Author Archive | Liam McGonagle

To Reduce Inequality, Tax Wealth, Not Income

By on November 20, 2012 in News 9

Picture: Kriplozoik (CC)

Disinfonauts have known about this idea for quite some time.  And the idea was floated by the floundering Lib Dem Party leader in Britain earlier this year.  But only just now does it seem to be gaining traction in the mainstream American press.  By Daniel Altman in the New York Times:

 WHETHER you’re in the 99 percent, the 47 percent or the 1 percent, inequality in America may threaten your future. Often decried for moral or social reasons, inequality imperils the economy, too; the International Monetary Fund recently warned that high income inequality could damage a country’s long-term growth. But the real menace for our long-term prosperity is not income inequality — it’s wealth inequality, which distorts access to economic opportunities.

Wealth inequality has worsened for two decades and is now at an extreme level. Replacing the income, estate and gift taxes with a progressive wealth tax would do much more to reduce it than any other tax plan being considered in Washington.

… Read the rest

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G.O.P. Factions Grapple Over Meaning of Loss

By on November 7, 2012 in News 43

I bet you they never even stumble across the actual explanation, though (i.e., they’re *ssholes whose policies don’t work and their electoral strategy relies on alienating every growing segment of the population).  From Michael Cooper at The New York Times.

It was the morning of the Republican hangover.

After four years in which the jobless rate never dipped below 7.8 percent, with millions of Americans still unemployed or underemployed and median household income falling, Republicans still failed to unseat President Obama and, for the second election in a row, fell short in their efforts to win control of a Senate that seemed within reach. The Wednesday-morning quarterbacking began quickly.

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, captured the feelings of many Republicans when he said in a statement that “we have a period of reflection and recalibration ahead for the Republican Party.”

“While some will want to blame one wing of the party over the other,” Mr.

… Read the rest

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Exorcisms Performed; Rates Reasonable

By on October 26, 2012 in News 6

I’m sure they are reasonable.  But watch out for the hidden fees and subscription-based extras (e.g., “ectoplasm removal”, “ongoing psychic remediation”, etc., etc.).  From Alanna Gallagher at The Irish Times:

FIFTY-YEAR-old Patrick McGuire is a banker who grew up in a haunted house in Dublin. As a child he complained to his mother about being kept awake by a presence.

“She saw him quite a few times … a person walking across the hallway,” he explains. “One day we had a house guest who said she was psychic and asked for permission to walk through the house. She said the property had a spirit and that it was protecting the family. She pointed to a formal room that we never used where she indicated that a duel had taken place. During the fight a man had been killed.”

There was never any malice, McGuire says, it was just a fact of life in the home he grew up in.

… Read the rest

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Superman to Launch Alternative Media Venture

By on October 24, 2012 in News 1

Watch out, Luke Rudkowski!

From Alison Flood at the Guardian:

Journalism’s future lies online – at least according to Superman‘s alter ego Clark Kent, who is about to quit his job at the Daily Planet and found a version of the Drudge Report.

In the new issue of DC Comics’ Superman series, out tomorrow, Clark will stand up in front of staff in a “Jerry Maguire-type moment” which will see him resign from the Daily Planet and mourn “how journalism has given way to entertainment”, writer Scott Lobdell told USA Today.

Clark will also call on his fellow reporters to stand up for truth, justice, “and yeah — I’m not ashamed to say it — the American way,” said Lobdell.

Continued at the Guardian… Read the rest

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1970′s Era S&M Dungeon Unearthed in Kentucky

By on September 4, 2012 in News 3

Picture: Yice (CC)

Aren’t archaeology and “history” fascinating?

I don’t see how the identity of the owners is going to remain secret for long, though, as property tax assessments are part of the public record.  Keep an eye out for some interesting revelations about Grammie and Gramps in the coming months.  From Joe Arnold of WHAS11:

LOUISVILLE, Ky (WHAS11) — The mystery of an underground sadomasochism club continued to unravel on Tuesday after WHAS11 News aired images of what work crews discovered during Whiskey Row stabilization efforts.

Judging by the state of decay in the collapsing buildings, demolition crews had estimated the club dated to the 1970′s, but e-mails and posts to WHAS11′s Facebook and Twitter accounts reflect a  more recent sadistic history.

Click here to see pictures from inside.

A former founding member told WHAS11 that LATEX, short for Louisville Area Trust EXchange, was in operation in the mid to late 1990′s with close to 1,000 dues paying members.

… Read the rest

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Jenna Jameson Endorses Mitt Romney

By on August 5, 2012 in News 23

Photo credit: Luke Ford, lukeford.net

Well, why not?  After all, wafflemongers like Alec Baldwin get to have opinions all the time.  It must be admitted, Jameson’s ideas do have a direct simplicity that is very disarming.  Would you rather be popular or be correct?  And if reality is nothing more than a consensus construct, doesn’t being popular essentially make you correct?  If that’s your criterion, wouldn’t Jameson be a better keynote speaker at an economics symposium than Joseph Stiglitz?  From Nick Wing of the Huffington Post:

Retired porn star Jenna Jameson waded into the 2012 presidential race on Thursday, choosing a San Francisco strip club as the venue to announce her support for GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney.

CBS San Francisco has her comments:

“I’m very looking forward to a Republican being back in office,” Jameson said while sipping champagne in a VIP room at Gold Club in the city’s South of Market neighborhood.

… Read the rest

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Space Aliens Gatecrash London Olympics

By on July 31, 2012 in News 11

Well, that’s my theory, anyhow.  Other possibilities include resurrected ancient Maya come to declare the end of Time, predator drones enforcing the sponsor-mandated dress codes, or Jesus come back to earth to close his RBS account.  From Lee Speigel at the Huffington Post:

Talk about an uninvited guest at the Olympics.

Friday night’s spectacular pyrotechnics display of the most watched opening ceremony in summer Olympics history attracted more than the eyes of over 40 million people. A clearly seen unidentified flying object was videotaped making its way over London’s Olympic stadium, reports Examiner.com.

The disc-shaped object is first seen entering the upper left portion of the video as the fireworks erupt over the stadium. The UFO — which appears to have a dome or bulge rising from its center — moves slowly across the sky as if deliberately observing the light-show spectacle below it.

While NBC Olympics — a division of NBC Sports — has chosen Goodyear blimps for all of its 2012 Olympics aerial coverage, the strange-looking object that appeared over the opening ceremonies doesn’t appear to be a blimp.

… Read the rest

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The Recipe for Cultural Fail: One Part Murder, Two Parts Rape

By on July 26, 2012 in News 38

If recent events prove nothing else to the world, it’s that Americans are effeminate b*tches.  I refer, naturally, to the deluge of predictably worthless public reaction following the shootings in Aurora, Colorado.

Of course, I mean “effeminate” in a very specific way.  Not in terms of having two X chromosomes or regularly shaving one’s legs.  More in a sort of “thinking-that-’Fifty-Shades-of-Grey’-is-something-other than-a-steaming-pile-of-dreck” way; a way that reinforces and insanely celebrates our culture of debility.

One persistent theory of gender relations is that females appear to be, on average, more passive than males because evolutionary biological pressures made them the default caregivers–therefore far more concerned with maintaining a stable child rearing environment than males, who were therefore free to pursue a more aggressively transactional approach to their undertakings.

I buy that, to a degree.  With the caveats of extreme individual variation around a statistical mean, and the awareness that current technological and demographic trends seem to mitigate against this being an immutable physically determinate characteristic.  In fact, I’d say there’s a good case to be made that the American impotence exhibited following the Aurora shootings is a clear symptom of the devaluation of of the transactional, male principle in contemporary culture.… Read the rest

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U.S. Administration Officials Charged with Politically Motivated Killings of American Citizens

By on July 20, 2012 in News 4

If only tree-hugging ACLU types like Saul Alinsky wannabe Obama and their radical constitutional originalist opposition like Mitt Romney would stop stoking this issue for political gain!  From Charlie Savage at the New York Times:

Relatives of three American citizens killed in drone strikes in Yemen last year filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against four senior national security officials on Wednesday. The suit, in the Federal District Court here, opened a new chapter in the legal wrangling over the Obama administration’s use of drones in pursuit of terrorism suspects away from traditional “hot” battlefields like Afghanistan.

The first strike, on Sept. 30, killed a group of people including Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who was born in New Mexico, and Samir Khan, a naturalized American citizen who lived at times in Queens, Long Island and North Carolina. The second, on Oct. 14, killed a group of people including Mr.

… Read the rest

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LIBOR Pains: Why Do These Stories Always Seem to Break in Britain?

By on July 12, 2012 in News 1

Probably not because their regulators are any smarter or scrupulous than those in the U.S. – more likely because they’re relatively powerless to conceal them. From Caroline Salas Gage and Joshua Zumbrun at Bloomberg:

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York was aware of potential issues involving Barclays Plc (BARC) and the London interbank offered rate after the financial crisis began in 2007, according to a statement from the district bank.

“In the context of our market monitoring following the onset of the financial crisis in late 2007, involving thousands of calls and e-mails with market participants over a period of many months, we received occasional anecdotal reports from Barclays of problems with Libor,” New York Fed spokeswoman Andrea Priest said in an e-mailed statement.

“In the spring of 2008, following the failure of Bear Stearns and shortly before the first media report on the subject, we made further inquiry of Barclays as to how Libor submissions were being conducted,” the statement said.

… Read the rest

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