Two observations, really.
1. I am a garbage-brained glutton for punishment for continuing to watch American Idol. That is not a judgment on anyone else who watches it, but a solid assessment of myself based on my own constantly infuriated reactions to it.
2. It really seems like the top 12 "boys" were explicitly encouraged to be as individual and quirky as possible, while the top 12 "girls" were encouraged to conform both in style and song choice to some weird amalgam of a high school talent show contestant and a pageant entrant. Which is not to say that none of the girls were quirky or talented or whatever, but only that the spectrum of acceptable quirkiness for the girls seems a lot narrower than it is for the boys.
I know. No doy. It's American Idol. But it's way more obvious than usual, even.
An Observation
Daily Dose of Cute
Video Description: Iain lies on the couch, asleep. Sophie hops up onto his chest and slowly circles around, then curls up into a little ball under his chin. He stirs and mumbles hi to her, then scratches her head. The nap commences.
The Overton Window: Chapter Forty
Chapter forty! The home stretch! Yes, we're on our way, something is bound to happen soon! No, it won't be in this chapter, but we're getting there. We are! I promise. No, I don't promise. I never promise. Because I am shit at keeping promises.
To sum up what happens in this chapter: Bailey and Kearns get out of the van.
That's it.
Scratch chapter forty off your bucket list, because it's done!
There's not even anything very snark-worthy in the text. I mean, it's all snark-worthy. But no more than usual. In a book full of phoned-in chapters, even this one seems phoned-in.
As they got close the scene became clearer. Danny saw the rear ends of two vehicles, a car and a midsize, unmarked yellow cargo truck, both of which were parked behind a square, gray, one-story building.
"Building" was an overstatement, actually; the simple ten-foot-high enclosure appeared to be made of nothing but cinder blocks and dark mortar. There was an open arched doorway but no roof overhead. About a stone's throw away from the main structure, in a perfectly spaced circle surrounding the building on all sides, were a number of bizarre, freestanding walls and angled edifices jutting up out of the sand. Some looked like backstops from a playground handball court, one like the black alien monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The layout reminded him a little of Stonehenge, but only if Stonehenge had been built over one hurried weekend by an amateur bricklayer on acid.
"What the hell is this place?" Danny asked.
Maybe an old part of a nuclear test site suggests Kearns. Who knows? Who cares? Kearns tells Bailey to pull himself together, and after they do their deal, he'll buy him a beer and take him to the airport. Oh, okay, that seems a perfectly normal thing for an undercover agent to do.
He'd stopped talking because something had caught his attention out the front windshield. One of the men they were meeting had appeared by the corner of the main cinder-block building, and with a broad gesture he beckoned them to come on over. Another of the men was behind the first, standing there with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder.
"Okay, then," Danny sighed, "let's rock."
Yes, Danny, let's rock. He takes one of Kearns' guns and shoves it in his waist. "The pistol went snugly into Danny's belt in back, not in the middle but closer to the right side." Oh, okay. I guess that means something? Then he tells Kearns to take his pistol out of his ankle holster and put it someplace more accessible. Bailey also pockets the sat phone as he steps out of the van. I guess that means something too.
"I thought you said you didn't know much about guns," Kearns said.
"That's not what I said. I said I wasn't an expert."
Expert wasn't a term to be bandied about among Danny's gun-savvy friends. An expert might be someone who could call their shot from ten yards and then, from a cold start, draw their pistol from concealment and put a bullet right where they said it would go, all in seven-tenths of a second or less. Molly Ross was one of those, and a few years back over one hot and memorable Tennessee summer, she'd taught him everything he knew. He'd been getting even more death threats than usual that year, and she'd wanted him to be safe. So, while he wasn't an expert, his draw was pretty fast—it was the part about hitting what he shot at that still left a lot to be desired.
Aaaand: Scene.
Yeah, that's it. Told you. Nothing happens. Seven more chapters to go. Something's got to happen soon, right? Right.
Quote of the Day
[Trigger warning for rape culture.]
"On my account, as long as there is a lot of rape and not a lot of remedy, as long as there is slut-shaming and double-standards, as long as the denial of the technologies women [who have sex with men] need to mitigate the risks of unintended pregnancy and disease, then they're going to look askance at [men who have sex with women], and they're going to act like they have more risk and less to gain from sex with us, because in fact they do."—Thomas Macaulay Millar, in a must-read post about a new study which has found that het/bi women's infamous aversion to the Clark-Hatfield Sexual Proposal ("a broad-daylight, out-of-nowhere proposition for casual sex") is not, in fact, down to some gender essentialist, pop evo-psych, innately female antipathy toward casual sex, but is attributable to "women's perception that their risks are higher, and their likely enjoyment is lower from the proposer," which is a pretty reasonable risk/benefit analysis.
Rodney King, Twenty Years Later
[Trigger warning for violence, police brutality, racism.]
Today is the 20th anniversary of Rodney King's surviving a brutal beating by Los Angeles police officers, an incident that sparked an investigation, an absurd acquittal, riots, and a national conversation about race that exposed the deeply-entrenched privilege that allowed white USians to exist in the blissful ignorance and/or willful denial of police brutality against USians of color.
King had been drinking, and he had been speeding, and he evaded the police for several miles. And when he pulled over, he got out of the car and was ordered at gunpoint to get on the ground, which he did, and that's when he got the first kick delivered to his head. (The officers dispute that version of events; the videotape does not begin until after that point.) He believed if he stayed on the ground, he might be gravely injured, so he stood up, hands up, and tried to reason with the officers. They tased him twice, bringing him to the ground, where he was defenseless. When he tried to get up and defend himself, an officer bashed his head with his baton, which knocked King back to the ground, where he was hit multiple times with the baton.
King, in fear for his life, repeatedly tried to get up. The officers continued to beat him. In the end, he is hit 56 times with a baton and kicked half a dozen times. His cheek is broken. His ankle is broken. He has serious internal injures. While two dozen officers watch, he is handcuffed and cordcuffed on his arms and legs, and dragged across the road on his stomach, where he is left in the gutter to await the arrival of a rescue ambulance.
This is a vastly different story than was reported at the time, about a black convict hopped up on PCP who resisted arrest and overwhelmed police who were just trying to do their jobs. The myth that King was on narcotics was so widely reported that many people incorrectly recall that he was high during the beating. In fact, he tested negative for drugs.
I wish, twenty years later, I could be writing a post about how the Rodney King case completely changed our culture, how it spawned widespread reforms (it did spawn some) that resulted in fair and equal treatment by police irrespective of one's race, or, failing that, how it left an indelible imprint upon the thick armor of white privilege that never allowed another white USian to seriously entertain the idea that such parity exists when it does not.
But last year alone, I wrote about the grievous racial disparity in "stop-and-frisk" policing in New York City, and the white male police officer who punched a young black woman in the face in Seattle, the absurd conviction of the white police officer who shot and killed Oscar Grant in San Francisco, and other stories of racial injustice perpetrated by law enforcement across the country.
And every fucking time I write about it, there are white people who show up to troll the post and blather about how the police were just doing their job blah blah blah, without any evidence of shame about their detestable pretense that this shit regularly happens to white people in the US.
Twenty years later, it's still the same victim-blaming I was hearing about Rodney King, even as he sat in a wheelchair convalescing from his physical injuries. (He has nightmares to this day, and, while currently sober, has struggled with alcoholism.) Twenty years later, same old shit.
But, twenty years on, I am a different person than I was then. Working through my privilege is an ongoing process—it always will be—but what happened to Rodney King was so much more difficult for me to understand and culturally contextualize then, and it's not just because I was a teenager; it's because I was a privileged white teenager who hadn't yet begun in any meaningful way to examine her privilege.
King has said that it gives meaning to what happened to him if people learned something from it. I did. It was an important moment for me at a time in my life when I was just learning what social justice meant. It is tragic that so much of our understanding of social justice comes from evidence of injustice—but I believe it would be more tragic still if we learn nothing from the injustice to which we bear witness.
Twenty years later, many groups are still actively working to fight racial injustice perpetrated by law enforcement in the US. One of the best among those groups is the Center for Constitutional Rights. I have made a donation today in Rodney King's name, and I hope, if you have the funds to spare, you will, too.
Oh, Ohio
So yesterday, the Ohio Senate passed the anti-union bill. Like with Wisconsin having the less-reported-on aspect of being able to fire-sale state assets, this bill has a little-known part: denying same sex couple equal rights.
Sec. 3101.01 of S.B. 5: … A marriage may only be entered into by one man and one woman. Any marriage between persons of the same sex is against the strong public policy of this state. Any marriage between persons of the same sex shall have no legal force or effect in this state and, if attempted to be entered into in this state, is void ab initio and shall not be recognized by this state. The recognition or extension by the state of the specific statutory benefits of a legal marriage to non-marital relationships between persons of the same sex or different sexes is against the strong public policy of this state. Any public act, record or judicial proceeding of this state, as defined in section 9.82 of the Revised Code, that extends the specific statutory benefits of legal marriage to non-marital relationships between persons of the same sex or different sexes is void.BTW, Ohio has already passed a gay marriage ban in 2004.
Project of the Moment
If you surf on over to http://wi.opencapitol.us/ or follow #opencapitol on Twitter, you'll see that someone in Madison had a pretty cool idea.
Here's how it works:
Place a post it note on the obvious physical symbol of whatever barrier, process, or action is clearly impeding your participation in your democracy, examples include:
Unreasonably locked doors
Barricades & ropes
Beside signs with silly rules
Access badges and tokens
Traffic routing equipment
Things that aren’t as they should be like disabled equipment or people not where they should be
For greatest impact, on the note we [at Open Capitol] suggest:
Your Name
Your Hometown
A peaceful civil message to your public servant(s)
http://OpenCapitol.us
Ooops We Went All Technicolor Luther On R Capitol
[h/t, photo credit to @legaleagle]
Top Chef Open Thread
Is it just me, or has this season just gone on foreeeeeever? The Neverending Season. I am sure they've eliminated 50 chefs by now, right? How long has Blaise been on? It seem like years. He's been on for years, right? It's been years.
Spoilers and whatnot below.
In Case You've Forgotten...
...since the last time we were obliged to pay attention to Mike Huckabee, he is still a jackass:
Mike Huckabee now says he knows President Obama wasn't born in Kenya and that he misspoke when he made that much-maligned comment earlier this week. But on social conservative Bryan Fischer's radio show on Wednesday, he agreed when the host offered that "there may be some fundamental anti-Americanism in this president."Leaving aside all the obvious birther-type fuckery in that comment, and the hilariously unsubtle reminder to paranoid Tea Partiers that Obama's a Top Secret Muslim, I'd just like to point out the inherent irony in the particular institutions chosen by Huckabee to ostensibly demonstrate the superiority of US culture.
..."And I have said many times," [Huckabee said], "publicly, that I do think he has a different worldview and I think it's, in part, molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas."
[Trigger warning for a mentions of sexual abuse.]
The Boy Scouts of America only allow male members to fully participate, and disallow atheists, agnostics, and "known or avowed homosexuals" from membership. Sexual assault cases have been brought against scout leaders in all 50 states.
The Rotary Club only began to extend membership invitations to women in the 1980s, and only after they were sued. It wasn't until the 1990s that gay members were allowed, and, by virtue of its by-invitation-only membership practices, Rotary membership remains disproportionately white, male, and straight.
Both organizations, at least in the US, are strongly affiliated with conservative Christianity.
So. The usual criticisms of madrassas made by conservatives like Huckabee is that they're insular, xenophobic, male-centric, religiously fundamentalist institutions, which discourage diversity and enable the sexual abuse of children via child brides. Ahem.
Never mind the accuracy of those criticisms; that's why they claim to object to madrassas (as if they are monolithic, which they are not). And yet, as long as an institution which could be described in precisely the same terms props up privileged men in the US, it's irrefutable evidence of American Exceptionalism.
Okay, player.
Question of the Day
What is your absolute favorite topic of conversation?
Frivolous, serious, irrepressibly geeky, embarrassingly square, limited to a tiny audience, universally relatable...doesn't matter. Just the thing you most love to talk about.
Quote of the Day
"We're all about the business of Indiana and trying to move an agenda forward right now. That could well get in the way of any national participation. If it does, it does."—Mitch Daniels, Indiana Governor and presumed Republican candidate in 2012.
Gee. I feel so lucky to be Mitch Daniels' priority.
But, on the other hand, I don't wish him on the rest of the nation, so.
Barf.
Shame is right
The "heartbeat" hoopla wasn't the only bullshit happening in the Ohio legislature today:
A GOP-backed measure that would restrict the collective bargaining rights of roughly 350,000 teachers, firefighters, police officers and other public employees squeaked through the state Senate on a 17-16 vote. Six Republicans sided with Democrats against the measure.Of course he does--back when he as gov-elect, he said he was going to outright dissolve Ted Strickland's (the former governor) executive orders that allowed two groups of workers (home health care and day care providers) to unionize. Kasich is as anti-union--and nearly as Koch-supported--as Walker.
Firefighters and teachers shouted "Shame!" in the chamber as the legislation was approved.
The bill would ban strikes by public workers and establish penalties for those who do participate in walkouts. Unionized workers could negotiate wages, hours and certain work conditions — but not health care, sick time or pension benefits.
The legislation would also set up a new process to settle worker disputes, giving elected officials the final say in contract disagreements. Binding arbitration, which police officers and firefighters use to resolve contract disputes as an alternative to strikes, would be eliminated.
[...]
he bill had passed a Senate committee after leadership replaced Seitz on the panel after he expressed disappointment in the bill, a move that secured the votes needed to get the legislation before the full Senate.
Extra chairs had to be brought in to accommodate the public attending the hearing. Prohibited from clapping, many wagged or waved their hands in response to pro-labor comments.
The bill now goes to the state House, where the GOP holds a 59-40 majority. If passed there, it would go to Republican Gov. John Kasich, who has said he supports the effort.
An Observation
The profundity of my fondness for actual "girl talk"—that is, conversations with other women about our lives, bodies, sexuality, relationships, jobs, whatever—is inversely proportional to my regard for the snidey, dismissive, superficial way the phrase "girl talk" is typically used in the mainstream media.
Photo of the Day
A Wisconsin Assemblyman (Rep. Fred Clark, perhaps?) talks with constituents outside the Capitol in Madison
I may have mentioned once or twice that people are having trouble getting into Wisconsin's Capitol. Sandy Cullen of The Wisconsin State Journal is reporting that Democratic Assemblymen Fred Clark (Baraboo), Cory Mason (Racine), Nick Milroy (Superior), and Josh Zepnick (Milwaukee) have moved their desks to the lawn outside the Capitol in order to hold meetings with the public.
[Photo by @MissPronouncer, h/t @BlueCheddar1]
ETA: Ruth Conniff at The Progressive has a great write-up of the Assemblymembers and their staff climbing out the windows (with furniture!) to set up the offices. [h/t BlueRidge in comments]
Daily Dose of Cute
Last Friday, I posted a video compilation of Dudley running to my office with high value treats. Below, Dudley demonstrates the enthusiasm gap between low value treats and high value treats.
Dudley sits in the living room. Liss: "Who's a good boy? You are? You're a good boy?" She holds out a treat. Dudley sniffs at it, then takes it reluctantly. "Mmm, yummy." He drops the treat on the floor. "No? You don't like that one? How about this one?" She hands him another treat, identical to the first. Dudley takes it gingerly, then looks at her disappointedly. "Ehm. Not interested?" He turns and drops the treat on the floor, then eats it with what can only be described as a resigned dog-shrug. He then returns to the first treat, still lying on the floor, and eats it, leaving crumbs on the floor.
He looks at Liss, stretching leisurely. He sniffs at the crumbs, but leaves them; sniffs at his food and water disinterestedly. He comes to the doorway of the kitchen, in which Liss is standing, and nudges her with his nose, then looks in the direction of the treats drawer. "What is it? Do you want a better treat?" He looks at the treat drawer. "Okay." Liss goes to the treat drawer. Dudley stretches and follows her. "Let's see if we can find a better treat." She rummages in the treat drawer; Dudley turns and runs back into the living room.
When she walks back in, he's lying down like a good boy, awaiting her return. Liss laughs. "Oh-h-h! What a good boy!" She hands him the GOOD TREAT. "There we go." Dudley gently takes the treat from her hand then trots down the hall to her office. Sophie jumps around at the end of the hallway, trying to get him to chase her. [edit] Dudley lies on his giant pillow, slowly munching on the treat, which he has broken into pieces, with a look of contentment. He picks up and savors each piece, then carefully and thoroughly licks up all the crumbs. He looks up at Liss and licks his chops.
An Observation
Every time I hear someone tell an anecdote about a run-in with a possum, myself included, they insert some variation on the qualifier, "And, I dunno, it must have been ill or something, because it looked like it had the mange and acted rabid." Snarling expressions accompanied by hissing, tend to immediately follow.
It may be that only the most horrible of possums make their way into our anecdotes, but I'm beginning to suspect that humans may just overestimate the pleasantness of opossums' appearance and demeanor.
Chipping Away at Griswold
I've been rather coy about my thoughts on the actual contents of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's proposed budget, but sure, I'll bite on this one:
The Capital Times:
Gov. Scott Walker wants to again give insurance companies discretion over whether they will cover contraception.Uh, no.
His budget, released Tuesday, proposes the elimination of a recently passed law that requires insurance plans that cover prescription drugs to also include coverage for prescription birth control. Walker’s budget summary says the requirement is an “unacceptable government mandate on employers with moral objections to these services,” and that it “increases the cost of health insurance for all payers.”
Also, lolsob @ recently passed law upholding insured people's right to contraception.
Interestingly enough, I recall that the dearth of birth control options in our insurance plan's formulary was a topic that came up during collective bargaining. Imagine that.
Blog Note
UPDATE: Looks like it's working again now. If you're still having problems, fire me an(other) email.
It's not just you. Disqus is down: "Commenting is unavailable at the moment and we're getting it back up asap."
It's not something we can control on our end. Hopefully, it will be resolved soon. My apologies for the inconvenience.
