Even more stuff I don't care about

On the theme of my last post about not giving a shit about when dinosaurs hunted for food, this latest article, coincidentally also from the BBC, talking about if the Last Supper was on a Monday or a Wednesday. WHO GIVES A FUCK!>!?>!!> Am I the only one who finds these sort of things so so so so so dumb? I think my main problem is actually more along the lines of "things British people consider newsworthy." Stay tuned.

Something I am now sick of

I was going to write "2 things I am now sick of" and bemoan how the Holocaust has become its own genre for movies and entertainment, but whatever, it keeps deniers on their heels and Daniel Craig in the acting game, so whatever.

What I am really sick of is reading articles telling me about how dinosaurs used to behave. FUCKING SHIT, they went extinct 65 MILLION YEARS AGO. We are bombing the shit out of Libya, which is making way more noise and destruction than anything the dinos ever did, as of one month ago and that has pretty much faded from the headlines. I don't think people understand how long ago 65 MILLION YEARS is. Try this, think about the oldest human stuff you can remember hearing about, it was maybe 1 million years ago.

As cool as it was that dinosaurs had functional brains, did shit at night and either did or did not do other awesome things, they had their epoch, they are gone, get over it. Reptiles don't cry, you shouldn't either.

Creative museum ideas

In honor of me reading about the seemingly awesome-sounding Iceland penis museum I sit here wondering what other crazy museums might be out there, just waiting for me to visit with my mail order bride?

What about:

- Museum of abnormally large boogers or shits

- Museum of ugly pets/children that parents/owners considered cute

- Museum with taxidermy animals that were the last of their breeds before being shot for game and rendered extinct.

Other ideas?

America the Beautiful

I'm not sure what's funnier, the fact that this awesome April Fool's prank happened or that a second degree assault charge is stemming from it!

The anti-therapist

Therapy is a very established yet regimented profession.
You sit on a couch, or perhaps a comfortable chair and talk with someone who is very kind, understanding yet has the not-so-hidden agenda of using that understanding and kindness as a way of analyzing, critiquing and altering you in some way. I believe, however, that balance, a zen-like middle path, is the way to success in life. Therapy as we know it has swung the pendulum too far in one direction and I see it as my duty to re-balance the force. I want to propose that anyone seeking therapy must also sign up for anti-therapy with a licensed anti-therapist.



The anti-therapist would augment what the therapist is doing with a heavy dose of realtalk. Depressed? Probably because you're fat ugly and single. Having trouble with your spouse? Get a job and some disposable income. Considering ending it all? Run a cost-benefit for the world and do the responsible thing.

Out of the therapist/anti-therapist combination will rise a heartier species, coddled yet challenged; ready for the world in all of its layered glory.

Also, this

It's Friday! Friday! Gotta get down on Friday!

So this has gotten so amazing, phenomenal, coincidental, and downright scary that I can't NOT write about it.

It's "Friday," the song by awkward 13 year-old middleschooler Rebecca Black of Orange County, CA. If you've seen it, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't, I've got three things to say to you:

1) it's 2011 now - welcome.
2) what rock have you been under for the past three weeks?
3) what the fuck are you waiting for? Click on the video for godsakes!



This is failure approaching epicness of Odyssean proportions. Just a Brunswick stew of epic fail. I'm truly shocked at how bad this is.

And yet I listened the whole way thought, as I'm sure many have, because I simply couldn't turn away from such a disaster. It's the sonic version of rubbernecking at the scene of a wicked car crash. It's like watching a slightly less funny Charlie Sheen interview, only a tad more pathetic yet somehow not quite as sad.

But at least the new media -- Web 2.0 or "You" or whatever it's called -- has lived up to its billing as a game-changing technology, and in more ways than just delivering copious amounts of every type of porn imaginable.

When I first saw this thing it was forwarded to me by a buddy who's a middleschool teacher in LA county. His description accompanying the link? "Watch this guys. See, teachers should be paid ten fold what they make. Teenagers are so unbelievably goddamned annoying."

That was over two weeks ago, and the video had "just" 4 million hits at that point.

But things happen fast in viral world. As of April 1, this trainwreck of a song has since garnered over 70 million views on YouTube in less than three weeks (it also has over 1.4 million "dislikes," making it the most hated YouTube video ever by quite some margin).

The sheer velocity with which this pile of garbage has spread around the digital globe is remarkable. She's already been on Leno, for godsakes.

At no other time in human history would it be possible to something so utterly worthless to be viewed by nearly 1 in 4 Americans. Hell, for the vast majority of our species' time here on this rock, there haven't even been 70 million of us around at any one given time. Scary when you think of it like that, isn't it?

Take a moment to contemplate the incredible flow of information here: Andrew Jackson killed 2,000 British soldiers at the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812 when the war had actually been over for two weeks; the news hadn't made it to either side.

So yep, it's here: we truly live in the information age now. A brave new world. Just remember: nobody ever said all that "information" wouldn't be worthless, or crappy, or both.

Nothing good can come of this. Trust me, this little girl isn't going to make nearly enough money from this to offset the fact that her life is officially ruined (public ridicule on this scale and intensity never really goes away -- I'm guessing pill overdose in five, ten years tops). The only positive thing about this whole mess is that it's bred some AMAZING parody videos.

Here are some of the best:







Is it just me, or does this actually sound like Andrew W. K.?




Yikes.

And finally, this wouldn't be complete without an epic Dylan cover treatment. Nobody does a better job of actually sounding confused while they're signing something that doesn't really make sense than Dylan:




But even with those great parodies putting a momentary smile on my face, I still couldn't put my finger on what was bothering me about the whole situation. Then I felt the stars align in the form of Satan's Pentagram and saw this:

Rebecca Black's Not To Blame: Meet The Man Who Wrote “Friday”

"You see, little 13-year-old Rebecca actually had very little to do with the notorious song or video. Patrice Wilson, the founder of Ark Music Factory and seemingly random rapper in Rebecca's video, is taking responsibility for this dubious phenomenon…He studied…at Whitman College in Washington state"

NOOOOOOO!!!! CAN'T YOU SEE?!?! THE DEVIL HIMSELF IS FOLLOWING ME, AND HE INTENDS TO COLLECT!!!! RUN!!!! RUN FOR YOUR MISERABLE LIVES!!!! I CAN'T SAVE YOU!!!! RUN!!!!!!!!!!!!!



Well, now that I've got that out of the way: don't worry all you wonkish El Monstro readers, I'll have a nice piece on the societal value of public stock markets in the next couple days.

More Cyclical Compensation Models - A Cure For 'Divide & Conquer' Anti-Labor Strategies?

I know there's been a ton of crazy shit in the news in the past couple weeks (including my accurate prediction of a massive earthquake on the Pacific plate just two days before the Japan tragedy - yikes) but I wanted to address the Wisconsin labor situation for a minute. I am very passionate about the subject, and I have a thought on how to improve the unions' bargaining situation:

It's been well established for quite sometime in the field of behavioral economics that as long as someone's standard of living is improving -- i.e., they're making more money and/or have more buying power -- they tend to not give a shit about how everybody else is doing financially. A rising tide may lift all boats, but even when it lifts some more than others nobody tends to complain (at least not in substantial numbers).

This is part of the rationale behind Reaganomics being a socially-stable economic policy position: yes, the rich may become fantastically fucking richer, but as long as it spurs enough economic growth that even the people at the bottom get a little richer there won't be riots or other forms of unrest.

China's leaders have played this tendency beautifully, papering a 9% annualized growth rate over an incredible rise in income disparity since the market reforms of Deng Xiao Ping began in 1978.

[quick trivia fact] Deng is the source of my favorite quote from a modern Chinese leader (the ancient ones were decidedly more badass, for the record). Once, Deng agreed to take a foreign reporter's questions -- the first example of such government openness since Mao's revolution triumphed in 1949. When asked if moving to a market system represented an acknowledgment that communism had indeed failed, Deng said the following (paraphrased): "No, that is not what is happening at all. You Westerners use too many labels that we do not have use for in China. Command economy? Market economy? Black cat, white cat -- what is the difference so long as it catches mice?" SO EPICALLY CHINESE!!![/quick trivia fact]

But bad shit happens when you don't have economic growth. When the proverbial 'pie' stops growing in total size, people use extra-market means -- i.e., political upheaval, riots, violence, etc. -- of squabbling over who gets what from the newly-set size of the pie. So if you want to avoid civil/political strife and unrest, you better have a growing economy more often than not.



I think this effect may help explain why unions are not supported 100% by the public.

Unions in general -- and public employee unions in particular -- have spend much of their energy and political capital over the past ~30 years fighting for more job security rather than better pay and benefits. As a result unionized government jobs on average pay less than their private-sector counterparts given constant levels of education, but they have a lot more job security when the economy goes through a cyclical downturn (or goes down the fucking toilet like in the Great Recession).

This is why people are upset at unionized public employees. They see themselves hitting hard times -- losing jobs, taking hits on their pay, working extra hours for no additional compensation, benefits freezes, etc. -- but not the unionized public employees.

The proverbial 'pie' has stopped growing, and people are resorting to extra-market means -- in this case, electoral politics -- of squabbling over who gets what from the set size of the pie.

And so we face the following reality: a whole shitload of people who make $40k a year and are sliding backwards are angry at the unionized public employees who are making $45k a year, and a majority of them just got convinced by a couple of billionaire Koch brothers to vote in the interests of the fabulously wealthy because of the more-visible perceived unfairness of the public employees' compensation being shielded from the negative effects of the recession.

Napoleon first termed this strategy "Divide & Conquer." Historically, it's been brutally effective. It's just what we did to the Native Americans: pitting tribe against tribe over comparably petty differences and old rivalries while we were fucking genociding the 'winner.' Dark, but effective. And the corporate anti-labor people are playing it really well.



He's my idea.

The unions need to focus on improving overall pay and benefits for their members, not just on shielding them from the trials and tribulations of the business cycle.

When Joe Six-Pack sees that Joe Gov't-Employee is also hurting, they'll likely feel solidarity rather than rivalry, even Joe G-E is making more money in absolute terms. They won't get taken for a ride by a socioeconomic class that has absorbed nearly all of the economic gains of the past 30 years and now faces no campaign donation restrictions, amplifying their power well beyond their meager numbers. They'll stop this anti-labor charade that actually hurts their own interests and focus on the real problems of economic inequality in a country where the richest 400 citizens have as much wealth as the entire bottom half -- 155 million people -- of the country does.

Just a thought.