Dogbark wisdom

Two cute woof-woofs from dear old Atrios, at Eschaton. ( I will link to him even though he refuses to acknowledge my existence (I hate that).)

In the most recent bark, he ironically says, Damn those unions for destroying Citigroup!!!. In the immediately prior arf-arf, he says,

I guess the Very Serious People are incapable of seeing how absurd this all is.

Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.

Bush and Paulson to Nation: “UP AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHERFUCKERS!!”

If you’re not reading Atrios as the class war goes into high gear (the money class has the virtual Panzers and hellfires fired from drones and legions of off-the-books Blackwater goons, but to quote the late great tripped-out lizard king himself, ‘you got the guns but we got the numbers’), you really should be. I love this dog bark: Nationalize it all, baby. It’s Kapitalism with a kapital k! Fuck yeah! And don’t forget to bail out Phil Graham’s foreign bank while you’re at it.

This is fun! The Republicanism of the Bush/Cheney/Rove/Norquist era has always been about nihilism, the pure joy of fucking shit up, vandalism, destruction, and setting loose the dogs of war. But until now they’ve pretended it was about other stuff. As the movie comes to its climax, Dracula is showing his fangs: no more pretense of being a misunderstood minor aristocrat from foreign Transylvania. It’s bloodsucking time, suckas, and you sure look tasty to me!

Man, I’ve got to find my old Jefferson Airplane records. There’s a song a need to hear, the perfect soundtrack for this rape and plunder, the New Republican Anthem :


We are forces of chaos and anarchy
Everything they say we are, we are
And we are very
Proud of ourselves
Up against the wall
Up against the wall, motherfucker
Tear down the walls
Tear down the walls

But please, President Bush, don’t be so totally mean. I mean, don’t bogart that joint, dawg. Everybody needs to get toked up to watch this show, dontcha think?

Shitpile Schadenfreude


Over on Eschaton, Atrios has been blogging about the financial meltdown for a few years now. He pretty accurately predicted just what we’re seeing now. When lazy journalists were still referring to the mess as “the subprime crisis[1]”, Atrios was referring to it as The Big Shitpile, a much better name, and running pictures from the house-of-cards like game Jenga.

Below the fold: WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!

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Atrios dogbark blogging

In March, I went to a gathering of people who read Eschaton, a blog by “Atrios”. This guy Atrios has a pithy blogging style that I like a lot. Basically he puts out short observations about this and that (or thus and such)–much as my late dog Rosa used to just bark at random times. People then leave hundreds of comments on Eschaton in response to the Atrios dog-barks.

Among other things, Atrios likes to bark at his readers. From time to time he barks at readers who want him to give them or their blogs publicity. He barks that it is not his job to give people publicity. When he blogs on this topic he gets riled up like a proper chihuahua.

One time Atrios put up on his blog a photo taken inside his apartment. I saw on his bookshelf books by Douglas Hofstadter. So I sent him a note asking if he would like a copy of my Hofstadterian book, “Cheap Complex Devices”. Atrios did not write back.

At Eschacon, I spoke with him for a little bit. He was drinking red wine & think he was a little tipsy. I gave him a copy of my book, which he graciously accepted, and I saw him carrying it around hours later, so I know that, at the least, he did not immediately throw it in the garbage.

However, he still has not replied to my email or given me free publicity on his blog. Also, hardly anybody ever leaves comments here on Wetmachine. Finally, although Doug Hofstadter and I are now friends, he had not read my homage a Hofstadter yet either. And none of you people leave comments!

Also, this entry is much too long for an Atrios-style blog entry. Maybe that’s why I’m a minor blogger and he’s a superstar. It’s harder than it looks.