Wednesday, November 30, 2011

a hundred dollars used to be more than enough


crusty the clown acts up

jezza gets cranky and pisses people off again.  watching the clip, though, he did seem to be mugging quite a bit, going for the edgy quip but not spewing any real venom.  make no mistake, jeremy clarkson is a pampered tory cock--austerity isn't gonna hurt him cuz he's a millionaire and won't depend on disappearing job or pension to get by--and would fit in well with the pathetic galtian douchenozzles on the serotta forum, but he's basically a clown who mostly just wants attention.

poo-slinging monkeys soil themselves over health care

the sad-sack circle jerk that is the serotta forum takes on the health insurance crisis in the united states and naturally the shit-flinging assholes come out in force to smear their greasy filth all over everything in defence of disinformation, the 1%, and their captive ass lickers.  where else other than the that place can you get such a vigorous fluffing of the dumbest stuff on the planet by people who inherited some money from their father?  well, lots of places, for sure, but not many of those places are as ugly and sick as that shithole.  in truth, the serotta forum is a disgusting symbol for all that is evil in america; the decent folks either have no guts or no interest and the ignorant and evil fucktards spew their crap unchallenged.

maybe those dickheads don't know it, but the canadian health system is in distress because of the conservatives failure to properly fund it.  i don't believe any of those bullshit stories about people who would have died of cancer unless they went to the united states for treatment.  these people are lying.  the canadian system has better outcomes, longer lives, and better quality of life for way less money than the united states spends, so fuck those lying assholes.  the health systems in the united states that have the best outcomes for the least money are medicare, which is single payer, and the veterans administration, which is essentially national health.  i am sickened that too many of my brothers and sisters are too fucking stupid to understand how fucked up our health care system is, and i am disgusted by the sort of evil pampered cocksuckers that you find polluting places like the serotta forum.

molly

watch the night crash down around their ears

reading lee papa's thoughts today, i'm not sure he gets it, atmo.  yes, the assault on the occupy camps was inevitable--and the winter would have been very, very difficult out there--but the assaults did not have to be so completely successful.  certainly a larger, more vigorous movement would have put up more of an obstacle to such tactics.  and yes, the winter is indeed the time to educate, train and organize the movement, but if spring comes and there is not a huge campaign to reoccupy the cities where they were evicted in order to give the movement a public face--and if that occupation is not successful--the movement is dead.  occupy wall street needs to be bigger, stronger and faster in the spring, the six million dollar protest.  i'm not sure if they see that.  i guess we'll find out.

i work my way backwards using cynicism

nifty article about the occupy wall street movement by stanley w. rogouski on his blog, which i originally saw on the counterpunch site.  much is excellent here, not the least of which is referring to chris hedges as a dissident journalist.  even better though, is the emphasis on the true power of the occupy movement in general: if they can begin to dismantle the arbitrary and artificial divisions erected between the individuals who comprise the 99% of america in the interest of preventing any potential threat to the hegemony of the 1% oligarchy, the movement will indeed be able to overwhelm the scope of police state violence and be the catalyst for legitimate change in the society.

mmmm...deer sausage

wait, what? l. ron's got a boat?

some things are just not right.  this might be a smallish one, but, still.  fuckin' l. ron hubbard's head in a jar drives a boat around to uninhabited islands and does all sorts of weird shit to mentally imbalanced young women dressed up as xenu's harim?  freeking sick, man.  that makes bill o'reilly's disgusting sexual perversion seem almost wholesome.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

landfall

classic bike racing goodness from the hampsten hegemony

the hampsten bikes blog talks up the new 7-11 book and has a link to an old road bike action piece about the old-timey racing bikes they used.  pretty much catnip for the historically-minded bike dweeb.

hermentum ain't no bubba

hermain cain is a thin-skinned pussy.  bill clinton, shameless hypocrite and hyper-evolved venereal disease vector, would never have let these slatterns derail his bubba-express.  the cain-train is the little engine that couldn't.  hermentum sure needs some kind of boost about now; maybe rush limbaugh will let hermentum break into his personal stash.

a new low for larry o

is there anything more worthless and vapid than lawrence o'donnell and thomas friedman on the tee vee at the same time?  we would be better edified listening to a couple of christmas cacti deconstruct finnegans wake.

neverneverno

that robot bitch

siri is not a nice robot.  who knew?  makes those shitty android phones look better, i guess.

Monday, November 28, 2011

the next shoe drop in los angeles and philadelphia

the next shoe to drop in los angeles and philadelphia could be very interesting.  non-violent protests that refuse to disperse have an enormous strength, and the duty of police violence is to make the protesters too frightened to understand their power.  instead of the highly likely violence, i would be thrilled to see a crack form in the concerted effort to destroy the movement if one of the mayors embraces the legality and message of the protest.  that's not likely, however, and the occupy movement will instead probably gain another historic victory only after the murder of one of the protesters by the police state.

black rose

walker recall

i have a bad feeling about the walker recall effort.  it would be a great thing for america to get that skeevy creep out of office--and wonderfully entertaining to watch all those koch-sucking sycophants squirming under the weight of failure--but i can see the obama campaign doing all it can to suck the wind out of it in some twisted idea of unity or some such bullshit.  really, if obama had one or more balls and a shred of decency, he'd be doing ads for those people encouraging every good gods-fearing american to take back our liberty and recall that fuckface bastard scott walker, but that ain't gonna happen.  if the recall fails to take off it could make it difficult for all the other useful campaigns out there.  wisconsin is not high on santa's list after they so ostentatiously failed to dispatch one more state senator in the last recall.

never a good reason for eddie vedder

jesus, watt, you broke up firehose cause you couldn't stand edfromohio, but eddie vedder and evan dando? oh, the humanity.

billy ray cyrus is the worst person who ever lived

his no-talent mutant spawn has killed the occupy movement.  don't thank her for it, you fucking moron.

who cares what andrew sullivan says?

and why did anyone ever listen to that fucking chump?  kicking sullivan seems a little too easy.  he's an old tory queen who was responsible for publishing scum-guzzling racist charles murray and loathsome hustler and liar betsy mccaughey, so really fuck him.  just ignore him and leave him to writhe onanisticly in his own fetid offal.

pete dupont for president

in the wake of the hilarious union-leader endorsement of newt gingrich, the local news anchor-clown was practically snickering tonight reporting on it, throwing in the amazingly heinous track record of the dickheads on the aforementioned editorial board.

since when is kevin drum a major progressive?

sure he writes for mother jones, but that's not the same as mother jones.  he never was more than a comfortable, democratic-establishment, village-idiot wannabe.  it might pay pretty well, but it in no way makes you a progressive, a liberal or anything but a fifth-tier david broder.

barney bids adieu

everyone's favorite purple dinosaur congressman, barney frank, says bye-bye to congress after a real long time.  frank's chief asset is his wise-ass persona, so without frank and anthony's wiener, we will have openings for reliably rock-ribbed centrist democratic congress critters with an ounce or two of personality and disdain for bill o'reilly.  i vote for grayson.


syracuse is a catholic school, too.

what is the matter with these people?  these horrible child molesting fuckers are gonna give hell a bad name.  it's starting to look like the pennsyltucky vatican is everywhere.

we miss you hermentum

hermentum, newt, edwards, bubba, the professor and maryann.  they're all scum.

Sunday, November 27, 2011

political song for rick perry to sing back in texas

art laffer is an idiot

sure, you know it, duncan black knows it, and i know it, too, but many of our brothers and sisters are either misinformed or fucking morons.  once we start digging a new circle in hell for art laffer and his followers, it is gonna fill up pretty quick.

duncan black is shrill

atrios is onto a bigger point that has not really broken into our wider political consciousness.  this long-term economic crisis is destroying lives.  not the lives of the 1% and their mindless servants certainly, but many others are not similarly blessed with secure, high-paying jobs and the best health care (lots of) money can buy.

the passion of mittens

no sane person could hold out any hope for a douche like mittens who is little more than a nominally less-worthless al gore, but when you see these fuckheads so disheartened by the romney nomination, perhaps there is room for optimism.  romney got lucky that perry was even more of an idiot than bush, but his last mission will be the hardest for him since he has never had any visible personality or intelligence.  despite the teabagger nitwits who will never support him, romney will have a chance against obama.  if he governs without the most extreme of the teabaggers and manages to co-opt the obama appartatchiks, america will be better off because it will be the end of the democratic party as we know it, while the mostly hopeless romney policies will be little different than the horrible ones under obama.

spin art

Saturday, November 26, 2011

obama's useless idiots

one of the biggest problems we as americans face in our politics is the phalanx of utterly useless obama apologists who waste a huge amount of space in the hopeless, hard-right center of the democratic party establishment.  these imbeciles are legion and serve no purpose except to battle mindlessly against truth and progress on behalf of the 1% and barack obama's political career.  very simply, they are the canon fodder of the class war, and they serve the interests of our unitary government as marginally more intelligent teabaggers.  while all of them share the characteristics of median-at-best intelligence and analytical skills, blind allegiance to conventional wisdom, and fanatic loyalty to their master, one of the most unsavory of these obama fluffers is imani gandy, the world's worst--and now unemployed--lawyer.  (say what you want about lawyers, but at least her employers were smart enough to can her sorry ass after they found out just how fucking dumb she was!)  i understand hero worship and the comfort of not having to think for yourself, but she is just so offensively stupid and annoyingly vapid; she embodies perhaps the worst of obama's failures.  she will refuse to acknowledge facts or logic or the sunrise if it might possibly diminish obama's politcal shine.  at this point, nobody knows for sure what role the federal government played in the occupy crackdown, if obama was directly complicit, or if they played any official role at all, but when you compare fools like gandy to proper journalists like dave lindorff and alexander cockburn, you see just how diseased our politics is.  who will be doing the actual reporting?  what sort of folks will follow the evidence where ever it leads?  who will admit a truth that may cast aspersions on barack obama?  not gandy and her fellow travelers, that's for sure.  at best, assholes like gandy and josh marshall will be conscripted into the vast governing relatively-moderate right-wing party of president romney after he dispatches the teabagging dipshits, which will allow the (few) decent and left-of-center democrats to begin to build a new and useful party of the left in america.  the gods know full well we don't need contemptible bastards like gandy and her ilk fucking up the important work that needs to be done.

just the dos of us

pink nagasawa

yowza.  in these pictures, the pink looks a bit brighter than the usual nagasawa pink.  i like this color as much as the purple metallic that is so so lovely.  i guess it's not really a nagasawa unless it has orange decals and yellow paint fill.  if only you could still get these in the states...




go wisconsin

take out those assholes from the pennsyltucky vatican today and recall scott walker tomorrow!!

Friday, November 25, 2011

political song for elmo to sing

a sad sad muppet

seeing disney associated with the muppets and that stupid new movie is really fucking sad.  what exactly did disney ever do except buy off other people's work and rip off some public-domain classics--other than be an asshole nazi and anti-semite?  very sad that every scrap of children's entertainment probably will have a disney logo any day now.

michael berube: the apologete of the pennsyltucky vatican

in the spirit of the season, alexander cockburn mercilessly shreds the paterno family professor of literature at the pennsyltucky vatican over his love of war and support for the glorious american empire and her lovely lovely oil.  sweet jesus.  more cockburn--and gibbs--and less berube and his child-raping patrons please.

over oversized lugs and the women who love them

as someone whose latest custom steel frame was built with columbus sp tubing, perhaps i am not the intended client-base for the newish over-oversized lugs and tubing for road bikes.  i am however more curious than i should be.  richard sachs lists the lugs and fd braze-on but no word on tubes or fork crown that i can find.  llewellyn seems to have been on this for a while, but he couldn't be any farther away unless he starts building frames on the moon.  not being a framebuilder, i don't really know how much variety of tubing there really is for these frames and how much tuning can be done.  i would think that even the lightest gauges would be overkill on smaller frames, but i don't know first hand.  i'm also not sure who's done enough of these frames to know the ins 'n outs--probably australia, again, but still wicked far.  is the point light weight or extra rigidity?  are there ever going to be matching fork crowns and enough tubing choices to make it worthwhile?  we may never know the answers to these questions,  but tune in next time for another exciting episode of bullshit or not?

what's the matter with kansas, still

get this girl a scholarship!  let's hope this girl gets herself outa' kansas if she wants.  some of our over-priced selective and not-so-selective private universities on the east coast would benefit from a wise-ass kansas girl.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

political song for saggy old newt gingrich to sing

something in the water




bite me, pilgrim

political song for linda katehi to sing

history says, there's always got to be a fall guy

i guess this should only elicit an ironic no shit, but it does tell you just how far we have to go before we root out the all the toady scum at all levels of society that fight against liberty and fairness every day on behalf of the 1%.  of course, seeing linda katehi forced to resign would be a fine thing, but it's really only one small step for mankind.

the empire strikes back, again

less money for people and more money for oil companies, that's the true mission of our imperial adventure in libya.  now libya has traded one set of problems for a whole new set, courtesy of freedom bombs and oil companies, and every one of these insights into the true aims of american imperial activity also tells us important stories about the workings of the oligarchy here at home.  each and every dollar that western oil companies can liberate from the domestic economy in libya will be delivered to the economy of the 1%; regard for libyan health, literacy, education and domestic stability does not enter into the equation.  in the same way, the goal of radical wealth redistribution to the top 1% in the united states will continue without pause if the current officials in both major parties remain in office.  far from being a method of defending some inane concept of liberty or freedom, our imperial wars are only waged to capture more of the world's wealth resources on behalf of the oligarchy.  maybe some of our more honorable politicians should start acknowledging this reality and begin the education of the american people at large.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

wild cards

the new wild card thing could be a good thing in baseball.  those 1-game playoffs are going to be a nightmare.  winning the division is gonna be a hell of a lot more important now, and that should make it a little more interesting in at least a few of the divisions during the last weeks.  so, not bad.  people are scared of change, but unless they go all the way back to pennant and world series only--and of course they never will--this should liven it up a bit.

mic check


ignore the human sacrifice

just look at this scary fucking shit and you'll get a thousand reasons to not do anything these jerkoffs tell you.  the 'about the author' on this nonsense is especially rich.  i'm pretty sure any asshole this stupid is beyond any meaningful redemption.

better at free throws than chris dudley, too

john kitzhaber not only makes a better governor than irredeemable fuckwad chris dudley could ever hope to, but i bet he can make a free throw occasionally as well.

digby hearts lil luke russert

digby continues to be the world's finest resource for the always crucial resource: righteous pissing all over luke russert. dylan ratigan is a fatuous turd himself, so he and russert get along fine, just fine.

fukushima mon amie

the fukushima disaster may have disappeared from the discourse and the imagination in most of the united states, but the whole situation will defy easy solutions for many years.  too cheap to meter, indeed, asshole.

jeannie longo's freedom toast

i have no idea if longo is 100% clean or doped to the gills or just tweaked, but she's still out there getting it done somehow.  no amount of doping makes the pedals turn on their own.  she's one of the world's truly remarkable athletes.

with prostitutes skilled in the arts

hahahahahaha.  sarah palin isn't even a very good whore.  you would never see the more skilled whores like hannity or o'reilly doing anything to betray roger ailes or rupert murdoch.  those cheap sluts would never spit out anything that belonged to ailes or murdoch on another john's show.  palin clearly can't do anything right.  she'll be back on the corner after fox news dumps her onto the street.

t-bowed

elway, successful quaterback, reactionary douchebag and not the father of eric cartman, tries to be reasonable about tim tebow, but he can't bring himself to embrace the idea of a quarterback who can't throw a football.  plus, i'd imagine that tebow is so fucking annoying and ignorant that even a tool like elway can't stomach him.  maybe jesus will order tebow to change positions.

the ballad of sally

Monday, November 21, 2011

cognitive dissonance @ yahoo news

yahoo news is kinda sorta trying to get to the big picture about spending cuts and austerity in a piece about impending cuts in the wake of the super committee, but it ain't easy for 'em.  they can't quite go all the way in reporting the bigger picture, but the effort has gotta be worth something.  the conversation about spending and economic activity is certainly necessary and valuable; the comments on that story show just how fucking stupid so many of our brothers and sisters really are.  cutting off unemployment and cutting social security payments is incredibly foolish given our current situation; any direct payments to citizens, especially those without other income, are fantastic stimulus to the local, ground-level economy, so continuing unemployment benefits and other transfer payments should be lauded and used as a primary economic stimulus policy by both parties.  that, of course, is impossible when most of our elected officials are walking cockbags and koch-suckers, but it doesn't change the reality of the situation.  atrios's helicopter drop schtick is not completely a joke.

grove innovations x frame. also, too.

unlike this guy, i would love to have a grove innovations x frame.  it is wicked wicked and all business for the pennsylvania/new york state/new england type of trail riding.  they look great out on the trails; i used to see two of them regularly way back when (when i was bopping around on the world famous diamond back apex).  really, i think a tweaked and updated--maybe with a lefty up front--x frame would be a fantastic modern frame, and like some other things a real refreshing break from the same old bullshit.


political song for ali khamenei to sing

time machine time share

this guy might be willing to pony up for a time share of a tardis.

the big stick

the coup in honduras is one of the innumerable shameful failures of obama's hope and change promises that tends to get lost among the wars and the lifeless economy and the popular uprising, but it's still an ongoing tragedy for the people suffering through our destructive policy down there.  good job, mr. president.

a newt has a tiny brain

every newt has a tiny brain.  this cockhead is what happens to pass for an idea-man amongst the republicans.  it's great.  privatizing social security.  gingrich couldn't be any more of a cheap pandering slut if he was volunteering to be the center of attention at lloyd blankfein and jamie dimon's bukkake christmas party.

sooper dooper

the super committee was a bullshit exercise from the start, and its failure is a good thing in every way.  it won't matter much in the long run because obama and most of the democrats and republicans in congress are on the same page and are hell bent on fucking things up with tax cuts and welfare money for the 1% paid for with tax increases and cuts for the 99%, but now at least we will get a smidge more transparency and accountability.

yeti ultimate. why not?

as long as i'm jonesing for an off road toad or an eastern woods, why don't i just go all-in with obscure mountain bike action-style play bikes and lust after a yeti ultimate.  i mean, getting the time machine to work the first time is probably the hardest part, so once you're cool, you can just wind up and go.

jake plummer gets it, atmo

pretty reasonable jake plummer on tebow and his faux-christian bullshit.  plummer strikes a good tone in support of the broncos and whatever gets them a win, while his tebow slam is nicely restrained, considering.

there's no need for awful pop music

when we can have fantastic tunes like this.

bernie sanders is not all bad

senator bernie sanders is not all bad, i guess.  he is one of the better senators we have, though that is not at all a compliment.  in reality, he's just the sort of center-left politician who would be barely tolerated in a true left of center major party, but compared to what we have now he looks like eugene v. debs.

by the way, nobody should ever be within a thousand meters of wolf 'the voice of israel' blitzer without mentioning the magic words jerusalem post.

norman finkelstein is an american treasure.

trouble down south

spain is the fourth-largest economy in the eurozone, and they are in deep trouble with their moribund economy and horrendous unemployment problems.  they've now traded obama-esque corporatist incompetence for some right-wing culture war bullshit generously ladled all over the top of another corporatist jerkoff by that cocksucker the popenfurher and their very own native backward-ass, woman-hating teabagger types.  the austerity cuts and following economic collapse are coming here soon, and we can expect the same sort of political results and absolute failure to address the actual problems as the parties rise and fall in each subsequent election when they are blamed for ongoing economic crisises.

slightly south of the border

if this sort of shit had happened to the unfortunate wives of bush and cheney, fox news would have michelle malkin and black ann coulter on the air 24 hours a day screaming for drone attacks and summary executions.

josh marshall: will be another dim bulb on fox soon

tpm's josh marshall is not exactly a deep thinker.  his analysis is usually simplistic and kneejerk beltway conventional wisdom compatible nonsense; he's desperate to get his top-level village idiot credentials, and like a good village idiot, he's almost always wrong.  his belief that the violence against the occupy movement is somehow a threat to the greater message is asinine.  the unfortunate reality is that any publicity is good publicity and the mounting violence will aid in forcing the message of economic and social inequality into our political and cultural discourse.  distrust of the police and fear of police violence are important touchstones for many of the 99%, and the majority of the currently politically-active americans are not as easily distracted as josh marshall would like.  common experience is a powerful educator and motivator; it will help the 99% move together.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

off road toad

are they really doing these?  the website hasn't been updated in a while.  that's kinda fucked up if in reality they are a going concern.  jesus, those top tubes are short, though.  it ain't 1991 anymore.  wonder if they did/do custom?  wonder if they have a couple of columbus max off road tube sets around?  any off road toad would be so much more fun and way fucking cooler than shitty no-name chinese carbon fiber with a fancy paint job.  if you really can get an off road toad and eastern woods research again during america's twilight, that's an unexpected treat.

erin burnett

the biggest embarrassment for williams college since that vile walking fuckstick the wannabe shah of iran.

the rubber duck revolution has been televised

see, punk's not dead, motherfrakkers.

a giant stirs to swat a fly that's lost its best defense

winning isn't easy.  and this is something that's not going to end well in the short term.  the occupy movement is going to face increased violence as it, along with the ideas it embodies, gains cultural significance.  the fear of the 1% was clear in the plaintive cries of the bill o'reillys and sean hannitys that the movement was finished.  their masters never believed it, even if their mascots were too shallow and incompetent to understand reality, so everyone can expect more beatings and tasers and pepper spray and mass arrests.  eventually, some idiot will kill a hippie or an old woman or a veteran or a retired cop, and then it's gonna get weird.  and whether that weird is gloriously transformative or violently destructive is something we can't know till it's happening, so...

there's nothing of magic in this shining pearl

the cracks are beginning to show.  this is not going to end well.  most days it appears the best we can hope for is that we manage to crumble relatively peacefully and not take the rest of the world with us, but you don't build a bigger military than the rest of the world combined without using it all before you disappear.  we will fuck everyone else rather than die gently.

punk's not dead

wait, what?  oh, yes it is.

columbus max off road

this might be the holy grail of orphaned oval steel mountain bike tubesets.  supposedly kona used more or less max off road tubing for a few years in mid-late 90s--that's the 1990s, y'all--on their explosif frames.  those were decent bikes; i liked them a lot even though the construction quality was sometimes a little rough.  that sort of thing stands out on a simple hardtail frame with small-diameter tubing; on those aluminum fs frames, the sketchy welding didn't show as readily, and there was so much of it that you lost your will to critique the joinery.  serotta also did what may or may not have been an almost completely max off road frame, the tmax.  much better construction, but the design was a bit too old-fashioned for serious technical trail riding.  regardless, i'd like to ride a really nice, modern custom frame made with the max off road stuff...never gonna happen, though.


she's got a hornet's heart


eddy merckx corsa extra max

that's the one i'd get if i had a time machine.  eddy merckx corsa extra max--not mx leader--in my preferred (custom) size.  of all the long long ago max frames, that's the one.  this pictured example is perfect in every way: no ergo loops, proper horizontal dropouts, threaded headset, better fork crown than tommasini.  fantastic.


hatchlings

apparently this is a popular time of year for tots to get hatched.

Friday, November 18, 2011

everyone loves a lovely bicycle!

nice bike blog here called lovely bicycle!  she has lots of info about commuter bikes, 3-speeds, classic frames, and cats with intelligent-but-not-overbearing writing and excellent photographs.  she took inspiration from sheldon brown, always a good thing for an easy-going bike geek, and reading her prose for a while you also feel the wavelets of grant petersen's ambient influence in the gentle zeitgeist.  overall, a fine job with none of the landmines of disagreement and hate you often find in certain less-reputable warrens on the interwebs, even bicycle ones!

tucker carlson's pitiful genetic shortcomings

tucker carlson, who himself appears to be a santorum baby sired by rich lowry on an especially dim-witted lizard or amphibian, seeds a pathetic lineage on the embarrassing shit stain he calls a website.  (warning: follow link and your brain begins to dissolve unless you are sufficiently inoculated, i.e. blind drunk.)  the story of the millionaires is especially sad but in a giggly schadenfreude way because even michelle fields should have known just how inane her question sounded as well as how puerile she looked in the clip, but she obviously did not and babbled on while the camera refused to show her any pity--she could not have looked any more inappropriate and out of place if she had been drawing pictures of bunnies on the walls with her own fresh excrement.  perhaps she should not be blamed however because she is apparently pretty much hopeless.  she works for the vile fuckwad carlson.  and she did after all go to pepperdine university which is little better than a motorcycle mechanics school whose sole existence depends on stealing student loan money.  she also joined the hilariously wrong-headed students for liberty--which started as a workshop for special needs children funded by the koch brothers.  now, i'm sure she's very nice, and a lovely young woman, though stunningly unintelligent, criminally uneducated, and abhorrently spoiled and unsophisticated, and none of that excuses her in the slightest for also being an absolute fucktard.




political song for einstein's ghost to sing


santorum baby, just in case

just in case the newt's bloated-hindenburg campaign crashes and burns early, and we get another one of these douchenozzles spurting up, remember exactly what a santorum baby is.

follow the blue arrows to the nearest suicide booth

if you're sure you have exact change and need more incentive to find blissful silence and final peace in a suicide booth, click through on this gem and read some of the teabagger-jesus-freak-asshole-esque comments.  some of them are snarky parody, but given the state of our nation, i'm sure more than a few of those dumb fuckers are serious.  it's highly unlikely we as a species will ever extricate our heads from our asses, and the suicide booth will rank as our greatest innovation.

spin up the jump engines

maybe we will get the fuck outa' this dump someday.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

toss one back

clearly, they need more pills

turdblossom gets flattened

too funny.  rove is jerkoff and a thin-skinned little piggy.  every time he bobs up, i can't help but think he's the next jerry sandusky we need to get off the street.

nu skin: a mormon amway

speaking of that chicken-fucker dirtbag jason chaffetz, his former employer, nu skin, is a sleazy multi-level marketing pyramid scam.  these are the sort of useless assholes that populate our government.  no wonder we can't ever seem to find anybody in washington who isn't 100% dipshit.

barack obama must be touched by an angel

watching barack obama operate and essentially play mini-hoover during our economic crisis, you cannot help to notice how fortunate he is to have no credible adversaries in the other party.  for now, obama seems blessed by the clown-car brigade in congress.  every time darrell issa, jeff sessions, jim demint, joe barton, jason chaffetz and their brethren soil themselves on the tee vee, obama looks like thomas fucking jefferson.

bill o'reilly is always wrong

i'm sure o'reilly didn't write a word of this shitty joke book, but he did put his name on it to make a quick buck.  still, it is quite sad that he his such a slacker that he can't even hire a chimp to do a basic fact-check on the reject who actually composed the fucking thing.

turkey day is coming

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

send in the army to deal some smack

dave lindorff shines some light into the cracks of the federal role in the occupy crackdown.  this shit is gonna be ruh-roh bad for obama next year.  if the election is dangerously close, that not-insignificant group of left-ish or liberal-ish voters who have drawn a line in their own little sandbox and just will not vote for obama due to one or another of the myriad obscenities he has promulgated could be the decider.

there are mysteries like the birds and the bees, as old as the sun

there are some things i just don't understand, and i'm not talking no-name chinese carbon frames with fancy paintjobs.  i'm talking about things like this...

atrocity that never goes away. none shall slumber or sleep.

this is america.  it always was. and it always will be.  probably.  the only hope of progress is constant struggle for freedom everywhere.  eventually enough of the 99% will see that the time has come to make a stand.  maybe.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

there were rumors he was into field hockey players

'press hard. you are making 3 copies.' newt comedy gold

the kicking machine might just be building a head of steam.  there is so much fun shit about gingrich that we will miss out on most of it if newt doesn't take his bullshit act all the way to the convention.  he has been responsible for so much harebrained babble of the years, in addition to his rancid hypocrisy and general stupidity, that we will probably only have time for a medley of his greatest hits no matter how long it goes.

will this super-committee nonsense be the end of obama?

unfortunately, probably not, but when the democrats give the republicans everything and agree to cuts to the programs that benefit the most vulnerable americans on the orders of obama, it does march us one step closer to president romney.

up close and personal with the police state

lee papa, aka you know who, has some interesting man-on-the-scene observations from zuccotti park, including a personal run-in with the police state in action.

political song for michael bloomberg to sing

freedom is always the enemy of power

the coordinated policy of violence against the occupy movement should not have been any surprise to anyone.  violence is always the favored tool of power against any citizens who attempt to exercise their rights beyond the limits delineated by ruling power.  true freedom is anathema to oligarchy.  the 1%, the elite power structure in the united states, are not at all interested in the exercise of freedom, constitutional or otherwise, beyond their own narrow interests and agenda.  any attempt to broaden the scope of the interests or agenda of the economy, as the 99% and occupy movement are doing, will be met with the most stringent resistance, up to and including deadly violence and the full weight of the corrupt criminal justice system.  as has been reported, the full force of every level of goverment will fight on behalf of the oligarchy.  no one can possibly be surprised.  this is the nature and the purpose of oligarchy.

the counterpunch piece by alan nasser presents an excellent background on the consolidation of oligarchical power and its projection.  it really is a short history of the development of the modern american state, diseased and corrupted as it is, and it illuminates the one possible path left that leads out of our current wilderness.  only if we break the oligarchy, the machine that is corrupting our entire planet, will we have any hope of repairing the hope of freedom and progress in our economy and our society and our planet.  the 99% and occupy movement understand that.  so do the bad guys.

the hellhole that is the pennsyltucky vatican

the more you hear about the twisted reality of the pennsyltucky vatican, the more it feels like an especially creepy david lynch movie re-edited into a houseswives-style 'reality' show.  jesus fucking christ, the lawyer is a child rapist, too?  that cannot be real.  it's just too fucking much.  perhaps this whole sad episode is little more than a tactic by some evil-doers to make alabama seem not so bad.

bicycle generators for all

according to the news sources, the occupy wall street camp lost their bicycle generators in the raid last night, along with their books and lots of other stuff.  the bike generators are a wicked good idea, so let's hope they get tons of support to rebuild whatever they need and also spread that techonology far and wide.

the battles we fought were long and hard

the occupy movement has won a significant victory in forcing that repulsive troglodyte bloomberg to mount a military assault on their encampment in manhattan.  it seemed that the movement may have been losing focus and its hold on the dialogue in and around our politics, but now they have the advantage once again thanks to that short-sighted little mayoral troll.  the optics are fantastic, so go back to zuccotti park, and every other location that has been forbidden across the country, in order to force the police to stage crackdown after crackdown.  media blackouts, assault weapons, mass arrests are all tools of anti-democratic governments, so the occupy movement should force the various municipalities into very nasty public relations fuck-ups as often as they can.  show the government for what it is over and over and eventually even some of rock-headed idiots across america will get the point.  this is not the america they think it is.  in reality it's china.  it's egypt.  it's libya.  it's palestine.  show that.  make the bad guys show their colors.  take it back in oakland, denver and everywhere else.  this truly is a sort of general strike against a broken and evil system.  every attack on the protests is an attack on the constitution; it is up to the occupy movement to draft as many americans as they possibly can in a vigorous defense of those fundamental principles.

in addition, there should be some serious hardball going on behind the scenes.  the big-time media and entertainment folks who support the movement should be called upon to provide the big-time money that will be required to post the bonds for potentially thousands of protesters as well as top-flight legal action against the cities, their governments, and the mayors and police brass personally wherever possible in order to make anti-democratic and violent action against the protesters exceptionally painful for every guilty party.  olbermann, letterman, moore and the rest should help to build an unstoppable war chest to open the fight on another front.

Monday, November 14, 2011

dando must die

dan siegel: a great american

this guy, dan siegel, is pretty fucking cool.  unlike many most people associated with government at all levels, he does not have his head rammed all the way up his ass, apparently.  it too fucking bad that a man like this is an advisor to the mayor instead of the mayor himself, or governor or president.  a person of principle is all too rare in our modern world.

just for a while

back in the saddle

this is where congresswoman giffords belongs

probably the only thing that makes gabby giffords' ordeal worse

having to go on tee vee with the loathsome former nixon staffer diane sawyer.  surely, no one deserves that.  well, jerry sandusky, for one, but still, hasn't congresswoman giffords suffered enough?

look yonder mayor richard daley

bill daley's failure as chief of staff is a wonderful thing for the country.  it's not exactly a direct victory for the occupy movement, but when you see a corporatist apparatchik former investment banker crash and burn as one of the most powerful men in the government, it is a fine day for the 99%.  daley is a vile character; choosing him was another colossal fuck-up for obama, but it might work out for the rest of us.

the legion of doomed

is this the best we can do?  i mean, clinton?  jesus, bill's like fucking herpes, and now we'll never get rid of his gods-damned family either.  chelsea?  she of the goldman sachs-felon father-in-law?  we are doomed.  i blame this on hillary.  if she'd only had the good sense to kick that douchebag the fuck out of her bed after a good bang, the whole world would be better off.  nice going, dipshit.

darcy burner, meet elizabeth warren

she is supposedly running in a much better district this year, so darcy burner should have a better shot.  she, along with alan grayson, are two of the highest-profile candidates who should hop on the elizabeth warren express and campaign hard on a common set of ideas and issues.

and you know that people are really rather afraid

at least brooke shields and meg whitman's idiot spawn are no longer the biggest embarrassment for princeton...

pop on, kids


Sunday, November 13, 2011

is allen gregory an nfl production?

fox's animated abortion allen gregory must be a national football league production, designed to get people to switch to nbc's prime time game after the simpsons and before family guy to boost the nbc ratings.  sweet fucking jesus that show sucks.

'insane, even for frank miller.'

that's about the best you could say about the man responsible for the movie 300, the most successful gay porn film since the passion of the christ.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

today, we are all nebraska

for this week at least, nebraska is the most popular college football team in the galaxy.

baked beans sugar and margerine (and campagnolo electric)

is it here?  is it really here?  an interesting curiosity for sure, like the shimano stuff, but i'm not sure what the point is.  well, that's not true.  i know what the point is.  gee wiz gadgets that cost very little to produce in (relative) quantity but command an excessive retail price are what america is made for.  it's probably a cool thing, but as far from my bag o' tea as no-name chinese carbone garbage with a fancy paintjob.  i look forward to the parking lot crit on the campagnolo electric components just as much as i did the the shimano.  after that, i'm good for a while.



(cyclingnews.com photo showing the shape of the lever)

you know you love it


she turned me into a newt

for once in his life skeezy newt gingrich has a high standard to meet: he must deliver as much delirious hilarity as bachmann, perry and cain have so far this year.  what that means is that the otherwise useless establishment media must mercilessly bait gingrich with his hypocrisy, his vanity, his utter vapidity and his serial adultery and sodomy.  if they do this with the proper vigor, gingrich will lose his mind and could become the most entertaining republican candidate this cycle.

the golden age of matt taibbi

michael moore is not the only good-guy type leftish media denizen to flourish in the glow of the occupy movement.  matt taibbi is another commentator who is doing great work on the subject.  what i've seen with both taibbi and moore, along with a few others, especially keith olbermann on tee vee, is that they are not strictly reporting or condescendingly hectoring but are instead both analyzing the movement and learning from it, broadening their perspective on politics and culture while they work.  this is a good thing--a great thing really--and cannot be dismissed; it is an important development for not only the occupy movement but the american left as a whole.

don't tuck with fexas

this clown is plainly a pathetic closeted chorus-boy, and it's more obvious every day.

looking forward to the last season of primeval

sooooo much better than dr. who or torchwood.  it was better in the first couple of series with that unintelligible scottish guy and that other guy and that woman and the younger woman, but the two kids have stepped up well, and they've all done better than expected considering the perilous production history.  makes just as little sense as terra nova but has about a billion times more style and more life and imagination in it than a thousand episodes of falling skies.

Friday, November 11, 2011

the passion of the newt

sleazy ole newt gingrich has to be in agony these days.  he's been humping and pumping his bullshit for two generations, turning his failed career as an historian and teacher and his even more amazingly failed career as a congressman into an engine to fleece loose change from nursing home residents, paranoid fundamentalists and low-grade morons with his inane books, fake awards and unintelligible speeches.  he's even pretending to run for president every four years in order to get free publicity, but now that's he's huffing and puffing himself into a waxy sweat this year on the campaing trail, he must be all kinds of pissed at the likes of herman cain, sarah palin and mike huckabee.  those assholes have managed to steal most of newt's act recently but haven't had to work nearly as hard.  cain played incompetent godfather to a failing pizza chain, scoped out some opp as a lobbyist in d.c. and did a few hours on local talk radio in his life; sarah palin used the national party credit card and bailed out on being governor of all 14 other people in alaska; huckabee barely punched the clock in arkansas state house and was able to become a fox news millionaire.  each of those three fools have managed to eclipse newt's profile without much effort at all.  on the other hand, newt has had to keep running his con non-stop for years and years with barely a chance to get some illicit pussy on the down-low.  if he had been half the con-artist that cain, palin or huckabee have become, he coulda been relaxing in his ugly senescence with a huge staff and a multi-million payday from rupert murdoch.  so as it turns out, newt's bullshit con-game is something else that is in fact an embarrassing failure.

political song for herman cain to sing

sachs machs lugs, atmo

you know what i thought before i saw the picture of the sax max lugs?  yep, dammit.

matilda

the brothers grunt

rocket science is hard.  they lost another one of these 15 years ago.  it would be pretty funny, except that when you lose a space probe, it often winds up falling on your head.  or someone's head.  or someone's atmosphere.  or someone's ocean.  if china continues with its plan to ramp up space activity, expect to see much more of this keystone-cops-in-orbit shit.

cockburn on clinton

no! not that way, pervs!  he reflects with fondness on that fine man from hope who, even by modern standards, was one of our worst presidents.

hoofing the austerity pony

austerity, it's what's for dinner.  the 99% are recipients of a wonderful gift, austerity.  democracy is not a remedy; in the face of a possible rejection, austerity voids democracy.  in the united states, obama and his merry men are riding the wave of austerity to complete their dream of dismantling the meager social medical and pension benefits in a brazen and massive redistribution of wealth up to the top 1%.  almost the entire federal government is aligned in their wish to destroy those social programs in the belief that they will be rewarded by their masters.  the plan is simple: lie about the national debt; convince enough voters that debt is a problem and 20% real unemployment is not; cut social security and medicare/medicaid and transfer the savings to the richest americans.  the individual suffering and the destruction of the middle-class economy is not their concern.  if it is yours, then don't go for a ride on the austerity pony.

let's be careful out there, folks

i've seen a lot of stoopid shit on the road and in the woods.  i've made some really dumb mistakes and been lucky lucky lucky at times when i had nothing other than luck to get me through.  night riding in the woods alone during the winter, for example--not the best career move.  bad stuff happens, though, no matter how kool we think we are.  have fun but be careful.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

calling all demons

the columbus max renaissance

i've been interested in the rare columbus max road frames since i was a wee tot.  back in the dark ages, the big builders didn't seem to know what to do with the tubes, and using the ugly-ass clunky-looking lugs right out of the box was not the greatest idea.  often, the frames looked unfortunately graceless and unfinished.  i do remember seeing a pretty nice looking celeste bianchi in a magazine, a very traditional marinoni pictured somewhere, and a cheesy somec in a shop long before i was in a position to even consider a custom or hand-built frame.  tommasini seemed to do the best job back in the day, contouring the lugs a bit, going with the chrome and usual italian shit.  when i finally saw one in person years later, i really liked it.



the merckx mx leader continued on for years in the lineup and gained the cred of a real pro racing frame, keeping the max tubing ideal alive even though the frame didn't use all the max tubes.  still, it was something; it was enough.



a generation after the original introduction, max bubbled back up lead by some small american builders, with lu edmonds-esque renaissance-madman don ferris howling into the bike tubing wilderness.   he stoked the max frame fire and then stopped building frames to enjoy the b2b stylings of his tooling business.



others hopped on board.   mike zankanto zancan zankon this guy made a big ole splash a couple of years ago with a graceful and stylish modern lugged max frame, actually making the lugs look good, as anvil had done before.



and the lovely and talented hampsten cycles folks have a clean and straight-up take on lugless max-tubed frames.



now, the max tubing is back or not back; columbus has apparently put it back into production using their modern alloys, or possibly it was around in stock all along and just essentially ignored by most of the steel bike frame world.  from the chatter on the interwebs, it looks like the lugs are not so readily available, but there's no need to spool up the time machine in order to get a new, custom max-tubed frame.  excellent.

it really is an embarrassment of max frame riches now.  my own thought is that i'd like to save my green stamps and get a tweaked and simple hampsten max, or maybe a lugged frame from someone known mostly for round-tubed lugged steel road-racing bikes like richard sachs--hah! what are the chances of the likes of me rating that??--peter dreesens, chris kvale or even mike zanconato himself.