Monday, February 23, 2015

The Clouds 2: Electric Boogaloo

“Oh shit! The reins of power! You mean these things aren't just discursive object? Thanks, Oz!” - Yanis Varoufakis

"Yanis Varoufakis, what a dreamboat! Too bad Syriza's gone so normcore." - the ghost of Alexandros Grigoropoulos

"That's the difference between Yanis Varoufakis and someone like Christopher Hitchens. No illusions of enlightenment. Just shame."
- Bernie Sanders to an empty Burlington Town Hall

"Typical teenage Greek Marxist story. We all turn out that way."
- Arianna Huffington

"Varoufakis was just some random intellectual, but now, thanks to the strength of his writings, he's been plucked from obscurity and controls the fates of millions. Truly socialism is government by the Righteous!" -10,000 salivating white men.

“He makes me want to fuck again!” - Doug Henwood

"He's the new Obama: we all to curl up with him beside the fire as the world burns. Our imaginary coupling vindicates our abdication, converts complicity into failure. His inevitable defeat ennobles our a priori surrender. We believe that we too have tried, that we desired to try. " - Andreas Papandreou from his lectern at UC Berkeley during a seminar on Trotskyism

"At least I wear a necktie when I beg for money from foreigners."
- Constantine II, King of the Hellenes, at the European Court of Human Rights

"The pity of it is, while Syriza is actually positioned to destroy Europe, socialists are the only people foolish enough to want to save it." - Chelsea Clinton

"This is a world historical moment, comrades, to sneer at anarchist anti-electoralism and erase a decade of anarchist leadership of the Greek struggle!" - the Jacobin editorial board

"I will never tire of liberating my country from the Turk, even if he lives in Berlin." - Nikolaos Michaloliakos

"You didn’t have the same upbringing as I did. You do not love the new Europe like I do." - Mesut Ozil to the unbaptized children of Alexis Tsiparas

"Do we have a lien on the acropolis? Yes. Will we enforce it?..."
- Deutsche Bank CEO Juergen Fitschen, trailing off as his mic is disconnected

"We ought not think that the Godhead is purely the euro. Ignorance is how we overlooked our God, the Germans. They now commandeth we all repent. They have appointed a day in which they will judge the world in righteousness. They have risen while austerity buries us all."
- Christine Lagarde at the Areopagus

"State violence is the new gold standard." - Angela Merkel

“We’ve been in this IHOP all night, and we’re still no closer to a settlement!” - the Negotiations

“Just in case, Chancellor, I've deployed a drone over Syntagma Square.”

“A drone?! Where did you get a drone from?”
“At the ECB Christmas Party. In the little goodie baggies. Why what was in yours?”
“A Fitbit!”
- Ursula von der Leyen & Angela Merkel

"Let a great spreadsheet advance itself across the entirety of the European continent." - Wolfgang Schäuble

“I can see it!” - Putin

"If I would have known this was how things would turn out, I'd have walked to Crimea instead. Where are my fucking cigarettes!" - Patrick Leigh Fermor, upon his arrival in Athens to undergo a tracheotomy, June 2011

"The USSR would have ended differently if they could have pegged the rouble to bitcoin." - Besim Beqaj, Kosovo Minister of Finance and avid gamer

"When do the islands go on sale? Daddy needs a new Red Room!"
- Xi Jinping

"The true disaster would be neither for Syriza to reveal themselves as just another neoliberal party, nor for them to make huge oversteps that bring about the end of their reign in a storm of fire. No, the true horror would be for them to prove competent in government, able to negotiate successfully with the ECB and institute an anti-austerity program that makes small but real improvements in the lives of the Greek working class without making permanent trouble for capital. When will the Left learn that their job is not to staunch the bleeding of the hand that feeds them, but to cut its arm off at the elbow!" - Bandito Paul Krugman

"Two, three, many Costa Concordias!" - Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi speaking to the new Alliance of Mediterranean States

"Can't you see it? Fascists in the streets in France, Germany and Italy. Hopeless communist struggle in Greece. A violent and wayward anarchist movement in Spain. The British silently and implicitly backing the Right, but ready to move against them should it prove beneficial. A war in Eastern Europe that could threaten the whole global order. But instead of communists in Russia, it's Putin! And America's on our side! We're getting a goddamn mulligan on the 20th century, but this time, the good guys are gonna win! Viva Fascism!" - Charlie Hebdo "satirical" editorial

Schäuble recognizes that Varoufakis has reached his end, and, to let his failing senses catch the words, roars in his ear: “No one else could have paid these debts, since they were made only for you. I am now going to release them.”

“THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!” - the Greek people being dragged from Europe

Thursday, February 19, 2015

The True Story of Brian Williams

“I feel you, bro.” - Al Gore to Brian Williams via Skype

“Let our forgiveness be as unmerciful as our revenge.” - Obama appears at NBC to calm the restless People

"I'm sorry Brian, you can keep your nut and perhaps Rock Center, but otherwise you may have to give up the trappings of power for awhile."
- Tom Brokaw

“I want you to find him, and I want you to break every bone in his body.” - Matt Lauer to local morning news teams

"The idea of a news anchor getting fired for lying about Iraq is beyond laughable. The very idea of it." - Dick Cheney

"The problem for Brian I think is that he never really beat his wife at games of skill or chance, and this is throughout the entire marriage."
- Jay Leno outside Denim Factory in a car

"If only he'd been given the Tonight Show when he wanted it, he'd have been paid to lie." - Conan

"This is why I stick to asking questions." - Charlie Rose

“Do you pretend to compete with Copernicus?” - Brian Williams' interrogator, Bryant Gumble, moves in for the kill

"No mortal man should be exposed to such putrid light!" - Dan Rather at his cabin door

"Windchill is for pussies." - Brian Williams, broadcasting bottomless from a hot tub

"Can you imagine their undercarriage in prior times?" - Brian Williams, off-camera with Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Neanderthals

"No fucking pad thai! I'm supposed to be allergic to peanuts for the trust." - Brian Williams

"JFK Jr. and I had a passionate steam shack fuck session one young hot summer on Cape Cod, but he swore me to secrecy until the time of his death." - Brian Williams lying to treating doctor, NBC 5 year Psych Evaluation Case File

"Yeah, I fucked a dolphin once." - Brian Williams, entry # 324

"Then the being of light prepared to leave the ship, and as it did so it looked upon us three astronauts and said, 'You were chosen.'"
"Amazing."
- Buzz Aldrin and BW, trading lies

“Do what you want to me, but leave my daughter and the cast of Girls out of this.” - Brian Williams

"When I saw that daughter of his receiving unholy pleasure on TV, well I had to tell the world what I know." - same testimony from every Army pilot

"Allison Williams, god what a bombshell! That jaw!!” - Prince Harry to Drake

"The new trend is eating through your nose."
"Yeah, it is."
- Lena Dunham and Zosia Mamet to Allison Williams, Greenpoint set

"Let art be a thing of privilege as the ancients decreed. My children they are not for the sword or the spreadsheet as the hardier stock of yore, let them have the bauble of the arts and so bind them by Joy."
- a golden chain tied to a golden hand tied to a velvet wrist refracted through a reflection in a golden eye

"What a magnificent country we live in, where I can sit in my PJ's and eat strawberry ice cream while the USAF protects me from the Islamic Caliphate by raining hell from above with F-16's." - Brian Williams

"There is no War! There is no Will! There are no guts!" - Petraeus freaks on the stand, Williams puts head in hands at the defense table

"Every single person who watches the nightly news on a major American television network deserves to die, me most of all."
- Brian Williams, to Oprah

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Secularization Now, Secularization Forever

“A white man oughta be able to kill whomever he wants over private property, regardless of whether that person is Muslim.” - Bobby Jindal

"Every day in the life of a white person is a hate crime." - Darren Wilson

“They indicted a cop! Okay, it’s over now.” - Democratic Primary Voters

"What I don't get is the man's wife goes on TV, says a few unconvincing, ritualistic words of apology, and then comes to life talking at length about her how her husband’s not prejudiced, just a man of progressive sentiment who champions social justice online and believes everyone is equal and shot three college kids point blank in the head over a park parking spot. I mean what the fuck is that bitch thinking?"
“Nah, look, this is not some deep thing, she’s just a dumb hick woman forced by lawyers to talk to television cameras in a desperate attempt to shore up a manslaughter or insanity plea. It’s not her fault anyone takes her seriously.”
- Brian Williams, throwing a cheesepuff at the television, and Bill Clinton, feeling the pain

"If you have to make this big a deal of saying you’re not a bigot, just a triple murderer, you are clearly a bigot." - Charles Manson

“Yo, I hate to shit on the indignation parade but hate crime laws are a trap, bad in principle because they are a form of mandatory minimum sentencing designed to pack prisons, bad empirically because they have a demonstrated history of being used most often against the very minorities they were ostensibly invented to protect. There are no law enforcement solutions to social and political problems. Only solutions of popular violence and organized Terror." - bandito Paul Krugman

“What do you do with a man like Craig Hicks after he’s done the thing he’s done? It matters very little whether he lives or dies, so, on the one hand, if the victims’ families want vengeance, then kill him, But on the other hand, why bother? That’s the horror of what he did--and also its power. His violence, in its arbitrariness and its gratuitousness, was foundational. It builds a social order, an order in which some live in fear, their lives always already forfeit, and others live secure, always already killers or the beneficiaries of killers. Such violence robs counter-violence of its significance so long as the latter remains merely reactive, particular, and proportionate. Punishing Hicks won’t bring back the dead, and it won’t undo the contribution of Hicks' murders to the perpetuation of white supremacy. The score can never be evened, only overturned, for the greater violence always earns a surplus: legitimacy. Justice, therefore, can only be achieved through excess. Ten of theirs for every one of ours.” - Who would say such a thing? Who would have the courage to believe it?