From the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam

Oh, Digby.

And anyway, the Fourth of July is my favorite holiday -- a beautiful, secular, mid-summer celebration of freedom --- and I just don't want to feel awful today.

I completely understand not wanting to feel awful today--I generally don't want to feel awful any day, though my success with that desire is spotty to say the least. But, come on now: a beautiful, secular, mid-summer celebration of freedom? Is that what today is?

Because my understanding is that it's more to do with a bunch of privileged, property-(including-slaves-let's-not-forget)-owning, wealthy white men taking a quick break from their ruthless genocide to violently express, first, their unwillingness to part with any of their wealth, and second, their desire to take on those aspects of power that they did not have already. The fact that they packaged these desires in populist hand-waving only means that they were clever about the long-term needs of maintaining that power, nothing more, nothing less.

Lovely also how she posts a video clip, perfectly frozen by youtube on a still of Barack Obama's most unbearable look of beatitude and his wife's most perfect look of contempt for her inferiors (who are, naturally, everyone else), of a bunch of privileged powerholders listening to a wealthy white man condescend to the rest of us, linking below it to Douglass's What to the Slave is the Fourth of July with a smug, very nouveau White Man's Burden "We've come a long way."

What to the Black American who is president is the Fourth of July? A celebration of the continued gullibility of the masses that enable his wealth, no doubt. And what is it to the vast majority of the rest of Black Americans of today? Or, for that matter, 99% of this country's population? And what is it to the rest of the world?

Myself, I'm celebrating the day by staying the fuck indoors and watching boatloads of Star Trek by myself. Its portrait of the unquestioningly patriotic front guard of a repressive psychologically totalitarian society is a perfect mirror of today's America. Later on I plan to start reading Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. God Bless America.

PEE ESS Those lyrics I used as the title of this post sure need amending at this point, don't they? "From the blasted, topless mountains to the mineral production fields and factory farms to the oceans brown with oil" doesn't exactly fit the rhythm of the song, but it'll have to do until we have better things to sing about.

PEE PEE ESS Another good way to celebrate This Great Nation Of Ours™ (unless you and your parents and your grandparents and your great-grandparents weren't all white people born here in which case get back to where you came from, and if you're already there what right do you think you have to read this American blog???) is with a listen to Laurie Anderson's wonderful new album Homeland. The lady's still got it, and she's always been good at seeing the actual world she lives in.

Note: these self-appointed guardians of culture aren't guarding shit.

Arthur Silber and I have very different tastes in our classical music--most music written between about 1750 and 1900 does nothing for me, and opera in particular does even less--but his complaints about the banality of the American high-cultural mainstream are utterly familiar to me, while his rant is utterly accurate and utterly wonderful.

Compare, contrast

In the following, all emphasis is mine.

The, er, youtube blog, back in March:

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

(via Avedon)

Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors, page 37:

Attorney Lawrence Stanley, who published in the Benjamin A. Cardozo Law Review what is widely considered the most thorough research of child pornography in the 1980s, concluded that the pornographers were almost exclusively cops. In 1990 at a southern California police seminar, the LAPD's R. P. "Toby" Tyler proudly announced as much. The government had shellacked the competition, he said; now law enforcement agencies were the sole reproducers and distributors of child pornography. Virtually all advertising, distribution, and sales to people considered potential lawbreakers were done by the federal government, in sting operations against people who have demonstrated (through, for instance, membership in NAMBLA) what agents regard as predisposition to commit a crime. These solicitations were numerous and did not cease until the recipient took the bait. "In other words, there was no crime until the government seduced people into committing one," Stanley wrote.

If, as police claim, looking at child porn inspires molesters to go out and seduce living children, why were the feds doing the equivalent of distributing matches to arsonists? Their answer is: to stop the molesters before they strike again. Newspaper reports of arrests uniformly follow the same pattern: a federal agent poses as a minor online, hints at a desired meeting or agrees to one should the mark suggest it, and then arrests the would-be molester when he shows up. But another logical answer to the almost exclusive use of stings to arrest would-be criminals is that the government, frustrated with the paucity of the crime they claim is epidemic and around which huge networks of enforcement operations have been built, have to stir the action to justify their jobs.

The specific motivation may vary slightly from situation to situation (though profit and entrenchment of power are always the ultimate goals), but Power will always behave in the same manipulative, exploitative ways.

(NOTE: I am perfectly aware that the Youtube blog, being a public face of Google, is also the voice of Power. They are most certainly despicable in their own ways. That's just not particularly relevant in this particular example.)

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pages 42-43

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

Arthur let out a low groan. He was horrified to discover that the kick through hyperspace hadn't killed him. He was now six light-years from the place that the Earth would have been if it still existed.

The Earth.

Visions of it swam sickeningly through his nauseated mind. There was no way his imagination could feel the impact of the whole Earth having gone, it was too big. He prodded his feelings by thinking that his parents and his sister had gone. No reaction. Then he thought of a complete stranger he had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket two days before and felt a sudden stab--the supermarket was gone, everyone in it was gone. Nelson's Column had gone! Nelson's Column had gone and there would be no outcry, because there was no one left to make an outcry. From now on Nelson's Column only existed in his mind--his mind, stuck here in this dank smelly steel-lined spaceship. A wave of claustrophobia closed in on him.

England no longer existed. He'd got that--somehow he'd got it. He tried again. America, he thought, was gone. He couldn't grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He'd never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald's, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald's hamburger.

He passed out. When he came round a second later he found he was sobbing for his mother.

Guess who I like better

Maureen Dowd?

The idea of seeing Saudi Arabia with the welcome mat out was irresistible...even when the wary Saudis kept resisting.

Or Zunguzungu, writing about Maureen Dowd?

The first thing to say, then, is this is how Orientalism works: we know what pictures of the Orient we want, and so we go out and get them. ...

It tells us a great deal about her and what she went to Saudi Arabia to find (and did find), in other words: confirmation. After all, look back at that quote: the fact that they’re selling her exactly the image she wants to buy — a slowly modernizing puritanical society — passes completely under her radar; she wants images of burkas next to swimming pools and they’re happy to give them to her, happy to cater to her belief that social justice is a sort of natural outgrowth of luxury. But this business of “wary Saudis” is preposterous; it would be hard for a trip to be more fundamentally state sponsored trip than hers was, and the image of “wary Saudis” was just one of the images they provided her to pose next to.

Obvious example

Jon Schwarz posts the obvious, digby suddenly is able to understand it.

I at first took her "It is so outside the range of mainstream belief that it takes a couple of readings to actually grok what he's saying" as embarrassingly dim, but really what it is is an example of what I was talking about yesterday.

Now, whether it will stick, whether it will lead anywhere, is another question. Signs point to no, as far as I can tell. Still, there's potential there.

A quick note on climate change

I've been seeing a lot of posts around the whatever-we're-calling-ourselves-osphere recently expressing disbelief in human-caused climate change. And yes, Al Gore, and yes, inadequate modeling, and yes, collapse of the oil economy anyway, and yes, there's wars going on too, and so on, and so on. Come on, people.

No, the science is not complete. Science by definition never is. But the basics, the unavoidable facts, anyone can grasp, and they are as follows.

1. Energy can be converted from one form to another, but it can be neither created nor destroyed.

2. The Earth is essentially a closed system. Aside from the continual huge energy input from the sun, what we have is what we have. And it's a complex system to be sure, and variable, but its tendency is towards the development and sustenance of equilibrium.

3. That thing we call oil? This is what it is: vast quantities of energy, ultimately from the sun, our one significant source of input, which was gathered by biological systems (i.e., living things) and stored over billions of years.

4. We are currently towards the end of a process of releasing pretty much all of that energy in a couple of hundred years.

5. Complex systems (see #2) plus even a little bit of energy (and we're emphatically not talking about "a little bit" here) equals lots and lots of unpredictable chaos and catastrophic destruction of equilibria.

All of that energy, this billions of years worth of sunny days being spewed out into the world in a period lasting only a few hundred millionths of that time, has to go somewhere, and I can tell you this: the place it's going is not "away." The fact that we don't know exactly what the consequences will be is not a reason to stop worrying about it, it's exactly the opposite.

And yeah, we pretty much can't do anything about it. Since when has that been a reason to pretend that a problem doesn't exist?

Obvious

Arthur Silber on the Russkie spies:

To return to Limbaugh's amazement that the evil Russians would feel a need to spy on the noble Americans: yeah, that's a tough one. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that by means of NATO expansion on one side, and permanent (or at least decades-long) occupations on another, the U.S. is intentionally engaged in an encirclement of Russia. An encirclement that happens to involve deployments of large numbers of troops, plus weapons of all kinds.

This is of course exceptionally obvious. I've often thought, while looking at the globe on my dresser that so handsomely complements the color I just recently painted my bedroom walls, about how painfully obvious it is. All you have to do is just that: look at a globe, or a map.

But many painfully obvious facts, which anyone can discover by thinking about them for half a second, are not actually obvious. The geographical facts of our empire are not obvious. It is not obvious that wealth funnels upwards, not downwards. It is not obvious that rulers have more power than people living in poverty. It is not obvious that a history, and contemporary reality, of slavery and genocide and empire means that America is not a force for good in the world. It is not obvious that each instance of a crooked corporation, or an overzealously sadistic soldier, or a bad president, is not just a "bad apple" but is in fact the system operating as it is intended to. It is not obvious that one should never make excuses for power.

Of course these facts are not obvious; if they were, more people would understand them!

There is always a concerted effort by those in power to create a culture in which these truths are not, as someone once said about something, self-evident. Conditioning begins, essentially, at birth. The ability that some people (I like to think I am one of these people; please let me know if you disagree with this assessment) have to see past this conditioning is not a mark of superiority, rather it is a mark of luck in intellectual development (whether this "luck" was lucky in any other sense obviously varies from individual to individual; for example, I come by my worldview by virtue of having wonderful parents and happening to have read good books in my teen years, while others have them by virtue of being victimized from childhood).

But this is why it's important to keep saying all these obvious things. John Caruso recently posted about a mind that encountered someone (Chomsky, in this case) saying the obvious right at the moment when he was primed to be responsive to it, and the difference that it made. My own mind, made receptive to obvious facts by the upbringing I just summarized, finally made a definitive leap into reality with the help, primarily, of Jon Schwarz and the 2006 congress (somewhat analogous to the carrot and the stick, respectively). You never know when it might work, for whom.

Tendency to lead to illegal magical practices

I wanted Janelle Monáe's The ArchAndroid to be the best album of the year. (I mean, just look at that cover!) It ended up disappointing me a little, but most likely it's just because I had built up an expectation that it might be the match for other recent idiosyncratic female R&B masterpieces like Erykah Badu's similarly sci-fi New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) or Solange's similarly skewed-but-still-pop-as-all-hell Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams, and as far as I'm concerned very little in this world is a match for those albums.

I think if I were going to change anything, I would make the production a little (but not much) rougher, a little (but not much) less bouncy. Oh, and I would remove Kevin Barnes's totally unsuitable voice from "Make the Bus." Then the album would be pretty much perfect.

Anyway, enough quibbling. The point of this post is to present the video for "Tightrope," which is just purely delightful. It mixes the imagery of fantasy, of both the "high-" and "urban-" varieties, dystopian sci-fi, 60's soul aficionados, high school drama, counter-culture One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest narratives, and countless other sources with Monáe and her associates' exhilerating dancing and a charmingly (and obviously falsely) cheap-looking visual style to create something that is, to me at least, truly beautiful. Sometimes the post-modern condition is worth it.



The song's pretty easy to get ecstatically carried away by, too.

Two last things to point out. First, the look of pure happiness on Monáe's face, around 2:00, when she first sees Big Boi. Second, every single person in the video is Black.

Google knows me

(clicking makes it bigger)

Dear liberals,

SHUT UP about Rand fucking Paul already. I mean, Christ, what's the big goddamn deal?

Only silence is shame

Scott Walker's 1972 album The Moviegoer is far from his best. If you're not familiar with him, I say start at the beginning, with the four numbered Scott albums, which see him working in a Jacques Brel/crooner-inspired style, with increasing experimentalism as the albums go on, frequently detailing seedy, decadent, disturbing, or violent imagery. Then move on to his later, far more out-there albums, from the Low*-inspired Nite Flights (technically credited to The Walker Brothers; the first four tracks are Scott's and are brilliant, the rest is disposable), to the legitimately insane, and terrifying, Tilt and The Drift. Then, if you feel like you want more, you can branch out, seeking out albums like 1984's interesting but very very 80s Climate of Hunter or the uneven-but-worth-it Til the Band Comes In, or this album.

It's entirely covers of movie themes, and most of it indulges the very crooneriest of Walker's croonery leanings. It's enjoyable in a way, but it's just absolutely nothing up to his other stuff. Except for "The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti," originally from the 1971 movie Sacco and Vanzetti. The original version, by the surprising pair of Ennio Morricone and Joan Baez, is great. Musically, I actually prefer Scott Walker's.



True, he cuts out some of the best lyrics ("Against us is the law/With its immensity of strength and power/Against us is the law!/Police know how to make a man/A guilty or an innocent/Against us is the power of police!"), and, in fact, most of the lyrics, and, sure, you could take it as cheesy that he replaces them with a bunch of Biblical blessed ares and the text of the Emma Lazarus poem from the Statue of Liberty, but whatever. I find it kind of startlingly powerful, when combined with the mournful-but-active rhythm (I imagine very sad go-go dancers), the chamber pop strings and harpsichord, and Walker's unmatchably intense vocals.

*The Bowie album, that is

I felt a special kinship

This is a perfect little allegory on why Barack Obama is so goddamn dangerous. This lady is afraid her husband is going to be deported, so she writes to Obama for help. ICE comes and arrests him. The only reason he ended up getting released rather than deported is because she managed to attract media attention to the story.

Obama tricks people into thinking he's on their side. "I felt a special kinship to him because I'm of mixed race, and my husband obviously has a similar background," the story quotes her saying. But guess what: you can be "vice president of marketing at a new-media advertising company," you can be the sort of person to tell CNN that "All he wants to do is contribute to this economy...We want to be a productive couple," and still--he will not be on your side. "Mixed race" is not Obama's background, at least not for these purposes. Power is his background.

The only side Barack Obama is on is his own. If you're helping him gets what he wants, he'll be on your side, too; otherwise, in swoop the stormtroopers. This is what power is.

"I did everything I could and went into survival mode and pushed for all these connections to the press," she said. "We are fortunate to have that leverage. What about the people in the country who don't have access to those means?"

It's an excellent question, and not a rhetorical one, though CNN, in its own empowered self-interest, treats it as one.

Regardless of whether or not her letter was mishandled, the incident has deeply affected the couple's faith in the Obama administration.

"I feel really confused, I don't understand how something like this is possible. I can't imagine that at the top of the Obama administration that they realize that something like this is happening," Jamieson told CNN.

So much is contained in these paragraphs. "Mishandled"? "Faith"? The quote we leave on clearly indicates that that faith is still, against all evidence, intact. Because what Jamieson can't imagine, and what CNN does its damnedest to keep us from imagining, is that this, again, is the system operating exactly according to normal parameters.

Why I continue to read Shakesville

Seeing a single sentence that indicates both the clarity of thought needed to conclude that

We are as consumerist, greedy, market-driven a capitalist culture as exists on the planet, in which needs are created just to sell products to serve those conjured needs

and a desperate plea for improved inclusion in that culture, for more products for ME!!!, has something of the sublime about it.

In better news, more-and-more-frequent Shakesville blogger eastsidekate has been fairly consistently impressing me recently with both personal narratives and posts about capitalism and class written in a way that even Shakesculters might be able to grasp.

Happy birthday, George

It is impossible to overstate the impact this goofy-looking fellow has had on my thinking. Happy birthday, friend.

Special form of the general law

Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors, pages 102-3, emphasis mine:

Following the implementation of the [sex ed funding rules in the Clinton-era welfare "reform" legislation], a study of 659 African American Philadelphia sixth- and seventh-graders, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, returned the same verdict. A year after the classes, the kids who had undergone an abstinence-only program were engaging in intercourse in the same numbers (about a fifth) as kids who had received lessons stressing condom use, with the dangerous difference that the first group hadn't been taught anything about safe sex. "It is difficult to understand the logic behind the decision to earmark funds specifically for abstinence programs," commented JAMA's editors. ...

If it is difficult to understand the logic behind abstinence-only policy, it may be instructive to know that its proponents were proudly unswayed by logic. Although the law's impetus came in part from the continuing concern over nonmarital births, the House staffers who worked on the legislation admitted, in the commentary circulated in Congress, that "there is little evidence...that any particular policy or program will reduce the frequency of non-marital births." Now, this is not true; any number of policies, from contraceptive education to college scholarships for women, can reduce the frequency of nonmarital teen births. But the welfare law was not really intended to reduce teen births anyway.

Levine goes on to imply that the law was intended to make a statement that the Congress was on the side of social conservatism; I would argue instead that it was intended as a form of class-based social control.

Regardless, though, she makes a point that is important to remember: our Leaders neither form nor market policy based on what "logically" will accomplish what they claim in public to be trying to do.

Victims of the Oiligarchy

By Diane Steen-Hinderlie, via Jon Schwarz.

Stories

Over at Dead Horse, Rob Payne has a great little one-paragraph story called "World Views". It's about a magical creature. As Rob says, stories are a good way to communicate ideas.

I almost forgot how much I like this

Smile!

The other day I watched an embarrassing old episode of The Avengers called "The Decapod" (it went downhill after the title). The plot was some sort of nonsense about a Balkan dictator/playboy who's going to be assassinated by some guy in a wrestling costume, only it's really him all along and he just wants to steal the UN's money and go on cruises, or something. But was really struck me was this:


That's Julie Stevens as Venus Smith, who was briefly one of John Steed's sidekicks in the early years of the show. She was a lounge singer, and each of her episodes included a musical number or two, which, you know, kind of tiresome since the music is bland, but nice, I guess?

Anyway. I have a minor temporomandibular joint disorder, which basically means that my jaw has a tendency to get painfully tense and can lock sometimes and occasionally feels like it doesn't fit right, which is terribly uncomfortable. Smiling or laughing for prolonged periods can be particularly bad for it. It's nothing tragic, and considering that it's currently my only notable physical ailment aside from back pain due to shitty posture, I'm not going to complain all that much about it.

My point is, look at that picture. The muscles in poor Julie Stevens' jaw must be so goddamn tense. And she's making that face--completely unmoving, incidentally, I wish I had a video to share--while singing. And then she smiles through the rest of the hour-long episode, in which Steed discovers that the Balkan dictator has a thing for blondes and is coincidentally looking for a "private secretary," if you know what I mean, because the last one was sexily killed by a man in a wrestling mask, so then he tricks Venus into thinking that the dictator is actually some kind of entertainment impresario who wants to book her for a tour of the Balkans even though he's never heard her sing, and then she falls in love with him because he kidnaps her.

Smiling all the while.

Women of the world, if I may, I would like to sincerely apologize to your temporomandibular joints. If you don't want to smile all the time, that's totally fine with me. Next time someone stops you and asks "Why so glum?" or ingratiatingly tells you to "Smile, it's not so bad," sock him one for me. Maybe you can fuck up his jaw, too.

RIP José Saramago

Maybe I should finally get around to reading you.

Difficult to know

Marisacat quotes from an exchange between ABC's Yunji de Nies and Robert Gibbs, about the dispersants they're going to be using in the Gulf, which may in fact be more harmful than the oil itself. De Nies, to her surprising credit, attempts to break through Gibbs's imbecilic stonewalling on this:

This particular chemical, this Corexit, as it’s called, because it’s patented, scientists are not able to see the actual formula of what this is, so it’s difficult to know what’s in it.

A more succinct summation of everything that's fucked up in this world is hard to imagine.

Oh, Mary, I'm in deep water

As the 60's groups broke up and members started releasing solo albums, circa 1970, some truly amazing music happened, and almost none of it was what you would expect from the people responsible. As an example, Plastic Ono Band, McCartney, and All Things Must Pass are three extraordinary objects*, none of them what anyone must have been expecting from the former Beatles at the time (with the possible exception of parts of All Things Must Pass). Not having been born yet, I can't even imagine what it would have felt like to be experiencing it as it happened (my father described it as "very, very sad" when I asked him, and it certainly must have been, but sad as the music and the circumstances that produced it are, it is incredibly vital music; there must have been an overwhelming excitement mixed in with the sadness).

On a less mainstream level, you could say the same about Vintage Violence, Transformer, and Chelsea Girl, though of course the timing and circumstances there are considerably different, Nico and John Cale having left the Velvet Underground long before Lou Reed and releasing albums while the band still existed. Nevertheless, the excitement of being around as these albums came out, one after another, must have been almost unbearable.

I just listened for the first time to John Phillips' first album after The Mamas and the Papas fell apart, which is sometimes referred to by his name, sometimes as John the Wolfking of LA. This is, as I said before, amazing music. It's in a country-folk style not entirely unrelated to TM&TP's most frequent modes, but feeling utterly different, more like a Tim Buckley or even a Leonard Cohen. The lyrics are, as they were with his band, frequently heartbreaking, but where John, Denny, Michelle, and Cass covered the sorrow with a kind of bombastic sweetness, the very different sweetness here leaves the emotion bare.

Incidentally, a good deal of the sweetness on this album comes from the backing vocals, provided perfectly by the legendary Darlene Love alongside her less legendary but no less delightful colleagues Fanita James and Jean King. Love, James, and King were the three most regular members of The Blossoms, frequent session singers who also recorded some obscure records under their own name, and much better-known songs as Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans and as The Crystals (in some versions; for hints of the Phil Spector-is-terrible story behind that, see here).

Anyway, music can speak for itself, so I'm going to shut up and present "Topanga Canyon."



PS And my god, that piano sound!

*Or technically four, since I don't want to dismiss how awesome Yoko Ono's Plastic Ono Band is, but since she was never in the Beatles it's not directly relevant to what I'm talking about. But: awesome, awesome album.

Halfway through Pride Month

I guess once July starts I have to go back to being ashamed?

Weird

If digby is, as she says, "immune" to speeches, what the heck keeps her so damn snookered?

Think of the children

Not irrelevant to the post I might eventually write at some point during my lifetime about young people and sex: I see that Perez Hilton could conceivably be charged with distributing child porn, which according to the article carries a mandatory minimum 15 year sentence, for linking to an upskirt underpantsless photograph of seventeen and a half year old Miley Cyrus.

Now, from what the article says, no one is actually charging him as of yet. But I hope we can all see past the natural disgust we feel towards Perez Hilton, and towards the concept of upskirt shots, to see how patently ludicrous even the possibility, even the suggestion, that someone could be imprisoned for fifteen years for not taking, not posting, but linking to a photograph, taken in public, that includes a glimpse of a vagina belonging to a woman half a year away from an arbitrary "age of majority."

I mean, it's absurd to call that porn, let alone criminal child porn. Our society's attitudes about sex are insane. That includes both what I've just described and the attitude that leads to the idea that taking and "distributing" such a picture is desirable. In fact, they're the same fucking attitudes.

Incidentally, I stumbled upon that article because it was linked to in the sidebar of this Greenwald article, which is overall his usual decent quality but which also casually refers to high school seniors as "children." I mean, what is wrong with us?

pass it on

well, we've finally given up being coy and are ready to declare an unbound desire for afghan mineral deposits. hell, let's just consider them ours already. from linked article above:

"[State Department spokesman] Crowley downplayed questions about the potential for other countries to try to exploit Afghanistan's possible wealth and acknowledged that internal corruption could pose a problem...


'We're very mindful of the fact that around the world, you have a number of countries that are blessed with natural resources that may become a source of conflict and corruption,' Crowley said...


'We want to be sure that we have helped Afghanistan develop effective institutions of government so that it's able to develop its mining sector, that it's generating revenue that can be turned into greater prosperity and shared opportunity for the Afghan people,' he said."

This city was murdered, buy our product

Via io9, I see that Absolut has created an ad (or, sorry, Absolut sponsored an artist's creation, and then put their branding on it for entirely selfless reasons!) in which Picasso's Guernica is, as io9 would have it, "reimagined" as an x-ray. As a work of art it's fine, I guess, though a bit pointless unless I'm missing something. As an advertisement it is reprehensible beyond belief.

Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors, introduction page xxii

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

Beleaguered parents have only the media and the marketplace as sources of advice and help. The parenting magazines indict a hazard of the month, providing fretful mothers and fathers with a ready list of names for their vaguest fears: television radiation, chlorine, medicine droppers, iron pills, automatic garage door openers, latex balloons, trampolines, drawstring sweatshirts. The newsweeklies chime in with perils of a less concrete, more moral nature. "How Can We Keep Our Children Safe?" asked the cover of Life magazine in the mid-1990s, ringing the vulnerable face of a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl with a boldfaced wreath of horribles: "sexual abuse, abduction, television, accidents, neglect, violence, drugs, vulgarity, alienation." The article, like the pieces on chlorine and sweatshirts, offered few solutions that were not purchasable, and private.

Why can't I stand up and tell myself I'm strong

On a different subject, Jackie DeShannon:

Good night. Til tomorrow.

Sexually dangerous, belated addendum

So obviously the promised followup to my Sexually dangerous post, focusing on our society's attitudes towards young people and sex, hasn't happened yet. Maybe eventually I'll feel up to the task. But in the meantime, I want to point out something that I didn't say (or even think of) explicitly when I wrote the original post.

In comments, there was quite a bit of back and forth, first between ASP and myself, then between ASP and Richard, and then between ASP and Jack, and eventually I started feeling really bad that it seemed like an argument between ASP on one side and a bunch of dudes on the other. Of course the only person who really got argumentative in the whole thing was me, and that was because a) I was tired and b) I unfortunately conflated what silly Jenny was saying with what sensible ASP was saying, which, sorry about that.

Uh, anyway, now that my absorbing summary of the comment thread is done, what I want to point out is that out of the exchange between Jack and ASP came this statement of Jack's, in response to a summary of a study of rapists:

It contains the beginning of the answer of how to "handle" rapists.

Don't make them.

No one, I think, could disagree with this. The disagreement arose when ASP responded, quite accurately, that feminists have been working on this for quite some time. And it is true, and no matter how minor any individual example may seem, I do think it's valuable to point out examples of how our mass culture reinforces the attitudes that lead to so many men thinking it's perfectly OK for them to do as they please with women, regardless of how the women might feel about it. On all this, I agree with ASP 100%.

However.

These efforts, particularly as I see them at Shakesville but also in other places (and I am not accusing ASP of doing this herself; this is simply a response set off by what she said, hopefully not to be taken as a criticism of her herself), often seem to come hand in hand with the kind of punitive impulse, and the kind of deference to power, that I was clumsily attempting to criticize in my original post (I realized later that I should have split it into two posts, one discussing the ruling itself, one discussing the reaction to it, but my own navel gazing self-criticism is neither here nor there right now).

The problem is that these attitudes, the deference to power and the impulse to punish, are in themselves extremely powerful drivers of the rape culture.

The problem with the deference to power, expressed here by McEwan's bizarrely trusting "sure, there's potential for abuse, but..." framing, expressed elsewhere in her fawning admiration for people like Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, surely needs no explanation. Rape is in large part about expressing power, the rapist declaring his total dominion over the body of the victim. A society with entrenched power structures such as we have, in which we are expected to subsume ourselves to the individuals at the top who present themselves as speaking for us, by its very nature encourages other, violent expressions of power. And this is all without even mentioning the fact that the wielders of American power have encouraged and instituted regimes of systemic rape as a means of control, around the world.

(Another aspect of the power-worship--passively allowing huge corporations to define culture for you--was ably demolished by Jack in the original comments.)

The problem with the punitive impulse as a response to rape should be even more obvious, but somehow it doesn't seem to be. I mentioned in comments to my original post that "rape is itself rampant in prisons." Your good liberal thinks that this is something that could be regulated away; of course I think differently. Rape, as far as I'm concerned, is an integral part of the prison system, a way of ensuring that the power structures that prison serves to reinforce are perpetuated on every level. But even if it's not--even if we could somehow eliminate all traces of rape and sexual assault from prisons--even in this hypothetical (if you ask me, impossible) world, the prison system, and the punitive impulse that leads almost everyone, no matter where they fall on the limited spectrum allowed in mainstream thought, to encourage it, would still reinforce the rape culture.

Opposition to the death penalty is thankfully common among liberals. In discussing it, they often rightly point out the hypocrisy inherent in killing someone as punishment for killing someone. That the implications of this line of reasoning are never explored any further is an indication, again, of how limited the range of mainstream, allowable thought is.

Because surely a moment's reflection would make anyone realize that imprisoning someone (i.e., the use of power to remove someone's agency) as punishment for raping someone (i.e., the use of power to remove someone's agency) is just as hypocritical. And if one's goal is changing the culture that creates rapists, it can only be counterproductive.

I hope it is clear that none of this should be taken as a defense of rapists, nor as an erasure of the fact that, as things stand, rape is a largely consequence-free act as far as the rapist is concerned. And no, I don't have a solution for what we should do with rapists, given that we obviously have a culture that creates them in large numbers. I do know, however, that what we currently do with them, both when we let them go free and when we do punish them, only contributes to creating more and more of them.

UPDATE I'm kind of an asshole. See comments.

Quasi-scientific study

This morning I walked two miles, half of it on a main road through a small city, half of it on suburban residential streets. As I did, to amuse myself I decided to keep an eye on the cars driving towards me and count how many carried only one person versus how many carried passengers. Just one passenger was enough to be counted, and I disregarded any vehicle that seemed to be business-related (pickup trucks with logos on the sides, anything bigger than an SUV, that kind of thing), just to be extra-clear.

In the two miles, fifty-one eligible cars passed me. Six carried passengers. The remaining forty-five carried only the driver.

The rapid use of energy that took billions of years to store up is killing us. We know this. In order to get this energy, we've cut bleeding gashes into the earth, all of which, but especially one of them right now, are killing us. We know this. But nothing changes.

And to a certain extent, how could it? Or, rather, how could we change? I'm all for assigning some of the blame to each and every single one of us, and have engaged in some of that myself. But at the same time, our leaders have invested a lot of money and effort over the decades forcing us to behave in the ways that make us responsible. Sure, we could all do better--carpool, say. But our local worlds have been delocalized. Most of us have to drive to work, most of us can't eat without having our food wrapped in plastic and shipped from miles and miles and miles away. And so on and so on and so on.

As far as the cars go, I've often thought that if we need them at all, they should be modular. If you're just driving yourself, you've got a smart car or a motorcycle or something similar. Small, so you're not lugging tons of steel around just to move yourself. Then if you have a passenger, you can add a passenger seat. Or if you have cargo, you can attach a trunk. Of course, decades of engineering have steered us in a direction where designing that would probably be near impossible, even if anyone wanted to.

I don't really have a point. We're fucked and I don't know what to do about. Shocking, I'm sure.

Look who's doddering

Digby thinks Helen Thomas is senile, or something.

UPDATE since I don't want to devote a whole new post to it: The McEwanator feels "obliged" to write a post about it, thank god! And uh, she thinks Thomas's comments were terrible and also talks about her like she's dead.

Press release

Chris Bowers:

I want to make it clear that I know there are still "amateur" independent blogs around. Also, I do not begrudge a single person for taking any of these various routes to professionalism. Hell, I have wanted to be a professional blogger since Kos first began selling ads in late 2003.

You heard it here first: I have never been jealous of Markos Moulitsas, and I will never go pro. No ads here!

That post is up there with the most unintentionally funny things I've ever read.

(via Avedon Carol)

In happier news

It's getting more and more likely that we're not the only life in the solar system. Hydrogen-breathing, acetylene-eating, methane-pooping microbes on Titan! It's a big maybe, but my god it's beautiful.

Between this, the ease with which life could evolve on Europa given the conditions we know exist there, and the increasingly strong evidence that there may have once been or may even currently be microbial life on Mars, it's a damn near certainty in my mind.

Life may have evolved independently as many as four times just in our solar system alone. That's not even including the entire rest of the universe.

Makes me happy, is all.

Excellently crafted blog comment sentences

hist on SMBIVA:

If I wrote a fictional villain who put out a young art students eye and laughed about how she deserved it, I'd be accused of laying it on too thick.

fred on Tiny Revolution

Israel will always agree with Turkey on this matter: it's simply a coincidence that some Armenians were killed at the same time that other Armenians were being killed.

Where its due, part whatever

This digby post, unless my reading comprehension is failing me, is shockingly on-target and undeluded.

It’s an article of faith among financial elites across the planet that the welfare state is an abomination and this is a global opportunity to end it. Each culture will deal with it slightly differently --- riots in Greece, marches in France, blog posts in America. But in the end, the result, short of revolution, will be similar everywhere --- the post-war welfare state will be weakened or destroyed. The left is barely relevant anywhere anymore and they simply do not fear any kind of serious populist uprising.

To my fellow East Coasters

Uh, go to the beach while you can.



Projection via Minnesota Public Radio, h/t Johnny Sunshine Jackson in comments.

Redundancy

If you read this blog (you do, don't you?) you probably already read the much more useful Chris Floyd and Arthur Silber and IOZ, which means most likely you've already seen this amazing Washington Post article about how "the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war...in 75 countries." But just in case you missed it, here you go. The next time you hear someone talk about how at least Obama's better than Bush was or McCain would have been, or about how America is fundamentally a force for good, or whatever nonsense people like that let fall out of their mouths, point them in the direction of this evil shit.

The best intro before reading the article, I think, is this from Chris Floyd:

[T]he Post is often a very good source of information about the operations and machinations of the militarist empire -- not because its editors are seeking to expose the empire's crimes and atrocities, but because they approve of them. And thus they will often write about them, in detail, in the most straightforward manner: "Hey, look at the cool stuff our boys are doing now!"

As a final note, I would like to point out that a bug just deliberately flew into my nose.

Another post that might confuse JR

Don't worry, though, JR. I'm confused too. The only way I can think to interpret this is saying that capitalism drives the knife of hatred through the heart of human love, but I sincerely doubt that that is the message that B.C., best known for promoting the most virulently capitalist strain of evangelical Christianity, was trying to get across.

Still, I have to admire the strip for getting the word "capitalism" onto the comics page at all. When was the last time that happened? Hell, how often does it show up in the paper, period?

RIP Rue McClanahan

I feel bad being a day late on this, but I wanted to get this video uploaded and that shit takes forever.

The Golden Girls continues to be one of my all-time favorite entertainments; the quality of its specific combination of a writing team, four actors, and a spectacularly useful formula has rarely been equaled. You could say this equally of Bea Arthur, Estelle Getty, or Betty White, but: it never would have worked without Rue McClanahan.

Everyone knows Blanche, or if they don't, it's easy to find her (and they should). I'd like to leave you with something else, though. It's her brief appearance in Starship Troopers, which I have been known to describe as my favorite movie of the 1990s (this isn't always true, depending on my mood, but it's definitely up there). The scene is sadly under a minute and a half long (you can tell it was edited down from a longer take, I'd love to see those deleted scenes) and largely taken up by Denise Richards' antics, but McClanahan's blind weirdo biology teacher is worth it. I love her face in the background of the Denise Richards barf shot.

Edgar Allan Poe, "Berenicë" first two sentences

(cross-posted from Commonplace)

Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform.

Ronald Reagan, Campaign Speech 1976

"I would like to be president, because I would like to see this country become once again a country where a little six-year-old girl can grow up knowing the same freedom that I knew when I was six years old, growing up in America."

---

"I would like to be a president. I would like to be a six-year old girl. A country can grow to like a six-year-old girl president.

Growing up old in America, where a president can be a six-year-old girl, I knew freedom. Again, I knew freedom... Can I know freedom? I would like to.

'Where can I see this freedom?' In this country. This America, where freedom can grow. Grow up, America!

I would like to see this country become a six-year-old girl once again."

Misunderstandings

President...er, former President Horst Köhler of Germany:

A country of our size, with its focus on exports and thus reliance on foreign trade, must be aware that military deployments are necessary in an emergency to protect our interests, for example, when it comes to trade routes, for example, when it comes to preventing regional instabilities that could negatively influence our trade, jobs and incomes.

Whoops! Someone told the truth! And then he resigned!

The funny thing is, Köhler's a politician. So even when he was telling the truth, he was still lying, and doing it all for the wrong reasons:

I regret that my comments in an important and difficult question for our nation were able to lead to misunderstandings.

This is hilarious on several levels. First of all, "able to lead to misunderstandings." I concede that it could just be an awkward translation from the Deutschlandish (he may actually have said that Israel needs to be wiped off the map for all I know), but really, how perfect is that little bit of politicianese?

Second of all, it's funny because most sane human beings would take a statement like "military deployments are necessary in an emergency to protect our [economic] interests" as being definitively unmisunderstandable; that is, your average every day sane human being would hear that an interpret it, correctly, as meaning "We kill people for profit every day, isn't that evil?"

But you see, that's not what Horst meant. For whatever reason, he forgot himself while making those statements. He thought he was talking to his friends; you know, the other shapeshifting reptilians from other dimensions who rule the world. These are not your average every day sane human beings. To them, the statement "military deployments are necessary in an emergency to protect our [economic] interests" means "Who should we kill today in order to maximize our profits?" This is the spirit in which Köhler intended his remarks to be not able to have been regrettably misunderstood. Imagine his surprise when he remembered the species that made up the majority of his audience!

Here's my favorite part of the NYT article:

He complained that some critics had suggested he supported military “missions that are not covered by the Constitution.”

“This criticism lacks any basis,” he said. “It also is lacking in the necessary respect for the presidential office.”

Now let me get this straight. The mere suggestion that he might have suggested breaking the Constitution is "lacking in the necessary respect" for the office of the President of Germany?!?! Well, sieg heil, I mean really.

Some added funny is that while I am no expert in the intricacies of the German political system, it is my understanding that the President is pretty much a ceremonial figurehead. So I'm like, exactly how much respect is necessary, when we really get down to it? (Answer: None now, he's not the President any more!)

Everyone stop trying!

For reasons not unrelated to what JR says about Greenwald, I don't feel that I have anything useful to say about the Israeli massacre of relief workers en route to Gaza. If only this same reservation would stop others from feeling the need to chime in on it, maybe we'd hear less about how, OK, maybe it's Israel's fault, but it's the malevolent dead folks' fault too, and about how wanting to help people who are being throttled to death is not "peaceful," and how when armed troops started boarding their ship if they really hadn't wanted to get shot they would have just stood around and waited for the men with guns to attack them, and how, yes, it is still mostly Israel's fault, but all in all it was just a "hawkish" "screw up." No big deal, really, unless it turns out, as it "possibly" will, that it was a war crime, whatever the fuck that is. It's really amazing that the shooting didn't start sooner! Way to go, IDF!

The last sentence, though, I can agree with:

Sometimes I think that Netanyahu would be better defender of Israel if he just stopped trying.

Because yes, in general if you stop "trying" to murder thousands of people for profit, you don't usually have to do much to defend yourself against them.

Memorial Day

At least 350,000 dead Koreans.

At least three million dead Vietnamese.

At least two million dead Laotians and Cambodians.

No idea how to begin estimating how many dead South Americans from various countries.

At least two million dead Iraqis.

Tens of thousands of dead Afghans.

And, uh, so on.

I guess there are many things you shouldn't ask, shouldn't tell

"This legislation" = repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell; "he" = Obama:

“This legislation will help make our armed forces even stronger and more inclusive by allowing gay and lesbian soldiers to serve honestly and with integrity,” he said.

OK, two things. First, it will make our military even more inclusive? Even more inclusive than what? Second, how the fuck strong does our military have to be???

Trivium

Something struck me while looking at one of the pictures of Melissa McEwan's hero, Hillary Clinton, in the post I linked to in my previous.



You frequently see shots of our fearless leaders in settings like these. Two awkwardly large chairs pointed towards the cameras, the subjects of the photographs sitting awkwardly half facing the cameras, half facing each other, twisted in what looks like massively uncomfortable positions, leaning in to one another to attempt to bridge the awkwardly large distance between them as they talk, legs dangling uncomfortably, never knowing whether to cross or stay feet planted on the floor.

One: It reminds me of the awkward posing of televised sketch comedy.

Two: Is there any question this is anything but theater?

Three: Maybe at the very least sitting in these positions gives these people terrible back pain, which would totally make up for all the killing and everything.

Long live the revolution!

The PZ:

There is a cost to these risky ventures in offshore drilling, and they are not adequately paid by the companies doing the dirty work.

Those who would profit need to pay the price. There are clearly at least three companies that shouldn't be arguing…they should be coughing up the cash, and recognizing that their businesses will have to be slightly less profitable.

Yeah! And then, everybody don't buy an iPad!

Another revolutionary: I honestly can't think of anything sufficiently disparaging to say about The McEwan anymore. Yes, Hillary Clinton is the target of much misogyny, and that is bad. On the other hand, she's a mass murderer, and no amount of pictures of her wearing bright colors or looking comfortable with children (when she's not blowing them up that is) changes that.

on the same level

time magazine recently made a list of the 50 worst inventions of all time. while it isn't in any particular order, this sequencing has one of the funniest turns I've ever seen:

1. The Segway
2. New Coke
3. Clippy [Office 1997]
4. AGENT ORANGE

Throwing something off the Tallahatchie Bridge

Because it's been summer-hot and thunderstormy here, and because I'm listening to her, and because her vocal performances are incredible, and because her songwriting is just as great, and because I haven't written any of what I want to write yet, here's three of Bobbie Gentry's best songs.

Mississippi Delta:

(M, I, double-S I, double-S I, double-P I)

Niki Hoeky (she didn't write this one, but I love the performance):

(woo boo poo poo yoo)

And, of course, Ode to Billie Joe:

The whole Ode to Billie Joe album is a masterpiece.

Apparently it actually has something to do with UPS

exclusion

just came across this in The Transgender Studies Reader and thought it good to revisit some past talkin's:

"'Woman' typically has been mobilized in ways that advance the specific class, racial, national, religious and ideological agendas of some feminists at the expense of other women; the fight over transgender inclusion within feminism is not significantly different, in many respects, from other fights involving working-class women, women of color, lesbian women, disabled women, women who produce or consume pornography, and women who practice consensual sadomasochism..."

- Susan Stryker, (De)Subjugated Knowledges

girls, my schedule has opened up!

if predator drones start to patrol the us border, people like jim gilchrist might have to find another hobby.

thankfully, it looks like he's got one.

Conspiracy

Digby:

"Truthers" are part of American conspiracy lore going way back. For instance, one of Jonah's intellectual forbears, Robert Welch, made his bones claiming that Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor and purposefully did nothing to stop it. In fact, that has been an article of faith among a segment on the right for many decades

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 238:

Admiral Richardson, commander of the U.S. fleet, had a confrontation with President Roosevelt. It was October 8, 1940. Richardson said...that Pearl Harbor was the wrong place for ships. Roosevelt said he thought that having the fleet in Hawaii had a "restraining influence" on Japan.

Was the United States going to war? Richardson asked the president. "He replied," in Richardson's account, "that if the Japanese attacked Thailand, or the Kra Peninsula, or the Dutch East Indies we would not enter the war, that if they even attacked the Philippines he doubted whether we would enter the war." But the Japanese couldn't always avoid making mistakes, the president said. "Sooner or later they would make a mistake and we would enter the war."

And page 282:

In Tokyo, the American ambassador to Japan heard something about a possible surprise attack. "There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japanese, in case of a break with the United States, are planning to go all out in a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor," the ambassador, Joseph Grew, wrote in his diary. "Of course I informed my government." It was January 24, 1941.

And page 415:

Edgar Mowrer, the journalist, was at a bar in Manila, having a drink with a man who worked for the Maritime Commission. It was late October 1941, and Mowrer was on a spy mission for Colonel Donovan....

The maritime man in the bar, Ernest Johnson, said he had a daughter in San Francisco. He didn't expect ever to see her again. "The Japs will take Manila before I can get out," Johnson said.

"Take Manila?" said Mowrer. "That would mean a war with us."

Johnson nodded. "Didn't you know the Jap fleet has moved eastward, presumably to attack our fleet at Pearl Harbor?"

And page 431:

Roosevelt's army chief of staff, George Marshall, had some reporters--from Time, Newsweek, the Times, the Herald Tribune, and three wire services--into his office for a briefing. "We are preparing an offensive war against Japan," Marshall said.... The aim was to "blanket the whole area with air power." Keep it a secret, he said. It was November 15, 1941.

And page 433:

Henry Stimson was writing in his diary. He, Knox, Stark, Hull, and Marshall had been in the Oval Office with the president, batting around a problem that Roosevelt had brought up. The Japanese were likely to attack soon, perhaps next Monday, the president said. "The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves," Stimson wrote. "It was a difficult proposition." It was November 25, 1941.

And page 445:

In Washington that night [after the attack on Pearl Harbor], Edgar Mowrer couldn't sleep. He thought, The man in the bar in Manila was right! "And if a member of the Maritime Commission knew the destination of the Japanese fleet, why had the President, why had Knox and Stimson and Hull who were expecting war, not known it and taken the necessary precautions?

And then Mowrer realized: "Nothing but a direct attack could have brought the United States into the War! Here was the 'break' for which both Churchill and T.V. Soong had been waiting."

Of course, Digby probably thinks Human Smoke has a dangerous affect on poor mindless readers who can't be trusted to think about what they take in.

Incidentally

I continue to find myself completely unable to think about the oil spill.

I can't find a link to it right now (if I do I'll update), but my father was telling me the other day about plans to essentially blow up the Finger Lakes in New York (which my family is deeply tied to and which have a hugely significant place in my own personal history) to squeeze a little oil out of them.

On some fundamental level, it seems we really don't want a world to live in.

Calvin and Hobbes

It amazes me that the first two panels of this strip were circulated in newspapers nationwide. Sure, they're the throwaway panels that a lot of papers edit out, but a lot don't, too.



Marx, updated for contemporary life, presented to children, endorsed by newspapers and parents. Calvin and Hobbes was amazing. Of course, when a lot of kids asked their parents what "opiate of the masses" meant, they probably lied like Calvin's dad would have. But still.

(Also, in the rest of the strip, I'm almost exactly Hobbes.)

Sexually dangerous

So. The other day the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government can indefinitely hold prisoners considered "sexually dangerous", after their sentences end.

"Sexually dangerous." This, in a country where teenagers taking naked pictures of themselves on their phones can be convicted of child pornography (and made permanently "registered" sex offenders). In a country where, for example, a man can be sentenced to ten years in prison (and maybe more, if someone decides he's "sexually dangerous" at some time in the future) for having sex with his fifteen year old girlfriend when he was seventeen. In a country where the first thing that leaps to mind (at least for me) when hearing the phrase "sexually dangerous" is this.

The primary reaction of our good liberals seems to range from indifference to complete silence. A notable exception is Melissa McEwan, who in this one post transforms in my eyes from an amusingly misguided and ignorant simpleton into an irredeemable, despicable monster.

...like any extrajudicial detention policy, there is a huge potential for abuse.

But, unlike most other crimes, perpetrators of sexual assaults have a high recidivism rate and are more resistant to rehabilitation. Convictions for sexual assault frequently don't come with sentences that reflects that reality, with average prison terms being appallingly low. So, something's gotta give.

I'd personally prefer to see long mandatory sentences with multiple parole opportunities, with parole contingent on rigorous and comprehensive rehabilitation, some demonstrable evidence of success, and a required lifetime commitment to ongoing treatment, the failure to comply with which automatically triggers a reversal of parole.

Waiting until people re-offend is not working. For anyone.

(Incidentally, she closed the comments on the post after about twelve hours because a few people were questioning her baseless assertions, and when she said she had provided links to back herself up in previous posts, they responded by saying "Where?")

"Potential for abuse, but..." Nice. Yes, Melissa, there is a potential for abuse. A potential for abusing this ruling, that is in itself an abuse of a system that is an abuse; a potential for abusing this ruling made by a body that is by definition an abuse. And there is no fucking "but." Sexual assault is of course a horrible and all-to-common thing, but advancing the power of the prison-industrial complex is not the solution.

As for what she'd "personally prefer to see," anyone who thinks that "long mandatory sentences" (regardless of her caveats on it, which range from laughable to terrifying) are acceptable for any crime, particularly one so ill-defined, variable, and frequently (note I say "frequently," not "always" or even "a majority of the time") completely harmless as the vast range of acts our sick society lumps together under the sensationalistic umbrella label "sex crimes," is a horrifying beast who can only vaguely be recognized as human.

And another thing: she posted that horrific excretion just one day before sanctimoniously criticizing what seems to be a fairly useful article from the Guardian on the seldom-discussed, massive increase in the wealth gap between white and Black Americans in the past few decades, because it doesn't use the specific word "racism." MS. MCEWAN, LET ME REMIND YOU OF THIS.

I have a monster post bubbling up in me about our society's attitudes towards young people and sexuality. I've been thinking about it for several months now, trying to figure out how to structure it, and how to go about it so as not to say things I don't mean to say. It was inspired mainly by the popular reaction to the latest round of Catholic sex scandals, but shit like this ruling is pushing it along even more. I hope to have it written soon but make no promises.

Oh, and one more thing. This ruling split 7-2. Guess who the two were? That's right, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. And the person who successfully argued the case before the court? Elena Kagan. Tell me again why I have to vote Democrat because of the Supreme Court.

Institutionalized

My best interests? How do you know what my best interest is? How can you say what my best interest is? When I went to your schools, I went to your churches, I went to your institutional learning facilities! So how can you say I'm crazy?
...

I'm not crazy!
You're the one who's crazy!
You're driving me crazy!

-Suicidal Tendencies

Astounding

Via io9, this video is amazing. It's the demolition of the Cowboys stadium, from inside, and you can click and drag to rotate the view as the video plays. It loads slow for me at least, I'm assuming because there's so much information in it, but it's worth it.

Imagine...

...how Digby would react if someone said something like this about a Democrat:

Granted, there's no reason to assume that he holds views like that. But to he best of my knowledge, he hasn't repudiated them either.

Such a stupid line. Incidentally, doing a search for "repudiate" on Digby's site is pretty hilarious. Calm down with that word, friend.

She's talking about Rand Paul and all the tedious "Is he a racist?" nonsense that's going around. If we even accept that such a question makes any sense to ask of anyone (which I don't), IOZ repudiates the hell out of it in a post that makes a few questionable assertions but which overall I feel no need to repudiate whatsoever:

A libertarian who hates Black people, thinks they are racially and genetically inferior, and would, given the opportunity, refuse to serve racial minorities at his own business could nevertheless be better for Blacks than any cruise missile liberal. Ending the drug war and closing prisons and not sending poor Black people to die in crazy foreign adventures based on hazy "humanitarian" principles is more important than paying lip service to the Civil Rights office at the DOJ. For realz.

Although, I gotta say, in general the term "liberatarian" is pretty damned repudiatable. And come to think of it, I repudiate the phrase "For realz" with all the repudiation power in my body.

UPDATE: There's absolutely nothing to repudiate in IOZ's latest on the subject.

Easing back into it

About a week ago, the reprehensible monster Melissa McEwan (more on why I call her that in the coming days) linked, with appropriate disgust, to the reprehensible monster Christopher Hitchens (surely no explanation of why I call him that is required) in Vanity Fair filling out the "Proust questionnaire," apparently a Vanity Fair tradition which I, wisely never having read the magazine, was unaware of.

I saw it and thought "Hey! What better way to ease back into blogging my own words instead of other people's than filling out this imbecilic survey!" And now, a week later, I'm ready. So here goes. It is very long and stupid, so please feel free to not read it.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
In my experience, the state that any attempt to navigate contemporary society leaves one in. Outside of my experience, being poor in an oil-rich country.

Where would you like to live?
Rhode Island. (Yes, I know.)

What is your idea of earthly happiness?
Whatever would arise from the non-violent collapse of all the structures surrounding us.

To what faults do you feel most indulgent?
I feel certain that this question could have been phrased better. I'm thinking this means what bad thing do I indulge frequently? I would say ownership, or maybe allowing myself to unengagedly experience shitty television.

Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?
I utterly despise the concept of the "hero," so I'm taking this just to mean my favorite male characters from fiction (the arbitrary distinction of "male" I'm making based on a later question). So, very colored by recent reading and viewing, I'll say Walter M. Miller's Brother Francis, Kovac and Joe from Hitchcock's Lifeboat, Sherlock Holmes, the guy who didn't make coffee for John G. Miller in the convenience store, and Jean-Luc Picard.

Who are your favorite characters in history?
Guy Debord, Pocahontas as written about by Paula Gunn Allen, Rosalind Franklin, and Huey P. Newton.

Who are your favorite heroines in real life?
Assata Shakur, Angela Y. Davis, and Yoko Ono.

Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?
Again colored by recent reading and viewing, and again hating the "hero" concept: Mrs Richards at least from the first 300 pages of Dhalgren, Rosemary Woodhouse, Buffy Summers, Foxy Brown, Caroline from Muriel Spark's The Comforters, and Walter M. Miller's Mrs. Grales/Rachel.

Your favorite painter?
My brother, though he's largely abandoned painting in favor of sculpture and video, Egon Schiele.

Your favorite musician?
David Bowie, Brian Eno, The Stooges, The Supremes, Terry Riley, J.S. Bach, James Brown, Buffy Sainte-Marie, The Monks, Eliane Radigue, and far, far, far too many more to name.

The quality you most admire in a man?
Physically? Being somewhat smaller than me. Other than that? I don't know, but just being "nice" doesn't cut it. That and not making these foolish distinctions between male and female all the time.

The quality you most admire in a woman?
See above.

Your favorite virtue?
I was not aware that "virtues" were meant to be ranked. I don't know. Is true equality, as opposed to the kind we have, a virtue?

Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one?
Hard work.

Your proudest achievement?
Having created music, both on my own and in collaboration, that I think is good.

Your favorite occupation?
FIREMAN!!! I don't know, what?

Who would you have liked to be?
Someone who was in Paris in 1871 or 1968, maybe.

Your most marked characteristic?
A pervasive awkwardness.

What do you most value in your friends?
Stimulation of whatever kind they can provide.

What is your principal defect?
A tendency to overanalyze my defects, so I'm going to skip this one.

What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes?
Any number of things that are happening in the world currently.

What would you like to be?
A backup singer in a girl group in the 60s, but that'll probably never happen.

What is your favorite color?
For what?

What is your favorite flower?
BLOOMIN' ONION.

What is your favorite bird?
God, all of them. I love birds.

What word or expression do you most overuse?
Anything that can be put in between commas.

Who are your favorite poets?
I've honestly never been able to get into any poetry. It's a failing.

What are your favorite names?
I've liked Sophie ever since I read The BFG as a child.

What is it you most dislike?
Capitalism.

Which historical figures do you most despise?
Every head of state or person of any power involved in any way on any side of World War II.

Which contemporary figures do you most despise?
Barack Obama and every single fucker in his entire administration.

Which events in military history do you most admire?
Until they day they give a war and nobody comes, none.

Which natural gift would you most like to possess?
The ability to understand basic human mating rituals.

How would you like to die?
While I'm sleeping, that's for damn sure.

What do you most dislike about your appearance?
Let's skip this one.

What is your motto?
"Motto"? Gross. But I think "Never work" is a great aspiration.

Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren, several more excerpts

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

"Say, has this ever happened to you? You're walking along a street, or sitting in a room, or lying down on the leaves, or even talking to people, and suddenly the thought comes--and when it comes, it comes all through you like a stop-action film of a crystal forming or an opening bud: 'I am going to die.' Someday, somewhere, I will be dying, and five seconds after that, I will be dead. And when it comes it comes like--" he smashed cupped palms together in the air so sharply she jumped-- "that! And you know it, know your own death for a whole second, three seconds, maybe five or ten...before the thought goes and you only remember the words you were mumbling, like 'Someday I will die,' which isn't the thought at all, just its ashes."

"Yes...yes, that's happened to me."

"Well, I think all the buildings and the bridges and the planes and the books and the symphonies and the paintings and the spaceships and the submarines and...and the poems: they're just to keep people's minds occupied so it doesn't happen--again."
-page 218

"Do you think a city can control the way people live inside it? I mean, just the geography, the way the streets are laid out, the way the buildings are placed?"

"Of course it does," she said. "San Francisco and Rome are both built on hills. I've spent time in both and I'm sure the amount of energy you have to spend to get from one place to the other in either city has more to do with the tenor of life in each one than whoever happens to be mayor. New York and Istanbul are both cut through by large bodies of water, and even out of sight of it, the feel on the streets in either is more alike than either one is to, say, Paris or Munich, which are only crossed by swimmable rivers. And London, whose river is an entirely different width, has a different feel entirely." She waited.

So at last he said. "Yeah...But thinking that live streets and windows are plotting and conniving to make you into something you're not, that's crazy, isn't it?"

"Yes," she said, "that's crazy--in a word."
-pages 249-250

"After all, they were nice in a useless sort of way, which is, after all, the only way to be truly nice."
-page 260

30 years ago today...

...Ian Curtis listened to Iggy Pop's The Idiot.





To bring this back to me, I have nothing but time tomorrow and the day after, and several things I want to write, so this blugg may become a bit more active. Here's hoping.

CORRECTION Of course it was thirty years ago yesterday. I'm a mess.

Happy birthday Brian Eno!

(thanks to BDR for reminding me and also for posting another of Eno's best, which has a very very different mood than this one.)

What in the...

If anyone can explain to me what the devil John G. Miller is on about, you will win the prize of me eventually actually writing another QBQ post.

Much of my confusion stems from the fact that, to my understanding, the whole concept of the QBQ would be in opposition to the act of giving a homeless man food. He has to take personal accountability for his hunger!

Meanwhile

Melissa McEwan wants you to write to Lipton to thank them for, um, advertising Lipton.

a mother's love

my mom has sent me this tape every mother's day since 1992:



have a good one, mom!

Footstompin'/Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate

via Zamboni

Is there a DVD collection of musical guests from the Dick Cavett show? There are some amazing performances to be had there.

I had heard this 1974 performance before (on the poorly put together but indispensable RarestOneBowie comp), but never seen it. The obviously exciting thing about this recording is that the opening guitar riff (which is pretty much completely unrelated to The Flares' original version of the song) ended up being used, almost identically, for "Fame" the following year. As the Baronette has frequently pointed out to me, Carlos Alomar is one of the best, most inventive rhythm guitarists of all time, despite the fact that no one ever really talks about him.

A few other things I'd like to mention:

This is by far the roughest I've ever heard Bowie's voice sound, and I've heard his voice sound a lot of different ways in different recordings dating from anywhere in the past forty-six years. It sounds amazing, and it's a very different kind of amazing than the usual Bowie amazing.

Check out Ava Cherry's wonderful dancing (and skirt! and jacket! and hair! and beauty!), first seen at about 1:39 and then visible again (first only as a shadow) starting at 2:38. (If you want to see her do more, like, say, sing, there's also the performance of "Young Americans" from the same episode.)

And finally, it's just a little minor accidental detail, but: I am absolutely in love with how the very first clap from the audience at the end is perfectly in rhythm with the foot stompin' that ends the song.

And now that I've discussed how damned enjoyable the music is, let's have some dull social analysis.

The whole Young Americans period (and the fantastic* album itself) is an interesting chapter in the white people stealing Black music story. Judging from interviews at the time** (or actually just after), Bowie was consciously, explicitly toying with the narrative; he seems to take a perverse joy in pointing out that just a few years prior this album could never have been considered "soul" and talking about how "dangerous" disco is--and yet how much he loves it--less than a year after "Fame" was his biggest hit. Young Americans, he says, is "the squashed remains of ethnic music as it survives in the age of Muzak*** rock, written and sung by a white limey." And it's true. And yet many seriously respectable "ethnic" musicians--Luther Vandross, for example--took part in its creation. And yet, again, it is fantastic music. The best possible reaction to this music, if we're being responsible, is ambivalence, but I am incapable of doing anything other than embracing it wholeheartedly.

With Young Americans, Bowie secured the complicity of Black and white alike on both the side of performer (Lennon and Vandross, remember; and Carlos Alomar was poached from the house band at The Apollo) and audience, all the while reminding everyone that what he was doing was in fact racist theft. I honestly can't decide if this is reprehensible or admirable. It's definitely impressive.

That it all happened right around the same time as his notorious obsession with fascism and Nazi mysticism makes it all the more fascinating.

*Barring the inexplicably awful cover of "Across the Universe" in which John Lennon himself participated and which is nonetheless unlistenable.
**Though of course you can never rely too much on Bowie interviews; there's another more recent one where he says the primary thing his fans pay him to do is lie to them. Speaking as an embarrassingly huge fan, I can't say he's wrong.
***The mention of Muzak, incidentally, is interesting, coming as it does in this period just a few months before he begins working intensively with Brian Eno, who is, essentially, the inventor of ambient music. Ambient and Muzak are of course not the same thing, but there is a very strong relationship.

Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren, several excerpts

(cross-posted from Commonplace)

"Why do you stay?"

"Stay?" Loufer's voice neared that other, upsetting tone. "Well, actually, I've thought about that one a lot. I think it has to do with--I got a theory now--freedom. You know, here (...) you're free. No laws: to break, or to follow. Do anything you want. Which does funny things to you. Very quickly, surprisingly quickly, you become (...) exactly who you are."
-page 20

"It's funny," Tak said; they passed between. "You show me a place where they tell women to stay out of at night because of all the nasty, evil men lurking there to do nasty, evil things; and you know what you'll find?"

"Queers."
-page 21

Equipped with contradictory visions, an ugly hand caged in pretty metal, I observe a new mechanics. I am the wild machinist, past destroyed, reconstructing the present.
-page 24

Happy birthday to me

Tracings and trajectories of consumerist boredom

If you're not reading Pruned, you should be. Take this post, whose subject is essentially the psychogeography of IKEA:

Next door, meanwhile, a fellow employee is also busy crunching numbers. This rogue among rogues has been tasked to weaponize the work of his colleagues, to design an IKEA store as simulant city in which one could trap would-be occupiers and confuse them with self-knotting streams of generic spaces, a labyrinth within labyrinths, until they can be neutralized.

I've often thought I could write whole shelves of books about IKEA, but aside from the bit about the sense of false accomplishment ("I made something!") conferred by putting together one of their prefab units, this short post by Alexander Trevi pretty much covers it all.