aint no cure for the summertime blues

7-27-2010--“Super Sad” takes place in the near future, and Mr. Shteyngart has extrapolated every toxic development already at large in America to farcical extremes. The United States is at war in Venezuela, and its national debt has soared to the point where the Chinese are threatening to pull the plug. There are National Guard checkpoints around New York, and riots in the city’s parks. Books are regarded as a distasteful, papery-smelling anachronism by young people who know only how to text-scan for data, and privacy has become a relic of the past. Everyone carries around a device called an äppärät, which can live-stream its owner’s thoughts and conversations, and broadcast their “hotness” quotient to others. People are obsessed with their health — Lenny works as a Life Lovers Outreach Coordinator (Grade G) for a firm that specializes in life extension — and shopping is the favorite pastime of anyone with money. –NYT
7-26-2010—A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.NYT A1[pentagon papers redux]
7-25-2010—A federal investigation has accused dozens of military officials and defense contractors, including some with top level security clearances, of buying and downloading child pornography on private or government computers.NYT A16 [pentagon porno]
7-26-2010--Chile’s president abruptly rejected calls on Sunday from the Roman Catholic Church to pardon dozens of imprisoned military officials convicted of human rights violations during the era known as Chile’s dirty war. NYTA7 [hey, they forgive pederasts, why not fascists?!!]
7-25-2010—So Jeb Bush is running for president. I don’t know about the rest of the country, but thank God, ladies and gentlemen, the comedy recession is over—David Letterman—NYTWK2
--7-24/25/2010—In February 2003, [the CEO of Calpers] was sent a letter making a number of predictions. It said a housing bubble would soon deflate and wreak havoc on average consumers. It urged Calpers to resist risky investments in a push for higher returns. ... The prescient letter ... was from the leader of a small highway patrol union in California. WSJ B4 [these union goons do nothing but diss free enterprise]
7-24-2010—[Yu Keping travelled] across 30 states on a Greyhound bus.] He said he saw the chasm between the grotesquely rich and the abjectly poor, the lack of respect for the elderly, and the apathy on Election Day... He said he was mugged twice, once by a man who put a knife to his back in a public restroom in Indianapolis. NYT A5 [hoosiers educate commie Chinese dude]
7-24-2010—The Shirley Sherrod story tells us [that] the Obama administration, which runs from race issues the way thoroughbreds bolt from the starting gate, did not offer this woman fair or respectful treatment before firing and publicly humiliating her.... There is no way we’ll overcome those divisions if people who should know better keep bowing before and kowtowing to the toxic agenda of those on the right whose overriding goal is to foment hostility and hate. NYT A15 [The person who released the Sherrod tapes] ...Mr. Breitbart is the person who last fall released the Acorn tapes to Fox News. NYT 7-26-2010, p B2
--7-22-2010, LRB—The impoverishment of Iraq—not to mention the exclusion of its oil from the global market to the benefit of oil prices—was not a means to an end: it was the end. P. 9
--It is said that the analysts of the fighting in World War Two, concerned at the apparent reluctance to participate or even fire their weapons of so many of the Western armies’ combat soldiers, tried to figure out what characteristics marked the born warrior.... The only feature they could find which seemed to have strong predictive power was that effective fighters had a strong sense of humor. And that is one of the really distinguishing features of Old Norse poetry, legend, and saga: grim gallows humor. It is always a bad sign in a saga when some one cracks a joke. Ibid., 27 [ blondes do have more fun...]