Find teh funny - zen master edition

Muir just gets more Zen all the time.

more at Pandagon

Touched by Mary Gross

When I was fifteen and in sophmore gym class, I decided to give jockdom another chance. I had recently broken up with my first real boyfriend, and was in the mood for a change. Previously I had avoided gym class, and when I couldn't avoid it, participated as little as possible.

I didn't start out that way. When I was about nine, I really wanted to be a jock. I joined a girls softball team and went from bad shortstop to semi-adequate outfielder. My team, the Bensalem Doves, was actually good in spite of me - we won the division championship both years I was on the team, and the second year we were undefeated. So I got two trophies just like everybody else. But the only way I could claim credit for our record was, maybe, that I psyched the other teams out by making the sign of the cross when they came up to bat. I was very religious as a kid, ironically.

I don't think I ever actually learned all the rules of softball while I was on the team, and I spent most of my time on the field hoping that the ball wouldn't come to me. So in spite of my proto-feminist belief that it was important for girls to play sports as much as boys I was a lousy jock. And after the second year in softball, I admitted it and didn't try to fight it any more - until I was fifteen and depressed and looking for a way to redefine myself.

Bad move.

I don't know why they allow kids to play field hockey without helmets. They didn't provide helmets in my day, and I'm told kids are still not required to wear them. Who the hell thinks it's a good idea to distribute long heavy wooden sticks to a group of adolescents wearing nothing more protective than gym shorts and t-shirts and tell them all to try to hit a tiny ball at the same time?

Now I know even less about the rules of field hockey than I did the rules of softball when I was a player, but I'm pretty sure it's not considered good form, at the very least, to raise your field hockey stick over your head and then slam it down on the ball like you're playing golf. But nobody told Mary Gross.

So there I am, back on the jock trail, chasing after Mary Gross, who was controlling the ball. She decides to go for a hole in one. She swings her stick violently up and back and connects with my face, knocking me out for maybe five seconds. The next thing I remember was the gym teacher quickly hustling me off to the school nurse, more annoyed that I delayed the game slightly than worried about my welfare. I ran with the blood streaming. The field hockey stick had rammed my lower lip into my upper right tooth, ripping a big gash in my lip. I had to have a bunch of stitches - big long black ones that protruded straight out from my lip, just in time for a Halloween party - and yes, my ex-boyfriend was at the Halloween party.

After it was all healed, my lower lip was uneven - the scarred side was slightly lower than the other. This was bad, and at first I thought that was the only permanent disfigurement. It took me years to realize that my nose had been broken. I had always had a small hump on my nose, but now it was also out of alignment from left to right - and got worse over the years. My septum was deviated. Eventually I had rhinoplasty. That was ten years ago.

Even more slow to develop, but just as ugly, was my discolored tooth. When Mary Gross literally hit me with an ugly stick, she also killed my upper right tooth. Over the decades it slowly, steadily became discolored. I tried various whitening schemes until a dentist finally declared it dead and said no amount of topical treatment would lighten it up.

So today, finally, all these years later, I have corrected the last effect of the touch of Mary Gross. I had a nice white veneer placed on that tooth. Now I'm ready to get back in the saddle again - I'm ready to give physical fitness, at least, a chance. But nothing that involves free-swinging wooden sticks, that's just madness.

An Inconvenient Truth - with a bullet

An Inconvenient Truth is the 7th highest grossing documentary of all time, and unlike numbers 1 - 6, is still in theatres.

UPDATE An Inconvenient Truth is now number 5 and closing in fast on Madonna's Truth or Dare.

Huck Finn blog

I have a new blog up, to help promote my play in progress HUCK FINN. The blog is also a tribute to Mark Twain, who was very focused on promoting his work any way possible.

I was fed-up with Blogger when I began the site, so created my own blog, using SQL and ASP to connect the front-end to the database, although I still need to do a little tweaking of the text handling. But if Google wants to buy my blog service too, I'm cool with that.

The logo for the play is based on a significant event in the story. I wonder if people will get that.

The site includes my ongoing project of recording the entire original novel's text narrative. I had to do it myself, since I don't know any 13 - 15 year old boys who want to do all that work for free. But hell, I think I sound more like the character than Garrison Keillor or any of the other adult males who read the unabridged versions available on iTunes.

Book 'im, Dan-O

Limbaugh Detained At Airport

Via Tom Tomorrow

The atheists nightmare

From the good Rev. Bookburn and You Tube:
The atheist's nightmare: the banana
Kirk Cameron seems a bit skeptical.

I get emails

This choice item showed up last week in my Inbox:

This is the whiney and unfairly remunerated Daphne Merkin reporting in, having stumbled on your blog late this night instead of sleeping or finishing reading D.H. Lawrence's THE RAINBOW. Aside from insulting me, you sound like a generally unreflective and overly self-regarding person. >From glancing quickly at your bio, I gather your own "feminist" credentials are less than wonderful, since you seem to have abandoned one early putative interest (illustrating) for another ( playacting) on the basis of meeting a "beautiful young man." Your blog makes me fshudder on behalf of bloggerdom, seething as it is with envy and bravado and received wisdom. I hope your plays are better than this.

Now I still haven't confirmed that this is the actual Daphne Merkin, but if it isn't her, somebody sure can do a great parody, from the revelation of a mundane-yet-pretentious detail of her life: "...finishing reading D.H. Lawrence's THE RAINBOW..."; to the utter cluelessness on the subject of feminism: "I gather your own "feminist" credentials are less than wonderful..." to the pitch-perfect whine and operatic grievance that suffuses her every written thought.

For those of you who don't know, Daphne Merkin is a writer who has been published in the New Yorker and the NYTimes - she seems to have a regular slot in the Times' Sunday Magazine.

I certainly hope it WAS Daphne Merkin though. The thought that I might have given her a moment's discomfort, and slowed down her project of reading the entire Great Authors Home Library Collection almost makes up for many and sundry moments of utter frustration and itchy trigger finger I experienced before I wised up and began ignoring anything connected to her byline.

And in fact, the item that "Daphne Merkin" responded to was written after I began to disregard her work. I wrote an item way back in February (ancient history in blogland), in response to an item on Pandagon, where Amanda happened to catch the Merkin show at the NYTimes. When I received the email it took me a few moments to remember what in tarnation she was on about.

I'm guessing that Merkin recently learned how to Google her own name which is how she came to find my remarks about her. But when I Googled her name myself I discovered my item on page 13 of the hits for "Daphne Merkin." The Pandagon article was on page 10. And Amanda and I are certainly not the only people on the Internet to say something critical or unflattering about Daphne Merkin. I see that Granny Gets a Vibrator at the top of page 10 of the Merkin hit parade says:

So in today’s NYT Magazine, whiny defeatist anti-feminist Daphne Merkin informs us that there’s nothing hot about women over 45.

“It would seem fairly self-evident,” she declares based on the flimsiest anecdotal evidence she could muster, “that as women enjoy longer and more active lives in a culture that venerates youth, especially in women, something's gotta give — and what gives, mostly, are men.”

And even earlier, on page 3 of the Merkin Google hits, is a Susie Bright article at the Huffington Post in which Bright says:

Meet Daphne Merkin, The Lady Who Talks Dirty But Hates Sex.

Daphne's latest think-piece, Our Vaginas Ourselves, appeared two weeks ago Sunday's Times magazine. (I wanted to respond more quickly, but was distracted by L'Affaire Leroy).

It starts out with a promising lede: "These are cruel times for vaginas." Go, Daphne, Go!

She began to talk about those awful operations that some Beverly Hills plastic surgeons promote, to refigure your labia and sew your hymen back together. I can't type the description without wincing!

But why is this surgery a new trend? Why does feminine self-loathing seem to be going over the edge?
You are not going to believe Daphne's answer.

According to Merkin, this nightmare has came to pass because feminists in the '70s looked at their vulvas, schooled themselves in gynecology, and demanded to have a say in reproductive rights!

GONG, please!

"Truth be told, I always considered myself lucky to have escaped coming of age at the height of the consciousness-raising era, when anatomical self-examination took on the aspect of a collective ritual. Those were the days when women felt obliged to convene in sisterly circles with mirrors and flashlights the better to study their bodies, themselves. Never having been one to enjoy group activities of any sort, the thought of becoming more closely acquainted with my private parts in a public setting seems potentially traumatizing rather than liberating or, God knows, celebratory."

Indeed, it has always seemed to me that one of the singular advantages of being a woman lies precisely in the "dark continent" quality of our genital cartography...

What a piece of work. The only reason Daphne even knows what a speculum is, or has the legal right to abortion, or maybe even a clue what is involved in clitoral consciousness-raising, is because of revolution initiated by the very women she disdains. I'd call her a cunt, but frankly, she hasn't earned it.

What is she talking about, women "OBLIGED" to perform genital examinations in PUBLIC EXHIBITIONS? Is she high?

The Bright article goes on to quote the great Betty Dodson - whom Merkin could certainly learn a thing or two from - taking Merkin to task.

So lots of people think that Daphne Merkin is a hopeless, regressive feminist-bashing whine-meister besides me. Is that what Merkin meant when she accused my blog of seething with "received wisdom?"

Did Merkin Google her own name and then go down the list, shooting off defensive, whiney screeds to anybody who ever complained about her? Are famous (famous-ish at least) well-paid editorialists that incredibly petty? And what about poor neglected David Herbert?

I will have more to say about Merkin's idiotic comment about the spark that ignited my playwriting career presently.

Man-Dude Love

Wolcott and Digby have made an important discovery.

Find teh funny - Alan Keyes edition

See the whole thing here.

Frequent challenges at Pandagon.

note from Karl Rove

Hey guys,

I wasn't indicted. That's the good news. The bad news is that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Let's face it, we fucked up. Iraq is now rife with ethnic cleansing and summary executions. Global warming is getting worse, and that robot boy Al Gore is getting attention with his dog and pony show.

How to deal? In the time honored fashion - shoot the messengers and blame the scapegoats.

If ANYBODY suggests that Iraq isn't a shining example of democracy, attack them. I don't care how. If you think of something really low down and mean, and don't want to say it yourself, send it to Ann Coulter. So long as it's low down and mean, she'll say it. Keep up the good work with infiltrating the major news organizations with operatives. And if somebody notices all the operatives, start screaming, 24/7 about the leftist slant of the mainstream media.

Don't count out linking Iraq to Al Qaida. I realize that there's a certain percentage of people now who don't believe that Saddam was behind 9-11. But guess what - there are still plenty of people who do! God I love this job.

Whenever the base starts to get restless, you can easily stampede them back into the herd with our two big dogs: Terrorism and Homosexuality. There's nothing that scares Ma and Pa Johnson out in Bumfuk South Dakota like the thought of a bunch of Arabs blowing up the world's biggest ball of string, or a bunch of gays waltzing into the Johnson homestead, stealing Ma's wardrobe and making a pass at Pa.

Remember, if the base had a chance to fix Iraq and end global warming, but along with it had to give gays "special rights", they would gladly see Iraq's streets flowing with blood and the polar ice caps burst into flames.

And never forget - Dear Leader has been appointed by God to be the Decider. To question his Decisions is to question God.

Karl

Pollitt's back

After months of hiatus from her Nation column to work on a book, Katha Pollitt is back, and saying something that many of us have also been saying to Nader voters and fans of Daily Kos:

For more than thirty years, opposition to legal abortion has nourished right-wing politics at the grassroots. The right, you see, never got the memo about abortion being a trivial "cultural" issue, or the one about how a strong uncompromising position would alienate potential recruits. Liberals got those memos. Liberals got other ones too, and not just on abortion: Don't bother with small rural conservative states. Build big top-down Beltway organizations that don't give members much to do except send money and e-mail their Representatives. Focus on the national picture--the White House, Congress and, above all, the courts.

You go, Katha Pollitt.

The New York Times should hire her now, in spite of its quota of one female op-ed columnist for every seven males.

How to spin Paul McCartney into a conservative hero

Pity the poor conservatives. So many people in the arts are flat-out liberals. But some conservatives like pop music too, just like normal people. Which pop music celebrities can they celebrate, without running the risk of promoting liberal causes?

Paul McCartney turns 64 on Sunday, and The National Review Online has an editorial about it. So I'm reading, I'm reading, and the author is talking about McCartney's career, and her own career as a teen magazine journalist, and I'm reading and I'm going "where is the conservative spin"? I mean, I knew that McCartney is an agnostic, a vegetarian, a peacenik, and like the other Beatles was always opposed to the war in Viet Nam. He may not have been as vocal about it, but McCartney is no less a liberal than John Lennon was on a whole slew of issues.

So how is the rightwing bitch gonna spin this? And finally, the answer comes at the end:

Linda and Paul met at a small press reception for the release of the Sergeant Pepper album, the very first time “When I’m Sixty Four” was played in public. A shrewd, fierce New Yorker, she created on their Sussex farm (while her family handled Paul’s money) a very private and quite simple—considering their fortune—family-focused life for the singer, especially when their four children were growing up.

In contrast, Heather Mills, according to her many critics, is an attention-seeking gold-digger obsessed with her causes, which include animal rights, and especially the hunting of baby seals.

So THAT'S it. Bitch is going to jump on the press's whipping girl, Heather Mills and paint her as a greedy liberal bitch who forced poor Beatle Paul to care about those stupid animals! You'd think that Mills having a child with McCartney during the brief marriage would have mollified the wingnuts, but she's needed as a symbol, so forget that. She must be contrasted to the good wife, family-values Linda.

Now of course conservatives won't hear anything that might impact their simplistic beliefs about the world, but Linda McCartney was no fucking Stepford Wife conservative ideal. BEFORE she hooked up with McCartney she was a divorced single mom working as a photographer. Once they were married, she was the one who got Paul to become a vegatarian. And why did they become vegetarians? Out of compassion for animals. Linda McCartney was a huge animal rights supporter.

Holy hopping jesus on a pogo stick. The only mystery about conservatives is - are they really that stupid, or are they really that shameless?

more love from the anti-abortion crowd

Watch in Quicktime mov format

From back in the 90s on Women's Center security patrol

Jon Stewart hammers Bill Bennett

In case you missed it, check out the video clip at Crooks and Liars where Jon Stewart takes on professional hypocrite/homophobe Bill Bennett over Bennett's desire to deny human rights to homosexuals.

I love Al Gore

And the fact that our country is run by an ethically deficient cretin instead of this good and decent and thoughtful man is a tragedy, not only for this country, but maybe for all human civilization.

Republicans should hang their heads in shame. They are the ones to blame when the environmental shit hits the fan.

If you haven't seen "An Inconvenient Truth" GO SEE IT NOW!

We are living under a virtual dictatorship

From The New York Review of Books

The President's recent political weakness hasn't caused the White House to back away from its claims of extraordinary presidential power. The Republican lobbyist Vin Weber says, "I think they're keenly aware of the fact that they're politically weakened, but that's not the same thing as the institution of the presidency being damaged." People with very disparate political views, such as Grover Norquist and Dianne Feinstein, worry about the long-term implications of Bush's power grab. Norquist said, "These are all the powers that you don't want Hillary Clinton to have." Feinstein says, "I think it's very dangerous because other presidents will come along and this sets a precedent for them." Therefore, she says, "it's very important that Congress grapple with and make decisions about what our policies should be on torture, rendition, detainees, and wiretapping lest Bush's claimed right to set the policies, or his policies themselves, become a precedent for future presidents."

James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper No. 47:

The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many...may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

That extraordinary powers have, under Bush, been accumulated in the "same hands" is now undeniable. For the first time in more than thirty years, and to a greater extent than even then, our constitutional form of government is in jeopardy.

more on the patriarchy's double-standards

Via Ann Bartow

Cable TV's premium Playboy channel is about to take all those dating reality shows a step further with its new show, "Foursome."

Playboy TV will roll out the half-hour show July 8. It will take two couples each week and follow them for 24 hours to see if they end up in the sack, Daily Variety reported.

Every move will be recorded -- including bedroom moves.

Among the more racy episodes revealed by Playboy is one in which one of the men is so obnoxious, he drives the women into each others' arms.


The network said while women are being encouraged to discover "their inner bisexuality," man-on-man action is being strictly banned from the show.

Of course. Because so many straight men are incredibly hostile to homosexuality - unless it is between women.

Bunch of hypocrites and gender fascists.

Go Al Gore!

This cartoon appears in this week's New Yorker. You can buy a print at the Cartoon Bank

.
The New Yorker has a great review of "An Inconvenient Truth" in the latest issue. I especially liked this

(Gore) knows that people find him exasperating, and he has learned to modulate his voice; one has the impression of a complex personality that has gone through loss, humiliation, a cruel breaking down of the ego, and then has reintegrated itself at a higher level. In the movie he is merely excellent. But in person—he is on a speaking tour to promote the movie—he presents a combination of intellectual force, emotional vibrancy, and moral urgency that has hardly been seen in American public life in recent years. It will be interesting to watch how skeptics will deal with Gore’s bad news on the environment without making themselves look very small.

An Incovenient Truth web site.

Fun at the Women's Center

Click to watch the video

Back in the day, my friend Bob and I did security for a women's health clinic in South Jersey. Well, Bob did security and I videotaped him doing it. Sometimes we got a little silly, as in this video clip.

I love LOGO

I'm not gay, but I love LOGO, the gay channel. It's so refreshing to watch TV that is not completely dominated by the straight male mindset. I had no idea that there was a counterpart to "Girls Gone Wild" called "Guys Gone Wild" until I saw it on LOGO. Of course "Guys Gone Wild" commercials would reach the target demographic on other channels, but straight males would go into gay panic, so only straight male desires are catered to on "general audience" channels. Damn I hate living in a Patriarchy.

LOGO is good for other reasons - rerunning all the "Tales of the City" series, showing "In the Life," good offbeat movies - and even its commercials are refreshingly different. Now if only they would syndicate "Queer As Folk" and show it on LOGO it would be a damn-near perfect channel.

Is Gregg Easterbrook a complete moron?

With all the talent out there in the blogosphere working for free, you'd think Slate could pick and choose whom to hire, but instead they get this bozo, who, as Atrios points out, says things like:

Intelligent design is a sophisticated theory now being argued out in the nation's top universities. And though this idea assumes existence must have some higher component, it is not religious doctrine under the 1986 Supreme Court definition. Intelligent-design thinking does not propound any specific faith or even say that the higher power is divine. It simply holds that there must be an unseen intellect imbedded in the cosmos.

The intelligent design theory may or may not be correct, but it's a rich, absorbing hypothesis--the sort of thing that is fascinating to debate, and might get students excited about biology class to boot. But most kids won't know the idea unless they are taught it, and in the aftermath of the Kansas votes, pro-evolution dogma continues to suggest that any alternative to natural selection must be kept quiet.

Not suprisingly, Easterbrook doesn't believe in fact-checking, and neither does his editors at Slate.

What is wrong with these people? Have they no shame?

Read more at Media Matters

Find teh funny - repetition edition repetition edition

Helping Chris Muir, right-wing wit about town, find the funny.
See the whole thing here.

Based on the challenge at Pandagon.

Newsflash: old guy doesn't like new-fangled foolishness

One of the New Yorker's sacred Great Men of the Arts, John Updike, doesn't like the idea of an online library:

"You are in the front while writers cower in their studies," he told the audience. "I see bookstores as citadels of life. They civilize neighborhoods." His favorite local store "brightens my life and the whole street it's on."

Speaking of the May 14 New York Times Magazine article called "Scan This Book!" about the universal library of the future--where all texts would be available digitally and snippets of them mixed together the way listeners mix favorite music--Updike mocked some of the writer's predictions, including that authors will be involved in more performances and that readers will have "access to the creator." He called the article's vision a "pretty grisly scenario," a kind of "throwback to a preliterate society where only a live person adds, shall we say, value." He wondered if the culture of celebrity had made "signed books seen only as a ticket to the lecture platform." The written word, he continued, is "supposed to speak for itself and sell itself even if the author's picture is not on the back cover." Sadly, he said, the author has grown "in importance as the walking, talking advertisement for a book."

and ...

He noted, too, that "yes, there is a ton of information on the Web but much of it is unedited and inaccurate." By contrast, the book, he continued, "is still more exacting and demanding of writers and consumers."

He concluded, "Booksellers, defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our human identity."

I love a good bookstore, but what I like even MORE is easy access to information. If you live in a sweet upscale hi-culture neighborhood, and I feel confident in predicting that John Updike does, then yeah, you might miss those little boutique bookstores where everybody knows your name. But as you are probably aware, most of the world does not live in neighborhoods like John Updike's.

I absolutely love that I can go online anytime, almost anywhere and look stuff up. Stuff like - hey, I remember why I dislike John Updike, because I read a review he wrote about a book by a gay author about gays - but I don't remember the name of the book or exactly what he said or when he said it. Now if I had to go to a library or a bookstore to get the info, I wouldn't bother. Who has the time? But abracadabra, I enter "Updike" and "gay" and "review" into Google and Google gives me the facts:

The book is called "The Spell" the review was written in 1999, and I find that "Updike zeroes in on his real complaint about gay male relationships where "nothing is at stake but self-gratification." "Novels about heterosexual partnering," Updike explains, "however frivolous and reducible to increments of selfishness, social accident, foolish overestimations, and inflamed physical detail, do involve the perpetuation of the species and the ancient, sacralized structures of the family."

Updike also said: ""Perhaps the male homosexual, uncushioned as he is by society's circumambient encouragements to breed, feels the isolated, disquieted human condition with a special bleakness: he must take it straight."

Thank you, Gay Today

Have you ever heard such a pile of right-wing shit? And when I enter "updike", "apologizes", "The Spell", and "review" into Google I find no evidence of Updike having second thoughts on the topic.

The best part of Updike's recent comments is his bemoaning the culture of celebrity. As if his entire career hasn't benefitted from a culture of literary celebrity. And that's what it boils down to - the stripping away of privilege. Now even I can post stuff to a blog and have it read, potentially, by thousands of people. I might be as good a writer as Updike, maybe better, but unless you're annointed by the literary gatekeepers it doesn't mean anything. Updike dimly understands that the days of the literary gatekeepers are numbered, but he doesn't get why - not because of some newly-invented celebrity culture, but because celebrities won't be quite so celebrated as they once were because of all the competition.

Professional editorialists have the same reaction to Internet bloggers - they feel threatened by the competition. And so they should. You no longer have to go to cocktail parties with the editor of The Atlantic to get your license to opine, like that mental midget Caitlin Flanagan. Anybody can do it, and although the Flanagans and the Updikes of the world and their cocktail party pals can't admit it, some of those anybodies who might never have had the opportunity to be heard before everything went online might be good.

But it isn't just the chance to opine that's new. It's the chance to get at info. I doubt Updike has ever had a comparable experience, but when I was an impoverished teenage mother living in a white trash town, I went to the town's tiny library to try to take out copies of the plays of Shakespeare - I had recently been enthralled by the BBC's production of AS YOU LIKE IT and I was suddenly a Shakespeare fanatic. Well this white trash library had available about four of the plays. It took me over a year to track down, one way or another, all the rest. Now you can go to Shakespeare Online and read everything Bill S ever wrote plus essays on the plays, a glossary a quiz and additional sources. I'd say that's an improvement.

Of course Updike's not going to like it. I doubt that another annoying privileged old guy, Harold Bloom likes it. Anybody can be a Shakespearean scholar if they want, and more efficiently than if they had to go to the big city library to get at the relevant texts.

I love libraries myself. I wish libraries were open 24-7 so that you could go to them for a night out - I'd rather spend time in a well-appointed library than a noisy bar any night. But I'd be there for the pleasure of the experience, not for the efficiency of information gathering.

Of course privileged, well-paid, annointed Great Men of the Arts have time to linger over shelves and watch the women coming and going talking of Michaelangelo. The rest of us gotta get stuff done and pay the rent, suckah.

Is it a coinicidence that guys who are considered science fiction authors get what the authors of Important Novels don't?

Kurt Vonnegut, in his book Fates Worse Than Death, said:

In the children's fable The White Deer, by the late American humorist James Thurber, the Royal Astronomer in a medieval court reports that all the stars are going out. What has really happened is that the astronomer has grown old and is going blind. That was Thurber's condition too, when he wrote his tale. He was making fun of a sort of old poop who imagined that life was ending not merely for himself but for the whole universe. Inspired by Thurber, then, I choose to call any old poop who writes a popular book saying that the world, or at least his own country, is done for, a 'Royal Astronomer' and his subject matter 'Royal Astronomy.' Since I myself have become an old poop at last, perhaps I, too, should write such a book. But it is hard for me to follow the standard formula for successful Royal Astronomy, a formula going back who knows how far, maybe to the invention of printing by the Chinese a couple of thousand years ago. The formula is, of course: 'Things aren't as good as they used to be. The young people don't know anything and don't want to know anything. We have entered a steep decline!' But have we? Back when I was a kid, lynchings of black people were reported almost every week, and always went unpunished. Apartheid was as sternly enforced in my hometown, which was Indianapolis, as it is in South Africa nowadays. Many great universities, including those in the Ivy League, rejected most of the Jews who applied for admission solely because of their Jewishness, and had virtually no Jews and absolutely no blacks, God knows, on their faculties. I am going to ask a question -- and President Reagan, please don't answer: Those were the good old days? When I was a kid during the Great Depression, when it was being demonstrated most painfully that prosperity was not a natural by-product of liberty, books by Royal Astronomers were as popular as they are today. They said, as most of them do today, that the country was falling apart because the young people were no longer required to read Plato and Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius and St. Augustine and Montaigne and the like, whose collective wisdom was the foundation of any decent and just and productive society. Back in the Great Depression, the Royal Astronomers used to say that a United States deprived of that wisdom was nothing but a United States of radio quiz shows and music straight out of the jungles of Darkest Africa. They say now that the same subtraction leaves the United States of nothing but television quiz shows and rock and roll, which leads, they say, inexorably to dementia. But I find uncritical respect for most works by great thinkers of long ago unpleasant, because they almost all accepted as natural and ordinary the belief that females and minority races and the poor were on earth to be uncomplaining, hardworking, respectful, and loyal servants of white males, who did the important thinking and exercised leadership.

And Douglas Adams said in "The Salmon of Doubt", more succinctly, if not better:

Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Shelf Awareness by way of Sivacracy.

If you want to be depressed

Check out the male:female author ratio for national "general interest" magazines. The average ratio is 1,037:355 for the past 8 months.

Get the ratios, by issue of The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair at WomenTK.com.

Supposedly women read more than men. And evolutionary psychologists are always going on how much more verbal females are (as opposed to male superiority in math) - so how do the gender essentialists explain this? It's always fun to watch them twist and turn to avoid explanations that come near "institutional discrimination."

by way of Ann Bartow

Cinco de Mayo is here

My first song created with GarageBand


Cinco de Mayo copyright 2005 by N. G. McClernan

Slings and Arrows

It's a shame that so many people in the NYC theatre world have not yet seen the Canadian mini-series Slings and Arrows - the second season is now playing on Sundance Channel. It's a show about the theatre artists and administrators who work for the fictitious New Burbage Theatre, and is very true-to-life. It even has an obnoxious, self-important director who threatens to sue the theatre. Is there something about directors that makes them litigious?

The first season was better than the second season, but both are great. Hopefully both seasons will be released on DVD soon.

And for Broadway people - Don McKellar, the actor who played the obnoxious director, wrote the book for the currently running The Drowsy Chaperone. Bob Martin, who played the accountant/actor ("you da money man!") on S&A, and also wrote and produced S&A, plays 'Man in Chair' in Chaperone.

Fairies, Brownies and Cronies

On April 28 Paul Krugman indentfied a creature stalking the U.S. government:"...an invisible bandit, the Crony Fairy, who visits key agencies by dead of night, snatches away qualified people and replaces them with unqualified political appointees. There's no way to catch or stop the Crony Fairy, so our only hope is to change the agencies' names. That way she might get confused, and leave our government able to function."

The Crony Fairy, it turns out is George W. Bush. And what kind of Crony did the Crony Fairy leave at FEMA? A Brownie!

Pictured above is a Palmer Cox brownie. More can be seen here. I thought this brownie's aphorism was highly appropriate.

What Stephen Colbert said right in front of Bush

Transcript here

Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well-known liberal bias.

Watch the video at Crooks and Liars.

Right-wingers just don't GET Stephen Colbert. It's so sad and pathetic to see them come on his show and make fools of themselves, as Harvey Mansfield and Caitlin Flanagan recently did. One of Bush's people probably thought Colbert was a real live right-winger and asked him to be on.
This almost makes up for that idiot racist Don Imus's insults of the Clintons to their faces at the Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner Dinner ten years ago.

After you read the Imus idiocy, read Al Franken's White House Correspondent's speech given a month after the Imus speech.

There's a web site where you can say 'thanks' to Stephen Colbert.

I love me some Dramatists Guild

"You've got a nice play here Colonel. It would be a shame if somebody were to set fire to it."

Hooray for the Dramatists Guild. When we told them about the Einhorn Brothers and their plan to turn a matter for small claims court into a federal case via Edward Einhorn's ill-gotten copyright, they were on it.

They recommended our lawyer Toby Butterfield of Cowan DeBaets, Abraham and Sheppard, LLP. If they were casting the role of "smart and charming British-American copyright lawyer" they would have to choose Toby. He even has the wig and when he's on a roll sounds just like Graham Chapman.

Then they wrote us an amicus brief, sent the intrepid Rebecca Frank, legal advisor to sit with us every day of the trial, and had Ralph Sevush, executive director of the Dramatists Guild, testify for us as an expert witness, to counter the other side's use of Pam Berlin, president of the SSDC (Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers) as their expert witness.

If you are a playwright, composer or lyricist, you really should belong to the Dramatists Guild.

Tam Lin is free!

The Brothers Einhorn have agreed to cancel their copyright registration and withdraw their copyright complaint!

More details as soon as I have a copy of Judge Kaplan's opinion.

A new personality equation

Dr. Laura, The Joker, Caitlin Flanagan

I know I said I wouldn't blog much, but I have to unwind somehow.

Besides, I just caught Caitlin Flanagan on the Colbert Report and whoo doggies, I thought Manly Harvey Mansfield was cuckoo for cocopuffs!

OK, now I don't want women to be judged on their appearance, and Athena knows I ain't no Miss America, but if you are advocating a world in which women trade sexual services for economic/domestic security, shouldn't you be even just the tiniest little bit HOT?

I was going to compare Flanagan to Phyllis Schlafly, who is of course Flanagan's inspiration - a mommy-stays-home harpie who has a sweet public career for herself - but to tell the truth, Schlafly is much hotter.

And how sad is The New Yorker? It already has a quota of two female contributors per issue, and this troglodyte - or as no doubt she prefers, troglodytette - is one of them. She's identified on Colbert as "a writer for the New Yorker."

The New Yorker needs a serious overhaul.

Low blogging frequency until Monday

While we prepare for the trial of the case of "The Man Who Mistook His Raging Ego for a Legal Precedent"

Also known as "An Unauthorized Derivative Copyright in Oz"

The Country Club mentality

When I was about eleven, Barbara, a girl in my class, invited me to hang out with her. I thought she was not very bright, but she seemed pleasant enough, so one Saturday I went to her neightborhood to hang out. I thought we would rollerskate or something. Instead she took me to a friend's house. There were a bunch of kids there who went to public school, so I didn't know them - Barbara and I went to Catholic school.

So we all hung out. I vaguely remember thinking that like Barbara, they were not very bright. We played on a swing set and talked. I don't remember the conversation, except the end, when Barbara informed me that her friends had decided they didn't want me to be part of their group. So I went back to Barbara's house and read her brother's comic books until my Dad came to pick me up.

Being kept out of the group wasn't a problem - I never had any desire to be part of their group, since I thought they were dullards. Plus I really enjoyed those comic books. But it was maddening that they seemed to take great pleasure in joining together to pass judgement on me.

Welcome to the Country Club mentality. I should know the anthropological term for this behavior, but Country Club mentality is a good enough description for the pleasure that most humans get in being insiders, both for the comraderie of other insiders, but also, and possibly even more significantly, scorning outsiders.

I've run up into this behavior several places on the Internet, most recently on Wikipedia. And I've noticed an interesting phenomenon. It seems to me that the Country Club mentality usually kicks when I feel like I'm starting to win a debate with an alpha insider. At this point the alpha insider will stop responding to rational arguments and simply pull rank, saying something to the effect of "I'm a member of this insider group so I know better than you, so that's the end of the discussion." Then the beta insiders will chime in to the effect of "yeah! You're not an insider. Acknowledge our superiority or we will shout you down." Sometimes they don't threaten to shout you down, they just shout you down.

Of course my perspective is not objective here. If I had time I'd look for a relevant anthropological study. And BTW - anthropologists are just as bad as any other group in displaying the country club mentality.

Darwin Awards discussions

The flame war over the Darwin Awards has cooled down, and I've gotten into some interesting discussions about the qualifications for adding information to a Wikipedia article.

I've also determined that I have to write a critique of the Darwin Awards. Thanks to a Wikipedia contributor, I now know of one other person who has publicly criticized the Darwin Awards. Unfortunately the person posted under initials. I might do some detective work to try to discover the identity of the critic, but I do think the critique, and the author's responses to critics are a little weak, and I think I might write a better critique. But it's good to know that at least somebody has thought through the Darwin Awards enough to understand the essential dehumanization inherent in the concept.

I'm currently reading Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in preparation for writing the critique. Not that I think that the Darwin Awards are the equivalent of Nazi atrocities. Rather, I plan to make the case that Nazi atrocities are an example of the simmering banality of evil that exists in human populations brought to a boil for political expediency and that the Darwin Awards is evidence of the banality of evil in the most banal of circumstances.

The Arendt book is utterly fascinating so far. I'll post a book review later.

Darwin Awards lovers - strangely intolerant

Or perhaps not so strange - I mean, if you're the kind of person who enjoys laughing at the deaths of strangers who never did you any harm* imagine how pissed off you're going to be when you're confronted by a stranger who (oh the horror!) doesn't approve of your hobby!

I posted a criticsm of the Darwin Awards on its Wikipedia entry.

My entry was originally deleted because it didn't follow Wikipedia's rules of attribution. So I reposted it in Wiki-friendly format, and almost every day somebody
has to post a criticism of my criticism - in a way that is not acceptable to Wikipedia. We call that vandalism.

Here's the latest vandalism, posted anonymously, of course:

Most people, however, seem to understand that the Darwin Awards are all about being funny, and hardly rise to the standards of being dehumanizing or unethical. Laugh, it's good for you!

I think Al Franken had the best take on people who think that cruel creepy shit is funny. People like Ann Coulter. Here is Al Franken's remarks about Ann Coulter's concept of humor, delivered in his opening remarks for their recent debate:

Ann recently told an audience:

“We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens’ creme brulee,” Coulter said. “That’s just a joke, for you in the media.”

Here’s my question. What’s the joke? Maybe it’s a prejudice from my days as a comedy writer, but I always thought the joke had to have an operative funny idea. I’ll give you an example of a joke.

Like they do every Saturday night, two elderly Jewish couples are going out to dinner. The guys are in front, the girls riding in back. Irv says to Sid, “Where should we go tonight?”

Sid says, “How about that place we went about a month ago. The Italian place with the great lasagna.”

Irv says, “I don’t remember it.”

Sid says, “The place with the great lasagna.”

Irv says, “I don’t remember. What’s the name of the place?”

Sid thinks. But can’t remember. “A flower. Gimme a flower.”

“Tulip?” Irv says.

“No, no. A different flower.”

“Magnolia?”

“No, no. A basic flower.”

“Orchid?”

“No! Basic.”

“Rose?”

That’s it! Sid turns to the back seat. “Rose. What was the name of that restaurant…?”

That’s a joke. What exactly is the joke in “We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens’ creme brulee?” Is it the crème brulee? Is that it? Because Stevens is some kind of Francophile or elitist? Is it the rat poison? See, I would have gone with Drano. I’m really trying here, Ann. Please, when you come up, explain the joke about murdering an associate justice of the Supreme Court. One who by the way, was appointed to the Supreme Court by Gerald Ford, and who, also, by the way, won a Bronze Star serving in the Navy in World War II. What is the joke? ‘Cause I don’t get it.

You can read my ongoing flame war with the DA lovers here.

More on the DA lover spleenage as it develops.




*but it's OK, because unlike you they're stupid and genetically inferior

What is this Harvard mystique?

Why does Havard have this lofty reputation? The most prominent Harvard people I know are Laurence Summers, Steven Pinker and Harvey Mansfield. None of them are at all impressive.

The focus here is on Harvey Mansfield. If he has always been this confused and incosistent, it's incredible that he was paid to teach at Harvard. If he's only recently become a crazy they should fire his ass.

Tom Ashbrook was all over Mansfield's inconsistencies in the interview on WBUR. He questioned Mansfield's premise that educated women should endorse "irrational manliness" by reason. He also said that manliness was 50% good and 50% bad, but when Ashbrook pressed him on it, he changed it to "more than 50%."

Then Ashbrook brought analyst Jack Beatty on, and he observed that the "democratic revolution" has begun to erode male privilege.

Then Katha Pollitt delivered the coup de grace. She began by trashing John Wayne - one of Mansfield's heroes. She pointed out that Wayne was an actor, not a manly men. She pointed out the complete insanity of Mansfield's pretzel logic - in his book, Mansfield claims that women should do the housework because men have contempt for housework because that's something that women do.

Mansfield is an addle-brained old coot, and the ONLY reason that anybody takes him seriously is because he is surrounded by the Harvard mystique. I say to hell with it.

Dept of bad career promotion

So Katha Pollitt debated Manly Harvey Mansfield on March 21 at WBUR this year. So why didn't I find out about it until today?

You can hear it from this page.

It isn't mentioned in the Nation's archives of Pollitt's columns, which I check regularly for updates. What I don't check regularly is the Nation's home page, which is where I finally did find out about the debate. I love Pollitt but I don't love the Nation - I'm still annoyed with the Nation over its coddling of that ratfink Christopher Hitchens.

And apparently I'm not alone - I haven't heard a peep about this debate from any of the liberal blogs I read - blogs which mentioned Mansfield's Manliness book and which usually report on Pollitt's columns.

Anyway... I'm too busy to listen to the debate right now, but I predict Pollitt wipes the floor with His Manliness. I caught Mansfield on The Colbert Report last week and the guy is out to lunch. I mean, he's a rightwinger so his beliefs are surreal, but I also think he's got some, shall we say age-related problems with his mind. I almost felt bad for him, he was so befuddled by Colbert.

More on the debate after I've listened...

But I really think Katha Pollitt could be doing more to promote herself as an intellectual and pundit. It annoys me that mental midgets like David Brooks and shallow Smurfettes like Maureen Dowd get more attention than the clearly superior Pollitt.
Pollit has a blog http://kathapollitt.blogspot.com/ which she occasionally posts to, so occasionally that I rarely check it out. But I've been remiss in not putting it in my liberal links, which I will do today. But there isn't even a link to this blog from anywhere in The Nation that I can see, certainly not from the Pollitt column archives page. What's up with that???

The Iran Plans

Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article about the plans to nuke Iran

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”

Of course we know that Bush is partial to booze and cocaine, not marijuana.

Theatre critic's dichotomy

Standard theatre critic's dichotomy - if you don't like the pointless bloodshed of The Lieutenant of Inishmore then you must therefore be a philistine who only enjoys unchallenging, "old-fashioned" fare.

Charles Isherwood demonstrates:

Theatergoers with a taste for things traditional - imposing, naturalistic sets; pretty period costumes; tidy narratives with a surprise twist or two - can take comfort in "Tryst," a suspense drama of a distinctly old-fashioned stamp that opened last night at the Promenade Theater. No bloody bodies are dismembered and no cats are harmed in the course of this new play by Karoline Leach, making it a safe option for the "Inishmore"-skittish crowds.

The Catholic Church: always doing whatever it can to make women's lives a hell on earth.

This is what happens when the Catholic Church is given free reign.

During the first round of investigations, police officers interview the woman's family and friends. "The collecting of evidence usually takes place where the events transpired — by visiting the home or by speaking with the doctor at the hospital," Tópez said. In some cases, the police also interrogate people who work with the woman. Tópez added that that didn't happen very often because, she said, "these are women who don't work outside the home." (Indeed, the evidence suggests that the ban in El Salvador disproportionately affects poor women. The researchers who conducted the Journal of Public Health study found that common occupations listed for women charged with abortion-related crimes were homemaker, student, housekeeper and market vendor. The earlier study by the Center for Reproductive Rights found that the majority were domestic servants, followed by factory workers, ticket takers on buses, housewives, saleswomen and messengers.)

As they do in any investigation, the police collect evidence by interviewing everyone who knows the accused and by seizing her medical records. But they must also visit the scene of the crime, which, following the logic of the law, often means the woman's vagina.

No sane women supports the Catholic Church. It is an evil misogynist organization - and getting more evil by the day as the crazy rightwing Opus Dei increases its control.

All the President's Men

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

I is for Impeachment

In Court Filings, Cheney Aide Says Bush Approved Leak

But the disclosure in documents filed Wednesday means that the president and the vice president put Libby in play as a secret provider of information to reporters about prewar intelligence on Iraq.

......

Libby's testimony also puts the president and the vice president in the awkward position of authorizing leaks -- a practice both men have long said they abhor, so much so that the administration has put in motion criminal investigations to hunt down leakers.

Treasonous traitors. Impeachment's too good for them - they should get jail time too.

Darwin Awards: profiting from the celebration of human tragedy.

Few people express disgust with the unethical nature of Wendy Northcutt's Darwin Awards, a profit-driven celebration of human tragedy, because the Darwin Awards employs the technique of dehumanization - through declaring that its award winners are less evolved than "us." The popularity of the Darwin Awards reinforces the contention that the mass of humanity, while capable of self-preservation, is easily manipulated into cruelty and callousness.

Ann Bartow tells me that Wendy Northcutt, the main beneficiary of the profits earned through laughing at other people's death or mutilation, will be in the "YearlyKos" conference. Kos and company should be ashamed, but people who champion the Darwin Awards by definition have no sense of shame.

I contributed to the Darwin Awards wiki. The original text was verging on an advertisement for Wendy Northcutt.

Messing with Texas - Tom Delay edition

Buh-bye, Tom Delay!

I used to work for Donald Rumsfeld

Back in April 2000, when the Bush presidency was still just a twinkle in the Devil's eye, Donald Rumsfeld was on the board of advisors for a company I was working for. I only had a vague idea of who he was at the time. Wish I still did.

April 26, 2000 (12:16 p.m. EST)
TechWeb News

Former White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld is joining the board of advisors for e-business consultant TIS Worldwide. Rumsfeld has held several high-profile public service positions. He was President Reagan's special envoy for the Middle East, chief of staff of the White House, the youngest secretary of defense, and a four-term U.S Congressman.

How Texas dictates what may be taught in high school

via Ann Bartow at Sivacracy

The Muddle Machine - Confessions of a Textbook Editor

The big three adoption states are not equal, however. In that elite trio, Texas rules. California has more students (more than 6 million versus just over 4 million in Texas), but Texas spends just as much money (approximately $42 billion) on its public schools. More important, Texas allocates a dedicated chunk of funds specifically for textbooks. That money can't be used for anything else, and all of it must be spent in the adoption year. Furthermore, Texas has particular power when it comes to high school textbooks, since California adopts statewide only for textbooks from kindergarten though 8th grade, while the Lone Star State's adoption process applies to textbooks from kindergarten through 12th grade.

If you're creating a new textbook, therefore, you start by scrutinizing Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). This document is drawn up by a group of curriculum experts, teachers, and political insiders appointed by the 15 members of the Texas Board of Education, currently 5 Democrats and 10 Republicans, about half of whom have a background in education. TEKS describes what Texas wants and what the entire nation will therefore get.

Texas is truly the tail that wags the dog. There is, however, a tail that wags this mighty tail. Every adoption state allows private citizens to review textbooks and raise objections. Publishers must respond to these objections at open hearings.

In the late '60s a Texas couple, Mel and Norma Gabler, figured out how to use their state's adoption hearings to put pressure on textbook publishers. The Gablers had no academic credentials or teaching background, but they knew what they wanted taught--phonics, sexual abstinence, free enterprise, creationism, and the primacy of Judeo-Christian values--and considered themselves in a battle against a "politically correct degradation of academics." Expert organizers, the Gablers possessed a flair for constructing arguments out of the language of official curriculum guidelines. The Longview, Texas-based nonprofit corporation they founded 43 years ago, Educational Research Analysts, continues to review textbooks and lobby against liberal content in textbooks.

The Gablers no longer appear in person at adoption hearings, but through workshops, books, and how-to manuals, they trained a whole generation of conservative Christian activists to carry on their work.

It's time to start messing with Texas.

Find the funny - xenophobe edition

Helping Pandagon helping Chris Muir find teh funny...


See the whole parody here.

Ghastly original here.

I gotta go see that Hatshepsut exhibit

Hatshepsut was the female pharoh of Egypt. There's a big exhibit about her at the Met.
Good review in the New Yorker

Lennon-McCartney

Given how often the Beatles were photographed, it's suprising how few photos there are of just John and Paul together. The original of this cropped image
by Harry Benson has George and Ringo in it too.
If I had the money I'd buy all kinds of original Beatle art photos prints - what's not to like? Not only are they an investment, they're historical, the subjects are very attractive young men, they're works of art, and come on, it's the Beatles.
I did treat myself to a couple of prints signed and numbered by Beatles "exi" pal Astrid Kirchherr (Stu Sutcliffe's girlfriend) a few years ago.

Sight Unseen, Lunch Revisited

I went to a mass actor audition thing yesterday and to my great dismay was treated to two versions of the same ghastly monologue, one of the most nauseating examples of self-loving male puppetry ever forced down the throats of female actors:

PATRICIA: I can't describe the pleasure I had being your muse. The days and nights I sat for you. It thrilled me, watching you paint me. The connection. The connection was electric. I could see the sparks. I never felt so alive as when I sat naked for you, do you know that?

Now I did some nude modelling when I was a desperately poor single mother and I don't care if the painter is young Elvis in a thong, it's not a pleasurable experience. I bet a hundred bucks Donald Margulies never did even 2 minutes of sitting naked for a painting.

I can't believe any female actor with an ounce of self-respect would choose that monologue, with its pre-1969 levels of female passivity and self-abasement. I'd have a hard time casting someone who picked it - I'd just automatically assume she's an idiot.

The monologue is not only obnoxious in itself, it is obnoxious because it encapsulates the mind-blowing irritation level of Sight Unseen, a play about the playwright's desire to be worshipped, especially by females, for his artistic importance and power. Donald Margulies admits in the latest issue of the Dramatists Guild magazine that Sight Unseen is a thinly disguised self-portrait. I'd lock that shit away, Dorian Gray.

The Patricia character isn't the only female who appreciates Jonathan the Important Painter. The other female in the play is an attractive German woman who is interviewing him about his art, and the importance of his art, to give the playwright a chance to wax philosophical on the importance of art. Not that he REALLY needs your goddam worship, thank you very much.

JONATHAN: What I am today? What am I today? I just got here. People like you suddenly care what I have to say.
GRETE: I do care.
JONATHAN: I know you do. It cracks me up that you do; it amuses me.

Women care so much about him and his art, and yet he doesn't care about their adulation. No, not really. He can live without it. Protest much, bitch?

The Patricia character doesn't merely worship Jonathan and his art though. By rejecting her, Jonathan has ruined her life. Thanks to Jonathan, Patricia had to marry an English guy she doesn't really desire. The only time they have hot sex is when Jonathan comes to visit, because his proximity turns Patricia into an animal.

Male critics, and most critics are male, adore this play, which is a big reason why it's considered an Important Play That We Can All Learn Something From. To get a sense of the gender divide, consider this item from a recent production. A rare female critic notes:

The final scene (the second flashback of the play), surely intended to be a poignant last look at love lost, feels unfinished in this production, leaving the audience confused, saying (as the woman sitting behind me did) "is that it?" at the end of the show.

The critic blames the director, but the problem is the script. I think the woman who said "is that it?" assumed incorrectly, because Patricia does get a few lines not explicitely about Jonathan's importance, that this is a play about their relationship. Oh no no no, woman in the audience. This play is the story of the godlike power and sexual attractiveness of the Great Man of the Arts, who can ruin women's lives forever with his indifference. The little men of the arts never tire of that story. And since we are trapped in a Patriarchy you can expect to see this play revived again and again.

Cheney's downtime demands

As featured on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and available at The Smoking Gun.

Am I the only one who's ever noticed this?

If you crossed Frank Burns from MASH with Senator Joseph McCarthy you get... Bill O'Reilly!

comic book about copyrights

Via Ann Bartow at Sivacracy

What the NYTimes can't say: "nasty ass military area"

In today's NYTimes article about Camp Nama yet another horrendous American torture site and another blot on this country's reputation, it says:

Some former task force members said the Nama in the camp's name stood for a coarse phrase that soldiers used to describe the compound. One Defense Department specialist recalled seeing pink blotches on detainees' clothing as well as red welts on their bodies, marks he learned later were inflicted by soldiers who used detainees as targets and called themselves the High Five Paintball Club.

It took me a few moments of Googling but according to a military person, a friend of members of a web site devoted to quilting of all things :

Due to security concerns, I don't go downtown too much, although I do make pretty frequent trips to neighboring compounds. I spent the night of my birthday at Camp NAMA (which stands for Nasty A$$ Military Area--named by a General). Like the name says, it is lacking in accomodations--all tents and portajohns and "Navy" showers.

If a quilting circle can handle "nasty a$$ military area" why can't the urban sophisticate readers of the NYTimes? Especially when the accounts of torture and abuse mentioned in the article are far more "coarse" than that phrase.

Manly Man Mansfield

Walter Kirn in the NYTimes has an awesome review of the book "Manliness" by Harvey C. "Manly" Mansfield

After a section on the history of "the great explosion of manliness that took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries"(an image that gives even me, a straight man, erotic chills), it's time for Mansfield to stop preheating the oven and cook up the geese he's already got trussed and cleaned: the feminists. Remember the feminists? These would be the late Betty Friedan and the even later Simone de Beauvoir, along with the somewhat more recent, but not very recent, Kate Millet, Germaine Greer and so on.

These thinkers are all somewhat different from one another, Mansfield carefully shows, but they also have something profound in common: they stole their best ideas, by and large, from two great men. From Marx they pilfered their economic theories. From Nietzsche they swiped their "nihilism." For Mansfield, nihilism is the idea that in a godless universe people are free to invent their own identities. At least I think that's what he means. Next to "manly," "nihilism" is Mansfield's favorite word, and it shows up in such a variety of contexts, attached to so many names and objects, that he might as well have rendered it as "X," as in: Simone de Beauvoir + all those other gals + the fact that they're female + the notion that "becoming manlike is a strange way of proving you are independent of men (ladylike would seem to be a better way)" = X.

You got served

The guys that do South Park are libertarian jerks, but I have to admit every now and then they do something great. "You Got F*cked in the Ass" from 2004 isn't an all-around great episode, like the immortal Underpants Gnomes episode or the anti-Scientology episode "Trapped in the Closet" but it has great moments, especially with the goths.

Stan: Hey guys. Uh. You guys know how to dance, right?

Tall Goth: [with cigarette] Of course we know how to dance.

Stan: Cool, because, there's this competition on Saturday, and I have to find the very best dancers in South Park to be on my crew. My friends can't do it because they suck ass, so, will you be in my dance troupe?

Red Goth: Dance troupe? Please. [leans to one side and whips his hair back into place] We don't dance like those Britney and Justin wannabes at school. [whips his hair back into place] Goth kids dance to express pain and suffering.

Tall Goth: Yeah. [stands up] The only cool way to dance is to keep your hands at your sides and your eyes looking at the ground. Then every three seconds you take a drag from your cigarette. [leans his head to the right for two beats, leans it to the left for two beats, leans it to the right for two beats while taking a drag, leans it to the left for two beats, repeats. The red Goth follows suit, then all four Goths dance the same way]

Stan: Okay, that'll work fine. Listen, there's a dance competition this Saturday and I need good dancers so I don't get served.

Red Goth: [flips his hair back] No way. Dancing is something you do alone in your room at three in the morning.

Stan: [walks up to the red Goth] Please, you guys, our whole town's reputation is at stake! Will any of you do it?

Red Goth: I'm not doin' it. Being in a dance group is totally conformist.

Henrietta: Yeah. I'm not conforming to some dance-off regulations.

Little Goth: I'm not doin' it either. I'm the biggest nonconformist of all.

Tall Goth: I'm such a nonconformist that I'm not going to conform with the rest of you. Okay, I'll do it. [rises and walks over to Stan]

Stan: Great! [they leave together]

Henrietta: Whoa. I think we just got put in our place.

Red Goth: Yeah. We just got Goth-served.

And now... it's on!

Book report: Adapting Minds

Just got Adapting Minds, Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature by David J. Buller, and so far so good.

Unfortunately, but not suprisingly, it hasn't captured the public's imagination the way many of the works of the Evolutionary Psychologists (Buller capitalizes the term) have but then that's always the advantage EP had - telling the public, in simplified "scientific" terms what it already believes about the true natures of men and women.

But what Buller lacks in user-friendly presentation he makes up for in his solid examination of the claims of evolutionary psychologists. I've only read a few chapters and already found refutations of EP that I hadn't considered, like the fact that much of the results of the celebrated female desire for males with status actually boils down to "status homogamy" - the tendency of people to mate with those in their own status group. He points out that it's very likely that studies have shown that women prefer high status men because the women studied, invariably white upper-class women in college, have high status themselves.

He criticizes the methodology of David Buss and confirms what I suspected but hadn't yet researched - that David Buss ignores cultural restrictions on female choice of mates. As Buller says:

...in a well-documented study, the anthropologist William Irons found that, among the Turkmen of Persia, males in the wealthier half of the population left 75 percent more offspring than males in the poorer half of the population. Buss cites several studies like this as indicating that "high status in men leads directly to increased sexual access to a larger number of women," and he implies that this is due to the greater desirability of high-status men (David Buss 1999 "Evolutionary Psychology the New Science of the Mind").

But, among the Turkmen, women were sold by their families into marriage. The reason that higher-status males enjoyed greater reproductive success among the Turkmen is that they were able to buy wives earlier and more often than lower-status males. Other studies that clearly demonstrate a reproductive advantage for high-status males are also studies of societies or circumstances in which males "traded" in women. This isn't evidence that high-status males enjoy greater reproductive success because women find them more desirable. Indeed, it isn't evidence of female preference at all, just as the fact that many harem-holding despots produced remarkable numbers of offspring is no evidence of their desirability to women. It is only evidence that when men have power they will use it to promote their reproductive success, among other things (and that women, under such circumstances, will prefer entering a harem to suffering the dire consequences of refusal).

The fact that Buss can't be bothered to account for virtual female slavery when proclaiming female choice is typical of the Evolutionary Psychologist approach. Their belief in the power of biology to control human behavior is so reflexive that they can't be bothered to consider even the most glaringly obvious cultural factors impacting their claims.

And those who claimed that all Lawrence Summers was doing was expressing an interesting theory on human nature are so incredibly short-sighted. Because Summers suggested "to provoke you" that women are mentally inferior to men in math and science, and that's the primary reason why women have lesser math/science careers than men.

This isn't just interesting scientific speculation. He was the president of Harvard and had some say in its hiring policies. That made it political, and feminists would be fools to refrain from fighting tooth and nail to prevent the flimsily-backed claims of Evolutionary Psychology from being allowed to excuse gender-based discrimination.

Permalink

...and the president you rode in on.

By way of Evil Li-brul Overlord >:D , Shakespeare's Sister has a great post on conservatives who are now trying to distance themselves from Bush.

And now that the hideous underbelly of conservatism is exposed in a grotesque mosaic of avarice, antipathy, and corruption, the movement conservatives, who happily regarded Bush as the water-carrier for their movement during this hog wild run toward heaven on earth, now want to distance themselves from him as if the revolting montage of carnage is the singular result of his dogmatic incompetence, instead of the culmination of a mob-directed feeding frenzy that it actually is. Well, fuck you and the president you rode in on.

Bush was your Golden Boy—a corporate shill with the demeanor of a country bumpkin, who could hold together the unholy alliance between Big Money and Big Religion, standing at the altar and giving the blessing to the crackpot marriage between the business interests who sought to get rich off the stupid sods who marched in lockstep if only someone would protect the children from radical feminists and kissing boys. He didn’t just give good speech on Neocon dreams and working class nightmares; he believed that shit. And with a GOP-led Congress and a neverending stream of media mouthpieces willing to demonize anyone who dared to dissent, he tumbled headfirst into fulfilling every last one of your wishes, like a demented genie pulled out of a bottle in oil-soaked Texas.

He wrapped himself in the flag and told America to follow him down the Yellow Brick Road. He went to war, and he made you rich. And you cheered him all the way, over every last golden cobblestone. Then America got to Oz, and started getting itchy—and now you want to pretend you never knew what was there. Why, we had no idea there was just some shriveled old man behind the curtain! Please.

This excerpt also gets bonus points for using a Wizard of Oz metaphor, which I intend to use myself when I create a web site devoted to the lawsuit involving my fight to protect my copyright, and my right to authorize derivative work - or to refuse to authorize derivative work - in the spirit of the savinsucks.com web site.

Fun Copyright Fact

This is from the US Copyright Office's Circular 14 Copyright Registration for Derivative Works

WHO MAY PREPARE A DERIVATIVE WORK?
Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work. The owner is generally the author or someone who has obtained rights from the author.

I have never authorized a derivative work for my play TAM LIN, so anybody who claims to have a copyright on such a derivative work has obtained it unlawfully.

anti-slavery.org

Find out which products you buy are produced by slave labor.