In Memoriam

Ronnie Gilbert, singer (the Weavers), psychotherapist, and actress.

In Memoriam

• Jean Ritchie, folk singer  (Ad may play.)
• Betsy Palmer, actress.  Also, panelist on I've Got a Secret.

To the Warehouse

Thank you, sorta, Virginia Woolf.

I've moved some blogs to the Archived blogroll.

Here, have some Blind Faith (Blind Faith music proper begins at 9:55; previous material is the histories of the members of the band).

I'm beginning to think Robin Williams was right about Fukitol, except America is still taking it on the sly.

In Memoriam

Mary Ellen Mark, photographer.

In Memoriam

Tanith Lee, writer

Speaking of StumbleUpon

I clicked on this by accident.  Happy accident.  Here's an intelligence character test for the candidates for next year's presidential election.  Here's a post about Texas and its political culture and that Jade Helm thing, with ableist words and this sentence:  "Why would you need some secret plot to get Texans into a Wal-Mart?."  Here's a post from 2012, with gobbets of right-wing gibbering debunked.  Stonekettle Station, Jim Wright, proprietor.  Probably will offend you.  Eventually will offend me.  But at the moment providing distraction from the ongoing kerfuffle (seriously, the sour grapes on one side have been filling Grand Central Station).

(No, I haven't been talking about StumbleUpon.  Why do you ask?)

In Memoriam

Anne Meara, actress and comedian.

I enjoyed Stiller & Meara's act, and if you were listening to radio in New York in the '70s and '80s, all I have to say here is "a little Blue Nun."

In Memoriam

First report, which I saw because I worry occasionally about sibling and spouse.

Follow-up, today.

John F. Nash, Jr., mathematician.

Go, Ireland!

Ireland votes in favor of marriage equality by a landslide.

There's still the enacting it into law part, but what a wonderful message the Irish have just sent the world!

Another One

The headline at Alternet (from an article from Salon), An Anti-LGBT Pastor’s Outed on Gay Dating Site, is rapidly becoming the "Dog Bites Man" of news.

One of the things I would dearly love to hammer into the heads of all these God-fearing Christians and conservatives on the down-low:  Marriage will not make you straight.  Marriage can't even make you rich, happy, or moderately good-looking.  Marriage won't transform your race, ethnicity, ancestors, or birth relatives.  Marriage can't change your taste in clothes, home furnishings, automobiles, or movies.  Marriage does not alter your sports loyalties or your favorite TV shows.  And if marriage doesn't do any of these things, what gives you the idea that marriage will "fix" your sexuality?  It's like expecting that buying size 28 waist 28 inseam jeans, without nasty surgical interventions or unpleasantly stringent physical modifications, will magically reduce your body to fit.

To put it in the vernacular:  Nuh-uh.  Ain't gonna happen.

Current assumption is now that the more virulent the anti-gay pronouncements, the more likely that person is at least bi-curious and just hasn't been caught.

By the way, that's not the oncoming rant.

You Might Want to Check Your Hat (and Assumptions) at the Door...

• Via the sidebar at Ian Welsh's blog, The Archdruid Report takes a long and not optimistic view of the future.

  In the last years of the nineteenth century, it was common for politicians, pundits, and mass media in the United States, the British empire, and other industrial nations to discuss the possibility that the advanced civilization of the time might be headed for the common fate of nations in due time. The intellectual history of the twentieth century is, among other things, a chronicle of how that discussion was shoved to the margins of our collective discourse, just as the ecological history of the same century is among other things a chronicle of how the worries of the previous era became the realities of the one we’re in today. The closer we’ve moved toward the era of impact, that is, the more unacceptable it has become for anyone in public life to point out that the problems of the age are not just superficial.

  Yes, it is long, and yes, it is presumed you know history.  Deal.  There's more, and it is not reassuring.
• I was there because I followed a link from Avedon's Sideshow to an Ian Welsh (aha!) article on East Germans twenty-five years later.  Katarina Witt was not alone.  Plus a mention of comparative surveillance.
• I have the makings of a rant coming on.  You may want to assemble protective clothing now.

In Memoriam

Annette Funicello, actress and singer (and Mouseketeer). Avedon Carol had a link, and I visited and discovered that it happened 2 years ago.

Oh well. We all make mistakes.

In Memoriam

B. B. King, bluesman.

Racialicious produced video and snippets from interviews.  An excellent sidebar.

In Memoriam

Grace Lee Whitney, actress, whose life post-Trek was unexpected.

More Manure

• Mike Huckabee (The Republic of T) is a dose of ipecac.

  Huckabee’s ideas about women aren’t quite medieval, but they’re at least Victorian. Last January, at the Republican party’s annual winter meeting, Huckabee said that the Democratic party told women, “they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government.” Huckabee then went on to argue that Republicans aren’t waging war on women, but “they have a war for women, to empower them to be something other than victims of their gender.”
  
  Right. Women who use birth control are “victims of their gender.”

• Paul Ryan (I don't think he's running, but who knows these days?) doesn't understand poverty.  Or statistics, apparently.

  And Republicans have been throwing this accusation around for a couple of years now: that the War on Poverty has been a $12 trillion (or $18 trillion or $22 trillion, depending on who is telling the lie) waste of money that hasn't helped anyone in America.
  
  That's just an out and out lie.

  There is a graph.  (Zandar Versus The Stupid.)
• Via Wonkette, Maine governor supports a law that forbids welfare recipients from spending on an interesting array of foods:

  This bill, S.P. 195, introduced by state Senator Roger Katz (R-No Shit), seeks to run around that exemption and ban the poors from using their EBT riches for even those items. They are specifically asking the USDA for special permission to ban poor people from buying “food items that are otherwise subject to the state sales tax and for bulk purchases of grocery staples that, if purchased in smaller quantities, would be considered prepared food and therefore would be subject to the state sales tax.” Get it? If you buy one slice of gourmet baloney, you’d have to pay the higher tax, but if you buy a whole package, it’s considered a “staple.” UNLESS YOU ARE POOR. Then, according to this bill, you can’t buy any of it with your EBT card, because that would be … wasteful? Not nutritious? Just a fun new rule to show how gross you think poor people are?

  I'm surprised none of that bunch have tried reintroducing sumptuary laws yet.
  
• News too weird for words.  [ETA:  Story at sfgate.com.  Still weird.]

Om Nom Nommmmm

This year's Oakland Greek Festival is next weekend (May 15-17).  The San Francisco Greek Food Festival isn't until September.

Check, Please.

Mark Morford gets sarcastic.

(Well, to be fair, Mark Morford is always sarcastic.  Here with frosting.  Mike Huckabee deserves no less.)

The other kerfuffle is still happening and is strongly reminiscent of "Mr. Costello, Hero" at this point.

And So It Begins

So far, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders (Democrats) and Mike Huckabee and Marco Rubio and Dr. Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina and (maybe) Ted Cruz (Republicans) and other people who've slipped my mind are running for President of these United States.  Which means they'll poison the entire summer.  I realize that boring everyone to tears so we won't look closely at the issues is a feature of this system, not a bug.  Nevertheless, pay attention to those folks behind the curtain.

• Bernie Sanders (naked capitalism) defends European socialism.

  ...Sanders went on to defend democratic socialism and explain, in detail, why America should be trying to emulate Northern European countries rather than belittle them. The ABC host and former Bill Clinton advisor tried to pin the Vermont senator down, musing aloud, “I can hear the Republican attack ad now: [Sanders] wants America to look like Sweden,” to which Sanders deadpanned in response, “That’s right. And what’s wrong with that?”

• Carly Fiorina (The Republic of T) probably thinks we've forgotten about Hewlett-Packard, among other things.  She's wrong.

  Fiorina is running on her resume. Specifically, she’s touting her business experience as CEO of Hewlett Packard (HP) as the main reason why she should be elected. “I’m very proud of our record. We went from a market laggard to market leader. Unlike Hillary, I have actually accomplished something,” Fiorina likes to say. (See above for comparison of “accomplishments.”
  So what was Fiorina’s track record at HP? Fiorina was CEO of Hewlett Packard from July 1999 to February 2005. The company was lagging when Fiorina was hired. While it’s likely no one could have saved HP from decline, Fiorina’s efforts failed to impress. A top HP executive who joined HP shortly after Fiorina told Yahoo Finance, “She was polarizing [and] disenfranchising.” One top tech CEO said: “She was a value destruction machine with near zero cultural sensitivity. … Carly self excused the barrage of criticism by saying it all came with her necessary role as a change agent. … The [Silicon] Valley opinion was universally and viscerally negative. I literally don’t know a single person who thinks she was great and unfairly treated.”

• Ben Carson (The Republic of T) doesn't get it.

  What Carson doesn’t get about “turmoil in our cities,” is that in cities like Ferguson, Baltimore, and Detroit, people lose hope because their isn’t much of any way to get the things, or the life, they desire. That’s because jobs have disappeared from these cities, in large part due to economic policies and trade deals that made it easier for businesses and corporations to ship jobs overseas, where labor was cheap and unorganized, and environmental protections were few or non-existent.

And the basketball and Stanley Cup playoffs roll on. Thank $DEITY for baseball.

Last week, the anti-same-sex marriage people tried science.  And I mislaid that link.

The Legal Department

• Federal appeals court overturns Barry Bonds' felony conviction.  "Rambling" is not obstructing justice.
• Petraeus (remember Petraeus?  This is a song about Petraeus) was sentenced to two years probation and $100,000 fine for giving his biographer (and lover) classified material.  No.  Get your mind out of the gutter.  Secrets.
• Former guard at Auschwitz testifies at his trial on 300,000 charges of accessory to murder.  This is precisely why I do not suffer Holocaust deniers.

Earth Day

Turning the podium over to Comrade Misfit (Just an Earth-Bound Misfit, I):

Earth is the only home that we have. It would be nice if we treated our home with a little more respect than one might give to a single-wide that one is renting for three months whilst evading a process server.

That is all.

Loose Ends

• The butler did it.
• I've been following another kerfuffle for the last week or so, which has eaten considerable time and necessitated Fleetwood Mac and Billie Holliday vids, with occasional Robin Williams.  Since I have no intention of writing about it directly (cue gagging), let me just repeat (from almost exactly 6 years ago!) that thing of Theodore Sturgeon's from the introduction to The Stars Are the Styx:

  "He [Horace Gold, editor of Galaxy] said, 'Well, I'll tell you what to do. Write me a story about a guy who goes to the bus station to pick up his wife; she's been away for the weekend. And the bus comes in and the place is suddenly full of people. And across the crowd he sees his wife, talking avidly to a young man. ... She walks across, meets her husband, gives him a kiss hello.
  
  'Write me that, Sturgeon, and everybody in the country will know how you feel about that meathead senator!'
  
  ... It was this: that if you have real convictions...it's going to come through, no matter what you're writing about."

  This is where I have to explain that I don't look for political messages in my fiction and consequently only notice them when they're fairly blatant.  And blatant political messages in my fiction mean the fiction gets disregarded and probably disposed of, unless I got it from a library.
  
• Medical marijuana is effective against certain brain tumors, but the Feds will still bust you.
• Annual (somewhat) comment policy declaration:  After about ten days, comments go to moderation.  I do check once or twice a day, which is how I found 5 (!) spam messages in one day.  Spam and trolls will be raygunned.

Still Not Your Friend

Helmut Monotreme at Sadly, No! on Scott Walker.

Because it’s projection. We know Scott Walker’s record, we know what he stands for, and we know that he’s going to try to privatize the US just like he’s tried to privatize Wisconsin. I use the word ‘privatize’, cause it’s a lot simpler than typing out “steal the common wealth and birthright of the citizens and sell it to unscrupulous patrons who are already as rich as Croesus at fire sale prices, who might let the electorate use a degraded version of whatever they haven’t consumed completely, if they can pay through the nose for the privilege.”

ETA: Maybe not. (AlterNet)

Hello, Mr. Hatlo.

That would be Jimmy Hatlo, who sometimes had characters captioned with "The Urge to Kill."

Not interested in killing.

But when I read things like this and this and this, I had a brief fantasy of using Pavlovian operant conditioning on Mr. Bates.  Just so he would know, without any doubt at all, the difference between a Taser and a gun.  Not that Tasers are peaceful and non-fatal, of course.  Also, Mr. Bates should be sued for wrongful death until he has to live in the streets.  (Vindictive?  Moi?  We're all lucky he didn't want to play doctor surgeon.)

I mourn Eric Harris.

(Is there a reason to shape Tasers and guns similarly in manufacture?  Not that that would stop a determined killer, but why not make "mistakes" less likely?)

In Memoriam

Günter Grass, writer (with problematic past) and Nobel laureate.

(Yes, I restored his umlaut.  Computers let one do that.  We don't have to scream at diacritical marks anymore.  Hačeks!  Accents!  Umlauts!  Whatever you call the thing above the A in Ångstrom! ["Ring" is what the character viewer calls it.])

The Soft Cushions. Then the Comfy Chair.

Because the proper response to the announcement that Hillary Rodham Clinton is kicking off the 2016 Presidential Campaign season is thorough immersion in Monty Python sketches.  Not because I dislike Ms. Clinton, but because the fertilizer level in the news is about to rise.  And now for something completely different...

• Jurassicpork looks at police reactions to known white killers and unarmed black men.  Yes, he uses the G word.  You would too.
• Jesse Curtis weighs in with two articles to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the end of the Civil War:  "Why Black Southerners Fought" and "Why White Southerners Fought."   And yes, you need to read them both.
• My really-should-be-annual link to "I'm a Fighting Liberal," by the late Steve Gilliard, because the truth never gets old.  Driftglass reminded me (he's up to 2012 in his retrospective).

The rest of the open tabs seem to be about Puppygate, about which the less said the better.  Speaking of fertilizer.

In Memoriam

• Stan Freberg, humorist.  Mark Evanier remembers him.  I've mentioned him once or twice as shaping my sense of humor.  Even though he didn't much care for rock 'n' roll.
• Julie Wilson, singer (that "undated photograph" was on every announcement of her concerts.  Until this obit, I had no idea of what her actual face looked like) and actress.
• Dr. Phyllis R. Klotman, scholar and archivist of African-American film.
• Lon Simmons, Bay Area sportscaster

Celebration

Happy Passover and Happy Easter (Western, tomorrow) to those who celebrate!

Driftglass is marking his tenth anniversary as a peerless, tireless, unblinking blogger (taking "conservative" pundits apart like cheap watches and dissecting their wormy cerebra, with a side order of Chicago politics) with selected "Best of" posts and fundraiser.  Reflect that in a just universe (that one, over there), Drifty would have a column in the New York Times and would be lauded as "insightful and prescient," and the person currently holding that position would be whimpering and mewling in some conservative think tank.  It is not for nothing (although I don't get paid to say it) that I occasionally refer to Driftglass as the Mike Royko Memorial Emeritus Chair of the Unseen University School of Journalism.

I wanted to pull out a few for particular attention, but there are Too Many (and he's only up to 2009), so sample this one, and this one, and this one.  And then read the rest, salty language and all.

And if you can drop something in the tip jar, that'd help.

(And I need to catch up with Blue Gal.  I've been neglectful lately about investigating bloglinks.  That must change back.)

In Memoriam

New York Times obits.

• Izola Ware Curry, attempted assassin
• Miriam Bienstock, co-founder of Atlantic Records
• Gene Saks, actor and director
• Sashimani Devi, last ritual temple dancer
• Gary Dahl, who thought up Pet Rocks

Oh, Aaannnnnnnnd...

1. American "right-wing" "Christianity" misses the Iron Age.

   In sum, it is much easier to extrapolate from the biblical worldview to the idea that a parent has the right to beat his child or withhold medical care, or that a teenage sex slave should be forced to bear a child, than to derive the idea that we have a responsibility to bring children into the world under the best of circumstances and to acknowledge their rights as individuals once they arrive. These are fundamentally post-biblical ideas, as is the notion that empowering women to delay or limit childbearing is a positive social good.

2. This is the 2,500th post!  

DDoS

That would be "Determined Denial of Service," and I'm applying it to Indiana, whose governor signed a bill legalizing discrimination against gay people on religious grounds.

Now I've never quite understood this desperate need of businesses to discriminate against customers people who have different colors/genders/religions/ways of living.  Theodore Sturgeon suggested that humans need to feel superior and therefore need to feel that others are inferior, but that really has nothing to do with the transactional relationship:  I give you money, you take my money and part with the product or service, I take the product or service, and as long as there is no coercion or fraud involved, there should not be any problem.  (Hmmm, that almost sounds...libertarian.)

And yes, wedding planners and the like do have to work closely with the spouses-to-be, and may be made uncomfortable by organizing nuptials for people of the *gasp* same gender.  They would also be made uncomfortable by "Bridezillas," folks who intend to have liquor at the reception, and people for whom "jumping the broom" is part of the ceremony.  You'd think, what with the divorce rate, that these business people with religious scruples would refuse to deal with second-plus marriages unless the prior spouse was certified dead, but no.  The wedding industrial complex mostly recognized that there was money to be made, and money over time has trumped religious objections to much (does anyone refuse service to financiers or bankers on religious grounds?  Usury is specifically decried in the Bible.  "Illegitimate" persons?  Thieves?  Murderers?  Politicians Liars?  Those who disrespect their parents?  No sweat).

The bill seems to cover all businesses, though.

According to Melissa McEwan at Shakesville,

Although the Republican-controlled state legislature, nor the Republican governor, won't say it plainly, this reprehensible bill is their fuck-you to the federal government for thwarting their efforts to continue to ban same-sex marriage in Indiana. They want the right to make LGBTQIA Hoosiers second-class citizens, and they couldn't do it by banning same-sex marriage, so they'll do it this way.  [Emphasis added.]

Souls the size of walnuts. Anyway.  Repercussions have already begun.  Gen Con, a (huge) gaming convention, is talking about moving out after their contract expires in 2020, and has the support of the host city.  Salesforce is cancelling business trips to Indiana.  Other organizations, including the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) have objected forcefully to the law.  Southern Beale as usual gets right to the point:

Let me also say, if your religion requires you to be a bigoted asshole, then I have no use for your religion. Can you just imagine? Whatever happened to “Love one another as I have loved you”? Of course, it’s not about the Bible. It’s about belonging to a club that needs to breed hatred and fear of “the other” to justify its lack of cultural impact. You people are supposed to go out and be salt and light in the world, that’s your Great Commission, and yet all you can do is fight for the right of a bakery to not make a gay couple’s wedding cake.

Blessedly, there is the Open for Service campaign for non-bigot businesses (via Jean Ann Esselink at the New Civil Rights Movement, via skippy the bush kangaroo a comment at Making Light [my mistake]).  It would please me if service-to-all firms prospered and the discriminators went bankrupt, but that probably won't happen; the state of Indiana has economic problems that it's just made worse, and it will take a while to see that clearly.  But the NFL is watching the situation closely, and they moved the Super Bowl from Arizona in 1993 when that state's voters refused a Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.

ETA:  Tim Cook decries the law.  The NCAA is "concerned."

Text of the Bill.  In case.