Category: Quick Hits

Several things, and quickly.

1. I just drove 24 combined hours (12 Sunday, 12 Tuesday) and looked at 10 rental units in my new hometown in between. Under the circumstances, please excuse the lack of updates – although, trust me, I felt guilty not finding the time Monday night.

2. I am now home for about 20 minutes on this Tuesday afternoon before I get in a van for the inaugural HACKS Comedy summer tour. This likely means more gaps in posting, although I am going to take advantage of the nearly 10 years' worth of archives here to entertain you with links to the past.

This site has a ton of readers now, many of whom are recent fans who may not have been around for some of my favorite older posts. Lazy? Practical? Both. Also, here are some tour dates; come out and say hello if you're in the area:

06/12/12 – Tue – Auburn, AL – Bellwether Variety Show
06/14/12 – Thur – Asheville, NC – Slice of Life GA Showcase
06/15/12 – Fri – Louisville, KY – Young, Dumb, and Full of Comedy (Bard's Town theater, 9:30)
06/17/12 – Sun – Indianapolis, IN – The Sinking Ship, 9:30
06/18/12 – Mon – Cincinnati, OH – Baba Budan's, 8 PM
06/19/12 – Tues – Chattanooga, TN – JJ's All-You-Can-Eat Comedy Buffet (with Nikki Glaser, Joel Ruiz, and more)

3. The Gin and Tacos facebook page is a good place to acquire two-sentence bursts of sarcasm even when I am too busy to write a proper post.

4. It was brought to my attention, justifiably, that I have been slacking lately. Not merely in quantity but, in my view, in quality as well. I have been lazy about citing sources, fact-checking, and developing arguments as well as I prefer to over the past couple of months. For the first time I have had trouble devoting as much time as I would like to this endeavor. The more I spend my evenings doing comedy, my days scrambling up the academic ladder, and generally attempting to have a social life, the more I have to write these posts in one burst that amounts to "Here's some stuff, and here's what I think about it.

" I'm also trying to write a book, which requires a good deal of research that benefits neither my professional nor blog-fessional lives. In short, I am probably trying to do way too many things at once, which is usually the amount of things I am trying to do at any given moment.

In the next few weeks I am moving and starting a new job in a new city where I know exactly no one, so rest assured that I will be back to not having any life outside of Gin and Tacos soon.

More than two years ago, this is what I had to say about Citizens United:

Now in the wake of Citizens United vs. FEC plenty has been said about the folly of corporate personhood and the opened floodgates courtesy of the patriotic, non-activist majority on the Supreme Court. There appears to be widespread consensus that this is a bad thing. This is all correct, of course, but here is the thing: you have no idea how fucking ridiculous this is going to get in 2012. We will look back on 2008 as a simpler time.

A decent guess is impossible to generate since we are in uncharted waters from this point forward. An obvious guess would be another 100% increase; I think that will be a baseline. The campaigns themselves will double the $1.5 billion spent by all contenders in 2008.
buy amitriptyline online langleyrx.com no prescription

How much will corporate groups – not to mention various other tax code loophole groups – toss on the fire? Another billion seems like a reasonable guess, equal to the amount that the candidates spend on the books.

online pharmacy synthroid no prescription pharmacy

I think that's an understatement. $10 billion? $20 billion? More? It's not out of the question. I could just be a pessimist, but I think we are in for something so grotesque and ridiculous that we'll scarcely be able to grasp it.

Given what just happened in Wisconsin, I think we're beginning to get a clearer picture of what elections will look like when conducted in the midst of a tsunami of unregulated corporate money. Did money make a difference in the outcome? That's hard to say definitively. But we certainly are entering uncharted waters and if we needed yet another way to make the electoral process seem rigged, inaccessible, and futile to the ordinary voter, rest assured that we have found it.

Today was almost one of those exhausting, soul-crushing essays you all love so much, but at present I lack the emotional energy to finish it. Instead, some quick musings on China triumphalism in the media. To a lesser extent the same points apply to India, although there are some key differences.
buy cymbalta online healingtohappy.com/wp-content/languages/new/over/cymbalta.html no prescription

If you even occasionally consume news these days, you might be as sick as I am of the "Rise of China/India" narrative. It dominates publications like Time and U.S. News, making readers feel as though they have learned something useful about foreign policy even though it is largely empty calories. Nothing says "Deadline approaching" quite like this story; blah blah emerging middle class, blah blah biggest economy in the world by 20XX, blah blah new superpower. How many times do we need to read this?
online pharmacy clomid best drugstore for you

More importantly, is anyone planning on questioning the underlying assumptions?
buy amoxil online healingtohappy.com/wp-content/languages/new/over/amoxil.html no prescription

Yes, China is a large and rapidly growing economic power. The storyline encourages us to see it as The Next Superpower. The commentators see a military, population, and economic colossus that will soon dwarf the United States and EU.
online pharmacy azithromycin best drugstore for you

I see a country with staggering problems that has mastered the art of mortgaging the future for short-term gains (as has the United States, of course). I see a country, middle class with shiny new luxury cars aside, that is overwhelmingly poor and unindustrialized outside of urban areas. I see a country that has polluted itself and exhausted its natural resources on a scale that makes the U.S. look like it is run by Greenpeace in comparison. I see a country with a population that it will struggle to feed at current rates of growth and a booming economy based on its status as a Third World plantation for cheap labor; multinational corporations are heavily invested in China, but they're keeping one eye on the emergency exits at all times. I see a government that lives in the past, understands the outside world only haltingly, and is paranoid beyond belief. I see a large military armed to the teeth…with indigenous knockoffs of 1970s-vintage Soviet equipment.

I'm the farthest thing from a China expert and I may be wrong with some or all of these characterizations. My point is merely that the basic narrative with which we're being repeatedly hit over the head does not hold up very well to even casual scrutiny.

A key part of the financial recovery of General Motors is attributable to the success of its various brands in China. You've been hit over the head with enough emerging-markets-new-middle-class stuff about China and India to last a lifetime, so let's skip to the good part.

While the brands – Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, etc. – and models are often familiar, GM cars sold in China are almost all made in China by the GM Shanghai division.

In other words, the Buick Regal sold in China is made in Fushun, while the Regal sold in North America is made in Oshawa, Ontario (and the European version, rebadged as the Opel Insignia, is made in Russelsheim, Germany).

The net result is that the car costs approximately the same in these different markets; the Chinese Regal goes for 150k – 250k RMB, or about $23,000 – $39,000 USD, on par with the US/Canada price.

Chinese-made vehicles are not sold in the US, as consumers are (rightly) skeptical of them.

American- or European-made vehicles are not sold in China because of Chinese tariff policy (and, not insignificantly, because nonexistent Chinese safety regulations allow stripped China-only versions of the vehicles to be made at a considerable cost savings. Cue the hilarious Chinese Crash Test footage.) One exception for GM is full-sized trucks.

None are made in China, but the American-made models are exported and offered to Chinese consumers. With all taxes and import duties, an American-made GMC Sierra Denali ($45-$50,000 in the US) retails in China for 850,000 RMB…or $135,000 USD.

"Free trade" really is a misleading term, as it implies that goods and services are being exchanged for other goods and services. In practice China sends us millions of shipping containers and we send them a small number of incredibly expensive luxury items. More accurately, they send us cheap shit and we send them our jobs. That doesn't seem like such a great deal.

It has been over a year since I had back-to-back weekdays without a post. The condensed summer session began on Tuesday and it's taking me a few days to adjust to the schedule, i.

e., not to fall asleep at 11 PM. Please excuse the inconvenience while we remodel our store to better serve you.
online pharmacy prednisone best drugstore for you

The mantra of pay-for-performance is a cornerstone of the free market religion – people should get paid for what they accomplish, not merely for showing up. Shouldn't we pay teachers based on what percentage of their students make the grade? Of course we should! That's how the rest of the world works. Unless you happen to be un- or self-employed the odds are good that your job is subject to a number of performance-based caveats, as this kind of thinking has permeated the economy in every field from fruit-picking to medicine. True, we're not all working piece rate yet, but the Paul Ryans and Rick Scotts of the world are clearly pushing in that direction.

Performance-based salary and job evaluation schemes are popping up everywhere except, of course, among the people pushing to implement them.
buy plavix generic buywithoutprescriptionrxonline.com over the counter

Congressional or state legislative salaries remain based on the divine right of kings, and CEO/Job Creator pay has been uncoupled completely from performance under the mantra of rewarding Producers in a manner that will continue to give them incentives to bestow their wisdom upon us. One of the most hilarious examples from the Bush years was General Motors' continued lavish rewarding of the executives who were running the company in the ground.
online pharmacy amoxicillin best drugstore for you

Of course we have to pony up top dollar for brilliant talent like Rick Wagoner, a guy who managed to make Roger Smith look like Bill Gates while pocketing about $100 million in compensation. Talent like that doesn't come cheap.

One of Obama's brief Wall Street love interests, Jaime Dimon, just pocketed $23,000,000 in extra compensation for leading JP Morgan to a $2 billion quarterly loss. And the kicker is that the compensation package was approved in a shareholders' vote. I guess that whole "maximizing shareholder value" thing, the Commandment that has done more to turn this country into Dogpatch than anything else in the last three decades, doesn't apply when it comes to doling out money at the top.

We might expect that the shareholders would be inclined to save money rather than spend it, and certainly to avoid rewarding people who perform so poorly. But a stockholders' meeting is little more than a boys' club operating under the pretext of a transparent process of corporate governance. The kind of heavy-hitting institutional shareholders who decide these votes – mutual fund managers, fellow banking executives, and so on – are either in Dimon's position or expect to be there someday if they can make it to the other side of the shark tank. Perhaps getting to the top, into a position like Dimon's, is so difficult and unpleasant that the people who manage to do it feel entitled to endless compensation to make it all seem worth it.
online pharmacy desyrel best drugstore for you

Or maybe it's just a bunch of assholes born into money, rooming together at prep school, getting the same Gentlemen's B at Harvard or Yale, and using Old Money and family connections to land jobs for which they are woefully unqualified, emerging from their life of privilege with a profound sense of entitlement and a belief in their own greatness that borders on sociopathy. In either case, like so many aspects of our political, economic, and social systems the idea of performance-based compensation and employment standards apply only to the little people.

The 2012 presidential race has begun in earnest, notwithstanding the six month Gathering of the Juggalos / circus sideshow / island of broken toys that was the GOP nomination process. The Romney vs. Obama square-off is all of about 2 weeks old, and I'm already consumed with cold dread at the prospect of sitting through six more months of this.

Now that we've just passed the one year anniversary of the death of bin Laden, Republicans are courageously asserting that no president worthy of the title would ever make a campaign issue out of a foreign policy success.

Read John McCain's incontinent, 74 year old hissy fit. Then read the comment thread.

I can't, people. I just can't. I'm so full of Can't and Nope. I really don't think I have it in me to handle six months of this stupidity.
buy symbicort online buy symbicort no prescription

Can't we just fast forward to November 15 and let the GOP focus on its post-election excuses? Do we really have to sit through half a year of hysterical nonsense and irrelevant "issues" blown out of all sense of proportion?

Wouldn't it be great if we all consciously declined to talk or think about this meaningless noise and instead, like, read a book or something?
buy levaquin online buy levaquin no prescription

The campaign seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest it.

The study of public opinion has been a sixty-plus year long search for what we call constraint – the degree to which a belief held by an individual is predictive of other beliefs.
online pharmacy orlistat best drugstore for you

A constrained belief system is an internally consistent one; for example, if you believe in lower taxes we would expect you to believe in lower spending as well. This seems like a remarkably obvious concept, but since Converse we've found that frighteningly few Americans organize or constrain their beliefs about politics into anything approaching a coherent worldview. This is why so many voters hold ideas that make absolutely no sense together, even when the conflicts are glaring.

The modern Republican ideology is often criticized for inconsistency on the grounds that it abhors Big Government but promotes government involvement in our private lives through social issues. It is strongly pro individual rights in theory but with dozens of "exceptions" in practice. That said, I see a kind of constraint across prominent political issues in the contemporary GOP: they generally believe that problems have supply side solutions. Poverty exists because the welfare state enables it; without food stamps and TANF, people would be working. Illegal immigration is solved with guns and border fences, not by eliminating the demand (American employers who knowingly employ immigrants of dubious legality).
online pharmacy prednisone best drugstore for you

You get the picture.

There are, however, two glaring exceptions to the supply-as-constraint idea. First, the drug war is very much a demand side problem to Republicans. Sure, some efforts are made to stop the importation of drugs at the border, but the vast majority of law enforcement resources (including manpower and time) in the War on Drugs is devoted to rounding up users and small-time dealers (who are merely the retail kiosk of a system that generates supply much farther up the food chain). Second, gun violence is emphatically a demand-side problem. The supply and availability of guns certainly isn't seen as a problem. The problem is what some individuals ("Bad Apples", of course) decide to do with the plethora of firepower to be had.
buy wellbutrin online langleyrx.com no prescription

I'm sure there are other examples of issues that Republicans define as supply problems as well as others that are considered demand problems. I find it interesting and somewhat revealing that two prominent issues that contradict the overarching supply side understanding of socioeconomic and political issues are the War on Drugs – when seen as a demand problem, the state responds by putting countless poor and/or dark-skinned people in prison – and gun politics as a whole, where a demand-based explanation ensures widespread access to the guns people need to make themselves feel secure and/or powerful.

So I'd argue that the average Gingrich / Perry voter does have a constrained set of political beliefs. The problem is that their underlying motivations – dislike of the poor/dark and gun fetishism – are stronger than any ideology or worldview that might attempt to constrain them.