Ted Rall Newsletter - February 2010
Issue Number 2 - February 2010
Ted Rall Newsletter
NEW BOOK FOR FALL 2010: POLITICAL MANIFESTO
My new political manifesto, which argues that the United States is headed toward economic and political collapse—and offers a solution so radical it'll make you giddy—is coming out this fall from Seven Stories Press. I'm polishing up last-minute edits and working on the cover now. From the first chapter:
It doesn’t matter whether you feel it or not. It’s happening. The story of the United States of America as we know it—not merely as the world’s dominant superpower, but as a discrete political, economic and geographic entity—is drawing to a close due to a convergence of emerging economic, environmental and political crises. It’s not just that we won’t be selling most of the goods, using most of the resources or starting most of the wars anymore. (Although we won't.) Nor will we all die. Many, probably most of us, will survive. Our land will remain, whatever remains after rising seas anyway, and our descendants will be doing whatever people will need to and be told to do then. But the U.S. as an idea, as a country, will cease to exist. Like the Mayan empire. Like Czechoslovakia. Like the Soviet Union.
SUMMER 2010 AFGHANISTAN TRIP IN PERIL
I'm trying to raise the travel expenses to return to cover the war in Afghanistan this summer. I want to check in on my fixer from 2001 and his family in Taliban-occupied Taloqan, do an exposé on the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline oil and gas project, and visit remote parts of the country where reporters never venture. I will blog, file essays and cartoons, and write a book about what I hope to find—how the occupation is affecting ordinary Afghans nine years into the war.
Since I can't find a newspaper or magazine willing to foot the bill, I'm using Kickstarter.com. People who want to support a project that might not otherwise take place pledge money; if enough people do it, the project gets funded.
If not, it doesn't. And everyone gets their money back.
Unfortunately, things don't look good now. After a great start—66 people put up $5,334—pledges have slowed to a trickle. There's still time left, but at this rate I will NOT be returning to Afghanistan—unless more people pledge their support.
I understand; times are tough. It may be that this idea just won't work. However, if you're interested in supporting aggressive, independent, completely unembedded journalism and have a few extra bucks, please help me get there! I need $19,000 more in order to pay for transportation and security for four weeks travel. You get goodies depending on your level of support; obviously bigger is better. The link is:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tedrall/comix-journalism-send-ted-rall-back-to-afghanista-0
TED RALL ANIMATIONS ON YOUTUBE
I am producing, along with David Essman, some of the most outrageous political cartoons available in animation, for the Internet. But I won't be able to keep doing them unless some websites start paying for them. If you're working for a website interested in edgy political content, please check them out and get in touch. I am willing and able to package them with my weekly opinion columns.
http://www.youtube.com/user/tedralltoons
You can also see them on Ted Rall Online at:
http://www.rall.com/goodies.htm
Up most recently, “Operation Haitian Earthquake Freedom,” about the militarization of disaster relief.
SIGN UP TO GET TED’S CARTOONS AND COLUMNS
I have begun serializing pre-edited copy from my upcoming Political Manifesto through the 2010 Ted Rall Subscription Service. This is EXCLUSIVE to subscribers. Everyone else will have to wait until the book comes out this fall.
Subscriptions for the Ted Rall Subscription Service are open now for 2010. For $30 a year you get my cartoons and columns emailed to your in-box, in many cases days or even weeks before they go online or appear in newspapers! You also receive big discounts on any original cartoons you request ($100 cost instead of $500).
Go to: http://www.rall.com/subscription.htm
EVENTS - FEBRUARY
Hey New Yorkers! Please come out to support me at my biggest book signing ever—at the flagship Upper West Side Barnes & Noble.
When: Tuesday, February 16th, at 7 pm
What: Discussion about my new graphic novel memoir, “The Year of Loving Dangerously,” with Pablo G. Callejo.
Where: Barnes & Noble at Broadway and 82nd Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
BUY A SIGNED COPY OF “THE YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY”
You can still get a personally signed copy of Ted’s “The Year of Loving Dangerously” for $23.90 (includes shipping within the United States). There are only a few copies left. Then the offer is null and void.
Check out: http://rall.com/buyyold.htm
VISIT TED ON FACEBOOK
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/profile.php?ref=profile&id=500182857
FOLLOW TED ON TWITTER
http:www.twitter.com/tedrall
DEMAND THAT YOUR NEWSPAPER CARRY ME!
The Internet is cool. But it doesn't pay. If you want to keep seeing good cartoons, write to your local newspaper and demand that they carry my stuff. It works more often than you'd think!
To unsubcribe from this newsletter, simply hit “reply” and type “UNSUBSCRIBE” in the subject line of the email.
Ted Rall Newsletter
NEW BOOK FOR FALL 2010: POLITICAL MANIFESTO
My new political manifesto, which argues that the United States is headed toward economic and political collapse—and offers a solution so radical it'll make you giddy—is coming out this fall from Seven Stories Press. I'm polishing up last-minute edits and working on the cover now. From the first chapter:
It doesn’t matter whether you feel it or not. It’s happening. The story of the United States of America as we know it—not merely as the world’s dominant superpower, but as a discrete political, economic and geographic entity—is drawing to a close due to a convergence of emerging economic, environmental and political crises. It’s not just that we won’t be selling most of the goods, using most of the resources or starting most of the wars anymore. (Although we won't.) Nor will we all die. Many, probably most of us, will survive. Our land will remain, whatever remains after rising seas anyway, and our descendants will be doing whatever people will need to and be told to do then. But the U.S. as an idea, as a country, will cease to exist. Like the Mayan empire. Like Czechoslovakia. Like the Soviet Union.
SUMMER 2010 AFGHANISTAN TRIP IN PERIL
I'm trying to raise the travel expenses to return to cover the war in Afghanistan this summer. I want to check in on my fixer from 2001 and his family in Taliban-occupied Taloqan, do an exposé on the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline oil and gas project, and visit remote parts of the country where reporters never venture. I will blog, file essays and cartoons, and write a book about what I hope to find—how the occupation is affecting ordinary Afghans nine years into the war.
Since I can't find a newspaper or magazine willing to foot the bill, I'm using Kickstarter.com. People who want to support a project that might not otherwise take place pledge money; if enough people do it, the project gets funded.
If not, it doesn't. And everyone gets their money back.
Unfortunately, things don't look good now. After a great start—66 people put up $5,334—pledges have slowed to a trickle. There's still time left, but at this rate I will NOT be returning to Afghanistan—unless more people pledge their support.
I understand; times are tough. It may be that this idea just won't work. However, if you're interested in supporting aggressive, independent, completely unembedded journalism and have a few extra bucks, please help me get there! I need $19,000 more in order to pay for transportation and security for four weeks travel. You get goodies depending on your level of support; obviously bigger is better. The link is:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tedrall/comix-journalism-send-ted-rall-back-to-afghanista-0
TED RALL ANIMATIONS ON YOUTUBE
I am producing, along with David Essman, some of the most outrageous political cartoons available in animation, for the Internet. But I won't be able to keep doing them unless some websites start paying for them. If you're working for a website interested in edgy political content, please check them out and get in touch. I am willing and able to package them with my weekly opinion columns.
http://www.youtube.com/user/tedralltoons
You can also see them on Ted Rall Online at:
http://www.rall.com/goodies.htm
Up most recently, “Operation Haitian Earthquake Freedom,” about the militarization of disaster relief.
SIGN UP TO GET TED’S CARTOONS AND COLUMNS
I have begun serializing pre-edited copy from my upcoming Political Manifesto through the 2010 Ted Rall Subscription Service. This is EXCLUSIVE to subscribers. Everyone else will have to wait until the book comes out this fall.
Subscriptions for the Ted Rall Subscription Service are open now for 2010. For $30 a year you get my cartoons and columns emailed to your in-box, in many cases days or even weeks before they go online or appear in newspapers! You also receive big discounts on any original cartoons you request ($100 cost instead of $500).
Go to: http://www.rall.com/subscription.htm
EVENTS - FEBRUARY
Hey New Yorkers! Please come out to support me at my biggest book signing ever—at the flagship Upper West Side Barnes & Noble.
When: Tuesday, February 16th, at 7 pm
What: Discussion about my new graphic novel memoir, “The Year of Loving Dangerously,” with Pablo G. Callejo.
Where: Barnes & Noble at Broadway and 82nd Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
BUY A SIGNED COPY OF “THE YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY”
You can still get a personally signed copy of Ted’s “The Year of Loving Dangerously” for $23.90 (includes shipping within the United States). There are only a few copies left. Then the offer is null and void.
Check out: http://rall.com/buyyold.htm
VISIT TED ON FACEBOOK
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/profile.php?ref=profile&id=500182857
FOLLOW TED ON TWITTER
http:www.twitter.com/tedrall
DEMAND THAT YOUR NEWSPAPER CARRY ME!
The Internet is cool. But it doesn't pay. If you want to keep seeing good cartoons, write to your local newspaper and demand that they carry my stuff. It works more often than you'd think!
To unsubcribe from this newsletter, simply hit “reply” and type “UNSUBSCRIBE” in the subject line of the email.
posted by Ted Rall at
12:34 PM
4 Comments:
I take end of country predictions with a pinch of salt.
Ted, I've always admired you and felt that you were a writer in the United States who accurately covered the dominant "vibe" that Pakistani journalism I grew up with. A mixture of deep cynicism and total disbelief for what the powers that be say until you saw it with your own aching dust hurting eyes; a man who didn't believe that the good news or the good times had arrived until you could feel it in your bones. And a man who transferred this journalistic vibe present in my country to the United States of America, taking it out of the government reportage, and directly into the suburban houses and residential back alleys of America.
That's why I say no - it won't happen in our life times. The United States will not go the way of the Soviet Union. If the USA goes so goes Canada where I currently study.
Sorry but if you expanded or elaborated I would pay attention. But I am a man who is coming from a position of Secessionist over-caution, where our primary political objective in Pakistan is always first and foremost to keep the country together. Beyond this we deal with the constant warnings sent out by every hack who enters our country. We deal with warnings of calamity every eight months.
The result is that our antennae our finely tuned for any real sign of secessionist trouble as well as any fake smoke conjured up by foreigners passing through.
With my credentials laid out, let me put my case forward that secession is not a real possibility in our lifetimes from the United States. To make real secession work you need VASTLY different mentalities. I have not seen evidence of that in the United States apart from the Corporate/People divide. Of course there will be political turmoil as the suburbs and suburbanites are forced by circumstances to adapt to a new energy priority. But secession is just guff, like Rick Perry before the swine flu epidemic broke out.
We don't need no stinking manifestoes to know the USA is doomed. You heard it from many sources since the Republican Party took George W. Bush (the guy everyone wants to have a beer with) under its wing for the 2000 Presidential selection. You're hearing it now, every single day, when the mainstream media gives Sarah Palin's beyond-belief incompentence and criminal stupidity nationwide airing. Hello-OH! Sarcasm doesn't work. It didn't work with George W. Bush. Our brain-dead countrymen/women just dug their heels in deeper to support Bush's criminal acts and decisions. Not to discount the intelligence, the research, and the common sense and logic of Ted Rall's words, but it's become a waste of words. The Republican Party of "NO!" has armies of wasted-talent young Republicans and tea-baggers with plenty of time on their hands to monitor every piece of intelligent discourse and opinion and make it into anti-Americanism, unpatriotic, Socialist, anti-life, pro-gay...you name it, the Repubicans are right on top of it. They WILL win with Palin, and we will ask, how did this ever happen? You know what we'll hear from the Republicans? It's Bill and Hillary Clinton's doing. The Republican party of "NO," never one to let a foul lie die a natural death. Too bad we have to listen to them tell us they were never in Palin's corner and it's all the fault of the liberals, too. Manifestoes, no. Rants, yes. Neither does any good and it's going to be all we have left.
Y_S (Yussuf?), I don't understand how American secession is so unattainable/undesirable? Like I said many times, it's in the best interest of all, if not most, political undercurrents as well as geopolitical divides in the American landscape.
I can see how the powers that be (both of the so-called "parties") would fight it tooth and nail. And I worry that, in keeping with the American state's tradition, the administration of a seceded California will feel obliged to wage war on a seceded Nevada.
I pity the person that depends on the generosity of liberals for his endeavor. Liberals are notoriously stingy.
Post a Comment
<< Home