lost_horizon
SS.org Regular
Fixed it for you, all three are identical and equivalent eh?
It's a bit of a moot point when Biden can pardon himself or anyone else he wants.
US Political Discussion: Biden/Harris Edition (Rules in OP)
- Thread starter mongey
- Start date
It's a bit of a moot point when Biden can pardon himself or anyone else he wants.
Fixed it for you, all three are identical and equivalent eh?
It's a bit of a moot point when Biden can pardon himself or anyone else he wants.
nightflameauto
SS.org Regular
Our lawmakers finally came together over one of the most important and pressing issues of our time: Taylor Swift tickets.
I mean, I do get it. Ticketbastard is a real fucker and needs to broken up and beaten with a stick, but the grandstanding over the Taylor Swift debacle among the congress-critters is a little embarrassing when some of these people standing together for our right to be entertained by pretty people playing vapid music, then spending most of the rest of their lives threatening to kill each other for sport. WTF is this world?
I mean, I do get it. Ticketbastard is a real fucker and needs to broken up and beaten with a stick, but the grandstanding over the Taylor Swift debacle among the congress-critters is a little embarrassing when some of these people standing together for our right to be entertained by pretty people playing vapid music, then spending most of the rest of their lives threatening to kill each other for sport. WTF is this world?
wheresthefbomb
SS.org Regular
Bread and circuses, my dude.
But these days the circus is free and the bread costs extra...
I looked up to see if anyone good at reading lips had figured out what McCarthy and Gaetz were saying to each other, and found this:
Probably far more intelligent than the actual conversation they had had
wheresthefbomb
SS.org Regular
But these days the circus is free and the bread costs extra...
I looked up to see if anyone good at reading lips had figured out what McCarthy and Gaetz were saying to each other, and found this:
Probably far more intelligent than the actual conversation they had had
love these
nightflameauto
SS.org Regular
Dude, Bad Lip Reading is possibly one of the greatest things to have ever been on Youtube. My wife and I used to end most nights watching two of three of them. We still pop off stuff from them out of nowhere all the time.
Joffrey - "WHO TREW DEY POOP ON ME?"
Edward - "It was my. . . bestest creation."
Carl Poppa - 'nuff said.
The Governor - "I always wanted a wookie, 'till I found out they weren't real. Thanks a lot George Lucas. Ba bibbidy bibbidy dumb. Ba bibbidy bibbidy do. Cluck? Like a chicken!"
Uh oh, I may be about to lose a day to the bad lip reading rabbit hole.
Joffrey - "WHO TREW DEY POOP ON ME?"
Edward - "It was my. . . bestest creation."
Carl Poppa - 'nuff said.
The Governor - "I always wanted a wookie, 'till I found out they weren't real. Thanks a lot George Lucas. Ba bibbidy bibbidy dumb. Ba bibbidy bibbidy do. Cluck? Like a chicken!"
Uh oh, I may be about to lose a day to the bad lip reading rabbit hole.
Drew
Forum MVP
I mean, I don't want to go on TOO much of a tangent here...
...but, arguably, the reason so much of modern popular music is pretty people playing vapid music is a direct result of Ticketmaster, and Live Nation, now iHeartRadio, having near-monopolistic control over the US music radio infrastructure, and dictating playlists from the top down.
Radio homogenization - Wikipedia
The early 90s were an interesting period for popular music, and you kind of come away with the impression that DJs were just throwing shit against the walls to see what would stick. Nirvana and Bush, sure. Soundgarden and Alice in Chains were veering more into metal territory though. So were the Smashing Pumpkins, but in a very different direction. And then, Dave Matthews Band? The Counting Crows? Rusted Root? The whole ska scene? Barenaked Ladies? Some of that shit was just weird, and no focus group would have told you that a guy with a harmonica singing songs about how pop music sucks was going to be the next big thing, and yet here we have Blues Traveler's "Hook."
Today. that doesn't really happen in mainstream music. The internet has its own counter culture, but that imposes its own costs - djent sounds pretty much the same all over the world. In the early 90s, though, Chicago bands like The Smashing Pumpkins and Hum sounded a lot more like each other than they did like Seattle bands like Pearl Jam and Nirvana, even though they're all generally considered part of the alternative rock/grunge era. When's the last time you heard a new song by a new band, and thought, "Ah, yes... the Boston hardcore scene, for sure." That just doesn't exist anymore.
And I'm not knocking Taylor Swift here - I don't like everything she does, sure, but "Folklore" was actually unexpectedly a great album, stripped down and intimate, and kind of surprised me for being a bit of a pop concept album with an interconnected series of stories sung from different viewpoints scattered throughout the album. There's some great stuff on there:
But, the mechanics of music distribution have changed SO much since 1996, that what gets on the radio and what doesn't is now essentially a centralized marketing decision, rather than a bunch of local DJs just playing what they were excited about. I can't find the article about this, but that stupid Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeroes "Home (is wherever I'm with you)" song got picked up by what became iHeartRadio largely because they thought happy, catchy, upbeat acoustic music would attract advertising dollars, as one of the first big centralized content moves by the ClearChannel people. That's kind of where we are today.
I think I can offer a pretty strong counter-example of everything you just said with one word: Macarena.
I get what you are saying, but the music industry has always had the same scaly underbelly the seemed to make weird decisions and force songs on people until everyone wanted to gauge their ears out, with no apparent logic driving it. On the other hand, the crazy independent movement has always been there, but definitely had its big win starting with MTv and stayed on a roll until the mid-1990's. And maybe it was the explosion of variety that sort of put an end to the momentum. I remember Ska getting huge for like one summer and by the end of autumn, it was back to being a novelty. Some movements, like pop punk, lasted a little longer, but I feel like everything has fizzled by now. But yeah, there were just so many musical subcultures all happening at the same time: skatepunk, ska, poppunk, nümetal, gangster rap, new wave of big band swing, post-grunge, death metal, eurodance, the newer darker industrial stuff like Marilyn Manson, whatever Tool is/was, probably some country music trends I totally didn't pay attention to, etc. ...
When I was in high school, playing guitar, and really wanting to start a band, it seemed like everyone I spoke to played an instrument, but they were all into totally different things. Once I finally got it all together, it was really only because I found other people like me who were fans of many different scenes. That's when music was a lot of fun, for me at least. I started booking gigs before I even had my driver's license...
It's a huge topic of interest for me what happened in between the mid 1990's and early 2000's that caused "mainstream" music to change from so richly diverse and interestingly weird to being cookie-cutter 4-chord songs with predictable lyrics.
Back to classified documents, Clinton, Bush, and Obama have supposedly been confirmed to have turned over everything, as well as Dan "Potatoe" Quayle. As for Al Gore...
According to Gore, through a spokesperson.
Okay.... the way that was worded makes me feel kind of weird... oh well... ?
Drew
Forum MVP
Just checked google - it was released in 1993, though it didn't blow up until mid-1996. The 1996 Telecommunications Act wasn't signed into law until February 1996 and while good internet soruces here are hard to come by, but here's an article from May 1996about ClearChannel acquiring 15 more stations, bringing their count (at the time) to 92. The wikipedia article above says they went from 40 (the pre-Act limit) to 1,240 in seven years after the passage of the Act, so they'd little more than doubled in size by the start of the summer of 1996, when Macarena was blowing up, but would eventually grow 31-fold over the next seven years and now control half the market.
So, I don't know if that's really a great counter-example after all - it takes some time to corner a market, and by the summer of 1996 they were still smaller than the size they would grow to by 2003 by a factor of 15.
Well, that's the year you gave as an example of great musical diversity. But it could have been almost any year; there used to be a Macarena every couple years.
As for the song, I doubt anyone would even recognize the 1993 version, which is definitely different from the 1995 version that was popular in Texas and the US southwest, or the 1996 version that virtually everyone knows (with the female english language parts added in as verses).
If you look at the biggest hit from 1995, it's Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise, which is a better song (well, ripped off from a better song) and doesn't have a stupid dance, but still was absolutely everywhere at the time it was fresh. 1994 was "The Sign" from Ace of Base.
As for the song, I doubt anyone would even recognize the 1993 version, which is definitely different from the 1995 version that was popular in Texas and the US southwest, or the 1996 version that virtually everyone knows (with the female english language parts added in as verses).
If you look at the biggest hit from 1995, it's Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise, which is a better song (well, ripped off from a better song) and doesn't have a stupid dance, but still was absolutely everywhere at the time it was fresh. 1994 was "The Sign" from Ace of Base.
Drew
Forum MVP
Not sure I followed - I'd said "early 90s." The change didn't happen overnight, but early 1996 was the year the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed. Clear Channel had only doubled, roughly, from 40 to 92 radio stations when the Macarena blew up, and was a small cry from the behemoth it is today. (EDIT - oh, ok, I see what you mean - I meant "since 1996" not because '96 was an amazing year of diversity, but because that's the year the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed and things began to change).
Of course, I'll concede that the fact we don't get a new Macarena every couple years any more is maybe not the worst thing, but music distribution changed radically by the early 2000s when radio essentially became a duopoly.
That's kinda what happened. We allowed radio (and internet radio... and in turn live music booking... and most of the traditional music distribution network) to become a duopoly, and taste-making became a national top-down process, rather than an organic bottom up where almost anything could end up on a radio station if the DJ liked it. I think the way rock music became homogenized nationally and lost its regional characteristics is if anything more striking than what happened with pop radio.
Last edited:
Warren Buffet hates this one trick!
StevenC
Javier Strat 7 2024
It seems fair to say that the only living president or vice president that we can rule out from having classified documents in their possession is Jimmy Carter.
nightflameauto
SS.org Regular
And then politicians wonder why there's no trust among the electorate. Maybe "me firsting" every situation for their own benefit isn't what they were elected to do?
What does anyone expect a politician with a bunch of personal investments to do with the knowledge they have?
Our system of government in the USA was set up to be governed by "regular people." That's why you had Ben Franklin, printer; Thomas Jefferson, hemp farmer; John Hancock, tea smuggler
lol, etc.It still is this way in the Vermont State government, well, in the legislature... the salaries are very low and the legislature meets part-time so that the congresspeople can do their jobs and make a living.
But now federal politicians almost all make all of their careers and all of their money politician-ing. So, I guess, the question we are forced to ask is how to make things fair. Obviously, it isn't right to have Pelosi dumping stocks due to confidential government information, costing private citizens all of the damage. But that's what we'll get so long as public servants get to keep making private investments. But if we take that away from them, then they'd have to be compensated fairly for their time... oh wait, they already are...
IDK, to hell with all of these leeches.
Insider trading bad..
tedtan
SS.org Regular
They should at least be subject to the same insider trading laws as everyone else.What does anyone expect a politician with a bunch of personal investments to do with the knowledge they have?
Our system of government in the USA was set up to be governed by "regular people." That's why you had Ben Franklin, printer; Thomas Jefferson, hemp farmer; John Hancock, tea smuggler
It still is this way in the Vermont State government, well, in the legislature... the salaries are very low and the legislature meets part-time so that the congresspeople can do their jobs and make a living.
But now federal politicians almost all make all of their careers and all of their money politician-ing. So, I guess, the question we are forced to ask is how to make things fair. Obviously, it isn't right to have Pelosi dumping stocks due to confidential government information, costing private citizens all of the damage. But that's what we'll get so long as public servants get to keep making private investments. But if we take that away from them, then they'd have to be compensated fairly for their time... oh wait, they already are...
IDK, to hell with all of these leeches.
But since when are politicians held accountable in the US?
