foods) is on the rise. But there's another factor contributing to our weight gain that is often overlooked: Smoking.

Full article here.

The gospel of supply side Jesus.

Supply Side Jesus, The Comic Strip:


Click through to read in full. Its worth it. I originally saw it in Al Franken's (now Senator Al Franken, (D-Min) book Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them.

Journalism is not about fairness.

Excellent: http://www.alternet.org/media/152463/the_problem_of_media_idiocy%3A_why_do_msm_media_stars_pretend_to_be_stupid.

The men and women who inhabit the upper reaches of the US media (and pull down the multimillion-dollar salaries) appear to believe that to do their jobs properly, they must make themselves behave like idiots in order to be “fair” to the Republicans and their idiotic ideas.

Indeed, it seems as this is a hidden agreement somewhere. Assholes.

Dicks in church.

From It's Just a Ride comes the harrowing story of a man's cock showing itself whilst in church.

It's Just a Ride: How d'ya do??: To the fearless Massapequa, NY man that expressed such wanton perversion in an area church yesterday: I Salute You! From News12 Long Isla...

My, my. The Department of Defense is the largest employer in the world.

Give this a gander:



http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/09/employment

Dwarf Porn!

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/gordon-ramsays-dwarf-porn-double-percy-foster-dies-in-badger-den/story-e6frf7jx-1226137921668

AWEsome.

http://continuitygame.com/playcontinuity.html

Dancing!

Good to know.

What Burger King shakes are made of:

A typical artificial strawberry flavor, like the kind found in a Burger King strawberry milk shake, contains the following ingredients: amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl acetate, ethyl amyl ketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl heptylate, ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate, ethyl nitrate, ethyl propionate, ethyl valerate, heliotropin, hydroxyphenyl-2-butanone (10 percent solution in alcohol), a-ionone, isobutyl anthranilate, isobutyl butyrate, lemon essential oil, maltol, 4-methylacetophenone, methyl anthranilate, methyl benzoate, methyl cinnamate, methyl heptine carbonate, methyl naphthyl ketone, methyl salicylate, mint essential oil, neroli essential oil, nerolin, neryl isobutyrate, orris butter, phenethyl alcohol, rose, rum ether, g-undecalactone, vanillin, and solvent.

And you thought there were strawberries in that shit!

Surprise, surprise!

Or... not.

From Brad Plumer at WaPo: Study: Privatizing government doesn’t actually save money.

The theory that the federal government should outsource its operations to private firms usually rests on a simple premise: It saves money. But why should we believe it saves money? Often the argument is made by pointing to salaries for public- and private-sector employees in comparable jobs and noting that the private-sector employees make less. So outsourcing the task to the private worker should be cheaper, right? That’s the theory, at least. But a new study from the Project on Government Oversight suggests that this theory is quite wrong. In many cases, privatizing government turns out to be far more costly.

Golly gee. But this flies in the face of accepted knowledge and conventional wisdom! It is obvious that if we let private companies bid on contracts and then pay some poor bastard less to do the same thing that someone with a decent paying gov't job decent benefits used to do, that we'll all save boatloads of money, isn't it?

Well... no, not really. The issue with this brilliant scheme is that while the poor bastard is making less money than the gov't employee did, his boss/the owner of the private firm makes a veritable shitload of cash, making the total cost to the taxpayer in many cases far more than it was before privatization.

Calls for privatizing government services, at the local, state or federal levels are invariably just clever ways of enriching those who run private service contractors at the expense of the taxpayer. Privatized means for profit. We must not forget this.

Go Corporatist Capitalism!

From Ezra Klein:

Chart of the day: America’s surprisingly tiny small-business sector.

The one thing every American politician can agree on is that small businesses are a crucial driver of the U.S. economy. So it’s somewhat surprising to discover that, as John Schmitt of the Center on Economic and Policy Research points out, the United States actually has the smallest small-business sector among wealthy countries.

Click through for the chart. The constant cries of "Raising taxes on the wealthy will cripple small business and small business is the engine of our economy!" seem a bit hollow, don't they?

Phlogiston!

Hooray for the atavistic political climate we find ourselves in today. Rick Perry professes to believe that Social Security is a scam, when it is in fact one of the most stable and successful programs in the history if the United States. Paul Krugman notes that we have apparently abandoned reasoned economic theory in the current discussion of our country's fiscal woes. Krugman goes on to suggest that perhaps we will soon be reexamining other outdated hypotheses such as the following.

The Theory of Phlogiston:

The theory holds that all combustible resources contain phlogiston, a substance without colour, odour, taste, or mass that is liberated in burning. Once burned, the "dephlogisticated" substance was held to be in its "true" form, the calx.

"Phlogisticated" substances are those that contain phlogiston and are "dephlogisticated" when burned; "in general, substances that burned in air were said to be rich in phlogiston; the fact that combustion soon ceased in an enclosed space was taken as clear-cut evidence that air had the capacity to absorb only a definite amount of phlogiston. When air had become completely phlogisticated it would no longer serve to support combustion of any material, nor would a metal heated in it yield a calx; nor could phlogisticated air support life, for the role of air in respiration was to remove the phlogiston from the body."^[1]

Thus, phlogiston was described in a way basically the opposite of the real role of oxygen in combustion.

These are sad and interesting times we live in.

Drunken animals

From Sweden: Elk gets drunk and climbs a tree.

The IMF and the World Bank are a bunch of assholes.

Check this out: Food Emergency: How the World Bank and IMF Have Made African Famine Inevitable.

LOC has been telling us about this for years:

Now you know!

Everything you ever wanted to learn about the Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919.

Danny? There's brown stuff coming out of my mouth!

Rock!

Labor day = Union appreciation day.

Read this: The American Middle Class was Built by Labor Unions. And look at this graphic:
Did you know labor day is a holiday celebrating unions? Thought not.

h/t to thinkprogress.org

You're welcome.

The story of a man with an extremely large johnson: The Big Lebowski Porn Parody.