less art more meat

Harpers: Leveling the Field (Beha)

2011-10-01T13:11:00.001-07:00

It seemed strange to me that a credit-bearing college course should be dedicated to telling students why they should go to college, but the entire first-year sequence turns out to be an almost surreal riff on the socialization process of higher education, where secondary characteristics of college graduates become the actual subjects of the courses. Having read in 'Your College Experience' that graduates have better health outcomes, students could look forward a few weeks down the line to tackling topics like 'optimal body weight' ... Because college graduates exhibit a collection of socially beneficial traits, we have come to believe that the development of these traits is college's primary purpose.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

felo-de-se

2011-09-28T06:42:00.001-07:00

a. One who ‘deliberately puts an end to his own existence, or commits any unlawful malicious act, the consequence of which is his own death’ (Blackstone).

[c1250 Bracton iii. ii. xxxi, Eodem modo quo quis feloniam facere possit interficiendo alium, ita feloniam facere possit interficiendo seipsum, quæ quidem felonia dicitur fieri de seipso.]

1651 W. G. tr. J. Cowell Inst. Lawes Eng. 124 He that murders himself, is by us tearmed Felo de se.

1689 E. Hickeringill Speech Without-doors iv. 30 How desperately they stabb themselves, and are Felones de se.

1814 Byron in T. Moore Life Ld. Byron (1851) 255/1 (Note) That ‘felo de se’ who‥Walk'd out of his depth and was lost in a calm sea.

1874 G. W. Dasent Half a Life i. 85 Dick‥pronounced him‥to be, in fact, felo de se.

b. fig.

1678 Lively Orac. iii. 40 Making their Natures a kind of felo de se to prompt the destroying itself.

1704 E. Ward Dissenting Hypocrite 34 That Church is Moderate and Easy T' excess, which would be Felo de se.

1749 H. Fielding Tom Jones III. viii. xiv. 287 That Protestants‥should be‥such Felos de se, I cannot believe it.

1767 W. Blackstone Comm. Laws Eng. II. 31 This modus is felo de se and destroys itself.

1840 T. De Quincey Style in Blackwood's Edinb. Mag. July 4/1 A man‥would be a madman and a felo-de-se, as respected his reliance upon that doctrine.

attrib.

1826 Edinb. Rev. 45 171 This felo de se system.

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/69117

2007 UK Campaign against gender violence

2011-09-27T12:02:00.000-07:00

http://osocio.org/message/act_until_women_and_children_are_safe/

A picture of a celebrity with fake bruises may seem like a cheap trick, but at least you noticed her. It's the 500K plus British women that are abused by their partners every year who go unnoticed.

How to peel a head of garlic in less than 10 seconds

2011-09-27T04:59:00.001-07:00

How To Peel Garlic in Less Than Ten Seconds from SAVEUR.com on Vimeo.

gender studies at reduced prices

2011-09-26T11:28:00.001-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/puzqr5

Not sure I am too keen on Amazon given their ~~recent~~ labour practices, but just in case…

Lars ...

2011-09-26T11:23:00.001-07:00

Lars von Trier on Kubrick's Barry Lyndon:

Watching Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon is a pleasure, like eating a very good soup. It is very stylised and then suddenly comes some emotion [when the child falls off the horse]. There is not a lot of emotion. There are a lot of moods and some fantastic photography, really like these old paintings.
Thank God he didn't have a computer. If he had a computer at that time, you wouldn't care, but you know he has been waiting three weeks for this mountain fog or whatever. It is overwhelming with the boy, because it is suddenly this emotional thing. The character Barry Lyndon is not very emotional. In fact, he is the opposite. He is an opportunist.
I saw the film when it came out. I was in my early twenties. The first time I saw it, I slept. It was on too late and it is a very, very long film. What is interesting is that Nicole Kidman told me Kubrick hated long films. If you have seen Barry Lyndon, the last scene of the film, where she is writing out a cheque for him, is extremely long. It goes on and on and on, but it's beautiful.
The good thing is that Kubrick always sets his standards. Barry Lyndon to me is a masterpiece. He casts in a very strange way, Kubrick. It is a very strange cast. But that is how the film should be, of course. This thing that he liked short films was very surprising. And he liked Krzysztof Kieslowski very much. He was crazy about Kieslowski.
I don't know if Kubrick saw any of my films, but I know Tarkovsky watched the first film I did and hated it! That is how it is supposed to be.

Tom Waits: I Don't Wanna Grow Up

2011-09-26T10:39:00.000-07:00

When I'm lyin' in my bed at night
I don't wanna grow up
Nothin' ever seems to turn out right
I don't wanna grow up
How do you move in a world of fog
That's always changing things
Makes me wish that I could be a dog
When I see the price that you pay
I don't wanna grow up
I don't ever wanna be that way
I don't wanna grow up

Seems like folks turn into things
That they'd never want
The only thing to live for
Is today
I'm gonna put a hole in my TV set
I don't wanna grow up
Open up the medicine chest
And I don't wanna grow up
I don't wanna have to shout it out
I don't want my hair to fall out
I don't wanna be filled with doubt
I don't wanna be a good boy scout
I don't wanna have to learn to count
I don't wanna have the biggest amount
I don't wanna grow up

Well when I see my parents fight
I don't wanna grow up
They all go out and drinking all night
And I don't wanna grow up
I'd rather stay here in my room
Nothin' out there but sad and gloom
I don't wanna live in a big old Tomb
On Grand Street

When I see the 5 o'clock news
I don't wanna grow up
Comb their hair and shine their shoes
I don't wanna grow up
Stay around in my old hometown
I don't wanna put no money down
I don't wanna get me a big old loan
Work them fingers to the bone
I don't wanna float a broom
Fall in and get married then boom
How the hell did I get here so soon
I don't wanna grow up

Amaru

2011-09-26T10:31:00.000-07:00

http://naruto.wikia.com/wiki/Amaru

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaru_%28poet%29

http://amaru.tumblr.com/

Beth Orton: Blood Red River

2011-09-26T05:33:00.001-07:00

Bryan Egnew

2011-09-24T19:10:00.000-07:00

Bryan Egnew, who I worked with and knew reasonably well, committed suicide two weeks ago:

Mormon Bryan Michael Egnew, 40, a Mormon who kept his homosexuality closely guarded secret for many years committed suicide after he was excommunicated by his church and ostracized by friends and relatives for finding the courage to come out about his homosexuality.

Bryan Michael Egnew married his Mormon wife Amy in a Mormon Temple, but he had been engaged in private battle for years over his homosexuality while outwardly living up to church expectations of strict heterosexuality. Egnew confessed his homosexuality to his family and church last month. The reaction from church and family confirmed his fears. His wife Amy immediately took their five children and drove them to Tennessee and refused to see Egnew. His parents and family withdrew from him and the church excommunicated him.

Egnew, unable to cope with isolation, committed suicide on September 10, 2011. His family and church tried to hide the facts about the circumstances of his death and his obituary made no reference to the fact that he was gay.

2X Food Stamps @ Farmers Markets

2011-09-24T07:19:00.001-07:00

The program, called Double Up Food Bucks (DUFB), is a project of the nonprofit Fair Food Network. It’s a simple idea: SNAP shoppers use their benefits at a participating farmers’ market and receive tokens for an equal amount to purchase any Michigan-grown fruit or vegetable at the market. In effect, food dollars spent at farmers’ markets are doubled, up to $20 per market day. By spending $20 of SNAP benefits at the farmers’ market, the shopper comes home with $40 worth of healthy, fresh, regionally grown produce.

Source, via

Staking a Life (Hitchens)

2011-09-23T08:41:00.000-07:00

Thus, as I was going on to argue, there is no reason to suppose that the death penalty is a deterrent. And then it hit me. I had been hammering on an open door. Nobody had been bothering to argue that the rope or the firing squad, or the gas chamber, or “Old Sparky” the bristle-making chair, or the deadly catheter were a deterrent. The point of the penalty was that it was death. It expressed righteous revulsion and symbolized rectitude and retribution. Voila tout! The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries.

Source, via

Lloviendo en Dur-home

2011-09-23T05:21:00.000-07:00

El coronel Gerineldo Márquex acudió aquella tarde a un llamado telegráfico del coronel Aureliano Buendía. Fue una conversación rutinaria que no había de abrir ninguna brecha en la guerra estancada. Al terminar, el coronel Gerineldo Márquez contempló las calles desoladas, el agua critalizada en los almendros, y se encontró perdido en la soledad.
- Aureliano - dijo tristemente en el manipulador -, está lloviendo en Macondo.
Hubo un largo silencio en la línea. De pronto, los aparatos salatron con los signos despiadados del coronel Aureliano Buendía.
- No seas pendejo, Gerineldo - dijeron los signos -. Es natural que esté lloviendo en agosto.

100 años de soledad, Márquez (204)

Music Day: Modern Lovers: I´m Straight

2011-09-22T11:00:00.000-07:00

Music Day: Cure: A Few Hours After This

2011-09-22T10:08:00.000-07:00

Music Day: Bjork: Joga

2011-09-22T09:52:00.000-07:00

Music Day: Geeshie Wiley: Last Kind Words

2011-09-22T08:44:00.000-07:00

Not many ciphers have left as large and beguiling a presence as Geeshie Wiley. Three of the six songs she and Elvie Thomas recorded are among the greatest country-blues performances ever etched into shellac, and one of them, “Last Kind Words Blues,” is an essential work of American art, sans qualifiers, a blues that isn’t a blues, that is something other, but is at the same time a perfect blues, a pinnacle. (Harpers, subscription only)

Silence of the Ligers

2011-09-22T08:18:00.001-07:00

Interesting Lecter / Napoleon Dynamite mashup.

DdL - notas

2011-09-22T08:11:00.001-07:00

http://plantas.facilisimo.com/reportajes/aromaticas-y-medicinales/diente-de-leon_184437.html#

En infusiones contribuye a calmar la ira, la depresión, los celos, la hipersensibilidad y el resentimiento.

En el siglo XVI los magos creían que si una persona se frotaba con un diente de león sería afortunado y bien recibido en todas partes.

Classic old school buttons

2011-09-22T07:51:00.001-07:00

Update: http://www.11points.com/Web-Tech/11_Best_Old_School_Animated_GIFs

Music Day: Seven Nation Army: White Stripes

2011-09-22T07:41:00.000-07:00

Music Day: The Shocking Blue: Love Buzz

2011-09-22T06:40:00.001-07:00

Vaccinate us against this moron

2011-09-21T11:29:00.000-07:00

The medical community issued swift criticism Tuesday after Rep. Michele Bachmann dragged the safety of the vaccine against the human papillomavirus (HPV) into the political spotlight, reigniting the controversy over the risks and necessity of vaccinating children.

"The American Academy of Pediatrics would like to correct false statements made in the Republican presidential campaign that HPV vaccine is dangerous and can cause mental retardation," the American Academy of Pediatrics said in a statement released Tuesday afternoon. "There is absolutely no scientific validity to this statement. Since the vaccine has been introduced, more than 35 million doses have been administered, and it has an excellent safety record." (source)

HPV infection is extremely common — the most common sexually transmitted infection in the United States. More than a quarter of girls and women ages 14 to 49 have been infected, with the highest rate, 44 percent, in those ages 20 to 24.

Millions of new infections occur each year, and researchers think that at least half of all adults have been infected at some point in their lives. The genital region is teeming with HPV, and any kind of intimate contact — not just intercourse — can transmit the virus. In most people, HPV is harmless: The immune system fights it off. But in some people, for unknown reasons, the viruses persist and can cause cancer.

Remark on Vaccine Could Ripple for Years: How Many Women Will Michele Bachmann Kill?

So if the vaccine prevents HPV, and HPV causes cervical cancer, and Bachmann's uninformed/unprincipled attack on "Perrycare" has prevented some parents from vaccinating their daughters, then Bachmann, at least indirectly, will be responsible for God knows how many deaths when a small percentage of these unvaccinated girls (or their partners) eventually die from an otherwise preventable cancer.

All LBJ, all the time

2011-09-21T11:03:00.000-07:00

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Lyndon_B._Johnson

Ford's economics are the worst thing that's happened to this country since pantyhose ruined finger-fucking.
- As quoted in Fuck (2005)

Frank, are you trying to fuck me? [...] your boys just shat on the American flag.
- To CBS president Frank Wise, after watching a CBS news account of U.S. Marines torching a Vietnamese village.

Search Google Better

2011-09-21T10:07:00.001-07:00

This is 4 years old. But I love it:

12 Expert Google Search Tips

Explicit Phrase:
Lets say you are looking for content about internet marketing. Instead of just typing internet marketing into the Google search box, you will likely be better off searching explicitly for the phrase. To do this, simply enclose the search phrase within double quotes.
Example: "internet marketing"
Exclude Words:
Lets say you want to search for content about internet marketing, but you want to exclude any results that contain the term advertising. To do this, simply use the "-" sign in front of the word you want to exclude.
Example Search: internet marketing -advertising
Site Specific Search:
Often, you want to search a specific website for content that matches a certain phrase. Even if the site doesn’t support a built-in search feature, you can use Google to search the site for your term. Simply use the "site:somesite.com" modifier.
Example: "internet marketing" site:www.smallbusinesshub.com
Similar Words and Synonyms:
Let’s say you are want to include a word in your search, but want to include results that contain similar words or synonyms. To do this, use the "~" in front of the word.
Example: "internet marketing" ~professional
Specific Document Types:
If you’re looking to find results that are of a specific type, you can use the modifier "filetype:". For example, you might want to find only PowerPoint presentations related to internet marketing.
Example: "internet marketing" filetype:ppt
This OR That:
By default, when you do a search, Google will include all the terms specified in the search. If you are looking for any one of one or more terms to match, then you can use the OR operator. (Note: The OR has to be capitalized).
Example: internet marketing OR advertising
Phone Listing:
Let’s say someone calls you on your mobile number and you don’t know how it is. If all you have is a phone number, you can look it up on Google using the phonebook feature.
Example: phonebook:617-555-1212 (note: the provided number does not work – you’ll have to use a real number to get any results).
Area Code Lookup:
If all you need to do is to look-up the area code for a phone number, just enter the 3-digit area code and Google will tell you where it’s from.
Example: 617
Numeric Ranges:
This is a rarely used, but highly useful tip. Let’s say you want to find results that contain any of a range of numbers. You can do this by using the X..Y modifier (in case this is hard to read, what’s between the X and Y are two periods. This type of search is useful for years (as shown below), prices or anywhere where you want to provide a series of numbers.
Example: president 1940..1950
Stock (Ticker Symbol):
Just enter a valid ticker symbol as your search term and Google will give you the current financials and a quick thumb-nail chart for the stock.
Example: GOOG
Calculator:
The next time you need to do a quick calculation, instead of bringing up the Calculator applet, you can just type your expression in to Google.
Example: 48512 * 1.02
Word Definitions:
If you need to quickly look up the definition of a word or phrase, simply use the "define:" command.
Example: define:plethora

Transatlantic, 3:00 AM (Greg Vargo)

2011-09-19T03:39:00.000-07:00

Not awakened by fear or the infant's hunger,
the tables and systems, the compounding debt,
the spasm in the leg or the headache that follows you,
nor by the formula split open, the long-sought insight,
the forgotten lover glimpsed in the alchemy of the dream,
the dear friend called back,
the rich seam the miner chances upon like a fate,
but only by this trick of the hours.

Isn't this why you've come?
To take your share of the loneliness
of those whose occupation it is to wait,
the clerk and night warden, the thief and orderly,
the beggar and miser, the card counter
conning his livelihood from the dull sequence?

Later, you will lash yourself to the rigging of sleep,
and the day will rise like a sullen continent
where noon is weighted like a crate of fruit
and every monument carefully restored.
But here your mind tries the sheer face
of the future and finds no fingerhold.
Falling, you are free from the flowers and statutes,
the wheels and notations, the tools shaped like weapons,
the come-on and the affront of strangers looking away.

Some other places I lived

2011-09-18T07:57:00.000-07:00

This is pure procrastination.

1. Hazlewood. This is where I grew up
1. a) Maternal granparents home (Norman Ave)
1. b) Paternal grandparents home (Boxhill Road)
1. b. i. Later my grandmother moved here, to Long Alley almshouses.

2. Silvester Close.
I moved out of my parents' house to live here for a few months

3. University.
3.1 First Year: Butler's Wharf (Gainsford Street)
3.2 Second Year
3.2.a) Tredegar Terrace (2 months, bedbugs)
3.2.b) @ a friend's place for a month (Finborough Road)
3.2.c) Back in North London at 15 Beechfield Road
3.3 Third Year
3.3.a) @ a girlfriend's place at 23 Endymion Road (2 months, insanity)
3.3.b) Bethune Road

4. Working in London
4.1 Wimbledon, Dolphin Court. I wasn't ready for this.
4.2 Raynes Park (Wimbledon Village?) The Downs. Not sure quite where.
4.3 After some time living in hotels, and notably here in BOZ, back to London in Clapham Junction.(Buckmaster Road) - I also spent 2 months on the sofa at 113 Sinclair Road

5.Milwaukee

6. Barcelona
6.1 Tallers (Casa Magarola)
6.2 Valencia (195)

7. Dur-home
7.1 West Village (West Morgan Street) 1 Year
7.2 Blackwell Street almost 3 years

Villanueva de Santo Adriano

2011-09-18T04:42:00.000-07:00

This is the house we hope to live in for the next few years while we look for a place of our own.

Back View
Side view (including the black and brown cat)
Front View

This is a view of the village

Antimanipulation + Shchedrovitsky

2011-09-18T03:39:00.000-07:00

New Humanitarian had standard subjects, like history and math, and Danya had many hours of homework a week. But Bogin added courses like antimanipulation, which was intended to give children tools to decipher commercial or political messages. He taught a required class called myshleniye, which means “thinking,” as in critical thinking. It was based in part on the work of a dissident Soviet educational philosopher named Georgy Shchedrovitsky, who argued that there were three ways of thinking: abstract, verbal and representational. To comprehend the meaning of something, you had to use all three.

When I asked Bogin to explain Shchedrovitsky, he asked a question. “Does 2 + 2 = 4? No! Because two cats plus two sausages is what? Two cats. Two drops of water plus two drops of water? One drop of water.”
From there, the theories became more complex. In practice, though, the philosophy meant that Bogin delighted in barraging children with word problems and puzzles to force them to think broadly. It was the opposite of the rote memorization of the Soviet system.

At dinnertime, the kids taunted me with riddles. “Ten crows are sitting on a fence,” Arden announced. “A cat pounces and eats one crow. How many are left?” “Umm, nine,” I said, fearing a trap. “No, none!” she gleefully responded. “Do you really think that after one crow is eaten, the others are going to stick around?”

... in Brooklyn, the school instilled an everyone’s-a-winner ethos. At New Humanitarian, Danya says, “they send an entirely different message to the kids: ‘Learning is hard, but you have to do it. You have to get good grades.’ ”

Source

Fud

2011-09-17T19:25:00.001-07:00

The G8 met in Hokkaido, Japan, in July 2008 to address the global food crisis. Over an eighteen-course meal—including truffles, caviar, conger eel, Kyoto beef, and champagne—prepared by sixty chefs, the world leaders came to a consensus: “We are deeply concerned that the steep rise in global food prices coupled with availability problems in a number of developing countries is threatening global food security.”

Source

Leftism (Lenin, Engels)

2011-09-13T06:51:00.001-07:00

1. "To attempt in practice today to anticipate this future result of a fully developed, fully stabilized and formed, fully expanded and mature communism would be like trying to teach higher mathematics to a four year old child." - in our era of self appointed pedagogues and supernannies, we might say that this second image presents leftists as communists with an attention deficit disorder.

2. Lenin's conceptual effort at defining the phenomenon itself will be familiar enough: leftism, or left-wing communism, involves a principled stance against any and all participation in parliamentary or bourgeois electoral politics, in unions, and even or especially in party discipline. The upshot of this repudiation of all compromises is a doctrinal 'repetition of the truths of "pure" communism', reduced to a frenzied, incendiary and semi-anarchist type of radicalism, also called 'petty-bourgeois revolutionism' or 'massism' ... Subjective impatience, in a characteristic oscillation between exuberence and dejection, between fanaticism and melancholy, thus takes the place of the arduous work of party organization.

Lenin: "it is tantamount to that petty-bourgeois diffuseness, instability, and incapacity for sustained effort, unity, and organized action, which, if indulged in, must inevitably destroy any proletarian revolutionary movement."

3. Engels: "What childish innocence it is to present one's own impatience as a theoretically convincing argument!"

Vamos Todxs Sal a Bailar

2011-09-08T08:24:00.001-07:00

Less Art More Meat: the Original (John Osborne)

2011-09-08T07:11:00.001-07:00

In a letter to his daughter:

I have made no secret of my detestation of your odious companion. I know that the only reason you spend even a few reluctant hours here is so you can cadge more money from me in order to pursue this squalid and ludicrous shopgirl's liaison with him and his drunken dreary friends ... Never did a mother deserve such a daughter. Such sublime selfishness must have its match! Less art more meat. I will not continue to be treated in this way by someone as criminally commonplace as yourself.

Your Ghosts: a Liturgy (6/9/11)

2011-09-07T09:47:00.000-07:00

Abandoned in the rolled down vigil an arbiter,
a parley with phosphorous haints – nocturne
and humpswathed, alive with renegade sounds
and shifts while the gut expands, alights;

I shuck the night. I gather myself up
in slow thigh dread, all humdrum beast
while you wrest and build – and come quiescent
to be blessed, to meet the day as if whole.

Laudatory entanglements in the grey light –
sneaking under the limp arm’s grasp
for a turbid embrace and then sidling, backing,
as you flood back down into sleep

and I ride out into those little hours
where yet I hold your form, your body primed
for work as vital as the day is long,
the quickening mitts grasping naught to themselves

and the milkspot nape dawdling in the rush of light.
More beautiful. More awake. A rupert’s drop
with its tail untouched, a crack front holding,
forging and tumbling in the proofing mire.

All day I hold your form alive in mine
as you hold hers. Feel it winnow and glide
quite uncertain and sure, a Hesperian nymph
guiding my eventual way on heated lanes

to both of you, at last, to roundmy retreat
into embrace, to close and complete
and greet you again – alive, awake, whole
and utterly wanted, loved, utterly at peace.

Comment on the GOP & Debt "crisis"

2011-09-07T05:28:00.000-07:00

As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

& to paraphrase Marcuse on the availability of a rhetoric of injustice or a political language:

After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.

Source, via

Like the deserts miss the rain

2011-09-04T08:17:00.000-07:00

When we came here: callow, insignificant, bound up, wound up. Not utterly lost but largely depoliticized. We actually had in mind the notion of moving on from here to roles in Asia, larger and more demanding roles. Note that those roles would have been mine. We asked few questions - this, and we were already reading more widely, already seeking out narratives.

The notion of community was extraordinary to us, foreign in the absolute sense. And much as it might be that we knew we were foreign, we knew we belonged to another culture, we hadn't yet identified which. And we struggled, not only to understand but also to distance ourselves further. We went out for walks dressed to the nines. We dressed more provocatively than we would have done in Barcelona.

But it wasn't until we made the leap and step and skip and went to Crop Mob that we were able to put the trumpet to our lips and make a start on the walls (this being both Pink Floyd and ol' time spiritual reference, we were either tearing them down or working to have them tumble). We'd made earlier starts - V's studies at the Center for Documentary Studies had led her to found a documentary project based on the queer group in Durham, but the long silences and disjointed rhetoric together with resistance put the thing to bed - but this was the first time we had met something head on, so to speak.

This isn't a history of the crop mob. I don't want to write that it changed our life, that it made us better people. But what happened instead is that a process started in which we were proud to have muddied our hands on a cold September day. Suddenly a vein of discussion opened when we were going & coming which brought us to community.

A part of that of course is finding points of connection, and there we curse our natures. It's not that we're retiring, but instead that we've become very sparing with our time. A's arrival may change that or reinforce it. Neither with Trace & Kristin, nor with Nick, Geoffrey, nor John & Sarah - maybe not with anyone did we know how to be friends up front. Not with Jon E. Not with Rob & Andrea. Not with Mattie. Fuck ... not with anyone.

And it really sucks to have to leave and know you could have been better friends to, with, and for people. That a lot of the things we struggled with really make no sense - it didn't matter that we are this mix of things, as are all people. And I find that now in the office, where the uneasy friendship formed over the past few months is extremely rich, beneficial, a source of pleasure - and where I can actually speak freely and openly of what I believe.

Such a strange experience with Kristin's father when he started talking to me about GE. These things do not define us, but then sometimes they shimmer into view, bas-relief or figure-ground inversion. But not one of these people would have cared for a second. Secrecy and smoke and mirrors about what or who you are is of no use, no purpose.

We feel about this place that it has allowed us to be ourselves, without a patina of judgement or a forcing means that makes us be what our trajectory has given us.

whadda ...??

2011-09-03T18:11:00.000-07:00

A frustrating short note from The Economist on traffic safety around bicycles - "Nearly 6% of commuters bike to work in Portland, the highest proportion in America. But in five out of the past ten years there have been no cycling deaths there."

Sweet Portland.

This is how the myth continues.

2011-09-03T17:55:00.000-07:00

In a long and interesting (but either too quotable, or not at all quotable) article about what has happened to the civil rights of people in the US since the 11th of September 2001 attacks:

I think the FBI are as smart as they get, and if they didn't want me to find the tracking device, I probably would have never found it.

Right. That right there is the problem. They're like demigods. They can do this:

The first man who took me, I came to learn his name was Inspector H. He said something to the effect of, "People are offended because of your T-shirt. People complained."

I looked down at my T-shirt to see which one I was wearing. It was black, and said in both Arabic and English, We Will Not Be Silent. An artist group in New York had made the shirt and given it to me as a gift. For me, the message meant, "We will not be silent about the murders that are happening in Palestine or Iraq." They had other T-shirts in Spanish. At the time I'd said, "Whoa, it's such a smart idea, because the Spanish one makes it seem like it's about immigration, and the Arabic one makes it seem like it's about wars."

Inspector H asked me, "What does it say?" I said, "It's the same thing that it says in English. We will not be silent."

He said, "Oh, but we can't be sure that's the translation."

I was so confused that I didn't know how to answer. Then he said, "We want you to take the T-shirt off, or put it on inside out."

I said, "It's my constitutional right to wear this T-shirt. If you have any regulations against Arabic T-shirts, show them to me and I will take it off or cover it."

I was very polite, but it was becoming a scene and people were looking at us. A fourth guy came – very hostile. He talked to me without looking at me. He said, "You've got the nicer guys here, so you should just do whatever they've told you."

I was like, Whoa, whoa, whoa – where is this going? The woman from JetBlue saw the escalation, and said, "Why don't we just reach a compromise? We will buy you a T-shirt and put it on top of this one.

And this:

The FBI drove us to Pennsylvania, across state lines, without my parents' permission. We got to the juvenile detention centre late at night. The female guard told me and Tashnuba we had to get strip-searched.

I was in tears. My own mother doesn't look at me naked. I said, "It must be against some law for you to do this to me."

The female guard said, "It's not. You no longer have rights."

She said, "Lift your breasts."

I lifted my breasts.

She said, "Open your legs."

I opened my legs.

She said, "Put your hands in there, to see there's nothing."

I said, "There's nothing there!"

She said, "Just do it."

I did it.

And they think it's OK. So they sure as shit aren't demigods who will only allow you to find a bug if they want you to know about it.

Animated GIFs are so bracing!

2011-09-02T10:03:00.000-07:00

I would refer to these as long photos,but apparently they are called "cinematographs" - shitty name: http://iwdrm.tumblr.com/

There is a mix between some that are just funny and others which are intended to represent exactly the permeability, or the impossibilitity, of a fraction of a second meaning anything at all -

For Trace: On Ambiguity

2011-09-02T08:04:00.000-07:00

When we first encountered the work that was being done in this area, when we first encountered what you were doing in that place, ambiguity and getting shit done were already constant bedfellows. The drive to have formed, coalesced, done - and the seeming lack of position at times that can curiously define non-hierarchical structures. Who is doing what, when, why ... questions that had risen to the fore when we visited Gripia and which might be termed questions about praxis, questions about ideology.

One of our greatest learnings here has been what we might call the letting go - rising beyond, embettering. Some process of release, of becoming thru letting out the corset strings or the battens or the grasp. And a part of that, of course, has been learning about what makes for an equitative or participatory economics. Understanding that ambiguity may be required in order to allow for alternatives to exist, for a hegemonic reckoning not to be the only narrative.

That which has happened is not only "a time and environment specific event, full of particular personalities and details" - as Zizek writes

when something happens just once, it may be dismissed as an accident, something that might have been avoided if the situation had been handled differently; but when the same event repeats itself, it is a sign that a deeper historical process is unfolding. When Napoleon lost at Leipzig in 1813, it looked like bad luck; when he lost again at Waterloo, it was clear that his time was over.

You say yourself that "we should have some idea of how we would like our relationships to work by the time we have the words available to provide the basic outline" - which one could take to mean that once this structure has been built (the arc-chamber constructed, the heart's impasse corralled and futile hope thwarted) we fill in the outline. It seems to me that it is damn ambiguity which makes it otherwise.

It's ambiguous not because we can isolate windblown stretches of the highway and tag 'em, bag 'em - we can say that this circumstance produced that outburst, that this particularity has no currency, that this can be discounted because of that - we end up with a spindly, windblown thing, a nothing, a haint. It's ambiguous because we are both outline and filling, ground and figure. The ruins at the backs of your retinas are both glorious and shameful, proud, buckled.

We die on our feet only when we have the fortitude to draw a new outline every day, to rise up and question, unreason, to pardon ourselves. To know that we are weak and shelter incoherence. That we are bitter beyond all reckoning and can cast it out like some spittle-demon. We do, and do.

Yes, there is no other way but to ache for work that means to be done. That work is a painfully ambiguous, full-on wrestling with the outline, the form, the figure. And it never stops.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again (M Piercy)

Cricket Bread

But ...

2011-09-02T06:09:00.001-07:00

My niece will grow up thinking women running for President is normal which is lovely except that the women running for President aren’t normal.

Source

Home Birth Legislation: Australia

2011-09-01T07:07:00.000-07:00

Let us be completely frank about this. Not everyone is going to choose a homebirth. But, in every country in the world bar this one, it can still continue. In the Netherlands, something like a quarter of all births are done at home. Look at the history of midwifery. You can go right back through five centuries. There was a time when homebirth was safer than being in hospital. Back in the 1750s, when they opened the doors of hospitals to mums of lower socioeconomic background—and the other side of the chamber should be listening to this all of a sudden—it was actually more dangerous to go to hospital for a birth because of the lack of antiseptic measures. There was a time, in 1854, in Vienna when 13 per cent of mums died in hospital childbirth compared to two per cent with homebirthing.

via Hoyden About Town

The Race Issue

2011-09-01T06:37:00.001-07:00

"Rather than thoughtfully discussing race," he writes, "Americans love to reduce racial politics to feelings and etiquette. It's the personal and dramatic aspects of race that obsess us, not the deeply rooted and currently active political inequalities. That's our predicament: Racial debate, in public and private, is trapped in the sinkhole of therapeutics."

"Awash in its racial conundrum, America has delightful people who are perfectly comfortable with widening segregation and yawning socioeconomic inequality that often breaks along racial lines,"

Rich Benjamin - Source

Summary Execution by US Forces: Iraq (2006)

2011-08-31T07:43:00.000-07:00

via wikileaks

The cable excerpts a letter written by Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, addressed to then Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. American troops approached the home of Faiz Harrat Al-Majma’ee, a farmer living in central Iraq, to conduct a house raid in search of insurgents in March of 2006.

“It would appear that when the MNF [Multinational Forces] approached the house,” Alston wrote, “shots were fired from it and a confrontation ensued” before the “troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them.” Mr. Faiz Hratt Khalaf, (aged 28), his wife Sumay’ya Abdul Razzaq Khuther (aged 24), their three children Hawra’a (aged 5) Aisha ( aged 3) and Husam (5 months old), Faiz’s mother Ms. Turkiya Majeed Ali (aged 74), Faiz’s sister (name unknown), Faiz’s nieces Asma’a Yousif Ma’arouf (aged 5 years old), and Usama Yousif Ma’arouf (aged 3 years), and a visiting relative Ms. Iqtisad Hameed Mehdi (aged 23) were killed during the raid.

Alston’s letter reveals that a US airstrike was launched on the house presumably to destroy the evidence, but that “autopsies carried out at the Tikrit Hospital’s morgue revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed.”

The Horror of Diamonds

2011-08-31T06:19:00.000-07:00

The diamond invention is far more than a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of wealth, power, and romance. To achieve this goal, De Beers had to control demand as well as supply. Both women and men had to be made to perceive diamonds not as marketable precious stones but as an inseparable part of courtship and married life.

Process

The diamond market had to be further restructured in the mid-1960s to accomodate a surfeit of minute diamonds, which De Beers undertook to market for the Soviets. Almost all of the Soviet diamonds were under half a carat in their uncut form, and there was no ready retail outlet for millions of such tiny diamonds.
DeBeers devised the "eternity ring," made up of as many as twenty-five tiny Soviet diamonds, which could be sold to an entirely new market of older married women. The advertising campaign was based on the theme of recaptured love. Again, sentiments were born out of necessity: older American women received a ring of miniature diamonds because of the needs of a South African corporation to accommodate the Soviet Union.
By the mid-1970s, the advertising campaign for smaller diamonds was beginning to seem too successful. In its 1978 strategy report, N. W. Ayer said, "a supply problem has developed ... that has had a significant effect on diamond pricing"—a problem caused by the long-term campaign to stimulate the sale of small diamonds.
"In fact, this [campaign] will be the exact opposite of the small stone informative program that ran from 1965 to 1970 that popularized the 'beauty in miniature' concept...."

The Atlantic

Trace is Not a Talker

2011-08-29T07:10:00.000-07:00

I love this post. Perfect balance of fact and limited bitterness, as Trace & Kristin depart one project for a new one

My sobriety factors very heavily in this move as does my desire to be less accountable and responsible to an increasingly distant and foreign collective. A strong sense of misplaced entitlement pervades that place, which is something that I cannot support in any way. Living rent free while someone else carries the financial water is not anarchist, not friendly and not nice. The others may argue that this isn’t the case, but all I have to do is read through old emails and bank records to see how things went down, get a glimpse of what should have been some serious red flags and see that I made many mistakes in making a path for this coddled land project.

Cricketbread

Libya Disaster Capitalism. Not a Surprise.

2011-08-29T05:46:00.000-07:00

No time was wasted by the imperialist interventionists, more commonly known as NATO. Soon after the capture of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's Bab al-Azizya compound, his main base in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, the military aggressors announced their interest in rebuilding the very same country they nearly demolished, all in the name of democracy, or in financial terms, unrestricted free market access for selected foreign companies.

Has the West eagerly been looking for a new Iraq to help avert its own downfall?

Press TV

Andre Pejic: Moving Beyond Gender

2011-08-28T04:39:00.000-07:00

More repressive desublimation?

"Though he may not exactly bristle at the gender distinctions made by others, he does question their underlying assumptions. “In this society, if a man is called a woman, that’s the biggest insult he could get.” He arches his eyebrows skeptically and asks, “Is that because women are considered something less?” Later, he tells me, “I know people want me to sort of defend myself, to sit here and be like, ‘I’m a boy, but I wear makeup sometimes.’ But, you know, to me, it doesn’t really matter. I don’t really have that sort of strong gender identity—I identify as what I am. The fact that people are using it for creative or marketing purposes, it’s just kind of like having a skill and using it to earn money.”

Androgyny has been a selling point in the fashion world at least since Coco Chanel jettisoned corsets in favor of sailor suits, but it’s always been a trickier, and more sexualized, endeavor with men. In the sixties, April Ashley’s career was destroyed when she was discovered to be a transsexual. Since then, there has generally been a level of campiness to men who modeled as women: Teri Toye, Connie Girl, and Candy Darling, Andy Warhol’s transgendered muse, all had a quality Pejic refers to as “We’re fabulous; fuck off” and which he views as less progressive because it drew attention to gender rather than moving beyond it. What he and others like the transsexual runway model Lea T (who was in a recent Riccardo Tisci campaign for Givenchy) are doing is sidestepping the gender issue altogether by not only passing as women but even managing to be a more ideal version of the impossibly hipless and curveless women the fashion industry fetishizes. Designers can use them and feel progressive without having to actually challenge the aesthetic norm.

Source

WTF Has Obama Done

2011-08-25T05:19:00.000-07:00

http://whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com/

Alpha Lipoic Acid: The Diddy

2011-08-23T08:48:00.000-07:00

Some nutrients have specific roles, while others are so versatile that they defy classification. It is like entertainers. The Game is a rapper, but Diddy, on the other hand, is a rapper, producer, actor and apparel designer. Think of alpha-lipoic acid (ALA) as the Diddy of supplements.

Source

Today I are mostly thinking about Meconium

2011-08-23T08:47:00.001-07:00

Meconium is the earliest stools of an infant. Unlike later feces, meconium is composed of materials ingested during the time the infant spends in the uterus: intestinal epithelial cells, lanugo, mucus, amniotic fluid, bile, and water. Meconium is almost sterile,^[1] unlike later feces, is viscous and sticky like tar, and has no odor. It should be completely passed by the end of the first few days of life, with the stools progressing toward yellow (digested milk). The term Meconium derives from meconium-arion, meaning "opium-like", in reference either to its tarry appearance or to Aristotle's belief that it induces sleep in the fetus.^[2]

Wikipedia.

film series

2011-08-22T06:31:00.001-07:00

http://crimethinc.com/movies/

Civil unrest, re: dinner conversation

2011-08-22T06:19:00.001-07:00

Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe, 1919-2009

http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/6851

In the wake of this week's London riots, some commentators have linked the youth unrest to budget cuts. The authors of CEPR DP8513 explore the historical basis for this view and find that austerity and violence have tended to go hand in hand.

Does fiscal consolidation lead to social unrest? From the end of the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1930s to anti-government demonstrations in Greece in 2010-11, austerity has tended to go hand in hand with politically motivated violence and social instability. In this paper, we assemble cross- country evidence for the period 1919 to the present, and examine the extent to which societies become unstable after budget cuts. The results show a clear positive correlation between fiscal retrenchment and instability. We test if the relationship simply reflects economic downturns, and conclude that this is not the key factor. We also analyse interactions with various economic and political variables. While autocracies and democracies show a broadly similar responses to budget cuts, countries with more constraints on the executive are less likely to see unrest as a result of austerity measures. Growing media penetration does not lead to a stronger effect of cut-backs on the level of unrest.

Strauss Kahn, you son of a bitch

2011-08-17T14:09:00.000-07:00

Empleada que acusó a Strauss-Kahn sí fue violada, según el informe médico
Llorosa, Diallo dio a los médicos más detalles de esa agresión, que están contenidos en el informe. “Un hombre desnudo con el pelo blanco cerró la puerta y la empujó encima de la cama” en un primer momento, para posteriormente agredirla al fondo del pasillo, donde tocó “la parte exterior de su zona vaginal” e “introdujo su pene en la boca agarrándola del pelo”.
La última página del informe médico describe la zona vaginal de la paciente, donde se señala la presencia de un traumatismo en la parte posterior, además de indicar que la zona estaba enrojecida.
El comercio

McDonald's + Fake Food

2011-08-03T06:21:00.000-07:00

From this article on self-regulation in the food industry comes a gem:

Forty percent of McDonald’s advertising budget is spent on marketing to kids.

Fancy th(is) -

Most medical professionals and health care decision makers say that we could make substantial gains in public health, and save lots of money if we addressed the social determinants of health more consistently and systematically.

Any connection??

Birth Control by Law

2011-08-01T10:48:00.001-07:00

Health insurance plans must cover birth control as preventive care for women, with no copays, the Obama administration said Monday in a decision with far-reaching implications for health care as well as social mores.

The requirement is part of a broad expansion of coverage for women's preventive care under President Barack Obama's health care law. Also to be covered without copays are breast pumps for nursing mothers, an annual "well-woman" physical, screening for the virus that causes cervical cancer and for diabetes during pregnancy, counseling on domestic violence, and other services.

"These historic guidelines are based on science and existing (medical) literature and will help ensure women get the preventive health benefits they need," said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

Yahoo

Nothing but good news today

2011-08-01T07:26:00.000-07:00

This deal, according to Paul Krugman, is called "The President Surrenders."

The deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.

Also:

What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t.

Source

Appalling, Outrageous

2011-08-01T05:45:00.000-07:00

Free speech in Israel was dealt a severe blow this month when the country’s Parliament passed antiboycott legislation that targets individuals or organizations publicly calling for a boycott against Israel or any area under its control.

Because I believe in ending the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, equal rights for Palestinians and Jews, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees forced from their homes and lands in 1948, I support boycotting — and calling on others to boycott — all Israeli companies that help perpetuate these injustices.

But this new legal limit on free speech could bankrupt me.

Israeli officials will not throw me in jail for publicly supporting such boycotts, but settler groups can claim financial damages without even having to show any harm done. Furthermore, organizations supporting boycotts could be denied tax-deductible contributions and state funding.

Source

Kind of a Shame

2011-08-01T05:42:00.000-07:00

Juliette Binoche in the Guardian -

In the past, Binoche has said she prefers working with independent auteurs – Kiarostami; Krzysztof Kieślowski; Michael Haneke – rather than Hollywood directors owing to her frustration with the way mainstream American films depict women. When I ask about this, she gives an exasperated sigh.

"That's a very old question for me," she says. "That's a very old way of thinking."

But what about the fact that we still see so few women, especially over the age of 40 – Binoche is 47 – in leading roles? She interrupts, raising her voice. "That debate has been there for ages! It's boring! We're kind of feeding this thought in talking about it. If we talk about something else, people will think differently, and we'll change it. Because we're responsible, as women – journalist, actress, whoever – just to move on."

Does she consider herself a feminist? "No," she says. "Aware of my feminine and masculine parts, sure. [But that term] just puts people in a stereotyped way of thinking. I think creation and doing, being active, is more important than talking about it."

Anarchy for the UK

2011-08-01T05:39:00.000-07:00

What should you do if you discover an anarchist living next door? Dust off your old Sex Pistols albums and hang out a black and red flag to make them feel at home? Invite them round to debate the merits of Peter Kropotkin's anarchist communism versus the individualist anarchism of Emile Armand? No – the answer, according to an official counter-terrorism notice circulated in London last week, is that you must report them to police immediately.

Guardian

Most Dangerous

2011-07-31T10:27:00.000-07:00

I missed this one - World's Most Dangerous Countries for Women, at the Big Picture

Yellow Peril

2011-07-25T05:50:00.000-07:00

Interesting how a few facts about the US debt ceiling talks have been wilfully obscured - like the old chestnut about China owning 'most' of the US debt ...

Many people — politicians and pundits alike — prattle on that China and, to a lesser extent Japan, own most of America's $14.3 trillion in government debt.
But there's one little problem with that conventional wisdom: it's just not true. While the Chinese, Japanese and plenty of other foreigners own substantial amounts, it's really Americans who hold most of America's debt.

Here's a quick and fascinating breakdown by total amount held and percentage of total U.S. debt, according to Business Insider:

Hong Kong: $121.9 billion (0.9 percent)
Caribbean banking centers: $148.3 (1 percent)
Taiwan: $153.4 billion (1.1 percent)
Brazil: $211.4 billion (1.5 percent)
Oil exporting countries: $229.8 billion (1.6 percent)
Mutual funds: $300.5 billion (2 percent)
Commercial banks: $301.8 billion (2.1 percent)
State, local and federal retirement funds: $320.9 billion (2.2 percent)
Money market mutual funds: $337.7 billion (2.4 percent)
United Kingdom: $346.5 billion (2.4 percent)
Private pension funds: $504.7 billion (3.5 percent)
State and local governments: $506.1 billion (3.5 percent)
Japan: $912.4 billion (6.4 percent)
U.S. households: $959.4 billion (6.6 percent)
China: $1.16 trillion (8 percent)
The U.S. Treasury: $1.63 trillion (11.3 percent)
Social Security trust fund: $2.67 trillion (19 percent)

So America owes foreigners about $4.5 trillion in debt. But America owes America $9.8 trillion.

via & mudede

I will never be cut

2011-07-22T20:14:00.000-07:00

Guardian:

I struggle to understand why the systematic and brutal wounding of young girls is not considered a national scandal. I know that right honourable and honourable members would not tolerate a situation in which little British girls were taken abroad and returned missing their fingers. Likewise, we should not tolerate female genital mutilation.

I am the MAAAASTER

2011-07-22T06:14:00.000-07:00

via kottke

You ARE EATING SHIT ... I paraphrase

2011-07-21T11:26:00.000-07:00

After midnight horrors, Goldy gets reflexive ....

Then I let out a long, welcome fart. Oh. It was the beans. I eventually fell back to sleep.

But it got me thinking once again about the absolute insanity of an industrial food system in which we have been taught to treat the meat we consume as if it were dangerous medical waste. You might think me crazy for my groggy, early morning hypochondria, but if you've ever suffered a case of severe food poisoning, I think you'd understand. It's the status quo that is crazy, not me, that we should so legitimately fear the food we eat. Read the warning labels on the meat packaging itself, or read the CDC statistics on foodborne illness, and then tell me I'm blowing things out of proportion.

They will know us

2011-07-19T04:38:00.000-07:00

... By our extraordinary dress sense

Raw power

2011-07-19T04:33:00.000-07:00

Came across this on Saturday morning in Pittsfield.

Rape in Uttar Pradesh

2011-07-18T09:37:00.000-07:00

RECENT RAPE CASES

20 June - Salia, 11, is raped and killed on her way back from school. A 23-year-old villager is arrested and confesses
19 June - A 35-year-old woman is gang-raped by five men inside her home. Afraid she will identify them, the men burn her to death
17 June - A 14-year-old girl is stabbed in the eye by her two attackers when she resists their attempts to rape her
10 June - Sonam, 14, is raped and murdered, allegedly by police. Her body is found hanging inside a police station
5 February - 16-year-old Sarika's ears are cut and one hand cut off when she resists her attackers

BBC

2011-07-13T03:16:00.001-07:00

... What I mean to highlight here is the shifting climate of orthodoxy ... (Harper's, July 2011) - note, not heterodoxy.

Amaru (2)

2011-07-12T06:28:00.000-07:00

Andrés Neuman - Palabras a una hija que no tengo

Entornaré tus ojos si prometes soñarme.
Compréndeme, no es fácil velar por alguien siempre:
a veces necesito saber que tienes miedo.
Cuando sepas hablar, dame mi nombre;
diciéndome papá habrás hecho bastante.
En invierno no abrigues demasiado
tu cuerpo de princesa, más útil y más noble
es irse acostumbrando a resistir.
Acepta golosinas de los desconocidos
(no está el mundo como para negarse)
pero apréndete esto en cuanto puedas:
más frecuente es lo amargo, que te ignoren,
y no los caramelos.
Te enseñaré a leer fuera del aula
y llegada la hora quiero que escribas «mar»
sobre los azulejos del pasillo.
Cuando cruces por fin la calle sola
sabrás que el riesgo y la velocidad
perseguirán tus días para siempre.
No creas que en el fondo no soy un optimista:
de lo contrario tú no estarías ahí
cuidando que te cuide como debo.
Como ves, desconfío
de quienes no veneran el asombro
de estar aquí, ahora.
Existe la alegría, pero duele;
tendrás que conseguirla.
Y cuando la consigas tendrás miedo.

Amaru

2011-07-12T06:27:00.001-07:00

The process of death

2011-07-12T02:38:00.000-07:00

Two articles that speak to the process of learning to live with impending death - "We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die."

1. Atul Gawande in the New Yorker.

Dying used to be accompanied by a prescribed set of customs. Guides to ars moriendi, the art of dying, were extraordinarily popular; a 1415 medieval Latin text was reprinted in more than a hundred editions across Europe. Reaffirming one’s faith, repenting one’s sins, and letting go of one’s worldly possessions and desires were crucial, and the guides provided families with prayers and questions for the dying in order to put them in the right frame of mind during their final hours. Last words came to hold a particular place of reverence.
These days, swift catastrophic illness is the exception; for most people, death comes only after long medical struggle with an incurable condition—advanced cancer, progressive organ failure (usually the heart, kidney, or liver), or the multiple debilities of very old age. In all such cases, death is certain, but the timing isn’t. So everyone struggles with this uncertainty—with how, and when, to accept that the battle is lost. As for last words, they hardly seem to exist anymore. Technology sustains our organs until we are well past the point of awareness and coherence. Besides, how do you attend to the thoughts and concerns of the dying when medicine has made it almost impossible to be sure who the dying even are? Is someone with terminal cancer, dementia, incurable congestive heart failure dying, exactly?

2. Dudley Clendinen in the New York Times:

There is no meaningful treatment. No cure. There is one medication, Rilutek, which might make a few months’ difference. It retails for about $14,000 a year. That doesn’t seem worthwhile to me. If I let this run the whole course, with all the human, medical, technological and loving support I will start to need just months from now, it will leave me, in 5 or 8 or 12 or more years, a conscious but motionless, mute, withered, incontinent mummy of my former self. Maintained by feeding and waste tubes, breathing and suctioning machines.
No, thank you. I hate being a drag. I don’t think I’ll stick around for the back half of Lou.

Freedom - Franzen

2011-07-11T14:51:00.001-07:00

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

LGBTQ Parades - Photos

2011-07-11T08:16:00.001-07:00

The Big Picture

Death of the Heirlooms

2011-07-11T07:44:00.000-07:00

From Middle English heirlome, a compound of heir (“heir”) and lome (“tool”), thus "a tool passed to one's heirs":

Great graphic at National Geographic, covering Our Dwindling Food Variety:

As we've come to depend on a handful of commercial varieties of fruits and vegetables, thousands of heirloom varieties have disappeared. It's hard to know exactly how many have been lost over the past century, but a study conducted in 1983 by the Rural Advancement Foundation International gave a clue to the scope of the problem. It compared USDA listings of seed varieties sold by commercial U.S. seed houses in 1903 with those in the U.S. National Seed Storage Laboratory in 1983. The survey, which included 66 crops, found that about 93 percent of the varieties had gone extinct.

Holy megaweeds - USDA GM Deregulation

2011-07-10T04:01:00.000-07:00

from Laura Flanders:

It's a hoary bureaucratic trick, making a controversial announcement on the Friday afternoon before a long weekend, when most people are daydreaming about what beer to buy on the way home from work, or are checking movie times online. But that's precisely what the US Department of Agriculture pulled last Friday. [...]

In its July 1 response, the USDA agreed: "[N]one of the organisms used in generating this genetically engineered (GE) glyophosphate tolerant Kentucky bluegrass...are considered to be plant pests," so Roundup Ready bluegrass "does not meet the definition of a 'regulated article' and is not subject" to the Plant Protection Act. In other words, go forth and multiply.

Definitely worth reading the whole thing - explains how the US regulations against GM crops were based on a 1950s era fiction bolstered by a slightly (but only slightly) more binding recent law that has now been blown thru ...

Wazí Aháŋhaŋ Oyáŋke

2011-07-09T14:53:00.000-07:00

Demographics (Wikipedia)

In 2005 in an interview, Cecilia Fire Thunder, the first woman president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, noted the following: "68 percent of the college graduates on the reservation are women. Seventy percent of the jobs are held by women. Over 90 percent of the jobs in our schools are held by women."^[38]

As of 2011, population estimates of the reservation range from 28,000 to 40,000. Numerous enrolled members of the tribe live off the reservation.^[39]
80% of residents are unemployed (versus 10% of the rest of the country);
49% of the residents live below the Federal poverty level (61% under the age of 18);
Per capita income in Shannon County is $6,286;
The Infant Mortality rate is 5 times higher than the national average;
Native American amputation rates due to diabetes is 3 to 4 times higher than the national average;
Death rate due to diabetes is 3 times higher than the national average; and
Life expectancy on the Pine Ridge is the lowest in the Western Hemisphere, other than in Haiti; Men - 48 years, Women - 52 years.^[40]

All sorts of morons are common

2011-07-08T09:41:00.000-07:00

Oak Park Woman Faces 93-Days in Jail For Planting Vegetable Garden

Code enforcement gave her a warning, then a ticket and now she's been charged with a misdemeanor. Why? The city is pointing to a code that says a front yard has to have suitable, live, plant material. The big question is what's "suitable?"

We asked Bass whether she thinks she has suitable, live, plant material in her front yard.

"It's definitely live. It's definitely plant. It's definitely material. We think it's suitable," she said.

So, we asked [the city] why it's not suitable.

"If you look at the definition of what suitable is in Webster's dictionary, it will say common. So, if you look around and you look in any other community, what's common to a front yard is a nice, grass yard with beautiful trees and bushes and flowers," he said.

But when you look at front yards that are unsightly and overgrown, is Bass' vegetable garden really worth the city's time and money?

[via]

A call for urgent international action

2011-07-08T07:47:00.000-07:00

Occupied Palestine, 9 July 2011 – While the Arab Spring for freedom, democracy and social justice has exposed and challenged the collusion of world governments with autocratic and oppressive Arab regimes, many states and corporations continue their business-as-usual arms trade and military cooperation with Israel. Cooperation with Israel is maintained despite its systematic resort to massive violence against and killing of Palestinian and other Arab civilians, including school children and peaceful activists, and in spite of its increasingly brutal colonial policies against the Palestinian people and the persistent flouting of international law. Seven years after the International Court of Justice advisory opinion recommending international cooperation to ensure that Israel dismantles its illegal Wall in the occupied West Bank, and on the sixth anniversary of Palestinian civil society’s call for a broad campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law, the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) calls for immediate international action towards a mandatory comprehensive military embargo against Israel similar to that imposed against apartheid South Africa in the past.

[more]

Rick Perry is a fucking madman

2011-07-08T07:22:00.000-07:00

1. Texas has executed a Mexican-born man after the US supreme court and the state's governor, Rick Perry, spurned appeals from Barack Obama to spare the convicted murderer's life in order to protect US interests abroad.

2. Gov. Rick Perry signed a budget that was balanced only through accounting maneuvers, rewriting school funding laws, ignoring a growing population and delaying payments on bills coming due in 2013:

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst bragged that the $80.6-billion, two-year budget will cut state government spending by $15 billion compared to the previous budget.
Critics, who see things differently on what services are truly essential, say it underfunds the state’s needs by $10 billion beyond that.
Democrats also derided the GOP’s claim that it was truly a balanced budget.
“It’s all smoke and mirrors and misdirection,” said state Rep. Garnett Coleman, D-Houston. “There’s no way this is a balanced budget. It’s billions short of where Texas is supposed to be on Medicaid and education.”
Washington Post

Teabagging Barker

2011-07-08T06:40:00.000-07:00

Two tables down, Clive Barker, in a silk shirt with the top four buttons undone and an iron cross hung from his neck, was calling for more tea.

“Do you know what ‘teabagging’ is?” he asked an elderly woman waiting in front of him with her open book, then proceeded to provide her an anatomically detailed explanation.

(source)

Clinton tells it like it is

2011-07-08T06:29:00.000-07:00

Speaking before a liberal student activist group, former President Bill Clinton was absolutely blunt about the Republicans' nationwide campaign of voter suppression.

“I can’t help thinking since we just celebrated the Fourth of July and we’re supposed to be a country dedicated to liberty that one of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time,” Clinton said at Campus Progress’s annual conference in Washington.

“There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today,” Clinton added.

(here, of course)

World Access for the Blind

2011-07-03T08:50:00.000-07:00

Echolocation for blind people offers a real alternative to being treated as invalids.

site, more

Abortion Culture Wars

2011-07-03T08:49:00.000-07:00

"Women are being stripped of their constitutional personhood and subjected to truly cruel laws," said Lynn Paltrow of the campaign National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW). "It's turning pregnant women into a different class of person and removing them of their rights."

Bei Bei Shuai, 34, has spent the past three months in a prison cell in Indianapolis charged with murdering her baby. On 23 December she tried to commit suicide by taking rat poison after her boyfriend abandoned her.

Shuai was rushed to hospital and survived, but she was 33 weeks pregnant and her baby, to whom she gave birth a week after the suicide attempt and whom she called Angel, died after four days. In March Shuai was charged with murder and attempted foeticide and she has been in custody since without the offer of bail.

Guardian

BDS Movement

2011-07-03T08:47:00.000-07:00

In 2005, Palestinian civil society issued a call for a campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights. A truly global movement against Israeli Apartheid is rapidly emerging in response to this call.

Lady Mekanika

2011-06-29T10:36:00.001-07:00

via Rocketboom (the subtitles seem to suggest an old-style male-focused journalism), this story of female mechanics being trained in Nairobi:

The training captures the need to create a pathway for decent employment for young women. to free young women in Kenya from teenage pregnacies, prostitution, domestic violence and illiteracy.

The Lady Mekanika Project has become a talk in the global arena with several media outlets sharing in the early success of our initiative in promoting gender equality and empowerment of women. Such outlets include http://www.womensenews.org/story/equal-payfair-wage/110530/kenyan-women-chip-away-at-employment-barriers?page=0%2C0

http://www.globalpressinstitute.org/global-news/africa/kenya/women-kenya-challenge-gender-stereotypes-work

This is the beginning of a revolution of femine leadership in Africa. When women dare to dream strive to take on those roles that for along time have been termed masculine. [Source]

40,000 in one blow!

2011-06-24T12:59:00.000-07:00

via Mudede / Slog (as usual):

Recall this recent victory:
These are tough times for labor unions. They are under attack in the private sector and at all levels of government. But workers are waking up to the reason for the attacks: unions are essential sources of protection for essential workers.
So it is that the labor movement has now secured one of the most important victories of recent years in a high-profile area of the public sector.

In a run-off election completed this week, the nation’s 40,000 Transportation Security Administration employees voted to become members of the American Federation of Government Employees.

AFGE will provide exclusive representation to the workers at airports across the country, who for many years after the creation of the TSA were denied the right to organize.
Labor has not seen a victory like this in years. 40,000 workers have been unionized. Amazing.

We are still here

2011-06-22T06:57:00.000-07:00

It's a shame that this SLOG post kicks off with a reference to the artwork that is pushing the debate, rather than the debate itself - but with statistics like these, not sure it really matters -

Unemployment on the Pine Ridge Reservation fluctuates between 85 and 90%... 39% of homes on Pine Ridge have no electricity. At least 60% of the homes on the reservation are infested with black mold. More than 90% of the population lives below the federal poverty line. The tuberculosis rate on Pine Ridge is approximately eight times higher than the US national average. The infant mortality rate is the highest on the continent... cervical cancer is five times higher than the US national average... The life expectancy for men is between 46 and 48 years old, roughly the same as Afghanistan and Somalia.

More here, and this is the big, feather-wearing, elephant in the room, in every goddamn room in this goddamn country.

Cloaca

2011-06-19T05:44:00.000-07:00

This would have been much needed yesterday.

PS just me, or does this map of ancient Rome have more than a slightly phallic cast to it?

The exigencies of grief

2011-06-19T05:43:00.000-07:00

One of the staff tells us a story about a funeral for a young man that had taken place a few days earlier. During some recent funerals people had become so riled in their grief they'd broken several metal folding chairs (at around 500 Haitian gourdes or £7.60 each). The priest, Father Lafontant told everyone during the last eulogy that anyone breaking a chair during the service would have to pay for it, and sure enough he had to point to two people during the service and yell out: "Cinq-cent gourdes!"

Arcade Fire / Cange

Nato will be defeated

2011-06-19T05:34:00.000-07:00

With any luck, but with the continuous creation of nonsense like this, we will wait and see.

I love what I do

2011-06-19T05:25:00.000-07:00

He positions himself in a chair next to mine but at a 90 degree angle so that instead of looking at me as he talks, he stares intently into a vast mirror that covers one wall of the room.

Snoop Dogg, Guardian

It's not quite a Jaguar

2011-06-17T12:26:00.000-07:00

Revisionist futures:

with the issue of women driving, the government seemed to synchronise with the extreme religious scholars, a trend recently becoming more prominent. The deputy minister of the interior released a statement that there was indeed an official law against women driving; it simply had never been announced before. This law was apparently enacted by the ministry of interior in the 1990s in response to a fatwa, or a religious decree, by the late mufti Bin Baz - who judged the women driving as prohibited, haram.

Afganistán es el país más peligroso del mundo para las mujeres

2011-06-16T06:36:00.000-07:00

Para la elaboración del estudio se ha consultado a 213 expertos en la materia de los cinco continentes. Estos subrayan como riesgos los problemas de salud, la violencia sexual y no sexual, ciertos factores culturales y religiosos, la falta de acceso a recursos y el tráfico de mujeres.

Afganistán se sitúa en la peor posición en tres de las seis categorías analizadas, concretamente en salud, violencia no sexual y falta de acceso a recursos económicos. Los expertos mencionan la elevada tasa de mortalidad en el parto, el limitado acceso a los médicos y una casi total falta de derechos económicos. UNICEF afirma que una de cada once mujeres afganas mueren en el momento de dar a luz.

Congo, capital de la violación

La República Democrática del Congo se sitúa en segundo lugar, principalmente por la violencia sexual en el este del país. Más de 400.000 congoleñas son violadas al año, de acuerdo con un estudio estadounidense, mientras que la ONU considera que Congo es la capital mundial de la violación. En general, el país africano continúa sufriendo los estragos de la guerra ocurrida entre 1998 y 2003.

Butch

2011-06-16T06:35:00.001-07:00

From Popbitch this morning, news of Miss Lincolnshire - made interesting and noteworthy only because -

"The main reason I entered is that I want to be a PE teacher and I want to show young girls that they can be in to sports and still be feminine. I've had it a few times at different schools, where girls have raised concerns about becoming 'butch'."

Source

The Internet

2011-06-14T11:58:00.000-07:00

London Slutwalk

2011-06-11T11:12:00.000-07:00

This to me is the real meat of the matter:

"If you go to a club you can be grabbed on the behind three times in an evening by a bloke who thinks it's ok because you're wearing a short skirt. There's an assumption it's flattering"

People are still grabbing other people's behinds? Is this a real event that happens? This is appalling in and of itself - the Victorian nature of it, a groper, a flasher, a lurker, a creeper. Arnold, I can understand - he is as much non-real as real. But it happens? For shame.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13739876

UPDATE - this is actually the meat. The above was more like tuna, or TVP - The organiser of the London event was a 17-year-old sixth former, Anastasia Richardson."It's fantastic that this has had such a positive response from people and shows that feminism is cool even if it is not cool."

Among the younger marchers were Ellie Rowe, 12, and Lettie Williams, 11, who persuaded their mums to come along.

V-Girls!

Is it safe, you goon?

2011-06-09T10:23:00.000-07:00

Harper's Index June 2011

2011-06-06T05:34:00.001-07:00

Percentage change in domestic violence when the local NFL team unexpectedly loses a game : +10
When it loses to a traditional rival : +20

Arundhati Roy

2011-06-06T05:29:00.000-07:00

Guerrillas use violence, generally directed against the police and army, but sometimes causing injury and death to civilians caught in the crossfire. Does she condemn that violence? "I don't condemn it any more," she says. "If you're an adivasi [tribal Indian] living in a forest village and 800 CRP [Central Reserve Police] come and surround your village and start burning it, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to go on hunger strike? Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation."

Her critics label her a Maoist sympathiser. Is she? "I am a Maoist sympathiser," she says. "I'm not a Maoist ideologue, because the communist movements in history have been just as destructive as capitalism. But right now, when the assault is on, I feel they are very much part of the resistance that I support."

Guardian