THINK.

As great as the pressure is to just say ‘fuck it’ and become apathetic teenagers again, I feel it is imperative to at least realize how we are being fucked. 

Wall Street: American taxpayers’ very own Fleece ‘Booty’ Johnson.

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi explains the cons Wall Street has pulled on America post-bailout:

1. The Scoop and Squat
   
   “Our economy was like a town where everyone has juicy insurance policies on their neighbors’ cars and houses. In such a town, the driving will be suspiciously bad, and there will be a lot of fires.”
2. The Dollar Store
   
   Thanks to a suspiciously expedited application process to become bank holding companies, IBs like Goldman, “simply took the money they borrowed from the government at zero percent and lent it back to the government by buying Treasury bills that paid interest of three or four percent.”
3. The Pig in the Poke
   
   “Someone sells you what looks like an eightball of coke in a baggie, you get home and, you dumbass, it’s baby powder.”
4. The Rumanian Box
   
   “Translation: You can lower interest rates all you want, but we’re still not fucking lending the bailout money to anyone in this economy. Until the government agreed to hand over even more goodies, the banks opted to join the rest of the “private sector” and “save” the taxpayer aid they had received — in the form of bonuses and compensation.”
5. The Big Mitt
   
   “Everybody was indeed looking at everyone else’s cards, in many cases with state sanction. Only taxpayers and clients were left out of the loop.”  Thanks to Tim Geithner’s genius PPIP program, which was meant for private investors to ‘relieve’ banks of the exact toxic shit that fucked us in the first place, banks got to BUY UP the toxic shit and inflate the prices to sell back to the Fed.
6. The Wire
   
   Imagine a wonderful world where you can gleefully fuck your own clients and not even have to hide it.  That is what front-running is.
7. The Reload
   
   “That’s why the biggest gift the bankers got in the bailout was not fiscal but psychological. “The most valuable part of the bailout,” says Rep. Sherman, “was the implicit guarantee that they’re Too Big to Fail.” Instead of liquidating and prosecuting the insolvent institutions that took us all down with them in a giant Ponzi scheme, we have showered them with money and guarantees and all sorts of other enabling gestures.”
   
   Guess what?  It’s happening all over again.

“If a woman, gets rape-raped, ends up getting pregnant and decides to keep the baby, her husband should be allowed to divorce her, right?

I mean, obviously he can divorce her, if he wants to, but should he be viewed as a douche, and should the divorce be considered his fault? Obviously not, and obviously not.”

Italy based designer Geoffrey B. Small writes a fantastic narration on the history and importance of good fabrics in clothing design.

Small goes over the history of Dior, Balenciaga and Armani and the central role fabrics played in their success.