is called a “cowhorn.” I am not making this up, having had occasion to become intimately knowledgeable about the subject of late. It’s sort of a curved tweezer on steroids. Which is not to say you couldn’t have a Cowhorn-Cam just as easily as one in pliers, mind you. Just striving for technical accuracy in case an expert in dentistry shows up.

And OT but (despite Lambert’s recent claims of restoration) since I am unable to find the Post Quotes function yet, this excellent description of How to Bake a Depression was posted earlier this afternoon over at the House of the Gray Turtleneck:

What’s going on is too much money in too few hands chasing investment opportunities. When too few people have all the money, there’s only so much that they can consume. So they have to find places to invest all that excess money so they can make more money to buy….uh, well, no one really knows the answer to this. But it’s important to keep their tax rates low so they can keep piling up the money until they have all of it, at which point no one else has any and the whole thing falls to pieces.

As it was not otherwise attributed we will credit its wording to its poster, one Jennifer. I commend it to the attention of all, and that it be committed to memory and spewed forth at anyone who raises the question “What’s wrong with the rich getting richer, anyway, huh? Waddaya, some kinda Commie?”

The founding fathers would be rolling in their grave

For me one of the most defining images of Plutocratic disconnect from the misery they create is that of the elderly billionaire John D. Rockefeller, as a public relations effort, handing out dimes to the desperate children whose hunger and poverty he had helped to create. Even more telling was that during the Great Depression, Rockefeller switched to giving out nickels instead because after all, with the little people so much poorer a nickel would mean just as much to them as a dime had before.

From historian Beverley Gage at Salon:

“According to the most recent statistics, the richest .01 percent of Americans…now take home a full 5 percent of the nation’s income. At least the poorest 20 percent, by contrast, some 60 million people, make do with about the same. The last time the concentration of income at the top was this extreme, according to economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, was in the 1910s and 1920s, when tycoons like Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie were at or near the height of their power.”

“The real question of today’s Gilded Age, highlighted by the comparison to its predecessor, is not why the rich became rich, or whether they behave well with their billions. It’s why the rest of us seem to feel we can do so little about it.”

I’m not convinced that technology is the path to our enslavement; it may as easily be an instrument of subversion and revolution that leads to our salvation. More likely is economic domination, where marginally survivable poverty becomes so ingrained in people’s existence that the struggle for daily bread precludes even the possibility of fomenting change.

(Sorry, Nezua, bit of a hijack here but at least it had to do with images and domination. Nice art, nice text, great punch line, nomination for Best Short-Short Sci-Fi Horror Story of 2007.)

quite alright, bringiton. i’ll take my award and the concise accolades and squeeze them for every drop of joy they contain!! and i’ll turn all my cameras on while i do.

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.delusions of un mundo mejor.