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

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)

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

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

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

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

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?

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.