Sophianotloren

“This is Chet from Visa. Your bill is two months overdue.”

“Yeah, I know. I just don’t have any money right now.”

“Well, can you tell me what happened? You’d been current on your account up until now–”

“I lost my job and have been been doing odd jobs, freelance work. The money’s just not been coming in.”

“Oh. Well, I understand, and I’m sorry to hear that. I’d like to work with you if I can to see what we can do to remedy this.”

“I don’t have anything right now. Everything I have needs to go to rent. But I will do what I can to pay when I have the money. I’m currently on county assistance–I can provide that if you want, if you need proof for your supervisor.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re able to get those resources. That’s great. But what can we do to just make a tiny payment on what you owe–”

“Ah, well, there is that…I don’t know, though.”

“What is it, ma’am?”

“It’s not a lot, but I do have a personal brand.”

“Oh? Well, can you tell me more about that?”

“I write about consent a lot and I’ve done a couple talks and have like 500 twitter followers.”

“That’s a start, but are you making any money from it?”

“It’s how I’m paying rent.”

“Sounds good enough to me! I’ll put you on the line with someone who can work something out with you.”

If you’ve found yourself having this conversation, then get that two-step authentication for your site because I’m coming to your alternate dimension and you don’t want the place I take to be yours. I’m swayed not by culture shock. Cyborg ocelots and mustard on toast or whatever it is your universe does, I can say–sight unseen– it’s easier to handle than having a faceless stranger interrogate your self-worth over a late payment paramount to what your roommates thrown down at “Sushi Thursday”.

Meanwhile, back at this fucking place:  those of us driven out the village for our activism are in turn taken to task for even the hint of any derived benefit from our work. And how I’ve hissed and hunkered at that word. Activism. In a culture where your erasure is deemed the societal default, simply leaving the house every day and being seen by people is activism.

But some of you are leaving your house to go to jobs. Some of you even have jobs at the very institutions that actively contribute to our marginalization. Which is fine. Capitalism is a drag and all, but you and your family still have to eat and wadded up mission statements have almost no protein in them.

There’s a lot of work to do. You’re doing what you can: we’re filling in the gaps. We’re blogging and speaking at your university and passing out pamphlets that point to local resources for those who don’t know where to turn. Some of us do this all day.  That killer blog post that is the “THIS! SO THIS” of your heart’s desire took–to contrast the few minutes you spent to read and retweet it–hours or even days for the person to write. Not counting: hours spent fielding negative comments and the occasional internet lawsuit.

Hashtags are the bearded Spock of an organic collective process. It takes experience and engineering. It all takes engineering.

Blame it on the media.  We’ve had a particular cultural portrait cultivated for us: the (usually white) free spirit with lots of free time who benignly irritates those around her with her (admittedly righteous) politics but doesn’t possess the resources or support to facilitate any genuine upset. Daria, Lisa Simpson, Hermione Granger, the girlfriend from Orange County–young (white) women without visibility who are summarily ignored by everyone, left as the lone voice of reason for us, the viewer. We feel a catharsis of empathy for the character and are (perhaps unconsciously) educated by the reactions of the other characters on how we and the rest of society should/will treat “activists”.

If you’d never written a blog post on rape culture, designed a protest flyer or spent the better part of an afternoon lecturing your local feminist sex supply shop about better inclusivity in their advertisements, you wouldn’t know the intense, thankless work that goes into it.

Let’s rewind.

Intense, thankless work that is necessary for your survival whether or not you possess the requisite spoons.

Last week, I spent I guess we’ll call it a “working lunch” at the local McDonald’s listening to a man tell everyone and their chicken nuggets that he would kill me. To keep AIDS out of our community. His presentation lasted the length of my meal and went uninterrupted. No one–not the private security guard, not the dyke couple holding hands and sharing a milkshake, not the family whose daughter was terrified to tears by the man’s shouting–said anything.

We–as in, those who do not direct the narrative–have had to reconcile this cultural blueprint for societal morals with the reality that this shit is bananas, bath and beyond. People of color are murdered by police in plain sight. Women face incarceration for miscarriages. We have to make cocktail straws and nail polish that reacts to date rape drugs because it’s too much effort to teach men not to rape and even if I ruin my manicure to catch a rapist CNN will still shed a tear over his lost lacrosse prospects if I press charges. We find ourselves a captive audience, stunned into silence.

That man followed me out of the McDonald’s. Not a single french fry was dropped in concern for my safety. Or his. He who thinks he can cast a circle of protection around his neighborhood with my blood to keep the AIDS away is just as sucker-punched as you, me or anyone else. What put the knife in his hand? Cultural mis-education about AIDS. A lack of adequate long-term care for those with mental illness. An inflammatory socio-political worldview that enables people to depict LGBT people as predators, as deceitful. Any other day, me and this man would be on the same side of the issue. But in that moment we were cast opposite, foils, albeit fleeting. And those who direct the narrative–the men who disrupt discussions of rape culture, politicians who view mental illness as a moral affliction–they don’t care, and that man didn’t care, if I was involved or not. Not being signed into the server wouldn’t spare me from permadeath.

And you expect us to make signs and design flyers and march against this shit out of the kindness of our hearts but I’m not sure I have one anymore.

I get it: the most prolific activists are always those who don’t need the money or visibility their activism affords them. Macklemore and Andrea James and Barney Frank make a fine, unthreatening addition to your Gl..b…..(t) luncheon, but they don’t know left from right about violence against trans women of color, transmisogyny in queer women’s spaces or really anything any of us want to have an actual conversation about. For all intents and purposes, they are uninvolved. This conforms to our bedtime stories of the bleeding heart who no one takes seriously.

See also: the Pride Whopper.

Not all activists are equal. Laverne Cox, CeCe McDonald, and Fallon Fox have so much more to know and say about being trans and/or queer in America and they have to fight so hard and endure so much hate–the quantity of which makes even spectators roll over in hopelessness–just to get a smidgeon of the visibility and presence of their white, heteronormative counterparts. And when we hold marginalized people to the same standards–the same, flawed standards based on a flawed understanding of how activism actually works–of their privileged peers, we are committing the very essence of complicity as violence.

If we can cast the responsibility of “saving the world” onto some yet-unsurfaced Pollyanna, clean of conscience and free of finanicial commitments, then nothing ever changes. There’s no quid for the quo. We remain rusted wheels. 

We want to believe. We want to think, to know, against all reason, against the ever-mounting evidence that life under capitalism just can’t work that way, that if we stopped accepting payment to write about pressing instances of social injustice, someone somewhere would take over Consent Culture. Someone somewhere would give that talk at Cornell. Someone somewhere will sit in on that community center discussion on trauma and sexuality. Anyone, anywhere. Out of their kindness of their hearts. 

To believe in activism without complications is to believe in an activist without complications. That is impossible. It goes against the very foundations of intersectional oppression. Everyone has bad thoughts. Everyone has prejudice. Everyone makes mistakes.

This perfect activist does not exist, and you cannot wish her into being by tearing down every other marginalized person who solicits donations on paypal for their twitter activism or gets rent money from Kickstarter/Patreon writing about what you write off as “no-brainer 101 politics”.

I wish Fallon Fox would make millions off her “personal brand”. I wish the “controversy” around her fights would build her a house and a boat and unlimited credit. But I know better. There’s no payout, no chest of treasures at the bottom of that deep, dark, well. Just more shitty Facebook petitions.

Still: we do the work. In hiding. Under aliases. Sometimes more than one.

We do what we must because we can.

We’re not always in this together, but we’re trying. Oppression is all around us. Within us. Forces go to work while we’re sleeping. We are surrounded and infiltrated and our spaceship doesn’t always know which way to go.

And maybe there’s no “right” direction for us to move toward. We need presence everywhere. We need people to get jobs. Grow vegetables. Share skills. Start blogs.

But there is a wrong direction–inward, at one another. When you accuse an activist of adopting social justice as their “personal brand”, by holding someone’s personal investment in fighting the oppression which actually seeks to hurt them, you are taking the side of the oppressor. You reward white men making a career out of telling other white men how not to be racist and sexist. You enable the forcing of trans women of color out of their homes so as not to interrupt Calpernia Adams’ coaching of cis male actors on how to be like trans women.

An activist is not a bad thing to be. It’s bad for your health–and sanity–but I defy you to make me feel guilty for taking a vested interest in toppling a system actively holding us down.

Activists deserve to be paid for their work. I’m not saying you have to pay for that work. We can discuss the boundaries of paying for anti-capitalism work in another post. But it’s valuable work, necessary work, work that allays the pressure and dread others feel at being trapped in a world they never made and being constrained by circumstances from participating to a degree that they like.

There is no perfect activism. There is no perfect activist.

When you go on social media to slap down an un/deremployed marginalized person for adopting a “personal brand”, ask yourself–

are you calling out or are you calling for blood?

One ensures sustainability and the other subsumes it.

That said: consent is not a zero-sum game. No line divides “good at consent” and “bad at consent”. Consistent with a consent culture is creating space where people can hold themselves accountable to educate themselves and others on the ways that un-negotiated power differentials in every day life have obscured our understanding of what that looks like and how that is best implemented.

I’m not an expert on consent. If anything, I strive to remain a perpetual pupil, as I think all activists strive to be.

Still: this is my job, and I don’t regret it. You shouldn’t regret your job either. Unless your job is the person who wants Kotaku to stop allowing people to fund game developers who rely on Patreon. In which case, you should regret your job and rethink your choices in life because you are trying to starve out social justice-minded media because you think it will make it better that some dude who writes for you did the thing with a girl who makes games. You and your mother should regret that.

But until the para-dimensional perforator punctures a whole in that parallel dimension where hospital billing departments take personal brand as payment, I’ll be here. We’ll be here.

Because it’s needed. Because we can. And because, for now, it ekes just enough to cover maybe half of rent pays.

The post Con$ent Is $exy: The Imagined Racket of Social Justice appeared first on Consent Culture.

...

So I returned to New York to find that The Young Lawyers had barely escaped cancellation in the purge that blissfully rid us of The Immortal, Barefoot in the Park, The Most Deadly Game, The Silent Force, The Young Rebels, Tom Jones and Matt Lincoln.

But the price of being kept on the air is a high one.  It is total Agnew-ization.

No scripts dealing with drugs.  No scripts dealing with "youth".  No socially conscious scripts.  Lee J. Cobb comes into prominence.  Zalman King fades back quite a lot and a pure WASP attorney will be introduced to ease the identity crisis of the scuttlefish  (Steve Kandel, one of the more lunatic scriveners in Clown Town, when assigned the chore of writing the script that introduces the new characters, despising the idea, named him Christian White.  It went through three drafts before anyone got hip to Steve's sword in the spleen.)

...

-- Harlan Ellison, approx. February 1970, reprinted in The Other Glass Teat *

...
[Kirk] Cameron said some of the claims that will be addressed in the film include: the notion that Christmas is really a church co-opting of winter solstice celebrations, that Jesus was not born on December 25, that Christmas trees are pagan and that consumerism is overshadowing the true reason for the season.

“It’s a scripted story about a guy named Christian White who represents the typical white Christian male and he’s got a bad case of religious bah humbugs,” Cameron said. “He is just deflating his wife’s entire Christmas party because he has come to believe that everything we’re doing at Christmas to celebrate is wrong.”

The movie includes reenactments of the original Christmas tree story, with portions and scripted scenes showing the nativity and the Council of Nicea, a pivotal event in the history of Christianity.

Cameron, who is also one of the film’s stars, told TheBlaze that he decided to make “Saving Christmas” to celebrate the spirit of the holiday season, while also pushing back against those who wish to “snuff out [the holiday's] holy root.”
...

Today in idiots:

Just when it seemed the right wing couldn’t get any more divorced from reality around here, a local conservative group has launched a protest against what it sees as a pernicious cultural touchstone.

Labor Day.

Yes, bittersweet old Labor Day — the first Monday in September, the holiday that’s been around for generations and is known to most non-ideologically blinkered Americans as an end-of-summer free day honoring all the hard work you put in the rest of the year.

But to the Freedom Foundation, a business-backed Olympia think tank, the day is evidence of the power of unions, which to them equals the decline of America. Rather than stoop to taking a union-backed day off, they plan to fight the power by … working all day Monday instead!

“I can’t think of a problem in society that can’t be traced in some way back to the abuses of organized labor, so it would be hypocritical of us to take a day off on its behalf,” said Freedom Foundation CEO Tom McCabe, in announcing the “work-in.”

That’ll show those unions who control everything around here. Let’s all go into the offices and the factories and work like dogs instead of barbecuing or watching parades! Who’s with me?

Of course, if McCabe followed this principle to its logical end, he’d have to work every Saturday, too. Year round.

If the Freedom Foundation is truly committed to this idea, might I recommend 19th century working conditions and wages as well?

Quite a while ago, the beautiful @rebelsnotes asked on Twitter if anyone sold a storage bag for doxy massagers. It seemed clear that nobody did. I piped up that I could make one for her if she would like. I have made quite a few storage bags for myself and for another friend.

While out shopping, I found a material that I hoped she would like and then got busy.

I find immense beauty and inner calm when I am making things, especially when they are for others. I normally channel this into baking, but I love craft projects and I got pure pleasure out of using my old, hand-cranked Singer machine to make this for Rebel.

The postie has delivered it to her and I got another rush of delight knowing that she likes it.

Who else is having a Sinful Sunday? Click and see.

Frank Wu writes, "Brianna Wu is a game developer and a frequent writer about gender issues in tech. As such, she frequently receives harassing, unpleasant emails. She got pissed off and wrote an awesome response to one here."

I got a harassing email today, and decided to respond with this letter. (Thanks, Frank!)

Been a looong time since I had a proper space to make art. I’m still pressed for time, unbelievably pressed, but..

Did you miss my art? Well, I'm back in the saddle, folks. pic.twitter.com/ZKg11JaENE

— bspencer (@vacuumslayer) August 29, 2014

More substantive posts coming soon.

A minor detail in this article on the history of Tabasco sauce, but one that is telling about how, when we are talking about “innovators,” we forget who actually does the work:

Accounts differ as to when exactly McIlhenny acquired the seeds for those Capsicum frutescens peppers. But in the years after the war, he began using them to make pepper sauce, a popular Louisiana condiment. His method was a laborious one that involved crushing the peppers with a potato masher and mixing them with rock salt from the island’s own salt mines, then aging the mash twice, adding vinegar in between. After straining the resulting mixture through a series of sieves, he decanted it into castoff cologne bottles.

He began making the pepper sauce? He crushed the peppers? He decanted it into castoff cologne bottles?

Or was it African-Americans doing all of this, probably ex-slaves working for quite low wages and in poor working conditions? The article is titled “Who Made That Tabasco Sauce?” It was workers who made that sauce, even if it was McIlhenny who thought of it, if he even did that.

But when we are talking about the rich, they are deified and thus any mention, not to mention asking questions about, the labor used to make these products is irrelevant. All the credit goes to the supposed innovator.

We’ve all read at least one: from “Against YA” to “Against Happiness,” essays that promise to dismiss entire abstract concepts using only rhetoric make for great click-bait. In The New Yorker, Ivan Kreilkamp explains why we keep overstating the case:

“Against [X]” is a symptom of a liberal culture’s longing to escape its own strictures; it’s the desire of thoughtful and nuanced people to shed their inhibitions and issue fearsome dicta. We feel that we must be fair and evenhanded in our prose, but in our titles we can fly a pirate’s flag.

Related Posts:

• This Week in Short Fiction
• Notable NYC: 8/23–8/29
• Rereading James Baldwin
• This Week in Short Fiction
• Gratification Be Postponed

I’ve believed in the possibility of reincarnation since I was seventeen.  Now, I won’t say I believe in the classic Eastern religious definition of the ins/outs and hows/whys of it.  For me, it is more a speculative concept — as I said, a possibility.  If human life is viewed as a vital energy, if energy is not created or destroyed — where does it go when our physical bodies fall down finished?  (Yes, now I have doubtless offended hard science sorts — get in line with the hard polytheists, please.)  Why would it not be possible that some less ephemeral bit of us be recycled?

Mind you, I don’t think it is necessarily the only option.  I have a bit of an issue with the ‘either/or’ and ‘all or nothing’ simple bits that my nation seems so fond of; you can blame my doubtless incomplete notions about quantum physics for this: particle or wave (or more!) means CHOICE to me!  And my mind merrily goes off singing “In microcosm, so in macrocosm; as above, so below.”  Shoot me, I’m a panentheistic pagan with a light side of science.  But IF you shoot me?  I won’t necessarily be gone.

I could be, in some sense, the tree seedling that comes up the next spring…or the wind that moves its leaves.  Some of me could be the raindrops that fall on said sapling, the water that was me evaporated in my cremation to rejoin clouds overhead.  Even if all there is a physical recycling, I am content.  So why do I think reincarnation is something that can happen?  Surely you knew there would be a story, right?

When I was seventeen, the summer after my high school graduation, I woke shaking and sweating after a very vivid dream.  The dream itself had a surreal calm about it; though I recall, in the dream feeling like a moth caught in a bottle and wanting to scream.  In the dream, I was somewhat like myself — fair skinned and blonde, but much taller.  I was standing in the rain in a much trampled muddy yard surrounded by barbed wire.  I felt a sense of complete unreality, as in “This simply cannot be happening to me.”  About three meters away stood two soldiers, smoking and talking and I could understand them perfectly.  They were speaking German and their uniforms were those of the Third Reich.

Now, as a child, I had spoken German for three years; at 17 I still had a child’s vocabulary for the most part — and degraded from lack of use.  It should not have made what the words of the guarding German in my dream intelligible to me.  But I remember it vividly: “Sie ist zu hübsch, sie kann nicht jüdisch sein. Und sie is so blond.” (She is too pretty, she can not be Jewish.  And she is so blond.)

My own words, with a voice raised to carry over the rain-patter, were what made me want to scream, even in the dream-state I was filled with horror and shame hearing myself speak them: “Aber ich bin jüdisch, sagen sie mir; wie kann es wahr sein? Ich komme aus Berlin?(But I am Jewish, they tell me; how can it be true? I come from Berlin.)

I woke just as they stepped towards me, smiling.  I was filled with shame and sure that I had been on my way to a concentration camp, a German Jewess who doubtless fucked her way to freedom.  For months the dream haunted me and I had trouble sleeping.  I told myself this was just the result of rather overmuch study of WWII history in my senior year.  Slowly, I dismissed the notion that I had seen something revelatory of another lifetime.

Then, years later, in the Army, I returned to Germany.  I had never been to the walled city of Berlin as a child, a military brat who lived in Stuttgart when the Wall around East Germany went up as we practiced bomb drills in school.  And yet, Berlin felt peculiarly familiar to me.  Believe me when I say, not any place in Germany is alike — even the German spoken in Berlin was not the same as the childhood dialect I used in Bavaria.  Berliners thought I WAS Bavarian — until they were told I was American.  And yet, I felt so at home that I was happier than in the last decade of my life.  Until the dreams resumed.

For most of the next three years vivid dreams would wake me – sometimes screaming, and sometimes in German.  Not only was the content disturbing, but the sensual reality was beyond normal dreams.  Not only visual, these dreams — but with taste, smell, hearing and even sensations of pain, all intense as waking life.

I dreamed of running through dark streets, hearing shouts behind me, “Halt, Hände hoch!”  I dreamt of a gap-toothed goon running his filthy hand up my leg beneath my dress as I sat handcuffed to a bench.  I dreamt of running though woods, smelling snow.  I dreamt of being in Israel carrying a pistol and smelling cordite in the air.  I dreamt it was 1948, in May when the British were leaving.  I dreamt I died, gunshot as I tried to rescue someone (a lover?) from a make-shift APC that was a-fire in the streets.  I believe I died in Israel in 1948.  I’d really prefer to believe that I had seen the movie “Exodus” once too often — but since I had NOT seen the film or read the book till AFTER I returned to the United States in 1979, it’s hard to blame that as a cause.

Every time I relax a bit, tell myself dreams can mean anything or nothing?  Something comes along and head-slaps me.  I can’t watch Holocaust related films; though I did see many documentaries in high school.  Such things now?  Make me get cold, nauseated, and sometimes almost paralyzed feeling.  It freaks me the fuck OUT, so I avoid such material…or get thoroughly shit-faced before attempting to watch. (Ask me how bizarre it was for my husband, while in Berlin, to be an extra in the mini-series “The Holocaust”, playing an SS troop attacking the Warsaw Ghetto.)

But it gets me anyhow, unexpectedly.  Earlier this summer, I engaged in the ‘summer novel’ — a recreation of the Sherlock Holmes genre by Laurie King.  She makes her female lead, Mary Russell, the daughter of a Jewess.  It didn’t seem a big part of the story until the tale took them to Israel to hide out from a villain.  Mary suddenly recites, as she lands in Jerusalem: “Simchu eth Yerushalaim w’gilu bah kal-ohabeha.”  I had not even read the translation of the Hebrew (Rejoice for Jerusalem and be glad for her, all you who love her.) when tears suddenly sprang into my eyes and a shiver shook my body.  I felt utterly certain I had spoken those words at some time in my past — my past life.

Imagine my surprise to learn, later in my study of several religions, that some branches of Judaism do teach that reincarnation can occur in special circumstances.  And there are those who believe the victims of the Holocaust did reincarnate to get the lives stolen from them in hatred and horror, even if not re-born Jewish.  So, yes, “R” is for reincarnation and I am stuck with my own unverified personal gnosis (UPG) of what might have been my last life before the one I was born into in 1953.  I did not, like some others who believe they are reincarnated Holocaust victims, hate all things German.  I hated myself, for surviving the Holocaust to die later in Israel.  I think I wanted to die, I was foolhardy and too much into taking risks in that last dream.  When I felt the punching sensation in my chest and looked down at my own blood on my chest-clasping hand, I had the only sensation of peace and satisfaction that existed in any of the serial-dreams.

I had my sons circumcised, not only for medical reasons and because their father was similarly ‘snipped’ ….but out of a deep sense of solidarity with those who suffered and died because of the unmistakable evidence of “otherness.”  My children grew up celebrating Hanukkah and learning some basics of Judaism so they wouldn’t be anti-Semitic shitheads.

And my last time in Germany?  I met a lovely Jewish woman whose Polish parents had hidden her with a Catholic family so she would survive what they did not. She embraced me, weeping, when my youngest son was born and circumcised over the objections of the doctors at the German hospital where he was born. She lit candles at Hanukkah with us and brought my children gifts as if they were her own grandchildren – she never bore children in the world that had eradicated her own family.

I will never see Israel in this lifetime — and I am angry at the nation for acting as harshly as those that once sought their ending.  I do not believe I was an observant or religious Jew in that life; but I believed in surviving, obviously.  “Live and make better the world,” is a singular commandment I could honor.  No matter how many lifetimes it takes.

(My entire personal pagan alphabet can be read by clicking HERE.)

Enhanced interrogation, was it?  Just some close questioning and extra motivation, was it? Thank you SO much 21st century White House – to Bush and Cheney to the world.  You ALLOWED torture and so now, Americans abroad face the same from the people you helped to radicalize.  James Foley was waterboarded before he was murdered by the ISIL/ISIS crew.

THIS is what a bad example leads to Mr. Bush; say, why don’t you go have a non-alcoholic beer with those guys and set them straight, ok?

Perfidy of an ex-cop snake,

In the caldron boil and bake;

Matron’s stories told defy the truth,

Gropes remember’d from their youth,

Liz Dux’ ego, and Meirion’s sting,—

For a charm of powerful trouble,

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Gall of Spindler, and slips of Yewtree

Sliver’d in BSkyB’s eclipse;

Nose of Murdoch, and Winsor’s lips;

Finger of the dead tree press,

Ditch-deliver’d by broadband,—

Make the gossip thick and slab:

Add thereto t’internet’s chaudron,

For the ingredients of our caldron.

Don’t get too excited – you’ll need to be patient, but we now have an idea how long it takes for a witch-hunt to die down – 332 years!

Next Sunday, hundreds of modern witches will gather at Rougemont Castle to call for a posthumous pardon for Temperance Lloyd, Mary Trembles and Susannah Edwards from Bideford, north Devon, who in August 1682 became the last three women in England to be hanged for witchcraft. 

Mary and Susannah were arrested having been seen begging for food with Temperance in Bideford. At their trial a month later all three women made no attempt to deny witchcraft.

Under the law as it stood there was no onus on the prosecution to prove the case against them – it was for the women to prove their innocence.

Apparently, the women were convicted on hearsay evidence, which included one of them being accused of turning into a magpie. Even the Assizes Justices at the time did not believe they were guilty but were forced to respond to an angry mob that was baying for a hanging. The mob got its way.

Jackie Juno, a modern day witch, said: “By getting them pardoned we are making a statement that humanity could change for the better. It would also be laying the women to rest in a way that resolves the mistakes of history.”

Some of the comments under the local paper coverage of this event are interesting:

“But 300 years ago it was considered a real crime. Beliefs change. Laws change. We cannot judge what happened 300 years ago by the standards of today.”

and:

“What a waste of time. They were found guilty of a crime over 300 years ago, and sentenced as seem fit at the time. No new evidence has come to light, so there is no reason to pardon them. Whatever next – the pardoning of all the criminals sent to Australia for stealing a loaf of bread?”

How curious – the same sort of people who comment on local newspapers are as sure that there is no argument in favour of ‘historic pardons’ as they are in favour of ‘historic convictions’. Courts convicting people on hearsay evidence without proof – for fear of the baying mob getting out of control? Judging what happened in the past by the standards of today?

For more information, email jackiejuno@yahoo.co.uk.

Every year, Hyperallergic pays tribute to David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), the classic sci-fi thriller, with a 12-hour journey through videos we discover littering the internet. Sometimes it can feel like you’ve fallen into a rabbit hole, so jump in and let us be your guide.

The following poem is by S.M. Hill, a Swedish immigrant to Oregon, circa 1916. I take it from here.

America

They boast a great deal about equality,
they loudly proclaim you are free.
Without answering I’d rather swallow my annoyance
and not pay attention to our slavery.
Here, gold measures human worth
here, everything is right as long as it succeeds,
here, food is given the highest value,
weak ones are crushed by the iron heel.

We are not tormented by aristocrats,
we don’t sigh under a king!
Nonsense! Here we are ruled by rascals,
the power of the multi-millionaires is oppressive.
Politics is merely a system of plundering,
the penniless become downtrodden
and honesty seems to have left us,
and those who steal gain honor and power.

No, my friend, you won’t find paradise here,
here, too, there’s a difference between rich and poor.
You change your name and receive the prize,
and praise yourself so heartily.
Yes, the race of Adam lives here, too
and sin rules here as well.
The beautiful land that your eyes saw,
lies far away and high above the sky!

GIF of Elisa Kreisinger’s mash-up (GIF by Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)

Do you ever feel like the art world is sort of like high school, or life at a small liberal arts college? Or maybe just a blowout party you’re not actually sure you were invited to, but you decided to show up anyway?

Me too.

Take “Picasso Baby,” for instance — that “performance art film” that Jay Z shot last year at Pace Gallery. I wasn’t invited. My boyfriend was. I lived. But the pictures and videos that came out of the gallery still fascinate me — they seem to expose something about the art world and its love of celebrity (and lately, the return embrace), something about the insideriness, the perpetual performance, the mixture of honest creativity and hucksterism that characterize this industry. It’s never been clear to me if Jay Z set out to capture all that, or if he just happened to do so along the way to wanting in.

Artist Elisa Kreisinger, aka Pop Culture Pirate, picked up on this too, and fortunately for all of us she made a video that amplifies it. Taking four minutes of footage from Jay Z’s “Picasso Baby,” she set it to Taylor Swift’s saccharine song “22,” which celebrates being young, “happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time,” having one-night-stands and dressing up like hipsters. That sounds a little like the art world, doesn’t it? The mash-up is technically simple — just straight images from Jay Z’s video and Swift’s voice — but the pairing is bitingly brilliant.

It’s miserable and magical oh yeeeeeeaaaaaahhhhhhhhh …

I can remember events that date back to being three years old – but they are ‘fixed images’ rather than a ‘video’ rendition of events. I have a clear image of my Father, bent over an old Rayburn, cooking bubble and squeak for me – but if you ask me ‘what was on the table in that room’ or ‘who else was present’ I couldn’t tell you – I don’t have the ability to ‘replay’ the entire sequence of events as I do for later memories.

Even at age 8, the memories are fairly static – and here I can draw on some that might properly be described as traumatic in that I was in hospital for many months, undergoing surgery, and didn’t see or hear from my parents during that time. You might have thought that event was traumatic enough to be imprinted on a child’s memory – but in fact I had totally forgotten until my brother came up with a letter written by me, found in my Father’s papers, which referenced in my childish hand writing, that I hadn’t seen them for two months, and hoped they might find time to visit me.  No sooner did I see that letter than it brought back a host of other memories, including the name of the young lad in the bed opposite me, the fact that his Father was a farmer, and that he had managed to blow his chin off twice with his Father’s shotgun – in search of rabbits. I was particularly upset about him for it had been necessary to give him a glass eye, which he used to take out every night…

I am quite confident that if someone had shown me an article 50 years later regarding a man called Jim, of farming stock, with a glass eye, perhaps a reference to the Oxford area, or a childhood shooting accident – I could easily convince myself that it was ‘Jim’ from the bed opposite. (if perchance you are reading this Jim, I apologise for bringing back memories of the screaming creature with all the tubes in the bed opposite you…but you did give me terrible nightmares).

I was minded of these memories when I read the NHS report of the allegation made against Jimmy Savile at the Roecliffe Manor. The NHS investigator had no trouble believing that ‘the informant was a sincere and honest individual’ nor that life in that convalescent home was ‘harsh’ – a nurse confirmed that a child had been tied to a chair for bed wetting; whilst such treatment might seem horrific in 2014, I was tied to the bed frame for repeatedly pulling out my ‘tubes’ so find it totally believable, and in keeping for the times. Children’s hospitals and convalescent homes weren’t the cuddly ‘mummy lying next to you’ ‘decorated with balloons’ and ‘nurses that make you laugh’ establishments that we expect today.

However, patient ‘A’s recollections proved harder to match to reality. Despite claiming to Operation Yewtree that he had placed an advert in the Leicester Mercury which had brought forth 47 e-mails from ‘other children abused by JS at Roecliffe’, he was not willing to hand over details of who those people were. Repeated advertisements in the same paper and a variety of other papers by the investigators failed to elicit a single response. Requests for patient ‘A’ to contact the 47 himself and ask them to come forward elicited the response that they didn’t want to talk to the investigators. Who were the 47? Assuming they existed, were they people who scented another compensation claim and had come forward to him and reinforced his belief that it was JS at Roecliffe?

Whatever the answer to that question, by this time, patient ‘A’ was quite sure that the person who had abused him at Roecliffe was called Jim, had dark hair, did ‘odd jobs’ round the hospital three out of four week-ends, wore a brown porter’s coat, sometimes worked on the hospital radio, and drove an old van ‘like a butcher’s van’.

By the time of his third interview, the best part of two years after constant media attention on Jimmy Savile, the butcher’s van had become a ‘camper van’, ‘Jim’ had lost his dark hair and was identified from a contemporary photograph as being the peroxided Jimmy Savile, and patient ‘A’ had remembered being taken to meet Slade, T-Rex – and, of course, Garry Glitter, in a motorway service station – and offered as corroboration that he had since been told that it was well known that these stars were often seen in that motorway station…

It is not hard to see what has gone on here – nor to sympathise with patient ‘A’. Old disjointed memories of an unhappy and frightening period of his life have been shorn up by modern stories in the media. From the report we can glean that he is today, a ‘fragile’ individual. Was he sexually abused – or did he undergo some painful medical procedure at the time? He remembers a nurse ‘comforting him afterwards’. If we accept, as I am quite happy (happy is probably the wrong word in this context) to do so; that he was abused by someone who worked as an odd job man at the hospital – we know that he wasn’t called Jim – they had never employed anyone called Jim.

Neither, after probably the most exhaustive and painstaking investigation carried out by any of the NHS Trusts, was there any record of Jimmy Savile ever having been near the place – and their dedication to the task is to be applauded.

That’s not a ‘false allegation’ – that is a painful memory being given socially acceptable validation in a modern context; it’s not malicious, it’s trying to make sense of that memory of the glass eye…

This incident, in turn, came to mind when I saw the photograph at the top of this page. It’s a Village Hall in Hampshire. There are Village Halls like it all over the country. People use them for low-key weddings, the annual dinner and dance of the Geranium Society, and the Council Rates rebate office letting their hair down at Christmas. They are cheap to hire, and if you don’t go with the brown Windsor soup apparently being served in our picture, you can dismiss the tables and cram 150 people in there to listen to the newsagent’s son and his three friends squark out a rendition of the latest hits and jig about a bit.

My photograph was taken in 1969. If you weren’t alive back then (JuliaM???) you will have to take my word for the fact that it is utterly representative of the scene that you could have photographed in hundreds of similar halls the length and breadth of the country. Soberly dressed people having what passed for a fun packed evening out in those days. No fights, no punch-ups, nothing exciting happening.

Except that one young lady does remember something happening in that very hall. Not that it should be described as exciting – traumatising would be the word. She remembers that a man put his hand up her skirt and touched her vagina over her clothing. She was the same age as patient ‘A’ in 1969. She’s never forgotten that incident, nor his ‘hairy hands’. The man had got up on stage and was singing an old song that has been around since 1902, but had recently been reissued.

The song was ‘Two Little Boys’. Everyone knows that Rolf Harris released ‘Two Little Boys’ to world wide acclaim around that time. Everyone knows now that Rolf Harris doesn’t have hairy hands. In fact everyone knows that despite exhaustive inquiry that rivals that of the NHS investigators there is absolutely no record of the extraordinary event that would have been Rolf Harris, world famous entertainer, appearing on stage after the Brown Windsor soup in Leigh Park Community Centre. No record of it at all – and no one else come forward to remember what would have been a staggering event in sleepy Havant in 1969.

The Rolf Harris jury were asked to chose whether they believed the word of ‘three victims’ (who must be believed) or the word of a man who had twice deceived his long-suffering wife by having lengthy affairs, who was roundly condemned as a liar for not remembering being at ‘It’s a Knock Out in Cambridge’ (he wasn’t – he was at a TV program called Star Games, which he might well have remembered). The jury, who were ‘confused and unable to come to a decision on Friday’ had by Monday, made a decision between a ‘deceitful liar’ and someone ‘who will be believed’ and jailed Rolf Harris as a paedophile. 

Am I alone in seeing similarities between the ‘Leigh Park Incident’ and patient ‘A’ who spent long periods in Roecliffe Manor and the tricks that memory can play on you when your memory is jogged?

Am I alone in wondering how Slater and Gordon manage to juggle the hundreds of ‘historic abuse cases’ they are now handling as a result of the ever helpful media – and the fact that last year they also recovered £13,000,000 in personal injury damages for 1,050 Police Federation members.

People served free food at a bar with their drink order, 19th century. The horror.*

God knows I love me a rant. And a lot of them are pointless but if there’s one thing I am never going to rant about, it is being served free food in a bar:

The common defining characteristic of free-pizza bars is that they are geared toward the very, very drunk and the very, very impressionable. Have I accepted free pizza from a free-pizza bar when I was drunk enough to believe it to be a pizza-shaped, cheese-flavored pint of beer? Sure. Did I go to free-pizza bars when I was young, wide-eyed, and enamored of novel ideas like body pillows and home-cooked bar snacks? Of course. Now, I see the light. I’d rather seek out mediocre-to-good pizza on my own time, resulting in personal satisfaction in both belly and spirit, than be tossed a platter of cooked flour and tomato sauce straight from my middle school cafeteria just because I showed up to get blottoed.

I should not be rewarded for drinking heavily. The reward for drinking heavily is drinking heavily. Part of the understood struggle of drinking heavily (as all good must come with bad) is that food must be sought out with wanton but fierce dedication. If you find pizza, which is almost everywhere in every city in America and most often at late-night hours, you will feel infinitely happier than if you settled for some grimy bar’s unwarranted handouts. And if you’ve stayed out too late and nothing is open, your punishment has been writ and you shall bear its truth.

If free pizza from a bar tasted like fucking caviar, maybe I’d try it once and a while. But it doesn’t. Pizza that is given to you from a bar always tastes like three-days-old diner grilled cheese. The tomato sauce is high fructose corn syrup swamped in red dye and the crust, well, there isn’t one—the whole thing is a mistake, its a blurry facsimile of pizza’s bastard son. It’s what a drunk person would say if they were asked to describe pizza to a person who’d never cooked it before.

There are so many problems here. First there is like a 200 year old history of bars serving drunks food to keep them in there. The term “bum’s rush” is a reference to bouncers watching the food buffet at 19th and early 20th century American bars that served free food if you bought a beer (mostly paid for by the breweries who had monopolies over the bars). When I go to Oaxaca, Mexico, it is standard there to be served free food with drinks. At worst, you get awesome roasted peanuts with garlic and chile and a ton of salt–making it the best bar snack ever. At best, tacos and who knows what else. It’s amazing.

Second, of course you deserve to be rewarded for drinking heavily. Isn’t this the common thread that holds LGM together. We even tolerate a vodka drinker in SEK because at least he still drinks. Do I need to expand on this? No, I do not.

Third, who cares if the pizza is bad? Why does this really matter? You are drinking. You know what is good while drinking? Fatty, salty, low quality food. I don’t even want the pizza to be that good because after a bunch of beer, would I even enjoy it? And if this does matter to you, I have a secret–you can always decline and let others enjoy their pizza. The 19th century food wasn’t necessarily all that great either (seriously read the link, which is a New Yorker article from 1940 about McSorley’s Old Ale House in New York). But it fed you.

This is all very silly. But I want to make one thing clear. I went to a bar last night. It was free plate of fries night with a beer. And those fries were tasty. Also they were free.

In a related story, even I have standards. Which are not to drink beer with offensive names and labels. I will drink Stone because I don’t find arrogance particularly offensive, but Flying Dog Raging Bitch, no. Why would I do that? With that many options, even in beer weak Rhode Island? I am just not going there. And as for that beer with the medieval “wench” whose breasts are exploding out of her top, I’d rather dump it down the drain than buy it. Knock it off bros, beer should not be for sexists. I will say though that Will Gordon is great and I look forward to his daily beer reviews as long as they last, especially has he goes into comments and smacks jerks down hard. Not that I’ve ever wanted to do that.

* I have no idea what the central theme in this image is supposed to be. Some sort of violence, perhaps anti-Chinese? In any case, it’s the only image I could find of people eating at bars in the 19th century.

carocat:

http://www.playboy.com/articles/should-you-catcall-her-flowchart

Allies in strange places.

Libertarians In Name Only

AUG 26 2014 @ 1:17PM

by Dish Staff 

Tim Fernholz highlights new Pew data on libertarianism in America, which shows that only 11 percent self-describe as libertarian and understand what the term means:

The survey showed a fairly even split among Americans considering whether the regulation of businesses does more harm than good, or if aid for the poor helps or hinders, though a majority does think that corporations make too much profit. Libertarians, meanwhile, leaned strongly against any interference in business or help to the poor, though not as strongly as you might think: 41% of libertarians saw government regulation of business as necessary, and 38% supported aid to the poor.

Indeed, perhaps the most interesting finding is that self-described libertarians favor US involvement in world affairs more than the average citizen, despite their reputation for an isolationist lean. And, even more weirdly, 16% of libertarians said US citizens need to be willing to give up some privacy in exchange for greater security.

Kilgore thinks that “Pew has at the very least cast some massive doubt on all that ‘libertarian moment’ polling from Reason“:

These findings of the non-particularity of “libertarian” views, mind you, is after Pew has melted the category down from 17% of the public to 11%, since a lot of “libertarians” could not accurately distinguish “libertarian” from “communist” or—get this—“Unitarian.”

Allahpundit’s analysis:

What you’re seeing in the poll results, I think, is a bunch of doctrinaire libertarians having their brand diluted by a bunch of conservatives/ Republicans who are disgusted with those labels right now, for whatever reason, and are thus hoping to claim “libertarianism” for themselves. Do you support aggressive policing, a muscular foreign policy, and a social safety net but are disgusted with how big and intrusive the federal government’s gotten and how complacent the GOP has gotten about it? Congrats, you might be a “libertarian.” In fact, this reminds me of what David Frum said recently about the “libertarian moment”...

...

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

...

So, for example, when you hear the same people who fanatically supported President George W. Bush when he famously told Iraq war critics to fuck off --

"Well, we had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election."

-- now insisting, less that a year after the 2008 elections, that President Barack Obama needs to:

"...scrap the current grandiose plans and to start over."

or when you see the mobs on the Right being whipped by talk of secession or revolution or spilling the "blood of tyrants" into a nearly-pornographic frenzy, understand that what you are witnessing are the echoes of political decisions made in the wake of September 11, 2001.

Political decisions that trained the Right to believe, on a visceral level, that a sufficiently bloody and horrifying disruption to the life of the country can -- if properly exploited -- wash away their eight otherwise-unforgivable years of sin and restore "their country" to its proper, wingnut default setting.

That if the right sacrifices are made to the right Gods in just the right way, then they can be virgins again.

...

The thing is, I don't especially begrudge these Four Heist Men of the Teapocalypse their ludicrous little charade; Hell, if I'd spent the last decade happily sucking the dicks of the people who destroyed my country, I'd guess I'd be dressing up in pantyhose and jaunty little hats and pretending I'd been asleep since the Ford Administration too.

Phil Ponce, on the other hand, is a different story. Letting these clowns use the the public airwaves to put across their underhanded, one-sided scam is unforgivable, and letting himself be used as their sweat rag in the process is beyond embarrassing.

If Royko were alive, he'd be dangling Ponce by his ankle from a fifth story window right about now, making him conjugate the verb "muckrake".

In Latin.

Backwards.

Else how's that boy ever gonna learn!

A good man is dead. And it feels like there should be some mechanism by which I can scream that at the sky loud enough to tear the universe apart. A good man is dead and everything should stop now. No jokes should be told, no flowers should bloom, no wine drunk except in the pursuit of some respite from the aching sore of its unfairness.

A good man is dead and the world should shut the fuck up and be mute for a while. Colours should bleach to bone. Gulls should drop out of the sky, stopped in flight.

A good man is dead and, for long minutes, I have forgotten how to breathe. I’ve forgotten how to cry; the misery that should rise is trapped somewhere in my skull, it’s taken a wrong turn and can’t find its way to my tear ducts. I’ve resorted to typing nonsense on a screen for fear that if I stop, I will break apart in the stagnant clutch of the moment.

A good man is dead and I am not. A man with beautiful children and a beautiful wife and a life worth living five times over. While I am older, smoke thirty cigarettes a day and think walking is exercise. He loved life and I do not. He lived in his skin and I ignore it. He was kind and smart and the loyalest of friends. How is it that his goodness did not buy him a quiet death in old age? When I have squandered mine?

It happens every day; this obcene imbalance. A good man is dead.

Remember the 1955 movie “Marty”? It was a respected oldie when I was a kid (it’s one of only two films to win both the Best Picture Oscar and the Cannes Palme d’Or), but it’s now pretty obscure. I saw the movie in the 1980s as part of a screenwriting class.¹

“Marty’s” title character, plain-faced, chubby, and not great at talking to women, despairs that no woman will ever love him. The screenwriter, Paddy Chayefsky, thought of the “Marty” story after he saw a sign posted in a ballroom, which said “Girls, Dance With the Man Who Asks You. Remember, Men Have Feelings, Too.”

Marty eventually meets a wonderful woman and begins a relationship, although he has to overcome the resistance of his jealous mother, and of friends who mock him for dating a “dogface.”² In pop culture, everyone – or at least, everyone who isn’t a terrible human being – eventually meets someone wonderful and falls in love.

But in real life, that’s not how things always work. Some people don’t want romantic love at all. Others want romantic love but will never find it. That’s life. I’m beginning to accept, at age 45, that probably “true love” will never happen for me. I have a bunch of factors working against me – I’m physically conventionally unattractive, I badly lack confidence, I’m sort of a weirdo, as I get older I meet new people less often, etc..

To tell you the truth, I resent the situation. It’s not an all-consuming bitterness or anything – on the whole, I’m a happy guy³ – but I irrationally feel cheated of a fundamental human experience.⁴ And although I’m happy for my friends who are in great relationships, there’s also some ugly jealousy in me on the subject. And I’m really fucking sick of movies and TV about the sad troubles of stunningly attractive people who somehow can’t find love until they meet some other stunningly attractive person, blah blah blah complications ensue and are overcome happy ending credits roll.

I don’t bring this up to ask people to feel sorry for me, or to ask for dating advice. (GOD NO!!! Please don’t give me any dating or romantic advice, folks; if I haven’t specifically asked you for it, I don’t want to hear it.) I bring this up because I feel my ability to enjoy complaining about my single state has been ruined by MRAs and anti-feminists.

Because in human culture, we do something called “signaling” a lot. And, on the internet, men complaining that they don’t have the romantic success they want, that they feel they should be more attractive to woman then they actually are in practice, etc., have all become signals used to indicate alliance with the manosphere.

When I read someone from the manosphere talking about their lack of dating success, I always emphasize empathize. How could I not? They’re pretty much describing my life story. Except then they keep on talking, and suddenly the repulsive bitterness towards women or feminists (or both) comes out. And the empathy is now accompanied by a strong desire for a shower.

I don’t want to be even momentarily mistaken for part of the manosphere. Because while not everyone in the manosphere is a bitter, angry woman-hater, lots of them are. And those who aren’t overtly woman-hating seem to find the misogyny among their comrades either invisible, unobjectionable, or excusable.

Those hatebags have directed abuse at me personally – fat jokes, “you’re just trying to get laid,” name-calling like “Mangina,” and so on. I’m not bothered by such insults, but it sure hasn’t endeared their community to me.⁵ I get off relatively easily; the abuse directed at well-known female internet feminists (Amanda Marcotte, Jessica Valenti, and Anita Sarkeesian are the most obvious examples, but the ever-moving hatefest is always seeking new victims) is stunning in quantity and vileness.

Gore Vidal once groused that the once-useful word “turgid” now belongs to the porn writers, because it has become impossible to use the word without sounding like a porn writer. The manosphere has done something similar to unattractive men’s romantic problems. They’ve flooded the discourse with misogyny and anti-feminism, and it’s nearly impossible to rescue discussion of being male and unwanted from their bitter waters.⁶

1. Actually, I’m not positive I’ve ever seen the movie – I may have seen the 1953 television play that the movie was based on.
2. Marty’s love interest, played by Betsy Blair, was too pretty to be plausible as someone men would label “dogface” at a glance. But nearly all “ugly” female characters are played by pretty actresses because Hollywood.
3. Seriously, don’t worry about me, folks. I’m not lonely, I’ve got lots of good friends, I’ve got a great job. My life is good.
4. What’s irrational about it is feeling “cheated,” rather than merely “lacking.”
5. Actually, one time my feelings were hurt. I attended a blogger dinner, where I was seated next to an anti-feminist who had clashed with me online. We had, I thought, a terrific conversation. He offered me a ride home after the dinner, and we agreed that we should meet again sometime. The next day, in a forum he didn’t know I read, he wrote that I clearly wasn’t into feminism to get laid, because I was (he said) so fat no woman would ever have sex with me. The insult was too pathetic to hurt, but that he was so extraordinarily two-faced stung.
6. Said waters are no doubt made up of male tears.
   To tell you the truth, I don’t feel natural making that joke – see Ally Fogg – but I’m making it anyway, because I hope it’ll get the goats of people who had vapors over Jessica’s sweatshirt, while remaining silent about the immeasurably worse comments Jessica receives from anti-feminists on a daily basis.

IVANPAH DRY LAKE, Calif. — Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant’s concentrated sun rays — “streamers,” for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair.

Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one “streamer” every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator’s application to build a still-bigger version.

The investigators want the halt until the full extent of the deaths can be assessed. Estimates per year now range from a low of about a thousand by BrightSource to 28,000 by an expert for the Center for Biological Diversity environmental group...

More than 300,000 mirrors, each the size of a garage door, reflect solar rays onto three boiler towers each looming up to 40 stories high. 

Federal wildlife officials said Ivanpah might act as a “mega-trap” for wildlife, with the bright light of the plant attracting insects, which in turn attract insect-eating birds that fly to their death in the intensely focused light rays...

BrightSource also is offering $1.8 million in compensation for anticipated bird deaths at Palen, Desmond said.

Molly at the breakwater.

Submitted for

Listen up children.  Alcohol will make you do and say things you’ll regret.  Here’s foxy dad to explain:

“Sorry I promised my dad I wouldn’t drink.”  Wow.  Talk about saying something you wish you hadn’t.  This brilliant new multi million dollar public awareness campaign is brought to you by SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration)  — your government advertising good old fashioned demon possession.  Here’s another:

“Alcohol can lead to so many things, none of them good.”   Well mom newsflash: sometimes kids do things that they know they shouldn’t, and sometimes they take risks that will lead to trouble.  Kids are rebellious by nature.  Why give them another excuse?

Obviously the purpose of this campaign is to heighten children’s fascination and fear of alcohol as a demonic ‘forbidden fruit’ to ensure a steady flow of ever younger newcomers to AA, the drinking club  / blood cult of mischief, and to create more robot zombies to drugs and alcohol and mind controlled slaves to the New World Order who will kill themselves on command.

OK seriously I don’t know the exact goal.  But really the conversation wouldn’t be much different if the kid was talking to the devil himself.   (Watch it again and see.)  This line from the Big Book comes to mind: “The alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn’t think so.”  Clearly the government has been infiltrated by the 12 Step cults, and they thirst for the blood of your children.

Call me crazy.

Anyway.  What should the parents say instead?  How about first of all talk to the friend’s parents and make sure they’re not AA members.  And then tell your kid: “You are responsible for your behavior whether drunk or sober.  I don’t ever want to hear the excuse, ‘The devil made me do it.'”

We tried that one before and it didn’t turn out well.  This may not be the Garden of Eden but I think we have it pretty good, and I wouldn’t want some idiot messing it up for the rest of us.

Tell SAMHSA what you think about their new campaign:

• Underage Drinking Press
• Contact SAMHSA
• Media Services Team: 240-276-2130

Did you like this article?  Please Like/Share:

Jimmy Carter may have been well to the right of the Democratic majority in Congress and tried to create policy from such an untenable position.

Bill Clinton may have signed NAFTA, created Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and ushered in welfare “reform.”

Barack Obama may not have lived up to the dreams of those naive enough to believe any president could bring in hope and change.

But at least the Democratic Party has never elected someone as antithetical to its core principles as the British Labour Party and Tony Blair, who is a terrible human being.

Tony Blair gave Kazakhstan’s autocratic president advice on how to manage his image after the slaughter of unarmed civilians protesting against his regime.

In a letter to Nursultan Nazarbayev, obtained by The Telegraph, Mr Blair told the Kazakh president that the deaths of 14 protesters “tragic though they were, should not obscure the enormous progress” his country had made.

Mr Blair, who is paid millions of pounds a year to give advice to Mr Nazarbayev, goes on to suggest key passages to insert into a speech the president was giving at the University of Cambridge, to defend the action.

Mr Blair is paid through his private consultancy, Tony Blair Associates (TBA), which he set up after leaving Downing Street in 2007. TBA is understood to deploy a number of consultants in key ministries in Kazakhstan.

Human rights activists accuse Mr Blair of acting “disgracefully” in bolstering Mr Nazarbayev’s credibility on the world stage in return for millions of pounds.

The letter was sent in July 2012, ahead of a speech being given later that month by Mr Nazarbayev at the University of Cambridge.

A few months earlier, on December 16 and 17 2011, at least 14 protesters were shot and killed and another 64 wounded by Kazakhstan’s security services in the oil town of Zhanaozen. Other protesters, mainly striking oil workers, were rounded up and allegedly tortured.

Tony Blair is like the love child of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Lanny Davis. Combine neoliberal economic policies, warmongering, and profiting off of advising dictators and you have quite the individual.

Yesterday Willard “Mitt” Romney and his former running-mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) met up for the first time since their 2012 tilt at the White House.  The two got together for a little bromantic back and forth, waxing poetic about each other’s “presidential timber,” and to discuss the Republican Wunderkind’s entry in the 2014 preliminary round of the “Does This Serious Book Make Me Look Presidential” book writing fair. 

Ryan’s book, The Way Forward: Renewing the American Idea is, I have to assume, Rep. Ryan’s plan for renewing the “American idea,” whatever that is when it’s at home . . . perhaps he felt that the old standby, “American Dream,” creates overly grand expectations among the 99%?
Brother Romney, an “action man,” himself, had this advice :

If people want to actually see action in this country and dealing with problems from education to health care, immigration to our fiscal needs ... they’re going to have to vote for Republican senators and ... a Republican president, as well.

For those who need a little more to go on than Willard Romney’s word for it, looking for historical support for Romney’s advice is a blessedly short research project because, in the last 60 years, there has only been one administration in which the modern Republican party controlled the presidency as well as both houses of Congress. 

And that would be part of the inglorious reign of C+ Augustus (George W Bush).  [Thank you, Mr. Pierce]

So.  Without further ado, let’s take a stroll down memory lane and assess the records of the 108th and 109th Congresses which should give us a contemporaneous view of what to expect from the autocratic government that Mr Romney recommends, shall we?

The One Hundred Eighth United States Congress convened from January 3, 2003 to January 3, 2005, during the third and fourth years of George W. Bush’s presidency.

On the 108th’s watch the United States invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003; on May 1, 2003, George W Bush became the first sitting President to make an arrested landing, in a fixed-wing aircraft, onto an aircraft carrier where he proceeded to announce Mission Accomplished aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.

In July 2003, the Valerie Plame CIA Leak Scandal came to light, the 9/11 Commission filed its initial reports and, in November, George W. Bush “swiftboated” his way to re-election with the narrowest ever popular vote for an incumbent president.

The 108th Congress gave us several new laws to include the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act, the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, additions to the Bush Tax Cuts and the Project BioShield Act to protect us all from biological WMDs which were always very much on the minds of Bush&Co.

Congress also delivered the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act to enhance the invasion of Americans’ privacy through warrant-less search, data-mining and domestic surveillance, while simultaneously expanding American meddling in foreign countries, as well, with the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act, the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004, and the Belarus Democracy Act of 2004 to which the Belarusian President, Alexander Lukashenko, said “thanks, but no thanks” because Belarus, among others, considers the act an intervention into the internal affairs of Belarus.

The 109th Congress, or the Do Nothing Congress [Part I], as it was dubbed, ran from from January 3, 2005 to January 3, 2007, during the fifth and sixth years of George W. Bush’s presidency.

This Congress had the dubious distinction of helping their President thoroughly eff-up Hurricane Katrina Disaster Relief, as well as kicking off huge nationwide immigration reform protests by introducing H.R. 4437, which proposed raising penalties for illegal immigration and making it a felony to help undocumented immigrants who either enter or remain in the US. 

In 2005, the Do Nothing Congress, with nothing much else to do, decided to jump into the Teri Schiavo case and make everything just that more nightmarish for the Schiavos because, as Brian Darling, legal counsel for Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL), advised his boss, “the Schiavo case offered ‘a great political issue’ that would appeal to the party’s base and could be used against Senator Bill Nelson,” a Democrat from Florida.  Well played, GOP.  Nelson won.

Another reason that Republicans in the 109th Congress didn’t get a whole lot done was because they were forced to spend considerable amounts of time away from their legislative pursuits tamping down numerous scandals involving congressional Republicans: Tom DeLay (R-TX), Mark Foley (R-FL), Bob Ney (R-OH), and Duke Cunningham (R-CA) all contributed to a world of hurt for Republicans in the 109th Congress.

Moreover The 109th’s legislative feats do nothing much to counter the charge against them of being a Do Nothing Congress.  The list is a frothy little confection bound to warm the cockles of social conservatives’ hearts without being much good for anything else real-world . . .

There was the Class Action Fairness Act, an exercise in tort reform, which Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) described as “the final payback to the tobacco industry, to the asbestos industry, to the oil industry, to the chemical industry at the expense of ordinary families.”

And, of course Teri’s [Schiavo] Law which broke just about every constitutional guideline for legislation in one go:  Bush signed the law before it passed the Senate; it skated perilously close to being a “bill of attainder” (ie, it applies to only one individual); it violated separation of powers (Executive - Judicial) and finally, it failed to create any substantive rights.

Then came the The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act which, despite its name, actually made it a lot harder for “consumers” to declare Chapter 7 bankruptcy and should have been called the “Credit Card Issuer Protection Act.”

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 was essentially a subsidy for various sectors of the energy industries and created a handy-dandy loophole for frackers—nicknamed the Halliburton Loophole in honor of Vice President Dick Cheney’s contributions in crafting the law—that exempts companies drilling for natural gas from disclosing the chemicals involved in fracking operations normally required under the Clean Water Act.

There was also the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act which contained the infamous Bridge to Nowhere earmarks; the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act which precludes suing gun manufacturers for shooting injuries. The NRA effusively thanked President Bush for signing “...the most significant piece of pro-gun legislation in twenty years into law.”

And, of course the usual suspects coming out of a Republican-controlled Congress: a Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act, a Deficit Reduction Act, a Secure Fence Act, and a Tax Relief and Health Act.

But the high point of the 109th Congress was that by the time these Republican controlled Congresses were giddy with majority, American voters cleared them out and replaced them with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.

So, by all means, if you find this parade of horribles a compelling argument for handing total governance over to Republicans, take Mitt’s advice and vote straight Republican.  If, on the other hand you are sane, and facts and history mean something to you, tell Mitt and Boy Blunder to give it a break, we already know how this story goes.