Posted on by lhl

Brenden Kelly’s (The Lawrence Arms) response to conservativepunk.com (via aubin on mefi):

Conservative Punk Rockers? I said, befuddled. Well shit, Toby. It must really just be all about the clothes and the belts at this point, huh. I mean, if some kid can listen to a top ten pop song that sounds just like the other 9 top ten pop songs, support the regime occupying the white house, comb his gentlemans Mohawk down into a respectable hairdo when its time for school and still call himself a punk, then it really has nothing at all to do with the ideas and ideals that got me into this whole thing when I was a kid. You know what Toby. Lets give those fucking Simple Plan listening, Paul Wolfowitz supporting, spiky belt wearing conservative kids the word punk. Its pretty useless at this point anyway, and I think that we could come up with a much better and less saleable word for a community based around songs inspired by anger and frustration and played by untalented musicians. Dont you think, Toby?

Not that I’m an expert or anything on punk, but somehow, support of statism or fascism seems to be antithetical to the ethos.

Also to note, it seems this whole conservative punk thing seems to be reactionary response to groups like PunkVoter.com.

Posted on by lhl
  • Bush’s Spending Lie

    Knowing this, it’s all the more extraordinary that when Bush got asked about his spending habit on Meet the Press, this was his answer:

    If you look at the appropriations bills that were passed under my watch, in the last year of President Clinton, discretionary spending was up 15 percent, and ours have steadily declined.

    That isn’t even close to being true. Under Bush, overall discretionary
    spending (i.e., with defense spending included) has increased every single year. It’s now 31 percent higher than it was when Bush arrived.

    But perhaps Bush meant to say, “domestic discretionary spending.” Well, that, too, has increased every single year of Bush’s presidency, and, as previously noted, is now 25 percent higher than it was when Bush arrived.

  • Bush spending increases
  • The Mother of All Big Spenders: Bush spends like Carter and panders like Clinton. – Colorful title c/o Cato Institutue
  • Conservatives Against Bush

    I. Non-Imperialist Foreign Policy —
    Conservatives Against Bush seeks an end to the Neoconservatives (read:
    imperialists) in the Defense Department and the Vice President’s office
    control over U.S. foreign policy. Conservatives Against Bush hopes to
    return the foreign policy reigns back to the Secretary of State and his
    State Department.

    II. Fiscal Responsibility — Conservatives Against Bush opposes the
    irresponsible 2003 Bush tax cut. Conservatives should be balancing the
    budget, not saddling future generations with debt.

    III. Limited Government — Conservatives Against Bush propounds the
    idea that government should only do what it has to do, and, therefore,
    opposes the recent Bush expansion of Medicare or any other further
    expansion of the welfare state.

    IV. Civil Liberties — Conservatives Against Bush is awfully
    rankled by the Ashcroftonian erosion of our civil liberties. We oppose
    the designation of U.S. citizens as “unlawful combatants,” and the
    indefinite detention of any person arrested within the United States.
    We are also troubled by a Justice Department engaged in the War on
    Terrorism that still finds time to foist its morality on the public by
    pressuring Hollywood.

Posted on by lhl

Downhill Battle interviews Ian MacKaye:

I see music as a river, and the water in a river is there for everyone and anyone that wants to have a sip can have a sip and have some water. Now somewhere along the line someone came up with the idea of putting the river water in bottles and selling the bottles of water. That’s the record industry. Music is a river, music is water, and the bottling company is the industry, and it’s not inherently evil, because it’s frankly, convenient to have water in a bottle, so if you’re driving in your car and you’re thirsty you don’t have to drive to the nearest river and take a sip, you can just reach down and take a sip out of your bottle. The same way if I’m driving in my car and I want to hear a song, I don’t have to drive over to the people’s house and ask them to play it for me, I can put the CD in and listen to it, or turn on the radio. Where it gets ugly is that when the bottling company, since their aim is to make money– at some point they may have thought like, “Let’s bottle this water and that way we can share the healthful qualities of water with all the people.” At some point it becomes, “This is our industry, we need to make money, and how can we increase profits?” Well, the way to increase profits is to try to discourage people from going to the river, and having to buy the bottled water. And they’ll start with that but eventually what they’re going to get into is they’re going to start blocking the river or they’re going to poison the river.

Posted on by lhl

For the most part I enjoy working on my Mac, mostly for its unfettered shell access, day to day apps (iCal, Mail) and timesaving graces like LaunchBar (just turned my PC back on last week after a month-long haitus. That being said, for some tasks (image processing, ripping/encoding) there’s just no comparison. Also, I’m not a huge iTunes fan (WinAmp any day of the week), and there’s just nothing on OS X on par w/ Trillian or TopStyle.

Posted on by lhl