justrick

In my younger and more naive years, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of politics and the politics of economics. Reality, it seems, is something of a bitch. As the financial crisis of 2008 became the the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, I saw unemployment shooting to at least 10% by the beginning of 2009. And sure enough , that's what...
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So it finally looks like the time that Greece will exit the EuroZone. There has been a lot written about this scenario over the last week but I figured I might as well out my two cents in.

I really think that, for the most part, what most people are missing when they talk about the Greek exit is that the austerity movement is, and...
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Dr. John came out with a new album in February, and it is simply amazing



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kxDeV3q2oo&feature=related

Also, I remembered an album Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks had before they joined Fleetwood Mac, appropriately titled "Buckingham Nicks." To be more accurate, the album is what got them into Fleetwood Mac. Anyway, it too is surprisingly good and I recommend you track it down and get, however...
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I wasn't going to write about this, but the "Michael Jackson is back in Pepsi ads" story just brought it all back to me. Ever since HoloPac at Coachella a while back, there's been a sudden wave of "Who should be the next holo-artist?" with Janis Joplin, Freddie Mercury, Biggie and Jimi Hendrix being on the list in a Rolling Stone reader's poll....
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I've been meaning to write this for a while, but figured I just needed to wait a bit. Anyway, it's about Community. When the show came back a few weeks ago, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about how the show was giving up all that had made it good: cutting down on the weirdness and using the the fairly standard sitcom...
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This is the third movement of Steve Reich's collaboration with the Kronos Quartet called Different Trains, this movement is called "After The War". The story behind this work is that when Reich was growing up in 1940, his parents got divorced and he spent a lot of time taking the train from New York to Los Angeles. The title comes from his realization years...
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There is a band out there called animals as leaders. If you're not listening to them, that is something that needs to change. Right now.

Well, so much for Greece. The parliament has just passed the new austerity provisions demanded by the troika (ECB, IMF, and European Commission) so that they could receive their latest round of bailout money. The problem here though, is things will only keep getting worse from here.

The main reason the Greek bailouts haven't been able to restore Greece's dying economy is that they were...
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Tunes I've been listening to lately













And because Cori's set went up on the front page today

Like most people, I've been trying to make sense of Newt Gingrich's rather sudden rise to legitimacy in the Republican primary. You could point to his high poll numbers in December to say that his rise isn't all that sudden, but that was due more to his being the last "Not-Romney" that the GOP elite could tolerate (after all, no party influence peddler is going...
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I'm not one for doomsday predictions and "apocalypse is upon us" sentiments, but damn if doesn't look like the world is going to hell as fast as it can. (It's long and super rantly, fair warning)

The eurozone is tearing itself apart with self-defeating austerity that basically ensure no one will recover from the crisis of 2007-08. It'll be interesting to see what happens when...
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I want to make a point I feel has been largely absent from all the debt ceiling hysteria posts around the Internet. And that is, we are pretty much fucked all the way around.

Naturally, the worst option is default. While no one actually knows what will happen, I believe it's safe to say that "catastrophic" will suddenly be insufficient. While noting the ludicrous amount...
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