Happy July 4th, y'all

[lapsedmodernist]

As fengi says, this is one of the least reassuring things you will ever see. And yes, it is for real the assistant Treasury Secretary.

Yesterday's report that 62,000 jobs were lost brought the total for the first half of the year to 438,000 jobs. Meanwhile, the Institute for Supply Management reported that its measure of the service sector had declined in June. Stock markets, flirting with a bear market, finished another losing week. Oil pushed to a record high. Inflation and foreclosures are up, consumer confidence is down, and administration forecasts for a "strong pace of growth" in the second half of 2008 are look increasingly absurd.

Comments

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

Oh my god, I actually felt sorry for the guy. I wanted to give him Derrick Jensen books and yoga lessons and tell him to quit his job. Ha.

Have you seen Wall-E yet ?
It is more accurate of the state of things than the news methinks.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

oh lord, while I appreciate some of Jensen's sentiment, I find him to be so insufferably annoying in that obnoxious white-dude-coopting-indigenous-cultures-for-privileged-neoprimitivism way that I wouldn't want to spread that particular meme.

haven't seen Wall-E. I am actually not sure I've ever seen a Pixar film! I don't know why, I think I have a subconscious resistance to them.

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

ah yes, I forget you don't like him. :)

this might have been my first Pixar, i think.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I don't think we ever talked about him--you probably just deduced that I wouldn't like him :)

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

Ooo. I envy you. You have a number of treats awaiting you. Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., and Wall-E in particular.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

but I can't actually bring myself to watch them. I have some weird blockage where I think I won't like them, even though intellectually I know I will.

[khalinche.livejournal.com]

Oh jesus, things are really in the shitter, aren't they?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

yes! happy july 4th.