Song 22

Only caught up with this now. Great track.

Song 21

Song 20

Crap budget video, great song.


Broken Bells - The Ghost Inside OFFICIAL VIDEO (Protein Exclusive) from Protein® on Vimeo.

Midterms

I for one am quite glad that the US is returning to normalcy and a split house and more equally-divided senate. It will make for less hysterical politics, I hope.

Still, the thing that continually annoys me is how ideologically non-sensical the two parties are. It's become about identity politics, but as such, it's become the worst kind - representing the kinds of hypocrises that usually colour one's outlook, but this time trying to pretend that that identity actually means something. The American voter is confused, and it is largely to do with the fact that the old terms of what is left and what is right are completely redundant. In this sense, I can completely see why the Tea Party is so amorphous and cannot be truly representative of a world-view as such - it is tradition-based in as much as it harks back to a less complicated era where the government couldn't encroach on your life because it was fundamentally your client (and not the other way around as it is now), but also where corporations couldn't act institutionally because their profits were the result of actual hard work and ingenuity that was seemingly tangible and understandable.

Everything has changed though - from morality that needn't be prescribed to morality that should be defended as a bare minimum, to economics that should still be formulated in common sense values. I mean, who cares about human rights when they're overblown to cover someone with an idiotic position; who should care abut aggregate supply and demand when they don't correspond to the reality of a balanced family budget?

From this confusion comes a mix of things that don't make sense - conservatives, posing as libertarians, posing as moralists, telling people that government should keep out of their lives; liberals, posing as socialists, telling people that they'd like to see efficient markets so that the corporations have less sway over their lives.

Seriously, it's at times like these that you do want to just scream: I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more! but then you realise that we're in an age when protest is redundant, when security is all-encompassing and where your rights are a pure function of the morality of others. Back in the das when those slogans were dreamt up, they meant something. Now, ideology has the stench of unknowable dogma and thus all current dogma is interchangeable - "Want more government? Vote for me?/ Want less government? Vote for me two years later!" The stupidity of it all is that no-one is actually going after the things that matter, which you really have to hand it to the Tea Party for noticing, in part.

I mean, Barack Obama is a great President of the United States. He really is, given his circumstances. However, he needs to stop playing the confused game of right and left politics, because neither make sense any more.

Great website

I love these illustrations http://poolga.com/

Art monday

This is strangely mesmerising.

TROIKA_SHOAL from Troika on Vimeo.

Poor old Rove

I despair at the future of the Republican party if it decides to turn on all of its star performers. There is something in this that reminds me of the whole "revolutions eat their children" phenomenon, where Rove's brilliance in organising grass-roots support for the Republicans leading up to the 2000 elections is ultimately what undoes him. It's a shame, because, for all his supposed Manichean traits, Rove does know what he's doing and he's very good at it. By becoming apostate, he could in turn become a much more powerful enemy of the Tea Partiers than the Dems ever will be. Ok, I'm overloading the analogies here. Still, this whole thing has a terrible quality of purges on a holier-than-thou basis going on in the GOP and te Tea Party believing its own hype. What is especially troubling is that this means that the moderate bastions of the Democrats will have to be counted as the the only right-wingers in the house, because the Tea Party GOP, for all its talk, seems skewed to the left. Or I don't know if it's left, but it's a strange hybrid of left-and-nutty-right, where the state is built up and maintained, but taxes are lowered. It's a paradox of such colossal proportions that I wonder how any serious person could in turn take it seriously. I realise that it's the prerogative of the party not in power to present contrary positions to the one governing rather than workable alternatives, but there is a limit.
The whole problem is of Rove's own making - he made the GOP run as a machine where everyone was always on-message, the Dems have had more heterogeny and therefore seem the healthier party, despite the outcome of the November elections. Once, you make a party truly cadre-fied you have to either lead the masses or you will be led by them because they will want loyalty above all.
The scary thing is that the phoenix that rises from this mess is Sarah Palin, the leader of a movement at the height of its anger. It's a scary world we live in.

Song 19

Mnhherr.

Dancing Pigeons - Ritalin from Blink on Vimeo.

Song 18

I like fighting.



There is no greater point. Aside from the fact that it just goes to show though that people really have weird hobbies.

Song 17

I know, two posts in one day. It must be the summer.