Screaming For Blood While Rome Burns

FARK's slogan is "It's not news, it's FARK" but as with other fake news outifts like the Daily Show, there are occasional turds wisdom excreted from its bowels. One recent shouting match turned up some interesting mind pellets. It was attached to a link to Matt Taibbi's rant telling off an AIG executive who wrote an open letter bemoaning his company's reaction to AIG's recent bonus scandal. The ensuing thread went as you might expect with people dividing neatly along idealogical lines with right wingers defending the AIG executive and left wingers defending Taibbi. But a half way down the thread, there were links to two interesting Slate articles examing AIG from another angle. By taking a look at one of AIG's deals with Goldman Sachs, the articles point out that while we are all screaming for people's heads over $160 million dollars worth of bonuses while AIG funnels billions of taxpayer funded bailout dollars to its trading partners which themselves have also received billions of taxpayer funded bailout dollars. 

In other words, we have one scandal which is essentially distracting us from something much bigger and much worse. Taibbi sees this as one big conspiracy designed to shift power and money to Wall Street. But it doesn't need to be a conspiracy in order to be an outrage. And that seems to be part of the problem. We are all so busy getting outraged over the latest Wall Street scandal that we are ignoring the real problems which have lead us into the economic hole in which we are stuck.

What Will It Be Like to Have a Black President?

FARK takes a look at that question with this classic Richard Pryor clip:

Election 2008 In Photoshop

As the election draws to a close, I thought I'd post some of the many photoshop pictures that I've collected )mostly on FARK because it's so much easier to post a bunch of silly pictures than to make cogent, logical arguments to justify your political opinions.

From the hard fought primaries:






A charismatic young leader emerges on one side:



And a grizzled veteran on the other:



And the election had begun in earnest:



Most of the 'shops were pretty geeky:





Others were tailored to the headlines and sound bites of the day:






Some of the 'shops were truly elaborate:




Not all of the funny images were photoshops, some were just unfortunate:



Going negative:




But in the end, a final winner had to emerge:

FARK on the Subprime Meltdown

FARK is one of the wildest places on the Internet. The most amazing thing about it is that even though by design it's a frivolous site that usually consists of a bunch of jerks shouting at each other from the safety of their keyboards, a lot of useful information gets posted to it. They recently had a pretty interesting discussion on the country's recent economic troubles. In addition to the original submitted article, many useful links have been posted in the discussion including this link to an amusing but informative Google Docs presentation (warning, gratuitus use of the "F" word) which explains the subprime mess with stick figures, an episode of This American Life devoted to the subject, and the FDIC's statement on what will happen to the Washington Mutual now that it has failed. All in all, a lot of pretty useful information buried underneath a lot of shouting and insults.