The Outlaw Josie Brown

I Love Me a Tropical Vacation, but...

2012-01-12T13:43:00.000-05:00

...after 28 years of living in snowy climates*, I still react to snow like this:

"SNOW OMG SNOW LOOK AT THE SNOW OMG OMG OMG!!!!" source

...and that tells me I'm always going to live amidst snow and ice.

* Yeah, you too, DC. I'm not buying into that creepy mass amnesia you people get about the fact that it snows every damn year.

Our Love is Like Byzantium

2012-01-12T12:49:00.000-05:00

I don't really like poetry generally, but when I DO like it, I love it. Like this one.

Our love is like Byzantium
must have been
on the last evening. There must have been
I imagine
a glow on the faces
of those who crowded the streets
or stood in small groups
on streetcorners and public squares
speaking together in low voices
that must have resembled
the glow your face has
when you brush your hair back
and look at me.

I imagine they haven't spoken
much, and about rather
ordinary things
that they have been trying to say
and have stopped
without having managed to express
what they wanted
and have been trying again
and given up again
and have been loking at each other
and lowered their eyes.

Very old icons, for instance,
have that kind of glow
the blaze of a burning city
or the glow which approaching death
leaves on photographs of people who died young
in the memory of those left behind.

When I turn towards you
in bed, I have a feeling
of stepping into a church
that was burned down long ago
and where only the darkness in the eyes of the icons
has remained
filled with the flames
which annihilated them.

--Henrik Nordbrandt
(translated by Henrik Nordbrandt and Alexander Taylor)

The Theotokos of Vladimir

Don't Worry Everyone Awesome Hockey is Coming

2012-01-11T08:00:00.000-05:00

As you know, I've been supportive of the Occupy movement, and I've been talking with a friend about what needs to get occupied (also when the guillotines should be deployed, but whatever, details.) and every now and then it's like "OCCUPY MOSCOW!" and then we remember that, you know, Putin.

"Nyet."

So that's suppressive. And then we think of some other things to occupy, and then eventually, "OCCUPY ST. PETERSBURG!"

"Nyet."

Every now and then we try to switch it up old school with some "OCCUPY STALINGRAD!" action but it really always comes down to "nyet" and we kind of had to give up the dream of Occupying Moscow because the "ex" in "ex-KGB" is silent and no one wants to mess with Putin because he is terrifying. It's hard to give up your dreams sometimes but that's what you have to do.

Let's shelve that for a second and talk about another thing that we argue about, that being why the NHL All Star Game sucks. There is general agreement that the All Star Game sucks because Gary Bettman is an ass, because that is the stock explanation for anything in hockey sucking for us, but there's also a consensus that the All Star Game sucks because there's no pride being played for. The example that my friend usually defaults to is that of the 1979 Challenge Cup, which replaced the All Star Game and featured the NHL's best versus the Soviet hockey team, which was at the time one of the most dominant forces in the world. In that series, there was a real us vs. them feel, and the hockey was spectacular.

This conversation usually devolves into "so if we could just get some Soviets back, we could have good hockey at the All Star Game again, even though everyone would get gulaged again and that would be bad." And then we sigh wistfully because obviously with Putin (...nyet) in charge, things will continue to get managed because that is what he is good at.

And then this happened.

"No, YOU nyet!"

Russians are out in the streets protesting their faces off over the most recent election results, which featured extravagant election fraud and made everyone angry (and rightfully so), turning out up to 100,000 people into the streets in protest, which in Russia at pretty much any point in the past 100+ years is remarkable. Needless to say, I decided that this would lead to an incredibly tight crackdown from the Putin government, leading to a new Soviet era and thus good hockey again. How could this possibly go wrong?? I, for one, can't wait.

PS - effin' YOU GO, Russia! Don't give up!

Get Help Early and Often

2012-01-06T11:51:00.001-05:00

Last year, one of the Worcester Sharks committed suicide. His name was Tom Cavanaugh and he was a local boy who came from a big hockey family in Rhode Island and played at Harvard. After his death, his long struggle with mental illness came out in the open. This was a huge shock for a lot of people, because Tom Cavanaugh was a uniformly charming, bright, sparkling person in public to most of us who had met him, be it in passing or more closely. He seemed to genuinely enjoy his hockey community, and I think he probably did - but the reality of mental illness is that it is a rollercoaster: you can be doing something you love and have moments of real joy, but the next moment be dragged down into the murk. This surprise, I think, speaks volumes of the way we think about mental illness. We confuse putting a brave face on with being okay, and making it through the day with success or happiness.

I know this in part because I have struggled with depression and anxiety for most of my adult life, and whenever I tell people this, they are surprised. I'm generally an upbeat person, particularly so in public, so the idea that I get depressed is surprising to people. My depression is not crippling, as it can be for others, but it is still something I have to be aware of and seek treatment for at certain times. I have been lucky enough to have truly supportive people in my life who have encouraged me and borne me up when I was having a rough time of it.

I don't think there's a person on this planet who wouldn't benefit from some talk therapy. There is something so helpful in having a neutral audience who can make suggestions based on knowledge and experience. I mentioned the surprise that people express when I mention my depression, and that's part of why a neutral audience is so important; a therapist is trained to keep their personal connection with you (should they develop one) out of it. As I said above, I have amazing friends and family who have been supportive of me, but when I express my persistent anxiety that I am not smart, or not smart enough, most of those friends and family brush that off, often saying that I am the - or one of the - smartest people they know. That's awesome to hear, obviously, and intellectually I know that I am plenty smart, but that doesn't mean I don't stress about it. My anxiety is not rational. A therapist can help me talk through that in a way that's difficult for friends to do, because...they're our friends! Friends think their friends are awesome! It's a rare friend who can step back enough to work through depression and anxiety with you without judgment or instability, and I'm not sure that should be a friend's responsibility.

I encourage everyone to consider talk therapy, whether they are momentarily stressed or persistently traumatized. You should also go into therapy remembering that the first person you see might not be the right fit for you! I've been to many therapists, and not all of them have been effective for me - some wanted me to write things down, some wanted to trace back problems to the root, some wanted to spend a ton of time on building a history, some just wanted to get some coping mechanisms in place. Therapists are people, and you might not click with them, just like you might not click with some coworkers. Keep trying. Don't be afraid to ask if an initial consult is free. Don't give up! And remember: mental illness doesn't make you weak and it doesn't make you not awesome. Some of us who suffer with it are doing exactly what they love, looking like everything is perfect. Happiness and opportunity don't exempt you from mental illness, and mental illness doesn't have to bar you from happiness and opportunity.

If you are having suicidal thoughts, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline for free 24/7 at (800) 273-TALK or go to their website for help. If you are looking for mental health resources, check out SAMHSA's lookup on their website. You can also look for local therapists through Psychology Today, your health insurance provider's website, or even sites like Yelp. Don't be afraid - they're there for you.

Rest well, Tom.

Sports Thoughts Potpourri

2011-11-20T11:35:00.000-05:00

1. The...NFL Network's panel of Football Discussing Types just demonstrated, in about three lines, why I don't watch a lot of sports commentary on TV.

Football Dude #1: What is it gonna take for a team to beat [some team I forgot already because I don't care]?
Football Dude #2: Well, it's gonna have to be a team that scores a lot of points.

I understand that this roughly means "'cause there's no stopping that offense" and all but man, that is some dumb-sounding shit. These guys are getting paid more than I'll probably see in a lifetime to issue inane comments like that. I don't even know.

2. The only way American hockey broadcasts are going to get more viewership is if they kidnap all the video and production guys from Hockey Night in Canada. Hockey is a hard game to put on TV and every US network who has tried has failed dramatically. Unfortunately, it's going to have to be kidnapping, because no way is Canada allowing those people to leave the Great White North. In turn, this means we're going to have to have a war. "No problem!" you may say, "America's overblown military-industrial complex will handle the Canadian invasion in a thrice!" If you say this, you are underestimating the passion of our neighbors to the north as far as their hockey goes. It would be like Thermopylae in that piece.

3. I'm pretty sure everyone should just elect Tim Tebow to something and have done with it. I don't know much about him, but it does seem that every sports outlet on the planet is going to great lengths to avoid saying he's really just not that good, yet everyone seems to agree that he's just a really nice dude and people like him. He was on The Daily Show and he charmed my face off, I understand this. However, maybe we should stop trying to make Tim Tebow happen and just let him get on with his career as a Congressperson or life coach or official hug therapist or whatever because now I'm starting to hate him and I don't even fully understand who he is or why anyone cares.

Those are my thoughts on sports for the day.

Math, We Meet Again.

2011-11-18T10:10:00.000-05:00

I very clearly remember a commercial from when I was a kid that featured a college type student running into a classroom late, seeing an abundance of incomprehensible math on the chalkboard and a droning teacher, and realizing he was in the wrong class. Who knows what was being sold in this commercial (alarm clocks?), but it stuck with me. I’m actually reasonably sure that I remember it for its college feel, having been a big honking nerd from a young age, but it turns out that the MATH part also stuck with me, because when I had nervous dreams about college before starting undergrad, they often featured those same walls of horrifying math.

I have never been good at math. This applies to all math, starting from a very basic level. I have many friends who, because they are kind and wonderful, cannot comprehend the depth and breadth of my math problems, the logic being something like “but you are smart, math should not be hard for you.” This may be true, but does not change the reality of my math situation. I would like to be good at math. I actually quite enjoy the application of math – I’m very good at Physics, of all things – and I really enjoy the satisfying “this is THE answer because MATH” conclusions that are possible. Even setting up algebra problems is reasonably satisfying to me. I like the order of it all. The problem is that I am the queen of basic math errors and I have a hard time connecting the math I’m doing to an actual result. I think this is why I like geometry but hate more or less everything else. If you do yourself some geometry, you can get your protractor out (oh man, I love protractors!) and you can test that shit on paper. The basic math issues are compounded by the basic limits of my math education; I only took Algebra I and II, Geometry and Trigonometry. No Calculus, not even pre-Calc.

Needless to say, this is making my Quantitative Research Methods class a little horrible.

If anyone is one of those political scientists who is like “I-I-I-I-I-I-I don’t wanna debate, I just wanna run me some stats all day,” I have a professor you need to meet. Two, actually, because I know that one of our other professors is like this too. The poor soul tasked with teaching me statistics is all over the math stuff, and he’s actually quite good at connecting it all with real world scenarios, which is endlessly helpful, but he also does a LOT of mathing and he appears to think that it explains something to me, which of course it does not because I do not speak math. The main problem is that I need some kind of remedial course and the professor has been lead to believe that he has been given people who are at least marginally competent. This brings me back to the classroom ad, because Quant has brought my nightmares to life. I have adopted a coping mechanism I like to call Write Everything Down Meticulously and then Hope that Later It Will Make Sense, Perhaps After I Skype My Friend Dan, Dan the Mathy Man. I try to note wherever the professor indicates some kind of revelation, to wit:

Oh, by the way, that’s the third page of that proof. The rest of it looked like this:

It's fuzzy because math is the natural enemy of cameras.
Okay actually I was on a train. Whatever.

Some of you might notice that this is actually fairly difficult stats stuff. That’s because it’s toward the end of the semester, and we’re getting into regression and all that good stuff. You may be thinking, “now Josie, it’s not so bad, many people could get confused by this stuff!” Yeah, here’s some stuff from week…two or so.

Now, to be fair, I finally got a handle on the above section of chaos, but I am still largely adrift. The good thing is that the professor hands us solution sheets back with our homework, so I am able to go back and take apart the problems and usually connect them to my notes. I think the problem with my notes is the same one I have had for years, that being that I'm notating something that makes sense to me in class, but then when I get home to do the homework, for whatever reason, the information has slid off my brain and the notes now correspond to nothing.

Class will be over soon and I won't have to do any more graded math, but I really wish that it would click so I could do this stuff more easily. I guess I should just pray for technology to advance until I can have math uploaded to my brain Matrix-style.

This Is About More than Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-15T08:19:00.000-05:00

You can agree with Occupy Wall Street or not. You can agree that the banking system is fucked and still think that Occupy is doing it wrong. You can completely disagree with both message and execution. All of those things are fine. But as of last night, you are no longer allowed to disregard what the behavior of the NYPD says about this country and who is running it.

Last night - in the middle of the night - Occupy Wall Street was forcibly removed from Zuccotti Park by heavy machinery, police in riot gear, and LRAD sound cannons. A public police force, at the behest of the Mayor of New York City, removed people exercising their First Amendment rights from a private park, and the President of the United States didn't say a goddamn thing.

There are a lot of things going on here. There is a larger question of whether a public park is appropriate to the exercise of First Amendment rights. One might argue no, and have a legitimate argument; private property is private for a reason and vice versa. However, we have begun ceding our public spaces to private control, and while this is a nice way to keep the maintenance of public spaces off the ledgers of local governments, it also means that we are ceding physical space in which we can exercise our rights as citizens. Public spaces are accepted as a public good, but we rarely explain why they are a public good. The Boston Public Gardens are lovely, but their virtue is not in the beautiful plantings or the swan boats. Their virtue is in the freedom of the space, the communal ownership of the land, and the chance to simply be a citizen in that space. If this is the good provided by public spaces, then we must either demand that private interests taking over the provision of public spaces maintain these freedoms or else refuse their generosity for our own collective good.

If we do accept these private/public spaces as private in ownership and control, then it is inappropriate to have public police forces managing them. Allowing private citizens into an office building does not give the building owner the right to use the police as security personnel, and neither should allowing public citizens into a private space. If the management group that owns Zuccotti Park wanted to hire private security forces to evict the Occupiers, it should have done that, and while the violence would probably have been worse, it would not have been a damaging blow to this country's civil liberties. Instead, a police force went in at the direction of a Mayor. Let us be clear: a government agency went in to shut down a peaceful assembly.

Had it not been the NYPD, maybe I wouldn't be so fucking angry. Had it not been at Mayor Bloomberg's request, maybe I wouldn't be so fucking scared. Maybe if there had been any nod towards the First Amendment's protections, I wouldn't be so fucking sad.

Some will say that the Occupiers did not have First Amendment protections in a private park. This would be a legitimate argument had the NYPD not gone in. It was not a private interest suppressing the Occupiers' protest, it was the government. With the involvement of a police force, it becomes a matter of First Amendment rights' suppression. This is, of course, all before we mention that the press were kicked out of the park and kept separate. It's all before we mention that this went down in the middle of the night. That tells me that the NYPD knew exactly how much a transgression of rights this shit was, because if they thought otherwise they'd do it in the light of day, in the light of righteousness.

Can we take a moment, too, to note that the NYPD sent in counter terrorism officers, closed down airspace over Zuccotti Park, and generally demonstrated that they have a fucking military policing New York?

And the President of the United States, a man who raised his hand on January 20th, 2009 and swore to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of his ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, has said nothing. He has had five hours in a 24/7 world.

Shame on you, President Obama. Shame on you for allowing this to happen without condemnation. Shame on you for allowing our security state to expand and to turn on our own brothers and sisters, our fellow Americans. Shame on every public official who didn't run to New York to stand with these people and shame on every public official who didn't make a statement decrying these actions. I've spent so much time defending so many of you and reassuring people that you do mean well. I've fucking had it. Voting for everyone who isn't an incumbent isn't going to work; you're all fucking complicit in this. You mark my words, you will force this nation into a civil war, against the work of people like me, people like your staffs, people who have advised and fought and rebelled against the slow slide you thought either wouldn't matter or wouldn't be noticed. Fuck all of you, fuck your cowardice. Fuck your goddamned tunnel vision, fuck your willingness to get so deep into politicking that you can't even do the right thing. I'm exhausted and I'm fucking 28. And you know what the sad thing is? I'm not exhausted by physical fighting or anything like that...I'm exhausted by trying to defend a country I love from the people running it. Your time is coming; the world is waking up and by the time this is over, you'll be the ones exhausted.

Religion Is What Holds Us Over

2011-11-15T07:31:00.000-05:00

I read a sweet story today about a Jewish bakery in New York being saved from closure (and kept kosher!) by a pair of Muslim cab drivers. It's a neat story for many reasons - long time cabbie buddies embarking on a new adventure, preserving a 91 year old business, great only-in-New-York intersections, etc.:

Peerzada Shah and Zafaryab Ali recently took ownership of the Coney Island Bialys and Bagels, a landmark fixture anchored at 2350 Coney Island Avenue for 91 years.

The bakery was about to shutter in September when Ali, a former staffer, learned of its demise and decided to save it — keeping it in the same spirit of its original owner, Morris Rosenzweig, a Jewish immigrant from Bialystok, Poland, who founded the shop in 1920.

Oh and the story also features a really great quote from Shah that assures me that everything's going to be juuuuuuust fine: “It’s the same bialys, but I don't have time to talk right now, we're busy. I have to make sure customers are taken care of, because they come first.” Right on. This story is, of course, being presented as a "oh MIRACLE OF MIRACLES look, people of different religions can get along!" story, and I always find that mode of presentation very strange.

Not everyone is religious or even spiritual, which I understand, but everyone who is religious has to face up to the reality that they will not receive any kind of universal authority by dint of their beliefs until after their death. Faith is at its heart a belief in something that cannot be definitively proven. Though we can understand anything in the world around us as evidence of God, God's existence not on Earth requires that we believe it in spite of His coming down to point at the flowers or our friends or skyscrapers and claim them as His work. This is in fact why we can base such far reaching moral structures on working towards the idea of Him. If God was of this world, we would inevitably understand Him as a limited entity - limited by geography and power and volume. Our experience of "things that exist on Earth" does not allow for us to understand things we encounter as greater than we are to the extent that would be required to construct the same constructs we have build around God as we understand Him. This is also why Jesus works so compellingly as a human figure and why he needed to die in the Christian mythos; his time on Earth (as laid out in the Bible) allows us to think about what a religious life might look like, but were he immortal, his significance would ultimately decline, eroded by continuing interaction with the world.

I also like Aristotle's concept of the Unmoved Mover, laid out in the Physics and Metaphysics, where he goes through an argument that everything is material and moves, and this movement is the basis of time. He then explains that everything moves because it's continually bumping into other things, either materially or in time (stay with me here, guys), but concludes that there must be something that starts all of this movement, and settles on an Unmoved Mover, ultimately a thought thinking itself, that all of these other movers are so inspired by that they move in turn. I like this kind of aspirational love, and it's how I think of God; as something so elemental, so universal and so beautiful that we all move towards it in each movement we make. Notice that there is no moral component here. Good, bad and neutral movements are all inspired by this divine love. I think this is where our language of impulse comes from...we call ideal employments our callings and say we felt drawn to have children. We fall in love, we are drawn together. When you think about it, it is strange that when we talk about the biggest, most life changing and most definitive aspects of our lives, we so often adopt incredibly passive speech.

Now, you might think that Aristotle and I are full of hooey. Aristotle also believed that there were crystal spheres floating around moving things, and science has checked space pretty thoroughly for those to no avail. But I think that one of the beautiful things about religion is that we are able to conceive of God so differently, and that these concepts conflict. If you do think of God as an inspirational force in the vein of Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, it makes sense for so many of us to conceive of a divine entity differently (and not at all). It all movement is movement towards and away from this mover, it seems logical that when we try to understand it, we will have to grapple with what, precisely, it is, even though we can't ever understand it, earth-bound as we are. And too, if all things come from this one source, then all the world's religions stem from it as well. What purpose does this serve? If there is one true God and one true answer, then why allow these other religions to contradict that answer?

I think the answer must be, "to understand that one true God more completely."

It is easy to point to the Bible, or the Quran, or any other text, and say "here is the answer, in black and white." But we have all seen that this kind of manicheanism leads to the worst kind of bigotry, and the least virtuous behavior. This is, of course, because we have accepted some fellow earth-bound person's interpretation of the Divine without consideration, without interpretation, without a struggle to understand. Without intensive consideration and without argument and challenge, our religious faith is worth nothing at all. Without a struggle to do right and live by a religion's tenets in a modern and changeable world, religion shrinks down to yet another checklist, something earthly and mundane. Religions differing from ours are a way to develop our faith; all religions are a part of the same project.

Considering all this, is it really so surprising that religious people manage to get along?

Measurement

2011-11-14T22:25:00.000-05:00

We had some startling and problematic snow up here right before Halloween. Huge power outages, chaos everywhere, the whole nine yards...the heavy snow on the still be-leaved trees wreaked absolute havoc and pulled branches down all over the place. The power was out at my house when I came home from the hockey, and stayed off for much of the next day. I went over to my parents' house, which is apparently some kind of impenetrable fortress and/or has Doc Ock's fusion reactor in the basement. When I pulled up, I saw this:

That is the damaged remains of the dogwood tree my parents planted when we first moved to Worcester when I was just six months old. I had to sit in my car for a while just to compose myself, and I was struck by how powerful my response to this scene was. I thought of all the times Mom and Dad had sent us out to shake the tree in the fall and how many neighborhood bikes had been dumped under it and how many swerve moves I'd run around it on my way to wherever...it's funny how things you don't always think would be so important really are.

Goodbye, tree.

Truer Words Not Spoken

2011-11-04T12:16:00.002-04:00

I usually turn over all rights to the person I am writing for, but in this case I asked if I could retain them so I could print it here, because I think the points in it are important and I think someone should say these things. I'm proud of what I wrote, and I'm upset that the courage to deliver it was lacking. I should note here that the dearth of courage is not my client's, and in fact, they were ready to go it alone, but this was built as a cooperative presentation with several colleagues so it would not just be one person falling on their sword, and those others were too nervous to go through with it. I understand that, but I'm disappointed nonetheless.

I have removed delivery notations and specific references for client confidentiality, however, the speech remains mostly unchanged.
****************************************************************************
I want to apologize to the people in my district, and in my colleagues' districts. I want to apologize to those protesting in the streets and to those too poor to join them. I want to apologize to those living comfortably and those living lavishly.

I brought these pages with me today because these stories are the ones we are charged to and have failed to prevent. All of us have taken an oath to will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same. We all swore that we made this promise obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion. In its turn, the Constitution we are bound to defend calls upon us to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.

We have not well and faithfully discharged the duties of the offices we entered.

Rather than promoting the general welfare, we have taken our proud citizens, upon whose backs America rose to greatness, and turned them into the wretched refuse of a teeming shore. The lamp beside our golden door has gone out; we have turned our backs on those who need our help the most. We have abandoned our own.

Some people might point out that members of this delegation have fought the good fight. Those people may be right. But if those people say we have done all we can, they are wrong. They are wrong because we didn't call the Republican party on its lies, they are wrong because we refused to fight their fire with fire of our own, they are wrong because we didn't bring the full force of our will on our colleagues to bend them to it even if it meant we would break along with them. There are reasons for this - it's poor form to call your colleagues liars, we wanted to maintain a high moral standard instead of stepping down into the murk of the trenches, we wanted to avoid the lockstep marching orders the GOP has made their trademark - but we didn't die on the battlefield for our American brothers and sisters, and now, they are paying the price...they, not we. We here in Congress are lucky enough to live privileged lives here in our ivory tower, but now those we neglected are screaming from outside our windows for the same safety and security we enjoy. It is true that the moral high ground matters, but the nonviolent occupations of New York and countless other cities prove that it is possible to speak loudly and powerfully without ceding it, and we should have adopted this approach sooner, stronger, and for as long as we remained in office.

It is past time for us to tend to our fellow Americans. I believe in a nation that cares for its peoples' lives and health. I believe that together we are stronger, and I believe that because our entire history has been the story of strength through unity. When we stand together, we achieve greatness beyond the world's wildest dreams; when we separate, we sink into cowardice and wretchedness. The Republican party doesn't even pretend to want to provide for the common welfare; their entire corpus amounts to little more than "make it on your own, or die trying." This is no doctrine for the United States of America. We are not that callous and we are not that foolish. Ours is not a story founded in selfishness. Many people will respond that they found success on their own, that they didn't need a hand from their neighbors or community. That kind of empowerment is precisely what our government should produce; people should understand the communal infrastructure and resources provided by generations of Americans as their own, as pathways to success that are as natural as the air we breathe. All Americans should wake up every morning and know that they will be met by opportunity and the chance to work hard and succeed. This is not the case now. These stories are those of people who did all "the right things," who work hard and follow the rules, but have been crushed under the immoral behavior of others who we have simply allowed to become more powerful than they deserve.

The unique strength of government is its ability to do things for all citizens. Government opens the doors for all its people, admitting them to a society where all can succeed. A good government helps all citizens gain an education that allows them to participate in the public sphere, a business world in which all can succeed regardless of size or power, and a society that understands all people as equally worthy of respect and honor. Throughout our history, we have crawled, then walked, towards these goals, and it is time, [Mr. Speaker], to run. This is the path to economic and social recovery - we have to create an America that lets us bear each other up. I expect many questions about the cost of such a path, and I will not lie to you and say that rebuilding America will be free of charge. Instead, I will point out that we have dramatically increased our debt through tax cuts for those who need them least and who promptly failed to reinvest them in the nation that granted them the incentive in the first place. We have increased our debts through two ten-year wars. These ideas have failed. They are not good for America and they are not good for Americans. It is time to invest in all Americans, not a select few.

I am introducing a bill, cosponsored by my colleagues. This bill calls for dramatic reform in the financial sector, and would outlaw most of the practices that allowed this sector to cause catastrophic damage to the US economy. I will also introduce another bill, which will take the first steps towards reformation of our campaign finance laws and electoral processes. These two bills are only the beginning of a massive project that stands before us, but I hope that my colleagues will join me in urgent and civil discourse in an effort to restore America to stability and prosperity. Because this project is so massive, I am also submitting a rule change, temporarily converting control of extraneous Congressional functions like the naming of federal buildings and operational details to either the states or to the Executive branch department under whose purview the concerns fall, leaving us more time for the business of creating jobs and repairing our economy.

I also encourage my constituents and all Americans to voice their opinion of the bill. The compassionate community on Wall Street and in other cities has inspired me to do what I can to invite you all to occupy my offices, both here in Washington and in the district. Coffee, tea, water and snacks will be freely available for all takers, and my staff will be prepared to discuss the mechanics of legislation with you and to record your opinions. My website will also be available for this purpose, and you will find full texts of both [suggested bills] there now, along with synopses and a form to submit comments and questions. We have also provided easy ways to contact your own representative, and I encourage you to do so.

Together, we can repair the great system under which we live. We can make a better America and a better world, and we can rescue all of our fellow Americans - our brothers and sisters - from that teeming shore.

We can rescue each other, and lift high the great American torch once again.

So Here's Some Stupid Shit (Shockingly, Congress is Involved)

2011-11-01T12:16:00.001-04:00

[extreme bad language warning throughout]

There's a lot of conflict in American politics right now, but I think there is one thing that Americans of every political stripe can agree upon, and that one thing is: "shit is fucked." Regardless of what shit you think is fucked, odds are overwhelmingly good that you have a list of fucked shit, and you are probably angry about this. I am angry too, which is why I had to put a bad language warning up front.

So okay, shit is fucked, and since Congress has the primary power to unfuck some shit - any shit - I think we can further agree that Congress should stop dicking around and address some of the stuff that has the most overlap on various constituencies' Shit is Fucked lists.

Here is the Congressional calendar for the last two months of this year.

Blue = House recess; Yellow = Senate recess

By my count, there are seventeen legislative days left in the Congressional session. [NB: "A Congress" lasts for a period of two years, starts on January 3rd of the odd-numbered year following an election year, and is broken up into two sessions. This is the 112th Congress and we're just finishing up the first session.] Rep. Eric Cantor just released the Legislative Calendar for the second session, and would you like to know how many days are on the calendar?

ONE HUNDRED AND FUCKING NINE.

I'd just like to take a moment to say, "Eric Cantor, you are a gigantic fucking asshole. Beyond being a shitty enough person to stand up and say 'oh no, I'm not taking any disaster relief funds unless they're offset with budget cuts' with a hurricane bearing down on your district, you are also too much of a pathetic, yellow-bellied dickbag to take your medicine from your own fucking constituents at your Town Halls. Do you know what the point of keeping disaster funding fluid is, Mr. Cantor? IT IS BECAUSE DISASTERS ARE DISASTERS. Amazingly enough, they do not give you multiple months' notice. THAT'S WHAT MAKES THEM DISASTERS. And frankly given the fact that your negotiating style is of the fucking sandbox variety, i.e. sitting down crosslegged and pouting while saying "NO!" to everything everyone suggests, I'd appreciate it if you don't try to blow smoke up my ass about how in the face of disaster all y'all are going to be able to quickly and efficiently settle on some spending cuts, because motherfucker, I know your ass is attaching policy riders to that shit and that ain't gonna fly. While most of this is more irritating than setting 109 workdays for people who make $174k annually in the midst of some of the biggest shit that we have faced as a nation, I'm certainly willing to take this opportunity to point out that you are a spineless sack of shit who shouldn't be dogcatcher in East Jesus Nowhere, VA, and to commend your district on what is clearly a thriving underground drug market since that's the only way I can imagine a majority of anyone who isn't in a persistent vegetative state voting to send your snivelling ass to Congress."

In any case, it's not just about Eric Cantor being a shiftless douchebag, it's about the fact that we have real shit to deal with and Congress will only be working 126 days between now and the end of 2012. Before I get to why this is extra obnoxious, let me state for the record that the next time some Congressional asshole has the absolute gall to stand up and suggest that teachers don't really work hard because they have summers off, I am literally going to shit in a box and mail it to their office. No. I will find their home address and send it there, because poop-bombing the interns isn't really acceptable. Anyway. I'm sure you're thinking to yourself, "but Josie, I'm sure that Congress is doing a lot of really important and significant stuff to fix the fucked shit during those 126 days!" You are correct! Let's take a look at what they are doing today.

Oh, they're voting on a non-binding resolution that "reaffirms 'In God We Trust' as the official motto of the United States and supports and encourages the public display of the national motto in all public buildings, public schools, and other government institutions."

Now see, this is interesting to me, because when Republicans took the House in 2010, one of the first things - the first things! - they did was to put some new rules in place basically saying that symbolic resolutions were a waste of everyone's time. This was a good call! In fact, Virginia's own Eric Cantor referred to these rules when he insisted that Congress could not pass a symbolic resolution noting the assassination of Osama bin Laden, in whose pursuit we have waged a ten year war. That's a pretty big deal, no? I mean, if you're going to skip a resolution like that, you must be extremely fucking serious about this rule.

Oh wait, we can vote on this to push our Bible-thumping bullshit, claw at the separation of church and state AND shame President Obama about biffing a reference to the motto by saying it was "e pluribus unum," which was the motto up until America threw its little Commie fit and made "In God We Trust" the motto in 1956 and in fact still appears on the Great Seal of the United States?

Well then by all means, let's piss away a day voting on this useless, pathetic rule while Americans starve and sleep in the cold.

Considering Grad School? Do Whatever the Hell You Want

2011-10-20T11:09:00.001-04:00

"*sigh* Poop." - Me, in a text to Erin

Sometimes I feel like my being considered an adult is an elaborate prank being played on the world, and I feel it with increasing frequency since starting grad school. People ask me what I'm doing for school, and I say "political theory" and it sounds very important and fancy, which is nice, except I know the reality of my grad school experience and feel like I am pulling off some kind of Ocean's Eleven grade heist of dignity. In truth, I spend much of my time complaining bitterly about math and procrastinating, and making jokes about Heidegger that are deeply inappropriate.

It's not that grad school doesn't take work, because it does, but in my case, being allowed to focus on what I love makes things much easier than when I had to muscle through, for instance, undergrad core curricula, about which I did not care. Instead, the work for me comes in the form of the DOING - the reading and writing and general getting things to the right people at the right time. There is plenty of hard thinking to be done as well, but because I enjoy that, it doesn't faze me.

Before I went to grad school, I got a lot of advice. A number of people told me various things I would need to do because That's How Grad School IS. None of them were right, and none of them were wrong. The thing about graduate study is that you are more fully in control of your academic destiny than you have been and will be, so How Grad School IS is contingent on your own initiative and relationship with your field and your department. This is why everyone was right AND wrong.

My Dad got his Masters at Shippensburg State University in Pennsylvania. He got admitted in an interesting way. He was out riding his bike and thought, "you know, I've been planning on popping in to pick up some information," so he walked into the math department, sans shirt, and wound up having a coffee with the department chair and one of his colleagues, which turned into an admissions interview. Did I mention that Dad went to Antioch College for undergrad, which did not give out grades? It didn't matter, because Shippensburg apparently liked what they saw and heard from Dad, and that was what mattered. Dad told me this story and finished it up with "the same thing could happen to you, you know," which sounds ridiculous because...that doesn't happen to ANYONE, Dad, but he's also kind of right. I COULD fall into a program or conference or academic drinking night by chance and have it turn out grandly, because that's how advanced study IS.

One of my mentors told me about his time in grad school, talking about how he buckled down incredibly hard for the duration of his program, eating Ramen because he didn't work because he was focusing on the Life of the Mind and what have you. He's also right. Both my Dad and my mentor are where they are now because of the way they chose to engage and capitalized on their graduate schools.

Now, there's probably an argument to be made that someone who sends texts that read "*sigh* Poop." to their cohorts should not be allowed near the Aristotle. But I also know that grad school is what I make it, and one of the things I choose - for myself and only myself - is to get through it with humor and a relatively low stress level, insofar as that is in my control. That's what I want of my experience, and other people will choose differently. The beautiful thing about academe is that you have that choice. When I talk about my undergraduate program, I often talk about two professors and the tension between the two of them. One is very much of the old school, "I will give you the wisdom of the ages - memorize it first, and then we can discuss a little," approach, whereas the other is less concerned with the material than teaching you to question everything that comes before you. It's the pairing that makes an Assumption College political science education so exceptional...not just the one or the other, but the combination of the two. There is always need for teachers of both kinds, and many more, and even more variety of people in non-academic fields.

Grad school is what you make it, in accordance with what you want of it. This is why, when people ask me for advice about applying and fields of study, all I suggest is that they know what they want to do with their degree after they obtain it. You need to know that to direct your study, and everything else comes after.

__________________________________
Posted on the move from my iPad; edits for grammar and spelling may be made at a later date and will be noted accordingly.

Location:Commonwealth Ave,Boston,United States

UPDATE: Still Not Watching the Debates, and Vindicated

2011-10-18T21:22:00.000-04:00

A while back, I wrote a bit about why I'm not watching the Republican debates right now (though I may once we get closer to primary season) and since there's one going on right now, the detritus of which I am currently wading through on my tumblr dashboard, I do find myself with one more comment on the debates.

I was totally right to ignore them and neener neener.

Even though it's late and I'm tired, I DO actually have a more coherent comment (though I am a fan of elementary school level insults). The main thing I want to note is that the coverage of the debates and the candidates has swung around so much that I feel I was correct in my assessment of the debates as largely unrevealing of the candidates' respective strengths. The first debate was in May, and at that time everyone was peeing their pants over Michele Bachmann, who was unceremoniously dumped from frontrunner status for Rick Perry, who is of course now taking a back seat, buzz-wise, to Herman Cain. This is all in a swing of just about five months, and of course leaves out the spectres of Romney and Paul, both of whom sit in a weird kind of popularity netherworld in this field. It seems to me that the media is too busy jumping all the guns they can find to tell anyone anything about the candidates, and that is the whole point of a debate, particularly in this kind of pre-primary setting. We should be hearing from the candidates about what sets them apart, and I do not get the sense any of that is coalescing, with the exception of Herman Cain's (utterly ridiculous and illogical) 9-9-9 tax plan, which I suspect is WHY he's currently so popular...he's the only one throwing out something concrete.

If you'd like some interesting thoughts on the Romney Issue as an alternative to my told-you-so-ing, Christopher Bird has a great little piece on the GOP's weird relationship with Romney that I think lays things out well. It's worth a read and is certainly thought provoking, and Bird's site in general is top notch. Give it a read!

I Will Make the Streets Run With the Smelt of My Enemies

2011-10-17T09:00:00.000-04:00

Dear Big Y,

You are apparently the official grocery store of the elderly. I congratulate you on carving out a niche for yourself and recognize that the elderly, living an unrushed retired life, enjoy a nice long interaction with any and all clerks they happen upon. That said, some of us want to buy some milk and get the hell out of the grocery store without celebrating a birthday in your aisles, and you are really not making that shit easy. My problem, you see, is your discount system.

Like all groceries - except Hannaford, which is awesome and magical and 45 minutes away - you have a little swipey card. Fine. I can live with that. What I want to talk about is the coins.

Do you see that pile? That's not even the whole pile. My husband hoards them in strange places throughout the house, so there's probably double this amount squirreled away in various pockets and jars. You will notice a preponderance of silver coins, which I literally get two of every time I manage to spend one. Not only do I have to take my fucking card to the store, I also have to take these useless pieces of shit with me and then wander your store aimlessly looking for deals, or else spend time looking through your circular. I HATE THIS. Of course, they offer just enough savings in theory that I feel bad about throwing them out, so I keep them in a container over by the sink.

Listen to me. I like you because you're an American owned business and I like when people take care of the elderly. Also, you're the only grocery store nearby. But if you do not cut it out with this shit, I swear on all that is good in this world that I will melt these things down and come to your store and start flinging melted metal at every smiling employee you have. They're clearly made out of junk metal that cannot possibly have a melting point over like, 85 degrees. DO NOT TEMPT ME. THIS IS SERIOUS FUCKING BUSINESS.

Love,

Me

Occupy Everywhere

2011-10-14T22:42:00.000-04:00

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
Thomas Jefferson, 1816 letter to George Logan

I wholeheartedly support the Occupy Wall Street movement.

My grad school safety buddy and all around fantastic human, Erin Bohanan, recently had an Op-Ed published in the New York Times, entitled "Invitation to a Dialogue: A Protest To-Do List," in which she explained that without clarification of desired actions and the identification of leaders, the movement runs the risk of stagnation and irrelevance. She'll be responding to some reader responses on Sunday, so be sure to check her out there, too! Erin and I disagree on the need for the protest to establish policy objectives, but I do agree that if the Occupiers want to lead the policy development instead of leaving it to politicians, they will eventually need to develop policy. We mostly disagree on time frame, but I also argue that the protest itself does not need policy to be valid. I think a lot of people have struggled with this because large protests have been on the decline over the past 50 or so years (wow, the 60s were 50 years ago...yikes), and we've gotten out of the habit of thinking of them in their appropriate context. A protest is just that - a statement against something, a mass showing of disapproval. Its object is not progressive, but static. Occupy Wall Street does exactly that, and phenomenally well. It's where we want to go that is in question, and Erin is right to point to that hurdle ahead. [Tangent: I also love this poster more than maybe anything. Absolutely fantastic.]

There has been a lot of hysterical whinging about people not knowing what the protest is about...I think this is disingenuous. There may have been a period at the beginning of the protest where some confusion was understandable, but at this point, if you're pretending you don't know why the Occupiers are mad, you're being deliberately obtuse. That said, there is always room for refinement, and I think it's worth addressing some of the criticisms that people raise and misconceptions being thrown around. One that's particularly pervasive is the idea that the protesters just want things handed to them, and most of all that these folks don't want to work. It is not a matter of people not wanting to work; in fact, it's the exact opposite. People are upset because they DO want to work and are not able to. There is currently one job for every five unemployed people, so even when all of those jobs are filled, there are still going to be ENORMOUS numbers of people still looking for work. Also, stats like that only account for jobs, period, not fitness of jobs for various candidates. If someone with a Masters in Economics takes a job as a barista at a local coffee shop, not only is that person underemployed, but they're also taking a job that would be better suited to someone working through high school or college. This leaves you with someone without a degree/specialization unable to work a job that would be appropriate to their skills, and another person unable to use their skills in a job that is likely underpaying them. This helps no one.

On top of all this, companies are making record profits while not hiring. This is in large part because of a line I'm sure everyone recognizes: "well, at least you HAVE a job." When the economy tanked and companies laid people off, the work didn't evaporate. If you're a company that was doing a collective 4000 hours of work a week by having 100 people working 40 hours a week, and on Friday you have to lay off 25 people, when Monday comes around, you're still going to have to do that 4000 hours worth of work to maintain your business. This means your remaining 75 folks now need to figure out how to squish 1000 more hours worth of personpower into their workweek. Since the company laid people off for financial reasons, they probably don't want to start paying each person 13 extra hours of overtime, so you now have pressure on you to do 53 hours worth of work in your 40 hour workweek, because if you can't hack it...well shit, man, you're not doing your job, how can you expect to keep it? Everyone's scared, because they have bills to pay and they don't want to lose their jobs, so they pick up the slack. This is a GREAT deal for businesses - now you only have to pay one person for one-and-a-half, two, three, four people's jobs. Why would you create more jobs and "waste" more money on people? When all that matters is profit margins, then people aren't people, they're just assets.

The thing is this: businesses qua businesses are morally neutral. Business is conceptual, its only function is to make money through some kind of enterprise. However, to take business from concept to production, you need people to run it, and that's when you need to start thinking about the ethical ramifications of employment. We haven't been doing that. We've allowed the most basic function of business, making money, to block out our concerns for people's wellbeing. This is a mistake not only because it's callous and douchey, but also because business can only rise to glory through people. Without innovators and grinders and copy monkeys and interns and CFOs and receptionists and people working to use the construct of business to make something exceptional, business is just something in a book. To reach the best of business' potential, you need people to be enthusiastic about their work, to be healthy so they can work, to make money that allows them to live their lives, and to have time to enjoy their lives so they remember what's so worthwhile. If all you worry about is the bottom line, then you don't make time for that, and everyone suffers, including, eventually, business. The people on Wall Street, and in Boston, and in Denver, and in Seattle, and everywhere else, don't want to see what we've all built fail.

There is a second issue in play, that being the "Fuck You, Got Mine" thinking in the finance industry. Loans and banking have reached a point of ridiculousness that everyone just has to take because there have become fewer and fewer banks. It sounds counterintuitive, but a free market's virtues need to be preserved by regulation. We've had less and less regulation, and as a result, our options for functioning within a free market have diminished. I like this chart in particular:

Click through for larger version

In 1990-95, you had 37 banks holding about 20% of our collective financial assets. Now, you have 54% of our assets in the hands of four banks. FOUR! Now tell me this...if you hold 13.5% of a nation's fiscal assets (assuming equal distribution), which by the way are NOTHING compared to your own corporate holdings, and those people want to change their terms with you...why the hell would you even take their call? You wouldn't, you'd just do whatever the hell you wanted. And they have.

I started my first business at 20 and my second at 22, so I have had to make hiring and firing decisions, and I have also had to pull those late nights and unending weeks doing the work of three people (or more) to make my business work. That is not what I object to. If it's my business, then the choice is mine to put my shoulder to the wheel and shove, because it's my business and I want to make it work. What I object to - and what many of these protesters object to - is when an employer hires an employee with one understanding (say our 40 hour workweek above, doing whatever job they applied for), and later demands that the contract be drastically changed after the fact, for the sole benefit of the employer and without a corresponding change in remuneration or benefits, and further demands that the employee abides by the changed contract essentially by threatening them with the "at least you have a job" line, since that line has a silent "because you know no one else is hiring, good luck making rent" at the end. Now, we might argue that the employee should saddle up and do the jobs of three people because the job provides his livelihood, and that's fine, except that's really only justifiable if the employee has the OPTION of doing so, and that is not the case. That is wrong, and it is very different from a business owner deciding to work a superhuman number of hours to save their own enterprise.

Many people argue that we don't need to hire people to count paper clips or sit around to restore the economy, we need to get people back to buying stuff, to create demand. How, then, can we do that? The way I see it, there are two options. You can have the government put more stimulus funding into creating jobs that can develop infrastructure of all kinds, which puts more money into more pockets, with which people can buy stuff and increase demand and eventually create job openings which these infrastructure developers can transition to. Many people don't like this option because they're concerned about the National Debt, which is valid (though a total, irreparable collapse of the economy would screw us worse than any giant debt), or because they don't like the idea of government expansion. If that option doesn't appeal to you, then you have the second option: require employers to take some of those profits they're hoarding to pay an actual living wage so employees CAN buy things instead of being perpetually struggling to barely keep their head above water. The minimum wage hasn't kept up with cost of living increases, and that's part of why people are having so many problems. Companies aren't going to do that on their own because as I mentioned above, we've allowed "it's just business" to permit us to look at employees as assets. This happens less in TRULY small businesses, but the mid-size businesses that like to pretend they're "mom and pop" shops and the gigantic businesses that employ thousands don't care. They are simply not going to start paying a living wage unless forced, and they have spent the past three decades proving it. Someone I was arguing with recently said "yes, corporations are saving their cash, but they would be happy to spend the cash if they could build their business." They can build their business by paying their employees enough that they can buy products and giving them enough time in the day to buy things or spend money on going out, etc.

The people who oppose the protests frustrate me, I don't mind admitting. It's a strange frustration, though, because it resolves into hope, and a desperate desire to wish them well. I hope they never wind up in a situation where buying a simple cup of coffee is a luxury that requires saving. I hope their hard work always pays off for them and they're able to afford the life they want by its virtue. I hope their children and relatives and friends are all able to pay for college outright and that their work, too, will always pay off. I hope they never find themselves unable to pay for desperately needed healthcare for themselves and their families. I hope they are never rejected for a loan that they need to make it for a few months because something entirely beyond their control happened and their life changed dramatically. But most of all? I hope that someday they are able to realize how lucky they are that so far, they have not suffered any of these catastrophes. THEY ARE LUCKY, and their experience is NOT universal. Occupy Wall Street is calling out to transform our great society into a place where that existence is the standard, and we no longer need to rely on luck.
Vive la revolucion.

"Manifesto" by Matheus Lopes

Beers for All Your Slow Friends

2011-10-10T09:00:00.000-04:00

A lot of my beer drinking is done in the closed environment of the DCU Center, where we watch the Sharks, and as is the case in many arenas, the selection is mostly limited to the major breweries. My options are usually Bud, Bud Light, Coors Light, Miller Light, Heineken, and occasionally Michelob Ultra. To their unending credit, the DCU Center has started serving beers from the local (and excellent!) Wormtown Brewery as well as Sam Adams* in their Charter Zone. This is not entirely the fault of the DCU Center. They have advertising and stock agreements with the various companies, and those agreements dictate how and where the beers are sold in the building. That's a whole other problem. What I'd like to talk about is how maybe, just maybe, we might be able to see the ascendance of the Wormtown Breweries of the world, because the big breweries are clearly wigged out by the fact that people are starting to realize that beer doesn't have to taste like a foot.

The clearest indicator of this concern that non-boring beer might be on the rise is shit like this:

From top left: beer for your slow friend, beer for your concussed friend, beer for your clumsy friend, and beer for...your friend who doesn't know to hold onto their beer?

Whenever I see a commercial for one of these bottles, I feel like chugging a case of Brawndo and checking to see if President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho has been elected yet. Coors Light is my particular favorite. Would you like to know the most efficient way to figure out if your beer is cold? Pick up the damned can. It's literally been working since the beginning of time. Babies can do this. However, Coors Light not only thought people could use a hand figuring this out, but thought they needed more detailed help and rolled out a can that has a "cold" bar and a "super cold" bar. Here's a question. If you went to a bar, and every time you ordered a drink, you had to listen to the bartender call you a moron, in great detail and at top volume so the whole bar heard them, would you go back to that bar? Of course you wouldn't, because that bar would be a shitty place with a douchebag behind it, and no one wants to deal with that shit when all you want in life is a beer. Coors Light is that bar. STOP GOING TO THAT BAR.

The other bottles have their own weird stuff; the Miller Lite vortex bottle is apparently for people that never learned to tilt the glass as you pour a beer (or, you know, just drink out of the bottle), and the Bud Light bottle...?????? If you need to rely on your beer bottle for entertainment, you probably have more problems than a little square of personalizable space on a sub-par beer can solve. But what is consistent across all of these is that the beer itself is not being marketed, but rather the container it's in. That's a sad statement on consumerism and the way we approach beer, isn't it? "Buy this thing, it's shiny." It seems to me that these beer companies acknowledge that their product cannot compete on a taste level, which to me only says good things about the smaller breweries who have begun to be more visible in recent years. I hope so, not only because I would like some non-gross beer to be available, but also because I think business is most productive when many smaller businesses are able to compete amongst each other and strive to create the best products possible.

All that said, I'd like to commend one beer for their searing honesty. That beer has chosen to market their product with this spokesperson:

Smooth like Keith Stone.

Exactly, Keystone Light, exactly. Your skunky-ass beer tastes EXACTLY like this sheisty hipster-failure looks. Well done. Not sure if it's actually good to point this out, but...you know. Bravo?

* NB: This is not to say Sam Adams is not a major brewery, but rather that it produces beer that tastes less like piss-water than the others noted. This is less an assessment of quality and more an identification of the fact that Sam Adams at least has a flavor, rather than going for "generic beer."

Pumped Up Kicks

2011-09-28T07:39:00.000-04:00

I'm super busy with class stuff this week, and while I'll be back on track posting tomorrow, I know I'm not going to get to something substantive today, so I'm giving you this amazing clip that Christopher Bird over at Mighty God King posted. I've watched it like 18 times since last night and I can't stop. Sorry about the start-of grad-school bobble, y'all...back to the grind tomorrow!

For comparison's sake, I often have trouble walking in a straight line.

FLASH: The Founding Fathers Didn't Have the Internet and THAT'S OKAY.

2011-09-27T09:00:00.000-04:00

I have been waiting to use this for actual years.

I've noticed an increase in an eternally irritating phenomenon in the past couple of years, and I'd like to try to inject some sanity into the situation. I speak, of course, of the frequency of the phrase "the Constitution says X is bad/good" applied to issues that the Constitution has absolutely zero commentary on, or else don't have a clear stance. This has got to stop, people.

That it needs to stop does not mean that I don't understand it, and I think understanding why people are so quick on the The Bible Says trigger is an important piece of the problem. We're in a wholly new era in terms of information. Not only are we awash in viewpoints, news and "news," but the Internet allows us to filter out the information in which we are uninterested.

This might not seem like a big deal, but it does allow us to disappear down the wormhole of theory. There are endless refinements within political thought, and anyone could easily spend a lifetime arguing minutiae within a particular side or alignment. For instance, my friend Aaron is an enthusiastic and active libertarian who is supporting Gary Johnson for President. On a regular basis, he winds up in arguments with folks who are supporting Ron Paul; in fact, much of my knowledge about both of these libertarians is spun off of these exchanges. Within these arguments, there's plenty of simple camp-to-camp bickering, but there are also discussions of how libertarians should stand on various issues and legislation. All of this is within the confines of libertarianism, so this debate - which is in no way close to running out of steam - is moving on without even touching other political ideologies. The same arguments go on among my liberal friends and I, and I'm sure among my more active Republican friends as well. This is, to say the least, disconcerting. Once you figure out what kind of liberal you are, how do you acknowledge valid points in conservatism or actualize the ideology you've worked out? When will this freaking project end?

I think once you realize this, it's pretty easy to feel like you're drowning in options. Obama's campaign and election - regardless of how you feel about the outcome - galvanized this country. People who had never even thought twice about politics started paying attention and started forming opinions. This is awesome! Except that it did exacerbate the embarrassment of opinions situation. So now you have lots of people, all of whom have spent various amounts of time thinking about politics, all engaging in public debate. In the midst of all this, people want to find a way that elevates their stance or gives them some kind of solid edge. Recently, the go-to tactic has been to say that the Founding Fathers espoused your position.

Look, it's really easy to cherry-pick pretty much everything written by the Founding Fathers, and to find other people supporting your interpretation. I've been studying politics for a long time and I can tell you that at this point I can make the Founding Fathers say whatever the hell I want them to, because the great thing about the American government is that it came out of a public discussion. This is not, of course, to say that everyone was invited to said discussion, but it does mean that we have a great body of work that includes patriots on either side of the debate, Federalist, Anti-Federalist, and even some ideas that don't fit entirely into either camp. I see your James Madison and raise you Patrick Henry, and so on and so forth. The problem is that these arguments were not made for sound-byting, they were made for debate, and this means that context matters. You don't get to be all "so and so said this once so I win" when they said something a lot more nuanced and grey than the point you're making. That's not fair to you nor to the Father in question.

Moreover, I think we'll all be better off if we accept that there were some things the Founders simply didn't know and did not have test cases for. We live in an amazingly fast, connected, plentiful time, and many of the checks and considerations that the Founders put in place were simply not built for this era. Now, that doesn't make their framework irrelevant or useless, it just means that we need to think seriously about what the larger ethic they were trying to codify was and translate it to what we are working with now. The staggering population growth we've experienced between 1787 and the present matters too. The Constitution was built in part by examining what had and hadn't worked in other nations and societies up to that time, all of which were on a smaller scale than their modern day manifestations or the current American population. This is the same reason that socialism brings huge benefits to Scandanavian countries even though their sociopolitical models would be extremely difficult - if it was possible at all - to apply to America. Politics of the 1700s and before were considered in the context of the time, and there were many fewer people to rule, no matter how you were doing it.

I think it's fantastic that there's such a fight to get the Founding Fathers on our various teams, because it means we still care about what they said and the country they built. We should still care about that. But the thing is, the Founding Fathers were on all of our teams...they were working to build a more perfect union (more perfect, not infallible) for all of us, not one side of the aisle or the other. If we understand them in this way, it will allow us to have a much more robust and productive conversation about how to move their work forward, to the benefit of us all.

Perspective and Conversation

2011-09-26T09:00:00.000-04:00

I am prone to flying off the handle and producing some towering rants on the matter of political sheistiness, usually that coming from the right because frankly I think they are wrong about the way we should be governed, but the left doesn't get all the way off the hook either. However, I always make a conscious effort to calm down in reasonably short order, and it's because of statements like this little nugget from Rep. John Fleming (LA):

‎"By the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 left over."

On its face, this looks like a supercrappy "let them eat cake" type statement, as Dr. Bill pointed out on Facebook. However, Dr. Bill offered this observation in reaction to my commentary, that being that this may not be said so much out of cold-heartedness as of ignorance, much as Marie Antoinette's famous line likely was (if she said it at all, over which there is some debate). For the sake of discussion, let's look at the whole exchange, which is available in video here.

Chris Jansing: With all due respect, Congressman, the Wall Street Journal estimated that your businesses, which I believe are Subway sandwich shops and UPS stores - very successful - brought you last year over 6 million dollars.

Congressman Fleming: Yeah, that's before you pay 500 employees, you pay rent, you pay equipment, buy food...the actual net income of that was actually only a mere fraction of that amount."

Jansing: So you're saying that if you have to pay more in taxes you would get rid of some of those employees? These are not as successful business as one would want to indicate?

Fleming: I would say that since my net income - and again that's the individual rate that I told you about - the amount that I have to reinvest in my business and feed my family is more like $600k of that 6.3 million, so by the time I feed my family I have maybe $400,000 left over to invest in new locations, upgrade my locations, buy more equipment and all of that.

Jansing: You do understand, Congressman, that the average person out there making 40, 50, 60 thousand a year, when they hear that you only have $400,000 left over...it's not exactly a sympathetic position.

Fleming: Well again, class warfare has never created a job, and that's people that will not get jobs. This is all about creating jobs Chris, this is not about attacking people who make certain incomes. You know, in this country most people feel that being successful in their businesses is a virtue, not a vice.

Boy, lots to unpack here.

So first of all, the reason that comments like this prompt me to calm down when I'm angry is that I'm pretty sure Fleming is speaking here out of ignorance rather than any kind of mean-spiritedness. I'm guessing that he thinks $400,000 is obviously a meagre amount, and does not question his decision to bring this up. Here are the principal problems with his statements.

By his own math, Fleming is taking about $200,000 to feed and support his family. About 30% of Americans live below the lowest tax bracket, which kicks in around $20,000. Fleming is opting to take about ten times what a significant proportion of the US population must live on to support his family. I don't begrudge him that, but I do think he should avoid acting like he's scraping by. $200,000 is certainly making good money; his family does not need to worry about where their next meal is coming from or about keeping the lights and heat on. He is a successful businessman.
Having $400,000 to reinvest in your business may not be the same as being awash in millions that will allow you to buy your own private army to solidify your market dominance, but it's not doing terribly, either. What he's actually saying in this exchange is not that he only makes $400,000 a year but that he has that amount to reinvest in his businesses. If he's routinely getting that amount out of his businesses, he is doing fairly well and is able to sustain his existing franchises and consider expansion.
Lest we forget, his businesses did bring in $6 million. We can deduce that these businesses would net him a fair amount - maybe not $6 million, but a good solid chunk of change - if he was to sell them. Not all wealth is completely liquid or completely cash. These businesses, particularly in their current state as stable enterprises in the black, are assets for Congressman Fleming, even if he cannot go out tomorrow and buy a Lambo with Subway sandwiches. He is doing fine.

The thing that's most galling to me about this, though, is his closing statements. In them, he suggests that tax reform is about penalizing certain incomes, and that it views success as a vice. This is not the case. What he seems to fail to grasp is that having a business does not entitle you to some exemption from tax liability. Not every business does - or should - succeed, and not every business should - or does - make massive profits. You do not gain a higher moral, social or political status by being daring enough to start a business, nor by creating a successful one. What people calling for tax reform - particularly for taxing the rich - want is for everyone to pay their fair share, whether they own the business or are employed by it. It is that simple, and I hope that Fleming and his ilk can understand it.

No. YOU Move.

2011-09-19T09:00:00.000-04:00

America has made a lot of promises in its time on this earth. A lot of them are good. We drew a line and said "we are all due life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." I've talked before about how much I love that we are promised the pursuit of happiness, not happiness itself. It's better that way, because that way you never stop imagining happiness and chasing after it. That way, happiness changes, and you can find it anywhere - ahead of you, behind you, in your loving arms - and know you can continue seeking new happiness out every day.

One of the challenges, though, of being American and of being given these rights, is that you need to worry about those three things in equal measure. I love this Captain America frame because it highlights something important to the preservation of our republic: taking public, vocal stands. There is literally no way for us to all agree, and we certainly can't do it by assuming everyone understands our reasoning and our positions. We have to continually discuss and consider the problems we face as a nation, not only to resolve them, but to interact with each other as citizens and to hold our government accountable.

"Doesn't matter what the press says, doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say, doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world -- "no, YOU move."

Ten Years Later, and Ahead By A Century

2011-09-10T23:30:00.000-04:00

With illusions of someday casting a golden light,
No dress rehearsal, this is our life.
That's when the hornet stung me and I had a feverish dream;
With revenge and doubt tonight we smoke them out...
The Tragically Hip, "Ahead By A Century"

I've written about September 11th so many times. Nothing I've produced, no matter how graceful in its simplicity or florid of language, can top Sarah Bunting's piece For Thou Art With Us.

I'm 28 now. I'm a graduate student, far from politics. I'm far away from DC, where my friends comment on my energy when I return. When I was 18 I didn't know anything, but I thought I knew it all. I still don't know it all, but now I'm aware of it. I regret that it wasn't simply the brilliance of Aristotle that made me understand how little I knew. It's a little bit like learning that the stove is hot; someone can tell you it's hot, but you'll remember it forever once the shiny, tight burns have healed and only the scars remain, fading through time as you grow older and wiser. September 11th was what taught me how little I knew and how little I would be able to know before I shuffled off this mortal coil. There are people and there are acts that I will never understand.

In America, we are deeply attached to our sense of fairness. Even though we know life isn't fair, we appeal to it so frequently. We're driven to mention it even as we acknowledge that fairness isn't the point. There is very little that is less fair than what happened on September 11th. People were simply going to work, on a beautiful day, when our world changed. Over the course of the past ten years I have had nightmares about being at work - at jobs nowhere near Washington or New York or Pennsylvania, jobs that have nothing to do with what I was doing in 2001 - and being engulfed in flames, struck by what sounds like monsters but I know are aircraft, watching my friends burn by my side. The worst part is that I don't wake up screaming or crying. I sleep through these dreams, waking up exhausted and paranoid. I don't claim to know what every American feels, but I think some variation of this is what has been happening to everyone over the past ten years. This immense, sudden, violent unfairness has haunted us, because it removed our ability to ever again appeal to fairness or to pretend we are in some what guaranteed it by virtue of our government and our society. Nothing is the same, but everything looks like it is.

This all-consuming fear that chases us into our dreams and into the dark corners and bright daylight of our lives is not to be minimized. However, giving into it is to give it power, and to turn our fear into legitimate concern. In the past ten years, we have abandoned so many civil rights in the name of safety. We have abandoned so much of the fabric of America for the sake of protecting against what might happen. We have continued two wars, one of which was invalid from the start and the other of which will never be won in any meaningful sense beyond what was accomplished a few short months ago with the death of Osama bin Laden. We must celebrate this dark anniversary with a revival of our courage. This is no small task.

It takes courage to reject intrusive searches and accept risk back into our lives.

It takes courage to stand up to a police state and risk bodily harm.

It takes courage to fight against those who would take our rights for their own gain.

It takes courage and it takes strength to reverse these ten years of fearful relinquishment of what makes us who we are. I am afraid. I know many others are. I know many of us feel like we cannot possibly fight the forces who have risen to power while we were hiding under the blankets and wishing for a new day - those of immense power and of immense fortune, who seem to control every aspect of our lives. But my friends - my fellow Americans - we have to try. We have to try, and we have to be brave. We have to be involved not just with national politics but with our communities. We have to reach down to those of us most bereft of power and hope and help them up, so that they too can join us and so that we all can emerge free from this crushing fear. We have to offer up the best of our communities as candidates - business people and parents and the unemployed and the students - the people who want to fight for us, and to return us to our best selves.

The people who have perpetuated this fearful existence seem bigger than life. Some of them have weapons, some of them have militaries. Some of them employ us, hold sway over our mortgages and leases and bank accounts. But they, too, are people. Despite their greatest hopes, we still have the power of our Constitution...and we still have the power of numbers. We, too, sing America - and we must, ever more so on this day, ten years after the world fell in.

Chess and Politics, or Why I'm Not Watching These Stupid Debates

2011-09-08T08:24:00.000-04:00

I've been trying to learn chess. A close friend with whom I share a competitive streak is an enthusiastic chess player, and this made me decide that I would learn chess secretly, then finally challenge him to a game and annihilate him, emerging as Queen of the Chess People and probably going on to international fame and fortune.

You will be shocked to find out that this did not go quite to plan.

Our first game didn't go catastrophically considering my super-beginner starting point, but needless to say I lost more or less immediately and have continued to do so both online and in person, and a week or so ago, he informed me he'd just won his 1500th game on a particular app. He'd probably want me to also point out that he has lots of losses, too (he is trying to sell me on the Losing is Part of the Process concept, which is true but also infuriating), but the guy's win percentage is 0.648 and 1500 wins is impressive so really, who cares about his losing? My online loss percentage is 0.777 and even that's ridiculous and actually more like 0.977 because most of the "wins" in my stats are timeouts from opponents - I've won one game fair and square. Queen of the Chess People indeed.

Anyway, this whole chess business is a challenge because while I learned some basic stuff about movement and object when I was younger, I know next to nothing about tactics and actual strategy and I have been learning slowly. One of the most helpful things this friend has gotten me into the habit of doing is to look at the opponent's move and figure out what they're up to first, before deciding what to do. This has not yet brought me to a place where I always make the right move as a result, but at least the thought process is the correct one. Sometimes when you look at the move, you see that you must deal with the resulting position immediately, and sometimes you look at it and see that you have a little bit of time. I have developed a bad habit of talking to myself when I'm playing online, and I often respond to moves that allow time with "...but so what?"

That's kind of how I feel about a lot of polling and particularly about the GOP debates going on these days. "...But so what?" There is so much ink being spilled over the various debates and who said what and all this stuff, and I think we probably should be talking about the content of what the candidates are saying, but there's a whole other layer of bullshit over the top of this that drives me right up the wall, and that layer is comprised of polls and commentary. There is so much focus on how these people would fare against Obama, and let's start there...it is still 2011. The election is in November of 2012. There is absolutely no telling what could happen in the interim - there could be more natural disasters, there could be another financial meltdown, the Euro could collapse, etc. - and any major event could dramatically change Obama and any opponent's chances. Moreover, not a single GOP candidate has any kind of solid platform that the public is clear on at this point. While they all have positions and such, the debates thus far have basically been extended Two Minute Hates on Obama and his various policies (and I'll leave it to you to decide what other groups have received some of said Hate), and little has been articulated about how they would do otherwise. It's a beauty contest at this point, so of course people are going to rank GOP candidates higher than Obama - Obama has an actual Presidential track record, and these people are speaking in glittering generalities. So I don't care about how [Insert Candidate Here] is polling against Obama, because it is September of 2011 and they haven't even articulated positions yet.

Beyond that complaint, I feel like we need serious discussion about where this country is and will be, and the coverage of these debates along with the incessant polling and bullshit is making that impossible. I've been down in the trenches, and I've been That Campaign Worker and That Staffer who knew all the numbers all the time. I know how easy it is to get sucked into that and to continually fidget with poll data without prejudice - "well, the poll says." "Yeah but it's about how people with pets vote on Wednesdays in June." "Yeah but it says."- but it really is distracting and foolish. Focusing on polls and pole position and all of this stuff makes the debates and the campaign at large about the election qua the election, not about the Presidency or Congress that will follow nor about need to select the best possible candidate on the basis of policy proposals. It turns into a story about one freaking day and it's this kind of thinking that has given us the shallow, ignorant politics that currently has most of the country infuriated.

This brings me back to chess. I've been reading commentary on last night's debate, and at a certain point I just sat back and thought "...but so what?" None of this matters, really. Last night was basically Mitt Romney and Rick Perry swapping jabs that were based on comparisons to liberals years out of public office. I mean seriously...Al Gore Internet jokes? Michael Dukakis slams? Is it late night TV in 1988? Oh and lots of "Obama is a poophead" level stuff, which...we know, okay? You don't like Obama. Noted. Fine. How about specific reasons for that? No? You'd rather stick with "[that policy I don't like] is bad." Get the hell out of here. This is a time for serious people willing to engage in serious debate with all Americans (and I direct this at Obama as well, whose communication with the American people has been massively problematic), not for juvenile sniping. So although I know I'm many people's "Political Friend" representative, I'm not watching this stuff, because I don't have to deal with the move right now....it's just one big "...but so what?"

WARNING: School Incoming!

2011-09-06T19:48:00.000-04:00

This semester's Murderer's Row:

Development of American Constitutional Law This class was taught in a early-90s high school looking room this morning; it was a little trippy. However, the professor is a new one named David Glick and all early indications are that he is awesome, starting with his Bachelor's degree in Political Science and Astrophysics. Yes really.
Approaches to the Study of International Relations I'm currently planning to make IR my sub-field (Political Theory is the major field; American Politics the minor field), so I'm taking this core to prepare.
Freedom How can you go wrong with a name like "Freedom"? Taught by my favorite professor - Dr. Judith Swanson - and full of Hayek, who I've been meaning to read more of. Can't wait!
Quantitative Research Methods This is not going to go well. I was going to take this last semester put it off because I basically managed to pick the four hardest classes in the program for the same semester. Thus I have read two syllabi for this course from two different professors coming from two different backgrounds that say, essentially, "this is useless for Political Theory people." Obviously, more knowledge isn't a bad thing, and I probably SHOULD learn this, but since I'm almost certainly going to struggle, I'm a little resentful.

This is my last year of classes in my Ph.D program. It seemed to go by so quickly, and in many senses it did; but on the other hand, I can practically feel my brain trying to make space for more smart up there. My program isn't perfect, but it's been a wonderful environment for me to argue and talk with so many people like and unlike me. While I am not as close to my classmates as I might wish, thanks to the commuting, I was thrilled to feel genuine joy throughout today as I saw my friends - Erin, of course, without whom I would be entirely lost, and who inspires me with her great attitude and ridiculously fantastic smile, but also seeing Tai Yi and Fatima and Doug and everyone else made me so excited to start a new year. I'm really lucky.

[CLASSIFIED] The Beautiful Skin Guarantee

2011-08-29T09:00:00.000-04:00

I am lucky enough to have emerged from my rounds with puberty-based acne with nice skin. I like makeup, so people often ask about products I use, and those folks are often surprised when I say I don't wear foundation very often. But for a little bit of rosacea in my cheeks, my skin tone is very even and tends to stay blemish free, barring a zit or two right before I get my period. Genetics-based luck is part of it, and it would be silly to not acknowledge that, but I also credit a great deal of it to a mysterious beauty secret I discovered some time ago. I have decided to reveal this secret to you all. It may take some work for you to find it, but if you want perfect skin, you're going to need to put in some work. I'm sorry, but not everything in this life can be simple.

The secret ingredient is....

That's right, olive oil. You will have to go all the way to the kitchen.

Now that you have completed your onerous slog to the kitchen and back, take some of that fabulous Italian goodness and slop it on a cotton ball, then swab that bad boy around your face. If you have excess on your face, just rub it in with your hands. Fin.

Your face may feel a little bit oily for a while, but after about half an hour you will have skin the likes of which infants will look upon with envy and try to recreate with a steady flow of jealous tears. I am not kidding. If you have a lot of blackheads lurking, you might want to do this and then steam your face by putting a bunch of very hot water in a big bowl and then sticking your head over it with a towel over the whole shebang. I know "put oil on your face" sounds like a violation of everything anyone has ever told you about your skin, but it really does work miracles. The only thing that keeps me from slathering myself head-to-toe with it is the smell, which isn't bad but is a bit "you have applied olive oil to your entire body" ish. Instead, I use either The Body Shop's Monoi Oil or Mario Badescu's Olive Oil Body Lotion.

The upside is that you don't need to take my word for it alone. I have the word of notorious beauty Sophia Loren, who famously credited olive oil in the preservation of her skin, and I figure once you have Sophia Loren on your side, you can declare yourself a winner and be done with it. However, if Ms. Loren's advice carries the whiff of urban legend to you, I have the responses of two women who I recently turned on to the method.

First, we have Val, who I think tried a slightly different method where she added in 10% castor oil to 90% olive oil. This was the response to her first, olive-oil-only go-round.

And my blackheads are freaking gone. THEY ARE 95% GONE. I'm shocked.

AND my skin actually feels like skin, which may sound weird to you guys who have like flawless poreless skin (damn you) but I have suffered with mine and after trying tons of cleansers and toners and moisturizers and buying into scams and UGH, my skin feels... not like skin. Sometimes it's too dry, other times too oily, and now it actually feels soft and smooth, and what I am guessing skin is supposed to feel like. It actually tingles a bit, too. It feels clean! I don't know if it helped to sweat earlier, but damn, I'm a believer. I need to shout this from my rooftop.

What did I tell you? This response prompted The Lucy to try it as well. I have cited Luce as a credible fashion and beauty resource before so regular readers will appreciate this response in light of her steady and critical eye towards beauty products.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

My skin looks fucking amazing! I cannot believe how soft and smooth it is! And it's totally clear save for the few little blemishes I have, which I have the feeling will not be around for long.

I have a lady boner.

I HAVE THE SKIN OF A CHERUB.

If those testimonials don't convince you to at least give olive oil a chance, well...

The Girl Scouts Will Teach Your Girls to Be Awesome, Full Stop.

2011-08-24T12:50:00.000-04:00

I am convinced that there is a swath of people on the right who have just decided to act like cartoon villains to see how long they can get away with it. Today's Maleficent wannabe is Wendy Wright, who is an asshole.

On Parshall’s show, Wright said parents should call for an investigation into whether the money from Girl Scout cookie sales goes to teaching “young girls to be activists and advocates for a radical sexual agenda.” She blamed the Girl Scouts leadership for supporting a “radical, feminist, pro-abortion form of activism and training these girls up to be feminist activists.” Wright urged parents instead to have their daughters join a “wholesome, pro-God, alternative to the Girl Scouts” called the American Heritage Girls. The American Heritage Girls was founded by Patti Garibay, who, according to CNS News was “motivated to leave the Girl Scout organization when the group decided it would take no position on homosexuality” and to encourage instruction in “traditionally feminine skills, such as sewing, cooking and laundry.” American Heritage Girls bills itself as a “Christ-centered” group that denounces “moral relativism.” (source)

So let's have a talk.

A lot of feminists talk about an "aha moment" or a "click moment," where they realized, in a beam-of-light-style revelation, that they were feminists. I did not have one of these moments. I can't remember the first time I said aloud that I am a feminist. But I can tell you why I am a feminist. I am a feminist because being a woman is fucking hard. I am a feminist because it is bullshit that my body is considered constantly available for public discussion, be it from cat-callers or politicos. I am a feminist because I should never have to justify my decision to work, or to not have children, or to have children, but I do, on a weekly if not daily basis. I am a feminist because it's ridiculous that people assume that I can't possibly be a "real" sports fan. I am a feminist because I am sick of explaining that I can be good at cooking and also not like doing it. I was lucky enough to grow up in a family and an environment where by and large the people around me were okay with me doing whatever the hell I wanted, and who saw me as a person first, and a woman later. However, this is not the norm, and once I left that environment I realized how unusual it was.

I had a weird relationship with the Girl Scouts. I was in Montachusett troop 101 in Worcester, Massachusetts as a Brownie and a Junior, and I attended both Camp Neyati in Spencer and Camp Green Eyrie in Harvard. I didn't really love the weekly troop meetings. I liked hanging out with my friends, obviously, and I had a good time, but for me, "Girl Scouting" meant lots of canoes and fire, and there wasn't a whole lot of that on a weekly basis. There was a lot of sewing and crafting and stuff like that, which I also liked, but...you know. No fire. It was when I started going to Camp Green Eyrie that I really started loving Girl Scouting, and it was in those tents and under those trees that I came to understand the power of women, and the limitless potential for all of us. I made friends there with whom I am still in touch, and did things I never would have expected to do. I'll never forget rolling up to the mess hall at the end of our Voyager unit, having hiked and canoed for a week, covered in mud and scrapes and running five minutes late for dinner, feeling so damn awesome because we all did the hell out of that trip. That was when I knew I could do whatever I wanted to do.

That's what Girl Scouting taught me. You'll notice there's nothing in there about hating God or about abortion or about radical feminism. Shocking, I know. It was about achieving awesomeness as a human first and a woman second, and having a damn good time while we were at it. Also? Fire. And sometimes canoes.

And let me tell you something, Wendy...the Girl Scouts are not the ones pressing an agenda on the young women in their organization. It is YOUR attempt to politicize their day to day activities that forces the political into what is a simple, healthy environment for young women. You take an entirely unrealistic view of how organizations work, on top of this. Would you like to know how much of a fuck I gave about what the Girl Scouts of America's upper echelons were doing when I was a Junior? LESS than zero. I cared about the girls in my troop or my camp unit, and I cared about what we were doing that day, and maybe if I still had time to zone out a little bit, I might have cared about some residual shit from school or my friends. But when shitbags like you force political issues to the fore of organizations whose primary services have nothing to do with political action, you make it political. And frankly, had someone like you come out shame fingers a-blazin' when I was having a good time being outside and canoeing and getting dirty and learning how to sew AND start fires and talking about how to be a good citizen...well, Wendy, I might just have thought that maybe people like you were the ones pushing a shady agenda worth avoiding.

But I will thank you, before I let this go and return to my radical feminist life. I'd like to thank you for inspiring me to rejoin the Girl Scouts today.

Nous Te Souviendras

2011-08-22T21:40:00.000-04:00

There are few absolute truths about politics. No matter how strongly we hold our beliefs or how clear and righteous we believe them to be, there will always be someone who believes the opposite with equal fervor, who believes their stance is just as obviously good. This is why those seeking absolutist solutions to political challenges are doomed to failure, and why those policies will simply be overcome, not necessarily by opposing parties or individuals, but by the passage of time and the fluid state of politics itself. For this reason, the few truths that do exist about politics are all the more sacred, and cannot be claimed by one passing party or one mortal individual.

There is one truth above all the truths, and it's simpler than one might think: we live together as humans on this Earth.

It's not that simple, of course, but in a few essential ways our joint presence on this Earth is all that matters. It means that we cannot escape each other, that every man, woman and child who dies is a loss for all of us, and the birth of every boy and girl is a promise that they will change us all, for good or ill. It means that every resource we discover or create will be drawn upon by us all, that once exhausted they will be missed by us all. It means that the better we make our neighbors, the better they can make us, and as we degrade them, we degrade ourselves. None of this is optional, and because none of it is optional, we all have to be invested in the communal project of our own existence. This means that no matter our differences - and we have had them, and will have them, forever - we must understand that we are all together, as humans, on this Earth.

Each of us is delivered to this home naked and screaming, with little but luck and circumstance to direct our path forward, and this demands that we respect each other as humans fundamentally, before anything else. This too requires that we remember that those below and above us share this humanity. None of us are infallible, none of us are perfect, none of us escape life without feeling fear or being intoxicated by love. Still, we must rely on imperfect humans to shape our politics and our societies, because there are no other options. God, the universe, chaos, chance - these options are no options at all because they write no policy and take no votes, make no speeches and settle no arguments. To require them to do so would be insulting in itself, to resign great sublime powers to the grind of determining the minutiae of human life, and it would rescind from us the great power of free will, which allows us to learn from our mistakes and victories alike. It removes the miracle of humanity and its beautiful relationship to everything beyond us - it renders God and the Webb telescope equally irrelevant. We must work through this business of living together with each other, as imperfect, mortal human beings.

Canada lost a man who understood this today. The Honourable Jack Layton passed away today after a long fight with cancer. He will be fiercely missed.

Jack Layton was no apolitical being and he could never be called a non-partisan voice. He lead the New Democratic Party to extraordinary gains this past election, and his last letter, when directed at his party, his caucus and his beloved province, rings clearly like the bells of the ships and ports of Quebec with his liberal identity. Liberals in Canada have lost a powerful leader, one whose work, had it not been cut short by cancer, could have taken Canada to a new position on the world stage. As a liberal, I hope every day for a leader like Layton, a leader who is willing to mount a spirited defense of liberalism in its robust, rich and appropriate form, and to challenge the image of liberalism that has been painted by those foolish enough to believe Mao and Stalin represent liberalism, rather than their own perverted and ultimately weak doctrines. The NDP will have an extremely difficult time replacing Jack Layton, and they may never succeed - every so often we are given political leaders who are simply unique. They will find a new leader, and they will have strong leaders, but they may never replace Layton.

What I think makes Layton special is when he turns to Canada as a whole, it is at the end of his letter, and it is nothing but these universal truths. In the end, Layton understood that he stood on this Earth, amidst his fellow humans, engaged in a communal project that will outlast but still enrich all of us in the time we do have, and bear up those who will succeed us. You can - and should - read the entirety of his letter here, and it would be foolish of me to try paraphrasing his last message to Canada, so I will simply leave it here.

And finally, to all Canadians: Canada is a great country, one of the hopes of the world. We can be a better one – a country of greater equality, justice, and opportunity. We can build a prosperous economy and a society that shares its benefits more fairly. We can look after our seniors. We can offer better futures for our children. We can do our part to save the world’s environment. We can restore our good name in the world. We can do all of these things because we finally have a party system at the national level where there are real choices; where your vote matters; where working for change can actually bring about change. In the months and years to come, New Democrats will put a compelling new alternative to you. My colleagues in our party are an impressive, committed team. Give them a careful hearing; consider the alternatives; and consider that we can be a better, fairer, more equal country by working together. Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done.

My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.

All my very best,

Jack Layton

I Swear That's Not a Jug of Pee in my Bathroom: Down with Shampoo

2011-08-18T09:00:00.014-04:00

Good news: you can buy apple cider vinegar in gallon jugs!

Bad news: if you keep these jugs in your bathroom, it will look like you are keeping a gallon jug of pee under your sink. And that you are having some kind of kidney issue.

Upshot: Worth it.

As part of my excising chemicals from my beauty routine plan, I read up on shampoos. I don't know when the last time you read your shampoo bottle was, but there's nothing in the ingredients under about 47 letters, and half of them are Xs or Zs. That's not really encouraging. However, lots of people were on the internet all "just use stuff in your kitchen!" and that didn't sound sufficiently hardcore, either. You see, I've had dandruff forever, and when I say I have tried every product out there, I mean every. product. Head & Shoulders, Redken, Selsun Blue, Pureology, Neutrogena T-Gel, Lush's Campfire solid shampoo, denial...you name it, I've tried it. Now, a lot of them worked, particularly T-Gel and Pureology, but I found that they made my hair really flat with tons of flyaways. Also, for those of you not familiar with T-Gel, the active ingredient is tar, and there's just no escaping that smell. They have a new formulation that they claim smells better, but I don't buy it. That shit is persistent.

Anyway, the problem has been solved because the hippies who run the Internet are right once again. In the course of my Googling, I kept running into two kinds of suggested rinses: baking soda and apple cider vinegar. My friend Juls had already suggested apple cider for the callus-fest that is my feet, so I had some on hand, and for some reason Rich and I decided when we moved into our house that we needed a constant supply of baking soda (...why??) so we had a ton available. I took these items into the bathroom, grabbed an empty shampoo bottle, and got to work. Lots of sites I read were very specific about measurements, but I have taken the "throw a bunch of it in the bottle then fill it up with water" approach because I'm lazy and also because I can't pour things. This is true, I don't know why. I tried the apple cider vinegar first, filling up a smallish (17 or 18 oz.) bottle about a third of the way, filling it with water, and then shaking it up. I put the rinse on my hair in the shower, then left it there while I did my whole shower routine, which takes about 10 minutes. I washed it out, ran two drops of Oscar Biandi Jasmine Oil Hair Serum through my hair and blow-dried it. I immediately noticed that my hair was extremely shiny and had great body to it. Victory!

The next day I tried the baking soda rinse. I put a golf ball sized heap of baking soda in the bottle and filled the rest with water, then shook it all up and followed the same process. My dandruff was INSTANTLY gone, and my hair was like the hair Romance period painters put on ladies gallivanting in the woods. It was unbelievable! I am never going back to regular shampoo, and with the hair oil, I've completely abandoned conditioner as well. I never would have thought I'd be saying stuff like this, but it's such a revelation I can't deny it. I now use the baking soda rinse for everyday showering and a cider vinegar rinse once a week. I'd also like to note that I did try using shampoo in a pinch after about two weeks of using these rinses, and it made my hair flat as anything and impossible to work with. I'm completely sold!

The Grand Deodorant Experiment Has Come to an End

2011-08-17T09:00:00.033-04:00

Every now and then I make grand proclamations about how I'm going to eliminate X from my life in the name of good living and do-goodery. One of the recent ones was "I'm going to eliminate chemicals from my life wherever I can," which lead to several wins and one significant non-win. In the win column, we have giving up shampoo, conditioner and face wash and replacing them, respectively, with baking soda and/or cider vinegar rinses, nothing and olive oil. More on that tomorrow and the next day. However, the non-win column is dominated by my attempts to switch to less-chemical-heavy deodorant, which makes me sad. I was kind of looking forward to being all hippy-dippy with my crystal deodorant. Alas, for me, it is not to be.

Deodorant is kind of tricky, right, because everyone sweats and stinks in different ways. For this reason, I'm going to do my best to hit up the full pros and cons of all deodorant options, because what doesn't work for me might work for you!

Deodorant #1: Deodorant Cream from Soapwalla

This was a recommendation from the lovely ladies at No More Dirty Looks, and it's actually a pretty good one for most situations. You can buy it at Soapwalla's Etsy store. It's a little weird to get used to using a cream, but it does work well, and you can kind of feel better where you're applying it. The smell is a true unisex scent, which makes it a good option for men and women. I will definitely use this one in the wintertime when I'm going to school. The main problem I had was when I worked out using this cream, after a certain point it did wear out. My personal feeling is that it's okay to get a little stinky when you're at the gym...you're supposed to be sweating, and everyone else around you is also engaged in sweat producing activities, so I don't think it's worth worrying about. That said, I'm a chronic Doing Stuff After The Gym Person. That means I'd really gotten used to relying on the staying power of chemical deodorants to let me pop in to CVS on my way home from the gym without worrying about smoking out the poor cashier, so I got to feeling a little gross about doing stuff after the gym. If you shower at the gym, though, it should be no problem. You don't need a ton, so although the $10 pricepoint is a little high, it makes up for it in lifetime. This was the most successful of all the natural deodorants and is definitely effective.

Deodorant #2 That Weird Crystal Deodorant the Hippie in Your Life Uses by Crystal

Yep, I went there. This has always intrigued me, simply because it sounds like such unbelievable bullshit. What convinced me to try it was some judicious Googling to find out how it actually worked, and once I learned a little more about the mechanics, I was more convinced that it might actually work. The crystal is actually a salt, and rather than preventing perspiration, it keeps bacteria from getting established on your skin. It's the bacteria that make sweat smell, so if they can't set up shop, you'll stay pleasantly you-scented. You wet the stone and swab it around under your arm and you're good to go. I will note that the plastic packaging of this particular variety of crystal deodorant (which I was able to pick up at my local RiteAid) is EXTREMELY satisfying to click up, and it's also recyclable. I did not find this as effective as I would have hoped, but I think for wintertime it would work fine, because there's usually a little less sweat involved with winter and fall. I was surprised to find that it did work! It's just not a super high-test deodorant. It's possible that with continued use it would improve, but that wasn't my personal experience. If you don't sweat a lot, this might work just fine for you!

Deodorant #3 Tom's of Maine Apricot Deodorant

This one was by far the best smelling option. I've been on a big apricot kick in the past year, having also picked up the glorious Apricots and Cream Philosophy 3-in-1 shower extravaganza, so when I saw the Fresh Apricot scent from Tom's, I snapped it right up. The scent is really lovely, but I didn't find the deodorant itself very effective. It wore off by midday and didn't hold up at all at the gym. I like Tom's efforts to use natural products and recyclable packaging, but this was a big disappointment. I wish it had been better, but I think I'll stick with Soapwalla and the Apricots and Cream body spritz from Philosophy. Better luck next time, Tom's.

Books Yay!: Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, by Helen Simonson

2011-08-16T09:00:00.054-04:00

I finished The Elegance of the Hedgehog in my bathtub, sobbing. It was like a Lifetime movie in there, people. Ever since then, I've been chasing the beauty of that book, and while I haven't found it yet, Amazon has recommended some good books that it thinks are similar, one of them being Major Pettigrew's Last Stand.

Major Pettigrew reminds me of a man standing on the edge of the advancing Nothing in The Neverending Story. His wife has passed away, his neighbors are abandoning the British gentility which has always guided him through interactions with them, and his son is such a man of the modern age that he may as well be a different species. On the passing of his brother, Major Pettigrew's family erupts into a display of poor behavior and entitlement unlike anything he has ever seen, particularly over the matter of his brother's hunting gun, which is one of a pair owned by the men's father and split amongst them to be passed down through the family. They are a birthright, and it seems that the Major is the only one who still regards them thus. As he struggles to make sense of this disappointment and retain control of the heirlooms, he must too manage a fledgling romance with Mrs. Ali, a beautiful, quiet widow who runs the shop near his home, and deal with the ugly striving of his son.

For what is essentially a romance novel, Major Pettigrew takes on a truly impressive number of difficult topics, and explores each in remarkable depth. The overarching theme is one of cultural dynamics and how they shift. Pettigrew's father's guns were a gift for his service in colonial India, and the Major's golf club wants to throw a colonial-India-themed gala to celebrate the event. Not only do many of the members fail to understand why this is not really appropriate (white people glorifying colonialization! Hooray!), but Simonson also shows us several ways that non-white people involved with the event choose to deal with the situation - one family sees it as a business opportunity, while Mrs. Ali is clearly uncomfortable, and so on. The gala shows the hazards of glorifying times and behaviors that were dominated by the domination of other people, and it's easy to look down on those behaviors from our current time, and to brush off all of the old monarchic traditions that produced them. But Simonson is not ready to let us discount tradition entirely. Pettigrew's little village has caught the eye of developers, and their proposed atrocities would stabilize the shaky fortunes of the local Lord, whose economic footholds have grown less sure as modernity sweeps in and redistributes wealth from the aristocracy. In view of the fuckery of the gala, one might be prepared to cheer this development as sweeping away the rotting vestiges of an oppressive structure, but Simonson shows us that doing so also threatens the community bonds built under the system, which tie people together and encourage them to care for the land and buildings and people amongst which they live. It's not all bad, Simonson is telling us.

There's also an interesting look at the dynamics of Muslims living in England, as well as the differences in generations within the religion itself. Mrs. Ali is a modest woman who is mindful of her religion even as she takes soft little steps outside some of its more hardline positions, but she must contend with her nephew, who comes to the shop to deal with the woman who is mother to his child. He is extremely rigid, and has a difficult time dealing not only with his own family's trespasses but the behavior of those in the community at large. This is all before we get to the mother herself, who is a rebellious, punky woman lashing out at both the restrictions of her religion and the prejudice that she encounters in the world around her. It's a rich and lovely portrait of the decisions we all must make as religious people, and Simonson seats it beautifully in the context of English society, adding yet another layer of consideration to our view of these characters and the qualities they represent.

I don't want to tell you how it turns out for all of these people, because you should read the book on one of our remaining summer days, outside, in the sun, with a glass of iced tea. It is in turns hysterically funny, incredibly sweet and crushingly sad, and the overall effect is of a beautiful story about the way we lived and live our lives.

Books Yay!: Bossypants, by Tina Fey

2011-08-15T15:49:00.032-04:00

I've never really been a big Saturday Night Live fan. I like the best of clips and such but for whatever reason, I've just never felt compelled to watch it every Saturday night. I have the same relationship with standup comedy specials; when someone says "watch this, it's funny," I do, and it's always funny (assuming the recommender has good taste which...you know who you are, people who tried forcing me to like Dane Cook), but I still click past those specials when I'm looking for something to watch. However, despite my SNL apathy, I love Tina Fey, not only because of the brilliant Mean Girls but for her willingness to be outspoken about women and feminism in the media. What I particularly like is that she is a very real manifestation of feminism at its core. I often say to people who claim to not be feminist that feminism's essence is about women having social and political equality to direct their lives as they see fit, and anything else that a feminist claims it is about is laid over that foundation as a result of that feminist's desires. Feminism is not a monolith. Instead, it means that some women will choose to work construction and buzz their hair short and some women will choose to have dinner on the table by 5:30p in heels and pearls, but that society has pressured neither group into feeling they must do those things. I appreciate that Tina Fey exemplifies this reality; she speaks openly about feeling pressures one way or the other, and talks about the existence of those pressures while also making choices for herself that line up with all kinds of different forces. Having that conversation is important, and having an intelligent, well-spoken woman like Tina Fey to guide that conversation is a real asset.

Bossypants is a combination of memoir and general observations about life in comedy. I appreciated that it didn't lean too heavily one way or the other. It seems like many people feel like a memoir has to Say Something or have some kind of self-help-y underpinning to it, and that seems silly to me if the author isn't an actual self-help-dispensing person. If some publisher thinks you're saleable, it's because people like you and want to know about you, and I don't think that necessarily means they want to know how you got to be you. Tina Fey has written a kind of memoir of her young life and the progress of her comedy career, and the advice she does give is not about how to make it in comedy necessarily but how to apply the lessons that she gleaned from comedy in your life. I particularly liked her descriptions of her youthful awkwardness, because for once - for once! - it was framed as "man, everyone is so awkward when they're kids," which is true, instead of that stilted "don't hate me because I'm beautiful" apology-cum-compliment-fishing way so many famous beauties tend to lean towards. It might just be better writing, but it's nice that the "...so we're cool, right? I'm just like you!" tone is absent there.

I really enjoyed hearing a woman who I think most people see as very together and balanced as she Does It All explain that it is incredibly challenging to do It All, no matter how it comes off to observers. She's not bemoaning the challenges of being a mom in a competitive and time-consuming field, but rather acknowledging that those challenges exist. She is obviously happy with her choices even though they certainly contribute stress to her life, and I think that's a healthy thing to show people. Not to return to the "other memoirists are doing it wrong" place, but I do think people often breeze over big and persistent challenges without admitting that they complicate and strain their lives, and that makes the reader feel inadequate, like they should somehow feel bad about feeling pressure from challenges in their life. I don't think celebrities exist to make people feel good about themselves or anything, but I think that too much pretending success is just a walk in the park is what has given us a world where children say they want to be "a celebrity" when they grow up and where we have deranged programming like Jerseylicious.

This is a great read, and Fey's writerly voice is wonderful. This would be a great pick for a short day trip, and I think it would also be a good audiobook to pick up. It would be a good choice for young people, too. Fey does a great job of stressing the value of continual striving and hard work, and she's so relateable. I think it would really help a lot of kids realize that they can do what they want, but that the world is not just waiting outside their door to hand success over without a fight. Pick up a copy!

Friday Round Up!: Why No One Except Grandma Can Have Nice Things

2011-08-12T12:50:00.001-04:00

I missed last Friday's roundup because I was busy contemplating whether or not I should just drink myself into oblivion to cope with the debt ceiling fallout. Luckily, I've decided against it, so here's this week's hit parade!

Steampunk Fashion on Display at HCC (ABC13, Texas) First on the list is my grandmother's upcoming exhibit in Houston, TX, because Grandma is awesome and so is this exhibit. She is a fashion historian and recently gifted her historical collection (which, by the way, is about 5,000 pieces strong) to her American Costume Society compatriot Kay King at Houston Community College. Some of the pieces were used to put together a fabulous steampunk exhibit, and my Dad, Grandma and I will be headed down to Texas at the end of September for Elizabeth Brown Day and the exhibit's opening! Here's the news clip from the local ABC affiliate:
What's Happening With the London Riots? (Mother Jones) Mother Jones routinely posts these rolling update articles about major events, and I find them immensely helpful. As far as the riots, I encourage everyone not to dismiss the rioters outright. Of course there are some people who just want to watch the world burn, but this is not that simple. I point you to this quote from a young man who NBC was asking if rioting really achieved anything: "Yes. You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you? Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you." These are people fighting for a voice.
States Can Now Opt-Out of No Child Left Behind Provisions (Amy Bingham, ABC) No Child Left Behind is the single most damaging thing to happen to American education in its history, full stop. The decision to let states opt-out of its ridiculous and useless provisions is a huge step in the right direction, and I'm proud of both Secretary Duncan and the Obama Administration for taking it. I hope that it is fully dismantled in the next few years. (For some smackdown on NCLB's shitty test-based standards, you can read this report from the National Academies.)
How the US Media Marginalizes Dissent (Ted Rall, Al-Jazeera) I recently submitted a paper for publication - cross those fingers, everyone! - about the way media frame debates compared to public opinion polling. I found that overwhelmingly, the media preferred to polarize complex issues, establishing two fairly extreme poles as the dominant views and completely dropping the grey area out of the debate. I suspect few people will be surprised to hear that most of public opinion is, in fact, in the grey area. This article takes a similar approach, examining the language used to marginalize voices that don't fit the media's established framework, particularly with references to people as being "serious" or not. [NB: I have been so impressed by Al-Jazeera as a whole lately. I'm not sure if their quality has gone up or I'm just bumping into their articles more frequently, but I think they're putting out excellent, excellent work.]
Canada Has Lessons, No Answers, for US Debt Woes (Randall Palmer and John McCrank, Reuters CA) Americans often think that we are or must be wholly unique. This was particularly visible in the healthcare debate, where other nations' systems were critiqued and held up as examples of why "universal healthcare, full stop" would not work, but not examined as systems that we could either pillage for parts or learn from to build a better system. Instead, the discourse went something like "we must create a system wholly new or nothing." Our politics have suffered from this mindset, because it disconnects us from historical context that provides balance and depth for our political system as a whole. This article talks about Canada's own happy fun time with debt problems and explains a bit about how they recovered, though it rightly admits that exactly replicating Canada's approach would not be a perfect fit.
Megyn Kelly Destroys Guy Who Called Her Maternity Leave a Racket (Maureen O'Connor, Gawker) I can't usually stand Megyn Kelly, but this clip is absolutely glorious. She is dead on, the guy looks openly embarassed - as he should - and he has zero response. I hope Kelly remembers this interaction the next time she's railing about entitlements (as Jon Stewart pointed out the other night).
Us. And Them. (Chris Carroll, National Geographic) An interesting article on the progress of humanoid and "helper" robots, and the ethical challenges posed by their development. I know I'm That Girl Who Always Talks About Robots, but this is a serious thing - military funding is pushing a lot of robotics development while shelving ethical considerations, and with the push for AI, there's a very real danger that technology may progress beyond where we CAN place ethical frameworks on robots. This needs to be talked about.
Falcon HTV-2 is Lost During Bid to Become Fastest Ever Plane (Ian Sample, The Guardian) Speaking of DARPA funded projects, the Falcon HTV-2, a rocket launched unmanned aircraft capable of travelling at Mach 20 and crossing the continental United States in 12 minutes, was lost during a test flight. This makes me sad even though I know it's a weapon of war, because I've been clinging to wild aviation projects like this following the death of the shuttle program.
Rare Sand Cat Kitten Gives Hope for Conservation (Zooborns) WARNING: WEAPONIZED CUTENESS AT LINK. A sand cat kitten was recently born at Zoological Center Tel Aviv - Ramat Gan, and is currently wiping the floor with all other comers in the Adorable Baby Animal Olympics (Cat Division). This is a big, exciting deal, as sand cats are endangered and have great difficulty breeding in captivity.
Every Picture Tells a Story (Janice Harvey, Worcester Magazine) A couple weeks ago, Janice Harvey wrote a column about how totes grody laydees with tattoos are. Not surprisingly, people did not like this, and proceeded to call her an asshole loudly, publicly and aggressively. She published an apology the other day, and while I appreciate the guts it takes to apologize publicly, I think this apology is kind of a template for how NOT to do it. It basically amounts to "you just didn't get it" (if you click through to the original, you'll see why her trying to play it off as humor is either incredibly disingenuous or demonstrative of a fundamental lack of understanding about how humor works) followed by "you guys were mean just like I said you were, you trashy bitches." I give her points for trying to change her attitude, but she has a long way to go in understanding that there is no single type of woman (or man) who gets a tattoo. (That it was shitty to use a public forum to trash a specific demographic still seems to elude her, so...whatever.) Janice, maybe this will help: I've owned my own businesses, I'm a Ph.D candidate in a very conservative field, I'm married, I wear makeup and heels, and I have tattoos. Keep your shit in your own basket.
Teaching With Twitter (Kohenari) This is a very cool project wherein a professor at the University of Nebraska is teaching his political theory course with Twitter, and invites outside folks to join in. I'll be doing this course and I hope you will too!

This week's music comes from the Great White North Courtesy of Chief Economic Adviser Len Badwin, who unfortunately linked me this video when he was upset about missing a music festival at which the Tea Party would be playing. While it's sad he missed the festival, I'm glad he linked me the video because I quite like it. As with so much Canadian music, good luck finding it on iTunes.

What the HELL, iTunes.

My Face Just Does That (But You Still Shouldn't Vote For Me)

2011-08-10T14:28:00.001-04:00

Right, so this:

Sorry if that made you spill your coffee.

People are in a big snit about this cover, and the criticisms range from "why did you make her look so crazy?" to "it's sexist!" The sexism charge bears some examination, and a lot of people have suggested applying the "what would people say if this happened to a man" standard. I think they're probably right to say that people would freak if Newsweek posted a picture of a male Presidential candidate looking this...bad. I mean, that's the reality of it, this is a bad picture of a pretty woman. Some people are trying to argue that there are plenty of pictures bouncing around the internet of McCain or Bush looking whacked out, and that's true, but we're not talking about pictures bandied around on the internet, we're talking about a horrible picture on the cover of a major news publication (...no comment on whether or not that's good), captioned "The Queen of Rage," which doesn't even make sense. I do think the media is comfortable with savaging female candidates in a way that they simply aren't with male candidates, and we've seen it from Clinton to Palin to Bachmann. That in and of itself reeks of "oh, look at this little girl, trying to play White House." And to the editors and reporters who perpetuate that crap, I have nothing but hearty Fuck Yous, always and forever.

That said.

I'm not entirely sure this photo is AS non-representative as everyone would like it to be. Michele Bachmann HAS crazy Manson-lamp eyes. They're very pale against her dark hair, and she often wears dark suits. Here's her Congressional photo, to the left. Those eyes are still unsettling. She also tends to do a thing where she's not quite looking at the camera but a little bit above it (and I'm speaking generally, not about that snafu with the response to the State of the Union where she just wasn't looking at the right camera). What I think is going on is an attempt to counteract eyes that squint a bit. When I smile widely, my eyes all but disappear. This happens to my whole family. Sometimes, when it's an important photo or I'm just conscious of it, I try to hold my eyes open. The result is usually much like both Rep. Bachmann's Congressional portrait and the Newsweek cover. I look a little too intense, like I'm trying to steal someone's soul through the camera. When you try to compensate for stuff your face does naturally, you're inevitably going to produce some weird looking alternatives. As someone who is in the public eye frequently, I'm guessing that this is always at the front of Rep. Bachmann's mind, and it should be.

Much better.

When I work with speechwriting clients on delivery, one of the things we talk about is being aware of what our bodies get up to while we're not paying attention and counteracting it. I, for instance, touch my face ALL the time, and I also tap podiums when I use them. When I am speaking in public, I adjust for those things so I give a more polished performance. I'm sure someone has talked to Rep. Bachmann about this and that it's something she focuses on. I suspect this because the further she gets from a purely photo-op-centric environment, the more natural she looks.

Now, all of this aside, I vehemently dislike Bachmann and think she'd be a disaster of a President. She's way too interested in producing a theocracy, she's aggressively anti-LGBTQ, she's simply wrong about a bunch of important facts, and she's way too willing to shift her stories to fit the moment, up to and including her own personal history. I believe that she is a dangerous person. I highly recommend reading Matt Taibbi's excellent profile of Bachmann in Rolling Stone for a more in depth analysis of why she needs to be kept as far away as possible from the White House. But not because of a bad Newsweek cover.

An Open Letter to the Tiny Puritan Who Lives in My iPad

2011-08-09T09:00:00.000-04:00

Dear Wee Puritan,

First of all, I would like to thank you for your tireless corrections to my typing. Sometimes I use my iPad on the train and things get a little jostley, and it's nice to count on you to correct my typing when some inconsiderate jerk flounces into the seat next to me with an entire office's worth of papers and laptops, skooshing me into the window and knocking over my various belongings.

Second, are you okay in there? I always thought of Puritans as being - forgive me - a bit narrow of thought, but certainly as full sized human beings. I know that Apple's manufacturing has been under fire lately, so I'm a little concerned that the process of getting you in there was not a pleasant one. If you want to get out, please send a sign and I'll see if I can figure something out. I hope you're okay in there.

Third, and most importantly...we need to have a talk. It's 2011 and while I recognize that you probably think the amount of swearing I do is extremely unladylike, an affront to morality, and unchristian, but you're going to have to accept that I am going to swear, and I'm going to do it a lot. When I write "hell," I do in fact mean "a firey place where bad people burn in eternity." I am not going for "he'll," and honestly, Tiny Puritan friend, if you looked at the context, which I know you can do, those two words aren't really interchangeable. One's a contraction, for goodness' sake. We also have to talk about the word "fucking." I use that one a lot, buddy. It's not going to change, especially not if those fools in Congress keep ruining everything. I don't mean "ducking," Tiny Puritan. I am not talking about ways to test for witches, and I am not talking about walking under low doorframes. I am cussing because sometimes profanity is the only way to go, and so help me, I am going for the big guns when the occasion calls for them. You have got to stop changing that one, because it ruins my flow and my flow is very important to me. This extends to all usage: do not twist my words into treatises about waterfowl, sudden drops in altitude, or references to "motherduckers."

Motherducker isn't even a word, Tiny Puritan.

You need to knock that shit off posthaste. I'm worried about your living and working conditions, because my iPad is pretty small, but if you do not stop messing with my cussing fits, we are going to have issues. Stop sanitizing my work, or I'm going to run the iPad through the dishwasher and then everyone will be upset.

Love,

Jos

Someone Give Fox25 a Medal

2011-08-08T15:27:00.000-04:00

Apparently our local Fox syndicate has had a busy 2011. They have this amazing commercial playing right now, which opens with lots of whooshing and screens that read "News in Boston"/"is RELENTLESS" before cutting to a series of dates and clips, with freaking bomb countdown noises in the background. The overall effect is a suggestion that the Fox25 News Team somehow orchestrated the news stories being shown, and it is HYSTERICAL. Here are some of their achievements to date:

4/26/11: "Police in Boston found the baby alone in the car, but the mom has not been seen in days..."

5/1/11: "Osama bin Laden is dead, there are thousands of people on the Common right now..."

5/2/11: "...he was found in a compound in Pakistan."

5/16/11: "The bitter reality is they have no idea who this little boy was..."

6/1/11: "At least three tornadoes turning homes into piles of rubble...right over the city of Springfield..."

6/2/11: "It is incredible to see these [tornado] sites first hand..."

6/15/11: "The Bruins pull off a game 7 victory...[A Bruin speaking, I think Tim Thomas:] 'Best day of my life, woooo!'...Your Bruins, Stanley Cup champions, get those Duck boats ready!"

6/22/11: "James Whitey Bulger captured in Santa Monica, California...he was hiding with several hundred thousand dollars inside his apartment."

6/24/11: In all of New England history there has never been a case like [the Bulger case]..."

[AS RELENTLESS AS THE NEWS WE COVER]

My favorite part of all of this (besides the bomb noise) is that the last mention of authorities of any kind as drivers of the action is in the first item, which gives the whole thing the sense that for instance Kevin Lemanowicz, the meteorologist, went down to Springfield and called down the tornadoes, or the female reporter (who I don't recognize) talking about Whitey Bulger actually captured him. It's the most spectacular little dose of hyperbole I've seen in a long time. I insist that these people be recognized for their good work immediately, and be dispatched to Washington to fix all the disaster down there. After all, it's not every year that you find numerous abandoned/dead children, take out Public Enemy Number One, summon tornadoes, win a Stanley Cup AND catch Whitey Bulger. GIVE THESE PEOPLE THEIR DUE!

On the Debt Ceiling and Its Attendant Fuckery

2011-08-07T16:08:00.000-04:00

The debt ceiling situation broke my soul a little, so I haven't been talking about it in this space much. It actually got so bad at one point that I wound up making an agreement with my primary talking-about-politics friend to not talk about politics for several days because even though we usually agree, we were creating this stressful echo chamber of rage every time the debt ceiling came up. However, a couple of my friends have asked about my thoughts on the matter, and it's important to talk about this stuff so people know what's going on and what should be going on. I responded to a request for my thoughts on Facebook, and I'll flesh it out here (though not too much, since I got on a tear and the comment wound up being almost 1000 words).

1. No fucking way should this ever have been the clusterfuck it was. The debt ceiling is a self-imposed mechanism that deals with the Treasury's ability to pay what Congress tells it to. Congress has a say in what we pay for via the budget process. When it gets to an issue of needing to raise the debt ceiling, the time to fight about what comprises our debt is long since over - the money has been spent and it's a matter of letting the Treasury pay the bill. This should have been a clean raise and I think Obama should have used the 14th Amendment to at least demand that it be that way, even if he wasn't comfortable addressing the additional budget considerations that (stupidly) got rolled into the debate by allowing the GOP to frame the discussion early on. Coming out swinging and using the 14th Amendment to frame the debt ceiling raise as a narrow discussion would have made everything a lot clearer and less stupid for everyone.

2. Anyone who didn't come away from this realizing that the Tea Party members of Congress are a dangerous group of privileged assholes with the GOP's nuts in a vise is a fucking moron. They have twice now demonstrated that they do not understand how government works, as evidenced by the budget shit they tacked on to this debate and the policy riders they tacked onto the budget discussions, which you may remember as "the last time they almost shut the government down." They are a bunch of childish, ignorant, selfish assholes and I am done pretending otherwise. If they were truly about the objectivist, libertarian ideology they say they are, they would join up with the incredibly rich, nuanced and energetic libertarian community in this country. But they aren't. They care about draconian social conservatism and don't give a shit about liberty in any way shape or form. I understand that there are Tea Party members who do genuinely care about liberty and want to deny this reality of the Tea Party, but they are wrong, and I am sorry. Those people who don't want to be called racist, sexist, xenophobic ignoramouses need to get the fuck out of the Tea Party because that is what these Tea Party candidates and representatives are bringing to the table.

2a. I believe that everyone's voice is worth hearing in American politics. That doesn't mean I think everyone's voice needs to be acted on, but I think they all need to be heard, not only because democracy runs on dissent but also because an idea that cannot stand up to challenges is a bad one to act on. Establishing certain ideas as status quo and expecting them to stay that way forever dooms any polity to failure; continual challenges to them keep them vibrant, adaptable and relevant. However, lying to the people you're ostensibly in a discussion with is not acceptable and represents a forfeit of your legitimacy in the debate. Speaker John Boehner got up in front of the American public and lied to their faces about what was at stake, where the debt had come from, the need for budget cuts to be appended to the debt ceiling, and his own interactions. That is shitty at best and treasonous at worst. John Boehner has been in Congress much longer than the Tea Party has existed. That he was willing to set aside his institutional knowledge to advance a foul and dangerous Tea Party plan is incredibly disturbing.

3. I am disappointed in Obama's choices, but I am MOST disappointed in the way he handled the negotiations and who apparently attended them. Nancy Pelosi never should have been third man in on those discussions and it sounds like she was. There has been a lot of theorizing that this is part of a larger play to the middle on Obama's part. If that is the case, it's a huge mistake.

3a. I probably would have invoked the 14th Amendment and drafted an Executive Order for a clean raise. The problem with this is that out debt's stability resonates through our markets and the world economy, and markets are a game of confidence. [Insert con game pun here as necessary] The deadline was met. We made it. Yay. I guess. Except there will be doubt about the stability of our bonds for years to come, and that is a dangerous thing for both our economy and the world's. Markets were dipping well ahead of the deadline, and S&P basically had to be talked out of downgrading out AAA rating during the process, and has now gone ahead and done it. Markets don't make autonomous decisions - the numbers don't decide whether to go up or down. They are chaotic systems and they operate on peoples and groups' whims and fears. This has been damaging for us already, and pretending otherwise is fucking foolish.

I think Obama resisted using the 14th Amendment because he understands that entering into negotiations like this and then acting unilaterally would have an effect on our governance and political system that would outlast even the economic costs of a default, and that it would be worse. No matter what these ignorant motherfuckers tell you, that man understands and respects the Constitution, and he understands that American democracy is contingent on compromise in the service of a communal project of governance. I respect the shit out of that even if I would have made a different decision.

4. All that said, everyone needs to calm the fuck down. I'm already twat-deep in people getting all hysterical about about we need to recall Obama and how he's betrayed us and 2012 we're all voting for Ralph Nader...no. Shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down. You have two options in 2012, and those options are Barack Obama and whatever the shit the GOP comes up with, and you bet your ass there's a chance it could be Michele "Crazy Pants" Bachmann. The deal is not one I like, and I would have liked to see either a.) a clean raise or if budget shit just HAD to be involved, b.) one with a tax increase for the rich ~~and dramatic military cuts~~ [Note: the plan as passed includes $350B in cuts to the base military budget with potential for more. The People's View has a great overview of what's going on and why everyone should calm down.]. As it is, the debt ceiling is good through 2013, so we don't have to go through this fuckery again until after the election which I assure you benefits everyone. In the agreement, Obama managed to preserve Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security while also securing big time military cuts, which fucking NO ONE has been talking about since ever and which we desperately need to be talking about. I also think that this can be parlayed into a solid smackdown of the Bush Tax Cuts when they come up again soon, because the Tea Party and GOP just spent 6 months showing what a bunch of priviledged corporocrats they are and how wrong they are about fiscal policy. People are already tired of these motherfuckers telling them how business should get off scott free while everyone else sucks it up. That shit is not going to fly again.

5. My main concern is with this special committee, which entrenches the two party system and is unconstitutional. We have a group to figure out cuts to the budget. It's called FUCKING CONGRESS and we ELECT IT.

TL:DR: That shit was exhausting and stupid and never should have happened, but the deal isn't as bad as all the pearl clutchers are making it out to be.

Navigational Difficulties

2011-08-05T16:14:00.000-04:00

Once upon a time I got lost in Pennsylvania.

If you've driven though Pennsylvania, you may know that large swathes of it kind of all look the same. It's beautiful, all rolling hills and nice greenways and the exact same gas station in all 46,055 square miles, why, WHY I ask you is it like that, but if you are not sure where you are, it can be a little disconcerting. I got lost pre-GPS (in my life anyway) and didn't have a Pennsylvania map. You would think that my Quakerness would come with some kind of inborn Pennsylvania-specific GPS system, but this is not in fact the case. I threw a Hail Mary pass and called my Dad. This is how it went.

Me: Dad, I'm lost in Pennsylvania and I don't know what the hell I'm doing.

Dad: Okay, what was the last road you were on?

Me: 84. No. 81. Maybe. Or 78.

Dad: What did the last exit you saw look like?

Me: [describes median and shape of exit.]

Dad: What are you looking at now?

Me: The Pennsylvanian variety of gas station. It's kind of blue.

Dad: Oh, okay. Here's what you do.

And then he gave me directions from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts, including exit numbers. There may be slight paraphrasing in here, but the bottom line is that I described my surroundings to him and he managed to give me exit-by-exit directions home. He used to drive trucks, so he's been all over the place, and appears to have spent much of his time on the road memorizing America's highway infrastructure. This is both awesome and useful.

I've inherited a lot of Dad's traits, but the navigational skillz are not on the list. I rarely know what street I'm on, and this includes streets in Worcester, where I've spent the vast majority of my driving life. If you ask me to give you directions, I will force you to navigate by trees and sculptures. This is totally confusing to Dad. Now, he is a strong believer in forcing you to work your own shit out. At one point in high school when he was trying to force me to work out navigation at the kitchen table before I went somewhere, I snapped, grabbed a piece of paper, and sketched something like this:

No, it's not some kind of black magic diagram.

This was my explanation of how I understand American public planning. What this indicates is that there is one path from my house to various locations I frequent, the paths never cross, and I don't know what I'm passing through on my way. This does add a certain excitement factor to driving, because I occasionally pass one of my known landmarks on my way to another known landmark and get all excited about this newfound knowledge. Over time, I've gotten better at navigation, but I still rely on a GPS if one's available, because occasionally my brain snaps back into "AND THERE IS NO OTHER PATH" mode and I immediately get lost.

The genetics, they are strong...but they can't save me.

Living with Cats is Much like Stockholm Syndrome, Y/Y?

2011-08-02T12:50:00.000-04:00

The sound that cats make before they puke.

I'm guessing that pretty much everyone just thought of the same thing, and many of you thought of it before you even got to "that cats make before they puke" because that sound is the most horribly distinctive noise ever for some reason. Important question: why is it so frigging resonant? The cat could be downstairs inside his little litterbox igloo and I could have my headphones on while vacuuming upstairs and I'd still hear that shit.

Anyway, the orange one started making that noise a few minutes ago. I'm writing a technical paper right now, which means I've been spending a lot of time sitting on the couch with my laptop on my lap and an extravagant blanket of paper and binders and like...assorted writing detritus locking me in. So the cat starts making the vomit noise, and I look down at the ground helplessly, at which point he barfs on my mitten book. And of course he barfs on the mitten book, because it took me three months to find a replacement copy when I lost it a while back and then took two weeks to actually get delivered. Do you know what the first thing I thought was?

"Well at least he puked on the book and not the carpet."

THAT IS NOT HEALTHY. That's like going "well, at least he only hits me in the torso so no one notices my black eyes." Some freaking animal puked on my belongings and I approved of his choice of barf locale! I used to be sane. Oh and needless to say he ralphed up fish food flakes because his OTHER favorite way to bring joy to my life is knocking the fish flakes off the table and last night when he did it, the cap fell off. The other cat, by the way, is sleeping on all of my papers at once somehow, and emits whiney squeaks when I try to use them, like, "sorry cat, I'd hate to disrupt your life, since you get paid for using these materials and all. OH WAIT."

Yeah, they look cute now. Fuckin' cats.

Bli Sterk, Norge.

2011-07-27T15:59:00.000-04:00

I've started trying to write about Norway many times this week, and every time I get stuck. I'm a political scientist, so I want to say something comprehensive and true about the political factors that were in play during this violence, but that's not what I, the person who is incidentally a political scientist, want to say, and it's not what actually drives me to write about it. There is no dearth of writing about Norway, and I could probably just leave it alone and no one would notice. But I can't leave it alone because it won't leave me alone. So I thought about this and I think I know how to write about it.

My Mom spent a year in Norway after her graduation from Middlebury, making friends and taking classes and learning Norwegian. When we were kids, she used to swear in Norwegian so even if we DID repeat what she said, people probably wouldn't know. Crafty lady, my Mom. Unfortunately, we eventually got older and increased our powers of persuasion, and we used them to make her tell us what she was saying. This wasn't as satisfying as one would hope, as is so often the case with swearing in other languages; you're expecting a one-to-one translation but it often turns out that someone's getting called a moldy foot or something. The standby for road rage was pretty good, though. It went fy faen i helvete, du er en drittsekk, which is "the devil in hell, you're a shitsack." We adopted "drittsekk" as a kind of family shibboleth, because we're really classy like that. This led to a really great family moment several years later when we were visiting Norwegian friends in South Carolina and overheard a tantrum-throwing six year old call her mother a drittsekk, to our immense collective amusement.

Many of Mom's friends came to visit us over the years, and we still exchange Christmas presents with many of them. One visit was from her host parents, and Reidar, who was a beautiful painter, went down to Little Indian Lake to paint and somehow, despite speaking no English, managed to charm the faces off some kids fishing down there. They sent him home with a still-flopping and fairly large fish in a plastic bag (?????). He came rolling up the front walk with this fish in a bag yelling "fiske, fiske, fiske" and we put it in the clawfoot bathtub and fed it fish food flakes for three days before sanity was mustered and we took it back to the lake. (In retrospect, he probably expected that we would kill and eat it, as you do when you get an edibly-sized fish. He did not realize he was dealing with suburbanites.) All of these visits were equally great, because Norwegians are generally wonderful, and Mom seems to have befriended the absolute best of Norway, which is not surprising if you have ever met my Mom. The longest visit, though, was from Cecilie, my parents' exchange student.

Mom and Cecile at my wedding in 2009

Cecilie arrived in Worcester in 2006, and she is awesome. Longtime readers of this blog may recognize her as "the Weege," who came on a cruise with my college roommate and I in an incredible lapse of good judgment on my mother's part. ("Take the underage Norwegian entrusted to my care on a cruise under the supervision of two drunks? Absolutely!" IT WAS FINE, DON'T WORRY, MOM.) [NB: longtime readers will also be glad to know that Cecilie, her family and her friends are all okay.] Cecilie and I really hit it off, and we had a total blast going on adventures and talking and hanging out. She was also a constant source of unintentional humor. For example, she once came home from school having removed large chunks of skin from her legs by falling off her bike. I know that doesn't sound very funny. Here's why it is: she fell off her bike because she was eating yogurt while riding. With a spoon. She and I have kept in touch and she came back to stand up for me at my wedding. This allowed us to relive another humorous incident. Cecilie was going to prom and wasn't interested in, you know, Googling dress size equivalents, so she just kind of ordered a dress in a size that sounded good. I'm still not sure how she breathed at prom, because it took Mom and I both to wrassle her into it. Who does that? The best part is, J. Crew, whence my bridesmaid dresses came, doesn't ship to Norway, so she had to ship her dress to my parents' house and see if it fit a couple days before the wedding. Kind of time sensitive, so obviously, she did the pick-a-size-any-size routine again. I don't know, you guys. It worked out okay both times though, so maybe I shouldn't mock.

In any case, we talked a lot about politics and culture, because there was a lot of stuff that Cecilie ran into that made her wonder what the hell was in the water over here, as well as a lot of stuff that she was simply curious about. It's thinking about these conversations that make me feel so sad for Norway in the wake of this massacre. Talking with Cecilie showed me that Norwegian culture simply does not include violence and guns in the same way that American culture does. This is not to say that there's no crime in Norway and everyone has a faintly glowing halo floating above their heads at all times. Instead, it means that you would not buy a gun for "home defense" because first of all a human life is more sacred than physical property and secondly, why would you stand and deliver when you could escape, stay safe, and call the cops? Resorting to violence is simply not a thing, and in many cases, not an option, because there are so few guns. I offered to take Cecilie up shooting with friends while she was here, and she was amazed that average people would just HAVE guns to take to the range to shoot around. She didn't totally get what I meant when I said we could go shooting because her prevailing understanding of guns did not include random people having them.

It's hard for Americans to imagine a culture so bereft of guns and so adverse to violence. Even if we don't own guns and even if we don't like guns, we are still bombarded at all times with violent imagery from every kind of media. Guns and violence are glorified and held up as solutions to problems, and even when they're not being glorified, they are often treated as a common fact of life. That is simply not there in Norway. Now, imagine that you are in this culture, and let's even assume that you're pretty cosmopolitan and you know about gun culture in the US and you kind of get it even if you think the American gun fixation is weird. It's still something that's Over There. Imagine this, and then imagine Anders Behring Breivik.

Breivik's actions were shocking even for we jaded Americans. The idea that someone would gather children around and open fire on them, that someone would fire on children swimming away in a desperate bid for the mainland, that someone would bomb government buildings...these are shocking ideas. These are shocking ideas even to people who remember Timothy McVeigh. These are shocking ideas to people who remember September 11th. They are the acts of a dangerous and evil man. But even as we are shocked, Americans should remember that this is a thousand times worse for Norway, not only because the death toll was proportionately worse than September 11th and because it happened on Norwegian soil, but because these attacks represent a leap in conception of violence so much greater than it would be for us. We shouldn't count our high tolerance for violence as a positive, but we can understand how it would be some insulation against at least a small part of the trauma.

I read an article today that included some texts from one of the young women stuck on Utøya who survived. She texted her mother "I love you even if I still misbehave from time to time." Her mother told her to "give a sign of life every five minutes." For me, all of Norway is in those two sentences. That Julie, a 16 year old, would think to mention that she still misbehaves from time to time while hiding from a gunman, seems to express such a fully realized love that my heart breaks as I think about it. Her mother's asking for a sign of life every five minutes - five minutes! How could you have the strength to ask your child for something so reasonable, instead of begging for continual interaction? I could write another 10,000 words and never hit on what it is about these phrases that is so Norwegian. They are so real, and so practical, even in the most chaotic possible circumstances. It is my hope that that same resolute attachment to truth, strength and the Norwegian way will carry Norway through this terrible time and emerge stronger than ever.

Bli sterk, Norge.

Books Yay!: My Booky Wook, by Russell Brand

2011-07-26T09:00:00.000-04:00

At some point, I realized that I had to accept that I loved Katy Perry and Russell Brand, and that was awkward. I didn't really like Katy Perry and I didn't know who the hell Russell Brand was, but they were so damn cute in interviews about their engagement and eventual marriage that all my defenses were worn to the ground. They were just so sincere and so respectful of each other, and I really liked seeing a big couple demonstrating that kind of equal and balanced relationship in public. I also came to terms with the fact that damn it, I like Katy Perry's catchy music no matter how hard I try to resist, and you can judge me for that all you want, but there is no way I have a chance against someone who makes a music video about having fireworks explode out of your chest, which is basically the superpower I would choose if I had the option because I love fireworks, people.

After these revelations, I thought, "well, I don't know much about this Brand fellow besides his relationship with my new BFF and his propensity for wearing ridiculous pants," and checked out his autobiography. I hate when reviewers get all existential about book covers, but the title really does tell you a lot about Brand: this isn't some serious tome about his grind to the top, but a serious and surprisingly objective look back at the imperfect life of someone who doesn't take himself seriously. Brand is refreshingly open about his myriad fuck-ups, and he doesn't attempt to glamourize them, even as he admits the charms of that lifestyle. He freely admits that he was kind of a shitty person for an extended period of time, and I really liked his willingness to stand up, now ostensibly having gotten his act together, and say "look, this was fun at the time but it made me a legitimately bad person and that is not a good thing."

Brand also talks about being a smart and talented person and what knowing that did to wreak havoc on his life. I really related to this; while I've avoided fucking up on Brand's scale, I know what it's like to decide you can coast on your natural talents and then have that come back to bite you. He rolled through drama programs and schools and environments, getting bored and resisting direction throughout, and in the end, that cost him opportunities and friendships. It's a good warning to anyone feeling those pangs of boredom. This is a problem that is tough to articulate, and Brand really handled it well.

This is a great summer read. Brand is a funny bastard, and as is the case with so many great comedians, much of his best humor can come from sadness or tragedy. I'm not sure how much of this book he wrote, but my impression is actually that most of it is his work, and while that in and of itself is admirable in a time when it's much more popular to hire a ghostwriter, it also represents the gift of a talented voice. It is always hard to understand how someone becomes famous, because most famous people take careful note of those they knew on their way who were just as talented and even sometimes harder working, but didn't make it, and Brand's discussion of the weirdness of fame is fascinating and deftly relayed.

Side note: Russell Brand recently posted a truly beautiful and insightful tribute to Amy Winehouse. It is worth a read. You can check it out on his website and I highly recommend that you do.

TRUE LIFE: Confucius Say, Josie is Not that Bright

2011-07-25T15:17:00.000-04:00

Ben: I suppose we should remove the logs from Paul's yard before we clear specks from others'.

Josie: That was very Confucian of you, Benny!

Ben: *facepalm*

Josie: [some other unrelated comment]

Ben: Please tell me you know why I facepalmed you.

Josie: Because...jesus christ, that's a real thing, isn't it?

Yeeeeeeeeep. Matthew 7:5. WHICH I KNOW. (Prof. LePain, please don't come to my house.) I particularly like that I compounded my dopery by taking the Lord's name aggressively in vain. Good job, Jos.

I, for one, look forward to hearing about this for the rest of my natural born life.

Domestication Has Its Consequences

2011-07-25T09:00:00.000-04:00

What's wrong with this picture?

BESIDES being a violation of every photo composition rule ever.

You might have missed it, so here's a closer shot.

There's a fucking rabbit right over there.

We have all these rabbits all over the place, which would be nice if they would stop eating my goddamn dahlias, and the cats are kind of vaguely interested in them. Every now and then, we let the cats out on the deck to see if they can catch one. I am fully aware that sounds super mean and jerky, but the reality is that these animals are totally incompetent. In that second picture, it kind of looks like Flyboy is looking at the rabbit, right? Wrong. Neither of these idiots even NOTICED the bunny. This was not a small rabbit. I could have gotten to it in about four running steps. Cady spent the whole time purring and rubbing up against that post, and Flyboy was just roaming around sniffing things.

These animals would die in about four minutes outside. They're lucky they're cute, is all I'm saying.

What My Workout Sounds Like On the Elliptical

2011-07-24T15:54:00.001-04:00

To Me

Like a G6, Far East Movement
Magic, B.o.B and Rivers Cuomo
Diva, Beyonce
Break Ya Neck, Busta Rhymes
Up In Here, DMX
Right Round, Flo Rida
Lose Control, Missy Elliott
Carry Out, Timbaland feat. Justin Timberlake
Blow, Ke$ha
I Wanna Go, Britney Spears
Party Rock Anthem, LMFAO
Hello, Martin Solveig feat. Dragonette
Let It Rock, Kevin Rudolf feat. Lil Wayne

To People Who Are Not Me

whizz

"..gettin' slizzered..."

whizz

"I'm a wikie woo, I'ma I'ma wikie woo"

whizz

"hahaha riots!"

whizz

*tapping on machine handles*

whizz

*whistling bit from "I Wanna Go"*

whizz

"Every day I'm shuf-shuff'lin'"

whizz

"Hello!"

whizz

"Cady, it's water and no pants time!"

Shockingly, Most People Can Care About More Than One Thing At Once

2011-07-23T18:19:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, 7 people were killed in a bombing in Oslo and 84 more were executed at a Labor Party camp in Utøya. Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian, has been arrested for the island massacre and a connection to the bombing. Obviously, there is still a lot of information shaking out. This is an incredibly sad and unusual violent event for Norway, and I'd imagine that the "that doesn't happen here" shock that Norwegians are experiencing today and will continue to feel is almost as traumatic as the violence itself. I'll certainly be holding Norway in the light, and I'm sure many other Americans will be doing the same. [NB: For those who know the Weege, she and her family and friends are all fine.]

Today, Amy Winehouse died at the age of 27.

About five minutes after the first wave of Facebook linking about Winehouse's death went by, a second wave started building, this one featuring people saying things to the effect of "that shitty good-for-nothing Amy Winehouse finally died so obviously all you callous stupid assholes will stop talking and thinking about Norway." This is my least favorite kind of self-righteous douchery and I would like to address it.

In re: this Specific Instance
1. Amy Winehouse very obviously had a lot of shit in her life that she was struggling to deal with. The overall tone of "who cares, she was worthless because she did drugs all the time" is so, so shitty. Anyone who dies at 27 deserves a measure of pity. Drug users and drug addicts do not stop being human because of their drug use. Stop minimizing a troubled person's humanity because they did shit you didn't like or sang songs you didn't happen to enjoy.

2. Sadness is not a zero-sum game, nor is concern, nor is attention. Norway's tragedy is an entirely different situation from Amy Winehouse. Amazingly enough, people can care about more than one thing at once, even in different ways!

General Fuckery
Stop. Playing. Sadness. Olympics. There is a lot of sadness in this world and it takes a lot of different forms. That's how life goes.

Here's a test, in 60 seconds I'm going to name all the sad things worthy of consideration I can think of.

Sochi Olympics
Canadian oil sands
The debt ceiling
Darfur's reconstruction
The Greek economy
Famine in Somalia
Child soldiers everywhere
US poverty rates
No Child Left Behind
Afghanistan
IEDs
Walter Reed's closure
Guantanamo Bay
Global warming

All of those things? Are worthy of consistent and focused consideration. So I read about them. They do not need ranking and even when I am focusing on one or the other intently, sometimes one of my friends is going to link me to a game or something and I am going to get distracted and think about that for a while. You don't get to suggest that because I give a shit about Amy Winehouse passing away, I am somehow less serious or less able to be worried about Norway and its larger implications. I don't assume you're a fucking moron who can't hold two thoughts in your head at the same time, so do me the same courtesy.

I'm Just Really, Really Romantic: a Phone Call with Dad

2011-07-20T12:04:00.000-04:00

Dad: Hello?

Me: Hey Dad, think fast, what's your social?

Dad: 555-12-1212.

Me: Do you know Mom's offhand?

Dad: 555-21-2121.

Me: Nice! I can't even remember Rich's birthday consistently, I'm impressed.

Dad: Let me just verify that. *rustling* Yep, that's it. So what did I just buy?

Me: Ha ha, nothing, I'm just going down to the Social Security office to change my name. They need your parents' socials to do it, I guess.

Dad: That's exciting!

Me: Well, yeah. We've been married two years, I figure "no time like the present."

Dad: Ha ha, but it's still a big step! Exciting!

Me: My license is expired, too, so I really need to replace it so I don't get arrested. I figure I should just change my name at the same time.

**********************************************
Poor Dad. I feel like every time he thinks he has girls figured out, one of his damn children ruins everything.

Note to future brides: Even if you don't plan on changing your name, make sure you request a copy of your wedding license when you send it in. I didn't, because I assumed that they would send me a receipt of some kind. [NB: in Massachusetts at least, you apply for the license, the officiant signs it after the ceremony is done, and you mail it back to the state.] This lead to two interesting things. First, I wasn't sure if we were actually married, because in Quaker weddings, you're declaring your intentions "in the presence of God and these our Friends," so there's no real officiant and the Clerk of Meeting kind of just stands in as a wedding referee to explain what the hell is going on to the non-Quakers. The state, however, requires that the officiant be all registered with them and what have you, so I wasn't sure how that was going to work out. GOOD NEWS, WE'RE MARRIED! This is particularly good because I think if I had told Rich that we were only pretend married and had to go to City Hall, he would have killed me and hidden my body in the woods.

The second interesting thing I learned is that the state of Massachusetts will jack you for $40 to order a copy of your license and it will take two weeks. What. the shit, Massachusetts. This is of course ostensibly my fault since I should have paid attention to the "free now, $40 later" angle, but STILL, $40? That shit should have come embossed with gold leaf all over it. Anyway, order your license when you're sending it in so you don't get all resentful and fussy.

My Life As A Human Encyclopedia

2011-07-19T09:00:00.002-04:00

Somehow I have managed to accumulate bug bites on my toes, which is like...fate worse than death, because I lack the emotional maturity to deal with them gracefully and instead walk around dragging my feet topside down along the carpet like I'm mid-evolutionary-step and shearing all the skin off the top of my feet, making the entire problem worse. What can I say, I'm pretty awesome. I tend to set things like this aside when I, for instance, tell the story about the girl at American who told me - in a single conversation, mind you - about her full ride to AU as well as the fact that her doctor forbade her from using Q-tips because she lacked the emotional maturity to resist jamming them into her ear canal and deafening herself. TRUE STORY. In any case, I decided to take a bath last night to soothe my bug bites and carpet-gashes, and I took my iPad in there because ~~I'm creepy~~ I wanted to read while I soaked. By "read" I in fact mean "switch between tumblr and Facebook while playing Words With Friends." At one point I clicked over to Facebook and found this:

So here's the thing. Kym has hit me with a broad range of random questions over the course of our friendship, refers to my Facebook wall as a news source, and occasionally sends me things like legal contracts saved as "sendtojosiesheknowseverything.docx." She seems to routinely hit topics that I happen to know about, like legal crap which I can give a somewhat sensible opinion on because it's a topic that comes up on the Peoples' Court a lot, or how to react to movements in the terror alert statuses while overseas. It was not until now, though, that I realized that she does in fact understand me as some kind of human encyclopedia to which she can turn for any and all problems, like moth identification. Reminder: I saw this while in the tub, and it made me laugh so hard I was crying.

I guessed "luna moth" incorrectly first, by the way, then did some google-fu to figure out that it is in fact a Polyphemous Moth. And then this happened: "JBL News!!!!! Well don't pee in the bathtub at this visual, but TJ just put some man gloves on and save the day haha"

Problem? Solved.

Books Yay!: Nobody's Fool, by Richard Russo

2011-07-18T09:00:00.000-04:00

In my family, you go to elementary school, then you go to middle school, then you go to high school and then you go to college. There aren’t lofty decrees about it or anything, but that’s kind of how everyone assumes it will go. So far, not one of us has done this properly. I took nine years to finish my bachelor’s degree before jumping right into a Ph.D program, my brother tried a business major at a state school before dumping it for a sound engineering program (which was the exact right thing for him to do), and my sister has put college on hold to make what seems to be about eleventy billion dollars bartending while she figures out what, exactly, she would want a degree in, which I also think is super smart because college is a horrible drudgery when you’re not connecting with your program (see: nine years to finish bachelor’s degree). This whole “you will be going to college” business seems to be getting more and more common, and its rise is accompanied by sneering derision towards those who haven’t gone to college. This is, without mincing words, a dick move, and the attitude cheapens both the college and the no-college paths. College is meant to be something you do in pursuit of academic knowledge, not for business or the vague majors that colleges are selling these days. With everyone high on college as the source of all knowledge, academic or otherwise, we denigrate the careers and knowledge of those in non-academic disciplines who have the sense not to waste their time and money on degrees they don’t need or want.

What I like about Richard Russo is his ability to appreciate everyone for their quirky fucked-upped-ness, academic or no. The tension between the two worlds is ever-present in Nobody’s Fool, as the main character, Sully, works to deal with the demented sensibilities of the more “educated” powers that be around him. He’s a laid-back man who has made his life on his strength and on being able to help people, and in the latter half of his life, he’s searching for direction while being weighted down by his past. These shackles take the form of the decaying house he inherited from his father years ago and the reappearance of his son, a failing academic being unceremoniously booted from academe after failing to get tenure. Nobody’s Fool is a celebration of the everyman and the rich wisdom available to him.

Much like Empire Falls, another favorite Russo book of mine, Nobody’s Fool features a wonderful array of small town characters who bear up and wear down Sully’s spirits. His sometimes-boss is an overbearing jerk who continually belittles him, he has a faltering flirtation with several of the local ladies, and his landlady is an older woman who talks to her dead husband. I could outline the plot for you, but as with so much of Russo’s writing, the specifics of the plot – though hysterical and sweet – are less important than the one essential truth at its core: that life grants wishes and dashes hopes whimsically, no matter what you try to do to prevent it, and the only defense against this trauma is to love the people in your life who are worth it.

Friday Round Up!: Cool Games and Terrible Ideas

2011-07-15T11:52:00.001-04:00

You may have noticed I've been posting more lately. There is a reason for this. Over the past year or so, people have been telling me with increasing frequency that they use my Facebook wall as a news source. While that is flattering, it occurs to me that other people might benefit from looking at stuff I post, as well as from additional explanation. I don't make any claims to neutrality. I am a liberal and I will always be a liberal, but I think it's important to note that liberal doesn't mean what the stereotype reads any more than conservative means what the popular imagination says it means. Neither side is comprised of idiots, and both are surrounded by a ton of people who don't identify either way or don't have an interest in finding out how they might identify were they so inclined. That's an important thing to understand.

I wanted to start writing more about certain articles because they often require more examination than the original phrasing offers or just because I sometimes disagree with them, and the nature of that disagreement is important. While I will continue unpacking as many articles in depth as possible, I do need to like, make a living and go to grad school, so each Friday, I'll post a round up of articles I though were interesting throughout the week. If you ever come across something you think should be in a round up, please feel free to email it to me!

Without further ado, here's this week's roundup!

My book, Rapunzel's Daughters, is Now Available on Kindle! I have a story about an absinthe swilling Tinkerbell in there and I edited the whole shebang along with Rose and Bill. Check it out!
Electric Box My friend Ben linked me to this game last night and now basically I'm going to be busy until January.
Time to Get Your Clark Kent On? A great article from the Christian Left (...yes really) about the decline in local news coverage that has accompanied the downslide of print media and opened the door for a dramatic drop in accountability. The author calls for bloggers of the world to unite, and get involved meaningfully with covering local government...checking sources, going to meetings, interviewing people, and providing the accountability where the mainstream media has fallen short.
South Sudan Declares Independence This sweet article puts a great personal spin on the exciting South Sudanese victory with a profile of a former child soldier who finally got to put on the "victory suit" he bought two years previously. It's great to see South Sudan emerging from the brutal genocide in Sudan. Hooray!
Dogs and Smurfs Max Barry explains gender dynamics and feminism through the lens of childrens' books and entertainment. I know that sounds pretty awesome, but in practice, it's awesome^bazillion. Here's a sample: "Male is default. That’s what you learn from a world of boy dogs and Smurf stories. My daughter has no problem with this. She reads these books the way they were intended: not about boys, exactly, but about people who happen to be boys. After years of such books, my daughter can happily identify with these characters. And this is great. It’s the reason she will grow into a woman who can happily read a novel about men, or watch a movie in which men do all the most interesting things, without feeling like she can’t relate. She will process these stories as being primarily not about males but about human beings. Except it’s not happening the other way." See? Get goin'.
What We Could Lose if the Webb Telescope is Killed On the heels of the end of the shuttle program, there are more attempts on NASA's funding, particularly around the super-high-tech James Webb Telescope. Through the use of infared technology, the Webb Telescope will be able to look back in time, possibly to before stars existed. How amazing is that?
Srebrenica, 16 Years On July 11th was the 16 year anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica in Bosnia. Bodies were moved to disguise the genocidal act, but they have slowly been recovered. On Monday, 613 of them were given a proper burial.
Shame on them The Economist points the shame finger at the Republicans for playing chicken with the debt ceiling. I'd feel sad for the Republicans except they're earning that shit. I do not think that "debt ceiling" means what they think it means.
50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice Geoffrey K. Pullum over at the Chronicle of Higher Education is not a fan of Strunk and White. "Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it." Those are words 40 through 84 of 2440. He is not kidding. WHEN LINGUISTS ATTACK!
Half of Americans Getting Government Aid Swear They've Never Used It Cornell University (my awesome grandma's alma mater!) has a new paper out demonstrating that a lot of people getting assistance from the government don't really know it's from the government. This is something Democrats and people concerned with the social safety net should be talking about non freaking stop these days. [NB: I think this headline is more "scandaloso!" than is necessary; it's not like these folks are hiding the aid, they just don't know that stuff like Pell grants are government aid. That said, some of the folks who are on food stamps and don't know they're government help should probably tune in a bit.]
Green Jobs Reach 2.7 Million: the "Clean Economy" Starts Delivering On Its Promise of High Paying Jobs, Brookings Finds Shockingly, when your economy has been oil-bound since ever, attempts at freeing yourself from it pay off. Green jobs are way up and they're good jobs.
The Women of the Harry Potter Universe Canonball has an awesome write up about feminism in the Harry Potter series and why the women who inhabit it are so exciting.
Worcester Sharks Schedule Out; Josie's Schedule Now Booked The AHL has now released its schedule, and the primary concern for me is of course the Worcester Sharks. Sharks opening night is October 15th, a week after my Habs open the NHL season versus the Leafs in Toronto on October 6th. Is it hockey season yet? The NHL schedule is available here.

Let's end with some music, shall we? I've watched the video for Britney's "I Wanna Go" about ninety seven times and it still makes me laugh my ass off...there are robot paparazzi, "Crossroads 2: Cross Harder," the line "I love dreams. And seashells." and a Thriller reference at the end. Enjoy!

You Are Worthless, You Are Invaluable

2011-07-15T09:00:00.000-04:00

Let's take a moment to look at the rhetoric involving those on unemployment and that concerning job creation.

On the one hand, we have the popular conception of people on government assistance: the black (let's be honest) woman with 15 children who has them for no other reason but the government check, driving a Cadillac and shopping at miraculously fancy grocery stores between bonding time with her dealer. The lazy person on welfare who got laid off from his job and never bothered looking for a new on. The asshole who just wants to live off the state.

At the same time we talk about unemployment. We have to create jobs, we have to employ people, we have to hire, hire hire. We have to get people back to work.

I ask you, people of America, people who espouse the idea that we must hire people and shove their noses to the grind stone: who do you think stands to be employed?

Shockingly, it is the people you spend your time villainising, those you accuse of being lazy, those who supposedly go through the dangers of pregnancy for shits and giggles and food stamps. At the same time, some of you rail on about how those who wish for more of life should look for better jobs which provide for their needs and wants. You are basing our recovery on the ability of those downtrodden and demoralized to brush over the vitriol you have sent their way, the malice you use in your discourse, and the sneering disenfranchisement you spew with every slam on those on welfare to ignore your slander, your libel and your frank hatred to gather the strength and will to apply for you jobs and re-enter the workforce under the auspices of people who clearly hate them.

Perhaps you should think of that before the next time you assail them and accuse them of hating America.

"Here and now I want to make myself clear about those who disparage their fellow citizens on the relief rolls. They say that those on relief are not merely jobless—that they are worthless. Their solution for the relief problem is to end relief—to purge the rolls by starvation. To use the language of the stock broker, our needy unemployed would be cared for when, as, and if some fairy godmother should happen on the scene.

You and I will continue to refuse to accept that estimate of our unemployed fellow Americans. Your Government is still on the same side of the street with the Good Samaritan and not with those who pass by on the other side."

FDR, 1936

Two Truths About Shrimp That You Need To Know

2011-07-14T09:00:00.000-04:00

1. Shrimp is magnificent.

2. Ina Garten's Roasted Shrimp Salad is the most glorious shrimp salad imaginable and you all need to make it.

2b. You should probably buy all of Ina Garten's Barefoot Contessa cookbooks because they are magic,

Meanwhile, In a News Studio Far, Far Away...

2011-07-12T17:01:00.000-04:00

My friend Joe sent me a message today that said "have you heard herman cain's gospel album yet?" Needless to say, I assumed this was a joke, but no, my friends...GOP Presidential candidate Herman Cain has a gospel album out. It's actually pretty good!! He has a good voice, though the songs available on that link are kind of muzak-y gospel. Bravo, Mr. Cain! Please do more singing and stop running for President.

Joe and I talked a little bit about the album, and he eventually declared: "Barack Obama must respond, preferably with rap."

This is what happened in my mind after I read that sentence.

"What the hell is that?" One of the producers peered into the monitor, his lips pulling back over his teeth as his eyes narrowed into intent slits. "Is he...bleeding? Cut to camera 3 until we can get makeup in there."

In front of the cameras, a drop of blood fell to the shoulder of Bill O'Reilly's meticulously tailored suit, soaking into the patriotic navy blue wool. He shook his head slightly, flinging fine droplets across his desk. "And when we come back, we'll be with Neil Cavuto to talk about the latest economic policy." As the broadcast cut to commercial, the makeup team and one of the cameramen ran to O'Reilly. The anchor was surprised by the flurry of activity, but as he put his hand to his ear to verify the makeup artist's story, he caught sight of a PA standing at the far side of the studio. "What's that kid doing?" The PA was clutching a sheaf of papers and staring at one of the lights. The papers were shaking as though an extremely localized tornado was passing through, and the young man's mouth hung open, a thin stream of drool escaping onto his shirt. The makeup team's head whipped between the PA and O'Reilly, who now had a stream of blood running from his ear.

"Guys, we have to be on air in 30 seconds, move it!" One of the cameramen went to check out the PA while the team did what they could to stanch the bleeding and repair O'Reilly's makeup. As the broadcast resumed, O'Reilly and Cavuto began discussing the economic squabble of the moment, only to be interrupted by a loud BANG. O'Reilly looked up at the control window and saw half the glass obscured by a horrific splatter of greenish-yellow goo. This was the point where Cavuto noticed that the bleeding at O'Reilly's ear had started again. "Bill, your ear..." he began, only to be interrupted by another BANG, this one from the PA who had taken ill not minutes before. When the two men looked in that direction, all they saw was the cameraman, covered in gore, trying to crawl towards them with a piece of paper. Cavuto got up, followed closely by O'Reilly, and ran to the man.

"Obama...has...a rap album."

With this last missive delivered, the cameraman relaxed, smiling beatifically, and then exploded, covering the talent in a sheen of greenish bile. As those words were spoken aloud, a massive explosion rocked Fox News. The windows shattered, though the structure remained intact. When the medical examiners released their report, they could only say that the cause of the combustions suffered by every member of Fox News were undetermined, but noted that if they had to take a guess, they would have said it looked like they all died of sheer glee.

America

2011-07-12T09:00:00.002-04:00

I don't like a lot of poetry, but I think it might just be because I don't spend enough time looking for good poetry. When I do find poetry I like, I tend to really like it. On Independence Day, one of the tumblr folks I follow, Letters to My Country, posted Allen Ginsberg's 1956 poem "America," which I'm sure you've all read, but I hadn't and I like it, so here it is.

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I’m trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.
I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.
I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
Asia is rising against me.
I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.
I’d better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.
America you don’t really want to go to war.
America its them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Exciting Josie News: The Etsy Shop is Open!

2011-07-11T12:00:00.003-04:00

I've been tatting for a while, and I finally decided to put some of my work up on Etsy. Tatting is a cool old-school craft (...surprise! Josie does old lady crafts!) and it creates little pieces of lace. I like to use color and fun design to make unusual and eyecatching jewelry. Here are some examples of what you can find at Lost Sheep Gardens! You can click through each photo to the shop, and there are plenty of other designs and options once you get there.

The Storm Cloud Bracelet

The Orange You Happy It's Summer Pendant

The Dripsy Daisy Bracelet

The Delicious Dahlia Bracelet

I hope you find something you like!!

Sometimes I Get Excited

2011-07-11T09:00:00.000-04:00

I got an actual real grown-up style royalty payment for Elf Love at the beginning of the month, and even though it wasn't the million dollar payment I will obviously be raking in in the future, it was enough to get a little frivolous something from Etsy. Check out this cool-ass pendant I ordered from Bunny X Productions:

It's called "Vein," which I like even though it is clearly a tentacle.

I love funky stuff like this. I have talked before about my own fashion and the reality that it's simply not that exciting for the most part, but my shoes and accessories give people interesting stuff to look out and thus turn me into an instant fashion plate. This definitely fits the bill...I love the texture, but my favorite part is the color combo.

The Last Dreams of Humanity Sent Skyward

2011-07-08T08:46:00.000-04:00

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. We propose to accelerate the development of the appropriate lunar space craft. We propose to develop alternate liquid and solid fuel boosters, much larger than any now being developed, until certain which is superior. We propose additional funds for other engine development and for unmanned explorations--explorations which are particularly important for one purpose which this nation will never overlook: the survival of the man who first makes this daring flight. But in a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon--if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there."
John F. Kennedy, in an address to Congress, 1961

I was talking with a friend the other day about the shuttle launch, and he said he was going to watch it so he could "tell [his] grandchildren that he saw the last dreams of humanity sent skyward." I wanted to write today about the last shuttle launch, which is happening today at 11:26a, but to be honest with you, I'm too sad about it to really do it justice. NASA's history of human space flight has allowed Americans to dream together in a way that very little has since the nation's founding. I know it's expensive, and I know that many people pooh-pooh the program, but the benefit to science and technology alone has been incredible.

And that's to say nothing of what manned space flight does for the way we think about the universe and our place in it. Sending humans into space nourishes the soul and has changed us in remarkable ways.

"For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return."

Leonardo da Vinci

Today's Point Missing Competition Winner in the How Security Works Division

2011-07-06T09:00:00.000-04:00

See "rong, doin' it."

Iran's chief of police has criticized the domestic media's "extensive coverage" of a recent spate of alleged rapes in the country, saying it would cause "a sense of insecurity in society," RFE/RL's Radio Farda reports.

Yeah. I don't want to tell you how to run your clearly awesome and totally efficient police force or anything, dude, but you know what causes insecurity in society? People actually getting raped.

While I give Mr. Moghadam credit for novelty, this is an extension of an ongoing bunch of bullshit that women get thrown all the time. Technically he's right - hearing about rape does make people feel insecure and that's a pretty reasonable reaction. However, the reason it's appropriate is because it's a violent act that often goes unprosecuted and is frequently turned around to incriminate the victim. I can't think of any crime I fear becoming the victim of more, because I know that after being violated and injured, there's more than an outside chance that I will then have to put up with the bullshit and shaming of having people ask about what I was doing and wearing and blah blah blah in the end it all just comes down to "are you sure you didn't just really want to get fucked, whore?" That is what makes rape so much more problematic than other crimes. No one would ask me what I was wearing if I got mugged. No one would ask me why I had my property with me in the alley if I got robbed. And that's how it should be, because no matter what I'm wearing or doing or where I am, none of it makes it okay for someone to rape me. Pretending otherwise serves no one except rapists. It promotes the idea that men are just powerless idiots who think with their dicks, which is not fair to men, by and large. It also presumes that rape is about sex, which it isn't - it is about power and control, full stop. It continues to argue that women are sex objects, pure and simple, and have no autonomy beyond that; all that matters is their appearance.

I think I get what the police chief means, but it's statements like this that causes a sense of insecurity in a society - it sounds like the police chief, the man ultimately in charge of handling prosecution of your rape case, thinks you should just hush up about your rape so it doesn't make society feel insecure...and the reality is that by "society" we actually mean "men," because I guaran-fucking-tee that feeling insecure about rape is in the back of every woman's mind, 24/7, 365. It's there because it has to be, because of attitudes like this.

My Book, Rapunzel's Daughters, is Now Available!!

2011-07-05T12:00:00.000-04:00

A while back I indulged in a little self-important puffery about Pink Narcissus Press' second anthology, entitled Rapunzel's Daughters, and I'm thrilled to announce that it is now available for sale! It's an awesome collection off short stories that extend or twist fairy tales and legends. I have a story in there that explores the idea of Tinkerbell as an exiled fairy queen who brought absinthe to Montmartre...how can you pass this up?? The book has beautiful illustrations throughout, and it has been named a Highlighted Title by Independent Publisher and received positive reviews from Publishers Weekly and SF Review.

Pick up your copy today either at our website or on Amazon! If you email me with your request, I would be happy to autograph your copy or draw an amusing picture on the frontpage. Rapunzel's Daughters will be available in the

For Those Who Have Had Enough of Silly Love [Songs]

2011-07-05T09:00:00.000-04:00

When I talk politics with people, particularly the politics of war, I invariably wind up saying or thinking that people just need to calm down and take a moment to consider each other as human beings. I always feel a little strange about saying it, sometimes a little strange about thinking it, because when faced with the whole world's worth of weapons, what hope does love for one's fellow man have? There's a reason there are sayings about every problem looking like a nail when all you have is a hammer. When the bulk of your foreign policy is military based, the military starts looking an awful lot like the only option.

We're so far down the military-as-foreign-policy rabbit hole that it can be hard to hang on to the idea of non-violence. That's why it's so wonderful when you can see forgiveness, tolerance and love prevail, particularly in the face of hatred and violence.

NPR recently did an interview with a man named Rais Bhuiyan. Bhuiyan is Bangladeshi man living in Dallas, and shortly after September 11th, 2001, a man named Mark Stroman walked into a gas station, killed two men and shot Bhuiyan in the face. Bhuiyan was the only survivor, and has required extensive medical treatment for years to deal with the attack and still has pellets embedded in his face. When word got to Bhuiyan's parents in Bangladesh, his father had a stroke from the shock. Mark Stroman was sentenced to death for his hate crime. He had been targeting "Muslims and middle-Eastern looking men."

Bhuiyan is fighting to overturn the conviction.

This is what he had to say: "According to my faith in Islam, there is no hate, no killing. It doesn't allow anything like that," says Bhuiyan. "Yes, Mark Stroman did a horrible thing, and he brought a lot of pain and disaster, sufferings in my life. But in return I never hated him." Later in the interview, he also said something important: "I strongly believe executing him is not a solution. We will just simply lose a human life without dealing with the root cause, which is hate crime." The reporter points out that when Stroman was interviewed in prison and told about Bhuiyan's efforts, he broke down in tears and said that “this is the first act of kindness that I’ve ever known.”

You cannot convince me that simply taking the tiny bit of effort required to just be kind to one another will not alleviate or solve a dramatic majority of our social problems, particularly violent ones. We are social animals, and we navigate our existence by reading other people. If we are surrounded by kindness, the need for violence and anger falls away. Sometimes it's not easy - I am genuinely unsure if I could muster the kind of response Mr. Bhuiyan has shown here - but I can't think of anything more worthwhile. I'm going to resolve to be more demonstrably kind in my life, and I hope you will join me.

Happy Independence Day, America!

2011-07-04T09:00:00.014-04:00

235 years ago today, the Declaration of Independence was adopted by Congress and a great, messy, lovely nation was born. I love being American and I love my fellow Americans with whom I am engaged in this big project of governance, politics, baseball, fireworks (!!!), funny hats, and apple pie with.

When was the last time you read the Declaration of Independence? Probably a while ago...I'm a political science dork and I don't exactly make a daily practice of it. It's short, give it a whirl - it's really a lovely document and it talks about some awesome and important things. It's good to revisit our origins from time to time.

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

Josiah Bartlett (NH), William Whipple(NH), Matthew Thornton(NH), John Hancock (MA), Samual Adams(MA), John Adams(MA), Robert Treat Paine(MA), Elbridge Gerry(MA), Stephen Hopkins(RI), William Ellery(RI), Roger Sherman(CT), Samuel Huntington(CT), William Williams(CT), Oliver Wolcott(CT), William Floyd(NY), Philip Livingston(NY), Francis Lewis(NY), Lewis Morris(NY), Richard Stockton(NJ), John Witherspoon(NJ), Francis Hopkinson(NJ), John Hart(NJ), Abraham Clark(NJ), Robert Morris(PA), Benjamin Rush(PA), Benjamin Franklin(PA), John Morton(PA), George Clymer(PA), James Smith(PA), George Taylor(PA), James Wilson(PA), George Ross(PA), Caesar Rodney(DE), George Read(DE), Thomas McKean(DE), Samuel Chase(MD), William Paca(MD), Thomas Stone(MD), Charles Carroll of Carrollton(MD), George Wythe(VA), Richard Henry Lee(VA), Thomas Jefferson(VA), Benjamin Harrison(VA), Thomas Nelson, Jr.(VA), Francis Lightfoot Lee(VA), Carter Braxton(VA), William Hooper(NC), Joseph Hewes(NC), John Penn(NC), Edward Rutledge(SC), Thomas Heyward, Jr.(SC), Thomas Lynch, Jr.(SC), Arthur Middleton(SC), Button Gwinnett(GA), Lyman Hall(GA), George Walton(GA)

Here's to many, many more, my friends! I'll leave you with this recording of me performing the Star Spangled Banner at a Sharks game. Happy Independence Day!

Oh, CANADA!

2011-07-01T09:00:00.015-04:00

It's Canada's birthday today! Happy birthday Canada, and happy Canada DAY, all my Canadian friends. Canada is 114 this year. Canada is also a very interesting political landscape (oh shut up, you knew that shit was coming as surely as you know I'm going to talk about hockey in a minute). Canada Day celebrates when the chunks of the Great White North were actually linked together as a federation and became a real live kingdom, with Britain riding political herd over it. That's not exceptionally unique situation in terms of colonialization, but the cool stuff went down in 1982 when Canada patriated its Constitution. Not repatriated, but patriated. Because Britain was still the Constitutional authority, Canada didn't have complete political autonomy, so they basically claimed the Constitution - with some adjustment - as being Canada's, for the sake of ruling Canada. Cool, right?

I've been thinking a lot about Canada in the past couple years as my faith in the republic's ability to reassert itself has wavered, and there's a lot to recommend it to anyone. A comprehensive listing of what I like about Canada would be too long and verbose for anyone of sound mind to tolerate, but here's a short list:

Hockey forever - the Montreal Canadiens, for rivalry purposes the Toronto Maple Leafs, the juniors system, its stature as the majority sport from sea to shining sea up there, pond hockey, hockey on Canadian currency, and fans who know how to fan properly (which is to say, not causing an aggressive and ill-timed ruckus during games and not walking down the aisles during play oh my God why why why does this happen and why won't it stop)...
Tim Horton's coffee and the strange existence of strawberry TimBits
Peter Jennings, whose news broadcasts shaped the way I consider news when I was a kid. Yes, really, he's Canadian!
the Canadian relationship to nature and a general understanding that you should not assault it
The Tragically Hip, for not only being excellent but also excellently named
a willingness to shore up and preserve Canadian products and enterprises
Don Cherry and his suits, even if he's getting kind of senile and crotchety and nonsensey. (Suits. You're welcome.)
Montreal, and specifically Ste. Catherine Street and Spa Eastman on Sherbrooke Ouest
Romeo Dallaire, his attempt to save Rwanda, his openness about how badly its failure screwed him up, and his unending dedication to humanitarianism
perhaps most importantly, a general sense that Canada is all in the project of Canada together, even when at odds with specific neighbors or coworkers or what have you, i.e. none of this designating certain people as real or fake Canadians as is currently in vogue in the States

That barely scratches the surface of what I enjoy about Canada, but it's a good broad-strokes starting point. I was going to post a nice picture of Canadians celebrating, but when I googled for "Canadian pride" this happened:

Well hello, Shawn Ashmore.

...and really, I think we're done here.

O Canada indeed.

These Are Our 95 Theses

2011-06-30T14:46:00.000-04:00

I recently came across Lupe Fiasco's "Words I Never Said," and the timing is pretty good since I've been feeling quite politically powerless lately and it's reassuring to hear people expressing your concerns, so you know it's not just you. I'm not actually that wild about the song as a musical endeavor, but the message has a lot of good stuff and/or hard facts. Here are the lyrics:

It’s so loud inside my head
With words that I should have said
As I drown in my regrets
I can’t take back the words I never said
I can’t take back the words I never said

[Lupe Fiasco]
I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullshit
Just a poor excuse for you to use up all your bullets
How much money does it take to really make a full clip
9/11 building 7 did they really pull it
Uhh, And a bunch of other cover ups
Your childs future was the first to go with budget cuts
If you think that hurts then, wait here comes the uppercut
The school was garbage in the first place, that's on the up and up
Keep you at the bottom but tease you with the uppercrust
You get it then they move it so you never keeping up enough
If you turn on TV all you see’s a bunch of “what the fucks”
Dude is dating so and so blabbering bout such and such
And that ain't Jersey Shore, homie that's the news
And these the same people that supposed to be telling us the truth
Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn Beck is a racist
Gaza strip was getting bombed, Obama didn’t say shit
That's why I ain't vote for him, next one either
I’ma part of the problem, my problem is I’m peaceful
And I believe in the people.

[Skylar Grey]
It’s so loud inside my head
With words that I should have said!
As I drown in my regrets
I can’t take back the words I never said
I can’t take back the words I never said

[Lupe Fiasco - Verse 2]
Now you can say it ain't our fault if we never heard it
But if we know better than we probably deserve it
Jihad is not a holy war, wheres that in the worship?
Murdering is not Islam!
And you are not observant
And you are not a muslim
Israel don’t take my side cause look how far you’ve pushed them
Walk with me into the ghetto, this where all the Kush went
Complain about the liquor store but what you drinking liquor for?
Complain about the gloom but when’d you pick a broom up?
Just listening to Pac ain't gone make it stop
A rebel in your thoughts, ain't gon make it halt
If you don’t become an actor you’ll never be a factor
Pills with million side effects
Take em when the pains felt
Wash them down with Diet soda!
Killin off your brain cells
Crooked banks around the World
Would gladly give a loan today
So if you ever miss a payment
They can take your home away!

[Skylar Grey]
It’s so loud inside my head
With words that I should have said!
As I drown in my regrets
I can’t take back the words I never said, never said
I can’t take back the words I never said

[Lupe Fiasco - Verse 3]
I think that all the silence is worse than all the violence
Fear is such a weak emotion that's why I despise it
We scared of almost everything, afraid to even tell the truth
So scared of what you think of me, I’m scared of even telling you
Sometimes I’m like the only person I feel safe to tell it to
I’m locked inside a cell in me, I know that there’s a jail in you
Consider this your bailing out, so take a breath, inhale a few
My screams is finally getting free, my thoughts is finally yelling through

[Skylar Grey]
It’s so loud Inside my head
With words that I should have said!
As I drown in my regrets
I can’t take back the words I never said

Some of it I can't be bothered with (no, the government didn't take out building 7, stop that) but a lot of is is worryingly sound. Here's the video.

At the end you'll notice a reference to the L.A.S.E.R. Manifesto. Maybe it's the civil service talking but wow, people need to stop forcing their various manifestos into acronyms. Take the time to title stuff something substantive. In any case, here's Lupe Fiasco's:

To Every Man, Woman & Child...

1. We Want An End To The Glamorization Of Negativity In The Media.

2. We Want An End To Status Symbols Dictating Our Worth As Individuals.

3. We Want A Meaningful And Universal Education System.

4. We Want Substance In The Place Of Popularity.

5. We Will Not Compromise Who We Are To Be Accepted By The Crowd.

6. We Want The Invisible Walls That Separate By Wealth, Race & Class To Be Torn Down.

7. We Want To Think Our Own Thoughts.

8. We Will Be Responsible For Our Environment.

9. We Want Clarity & Truth From Our Elected Officials Or They Should Move Aside.

10. We Want Love Not Lies.

11. We Want An End To All Wars. Foreign & Domestic (Violence).

12. We Want An End To The Processed Culture Of Exploitation, Over-Consumption & Waste.

13. We Want Knowledge, Understanding & Peace.

14. WE WILL NOT LOSE BECAUSE WE ARE NOT LOSERS, WE ARE LASERS!!!

Lasers are the opposite of losers. Lasers are shining beams of light that burn through the darkness of ignorance. Lasers shed light on injustice and inequality. Losers stand by and let things happen. Lasers act and shape their own destinies. Lasers find meaning and direction in the mysteries all around them. Lasers stand for love and compassion. Lasers stand for peace. Lasers stand for progression. Lasers are revolutionary.

Lasers Are The Future.

So okay, there are some problems in here, least of which being the whole losers/lasers play, but how messed up is it that anyone should feel like these are things that need to be demanded? I, for one, am down, Lupe Fiasco. Laser or not, these are things worth fighting for.

Mayhap the Defense Budget Could Verily Use a Side Eye

2011-06-28T12:17:00.000-04:00

The Project On Government Oversight has released the complete, unredacted Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (DoD OIG*) audit, and it is about as stupid as you would expect.

You can read a summary and get a link to the report itself here.

I think the natural reaction is to kind of freak out about this kind of stuff, and I don't really begrudge anyone that reaction. Some of this is absolutely ridiculous. My personal sense is that sanity is somewhere in the middle, towards the side of "buy it at Ace Hardware already." The Department of Defense uses these parts in some pretty extreme environments, and even if not every helicopter is being used in the desert, it makes the most sense to make sure all or at least most helicopters can be used in the desert, in case some supply crisis evolves and they need to go to the desert. The various pieces of hardware I can pick up at the local hardware store might not be sufficient for this kind of high-impact, high-stress application. If I knew about fixing a car engine, and someone asked me to take a stab at fixing an airplane engine, I would start with finding a manual or doing some Google-fu to figured out if there were different stressors for parts in an aircraft engine, just to check. The engines are essentially the same, but I would check. Same thing for military resources - some of them may need slightly different things. However, when every available part is marked up between 33 and 177,475 percent, I think we have a problem here.

One of my biggest problems with defense spending right now is that we seem to be very focused on high tech solutions at the expense of getting our troops' basic needs met, both in terms of comfort and in armament.

* There is a reason one of the things I got when I started working for the government back in DC was an acronym dictionary. People would toss that shit off like it was nothing. Alphabet soup has more coherent sentences.

Elderly Bigots Say "Haaaaaaaaaay!"

2011-06-27T16:00:00.003-04:00

"There is substantial evidence that some of these fires are caused by people who have crossed our border illegally. They have set fires because they signal others, they have set fires to keep warm, and they have set fires in order to divert law enforcement agents and agencies from them. The answer to that part of the problem is to get a secure border."

- John McCain, 6/18/11

"Absolutely not, at this level. There's no evidence that I'm aware, no evidence that's been public, indicating such a thing.”

- Tom Berglund, U.S. Forest Service spokesman, 6/19/11

Dude. Take your racist, xenophobic douche routine and go home. Don't THINK I haven't forgotten you're the reason I have to know who Sarah Palin is, either.

Odds Are, You're Getting Screwed

2011-06-27T08:00:00.070-04:00

TRUE LIFE: I'm pretty law abiding, and I tend to default to the assumption that authority figures and the rules by which they abide are generally interested in my interests. Over the past couple years, with recent acceleration, I've been trying hard to question that more often, because I simply don't believe it is the case any more. This is harder than one might think. Here in America, that's generally the line we get: when Abraham Lincoln said that our government was one "of the people, by the people and for the people," he was giving voice to something I think most Americans - certainly then, often now - believe. I still believe that most people who work in government, which is to say, the civil and foreign service, who predate and outlast every Presidential Administration and Congress, are generally good, and generally want to ensure that government of, by and for the people does not perish from this Earth. The problem is that politics are not government, and the direction of our politics have brought in another threat. I will not go so far as to say that an encroaching corporatocracy is new - Tocqueville referred to the danger in 1835 - but I feel that it presents a greater danger now than it has before.

There are plenty of problems with corporations being granted political rights properly reserved for citizens via the offensive and ridiculous Citizens United vs. FEC decision, but not all power is political, and it is in the context of this apolitical power that my concerns emerge. Economic oppression is a longstanding tool of those who would like to consolidate power amongst a select few, and we are in the midst of some of the most flagrant use of this tool in memory. While Congress whines endlessly about jobs while not bringing any jobs bills to the floor, they ignore the fact that they may not have any ability to create jobs, besides the less-sustainable one-off jobs created under the auspices of government. Corporations need to hire people, and they're not doing that. "But they can't! The economy! It is bad!" Yeah, about that:

Click to magnify

These two charts are compliments of Mother Jones' excellent collection of 12 angry-making graphs, and what you see here is a problem. In the GDP graph, you see everyone's GDP dip in roughly the same way, and then recover roughly the same way. In the next graph, you see unemployment dip in reaction to the general trend of the GDP drop...and everyone who isn't the United States recover in roughly the same way. The United States has dropped and stayed dropped. Your impulse here may be to say "but the US economy was the epicenter of the recession," and while you might be right to point to US financial fuckery as a primary driver of the recession, you would be incorrect to believe that means it is limited to the US in effect. The three Big Bads of the recession were the housing bubble's burst, the financial sector's collapse (largely contingent on the housing issue), and the auto industry's whatever the hell that was. These are three extremely internationalist industries; though it was the US housing market that went kablooey, the financial markets related to it were sectioning up bad mortgages to make them into "good" assets that could be poured into all kinds of financial endeavors. (For a truly excellent summary of the housing crisis and how interwoven with the financial crash it was, I recommend NBC's documentary House of Cards. It is presented clearly enough for even non-economics-wonks to understand. I cannot recommend this enough.) In any case, these were industries whose well-being affects the whole world - this is borne out by the GDP graph above - but only the US has stayed decimated by the effects.

Now, if the GDP is on the rebound [NB: I do not think that the GDP is permanently on the rebound, and I think we are on track for another recession. No real efforts have been made to reform the systems and industries that caused the crash, and the recovery is not sustainable. This is why Congress needs to stop fucking around and get to work.], why aren't American employers hiring more people and thus creating more jobs? Leaving aside accusations about people relying overmuch on the government, there's a simple answer: because shit isn't that bad for people in charge. Take a look at the increase in CEO pay to the left here. As you can see, CEO pay has been skyrocketing since the 80s, with some kind of nitrous booster kicking in around 1995 or so. That's (theoretically) good! There are people making lots of money! Prosperity!

Not quite.

Two important things. One is a good, hard look at what this graph is actually measuring, which is CEO pay relative to net profit, which is the money made after all the bills get paid, basically. In 1960, for every $1 of net profit, your average CEO could expect to make about $100. In 2000, that ratio jumped sharply, so a CEO could expect to make $500 or more per $1 net profit. This graph also stops around the early 2000s, but the trend has continued, even into 2010, when CEO pay jumped 11%. The second important thing is more damning, and we can see it clearly in this graph:

This graph shows us that the worker's share is doing the opposite of the CEO's share, and almost as dramatically. It is also worth noting that recessions (shown here as the grey bands) were not a reliable indicator of workers getting screwed, and in fact were more likely to show the opposite effect...until 2010. In 2010, we see that workers' decline in percentage of a share in profits continues its decline through the recession, and then drops even more sharply once it ends. Got a job? Odds are you're getting screwed.

Now, there are a lot of reasons for this kind of movement, but I think most of them are addressed in Mother Jones' excellent "All Work and No Pay: the Great Speedup," which you should take a few minutes to pop over and read. It is the article that the above-linked charts accompany. The speedup, as the MJ article explains, is where employers demand ever more of their employees without a corresponding increase in pay. We have given in to the dialogue that if you're not checking emails 24/7 and multitasking your face off, you are somehow lazy, ceding complete control of our lives to our work. It is the American Dream's work ethic on every steroid imaginable and stripped of every incentive - from "with hard work and perseverance, you can gain a free life" to "you must work hard and persevere." Our willingness to accept this has made it possible for employers to simply pile the work of laid off employees on those who survived the cuts, knowing that they will do whatever they must to complete the work shoveled onto their plates. I saw this first hand when Rich was laid off from his employer of 15 years. He kept in contact with his team, and they were absolutely wrecked with the sudden influx of work from having their group's population decimated. However, they figured out some way to do it, because "at least they had jobs." So say we all.

The "at least you have a job" argument is a compelling one, and a product of the above perversion of the American Dream. The idea is of course that having a job is better for both soul and pocketbook, and this seems logical. Unfortunately, our collective inattention to the preservation of a legally mandated living wage means that this is not always the case. It feels a bit strange to link Cracked here, but they published an excellent article about "Five Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor," which describes five things that comprise the absolute tippety-top of the iceberg of economic oppression. It's worth a read (cuss word warning, if you need such a thing). When you are not paid a living wage, you essentially descend into a vortex of suck that makes it more or less impossible to attain any kind of existence that would give you the luxury of having a political voice. Paper after paper after study after study indicates that the people who are most likely to get out and participate politically are the ones who have the social and economic capital to do so - the ones who can miss a day of work, or make large donations to candidates or organizations. Poor people simply do not have this luxury; when even a perfect week's work does not represent subsistence to you, you cannot afford time to read about or participate in political life, which generates the government that represents your only hope at changing your situation in a solid and permanent way. Once you're screwed, odds are, you're staying that way. With this in mind, is "a job" - as in, any job - really such a guaranteed blessing?

I'm not sure what the solution is - part of it is instituting a living wage requirement - but a big step would be dropping the hyperbole in which we discuss our working conditions. Demanding that employers pay a living wage is not stealing profit from them; it's paying workers fairly for the work that makes profit possible. Removing corporate tax loopholes and tax breaks for the richest of our society is not theft, it's investing via our government in workers who will be able to work longer, healthier, and better to - again - make profit possible. I believe that capitalism holds the most potential for the achievement of human greatness, but that pinnacle of human excellence is not as excellent if it stands amongst the broken bodies of the rest of humanity. Its risk is that it demands a continual fixation on the short term and a hyper-individualistic focus. As discussed before, being poor allows money to dominate your life for the sake of a mean existence; one might argue that the rich suffer the same hobbling, continually absorbed in the quest for ever more money. Democracy, on the other hand, relies on a concern for the common good, and consideration on the society as a whole. We cannot realistically presume that after spending 364 days and 23.5 hours of every year driven by the economic mindset demanded by capitalism, that for the one half hour it takes to vote every year (or two, or four), we will suddenly find every American imbued with patriotic love for their fellow man, casting a vote for the most benevolent and generous politician on the ballot.

Dance Like No One is Watching (or, Alternatively, a Gigantic Russian Man)

2011-06-24T15:23:00.001-04:00

This has been a trying week, vis a vis politics and bullshit. There have been a lot of weeks like that lately. It may just be the stuff I've been reading, but the fact that it exists doesn't change in response to my willingness to engage with it. When a giant ball of bullshit falls on Capitol Hill, it makes a sound whether or not I or anyone else are listening. If I go to a lake in the woods with nothing but flipflops, a bunch of beer and a chair, turning off my cell phone and not checking my email, the bullshit in which we live our lives will carry on affecting someone - some people I care about, some people I don't know. That can be crushing. The thing is, though, you have to still go to the lake by the woods. You still have to look for the good in people and things. You can't just ignore it, but you have to surround what stresses you with a belief that for every person intent on fucking up our world, there are a dozen who want to fix it, and who work at that goal in tiny and wonderful ways, and who sometimes change the world. You have to be that person. It takes less than you might think. Love your friends, love your family, seek joy, create wonder.

And perhaps most importantly, dance like a goon.

via Russian Machine Never Breaks

Have a great weekend, everyone! Change the world every moment of it.

Sometimes People Write Stuff and You're Like "Why Didn't I Write That OH RIGHT I'M NOT A GENIUS."

2011-06-24T08:00:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite blogs is MightyGodKing, which is written by a super-smart dude and his cohort of also super-smart people. I like it particularly because this crew is smart about a span of things that encompasses things I really care about (Canadian politics, law), things I sort of care about (comics) and things I don't really care about but am willing to find interesting in the hands of someone smart (specific characters I don't know much about). Christopher Bird, the titular Mighty God King, recently posted a fascinating article about DC Comics' upcoming overhaul and its incorporation of the Wildstorm Universe, which I didn't know existed until I worked some Google-fu on it. That's interesting to a comic fan generally, but it's also interesting to me as someone interested in the creative process and the generation of complete worlds. Bird has a lot of good stuff to say about the logic of comics and by extension long-running series, and frames this out by establishing a bipolarity between Marvel's pseudo-realistic universe (i.e. "Obviously Spiderman freaks out sometimes, he is a superhero and thus suffers great tension") and DC's more fantastical universe (i.e. "One man can clearly shoulder the burden of being Bruce Wayne and Batman while not really arousing suspicion and/or being an asshole"). It's a great take on how to make storytelling work, and it's one of my favorite topics on which to read Bird's work, because he gets it in a more elemental way than most.

Pictured: Wildstorm universe, Josie's concern that her blog is too text-heavy.

Bird also produced a really excellent and helpful overview on Canadian politics that I think everyone should read: A Primer on Canadian Politics Americans need to know and care about how Canada works and what's going on up there (usually, awesomeness), because we're inextricably linked, both by virtue of our geography and our economics. Befriend your Canadian bretheren!

Your Kid Brother is Watching You

2011-06-23T18:00:00.000-04:00

I have a lot of concerns about Big Brother watching us through our ever accelerating technology, into which we pour our entire lives. Even those who eschew Facebook, Twitter, MySpace (?? I don't know) and other social media must take extreme measures to truly get off the grid and out from under the eyeballs of various watchers - phones bounce off cell towers, credit and debit cards provide a map of our purchases, toll transponders note when we pass through on our way to wherever, surveillance cameras abound, electric bills lead to your home. This all makes it ever easier for the government - or whoever - to keep tabs on us.

However, it has also made us more willing to rat each other out, which may be the worst aspect of this rise of technological surveillance. The Harvard Business Review just posted an article about people in Vancouver gleefully reporting their fellow Vancouverians via social media during the riots that followed Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. The police, not being idiots, and recently having some trouble with not being douchebags up in the True North, seem to be concerned primarily with the volume of reports coming in. It's a little tough, because on the one hand, you shouldn't get up to criminal mischief and set your city on fire. That's pretty clear. It's dangerous and it's jerky. However, it doesn't sit well with me for the police to be able to go back to a mob scene and pick and choose the people they want to prosecute. Even if they see criminal activity, it seems like a fishing expedition.

I think the thing that I find upsetting is the tendency towards wanting to rat each other out, and that this surveillance eliminates our ability to resolve things without the force of law. David Brin had a nice post the other day about the idiocy of police whining about being videotaped, in which he said he failed to understand why good cops would need privacy to do their public jobs. I think he only gets half of the problem, because the surveillance knife cuts both ways. On the one hand, surveillance via cell phone, etc., can protect citizens against what unfortunately is a massive law enforcement population which includes some bad cops and some bad, prejudicial operational policy. On the other, it leads to the kind of finking that is visible in the Vancouver article, and it also - and this is more important - removes the possibility of good cops stepping in to mediate conflicts and resolve them without arrests, which is what ties police to the community and fosters cooperation and good relationships. Bad cops remove this option by creating a paranoia within the public that prompts them to film every police interaction, because if a good cop is filmed trying to help someone without following the letter of the law, there's a chance that the good cop's job could wind up at risk because politicians and pearl-clutching citizens are jerkfaces.

We're all in this together. No matter what, we won't be living in individual bubbles of self-sufficiency any time soon. To live together well, we need to drop our willingness to rat each other out for every little thing, and work to resolve all we can without the blunt instrument of the law. Don't worry so much about arresting rioters who are acting foolishly - focus on making sure those who were causing actual damage and injury are prosecuted and on getting the drunken idiot brigade home and off the streets...and then let it go. Don't get vindictive, don't persecute people for acting the fool, just let it go. Stop ratting out your neighbors, even if it's as easy as checking your Twitter feed.

Barney Frank and Ron Paul to Harness Both Parties' Awesomeness to Push Bill Legalizing Marijuana, Regain Sanity

2011-06-23T16:00:00.000-04:00

Word is that Barney Frank and Ron Paul are set to introduce a bill today that would decriminalize marijuana and defuse a lot of the attendant fuckery that stems from its criminality. I am not sure how far this bill will go - there was a similar bill brought by the same team in 2009 that fizzled big time - but I will never pass up an opportunity to support the work to decriminalize marijuana. Marijuana's classification as a Big Bad in the universe of drug use is ludicrous and damaging, and allows the federal government to promulgate the demented and racist War on Drugs that keeps minorities in jails, gives excessive power to all kinds of law enforcement and creates a need (and supply) for private prisons which function for profit and on the bare edge of legality, all for the botanical equivalent of vodka.

Source: Jack E. Henningfield, PhD for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), Reported by Philip J. Hilts, New York Times, Aug. 2, 1994 "Is Nicotine Addictive? It Depends on Whose Criteria You Use." Source: http://drugwarfacts.org/addictiv.htm

I don't advocate for the legalization of all drugs - there is some genuinely horrid shit out there that is a pox on society and should stay illegal and buttressed by rehabilitation programs - but marijuana is such an innocuous, potentially useful drug that it's ridiculous for it to be illegal, much less stigmatized the way it is. Not only does it give more justification to the War on Drugs, but it also limits the possibilities for pain management and medical treatment and keeps us from the chance to use hemp plants to make safer, non-petroleum-based plastics and fabrics. There's really no reason for marijuana to remain illegal, and I'm glad that Reps. Frank and Paul are taking this step against idiocy.

Whitey Bulger's Retirement Has Ended

2011-06-23T14:00:00.005-04:00

This might not be that interesting for non-Massachusettsians, but Whitey Bulger was finally captured after 16 years on the run. Bulger's Winter Hill gang absolutely terrorized Boston for years, and his flight has highlighted corruption within the FBI, as he turned his FBI observers into informants.

We have a strange relationship with crime like Whitey's up here - there's a certain gritty glory attributed to the Winter Hill gang's time in power. Everyone's response has more or less been "wow, I can't believe they finally got him," not "glad that son-of-a-bitch got what was coming to him" or anything like that. I think for many in Massachusetts, Whitey Bulger had just ridden off into the sunset.

IUD Update, and Well Played, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists

2011-06-23T12:00:00.000-04:00

About a month ago, I got an IUD and you all got to learn about my cervix - no more cervix today, I promise - and just to update you, I love it more than ever. Being off hormonal birth control has been glorious, not least because I'm not so cravey about foods (I've lost about 10 lbs since it was inserted), and I really feel comfortable knowing that my birth control has built in perfect use going for it. Two thumbs up, and only two because I am limited by my number of hands.

In other news, which is more official and fancy sounding, IUDs have been formally endorsed for all healthy adult women and adolescents by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Hooray! After a long period of Stateside shunning, IUDs finally have a major college of professionals openly endorsing them. The one thing that's kind of a bummer about most articles about IUDs is the way they list costs; while the actual procedure and device costs between $400 and $700, this is generally offset by insurance or by low-cost reproductive care providers like Planned Parenthood (if you click there, you can find a location near you quickly and easily). I mentioned in my earlier article that my IUD cost $20 and saved me over $4300 in monthly birth control, which of course assumes that I will stay insured and the NuvaRing I was on before stayed covered and at the same price. [NB: This is why preserving Planned Parenthood matters. They provide low cost care to the people who need it most. If you want less abortions, make reproductive care more readily available.] I'm really happy to hear about this endorsement!

Michele Bachmann is a Whackadoodle, but That Doesn't Mean She's Ignorable.

2011-06-23T10:35:00.000-04:00

Victor Juhasz's illustration for Rolling Stone

Matt Taibbi has a great article on Michele Bachmann's political arc and why it's horrifying in Rolling Stone this month. I love Taibbi and recommend everyone read his work; you can catch him on his blog - Taibblog - or regularly in Rolling Stone proper.

Taibbi pairs his clear disdain for Bachmann's delusions and whackitude with an essential warning: that despite her craziness, she has proven a compelling and dangerous candidate. During the 2008 campaign, I heard a lot of people on the left confidently assuming that Obama or any other Democrat would sweep to victory easily. This was the excuse given for not campaigning that hard, for not voting, for not worrying about it. This cannot happen again. If Bachmann gets the GOP nomination, Obama will not have the edge on charisma that he did over McCain. The economy, in lieu of real, robust assistance and reform on Wall Street, is going to fall again, and thanks to Murphy's Law, it will probably do so right before the elections, causing the same panic we saw before the 2008 cycle. People already frustrated with economics they don't understand and government too busy bickering to foment real change are going to respond to that by voting against everyone in office, starting with a man many of them hate simply for being who he is. (I'll leave you to decide which slur-tastic category of "being who he is" you'd like to assume the worst of them for.) This is not the time to relax, and it's not the time to take Bachmann lightly.

I assume that Taibbi is atheist or has atheist leanings, because he does seem to discount most religion as the stuff of delusion and blindness. This is one of my least favorite attitudes. I hope I can give Taibbi the benefit of the doubt here and assume that he knows that not all religion requires lockstep idiocy or inherently evil. I think I am safe making this assumption because of this piece of the article:

"Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can't tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don't learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you're a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they're even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies."

That to me indicates an understanding that it is a certain kind of person - particularly a certain kind of religious person - who creates the problem he's discussing. He is right to have concerns about this, and I hope that atheists take a moment to consider this. I am religious and I find myself infuriated at the smugness and presumption of so many otherwise sane and compassionate atheists who simply cannot keep their overbearing attitude at bay. I freely admit that there are plenty of religions that are damaging and do seek to impress their will on the general public through political actions, but not all do, and it would behoove atheists to bear that in mind, and to be more specific with their criticism lest they find themselves guilt of the same shaming and generalizing behavior they tend to criticize in religious people. This is particularly resonant in the context of the above passage as pertains to Bachmann.

No one gains anything from belittling the people whose faith Bachmann exploits for support. It is Bachmann, playing on their fears in a scary time, who deserves our scorn. Nor should we assume that those who oppose us politically are stupid. Instead, we have to work to convince them that the people preying on their fears will lead them not into freedom but oppression. To solve our problems, we must assume the best of our fellow Americans and work together for a better world. We have bigger things at stake than petty divisions - and we cannot allow our revulsion at the success of people like Bachmann separate us.

Styrofoam and Social Context, OR Captain Planet Would Not Be Having This

2011-06-18T11:36:00.000-04:00

I went camping a week ago up in Ontario and I forgot to bring a cooler. I wasn't bringing any food across the border, so I guess I just x-ed cooler considerations off my list of things to remember altogether. But since there was beer in play, we needed a cooler, which was annoying because my house is like, 50% coolers and I didn't really need another one. I remembered, though, that you can often get those styrofoam cooler things that you can't take to the beach because they ALWAYS wind up blowing into the water, and then you have to chase them and this always happens when you're at Hampton Beach or whatever and you're kind of pushing the whole "summer has arrived!" business so it's -17 degrees in the water and the second you put a foot in the water you start having cardiac events and then by the time you get over the shock, the cooler is halfway to the Cape, so you swim out and get it, drag it back, fill it with sand and sit on the beach in the glorious sun unable to appreciate a beautiful summerish day because you're trying to stave off hypothermia.

Styrofoam's a jerk.

Anyway, the reason these things continue to exist is because the human brain can block out trauma, so in Ontario when we headed out to get supplies, I said we could just get one of those things, to which Canadian Friend Ben replied, "we could, but we don't have those up here." I reacted to this with what I would probably class as glee, because...that's sound policy, right? Styrofoam is basically a giant punch to the face of nature, and nature doesn't deserve that. So in Canada, they're like "don't punch nature in the face, guys." I like that a lot. Ben thinks this is an overreaction, because he lives in a place where this is rightly accepted as common sense and it's not a point of contention in public discourse, whereas I live in a place where the people elected to run the country recently decided to replace the biodegradeable flat- and silverware in the Congressional cafeteria with styrofoam out of spite, because the point is definitely pissing on your political opponents, because only your political opponents have to live on the planet Earth.

So whatever we worked it out and I got a new cooler to keep our beer cold and all was well. This week, the same friend has gotten me hooked on watching old Captain Planet episodes on YouTube, and we've been reflecting on how great it is that someone made these. The beauty of Captain Planet and the Planeteers is that the power to make a difference is always clearly on the Planeteers. Captain Planet helps out when shit gets real - and as Ben pointed out, it always does - but it's the Planeteers that do most of the seeking out of polluters and combating them. Each episode closes with a little PSA about how you can make small differences that add up to big change. This wasn't seen as filthy pinko-Commie brainwashing, it was just...common sense. Why wouldn't you teach kids about not littering? Why wouldn't you tell them that if you are considerate of other people and the Earth, everyone wins? Why wouldn't you teach that to EVERYONE?

Earth! Water! Fire! Wind! Heart!

It can be hard to quantify and explain social context to people. Ben thought I was losing my damn mind over the non-existence of styrofoam coolers, but what that represents is a society that accepts and in fact defaults to ideas that I have to argue with people about on the regular. I've been trying to write for a couple days about the valley I'm in as a feminist right now; I'm in one of those phases where everything just feels very oppressive, like even though I have wonderful people around me who believe in equality, there's just too much to do. Sometimes the reality that I will probably die without the best hopes of feminism being realized being accomplished weighs very heavily on me, and that can be tough to wade through. The idea of social context is very present in discussions about feminism, because there is so much of our society tinged with our concepts of gender and sex. Feminists willing to talk feminism in public often find themselves on the receiving end of charges like "you're taking this too seriously" or "if you weren't so hostile, maybe people would listen to you." I understand where this is coming from. We're groomed to privilege "passionless," logical, academic arguments and devalue emotional presentation of arguments. However, the reason people get upset is a disparity in perspective: for the feminist, this is a discussion of a woman's right to occupy equal space in society as a man, and for her debate opponent, it is a thought experiment that can exist in the abstract without affecting their life*. In this stance, you often see backlash to attempts to get people to make room in discourse for equality or awareness. I understand that too. Changing the status quo is weird and uncomfortable feeling. The thing is, it only feels that way for a short while. After the adjustment period, everyone benefits.

This is why I'm sad that there doesn't seem to be a new Captain Planet, and that our discourse is couched in terms of extreme individuality and reinforces various -ist concepts that divide and injure us all. There's a sense that without sexism or racism or homophobia, there can't be humor, and we can't enjoy our coexistence. Not to overwhelm you with the various media I'm watching these days, but I was watching Golden Girls this morning, and the episode was one where Sophia finds a Cuban boxer, who she is going to pay fight fees for. He seems like a total Hispanic caricature, and the ladies sort of treat him as such. One night, right before the fight, they find that he is missing. They locate him in a practice space...playing violin. It turns out that he is auditioning for Julliard, and needs the fight purse money to attend the school if he gets in. He gently points out that the ladies assumed he was just some ignorant Hispanic, and lapses into a little monologue about how Cubans are people too - "if you cut us, do we not bleed?" - and then after a brief pause, says he thought about acting, hence the dramatics. It's funny and makes the point without shaming; you're aware of the stereotype, you have to think about it, but you think twice about it. That's all it takes - awareness of the dynamics we see and the fact that they intersect with a wealth of dynamics we don't see because we don't live the same life as everyone we encounter.

We'll always be different, and that's why conversations about how you're "colorblind" or what have you are unconstructive. It's not as easy as pretending that no one is different. Reaching the best of social structure means creating a common space where we can explore each other and make room for one another. That means protecting common resources - the earth, infrastructure, governments, political structures - so that we all have equal access to this space and can achieve our own best lives. We begin with building context.

* This probably sounds like only men oppose feminism, but that's only true if we presume that gender disparity only hurts women, which is not the case. For every expectation of women in society, there is an opposing pole of expectation for men, locking everyone into certain spaces. Sexism limits everyone, but our society is influenced it, so that's what we know how to navigate. This is why women, who may not be anti-feminist in reality, may defend sexist or oppressive concepts, because it's a known quantity.

Weiner to Resign; Democrats Jump Shark

2011-06-16T12:54:00.000-04:00

The Hill is reporting that Rep. Anthony Weiner will resign, likely Thursday, in the face of pressure from all sides after tweeting pictures of himself to at least six women.

I am reporting that this goddamn party has jumped the shark.

I grew up in Massachusetts and I've voted mostly Democrat ever since I was old enough to do so. I'm sure lots of people would like to brush that off as "oh, you're just voting that way because of where you lived or how your parents voted," or any of the other tired tropes that people haul out when they want to suggest that people who disagree with them are unthinking automatons because it's easier to dehumanize people than consider their views. And you know, in a certain way, they're not wrong. I DO vote Democrat because of my parents and my community, because my parents taught me to care about the welfare of other people, and not just myself. My community - Worcester goddamn Massachusetts, home of the smiley face, of the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence, of the American Antiquarian Society, of the Higgins Armory Museum, of the Galleria - taught me that when a community bands together and cares about each other, they can make a better world for themselves and for others. My community and my parents taught me that when you make sure everyone's doing all right, everyone can succeed, and everyone can reap the benefits of that success, because we don't live in little bubbles, we live together, and that means it matters how everyone else is doing. So yes, I vote Democrat, campaign Democrat, write Democrat and live Democrat because of where I grew up and who taught me.

All of that is why I am so angry - infuriated - with the Democrats for pressuring Weiner to resign. What he did was wrong. The man is married and he was sending pictures of his genitalia to women, some of whom did not solicit it, which is doubly bad, because consent matters. However, he did nothing illegal, and he did not run on the kind of Super Morals Man platform that so many on the right bust out every couple of years, so not only did he not break the law, he didn't go against his own public statements. He's a scumbag, and that's really disappointing, because I like Anthony Weiner, but being a scumbag doesn't carry legal consequences. Instead of defending their own, the Democrats decided to start whining about what a distraction Weiner was. Let us be clear: taking this stance made it a distraction. It is absolutely mindboggling to me that the Democrats did not turn around and slap the GOP as hard as they could with the hypocritical defense of GOP members who committed actual crimes in the course of their scandals. It is remarkable that they did not have the backbone to say "we will talk about this when David Vitter, who broke the law of his own district and state by hiring prostitutes, resigns." It is amazing that they failed to say "why should Weiner resign when John Ensign continues to serve after sleeping with a subordinate, paying people to cover it up, hiring his assignee's son and bribing her husband, and lying flagrantly and continually about it all?" It is spectacular in the actual sense of being a spectacle that not a single soul in the Democrat party managed to say "Weiner will resign when it costs the taxpayers a single penny, like the exploits of Mark Sanford, who flew to Argentina to carry on an affair and then lied about it as you would to a small child with a tiny vocabulary." This is of course without touching the fact that Vitter, Sanford and Ensign all run on moralizing platforms that one can only really claim a right to when their beatific purity actually renders them unable to wear anything but flowing white robes and a halo in public.

I want to scratch my eyes out because this business has made me agree with Michael Steele, who has done nothing but irritate me since he was named RNC chair and apparently plans to continue doing so even though he has left the post, because he went on Rachel Maddow's show and said "I heard what [current RNC chairman Reince Priebus] said today and I thought it was a little bit not right. A pox on both their houses because they violated the public trust." Of course, this demonstrates the classic adage about three fingers pointing back at you when you point one at someone, since Steele was at the helm during the Vitter, Ensign and Sanford scandals, but that doesn't mean he's wrong.

The thing is, this is about more than the loss of Anthony Weiner. New York has some redistricting coming and there's a good chance his district could have been eliminated. He could have failed to be reelected. He could have vaporized into the Bermuda Triangle. What is most upsetting about this is not only the loss of Anthony Weiner but the victory of the GOP's weltanschaaung over the Democrat party's political will. By shaming Weiner out of office, the Democrats have accepted the Republican line that says Democrats are bad for not meeting the GOP's moral "standard" (GOP members' transgressions aside, of course), that Democrats aren't focused, that Democrats are evil sex-beasts of some kind. Giving in to this allows Speaker John Boehner to call "the Weiner imbroglio a "distraction," saying voters wanted Congress to focus on job creation" when his GOP-lead Congress, which was unquestionably elected on their promises to focus on jobs creation, has brought ZERO jobs bills to the floor in over one hundred days, despite the fact that they apparently had PLENTY of time to almost shut down the government by attaching policy riders to a budget bill (indicating not only a lack of seriousness and professionalism but a general misunderstanding of how the budget process works). It allows the GOP to continue blowing smoke up the collective asses of Americans who are worried and want real change to overcome the economic and political crises in which we find ourselves.

This all goes beyond the Weiner scandal itself, of course. The Democrats have seated themselves permanently on the defensive, trying to satisfy Republican demands so people who are being mean to them will stop. They've adopted Oliver Twist as a role model, begging for more gruel while the GOP proposes outrageous and damaging policies that will worsen our recession and demolish the political system we love. The Democrat party has accepted the GOP line that says Democrats hate America, want to steal your money, want to spend it to spend it, don't take defense seriously...all the bullshit claims that are leveled at me, at the people I support, at the ideas I espouse, every time I have a political conversation, which have zero truth to them whatsoever. Every time the Democrats go on the defensive in this way, they ACCEPT these claims, and I am sick of it. I'm sick of my party, which I have supported since I was 12, sticking stamps on envelopes in the first of many cramped campaign offices, agreeing on my behalf that we really are just jerks who are given space in governance out of pity and need to be watched carefully.

I want desperately to see liberals standing up in robust promotion of liberalism, of the idea that caring for the whole brings the best for the individual as well as the whole. I want Democrats to walk the walk, of course, but right now, I just want to hear them talking the talk. I want them to carry JFK's words from the 1960 New York Liberal Party acceptance speech in their pockets, next to their hearts: "If by a 'Liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people - their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties - someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a 'Liberal,' then I', proud to say I'm a 'Liberal.'" And you know what? Kennedy didn't always abide by those words - some of his policies were a horrorshow - but that he was willing to stand up and say those words, to muster that defense of liberalism, is noble and entirely lacking in today's political discourse, even though those words - that liberal dogma - are no less true today.

Democrats have failed to embrace this and to bear up the torch of liberalism as the GOP hacks gleefully away at the policies and programs that have made us one of the greatest nations in the world. That is a shame. The Weiner resignation is the latest and perhaps clearest admission of defeat, and the Democrat leadership should be ashamed for their part in it.

Beyaz Needs to Stop Telling Me What Being a Woman is About

2011-06-15T18:00:00.000-04:00

If you are a TV watcher, you probably know more about erectile dysfunction, tampons and birth control options than you would ever have chosen to know left up to your own devices; those ads are everywhere and insist on being either weirdly coy or SRS BZNZ about it, which always throws me. There was one ad a while back that I found particularly irritating. It was for Yaz, and the premise of the commercial was that when women get dressed up and go out to a fabulous cocktail party on some kind of rooftop lounge, they immediately start talking about their birth control, not just in the kind of "I use X, it is good/bad" way that does occasionally happen, but in a detailed manner. It was the least subtle thing in the history of ever and started with Generic Woman #1 saying something like "HEY GENERIC WOMAN #2, LIFE MUST BE BUSY WITH ALL YOUR DOCTORING! WHAT CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT THE SIDE EFFECTS OF THAT NEW BIRTH CONTROL FROM BAYER?" The first time I saw it, my eyes nearly rolled out of my face, out the door and down the driveway. There's something about the way these women are portrayed that just set me on edge - I got the feeling that the ad people were kind of like "a lady doctor! Heeeeelarious! It's okay though, it's for lady medicine."

As it turns out, taking Yaz basically turns your blood to one giant clot or something (????), and also can cause something called hyperkalemia that leads to cardiac arrest and kidney failure, so it's been recalled. [NB: In the process of this recalling, it turns out that even the FDA took issue with the commercials, though not for the annoyingness quotient. They said that the ads "were overstating the benefits of Yaz while distracting viewers from the risks by playing fast-moving images and music while risks were read out loud or displayed on the screen." See previous link.]

I recently found myself chasing my eyeballs down the driveway yet again, this time thanks to an ad for something called Beyaz. I thought to myself "hmm, "60% of 'Beyaz' sounds like that stupid Yaz pill, and the other 40% sounds like its maker's name...mayhap this product verily be similar."

Oh hey, it's totally the same thing with a folate supplement.

So Bayer is basically trying to get one over on women, which is like, totally great, because it's not like it isn't a pain in the ass for women to get hormonal birth control in the first place in this country, so why not ALSO lie about its risks? Nice one, Bayer.

That's offensive, but luckily Bayer was also able to maintain its record of marketing this pill with revolting fuckery swaddled in tokenism and then baby-slinged to its stupid corporate chest with like, a million yards of gender roles. They also did me a solid here because while the Yaz commercial was offensive in a hard-to-articulate way, the Beyaz model is pretty clear.

Ladies walk into a store, because women be shoppin', amirite? Needless to say there are two white ladies in the foreground, followed in by a light skinned black woman and a Japanese lady. The premise of these commercials is that Beyaz leaves you free to do what you want to do, instead of being crippled by PMS or PMDD. I can get behind that, except Beyaz has a pretty clear and bullshit concept of what we womenfolk want. Let's take a look at what's on the racks at The Lady Store.

Grad school. I am a grad student. Hooray for grad school! However, this is the only occupation oriented (and it's definitely oriented, grad school isn't a career) option in the store. You could probably stretch it to a "women are nuturing educators" stereotype, but I am more inclined to take issue with the suggestion that women supposedly only want to go to grad school, and not for instance, run a company or work in a lab.
The Significant Other section. All of them are male, and all fit Maxim/Cosmo-type tropes: there's a rocker, a prep, an athlete, a crunchy looking guy, etc. I sometimes have difficulty explaining to men that gender roles are harmful to men as well, but this makes it abundantly clear, which I guess...is nice? Not everyone fits in a box, and the more we try to define masculinity and femininity, the more limits we place upon ourselves. It bears mentioning that all of the SOs are, again, male, because lesbians or bisexual women don't exist in Beyaz World. BONUS GROSSNESS: the Japanese woman swipes one of the SOs (who is not Asian) from under the fingers of the white woman, which to me suggests a creepy racist angle centered on Asian women stealing away white men.
A Picnic by a Waterfall/Trip to Paris. Because women like romantic things, you see.
A Stork. You know this was coming. I actually cut them slightly more slack here because it is a birth control ad and they need to demonstrate that taking their pill won't permanently disable your reproductive organs. However, having a stork as a major part of the store suggests that all women have babies on their list, and that is not the case.
A House (with a White Figurine in Front). Not everyone wants a house, and not everyone wants a picket fence. This presumes a level of aspirational-Stepfordiana that I just find boring as hell. Not all women are homebodies and not all homeowners are white. Shocking, I know.

You might ask here, "what's the big deal? So what if they have girly things in the girly store? It's a pill for women!" To a certain extent you might be right - the objective of the ad is to market a pill to women, not to provide career counseling to them. However, the "what's the big deal" card can cut both ways. Why NOT include a woman in the significant other section? Why NOT include a motorcycle? Why NOT include a corner office? Why NOT include a lab job? What would the cost be to Beyaz of including these things? Surely it would not be any more expensive than the ad already is. The problem here is that the ad suggests that Beyaz allows women to do anything they want, and that everything a woman could possibly want is found right here in this store. It reinforces the idea that women only want these things, and when an ad supporting this idea runs on national TV, it entrenches oversimplified ideas that box both men AND women into gender roles.

It costs nothing to avoid reinforcing gender roles in media and carries a huge social cost to promote them.