Owing to personal events, I'm spending the next two weeks trapped without a car in the middle of a city of 150,000 people. Yesterday I borrowed a neighbor's car, and mindful of my checking account, drove to the supermarket and attempted to buy enough food to survive should a James Cameron movie suddenly break out.
Today was this week's opportunity fresh veggies. On my way to the farmers' market, I braved streets that largely serve as on-ramps for the two highways that bisect downtown Syracuse. I crossed at lights that didn't have pedestrian signals, stepping onto uneven sidewalk ramps. Because I'm currently able-bodied, young, athletic, and it's not winter (people here don't really shovel sidewalks), I was able to make the trip in about twenty minutes. As an added bonus, I didn't get sent to jail after watching my child get hit by a car.
After walking through a stretch of my route where the sidewalk inexplicably gave way to dirt, I encountered the site where a group of environmental consultants and entrepreneurs is rehabilitating a long-abandoned building, complete with a row of shiny new charging stations for electric cars.
In fairness, Syracuse isn't unaware of the difficulty of getting around town sans cars. The city recently released a master plan of hypothetical bike routes. It was also involved in recent discussions about the future of one of our two interstates.
However, the charging stations were the first sign of the newer, greener Syracuse that I keep hearing about.
In reality, during these times of austerity, it's gotten harder to get around town. There are fewer, more expensive buses. Sidewalks are going unrepaired and yes, unshoveled.
So it's with bitter irony that I welcome these new charging stations. I'm not particularly impressed by a future in which some of the cars I'll be dodging will presumably be powered by the local nuclear plant.
This is what tends to happen. Too often, the solutions to environmental problems tend to reinforce a broken status quo.
In the case of Syracuse's newest electrical outlets, I believe most of them will be used to charge vehicles for a community car sharing service. I can certainly think of worse uses.
However, I'm not entirely sure how some people are supposed to get to the nearest car share location. I'm also not sure how some folks are going to pay to rent these wonderful green cars.
Don't get me wrong, I actually think a green car share program is a great idea, and a welcome initiative. However, I'm frustrated and unsurprised that the movers and shakers in my city have the capital to invest in putting more cars on the road, while efforts to improve things for pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit riders flounder.
This is How Things Usually Work
Quote of the Day
[Trigger warning for violence and terrorism.]
"On Sunday, the New York Times headlined 'As Horrors Emerged, Norway Charges Christian extremist'. A number of other news organizations like the LA Times and Reuters also played up the Christian angle. But Breivik is not a Christian. That's impossible. No one believing in Jesus commits mass murder."—Bill O'Reilly, employing the No True Scotsman fallacy in order to assert that Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik isn't a Christian because he did a supposedly un-Christian thing.
What REAL Christians do, I guess, is sexually harass people, victim-blame child survivors of sexual violence, offer up people and places he doesn't like to violence, and participate in a terrorist campaign.
Not that it's news that O'Reilly is a spectacular hypocrite with all the integrity of a Fox News presenter, but wow.
[Related Reading: On "Real" Christians and Christian Privilege.]
Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime
The Del Rubio Triplets: "Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead (Medley)"
Milly Del Rubio, the last surviving Del Rubio Triplet (and great niece of First Lady Edith Bolling Wilson!), passed away last week from respiratory failure. RIP Milly.
Today in Rape Culture
[Trigger warning for sexual violence, rape culture, police malfeasance.]
Despite NYC police and prosecutors' insistence that Jerry Ramrattan, a man who framed his ex-girlfriend for armed robbery as revenge for reporting that he had raped her, is some kind of criminal mastermind, and despite the New York Times' valiant attempt to sell that framing, it is manifestly apparent that Ramrattan is just your run-of-the-mill vindictive wankstain who paid off a couple of dudes and a woman willing to play roles in his misogynist scheme in exchange for the (false) promise of getting something they wanted.
I guess making Ramrattan out to be some sort of Danny Ocean is easier than admitting they held a rape victim behind bars for seven months because her rapist exploited their inclination to believe it was more likely that a successful businesswoman was randomly robbing strangers than that her boyfriend raped her.
I don't guess I need to point out the irony that Ms. Sumasar was evidently presumed of making false charges while her ex-boyfriend's stooges were making false charges against her. Two men who had not even been robbed easily convinced the police they had been, while Ramrattan is only now being charged with rape, after he was discovered to have framed his victim of armed robbery.
[H/T to Shaker Beth_in_Mpls. Previously on the New York Times' appalling coverage of sexual violence: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.]
This is what privilege looks like.
Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics:
The median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly available government data from 2009.The piece cites "plummeting house values" as the "principal cause of the recent erosion in household wealth among all groups," which disproportionately affected Latin@s, but, of course, there are other reasons: Whites are more likely to be invested in the stock market (even if merely through a retirement account like a 401k), which recovered its value in a way home equity has not; people of color are more likely to have been targeted by predatory lending; whites are more likely to have inherited wealth; etc.
These lopsided wealth ratios are the largest since the government began publishing such data a quarter century ago...
From 2005 to 2009, inflation-adjusted median wealth fell by 66% among Hispanic households and 53% among black households, compared with just 16% among white households.
...Moreover, about a third of black (35%) and Hispanic (31%) households had zero or negative net worth in 2009, compared with 15% of white households. In 2005, the comparable shares had been 29% for blacks, 23% for Hispanics and 11% for whites.
...Household wealth is the accumulated sum of assets (houses, cars, savings and checking accounts, stocks and mutual funds, retirement accounts, etc.) minus the sum of debt (mortgages, auto loans, credit card debt, etc.). It is different from household income, which measures the annual inflow of wages, interest, profits and other sources of earning. Wealth gaps between whites, blacks and Hispanics have always been much greater than income gaps.
All of which is a function of privilege.
[Related Reading: Can't Vs. Won't.]
So the President Gave a Speech Last Night
The transcript of Obama's speech is here. I liked this part:
Most Americans, regardless of political party, don't understand how we can ask a senior citizen to pay more for her Medicare before we ask a corporate jet owner or the oil companies to give up tax breaks that other companies don't get. How can we ask a student to pay more for college before we ask hedge fund managers to stop paying taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries? How can we slash funding for education and clean energy before we ask people like me to give up tax breaks we don't need and didn't ask for?And I liked that he made the point it's Republicans who are refusing to compromise. But that's about it. Because the point I believe he ought to be making is that AUSTERITY IS GARBAGE. But instead it's all about how we've got to wear grown-up pants and tighten our belts and eat our peas and get real about our spending, oh noes deficits, compromise and bipartisanship, because no one remembers Americans "who held fast to rigid ideologies and refused to listen to those who disagreed. ... We remember the Americans who put country above self, and set personal grievances aside for the greater good. We remember the Americans who held this country together during its most difficult hours; who put aside pride and party to form a more perfect union. That's who we remember."
That's not right. It's not fair.
Yeah, I'm not actually sure that's true. I don't remember Rosa Parks or Harvey Milk for their ability to compromise with the people who disagreed with their "rigid ideology" about their right to exist as equal human beings in a country that promises that equality. I get that Obama wants his legacy to be as The Grand Compromiser, but that is not the only sort of person this nation remembers.
Or needs.
Anyway, Boehner gave a rebuttal (sure), the transcript of which is here, and, spoiler alert, it's garbage. I can't imagine his attempt to make Obama look like the unreasonable one is going to get any traction with anyone who doesn't already reflexively hate Obama and presume bad faith at all times.
This isn't going to end well for any of us, because we are not a nation in need of austerity; we are a nation in need of spending to promote job growth and infrastructure renewal and energy independence.
But I think, and hope, that it's really not going to end well for the Republicans, and deservedly so. It doesn't bode well for them that this morning the Times editors have penned a piece titled "The Republican Wreckage" which begins with the stark line: "House Republicans have lost sight of the country's welfare."
Indeed.
Question of the Day
For what are you feeling thankful today?
It could be something little, something big, something altruistic, something selfish, something abstract, something material, something silly, something bittersweet. Just one thing, for which you're grateful and glad.
Hold That Thought
I was on a conference call this afternoon with someone from the Department of Education, and when he put us on hold to conference in another participant, this is what played while we waited.
[Video Description: The video of Schoolhouse Rock's "Conjunction Junction."]
Aside from the fact that it has so many degrees of awesome sauce for being the On-Hold music for the DOE, it reminded me of the time thirty years ago when I was teaching middle school English. When we came to the part in the grammar book that dealt with conjunctions, the entire class burst into this song.
lolsob
Peter Daou: "Does ANYONE think that if Obama had been a tough, principled, unabashed progressive, he'd be worse off than he is now?"
Quote of the Day
I sat there after I was told this story [about how celebrities' clothes are all tailored to fit them perfectly], and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I've succeeded and failed. I thought about all the times I've stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it's supposed to. No one told me that it wasn't supposed to. I guess I just didn't know. I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn't fit.—Lindsay, on clothes, expectations thereof, and images of self.
I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are "wrong," who can't find a good pair of work trousers, who can't fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn't mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.
I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.
Photo of the Day
In September, I wrote about [trigger warning for sexual violence] the case of two Michigan State University basketball players who were accused of taking turns sexually assaulting a woman for nearly an hour in their dorm room. Despite corroboration by one assailant of the complainant's story, they were never prosecuted and retained their places on the team.
Above, the Friendly Neighborhood Curmudgeon unfurls a sign at a game reading: EXPEL RAPISTS.
Two MSU basketball players raped a woman in the dorms then one admitted to it. Their only consequence was that they had to move out of the dorms. This picture is of me and one other woman holding up this banner during Midnight Madness. Two other brave souls had a banner on the other side for a while before some jerk started playing tug or war with them over it. This was taken before we got booed at by 10,000 people and police escorted from the stadium.Brava. o.oP
Nope
There are probably about a million reasons not to see the shitty new Smurfs film, but I'm just going to mention one: "Gutsy Smurf," the new smurf developed exclusively for the film, who is inexplicably Scottish, has ginger sideburns, wears a kilt, sports a tam-o-shanter style pom on his hat, and is described as "brave to a fault."
If you happen to see Iain, and he unaccountably requests that you raise his blood pressure, ask him what he thinks of "Gutsy Smurf." For additional raising of heart rate, helpfully offer that at least "Gutsy Smurf" isn't called "Cheap-Ass Drunk-Ass Smurf," and then work Shrek into the conversation.
It's not that he's offended; he's contemptuous.
And so am I.
Number of the Day
$716 billion: The additional amount of revenue the federal treasury would be collecting annually if "corporations and households taking in $1 million or more in income each year were now paying taxes at the same annual rates as they did back in 1961. In other words, if the federal government started taxing the wealthy and their corporations at the same rates in effect a half-century ago, the federal debt to investors would almost totally vanish over the next decade."
Breaking Bad Open Thread
"It's for defense."
Last night's episode will be discussed in infinitesimal detail, so if you haven't seen it, and don't want any spoilers, move along...
Black Women's Hair Ain't Public Property
Woot! Check out two of our favorite bloggers, Tami of What Tami Said and Renee of Womanist Musings, in this CNN piece about people (generally white people) touching black women's hair.
A note about the attempt at equivalency that Renee mentions:
In 2008, Renee Martin wrote "Can I Touch Your Hair? Black Women and The Petting Zoo" for her blog Womanist Musings and said she continues to get e-mails from women thanking her for her post and relaying their personal experiences about their hair being touched.It would have been nice if the author of the piece, Lisa Respers France, noted that women like Renee and Tami are not tourists in a foreign locale, to really underline how offensive the false equivalency of "My hair got touched by people of color while I was on vacation" really is.
Some white women who responded, Martin said, shared their stories of their own hair being touched in countries populated by people of color. They chalked it up to natural curiosity and accused Martin of being too sensitive, she said.
But she says she doesn't think the crux of the issue has to do with curiosity.
"I think it's the idea that they have the right to possess black women and they will take any excuse they can to jump over the border, whether it's policing our behavior or policing our hair," Martin said. "I think it's about ownership of black bodies more than it has to actually do with hair."
Of course people are naturally curious, etc. But when an adult white person wants to touch a black woman's hair in the United States or Canada, that speaks to segregation more than curiosity. It wouldn't be a curiosity for an adult in a diverse culture that's properly integrated.
And, of course, it wouldn't be an issue if our culture wasn't rife with privilege, narratives about women's bodies being public property (even to other women), and hostility toward consent.
Monday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by Zelda, who will happily snap with endless determination at any annoying flies who might be in your general vicinity.
Recommended Reading:
[TW for terrorism and violence] On the connection between Anders Behring Breivik and American rightwing blogs, see Peter Daou and Mustang Bobby.
Tigtog: The Blazing FAIL of a Thousand Suns
Penelope: Donors' Pledges to Reconstruct Haiti Come up Empty
Andy: 46 Gay Couples Marry in Mass Wedding at Niagara Falls
Josh: Rally Cry [Background on "Tough Mudders" here.]
The Angry Black Woman: [TW for misogyny] I Don't Read Comics Much, and Here's the Reason Why
Lesley: [TW for misogyny, homophobia, rape culture] Male Games for Male Gamers: A Case Study
D-Day: Reid Working on His Own All-Cuts Debt Limit Proposal
Leave your links and recommendations in comments...
Zelda
"We don't give them names."
That was what the woman working at the Humane Society told Iain and me when we asked the name of the dog we were playing with in the "family room," a tiny cinderblock room with a desk, some chairs, and a couple of ancient toys too sad to pique the curiosity of any animal. It was meant to be a space for prospective adopters to spend time with a dog or cat, to see how they would behave in a home environment, but it doesn't look like a home.
This, you see, is not a rescue organization or a no-kill shelter that takes in only adoptable animals; this is a place that takes in everyone, and keeps them alive as long as they can, in the hope they will be adopted before the next round of strays and dumps and regretful relinquishments come through the door. Many of these animals aren't housebroken. The "family room" needs floors, and chairs, and walls that can be easily cleaned.
It was the second area shelter we'd visited that day, taking dogs that otherwise wouldn't get them for walks and petting the cats and handling puppies—including a litter of pitbulls younger than any puppy Iain had ever seen in person; he held them gingerly, like he might break them. Both of them are high-kill shelters, not for lack of love or dedication by the people who work there, but for lack of funds and resources and space to accommodate the thousands upon thousands of homeless and abandoned animals in the area, where the busting of large dog fighting rings and backyard breeding operations are not unusual.
There are dozens of local rescue organizations—some breed-specific, some who will take any dog or cat that isn't aggressive or untreatably terminally ill—and they work with the shelters to save as many animals as possible through rescue and adoption. But it is impossible to save them all.
And it is because so many of the animals die that they aren't given names by the staff, if they don't come in with one. It's a heartbreaking enough job, without coming up with a name for every cat and dog on death row.
So the stray in the family room with us didn't have a name, until we gave her one.
Zelda, the newest resident of Shakes Manor.
We've been talking, at my instigation, about rescuing a second dog for awhile, although I expected we would get one from a rescue organization, from a foster home, like we did with Dudley, from people who could tell us something about the dog. We went to meet several dogs, who were lovely, but they just weren't the right dogs for us, for impalpable reasons best, although not perfectly, filed under chemistry.
A week ago Saturday, I didn't expect to bring home a dog from the pound. But there she was, this little nameless two-year-old stray, a black dog on death row, to whom none of the families looking to adopt dogs that day were paying the slightest bit of attention. I pointed her out to Iain, who was busily making eyes at a bluetick hound puppy in the cage next to her. We had already walked a few other dogs, pet them and praised them, and put them back in their cages. After we'd walked Zelda, we took her into the family room, which was empty for the first time since we'd been there, and I said to Iain, "I'm going to have a really hard time putting this little girl back in her cage."
So, basically, we didn't.
We asked if the cat who's used to test dogs could be brought in. Zelda sniffed at her, wagged her tail. The cat was not the slightest bit alarmed. We told Zelda what a good girl she was; she sat in front of us and grinned, her blue-spotted tongue lolling out of her mouth.
"Well," I said to Iain, "she's terrible on the leash. And she can't stand having her paws touched, which will make clipping her nails a challenge."
Iain shrugged. "If she were perfect, she wouldn't need us to rescue her."
We drove home and got Dudley. He's never met a dog (or cat, or person) he didn't like, and Zelda was no exception. Having gotten his stamp of approval, we signed the paperwork, paid $80 to spring her, and she was ours.
At the vet, where she got her vaccines, we found out, to our relief, she is heartworm negative—amazing for a stray in this area. Even the vet was unable to clip her nails: "You might have to have her sedated," he suggested. We've started paw-touch training in the hope of avoiding that.
BFFs.
We've also started leash-training, because she is, as Iain describes it, "impolite on the leash," or, as I describe it, "a total nightmare." She's already getting better, though—and this morning's walk was downright verging on pleasant. Dudley is a trooper—and even though he howls like he's being murdered by the devil himself and gives me a pitiable look of wretched aggrievement when Zelda's leash catches him up, he is being a ridiculously good sport, showing her the ropes and welcoming her in every way.
She definitely looks to him for guidance on how to fit in: When he sits, she sits; when he gets excited, she gets excited. At the dog park this weekend, she was very unsure of herself at first, but she saw that Dudley was confident and unafraid, so she just followed his lead. Soon, they were running around together, having a blast.
Video Description: Dudley and Zelda investigate the long grass, and Zelda decides to turn it into a game of hide-and-seek.
At home, their new favorite game is tug-of-war. One of them will grab Pinkie and waggle hir in the other's face, and then IT'S ON!!! There is much play-bowing and leaping around, and then they'll take a break to go drink out of the water bowl together, then back to the wrasslin', which is incredibly funny to watch.
Last night, they curled up on the same couch together for the first time.
Zelda is also great with the cats, who have all welcomed her into the pack. Her energy matches our low-key household very well. She's completely housebroken, quiet (I've heard her bark exactly once), rides wonderfully in the car, has perfect house manners, and is hugely friendly with new people, despite the fact that her two presumed breeds, Rottweiler and Shar Pei—she looks exactly like a mini-Rottie, with her coloration and square head and bottle-brush tail, except for the extra-wrinkly folds around her neck, her blue-spotted tongue, and her perfectly triangular Dorito ears, which give away her Shar Pei heritage—are meant to be naturally reserved. All she wants to do is cuddle. She would love for you to scratch her head, please!
Or her belleh.
The other night, Zelda was lying at my feet, and I put my foot out to scratch her. She jumped away and cringed. It is clear that in her life before she came to us, someone loved this dog, and someone hurt her. Maybe the same person. I am slowly teaching her that our feet won't hurt her. No one will ever kick her again.
"It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superdog!"
We really don't know what her life was like before now, how she ended up a stray with no identification and no one looking for her. We know, because she is a black dog and a Rottweiler mix, that she was at high risk for euthanasia.
We had no way to be certain, and really no reason to believe aside from our instincts, that we could bring her home and throw her into the deep end and it would all work out. But we took a leap of faith, and, so far (touch wood), everything is going swimmingly.
We're so lucky to have her. She has been a wonderful surprise—even though Iain says he knew we'd be bringing home a dog that day. By a strange coincidence, I was wearing the exact same outfit I had been wearing the day we adopted Dudley.
Because we weren't expecting her, we didn't even have a bed for her at first, or a food bowl. She's still wearing one of Dudley's old collars. But now, at least, she's got a name.
Zelda.
Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime
Amy Winehouse: "Tears Dry On Their Own"
During her career Amy Winhouse won five Grammys, a Brit Award, two NME awards, three Ivor Novello Awards, among others. Her 2006 album Back to Black sold over 10 million copies. Winehouse was found dead at her home Saturday. She was 27.
