Ready or not, here it is.
Archives for 2010
Good Hair
If you get a chance, I recommend watching Good Hair, Chris Rock’s documentary on black hair. I had no idea of the size and reach of the black hair industry ($9 billion/year, the majority of money spent on hair in the US), or the link between hair extensions and Hindu sacrifice.
Commenter Emily L. Hauser (ellaesther) has posted her take on it over at ABL’s place.
Wired’s Response
Bradley Manning is in prison in part because of some chats between him and Wired source Adrian Lamo. As John posted on Monday, Wired has refused to release those logs in full. Last night, Wired responded with two lengthy posts that hinge on this point:
We have already published substantial excerpts from the logs, but critics continue to challenge us to reveal all, ostensibly to fact-check some statements that Lamo has made in the press summarizing portions of the logs from memory (his computer hard drive was confiscated, and he no longer has has a copy).
Our position has been and remains that the logs include sensitive personal information with no bearing on Wikileaks, and it would serve no purpose to publish them at this time.
This makes no sense. If Lamo is summarizing parts of the logs from memory, then those portions of the logs should be released to evaluate his credibility as a source. If there’s personal information in those logs, it can be redacted. This doesn’t seem that hard, and the fact that Wired is making it difficult arouses suspicion rather than confidence.
The other sketchy part of this response is that it spends most of its time bemoaning Glenn Greenwald’s lack of journalistic ethics and touting Wired’s sterling grasp of the canons of the Society of Professional Journalists. Let’s just stipulate assume that Glenn Greenwald is a non-journalist and a complete asshole. Wired has a golden opportunity to make him look like even more of a jackass by releasing the rest of the logs, and they passed it up. That, in itself, is the biggest tell of the whole story.
Early Morning Open Thread: Mac & Bella
From commentor Jude B:
Meet Mac. He is a now four year old black Lab. He is our scared-y dog. He is frightened by noises, both either loud or just unexpected like a dropped paper bag. He is also frightened by new things: a new pillow on the bed, a new desk in the front room. Overhead fans and lights frighten him also. He is a rescue dog from the shelter one county over. I met him out-of-doors at the shelter where he is the closest to calm, as long as the number of new people is far exceeded by his own people and there
are no loud or unexpected noises. I could see that the car ride home from the shelter bothered him tremendously but was still taken aback by how very afraid he was of most of life. When he joined our family a year ago, he was very, very frightened by all of these things and would not drink from anything but an outdoor water puddle or stream for three weeks and would not eat any food for two days. With love, patience, encouragement and generic Prozac, he has come a long way. He even let me bathe him indoors two weeks ago. He lives to play fetch. He has bed and sofa privileges and has learned from me that the only reasonable response to a nighttime thunder storms is to burrow under the blankets and cuddle.
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The little cocker is Bella, also a rescue dog. She spent six years as a mom-dog in a puppy mill, popping out litter after litter, never getting much chance at a life like she has now. She loves to hunt and explore on our new small farm in her huge fenced backyard. When she is on the trail of something, nothing, not even meal time, will get her to come inside. She is also an escape artist of unparalelled accomplishment. She escaped from our new backyard when we moved to the farm six times in the first three weeks, one time returning after a dip in the sewage lagoon and once after rolling in the neighbor’s horse pasture. After each escape, my husband would walk the fence to find the latest escape hole and then he would patch it closed. Once the fence had been rendered impenetrable, she discovered the area under the back porch, tore the lattice work from the crawl space and got stuck under the porch, not being able to find the way back out. My husband had to cut an eight by eleven inch square in the porch floor in order to free her. She got four baths in five days, two of them in under twelve hours, because of repeat trips to the under porch area. The baths were the result of my husband muttering something about “rat feces” after her first trip under the porch. You can’t hear that phrase without plopping the dog into the shower and cleaning her. And, we thought that after each time, we had patched up the latest place she had clawed a way in. It was not until my husband bought thick plywood, cut it to size and nailed it all around the bottom of the porch that her under porch trips stopped. She also has bed and comfy chair privileges. When we come home she greets my husband but she will not leave the front door until I come in. It’s me she wants to welcome home and I love having her greet me.
Another Year-End list published too early…
On Christmas Eve Salon published a list of Wingnutopia’s most crazy made-up Obama scandals for 2010.
It was a pretty comprehensive list although some big wingnut freakouts like the so-called ‘Climate-Gate’ didn’t make the list–I guess because it didn’t have an “Obama-did-it” angle to sell. Still, it looks like the list was published a week too early as today two new new freakouts entered the mighty Wurlitzer playlist.
One, as Tom Levenson pointed out, is the batshit crazy idea that President Obama is getting ready to give New York back to Native Americans just because his Administration will reverse a Bush Jr. decision and support the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.
That fact that the Right is launching this freakout on the eve of the 120th Anniversary of the Massacre at Wounded Knee is just par for the course–especially when the latest freakout comes with an anti-Native American point of view that could have been shared by the US soldiers who gunned down the sick and cold back in 1890. The wingnuts are also outraged that one year ago today President Obama signed an Apology to Native Americans passed by the 111th Congress.
The other mini-freakout of the day is that in a call to Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie about plans for the football stadium to convert to Green Energy the President also praise the team for giving a convict like Michael Vick a second chance:
Lurie said Mr. Obama was “passionate about it,” adding that the president said “it’s never a level playing field for prisoners when they get out of jail. And he was happy that we did something on such a national stage that showed our faith in giving someone a second chance after such a major downfall.”
I think Vick is an ass and I couldn’t care less about him, but the USA is number one when it comes to people behind bars, whether you measure by number (2.3 million) or per capita (715 per 100,000 people). Most of these people will get out one day and the possibility of a second chance needs to be there. That part of the Vick story is OK with me, but for wingnutopia it is all just another opportunity for a freakout.
In the coming year the list of freakouts and nonsense will be even longer. I expect that we should be hearing new ones at a rate of about 3-4 per week. I can’t wait for the one about Michelle Obama feeding her family a dead chicken and then using the bones for soup. I imagine Issa will hold hearings on that scandal when Fox breaks the news.
Cheers
dengre
Another Year-End list published too early…Post + Comments (99)
No Republic for old men
And another good profile of someone who has deeply damaged our country, an excellent, sympathetic New York magazine piece about Marty Peretz. The short of it: he’s always been too emo for his own good but now he’s old, bitter, and recently divorced, and thus prone to saying excessively whack angry shit on his blog (which has recently been discontinued). He is no longer editor-in-chief of TNR.
Ultimately, it’s a story about how easy it is to buy some people’s loyalty:
From Harvard he brought E. J. Dionne Jr., Kinsley, Hertzberg, Wieseltier, and Andrew Sullivan. His joy in their ascent was palpable: When he hired Hertzberg the second time, Peretz impulsively took him to his own tailor and paid for a bespoke suit.
[….]Peretz is famously generous—it is a quality as extreme as his partisanship. He has paid for medical treatments, found houses, coached careers. His close friend Michael Kinsley once told him, jokingly, that he should publish his collected letters of recommendation. Peretz has remained devoted to tarnished, even imprisoned friends, and he commands an outsize loyalty in return.
This is why it’s unfair to call journalists “whores”. A prostitute may spend a night doing as a client pleases in return for a cash payment, Hendrick Hertzberg (whose writing I like) will spend a lifetime doing the same for the gift of a bespoke suit.
More “Decision Points”
You just can’t beat the London Review of Books. There’s nothing like it here:
In the book, as in his life, Bush the postmodernist is a simulacrum: a Connecticut blueblood who pretended to be a Texas cowboy, though he couldn’t ride a horse and lived on a ‘ranch’ with no cattle. He was, and is, happiest when surrounded by professionals in the three areas in which he was a notable failure: athletics, the military and business. He is like a sports fan who dresses up in the team jersey to watch the game. References to his ‘military service’ recur frequently throughout the book, as though it were actually more than a few months spent avoiding it. He was the only modern American president to appear in public in a military uniform – even Eisenhower never wore his while president – like a ribboned despot from a banana republic. He has said that one of his proudest moments was throwing out the ceremonial first pitch in a World Series game. The frontispiece to the book is the photo of Bush in his other proud moment, standing in the ruins of the Twin Towers with his cheerleader bullhorn, just one of the relief worker guys.
A pup in a valley of alpha males, inadequate compared to Dad, humiliated by Mother, he classically became a bully to compensate: an ass-brander, noted for what he calls verbal ‘needling’; a boss who cussed out his subordinates and invented demeaning nicknames for everyone around him; a president who taunted terrorists, most of them imaginary, and challenged them to ‘bring it on’.
The whole review is brilliant. I don’t usually like the whole “this is so post-modern thing” but it’s on the money here.