Making Monday Worse: We Have No Money, But Our GDP Is Doing Great

Monday is here again, and it means everyone has to go to work. Well, not everyone. If you are one of those parents who needed government-funded daycare to watch your children while you were at your job, you aren't going to work today, because, fuck, that daycare subsidy doesn't exist any more and you have to watch your kids instead. If you are a European who is approaching what used to be retirement age, however, you can look forward to many Mondays of hard work ahead because, fuck again, European countries are going to be bankrupted soon by all of their old pensioners living off of the government. I don't really understand exactly what happened, but all of a sudden there's less money in the world, and every single government in the world is poorer.

Ayn Rand's followers, those pillars of self-reliance who probably couldn't get laid in high school, might be rejoicing at the dawning of this new era, where even Europe is turning away from social safety nets. Then again, Randians had to deal with the embarrassing sight of favorite son Rand Paul* deliver a rambling defense of his criticism of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, during which he somehow got around to saying,

"Do you say that you should have the right to bring your gun into a restaurant even though the owner of the restaurant says 'well no, we don't want to have guns in here' the bar says 'we don't want to have guns in here because people might drink and start fighting and shoot each-other.'"

What? Maybe we should have laws against discrimination and bringing guns to bars, is that what's he's saying? Or is Rand saying that the government is forcing bars to serve the heavily armed? If so, I'm against it.

Meanwhile, oil is still leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, a bullfighter became an internet phenomenon after getting his throat gored open, and Brooklyn continues to fill up with dead animals. But on the positive side, neoliberal policies have had a positive effect on the US GDP! Doesn't that make you feel better?

*Yeah, Rand isn't a “true libertarian,” blah blah, blah. He's pretty close for someone who could actually get elected. And why would a libertarian run for public office anyway? Shouldn't they be busy enough being titans of industry or whatever? Read more!

Making Monday Worse: Sucking Up Oil Edition

Good news everyone! Remember that damaged drilling operation that is now constantly leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico? The one where no one knows how much oil is being leaked? Yeah, well, problem solved, sort of, according to British Petroleum. But not really, since the tube that is now attached to the leak is a “stopgap measure” at best. Since the leak started, it's become increasingly clear that there wasn't really a plan for this scenario, and all sorts of increasingly absurd-sounding solutions have been publicly mulled over. Can we put a dome over the leak? Fuck, guess not! Can we use disgusting logs of hair (pictured above) to soak up the oil? What about hay? Hey, let's ask the general public for ideas! (My favorite: “Is setting the spill on fire an option?”)

You don't have to be a hemp-wearing environmentalist to think that this whole “Extracting poisonous chemicals from the ground” thing is overrated. But unless you want to go back to the pre-combustion engine days when everyone was churning butter, killing whales to get lamp oil, and worrying about the massive amounts of horse feces clogging city streets, there really isn't a way to stop drilling for oil. A bunch of you just said, “Wind power!” but that's not an option yet, as right-wing asshole Robert Bryce points out. Denmark, which is one of the “greener” countries in the world, gets 15 percent or so of its electricity from wind, but it also engages in a ton of offshore drilling, so much so that it actually exports oil. (Left-wing asshole Matt Wasson notes that CO2 emissions have been reduced in Denmark, but doesn't mention Denmark's drilling and coal importing.) And if one of the most wind-power-reliant countries in the world is getting less than 20 percent of its energy from wind, well, shit.

Update: More good news everyone! The Supreme Court decided (barely) that we shouldn't send teenagers to prison for life if they haven't killed anyone. I for one did not know the US was doing that. Are we still pretending that prison is a place to rehabilitate criminals?

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