Onyx Lynx

Roundfiled on lived experience and its warpings.

Maybe I’m being nitpicky by pointing out that Ayn wasn’t much for Republicans, and maybe it’s wrong that it’s always bothered me that this was someone who fled a country in which she and her family were literally starving, only to get here and find that your Humphrey Bogart liberal class did not want to hear it, wouldn’t hear it. It couldn’t be true; the New York Times said there is no famine. You’re making it up.

And I just do not know anyone who wouldn’t be made a little fucking crazy by that experience.

Tiger Beatdown's Sady Doyle on comment deletion, sexism, and "mansplaining" with funny-but-true asides:

Here’s where we appeal to that “lived experience” thing. Because: Have you ever had a guy come up to you — on the street, in a bar, whatever — and just straight-up say, “hey, I wanna talk to you?” Happens all the time, right? Happens to women, all the time. But have you ever just straight-up said, “no?” Not “no, I have a boyfriend,” or “no, I’m busy,” or “no, I have to race to save the city from the Joker’s diabolical machinations, for I am the Batman,” or any other excuse: Just the word “no,” by itself?

Yeah. So you know what happens next, after you say “no.” The guy always keeps talking. He tries wheedling, or begging, sometimes. But if you say “no” firmly enough, or often enough that he gets the point, the dude just starts yelling. He tells you that you’re not that hot. He tells you what a bitch you are. (“You bitch, I have a Rolls Royce,” was my favorite of these.) Sometimes he follows you down the street, yelling at you; sometimes, he follows you in his car. These dudes are always so fucking certain that they’re entitled to your time and attention that they will harass you until you give it, or at least until you’re scared and sorry for not giving it. You do not have the right not to interact, as far as these guys are concerned.

This is how women are conditioned to live within a sexist culture, and within a rape culture. Unbelievably, I don’t need George R. R. Martin, or any man, to tell me what that’s like: It’s my actual no-fooling life, which I do believe I know more about than George R. R. Martin.

So my question is:  Do al-Qaida #2 guys double as drummers for Spinal Tap?

(If you can stand it:  Video of John Yoo the torture apologist [and yes, some of the comments will make you livid] in San Francisco.)

Doghouse Riley on The Usual Suspect columnist's analysis of the Republican "frontrunners."

And it seems to me that protecting the environment, engineering safety, and reducing the risks we've already created for ourselves is what calls for innovation. Not the libertoonian "If it weren't for all these damned regulations I could smelt ore right here in my spare bedroom" bullshit.

Maybe Romney the man understands the first, but Romney the candidate is committed to spouting the second. That is to say, he's a Republican. But, y'know, somehow Apple managed to innovate--in the business sense--itself into a behemoth despite the Socialist anti-business regulation and taxation environment in this country. 'Course that was Apple's corporate MO for twenty years while the smart boys consigned it to permanent Niche/Cult status. I don't really recall back then hearing anyone demanding that Microsoft innovate. Back then the great regulatory bugbear prevented Bill Gates from throwing his weight around however he pleased, and hindered "innovations" like AOL's takeover of Time-Warner. Y'know, the way Detroit could have innovated safer, more fuel-efficient cars if it hadn't been forced to litigate against government requirements that it create safer, more fuel-efficient cars.

It's "youngest, wastrel son of the Nobleman" syndrome.  Some of them never left the trees.

Stay safe.  Evacuate if you're in a danger zone.

You might want to pray.

1. Just so you know, earlier this week I passed the 1,500th posting.  Not bad for a taciturn recluse. ;-)
2. Also, I am trying to recalibrate the Rage-O-Meter, which seems lately to start in the red zone and shoot up from there.  "Stop reading news and blogs," you say, and I would agree, except I am now somewhat addicted, and I like the folks on Dreamwidth, many of whom are much better at the analysis angle.  Also, Bejeweled.  And YouTube.  And Pam's House Blend, which I mostly don't read because when it first began, it and Safari had Issues, put me on to a couple of resources for Journey.  (I am too lazy and too lacking in the interviewing skillset to write the scholarly work that sort of drama needs, which is a shame; I can't imagine anyone outside the band members wanting to.  I just enjoy the occasional hit of research.)
3. Anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution.  With reminder that some women had to wait a lot longer for the right to vote.
4. Arthur needs money.
5. Sideshow's roundup of *headdeskery*. I admit to a wry smile that this is the first scandal in Darrell Issa's office where the direct perpetrator is not named Darrell Issa  (Confidential to Mr. Issa:  Water runs downhill because of gravity).
6. Daisy explains "why the mainstream media are clueless about the religious right." Also:

   "With the exception of the anti-war stance"? Earth to Adele! Somebody does not keep up with the drug war, which is BANKRUPTING THE COUNTRY and decimating poor and minority communities. Maybe Adele doesn't know any teenagers whose lives have been ruined over a tiny and inconsequential puff on a joint, but poor people have plenty of examples to share with her. Ron Paul proposes to legalize and tax marijuana and end the super-expensive drug war altogether... and that is a damned radical position that no other Republican AND no other Democrat has dared take.
   
   The unbridled destruction of poor communities and the mass-imprisonment of young minority men is a fucking SCANDAL; the drug charges that the privileged kids from good schools can safely giggle about years later ("Oh man, my dad was sure pissed!") are the very same drug charges that will get you locked up for life if you are too poor to afford a lawyer or your daddy doesn't know the right people.
   
   Ending this VICIOUS ATTACK on the poor is a PROGRESSIVE POSITION and only Ron Paul will take it.
   
   You know this, right Adele? That one out of four black men is in prison for some BULLSHIT? Aaaarghhh, don't even get me started.
   
   The fact that you have ignored this point in your piece, Adele Stan, is rather clueless as well. The fact that you don't seem to know what is happening in minority communities? Marks you as one of the elite media that doesn't know what's going on out here in the fabled Heartland.

   I am not a Marxist, but sooner or later the class thing is going to have to be faced, probably is non-Marxist terms.  (I have other problems with libertarians.)
7. There was an earthquake a couple of days ago on the East Coast.  This weekend, there will be a hurricane.  It's because conservatives are not feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, or freeing prisoners.  Mark my words.
8. A quick refresher.
9. List of 2011 Hugo Award winners.
10. Fred Pohl on wealth and statistics.
11. Some small part of the problem is that many of the people alive today and most of the bloggers out there don't remember the Kennedy presidency At All.  

Dave Ettlin's earthquake.

I'm not going to say it,

So of course first thing this morning read that Nick Ashford, singer and songwriter (with partner/wife Valerie Simpson) had died.

Jerry Lieber, songwriter.

Actually, lyricist.

With Mike Stoller.

Oh, never mind.

ETA:  Jill has a video sampler.  [Warning:  One segment makes fun of fat women.]

Here.

We have reached agreement with Verizon on how bargaining will proceed and how it will be restructured. The major issues remain to be discussed, but overall, issues now are focused and narrowed.

Just listening to some Phil Ochs today.

In light of this post at Making Light, I just want to remind people that comments on posts more than ten (10) days old are moderated.  (I know people have run up against that sometimes.  It's not you.)

This concludes the somewhat annual notification of this practice.

Scott Horton on Solov'ëv and the problem of Evil.

In the modern world, there are essentially two approaches to the concept of evil. There is the traditional, conservative, essentially theological perspective, in which evil is an autonomous force working to corrupt man and society, and in which it is a foe, to be identified and battled wherever it appears. And there is the secular perspective, associated with such Enlightenment thinkers as Rousseau, which sees man as naturally good, capable of becoming “evil” only as a result of choices that may be the product of environment or education. Vladimir Solov'ëv, one of Russia’s outstanding thinkers and writers in the late nineteenth century, understood these opposing perspectives as a fundamental contradiction within the developed societies of his time. He was certainly right — in fact, his writings on this subject maintain their currency over a century later, attesting to the shrewdness of his insights and his abilities as a narrator.

Bonus political positions and evil.

Daisy has a post up about the 45,000 workers at Verizon who've gone on strike.  (The CWA was the union my brother belonged to.)

>> Verizon's annualized revenues in 2011 are $108 billion, with net profits of $6 billion. The concessions demanded from workers equal about $1 billion, working out to an approximate $20,000 per family, per year. Many of these concessions concern health benefits and pensions, benefits promised to workers.

>> Verizon paid no taxes last year and in fact received a $1.3 billion-dollar TAX REBATE!

>> The top five Verizon executives earned $258 million over the past four years.

I suppose I could pay my bill late...

Arthur Silber:

Consider the opposing forces. On one side, a massively powerful surveillance State, which brutalizes, imprisons, destroys and kills by myriad methods those segments of populations, both foreign and domestic, that it designates as noncompliant, or threatening, or disfavored for whatever reason, or for no reason at all. The State imprisons, destroys and kills in vast numbers.

On the other side, you have members of those noncompliant, disfavored groups. These particular disfavored persons perform incendiary, revolutionary acts -- such as wearing a pair of stolen shorts a roommate brought home, or writing Facebook posts.

And a lot of people -- including many liberals, progressives and "dissenting" writers -- side with the State.

This is not only why we can't have nice things, it's why any revolution we have is going to be bloody.  We can't figure out which side we're on.  (Note to Mme. deFarge/Comrade Stalin wannabees:  I am not a Marxist.  Go away.)

The conundrum of Michelle Bachmann:

Nothing in either definition, no matter what dictionary you choose, implies respect. At least not the mutual respect that Bachmann uses to try and paper over what she really said and what she really meant. If anything, respect in a submissive or subservient relationship is a one way street — the submissive or subservient person certainly respect those whose will and authority she is prepared to obey unquestioningly, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she is respected in turn. (BDSM relationships can be an exception, but I don’t think that’s what Bachmann was comparing her marriage to.) It’s a relationship that sounds an awful lot like slavery, and that may not actually be too far from Bachmann’s views.

Republic of T, who then digs back into the archives:

No doubt, part of the reason is that many evangelicals embrace another scripture that seems to make it clear that women are not to lead in the home or anywhere else. Yet Bachmann wants to have it both ways. She wants to embrace an understanding of scripture that would have kept her out of office and out of the media, if she really took it to heart and acted accordingly: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.” But she wants to reap the benefits of the movement for women’s equality — the very equality she renounces in order to signal to evangelicals that she’s one of them.

Also, jurassicpork had this link, which may or may not be true (there's an ad for something "trusted and used by Glenn Beck," which is an automatic disrecommendation, above the picture, and the other material on site suggests libertarianism), alleging that Ms. Bachmann

"...spent upwards of $1 million, paid for over 6000 tickets, paid for Grammy Award winning, country musician Randy Travis to show up, and bussed in Randy Travis fans in order to secure 152 more votes than Congressman Ron Paul. Michele Bachmann’s camp handed out flyers, which stated that in order to see the entertainment, you had to vote for her first." [Emphasis mine.]

In the ancient tradition of big city elections...Tammany Hall on line 2 for Ms. Bachmann...they want to know what was wrong with a chicken dinner...

ETA:  Jurassicpork has the "Assclowns of the Week" up, from whence I got the Bachmann link, and you might want to check it.  And if you're of a certain age, Santorum's entry might make you twitch.

Picked up from Firedoglake:  Dan Choi hasn't been arrested that often outside the White House, and yet the Justice Department is throwing the book at making an example of pursuing federal charges against him.  What's going on with that?

Gee, ya think?

Served cold.

There will be rearranging for the next week or so (because I have to feel like it), but relax, I'm not throwing out the comic books.

I'm having a bout of ennui,
And suddenly I find
A blandness in my mind--
And tea...

1. Via The Sideshow:  8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back, at Alternet.  That's entirely aside from the fact that it has gotten more difficult to live "off the grid" (which my brain kept insisting was "off the grill")(lunchtime, whaddayawant?) with the increasing insistence on papers please.  The writer begins with student debt and ends with 2 fundamentalisms:

   8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism. American culture offers young Americans the “choices” of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist consumerism. All varieties of fundamentalism narrow one’s focus and inhibit critical thinking. While some progressives are fond of calling fundamentalist religion the “opiate of the masses,” they too often neglect the pacifying nature of America’s other major fundamentalism. Fundamentalist consumerism pacifies young Americans in a variety of ways. Fundamentalist consumerism destroys self-reliance, creating people who feel completely dependent on others and who are thus more likely to turn over decision-making power to authorities, the precise mind-set that the ruling elite loves to see. A fundamentalist consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds of manipulations, including lies; and when a society gives legitimacy to lies and manipulativeness, it destroys the capacity of people to trust one another and form democratic movements. Fundamentalist consumerism also promotes self-absorption, which makes it difficult for the solidarity necessary for democratic movements.

2. Via Mills River Progressive:  David Swanson at The Smirking Chimp makes a case for a Constitutional Convention convention.

   But, again, the craziness doesn't come from amending the Constitution. The craziness comes, relentlessly, with or without taking any notice of the Constitution. It comes from poor education, evil propaganda, inequality, insecurity, violence, and corruption. A movement to rewrite/revise/reform the U.S. Constitution should be an integral part of a movement against craziness, but such a movement must include massive nonviolent resistance, the creating of new communications systems, and education and organizing that overcome political partisanship. Such a movement will not succeed until tens of millions of Americans who are now fiercely loyal to the Democratic Party, right or wrong, outgrow that phase of childhood. And it may succeed most quickly if independent activists on both the left and the right join together on those points where they agree. These points of agreement are areas on which a large majority of Americans agree, but on which the current federal government is strongly opposed and partisans too compromised.

   Mind you, there's too much if and would in this posting.  It reads like one of those libertarian pipe dreams.  Some of his proposals, however, could fly.
   

Via Mills River Progressive:  Vox Nova dismantling a John Boehner sentence.

• In memoriam:  Mark O. Hatfield, liberal Republican Senator from Oregon back in the day.
• Doghouse Riley on Medicare v. Defense:

  Why in the world would someone like David Leonhardt make this mistake? Is it because, as a Reagantot (born 1973) he's spent his entire life being lied to about it? Medicare, like Social Security, is a trust. You pay a separate tax bill into the fund. Eliminate it altogether and you get that portion of your taxes back, and good luck saving it for when you can't work. This has been lumped into the "social spending" category--public health, hospitals, schools--by the American Right and Democratic centrists since the Vietnam war, in order to insist it was The Great Society, and not a wasteful and useless jungle conflict, which was destroying the US economy. It's an argument disguised as a fact, and apparently no one born after the Nixon administration can be bothered to notice. Fer chrissakes, we spent nearly $700 billion on "Defense" in 2010 not including the costs of however many wars we're in now, and that's if you believe it's the one thing the government doesn't lie about. Subsuming this as "national security" is like imagining Wal*Mart is the most successful Mom & Pop hardware store in the country.
  
  Look, children: you've been sold a bill of goods, including the confusion of the honor of military service with the less-that-honorable uses to which it's been put over the last sixty years. You got sold the idea that the war in Vietnam was divisive because dirty hippies spit on returning veterans, and not because the goddam thing was a lie from beginning to end which a large portion of the citizenry slowly came to realize, and object to. There's nothing in this country so bloated and wasteful as our military budget; there's no government expenditure anywhere else in the world that begins to match it. Caring for our elderly and disabled citizens is not a discretionary item; it's a measure of our humanity. I don't know how the argument got so twisted, but I do know that a moment's thought should be enough to untangle it.

• Via Making Light:  the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization.  And then go to the Maps tab and spend hours.

• First, if you're not reading The Sideshow, GET OVER THERE AND READ IT RIGHT NOW!  I'll wait.
• Does Washington care about jobs?  Two guesses, and the first one doesn't count.
• Texas Gov. Rick Perry (aka "Governor Goodhair;" RIP Molly Ivins) promoted a prayer rally in Houston.  This is the beginning of the posting in the Politics and Government blog at the New York Times:

  HOUSTON — Thousands of men, women and children listened to Christian-themed singers and music groups at Reliant Stadium here Saturday morning, shortly before a controversial prayer rally sponsored by Gov. Rick Perry was to begin.
  
  At about 9 a.m., an hour before the program was scheduled to start, the stadium, with a seating capacity of 71,500, had tens of thousands of empty seats, particularly in the upper decks. By 10 a.m, organizers estimated that about 20,000 people were in attendance.

  Now, that still means that tens of thousands of seats were empty.  And while 20,000 warm bodies are nothing to sneeze at, I suspect that the Astros (who're in last place) get better attendance (attendance per game currently averages 26,483 which is better than my team is doing).
  
   On the other hand, Burning Man sold out.
  
• Hendrik Hertzberg at the New Yorker on the national debt, a Republican of old, and Obama.

  In 1866, Wade, a nationally prominent Ohio senator, laid down the law on the national debt. He was a principal drafter of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which, until recently, was known almost exclusively for Section 1, the guarantee of legal due process and equal protection. Lately, though, Section 4 has been getting some ink, especially its first sentence: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” The long-standing obscurity of this passage is due partly to the aside about insurrection and rebellion, which makes the whole sentence look like a historical relic and sound like a voice-over from a Ken Burns documentary, and partly to the rarity of the situation it anticipates, which has never before arisen in a serious way. Now that it has, a number of constitutional scholars, including Garrett Epps, of the University of Baltimore, and Jack Balkin, of Yale, have been calling attention to the sudden relevance of Section 4.

• Comrade Misfit blasts the tea party, and Fred Clark quantifies the damage.

  You don’t get anything in return for that $322, nor does my family get anything in return for that $1,288. It is simply an added cost due to our sharing this country with aggressively stupid, resentful, angry fools who would rather let the whole thing burn than bother to learn even the slightest bit about others or about the world they live in.
  
  Their willful, determined ignorance just cost you another $322.
  
  Alas, that $322 is not the entire cost to you of their destructive, crabs-in-a-bucket lashing-out. It’s simply the latest cost incurred from their childishness.
  
  [...]
  
  ... I would say they were thieves, stealing this money from you, but they’re not lucid enough to be thieves.
  
  Thieves at least enrich themselves by taking from others. These folks take from others and just set the money on fire.

• Southern Beale on another Pentagon boondoggle.
• How I'm beginning to feel, as elucidated by Arthur Silber.
• God's blog, with comments.

1. Immigrants in Europe, from Noli Irritare Leones;
2. Brilliant at Breakfast reposts George Carlin on The American Dream;
3. Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars on President Obama's flexibility (with a Bill Maher video which I haven't watched);
4. Open letter to Democrats from Southern Beale;
5. Palate cleanser:  The Muppets and their history post-Henson.

Oh, and we've got a talking point:  "Where are the jobs?"  Repeat until retreat.  If the only time Faux News can mention jobs is in connection with Obama's birthday, they're not mentioning it enough to get through to their minions.  This is usable.  The answer to any conservative talking point should be "Yes, but where are the jobs?"  Especially if it's not quite relevant.  Or, y'know, Rep. Steve King.

• Via Avedon and from Mills River Progressive, Keith Olbermann's Special Comment (video) on the Four Hypocrisies of the Debt Deal.  (Quoted in full here.)
• Historical perspective (yes, America isn't like those other silly countries, except when it is, but since we seem to be recapitulating pieces of other national tragedies, we might note one obscure one which can't hurt us and has no bearing on anything going on in Washington.  Right?):  the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the liberum veto.  From Republic of T.  Excerpt:

  The Poles had a republic and couldn’t keep it the first time around. They didn’t lose due foreign invasion alone. The end of their republic began with the internal abuse of their political process, which weakened and paralyzed government to the point that it couldn’t prevent invasion, occupation and eventual obliteration by foreign invaders. Today, we’re faced with a radical Republican party on record as willing to push our republic towards collapse for political gain, and happy to abuse our political process to do it. Foreign enemies couldn’t have done better.

• Something smells a little off here:

  AH. Maybe something to see here, after all. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Romney’s former company, Bain Capital, just made a $1 million donation to its founder’s presidential campaign, and it did so very secretively. That’s like Halliburton funding Dick Cheney’s campaign, or Pilot Oil funding Bill Haslam’s. That’s the problem with these CEO politicians, if you ask me: they are invariably doing the bidding of their company. It’s the United States of IBM, Oh Beautiful For Spacious ExxonMobil, From WalMart to Shining WalMart.

  From Southern Beale.

Blame, media, and history from Southern Beale.  A couple of paragraphs, because you should read it already:

We’ve all wondered why, for example, the lies about death panels and taxpayer-funded abortions and “government takeover of healthcare” were never countered in the press. You had right wingers spouting their nonsense, liberals sputtering “no it does not do that!”, and then, of course, that’s all the time we have, we’ll have to leave it there, yada yada. Why couldn’t someone, somewhere, read the damn bill, conclude that there are no death panels, no taxpayer funded abortions and certainly no government takeovers of anything, and the next time some yahoo tries to claim big mean ol’ Obama will decide if grandma gets to live or die, they tell them to shut the fuck up? Why is that so hard?

[...]

I don’t really have a point here. I’m just wondering if there aren’t there any principled Democrats left — or is such a thing even possible absent a news media that refuses to do its job?

Now yesterday, as it happens, Driftglass posted a large amount of H. L. Mencken writing about the Scopes trial.  (Tennessee vs. Evolution goes way back.)  Mencken's journalism and essays formed the views of a lot of people working in the media in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.  Sometime in the '80s he was found to have problematic beliefs (one of them, in fact, crops up a bit in an aside in the quote Drifty uses.  See if you can find it), and he fell out of favor.  (He's still quoted, just not as much.)  1981 was thirty.  Years.  Ago.  The Watergate scandal period (1972-4) is coming up to forty years ago.  Since Watergate,

1. News has become more entertainment than news (I grew up with news presented by Grumpy Old White Guys with Gravitas, which is not fair to people who are not grumpy, male, or white and not "entertaining"), which in practice means that what garners ratings trumps (no pun intended) boring old information.  When I was a kid I didn't always watch the news because it was kind of dry and dull, but I haven't been a kid for a while now, and there are two wars going on, apparently off the books, in which except for egregious mistakes nothing seems to be happening;
2. News Corp./Fox intruded its tentacles into the newspaper/television/media business and in some places is the only source of information;
3. The overwhelming majority of news gatherers/journalists/reporters come from university graduate programs which (ahem) skew toward the offspring of comfortably well-off people, class-wise.  

I've been too disgusted to do much more than quote better writers other blog postings and play YouTube videos, but my inner [Feminist] Hulk is getting ready to burst forth and Smash with Joy.  So watch out.

ETA:  The Daily Howler scorns Maddow and Dowd, and Shakesville features a TV segment setting forth the facts about wealth distribution, unemployment, and the deficit at nearly half an hour's length.  The TV segment is from Al Jazeera.

Mostly, anyway.

1. Echidne of the Snakes examines further a seriously dishonest survey (different questions to the groups being surveyed?  I took statistics on Saturdays and barely passed, and I know better than that) which not surprisingly has a not-so-hidden agenda.  
2. Helen Philpot on religion and politics:

   Those fools can keep on mixing politics with religion. I’ll stick to mixing gin with tonic. Ten bucks says my way is better.

3. Tomorrow is National Night Out.  My block has a block party.  I make a dish, usually at the last minute, involving mushrooms, pasta, and a vegetable.  This year, I have already sautéed the mushrooms and measured out the pasta.  The vegetable is in the fridge.  Something else will have to delay me this year...

1. Arthur Silber on a jeremiad, because the situation is pretty bad.
2. Because we never have enough bombs.  Southern Beale knows.
3. Jurassicpork on historic and present day undermining, because we can't remember anything.
4. Melissa McEwan on fundamental dishonesty.