Download or read book Welcome to Dumbfuckistan written by Ian Gurvitz and published by . This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A lot of what I believe, Ian Gurvitz has silver-tongued into a most readable, cathartic and funny book - congratulations, Ian Gurvitz, whoever you are!" Bill Maher Welcome to Dumbfuckisan is an unapologetic liberal screed about the deteriorating state of our national dialogue, which is dragging down our culture, our politics, and our lives. It contains strong opinions, snarky comments, and gratuitous insults directed at people and ideas I disagree with, disrespect and, in some cases, despise. Although the Western philosophical tradition may be grounded in a Socratic search for truth, American political life has devolved into a mosh pit of willful ignorance, talking points, disinformation, and lies, while the culture has descended into a celebration of the dumbest common denominator. Burning Man for the brain dead. While there has always been an element of stupidity in America, only now it's become a valid intellectual stance. Fact has been relegated to "just another opinion." Voices that, at one time in our history, would have been laughed off the national stage have now been afforded mainstream legitimacy. Idiotic remarks that would have been walked back when the speaker sobered up are now backed up with even more bluster than when they were uttered. Even racist and sexist taunts proudly ride in under the banner of flouting political correctness. And it's all been spearheaded by Rupert Murdoch taking a giant shit in the mouth of the American conversation with Fox News. We assume Orwell's 1984 dystopian nightmare can't happen here, yet we've been narcotized into a more ominous Orwellian somnambulism. We're inebriated on our own mythology, priapic at our military supremacy, and malleable via our ionic imagery, whether it's Jesus or the flag. Jacked up on Adderall, Red Bull and patriotism, we only unite in war, tragedy and the Super Bowl. We've become style over substance, image over reality, propaganda over truth, and symbol over meaning. We claim to value education, yet mistrust intelligence. Immune to facts, frightened of change, we think magically. Magic potions that will heal us, magic diets that will shrink us, and magic beliefs that will save us. And we think all this behavior has been blessed by a big daddy in the sky who lovingly placed us here for profit, guns, and heterosexual marriage. Perhaps evolution is a myth, in that we seem to be devolving. The Roman Empire collapsed due to war, overexpansion and rampant corruption. The British Empire dissolved due to cultural arrogance and imperialistic hubris. Sadly, as we devolve from Democracy to Idiocracy, America may become the first world power to crumble under the weight of its own stupidity.
Download or read book Billionaires Ballot Bandits written by Greg Palast and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A close presidential election in November could well come down to contested states or even districts--an election decided by vote theft? It could happen this year. Based on Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s investigative reporting for Rolling Stone and BBC television, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps might be the most important book published this year--one that could save the election. Billionaires & Ballot Bandits names the filthy-rich sugar-daddies who are super-funding the Super-PACs of both parties--billionaires with nicknames like "The Ice Man," "The Vulture" and, of course, The Brothers Koch. Told with Palast's no-holds-barred, reporter-on-the-beat style, the facts as he lays them out are staggering. What emerges in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits is the never-before-told-story of the epic battle being fought behind the scenes between the old money banking sector that still supports Obama, and the new hedge fund billionaires like Paul Singer who not only support Romney but also are among his key economic advisors. Although it has not been reported, Obama has shown some backbone in standing up to the financial excesses of the men behind Romney. Billionaires & Ballot Bandits exposes the previously unreported details on how operatives plan to use the hundreds of millions in Super-PAC money pouring into this election. We know the money is pouring in, but Palast shows us the convoluted ways the money will be used to suppress your vote. The story of the billionaires and why they want to buy an election is matched with the nine ways they can steal the election. His story of the sophisticated new trickery will pick up on Palast's giant New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
Download or read book Biblical Errancy written by and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on with total page 852 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Secret Omaha A Guide to the Weird Wonderful and Obscure written by Ryan Roenfeld and published by Reedy Press LLC. This book was released on 2021-05-15 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did Omaha get its nickname, “The Gateway to the West” and where can you gawk at the footsteps of the first human to walk in space? Just scratch the surface of a city best known for Warren Buffett, college baseball, and a great zoo and find far more than meets the eye. And Secret Omaha: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure is just the book you’ll need to uncover all the stories of Nebraska’s lone metropolis. Omaha rises up out of the low broken bluffs along the west bank of the Missouri River and sprawls west across what was once the prairie grasslands of the Great Plains. The buffalo wallows have been replaced by a more urban mix of grit and gentrification, with tree-lined avenues, boulevards, and varied communities that hold on to their heritage for generations. There’s a giant fork in Little Italy and stories told in stone around what was the world’s largest livestock market. There’s an old blues song by Big Joe Williams about an Omaha intersection that’s now on the National Register, and Irish Nationalists erected a grand monument to the Fenian who invaded Canada twice. Anyone in Omaha can take a gander at Goose Hollow or visit a haven for herons, but now author and Omaha enthusiast Ryan Roenfeld takes you on your own behind-the-scenes tour of the Big O. With his book as your guide, you’ll discover a whole new side to the city that’s inspired him for years.
Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy written by C. Dennis McKinsey and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important new volume is the most comprehensive critique of the Bible ever written. McKinsey strives to tell both the good and bad of biblical writings with this thoroughly-researched expose of the Bible's errors, contradictions, and fallacies. McKinsey believes that it is important that the Bible's inadequacies and negative teachings be exposed.
Download or read book Hello Lied the Agent written by Ian Gurvitz and published by Phoenix Books. This book was released on 2006-10-01 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As prevalent as TV is in our lives, most of us have no concept of what goes into creating a show, getting it on the air, and keeping it on. Perhaps we assume that the people in charge simply decide what amuses them at the moment, make those shows, stick them on, and wait to see if the public responds. Or maybe they just throw darts at a board. The truth, as with most things, is more complicated. In “Hello,” Lied the Agent, Ian Gurvitz has produced a corrosively funny insider’s look at what being a television writer is really all about. In his personal journal he details two years in the life of a Hollywood television writer—the dizzying ups and downs, the rewrites, the pitch meetings, the table readings, the studios and networks and execs in a riveting expose of the business. “It occurred to me that keeping a journal while I was going through the development process might illuminate a side of the business few people get to see, and give them a behind-the-scenes (God, I hate that overused ET phrase) look at the day-to-day experience of being a writer in Hollywood. OK, that’s partly bullshit. I’m not that altruistic. The truth is, after twenty years in the trenches, I found myself bitching about many aspects of the business and needed an outlet, which left either writing a book, doing standup, seeing my shrink more often or suffering in silence; but since I don’t have the balls to try stand-up, there’s no reason to waste a shrink visit bitching about the business when I’ve got more seriously fucked-up issues to deal with, and there’s no money in suffering in silence—that left book. Here it is...” Think you’ve got a great idea for a TV show? Read this book—your view of your favorite television show will never be the same.
Download or read book The New New Deal written by Michael Grunwald and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-08-14 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a riveting account based on new documents and interviews with more than 400 sources on both sides of the aisle, award-winning reporter Michael Grunwald reveals the vivid story behind President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus bill, one of the most important and least understood pieces of legislation in the history of the country. Grunwald’s meticulous reporting shows how the stimulus, though reviled on the right and the left, helped prevent a depression while jump-starting the president’s agenda for lasting change. As ambitious and far-reaching as FDR’s New Deal, the Recovery Act is a down payment on the nation’s economic and environmental future, the purest distillation of change in the Obama era. The stimulus has launched a transition to a clean-energy economy, doubled our renewable power, and financed unprecedented investments in energy efficiency, a smarter grid, electric cars, advanced biofuels, and green manufacturing. It is computerizing America’s pen-and-paper medical system. Its Race to the Top is the boldest education reform in U.S. history. It has put in place the biggest middle-class tax cuts in a generation, the largest research investments ever, and the most extensive infrastructure investments since Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. It includes the largest expansion of antipoverty programs since the Great Society, lifting millions of Americans above the poverty line, reducing homelessness, and modernizing unemployment insurance. Like the first New Deal, Obama’s stimulus has created legacies that last: the world’s largest wind and solar projects, a new battery industry, a fledgling high-speed rail network, and the world’s highest-speed Internet network. Michael Grunwald goes behind the scenes—sitting in on cabinet meetings, as well as recounting the secret strategy sessions where Republicans devised their resistance to Obama—to show how the stimulus was born, how it fueled a resurgence on the right, and how it is changing America. The New New Deal shatters the conventional Washington narrative and it will redefine the way Obama’s first term is perceived.
Download or read book Deconstructing God written by Ian Gurvitz and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2010-06-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER 2011 NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARDS -- RELIGIOUS NON-FICTION Deconstructing God makes a case for an understanding of religion that transcends the conventional categories in which one is either a believer, an atheist, or agnostic, by focusing on mysticism as the experiential core of religion. The book makes the case that this paradigm we've inherited in western culture has left us stuck in a series of false arguments about the subject of religion: Whether there is or isn't "a God"; the religion vs. science debate, the faith vs. reason debate. We bat these discussions back and forth under the illusion that we're engaged in a meaningful dialogue about religion, when all the while there is a more subtle understanding of the phenomenon, in the form of a very human, earthly psychological experience that, while generally referred to as "mystical" is really only a mystery in the sense that it has been obscured by our false understanding. Per Meister Eckhart: "God is at home, it's we who have gone out for a walk." "Although I don't agree 100% with Ian Gurvitz's analysis of religion -- who does on this subject? -- I loved reading this insightful, funny, and illuminating book. And we both think Pat Robertson is a douchebag." Bill Maher
Download or read book New York written by and published by . This book was released on 2004-11 with total page 1434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Your Friend Forever written by Zena Barrie and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-29 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preston, 1981. Maud, who is twelve and lives with her dysfunctional parents and her elder brother, spends a lot of her time in her bedroom writing letters to her favourite popstar, Tom Harding, the lead singer of a punk band called Horsefly. No one really understands her or tries to – and she thinks Tom just might have some answers to her many, many questions...
Download or read book The Swamp written by Michael Grunwald and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-03-27 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prize-winning r"Washington Post" reporter tells the story of the Florida Everglades, from its beginnings as 4,500 off-putting square miles of natural liquid wasteland to the ecological mess it has become. Photos.
Download or read book Whatever You Say I Am written by Anthony Bozza and published by Crown Archetype. This book was released on 2010-08-04 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: does eminem matter? On assignment for his first cover story for Rolling Stone, the very first national cover story on Eminem, Anthony Bozza met a young blond kid, a rapper who would soon take the country by storm. But back in 1999, Eminem was just beginning to make waves among suburban white teenagers as his first single, “My Name Is,” went into heavy rotation on MTV. Who could have predicted that in a mere two years, Eminem would become the most reviled and controversial hip-hop figure ever? Or that twelve months after that, Eminem would sit firmly at the pinnacle of American celebrity, a Grammy winner many times over and the recipient of an Oscar. did eminem change or did america finally figure him out? Whatever You Say I Am attempts to answer this question and many more. Since their first meeting, Bozza has been given a level of access to Eminem that no other journalist has enjoyed. In Whatever You Say I Am, original, never-before-published text from Bozza’s interviews with Eminem are combined with the insight of numerous hip-hop figures, music critics, journalists, and members of the Eminem camp to look behind the mask of this enigmatic celebrity. With an eye toward Eminem’s place in American popular culture, Bozza creates a thoughtful portrait of one of the most successful artists of our time. This is so much more than a biography of a thoroughly well-documented life. It is a close-up look at a conflicted figure who has somehow spoken to the heart of America.
Download or read book Wicked Omaha written by Ryan Roenfeld and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2017 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In old Omaha, the scent of opium wafted through saloon doors, while prostitutes openly solicited customers. When the St. Elmo theater ran short of the usual entertainment, the residents could always fall back on robbing strangers. Tenants of the Burnt District squirmed under the extorting thumb of a furniture dealer dubbed the Man-Landlady. The games of chance and confidence and outright municipal graft all played a part in a wicked city where gambler Tom Dennison ran politics and Madam Anna Wilson drove philanthropy. Join Ryan Roenfeld for a stroll along the seamier side of Omaha's past.
Download or read book God Guns Grits and Gravy written by Mike Huckabee and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-01-20 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestseller from the conservative commentator and 2016 presidential candidate. In God, Guns, Grits and Gravy, Mike Huckabee explores today’s fractious American culture, where divisions of class, race, politics, religion, gender, age, and other fault lines make polite conversation dicey, if not downright dangerous. As Huckabee notes, the differences between the “Bubble-villes” of the big power centers and the “Bubba-villes” where most people live are profound, provocative, and sometimes pretty funny. Here, Huckabee takes on government bailouts, politician pig-outs, and popular culture provocations from Jay-Z and Beyoncé to Honey Boo-Boo and Duck Dynasty. The former Arkansas Governor also discusses gun rights, gay marriage, the decline of patriotism, and the mainstream media’s contempt for those who cherish a faith-based life. The trouble with Democrats, the even bigger trouble with Republicans, our national security complex, and how our Constitution is eroding under our noses.
Download or read book Voltaire s Bastards written by John Ralston Saul and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-12-25 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a new Introduction by the author, this “erudite and brilliantly readable book” (The Observer, London) expertly dissects the political, economic, and social origins of Western civilization to reveal a culture cripplingly enslaved to crude notions of rationality and expertise. With a new introduction by the author, this “erudite and brilliantly readable book” (The Observer, London) astutely dissects the political, economic and social origins of Western civilization to reveal a culture cripplingly enslaved to crude notions of rationality and expertise. The Western world is full of paradoxes. We talk endlessly of individual freedom, yet we’ve never been under more pressure to conform. Our business leaders describe themselves as capitalists, yet most are corporate employees and financial speculators. We call our governments democracies, yet few of us participate in politics. We complain about invasive government, yet our legal, educational, financial, social, cultural and legislative systems are deteriorating. All these problems, John Ralston Saul argues, are largely the result of our blind faith in the value of reason. Over the past 400 years, our “rational elites” have turned the modern West into a vast, incomprehensible, directionless machine, run by process-minded experts—“Voltaire’s bastards”—whose cult of scientific management is empty of both sense and morality. Whether in politics, art, business, the military, entertainment, science, finance, academia or journalism, these experts share the same outlook and methods. The result, Saul maintains, is a civilization of immense technological power whose ordinary citizens are increasingly excluded from the decision-making process. In this wide-ranging anatomy of modern society and its origins—whose “pages explode with insight, style and intellectual rigor” (Camille Paglia, The Washington Post)—Saul presents a shattering critique of the political, economic and cultural establishments of the West.
Download or read book The Unconscious Civilization written by John Ralston Saul and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-11-06 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Voltaire's Bastards comes a philosophical examination of how corporatism has become so deeply ingrained into our society, how it's destroying democracy, and how we can fight against it. In this intellectual tour de force John Ralston Saul argues that our society is only superficially based on the individual and democracy, and the West now toils unconsciously in the grip of a stifling “corporatist” structure that serves the needs of business managers and technocrats as it promotes the segmentation of society into competing interest groups and ethnic blocks.
Download or read book Talking Heads written by Ian Gurvitz and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-11-22 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 52 unique color, and black and white drawings. This is not art in the sense that these drawings are the result of a unique creative vision. They are accidental flights of fantasy - spontaneous, right brain meanderings with a mind of their own. I started drawing in TV writers' rooms. During rewrites I would doodle on my script pages, either to keep my mind alive or to keep my head from exploding. Anyone who's been in a room at midnight, staring at a sea of blank faces all searching for the same insight, knows this experience. Most of the drawings were tossed out at the end of the night, along with stacks of cold pizza but, occasionally, one would take on a distinct character, or style, or evoke a mood or emotion. Those were interesting enough to keep, and eventually enough of an incentive to buy sketch pads and pens, and pursue it outside of work. I'm not an artist. Having read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and taken some art classes, I knew the trick was to draw without trying to draw -- to let go of any desire for a specific result and just let it happen. The "not-do- ing" of it became an interesting exercise. If I let go, it occasionally went somewhere interesting. If I got too deliberate, the results were forced. Sometimes, when I felt stuck in a familiar pattern, I'd try to break out of my head by taking a different color pen, and attacking the page randomly. Once in a while, I got in the zone. Though, as with all attempts at mindlessness, once you become aware of it, it's gone. Of all the drawings I've done to date, these faces seemed to express a unique attitude or emotion. I then added captions in an attempt to capture or enhance the mood. Whether there's anything Freudian going on in the darker images, I have no idea.
