Dinner with Nat King Cole

Posted on November 24, 2011 by oddmanout215

I don’t want french-fried potatoes,
Red, ripe tomatoes,
I’m never satisfied.
I want the frim fram sauce with the ausen fay,
With chafafa on the side.

And I’ll have whatever you guys are smoking!

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Which side are you on, Dems?

Posted on November 23, 2011 by oddmanout215

Woody Guthrie wants to know

Digby’s nicely distilled description of how Congressional Republicans continue to outmaneuver and cow Democrats — including world-class equivocator John Kerry — who are supposed to be protecting the social safety net:

Note [Republican Sen. Jon] Kyl’s language: he never says 1.2 trillion in deficit reduction. He says, “cuts”, “savings”, “reduced spending.” No taxes or revenue of any kind. He’s simply asserting that this is about discretionary and mandatory domestic spending cuts, period. And that trigger obviously means nothing. Then, you had John Kerry on right afterwards saying that the Democrats were more than willing to take a meat ax to the budget as well but they really, kind of, wanted some revenue too. It doesn’t look like they are going to get even that (thank God.) But the terms of the election year debate are all going to be about how the Democrats are insisting on raising taxes. After all, the only spending cuts that are controversial anymore are the defense cuts — which Democrats will never fight for. In fact, the Republicans will be able to say quite honestly in their campaign ads that the Democrats want to cut social security and medicare and raise taxes.”

Yes, the supercommittee was set up to fail, and it did, and that was a good thing. But when are wishy-washy Dems (Barack Obama is the wishy-washiest) going to take a real stand against the one percenters’ insistence on cutting the New Deal’s cornerstone programs?

I know, stupid question.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Great Recession, Obama, Politics, taxes, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Fox News moron: Why the fuss about pepper spray?

Posted on November 22, 2011 by oddmanout215


Megyn Kelly is:

A. Just another pretty face spouting misinformation on TV.
B. A mouthpiece for corporatists.
C. A and B

The answer is C, of course. It seems Kelly is also an expert on police violence, no doubt because of her extensive on-the-scene reporting at Occupy rallies (joking):

In the mind of Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, the pepper spray [incident at] University of California-Davis … last weekend was really just a one-sided food fight. Kelly gave her casual assessment of the increasingly common police weapon on Tuesday’s broadcast of The O’Reilly Factor, seemingly defending the cops.

“It’s a derivative of actual pepper, it’s a food product, essentially,” she told host Bill O’Reilly. “A lot of experts are looking at saying is that the real deal. Has it been diluted?” …

As Scientific American‘s Deborah Blum notes, commercial grade pepper-spray is immensely more painful than the most powerful natural pepper, the ghost chili. People who’ve eaten ghost chili compared it to “a cocktail of battery acid and glass shards,” and has since been turned into a weapon by the Chilean military.

Footnote: If you asked Kelly what she thinks of waterboarding, I’ll bet she’d say: “It’s a breathing exercise, essentially.”

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Sunday in the park with Lt. John Pike

Posted on November 21, 2011 by oddmanout215

The Photoshop meme “Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop” features images of famous paintings and photos graced by the instantly classic figure of UC Davis Police Lt. John Pike as he was filmed spraying protesters at an Occupy rally last week.

I’m sure everyone has their favorites. I’m especially moved by Pike’s intrusion on the tranquil scene depicted in Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

Pike’s presence in Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World is another fave, I guess because he makes Christina’s anguish seem all the more understandable.

Posted in arts, mainstream media, Occupy Wall Street, Politics | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

At Berkeley, a literal meaning for ‘Beat Poets’

Posted on November 20, 2011 by oddmanout215

Robert Hass, former poet laureate of the U.S., describing how non-violent students and teachers were brutalized by UC Berkeley cops on the very site where the Free Speech Movement was born 50 years ago:

… None of the police officers invited us to disperse or gave any warning. We couldn’t have dispersed if we’d wanted to because the crowd behind us was pushing forward to see what was going on. The descriptor for what I tried to do is “remonstrate.” I screamed at the deputy who had knocked down my wife, “You just knocked down my wife, for Christ’s sake!” A couple of students had pushed forward in the excitement and the deputies grabbed them, pulled them to the ground and cudgeled them, raising the clubs above their heads and swinging. The line surged. I got whacked hard in the ribs twice and once across the forearm…

… One of my colleagues, also a poet, Geoffrey O’Brien, had a broken rib. Another colleague, Celeste Langan, a Wordsworth scholar, got dragged across the grass by her hair when she presented herself for arrest…

Hass stopped recounting the assault by police long enough to note it was related to other unresolved social problems:

… I won’t recite the statistics, but the entire university system in California is under great stress and the State Legislature is paralyzed by a minority of legislators whose only idea is that they don’t want to pay one more cent in taxes. Meanwhile, students at Berkeley are graduating with an average indebtedness of something like $16,000…

Arguably, the condition of the education and law enforcement systems in most other states is just as bad. Put another way, anyone who says our rights and opportunities are more secure now than they were 50 years is either wealthy, related to a cop, or just plain stupid.

Posted in arts, economic collapse, Great Recession, New York Times, Politics, The New Depression | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Me and the devil and a Dallas church

Posted on November 20, 2011 by oddmanout215

Blues great Robert Johnson’s songs include “Me and the Devil Blues,” “Hellhound on My Trail” and “Cross Road Blues.” The latter explains how he sold his soul to Satan in return for guitar-playing prowess.

It looks like some Christians in Texas are at a crossroads, too. They’ve bought the Art Deco building where Johnson recorded about half of his songs, and will use it to preserve his legacy. It’s next to a building the church uses to serve the homeless.

Johnson spent much of his short life homeless.

… “There’s a natural connection,” said the Rev. Bruce Buchanan, executive director of the Stewpot [community center] and an associate pastor at First Presbyterian [Church]. “Robert Johnson could definitely relate to these people and the work we do.” …

Posted in arts, economic collapse, food, Great Recession, health care, humor, livable cities, New York Times, pop music, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Robitussin and elderberry wine

Posted on November 19, 2011 by oddmanout215

Robo and wine sounds like a recipe for disaster, but add nostalgia to the mix and it becomes an elixir and a rallying cry for outlaws.

Moby Grape was the epitome of outlaw energy and erratic creativity in 1960s rock & roll, at least to those of us who could appreciate the various bands apart from the hippie-dippie marketing strategies of the time.

These guys weren’t so much hippies as rowdy cowboys with mop tops and guitars instead of sidearms, and more talent than they knew what to do with. They were the great San Francisco band that should have been huge but imploded instead.

Trivia: Put the video in full-screen mode and you can see that drummer Don Stevenson has his right middle finger extended “fuck you”-style on the washboard, supposedly because he was pissed at the photographer for taking all day to shoot this, the cover photo for the band’s first and best album. As critic David Fricke later wrote, “Columbia [Records] airbrushed the photo on subsequent copies to remove the offending digit.”

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Indoor/outdoor Occupy strategies

Posted on November 19, 2011 by oddmanout215

Uh-oh, writes Henry Banta, it’s getting cold out there…

Since the police have turned nasty and winter is coming it might be worth considering adding some indoor activities. Like going to public town hall meetings – the kind that the Tea Party got so much press for misbehaving at… The trick is to confront the political leadership with the real questions they’d rather avoid. It may also be a good idea to keep the confrontation focused on facts and avoid ideological conflict. Getting to the facts is hard enough without trying to bring the other guys to some kind of spiritual epiphany.

Banta recommends slamming elected officials with questions that focus on the key issues: income inequality, the financial crisis, financial reform, tax reform, government spending regarding the recession, and labor legislation.

Meanwhile, Abigail Caplovitz Field thinks it would be a bad idea for Occupy to simply shut down encampments for the winter. She recommends shift work and is asking you who live near an encampment to invite a protester to “occupy” your home during those hours when he/she isn’t outdoors, holding down the fort:

If sleeping and all the biological needs of the occupiers–can be handled in your space, the Occupiers can stand vigil in our space. Can’t you see it? The afternoon shift giving way to the graveyard shift, sunrise greeting the morning shift as it arrives for its duty. Or maybe there’s just two shifts, day and night. Either way, shift work is very 99%, a tactic that’s on message.

Posted in Great Recession, mainstream media, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Nature’s way of telling you

Posted on November 19, 2011 by oddmanout215

This won’t faze the current crop of Republicans, because they don’t believe in science. But it might be of interest to thinking people:

Top international climate scientists and disaster experts meeting in Africa had a sharp message Friday for the world’s political leaders: Get ready for more dangerous and “unprecedented extreme weather” caused by global warming. Making preparations, they say, will save lives and money.

These experts fear that without preparedness, crazy weather extremes may overwhelm some locations, making some places unlivable.

The Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a new special report on global warming and extreme weather after meeting in Kampala, Uganda. This is the first time the group of scientists has focused on the dangers of extreme weather events such as heat waves, floods, droughts and storms. Those are more dangerous than gradual increases in the world’s average temperature.

“We need to be worried,” said one of the study’s lead authors, Maarten van Aalst, director of the International Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre in the Netherlands. “And our response needs to anticipate disasters and reduce risk before they happen rather than wait until after they happen and clean up afterward. … Risk has already increased dramatically.”

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From dystopia to reality, via NYPD

Posted on November 18, 2011 by oddmanout215

At what point does the near-future depicted in a novel stop seeming dystopian and become more-or-less realistic? This is from Super Sad True Love Story, the bestseller by Gary Shteyngart, who read Wednesday at Rutgers-Camden:

An armored personnel carrier bearing the insignia of the New York Army National Guard was parked astride a man-sized pothole at the busy intersection of Essex and Delancey, a roof-mounted .50-calibre Browning machine gun rotating 180 degrees, back and forth, like a retarded metronome along the busy but peaceable Lower East Side streetscape. Traffic was frozen all along Delancey Street. Silent traffic, for no one dared to use a horn against the military vehicle. The street corner emptied around me until I stood alone, staring down the barrel of a gun like an idiot. I lifted up my hands in panic and directed my feet to scram.

And here’s Amy Goodman on Tuesday, shortly after the NYPD trashed everything in Zuccotti Park, two days before the “day of action” involving Occupy groups all over the country:

Deeper in the park, I spotted a single book on the ground. It was marked “OWSL,” for Occupy Wall Street Library, also known as the People’s Library, one of the key institutions that had sprung up in the organic democracy of the movement. By the latest count, it had accumulated 5,000 donated books. The one I found, amidst the debris of democracy that was being hauled off to the dump, was “Brave New World Revisited,” by Aldous Huxley.

As the night progressed, the irony of finding Huxley’s book grew. He wrote it in 1958, almost 30 years after his famous dystopian novel, “Brave New World.” The original work described society in the future where people had been stratified into haves and have-nots…

“Brave New World Revisited” was Huxley’s nonfiction response to the speed with which he saw modern society careening to that bleak future. It seemed relevant, as the encampment, motivated in large part by the opposition to the supremacy of commerce and globalization, was being destroyed.

You could argue we’ve been living in Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited and are transitioning to Shteyngart’s version of dystopia, in which cops are everywhere and armed to the teeth, and people are monitored by devices that read their credit rankings and are detained in a “secure screening facility” if they attempt to keep any secrets from the government.

But who really would have thought a few years ago that paramilitary cops, in a nationally coordinated assault, might suppress the First Amendment rights of non-violent protesters tired of being used by the one percent of the population that holds all the money and power?

Shteyngart did. He lived until age 7 in what used to be the Soviet Union. He has a wild sense of humor and writes with a lot more flair and empathy than Huxley, which make his depiction of the near-future all the more disturbing.

Here’s Shteyngart at a pre-Occupy Wall Street reading, when fewer readers were focusing on the darker themes in Super Sad True Love Story:

Posted in arts, Camden, economic collapse, fiction, globalization, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, humor, mainstream media, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment