Buddy, can you spare ten trill?

Total Information Awareness, yo

Well, I have been asked for money for a latte before. And a friend of mine has an email signature, I live for the day schools have all the funding they need and the Pentagon has to have bake sales. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at this. Actually, having lived here for so long I shouldn’t really be surprised at anything.

It appears that the US Department of Homeland Security, having exhausted the normal funding routes of bleeding taxpayers and selling the next few generations to China as indentured servants, is muscling in on territory normally occupied by organizations like the Cancer Society, the SPCA, and the Make-A-Wish foundation.

It’s holding “charity” fundraising galas.

Oscar Wilde would’ve been ecstatic at the juxtaposition of life and art at the Brooklyn Museum earlier this evening — and not just because it involved an abundance of luxury goods. As guests arrived for the opening of an exhibit celebrating the art of Takashi Murakami and his collaboration with Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton, they were greeted by an outdoor scene more common on Canal Street: logoed merchandise piled on tables or hung on metal pegs, graffiti-covered walls, stalls closed “by court order,” and persistent vendors promising “best quality” and “best price.” The difference? Those piles of LV Multicolore bags were real…

As real as my recognition of Das Unheimliche.

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Who does Karl Rove work for now?

Who do you think?

Cthulhu as Nixon

Well who ELSE would he be working for?

via CelebratingTheAbsurd

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China’s Secret WMD Program Revealed!

Just when you thought they’d settled for poisoning your children.

But Nooooooooooo. The Yellow Peril, lurking all this time behind a mask of bland inscrutability and blind greed, has been quietly working since the collapse of the Cold War. Working on a project so secret that even the vast armies of workers working on it don’t know what it is they’re working on. Indeed: so secret they don’t even actually know they’re working at all.

It’s a secret, see? Quality control is so important.

I worry if whoever thought up the term ‘quality control’ thought that
if we didn’t control it, it would get out of hand.
Lily Tomlin

But what have they actually been working on? Oh, we’re glad you asked. For we right here at the ol’ raincoaster blog have got the world exclusive. Yes, we alone know exactly what mighty machine of destruction has been stealthily constructed, right under the very noses of the foreign Olympic-hunting paparazzi. Nothing less than the largest weapon of mass destruction since Britney’s appearance at the VMA’s. Nothing less than the Doomsday Machine Itself.

The Great Beijing National Bomb

Beijing, China: Workmen clean the roof of the National Grand Theatre
Photograph: Adrian Bradshaw/EPA

Oh, how clever these Chinese are. They think we can be taken in by a simple line drawn in Photoshop and a two-bit reflection filter on a photograph that had to pass through vigilant bureaucratic censors. They think we really believe this to be a simple photograph of workers on top of a rounded building, a concert hall, a theatre perhaps. HA! But if you have the skill to remove the slave-created, primitive layers of deception all is revealed after the jump.

A click here, a click there, and voilà! The naked truth is revealed:

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Continue reading

the mansions Jack built, the house Jack lost

I’ve been working on a post about this for quite some time, but this single comic from AccordionGuy says it better than I could, which will, of course, not stop me from giving it the old college-dropout try, right after the pic:

The House that Jack Built

And you know that Jack’s taxes paid for every one of them. The banks have been shuffled around between rich people, the bundled mortgage products rebundled and shuffled and dealt out again, tax writoffs have been off-written, but quite frankly the lack of defenestrations leads me to believe this was nothing but a shell game played by knowing hucksters, and every first-generation homeowner who thought he’d do something long-term for his family and think ahead instead of renting played the sucker here.

That’ll teach ’em.

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The power behind the throne

I’ll bet you’ve always wondered. Now, from MyConfinedSpace via Ectoplasmosis and a tipoff from dissfunktional comes photographic proof of what we at the ol’ raincoaster blog have always suspected. Paging David Icke, paging David Icke, we’re sorry about the misunderstanding

The power behind the Pope

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