B12 Solipsism

Notorious locker-room cancer and intern-boinker Stephon Marbury, aka Starbury, has apparently accepted a contract to play for a basketball team in China, Taiyuan Shanxi Zhongyu, currently ranked 15th out of 17 teams.

Li Fei, a 21-year-old college student, said that with Mr. Marbury on the team “it injects more excitement into the game.”

“I’ve always been his fan.” Mr. Li said. “I know he’s a selfish player, and he doesn’t like to pass, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s a great player. It’s beautiful to watch.”

It’s hard to say how this marriage will work out.

Taiyuan is the capital of China’s northern Shanxi province and the center of China’s coal-mining industry. The whole city is covered in a thin layer of coal dust, including Zhongyu’s Binhe Sports Stadium, which seats about 4,500 people. It has less than a fourth the capacity of New York’s Madison Square Garden where Mr. Marbury played from 2004 to 2008. Courtside seats in the arena, which run about $1,464 a season, are a collection of worn red sofas and lounge chairs.

The Binhe Stadium looks like an abandoned building in the daytime while the team is practicing, its gates held closed with bicycle locks. About two hours before each game, security guards set up temporary metal detectors in front of each entrance to the stadium.

[Click to continue reading NBA's Marbury Takes His Game to China - WSJ.com]
[Non-WSJ subscribers use this link to read the full article]

For a guy who always thinks he is the best player in the league, despite contrary evidence, perhaps this will be a good experience. If he lasts the season…

Taiyuan is markedly less tourist-friendly, internationalized and cosmopolitan than bustling cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. It’s hard to find a bank ATM that will accept foreign credit cards.

“If he lasts 10 days, I’ll be amazed,” says Bruce O’Neil, president of the U.S. Basketball Academy, which trains young American players to be drafted by Chinese teams. “The culture shock is tremendous.”

…

Mr. Marbury, though, isn’t playing in China for the money. He’s here to promote his shoe and apparel brand, called “Starbury” after his nickname, featuring low-cost sneakers for $15. The market is potentially huge: The NBA estimates that 300 million people play basketball in China. Mr. Marbury has the Starbury logo tattooed on the side of his shaved head.

His new employer, Zhongyu-owner Wang Xingjiang, is an iron and steel magnate and basketball fanatic who made the Forbes “400 Richest Chinese” list in 2008. At the time, his net worth was estimated to be $260 million.

A few interesting links collected November 11th through November 12th:

• 

• Joakim Noah is the spice in Rick Morrissey’s salsa escapade – TrueHoop Blog – ESPN – “When Noah was drafted, [Rick ] Morrissey wrote a column called “You Must Be Joakim” predicting Noah would be a bust, and promising to eat his column, with salsa, if Noah turned into a good NBA player.

  When I finally saw the video, one thing stands out: Joakim Noah is not only there watching, but he’s up out of his chair, cheering and dancing!

  After Morrissey’s droning preamble, in which he doesn’t really admit he was wrong, but instead asks Noah about how he got so dramatically better (as if nobody could have possibly foreseen this two-time NCAA champion succeeding — let the record reflect that when Noah was selected, David Thorpe said the Bulls would win a championship with Noah), it gets to eating time.

  Noah claps his hands together, shouting “NOW WE’RE EATING THE SALSA! NOW THE GOOD PART!”

  Indeed, because of Noah’s energy, this is the good part. ”

• Letters of Note: Please – no preferential treatment – Asimov was a mensch

• 

• allmusic – Alone Again Or – Written by second guitarist Bryan MacLean in the early ’60s in musical tribute to his mother, a flamenco dancer, “Alone Again Or” is lushly beautiful, but also achingly sad, thanks both to MacLean’s distressed lost-love lyrics and Lee’s high-register vocals, which give the song an off-kilter quality due to the fact (also revealed in the reissue’s liner notes) that Lee’s vocals were originally meant to be simply a high harmony to MacLean’s gruffer lead, but Lee pushed his own vocals front and center, mixing MacLean out almost entirely, during the album’s final mix. In both respects, then, it fits perfectly as the start of Forever Changes, a jaundiced “no thank you” to the supposed sunshine and good vibes of the Summer of Love as well as Arthur Lee’s own Pet Sounds, the album he intended as his personal artistic summation.

A few interesting links collected October 29th through October 30th:

• Chief drug adviser David Nutt sacked over cannabis stance | Politics | The Guardian – Alan Johnson, the home secretary, has sacked Professor David Nutt as senior drugs adviser after the scientist renewed his criticism of the government's decision to toughen the law on cannabis.

  Johnson wrote to Nutt saying he no longer had confidence in him as chairman of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) and asking him to consider his position.

  Nutt had accused ministers of "devaluing and distorting" the scientific evidence over illicit drugs by their decision last year to reclassify cannabis from class C to class B against the advice of the ACMD

• Think Again: Obama’s Commie Past Exposed Yet Again – Robert Fox, the millionaire brother-in-law of a GOP congressman, tried to prove the connection. He offered $10,000 to Dr. Peter Millican, an Oxford professor who had developed a computer program to make comparisons between texts. Times of London reported this on November 2, 2008. Millican told Fox that the initial findings made it “highly implausible” that the books shared authors. He also said that if further research was done, then the findings would be made public whether or not Ayers was proven to be the author. Fox withdrew his offer.
• Excerpts From The Book The NBA Doesn't Want You To Read – Tim Donaghy – Deadspin – I'm still fucking bitter about this game six travesty
  :"If we give the benefit of the calls to the team that's down in the series, nobody's going to complain. The series will be even at three apiece, and then the better team can win Game 7," Bavetta stated.

  As history shows, Sacramento lost Game 6 in a wild come-from-behind thriller that saw the Lakers repeatedly sent to the foul line by the referees. For other NBA referees watching the game on television, it was a shameful performance by Bavetta's crew, one of the most poorly officiated games of all time."

A few interesting links collected September 18th through September 21st:

• Back Issues : The New Yorker -

  “Today we launch Back Issues, formerly a department in our News Desk blog, as its own blog on newyorker.com. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll use this space to delve through more than eighty years of New Yorker history, with an eye to relating that history to the happenings of the day. Our chief goal will be to make this vast resource approachable and useful to our readers.”

  maybe its just my inner historian, but I love looking at news coverage from years before I was born

  

• Chicagoans for Rio 2016 – It would be exciting to host the Olympics here in Chicago. But you know what would be even better? Rio De Janeiro. Just let Rio host the 2016 Olympics. We don’t mind. Honest.
• In defense of ACORN | Salon -

  To claim that the stupid behavior of a half-dozen employees should discredit a national group with offices in more than 75 cities staffed by many thousands of employees and volunteers is like saying that Mark Sanford or John Ensign have discredited every Republican governor or senator. Indeed, the indignation of the congressional Republicans screaming about ACORN and the phony streetwalker is diluted by the presence of at least two confirmed prostitution clients — Rep. Ken Calvert and Sen. David Vitter — in their midst. Neither of those right-wing johns has been even mildly chastised by their moralistic peers. Nobody is cutting off their federal funding.

  Indeed.

• 
• freedarko.com: A Significant Bullet – From the press kit for Herzog’s new film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: “I call upon the theoreticians of cinema to go after this one. Go for it, losers.”

[Summer Hoops, Rogers Park somewhere]

Sam Smith reports:

Has Dwyane Wade purchased his Chicago dream house as a prelude to signing a free agent contract with the Bulls next summer?
Or is Wade just a clever real estate speculator at a good time?

Prying eyes want to know. And at least basketball franchises in Chicago and Miami.

ChicagoMag.com’s real estate blog reported Monday that Wade has purchased a four story riverfront townhouse in Kinzie Park, which is just west of the Loop across the river from the East Bank Club. The price is said to be about $1.4 million, which hardly seems like what you’d pay for an occasional getaway place back in your hometown if you are planning to establish roots in Miami by signing a major extension.

[Click to continue reading Chicago Bulls Blog: Dwyane Wade buys $1.4 million Chicago townhouse]

Hey, DWade for Ben Gordon¹ is definite upgrade; even though Dwyane Wade is injury-prone, he is certainly one of the top guards in the NBA.

Sam Smith still doesn’t believe in outgoing links, but Google is² our friend:

The Kinzie Park townhouse is part of a development of former industrial parcels across the river from the East Bank Club that also includes high-rise condos. The townhouses have private yards fronting the river along a shared promenade. Wade bought a 3,900-square-foot unit with a two-car garage and a rooftop deck.

The property was on the market for almost a year, says the seller’s agent, Harold Blum, and it sat vacant for a while. “But then we furnished it and we got two offers,” says Blum, who would not reveal whether Wade’s offer was the higher of the two. Wade closed on the sale in late June, but information on the deal only surfaced recently at the Cook County Recorder of Deeds.

[Click to continue reading NBA and Olympic Star Buys in River North - Deal Estate - August 2009 - Chicago]

Coincidentally, Flickr-eeno phule and I were just walking past here a couple weeks ago, albeit on the other side of the river. It doesn’t look like I took any photos of this area, but then I didn’t see anything photo-worthy either. I’d like having DWade as a near-neighbor, not that I’m much of a celebrity stalker (well, except for the time Michelle Obama was eating across the street). The Chicago Bulls can dream, right?

1. who signed with the Detroit Pistons over the off-season [↩]
2. usually [↩]

Some additional reading July 18th from 20:56 to 23:29:

• Falling Off the Turnip Truck… – ” four heads of cabbage? Some of us fled the shtetl and crossed the North Atlantic precisely to avoid having to eat four heads of cabbage n a single week…”
• Drug WarRant – Prosecutors Scared of the Constitution – Of course prosecutors are scared by this ruling. It makes their job harder and it also means that more drug cases might go to trial in the hope that they could get a dismissal if the prosecutor can’t produce the analyst. The only way prosecutors manage the huge load of drug cases is to see to it that only 5% go to trial (through piling on charges to make the plea deal attractive in comparison to the alternative). If more drug cases go to trial, the whole system falls apart, particularly in a time when more money for courts is unlikely to be found.

  And the system is corrupt. This Supreme Court ruling merely states that the prosecutors and judges must do their job as specified in the Constitution. If they can’t handle it, then maybe we’ll finally take a look at why we’re prosecuting so many people.

• 
• From Israel to the N.B.A., Missing the Hummus – NYTimes.com – The first Israeli in the N.B.A., Omri Casspi, is busily trying to adapt to life in the United States.

  For starters, he needs a cellphone with a local number. He just received a $4,500 bill for about two weeks of calls, which is expensive even by N.B.A. standards. He needs new chargers for all his gadgets. But he is struggling most to find comfort food.

  “Hummus,” Casspi said, with a hard h and a long u, stressing the first syllable in a way that conveyed utter seriousness. “You don’t have that here, though.”

“The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy” (Bill Simmons)

Bill Simmons is nearly finished with his book on a subject near and dear to my heart, the NBA. Avi Zenilman of The New Yorker interviewed Simmons on the NBA Finals, and the topic of the modern athlete came up:

The lack of college experience also means that you probably have less of a chance to have a conversation with a Finals player about English lit or political science. For instance, if you’re a reporter, maybe you don’t ask for thoughts from modern players on the Gaza Strip or Abdul Nasser, or whether they read Chuck Pahlaniuk’s new book. These guys lead sheltered lives that really aren’t that interesting. Back in the seventies, you could go out to dinner with three of the Knicks—let’s say, Phil Jackson, Bill Bradley, and Walt Frazier—and actually have a fascinating night. Which three guys would you pick on the Magic or Lakers? I guess Fisher would be interesting, and I always heard Odom was surprisingly thoughtful. I can’t come up with a third. So I’d say that the effects are more in the “didn’t really have any experiences outside being a basketball player” sense.

I can’t wait to see what happens to KG, Kobe, T-Mac, Carmelo, Howard and others when they finish with basketball. These guys have been mini-corporations and basketball machines since the age of eighteen. What will they do? What will be important to them? When I was researching my book, one thing that blew me away was how brilliant the guys from the fifties and sixties were. Not as players, as people. Oscar Robertson, Bill Russell, Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, Bob Cousy, Wilt Chamberlain…these were thoughtful, well-rounded human beings who cared deeply about not just their sport, but about their place in society and (in the case of the black guys) their stature during such a tumultuous time. Everyone knows about Russell’s eleven rings, but did you know about everything he did to advance the cause of African-Americans? Everyone knows about Oscar’s triple doubles, but did you know that he filed the lawsuit that paved the way for a real players union and free agency? These were truly great men and the N.B.A. just wouldn’t be where it is if that wasn’t the case.

Nowadays, the mindset seems to be more, “What can I do to raise my profile? How can I become more famous? How can I make more money?” We need more David Robinsons and Steve Nashes and Ray Allens. The N.B.A. does a terrific job of getting their players into a community, but I wonder how many of those players actually understand why it’s important, or if it’s just something else on their schedule right between “Make a cameo on Kendra’s reality show” and “Meet with E.A. bigwigs about a possible N.B.A. Live cover.” Five decades ago, when Russell wanted to get his point across about something that was important to him, he would write a first-person account in Sports Illustrated. Today, Shaq gets his point across in a 140-character Twitter post. I don’t think this is progress.

[Click to read more of Studying The Finals: News Desk: Online Only: The New Yorker]

Amen to that.

A few interesting links collected June 10th through June 13th:

• ESPN – OTL: Phil At Work – Jackson is not thinking about 10 rings. – He puts the players on alert with it. Trap now. Watch the double. Jump out on that screen-roll. See what the opponent is doing — read the floor. Its meaning shifts. It's a text to be read, interpreted and acted upon.…His brother taught him the whistle when they were kids. Jackson used it to call his dog …when they were walking through the streets of his hometown of Williston, N.D. When he got to the NBA, and shouting stripped his voice, he turned to the whistle.

  "Now it's the source of his power, in a way," assistant coach Brian Shaw says. "If it were words he was shouting, you could hear them or not hear them, but with the whistle, he's asking you to think, he's putting it on you."

  It's equal parts advance and retreat, right? He commands attention, then backs off, maybe leans back in his courtside chair, even puts his hands in his lap. The whistle says he's here and he has expectations, and at the same time it says he trusts you, believes you can do what needs doing.

• Valassis Uses News America's Own Clients Against in Trial; Feel the Wrath of Sara Lee! | BNET Advertising Blog | BNET – "Account reps for News America Marketing could face some uncomfortable meetings and phone calls with their clients over the next few weeks, because dozens of their clients’ names have been dragged into the ongoing Michigan state court trial in which the agency is accused of forcing its customers to take anti-competitive bundled deals on in-store promos and newspaper coupons.

  The News America clients named on just the first day of the trial were:

  Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Dial, S.C. Johnson, Georgia-Pacific, Campbells, Sara Lee, Pepsi, Church & Dwight, Johnson Family Co., Kraft, Coca-Cola, Conagra, Cadbury, Ocean Spray, Clorox, Novartis, Pfizer, Tropicana and Reckitt-Benckiser."

• Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive « alex.moskalyuk – Number 7 sounds like Apple's iPhone 3GS and 3G pricing model:
  "A more expensive product makes the old version look like a value buy. An example here is a Williams-Sonoma bread maker. After an introduction of a newer, better, and pricier version, the sales of the old unit actually increased, as couples viewed the new item as “top of the line”, but old product was all of a sudden reasonably-priced, even though a bunch of features were missing"

The New Jersey Nets were supposed to have moved into a new stadium in Brooklyn by now, but there have a myriad of problems relocating the team from New Jersey. Now the stadium itself has been down-sized.

As Nicolai Ouroussoff writes:

Whatever you may have felt about Mr. Gehry’s design — too big, too flamboyant — there is little doubt that it was thoughtful architecture. His arena complex, in which the stadium was embedded in a matrix of towers resembling falling shards of glass, was a striking addition to the Brooklyn skyline; it was also a fervent effort to engage the life of the city below.

A new design by the firm Ellerbe Becket has no such ambitions. A colossal, spiritless box, it would fit more comfortably in a cornfield than at one of the busiest intersections of a vibrant metropolis. Its low-budget, no-frills design embodies the crass, bottom-line mentality that puts personal profit above the public good. If it is ever built, it will create a black hole in the heart of a vital neighborhood.

[Click to continue reading Architecture - Demise of Gehry Design for Nets Arena Is Blow to Brooklyn - NYTimes.com]

Sport stadiums, and the financing of them, is one of the most puzzling and irritating aspects of US corporate welfare. Take Yankee Stadium, for instance…

One more quote from Mr. Ouroussoff’s piece:

Typically, a developer comes to the city with big plans. Promises are made. Serious architects are brought in. The needs of the community, like ample parkland and affordable housing, are taken into account. Editorial boards and critics, like me, praise the design for its ambition.

Eventually, the project takes on a momentum of its own. The city and state, afraid of an embarrassing public failure, feel pressured to get the project done at any cost, and begin to make concessions. Given the time such developments take to build, sometimes a decade or more, we then hit the inevitable economic downturn. The developer pleads poverty. Desperate to avoid more economic bad news, government officials cut a deal.

It’s a familiar ending, made more nauseating because we have seen it so many times before

Familiar, and sad. If owners of sports teams cannot afford to build a stadium for their team(s), perhaps they should be sold to the city that houses most of the team’s fans? End the public financing/private profit bullshit, in other words. In the New Jersey/New York plan, not only does the public pay for the stadium, but the stadium has no character and will probably destroy a vibrant neighborhood. Ever been past a million dollar condo near Chicago’s United Center? No, me either.

A little YouTubery humor from Charlie Murphy, last seen on the short-lived Chappelle Show.

Motivize! Pulverize! Realize! This is the unbelievable infomercial for Get Your Basketball On starring Leroy Smith, the man who motivated Michael Jordan.

“I’ll teach you the skills you need to dominate opponents the same way I dominated Mike…when we were in tenth grade.”

A few interesting links collected May 28th through May 30th:

• Transportation: Dark and moody ways we get around. | Today's Photos: Today's best Chicago photos, handpicked by our editors. in Chicago – Traffic

  by: swanksalot

  two versions of I-90/94, southbound.

• Photo Essay: 20 of the Freakiest Custom Bikes on the Road – "“No idea about who this is riding the chopper, just happened to snap it on Wells Street. I think he is part of the Chicago Critical Mass group.”
  Photographer: swanksalot"
• Bill Simmons: Blowing the whistle on the NBA's flaws – ESPN – "Danny Biasone, who owned the Syracuse Nationals at the time. An Italian immigrant who arrived on Ellis Island and made his money by owning a bowling alley — no, really, a single bowling alley — Biasone wore long, double-breasted coats, smoked filtered cigarettes and wore Borsalino hats. (Note: I don't know what Borsalino hats are, but they sound fantastic.) For three full years preceding the catastrophic 1954 playoffs, Biasone had been unsuccessfully trying to sell the other owners on a 24-second shot clock that would speed up games.

  How did he arrive at 24? Biasone studied games he remembered enjoying and realized that, in each of those games, both teams took around 60 shots. Well, 60+60=120. He settled on 120 shots as the minimum combined total that would be acceptable from a "I'd rather kill myself than watch another NBA game like this" standpoint. And if you shoot every 24 seconds over the course of a 48-minute game, that comes out to .. wait for it … 120 shots! "

A few interesting links collected May 22nd through May 26th:

• Concurring Opinions » Some Thoughts on the Supreme Court’s Reversal Rate – "Overall, this past term the Supreme Court reversed 75.3 percent of the cases they considered on their merits. The pattern holds true for the 2004 and 2005 terms as well, when the Supremes had overall reversal rates of 76.8 percent and 75.6 percent, respectively.

  It is interesting how remarkably constant the reversal percentage is — 75%. It suggests that the Supreme Court primarily takes cases it wants to reverse, with only a few exceptions. Assuming the Court takes about 70 cases a term, it will only affirm in about 17 of them. So perhaps the new game for commentators should be listing those 17 lucky cases that will get affirmed."

• BW Online | April 26, 2004 | Trader Joe's: The Trendy American Cousin – "Welcome to Trader Joe's. About all this 210-store U.S. chain shares with Germany's Aldi Group — besides being owned by a trust created by Aldi co-founder Theo Albrecht — is its rigorous control over costs. But where Aldi carries such basics as toilet paper and canned peas, TJ's, as it's known, stocks eclectic and upscale foodstuffs for the wine-and-cheese set at down-to-earth prices."
• Mad Dog Blog – Mark Madsen actually makes a lot of sense:
  "If Congress and the government allocate and allow so much time to pursue professional athletes and their statements about their own, or others’ possible steroid use, perhaps we should examine statements of elected officials and the CIA when it relates to interrogation, torture and national security. Surely we must pursue these issues with the same energy and effort with which we pursue the statements of professional athletes on personal steroid use."

A few interesting links collected May 14th through May 15th:

• Alderman says he had this mural destroyed | Chicago Public Radio Blog – Man, that sucks, especially since the owner of the building gave the artist permission

  "This week artist Gabriel Villa was putting finishing touches on this mural in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood. Now someone has brown-washed the work. Ald. James Balcer (Ward 11) told WBEZ this morning that he called the city’s Streets and Sanitation Department to have it destroyed."

• Liquid Dilemma: Godzilla vs. Ralph Records – I stumbled upon a collection of LPs from San Francisco based label Ralph Records, mostly recorded in the 80s and now out of print. They blew my mind. The record dealer claimed that he got them directly from the keyboardist of weirdo experimentalist band, The Residents.
• Shaquille O'Neal's Secret Performance Enhancement Recipe – TrueHoop By Henry Abbott – ESPN – Shaquille O'Neal was on Atlanta's 790 The Zone and was asked if he had ever taken performance enhancing drugs. He proceeded to described his recipe as follows:

  Frosted Flakes Athletic Performance Enhancement Cereal.

  They ain't even out yet…

  For all the little kids, the Performance Enhancement Cereal is you take the Frosted Flakes, and you take the Froot Loops, and you mix them together, and then you get some of them sliced bananas and you put them on that thing, and then you get a big old bowl. The kind of bowl if you pull out out your mother say, "Boy, you better put that bowl back!" And, then you pour that milk … "You better get a job eating all that milk."

Some additional reading April 14th from 14:44 to 18:08:

• 48 Minutes of Hell » Blog Archive » Bruce Bowen and the Evolution of the Box Score – "The ability to set solid screens is a crucial skill that is not represented in current box scores. But oh boy would Charley Rosen be excited if more big man learned to value this as an important aspect of their games."

  overall excellent breakdown of the need for enhanced box scores. Sign me up!

• If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats: The Art of Cinema #385 – Humphrey Bogart poster for In a Lonely Place
  (Nicholas Ray; 1950).
  He looks monstersly creepy, with lipstick, and eyeliner. Weird. Don't believe I've seen the film either, so that's a bonus.
• I Love Stars | Potion Factory – ""I Love Stars" is my new freebie application that shows the rating of iTunes' currently playing song in the menu bar. Before I say anything else, here's the download link."

  Me? I try to rate everything, but there a lot, and I mean, a lot of songs that never got rated. I Love Stars is perfectly unobtrusive, love it.

A few interesting links collected March 31st through April 1st:

• ESPN – OTL: Gotham’s Savior – E-ticket – Then I ask whether he’s driven to build a new thing here that will prove Phoenix was no fluke, that will show everyone that his system really works, that will silence the naysayers once and for all, and he says that until he has won it all, they can say anything they want about him and he can’t say boo back.

  I say Yeah, but aren’t you burning to shut ‘em up?

  He says it doesn’t consume him.

  I say I get that, but wouldn’t you relish it?

  And he leans forward in his chair and reaches across the desk to wipe up a little mess of popcorn kernels with his left hand.

  He cups the bits of shell in his right hand, then pours them casually into the nearby wastebasket, and looks up with a sly grin and says, “You’re asking if I’m human?”

  Wish Mike D’Antoni would have accepted the Bulls job, oh well.

• 

• AIG Exec Whines About Public Anger, and Now We’re Supposed to Pity Him? Yeah, Right | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet – DeSantis has a few major points. They include: 1) I had nothing to do with my boss Joe Cassano’s toxic credit default swaps portfolio, and only a handful of people in our unit did; 2) I didn’t even know anything about them; 3) I could have left AIG for a better job several times last year; 4) but I didn’t, staying out of a sense of duty to my poor, beleaguered firm, only to find out in the end that; 5) I would be betrayed by AIG senior management, who promised we would be rewarded for staying, but then went back on their word when they folded in highly cowardly fashion in the face of an angry and stupid populist mob.

  I have a few responses to those points. They are 1) Bullshit; 2) bullshit; 3) bullshit, plus of course; 4) bullshit. Lastly, there is 5) Boo-Fucking-Hoo. You dog.

  AIGFP only had 377 employees. Those 400-odd folks received almost $3.5 billion in compensation in the last seven years…averages out to over $9 million of compensation per person.

• 

• One Killer Smoked Brisket Recipe | Meaten – Anyway, that is how I do it, I hope that it made sense, and let me know how yours turns out.

  Viva Meat!

  Image courtesy of swanksalot¹

1. is it so fracking hard to give proper credit?? Still disappointed that TreeHugger is such a corrupt website. Meaten.com, which I imagine has a lot less traffic than TreeHugger figured out how to properly give credit to my photo. [↩]