Wednesday, September 24, 2008

I save the America from financial ruin and I explain to you why bad things happen only to good people like me

I discovered the best way to make my podcast more popular. Stop making my podcast and watch the dowloads spike upwards. I guess people like my podcast better when I stop talking. I've had more than 400 downloads this month which is twice as much as any normal month even though I haven't recorded a podcast in the 2 months since my Internet connection was cut off.

I think the podcast benefits from being listed on Digg.com and from getting ranked in the top 50 most popular podcasts by listeners over at Switchpod.com. And while the podcast seems to be enjoying a spike in popularity, I don't think my podcast will ever be truly popular because it suffers from some kind of bi-polar disease. My rating over at Switchpod is usually 2.97 which is only .01 away from being in the top 50. Every once and while I get a few voters vote up the podcast and that pushes me into the top 50 for a bit. Then I get flooded with votes for being listed as a Top 50 podcast and (from what I can tell at least) the new votes all seem to grade me higher than a 3.0 but my score drops back down to 2.97 leaving me just out of the rankings. So for a few moments I am awesome and popular, but then for next few weeks I am back to being just like you- an anonymous blog/podcaster that only my family reads or accidental searchers stumble upon.

I bring up this point up to echo a larger point about the cosmic injustice of the universe. *

*(And by the way anyone who blogs about their day should only be blogging to make a larger point but that is just my take on blog writing issues.)

I have 2 points to make about the cosmic injustice of the universe.

I don't make any secret that I think having a positive attitude is for suckers. I also feel like I am the only person in the world who laughs at folks who think the universe is fair or that the the universe actually cares about them.

I just don't see any evidence for karmatic justice in the world which I guess is why people who believe in that stuff have to resort to faith. The basic unfairness of human life is self evident to anyone with a brain so if the universe really is aware like some people claim it is we have to conclude that the universe does not give a shit about us. I guess for some people that kind of thing is so scary they would rather go on believing in Karma or some variation of magical thinking just so they can get through the day.

As your hero Barrack Obama would say, "Enough!"

I say you should just tuff it out and stop looking for rationalizations to do good, like "the univese gives back what you give to it" and just do the right thing anyway. I did yesterday. I saved the world from another financial meltdown. Not a lot of you can say that about yourselves and even fewer of you would chose to save the world when confronted with a billion dollar bribe, but I did because I don't care about money. I only care about the things money can buy you like: respect, women, and a fancy new laptop with wireless Internet connection.

How did I save the world you ask?

It was a just a normal day for me and like any day the Lottery goes over 150 million dollars I buy one Power Ball ticket and prey to god that he gives me the winning numbers. But unlike most days I was given the option to try the "power play" with my lottery purchase. The "power play" option allows the purchaser to triple and sometimes quintuple her winnings. Since the Power Ball is nearly 200 million dollars, the purchase of a power play would net me roughly 1 billion dollars.

A billion dollars is a lot of money and most have you have been bought for a lot less. You have been bought for the assurances that your rubbing thighs do not make you fat. You have been bought for the assurance that you will not be left alone in the universe just because one person in 7 billion can put up with your bizarre sex fetishes, or eating requirements. You think because you have a soul mate and I don't that deep down you are the better person and that you are the good person your mother always told you you were.

I know you are wrong and I doubt you are even an "OK" person but that is not the point, the point is that I turned down a billion dollars because I know that the financial markets are in turmoil and the industry that bets against people picking winners in the lottery, hedge their bets with risky investments in the real estate market and they could not cover the 800 million dollars they would be on the line for when I win the lottery with the power play. I know winning 200 million dollars is pretty good consolation prize and you think that maybe I should not complain, but I thought it necessary to point out to you that I am a much better person that you are because I am willing to turn down a billion dollars for the common good, and that is because I have something that you and your fancy community college degree holding friends don't have, and that is a little thing I like to call integrity.

The Universe still ends up screwing me

I may have integrity, but the universe does not care about those kinds of things. I know this because I got a call from my ex Google girlfriend the other day. She called me just to rub it in my face that she now earns three times as much as I do and that is even after my recent 73 cent raise to $9.32 and hour. (Suck it minimum wage earners!)

When we last left the Ex she had been fired from her job at B of A where she earned only twice as much as me. She was forced to move in with Baby Daddy #2 and his sister. As you might guess that situation only lasted a week or so and she had to leave and move in with her Mom. Yesterday, I got a text message from my Ex with a strange phone number telling me to call the number right away. Being the great guy I am, I naturally worried about her and the two kids being on the streets or in some kind of danger. I took my break early and hurriedly dialed the number only to find that the phone number in the text was a practical joke number where the voice on the other end of the line accused me of having bad breath.

After calming down and worrying that indeed, "I may have bad breath" just because I think brushing my teeth is some kind of ruling class plot to drum up support for fluoridating public water, I managed to work up enough "furious" anger to call the ex and inquire as to how things were going. That's when she told me the good news that she got a job at Charles Schwab and yes the same Charles Schwabb I applied for. (I blogged here about if you don't recall and why is it I must remind you of every detail of my life when it is all in print for you to read?)

She told me she was going to earn 25 dollars and hour and they were going to bend over backwards to not apply the college degree requirement for her position, and would pay for her schooling to get the degree and if she got the degree they would give her a much bigger raise.

Don't you see!

Good things like that happen to people like her and not to people like me.

The Ex keeps getting bailed out of all kinds of crazy things because random luck seems to flow her way. I know her luck won't last because she needs to eventually get a college degree to keep her position and my ex actually getting a college degree is about as likely to happen as Sarah Palin's mongrel child graduating with a college degree from Harvard. Actually the Down Syndrome child of a Vice Presidential candidate has much better chance of graduating from college than my ex girlfriend ever does. (Just look at George W.) I won't add that I am not eligible for food stamps, but she gets affordable housing and will be moving into a three bedroom house for three hundred dollars and I will be rooming with a man who marks down on his calender when it is ok to eat Frito's.

I will never see the kind of luck my Ex gets. All I do is save your life by snuffing out trash fires and maintain the health of the financial markets by refusing a billion dollar bribe therby protecting the very risk takers that helped create the supposed vitality that is the capitalist market (and hey whatever happened to the notion that the rewards of profit from capitalistic market places were derived from risk and that was what made them morally acceptable.)

Now we are just going to socialize the risk and privatize the gains and that is not Socialism as Glen Beck will try and tell you, and it is not Socialism for the Wealthy as PBS will tell you, it is FASCISM but what the fuck do I know I am just a Marxist and we all know that the classic Marxist explanation of the business cycle that warns of, "too much capital in one sector can lead to sharp disruptions in other sectors" [note to those who might care: that is not an underconsumptionist argument] and that these sectors will soon be so co-dependent that the nature of crisis in late capitalism is not that the crisis of the business cycle will grow deeper (a la the great depression) but ever wider (a la the housing boom/bust effects finance which effects loans which effect whether GM can buy steel and not announce another round of layoffs which according to the FED we were days away from the largest 900 companies essentially going bankrupt and I did not even bring up how the foreign markets are effected by this) but then again what the fuck do I know about all that shit I read the internets and 19th century treatises on the economy.

I do not listen to the dismal practitioners of modern economic "science." I do not listen to the because when you ask them why the economy is in shambles the only answer you get is, "We don't know." If they don't know that they don't know much of anything. But at least it is nice to hear a bunch of apolagists for capital's excess admit the truth for a change. They don't know.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well! If you're handling things, I'm going back reading Hustler and eating Cheeto-flavored pudding.

JS (Magic of making up) said...

When the one girl you love most in the world decides your relationship has run its course, it can be a really powerful blow to your entire way of life. If you want to be with her, you have to be able to make her feel like she's getting what she needs.
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Magic Of Making Up