I finally ordered cable. Neat, huh? But guess what! The cable descrambler (do they still call them that?) they sent me was defective and I was unable to watch last night's finale of Pink Donuts. Whut? Finale?! I thought there were still like 17 contestants to blow through before we got to the end of this trainwreck. Wevs. So, I missed the whole season. Anyway, since Craig left I couldn't be arsed to care. RIP Craig! Your goofy smile and naïveté will be missed. Sad face.
Last night's finale will be discussed in detail, including the not-very-surprising winner, so if you haven't seen it, and still care, pack your coax splitters and go...
The most seriously wounded [in the Oakland clash with police] was Scott Olsen, 24, of Daly City, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, who was listed in critical condition Wednesday at Highland General Hospital in Oakland.
The antiwar group said Olsen, a systems administrator at a San Francisco software firm, suffered a skull fracture when he was hit by a "blunt object." Olsen joined the U.S. Marines in 2006, served two tours in Iraq, and was discharged in 2010, the group said.
Video footage distributed on the Internet shows a protester, identified by the antiwar group as Olsen, being carried away by others with a head wound. The cause was unclear. While he lay wounded, the footage appears to show an officer tossing something - perhaps a tear gas canister - toward people trying to help him.
"I think it is a sad state of affairs when a Marine can't assemble peacefully in the streets without getting injured," said Jose Sanchez, executive director of Iraq Veterans Against the War.
The Guardian—Olsen "has a fractured skull and brain swelling after allegedly being hit by a police projectile."
The Guardian spoke to people with Olsen at the hospital. Adele Carpenter, who knows Olsen through his involvement with anti-war groups, said she arrived at the hospital at 11pm on Tuesday night.
Carpenter said she was told by a doctor at the hospital that Olsen had a skull fracture and was in a "serious but stable" condition. She said he had been sedated and was unconscious.
"I'm just absolutely devastated that someone who did two tours of Iraq and came home safely is now lying in a US hospital because of the domestic police force," Carpenter said.
But don't worry—there's going to be an investigation by "Oakland's independent police review body" and I'm sure they'll totally get to the bottom of this is a very responsible way, just like the jurors in the Oscar Grant trial. The one thing that definitely helps curb out-of-control police forces is a total lack of accountability.
Here's some of the other stuff I've been reading this morning...
New York Daily News—Occupy Wall Street protesters in NYC proclaim solidarity with demonstrators in Oakland, Atlanta: "Protesters stormed through downtown Manhattan on Wednesday night to proclaim solidarity with fellow demonstrators who were forced out of encampments in Oakland, Calif., and Atlanta, Ga. ... At least 10 people were arrested as the wild mob took to the streets towards Union Square chanting, 'Oakland to NYC, stop police brutality'." (lol your "wild mob.")
Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times—Crony Capitalism Comes Home: "[W]hile alarmists seem to think that the movement is a 'mob' trying to overthrow capitalism, one can make a case that, on the contrary, it highlights the need to restore basic capitalist principles like accountability. To put it another way, this is a chance to save capitalism from crony capitalists."
Richard Wolff in the Guardian—How the 1% got richer, while the 99% got poorer: "The CBO numbers teach some basic lessons. First, the last 30 years of ideological preaching about the superiority of private, deregulated, market-driven capitalism served to enable and mask one of the largest and fastest upward redistributions of income in modern history."
New York Times—Europe Agrees to Basics of Plan to Resolve Euro Crisis: "European leaders, in a significant step toward resolving the euro zone financial crisis, early Thursday morning obtained an agreement from banks to take a 50 percent loss on the face value of their Greek debt. ... The leaders agreed on Wednesday on a plan to force the Continent's banks to raise new capital to insulate them from potential sovereign debt defaults. But there was little detail on how the Europeans would enlarge their bailout fund to achieve their goal of $1.4 trillion to better protect Italy and Spain."
US Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis—National Income and Product Accounts: Gross Domestic Product, 3rd quarter 2011: "Real gross domestic product—the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States—increased at an annual rate of 2.5 percent in the third quarter of 2011 (that is, from the second quarter to the third quarter) according to the 'advance' estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis."
That's an improvement on second quarter numbers, which saw a real GDP increase of 1.3%, and, in a healthy economy, 2.5% growth would be fine, but, during a long and deep recession with high unemployment, we need something a lot more robust than that to achieve meaningful recovery in a reasonable timeframe. Slow growth just means more people fall off the edge.
Speaking of falling off the edge...
Liz Dwyer at Good: What Do Obama's Student Loan Reforms Mean for You? "While the income-based reform is a step in the right direction projected to help around 1.6 million students, Radhika Singh Miller, a program manager for educational debt relief and outreach at the nonprofit Equal Justice Works, notes it will only benefit students who are starting college next year or later. 'For those of us who've already borrowed and are buried in student debt,' she says, the plan offers no help. ... [N]one of the reforms will reduce the total amount you owe, and they won't affect loans borrowed directly from a bank to help with college expenses. 'People still need to be proactive about avoiding those private loans,' she says, because they aren't eligible for income-based repayment plans or consolidation. If you don't, you're really 'at the mercy of a private lenders. All the things you see that come with federal loans—like deferments and forebearance—aren't standard with private loans.' If the Obama Administration put some consumer protections back into the private loan industry, Miller says, that would help millions."
Suggested by Shaker monoglot: What do you like best about the age you are now?
I'm 37, and the thing I like most about this age, which I've enjoyed through much of my thirties, is that I feel very securely in my adulthood, while still feeling very much like a young person.
In my twenties, I didn't feel like a proper grown-up until I was 27, and, even then, I didn't have the sense of self or the centeredness or the contentment I have now.
I'm enjoying this feeling while it lasts, and I'm looking forward with anticipation, and not a smidgeon of dread, to feeling very much like an old person, if I am given the much-desired fate of getting there.
Via The Daily What: "iGlide of Remote Kontrol Dance Crew fame (previously) does his dubstep thing to Christina Aguilera. Clearly he did not get the memo about the human body and how it's not supposed to be able to move like that."
"This book right here, every Bible says, in Proverbs 1:7, 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.' … If you want education you better include the fear of God, if you want to be a good scientist you better include the fear of God, if you want to be a good musician—1962, '63, the US Supreme Court in three decisions said no more fear of God in education, we want education to be secular. All right, that's a theological issue. How's that working out? In 1962, '63, America was number one in the world in literacy, we are now number sixty-five in the world in literacy. We don't have the fear of the Lord, because guess what, we don't have knowledge, it goes down."—Solid logic from evangelical minister David Barton, who you also may know as the founder of WallBuilders, an organization dedicated to exposing as a myth the Constitutional basis for the separation of church and state, or as the former co-chair of the Republican Party of Texas.
First William Shatner coveredIron Man, and now this. It's like I'm living in Bizarro World on Opposite Day:
1) There's a proposal out there "to slice $3 trillion from the [US] federal budget over the next decade through significant cuts to federal health programs, including Medicare, and as much as $1.3 trillion in new taxes."
2) That proposal is coming from Congressional Democrats.
3) Irrespective of the Democrats' push to make "significant cuts to federal health programs, including Medicare", SUPER CONGRESS! appears to be at an impasse.
4) There are only four weeks left until OMG BUDGET CRISIS!OMFG BUDGPOCOLYPSE!!! OFMGBBQ BUDGETMAGEDDON!!!1!!
[Trigger warning for disablism, classism, and racism.]
Me, in February, responding to Most Willfully Stupid Person in the World David Brooks' gushing boycrush on my garbage governor Mitch Daniels:
[N]aturally Daniels proudly "spoke of...the education program that will give scholarships to students in failing schools so they can choose another." And while he talks a good game about how students from low-income families should have the same chance to attend a private school as students from wealthy families (as if a scholarship program for some poor kids really levels the playing field), the Indiana Coalition for Public Education has quite rightly noted that "taxpayer money shouldn't be directed to private schools, which can deny admission to certain students." The proposal thus stands to "reverse the state's progress on desegregation efforts."
Mitch Daniels' policies are consistently rooted in the conservative pipedream (which Brooks sooooooo loves) that there's no such thing as institutional bias and everyone can achieve precisely the same things if only they work hard enough. Just give poor people the same opportunities, and failure can thus be regarded as unassailable evidence of laziness.
Except: Shitty healthcare they can't afford and competition for education vouchers that favor low-income students who come from home environments that already give them a good chance of success, despite poverty, does not the same opportunities as wealth provides make.
Especially when rerouting tax dollars to private institutions that may select for existing biases means marginalized students may end up with the choice between shitty private schools and a shitty public school system. Swell.
The Associated Press, yesterday: Indianapolis Chief: Charter Schools Turning Away Homeless, Disabled: "The superintendent of the state's largest school district requested a state investigation Monday into his allegations that charter schools are turning away homeless and disabled students in violation of state and federal laws."
This, despite the fact that the same superintendent last week swore: "We take everybody that come through the door, whether they are blind, crippled, crazy."
Yeah, he's a real charmer.
Suffice it to say that discriminatory policies that target students by wealth disproportionately affect students of color, so in addition to being explicitly disablist and classist, this alleged practice is implicitly racist, too.
Anyway. Welcome to Indiana: What happens when you let Republicans run rampant with no meaningful checks or balances. Bootstrap Paradise.
Of course, now I'm wondering how the artist gets these pieces to remain this gorgeous, as my greatest sadness as a squash manipulator is that they seem very vulnerable to entropy.
Looking at older pictures now, I notice how her face has changed since we adopted her in July: She's filled out, care of a diligent regimen of treats, no more gaunt cheeks (or jutting backbone), and, as she's settled in, her face has relaxed. Her ears move around more, and her jaw is no longer clenched with anxiety. That she feels part of our family now is literally written on her face.
Wahlburgers. A restaurant/cafe in Hingham, Massachusetts, at which you can "enjoy fresh ground beef burgers made to order, hot dogs, frappes, rock tunes and more!" Owned and operated by the Wahlberg brothers: Actors/singers/producers Mark and Donnie Wahlberg and chef Paul Wahlberg.
When Kenny Blogginz told me about this last night, I thought he was kidding.
True Fact: I attended not one, not two, but FIVE New Kids on the Block concerts back in the day, and I know all the back-up dancer choreography from Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch's "Good Vibrations" video, because no doy who doesn't, amirite?
Eyes on the Prize. I've been re-watching the aforementioned PBS documentary about the struggle for racial equality in the US.
Once I reacquainted myself with the idea that PBS was airing documentaries back when Ken Burns was flipping burgers at Rax (technically Eyes on the Prize first ran only three years before The Civil War, but wev), a few things stood out.
To me it's clear that in the past sixty years the US has moved a long ways towards racial equality, yet we still have a long ways to go.
More than that, Eyes on the Prize contains an amazing array of primary sources, and it is awesome. It turns out that back in the day:
Activists made surprisingly moderate demands. Bigots and naysayers made familiar excuses. Politicians and other powerful leaders often displayed a healthy dose of cynicism. (Ooops, your phone negotiations have been recorded for posterity!)
None of that was a surprise to me, mind you. However, in light of the past couple of years, OMFG is the stuff in that documentary familiar to me. It's like history contains lessons for the present or some shit.
In this morning's Economic News Round-Up, I linked one story about the police action against Occupy Oakland protesters last night, but I also wanted to provide a dedicated thread to that serious incident, at which more than 100 people were arrested and many injured by the "non-lethal weaponry," i.e. concussion grenades, beanbags, and rubber bullets, that were used to disperse the crowd stop people from making use of their rights of assembly and free speech.
Aaron Bady has an excellent timeline and firsthand account of events here.
Malia Wollan and J. David Goodman have a great, comprehensive compilation of video and images here, where I direct you with the warning that there are graphic images of injuries sustained by protesters.
Raw Storydetails, with video footage, the story of the Marine veteran who was injured "after being shot at point-blank range with bean bags or rubber bullets by police."
This Burrito's got a gallery of images from the past couple of days here.
There's not a whole lot I've got to say about this authoritarian bullshit at the moment, but I will note the increasing absurdity of conservatives who call Obama's tax policy "class warfare" while 99 percenters are literally being brutalized in the streets by agents of the state.
I learned a useful new term from a friend the other day—the 'L-curve.' It's that graph you've probably seen around a lot of the Occupy Wall Street coverage, that line that shows wealth distribution across a specific population. A straight line means that the wealth is distributed evenly, and a lopsided, sagging curve means it's not. And these days, obviously, it's really, really not.
The blatant injustice of that is enough to piss off most of us on the face of it, but a recent post by Maia Szalavitz on Time.com's Healthland blog calls attention to a handful of studies that show that this kind of economic inequality doesn't just affect our pocketbooks. It affects our health. Our actual, physical health.
Szalavitz writes: "A growing body of research suggests that such inequality—more so than income or absolute wealth alone—has a profound influence on a population's health, in every socioeconomic group from rich to middle class to poor."
Yeah, you read that right—even that elusive 1% can't escape it.
It all comes down to the inherent stress of a stratified culture:
As studies of wild baboons in Africa have shown, there are certain key side effects of inequality—namely, stress. Baboons have a rigidly enforced social hierarchy in which fights to win alpha status are common and higher-ranking males constantly abuse and bully those below them. Not surprisingly, this results in chronically elevated levels of stress hormones in the lower ranks.
But:
[A] study found that alpha males—those at the very peak of the hierarchy—were actually just as stressed as their lowest-ranked followers.
Tough to be king, huh?
Szalavitz also tackles the inevitable victim-blaming:
In humans, in fact, differences in health linked to social status—which tracks closely with economic status—have often been attributed only to addictions and to the generally bad health habits of the poor, such as eating a lousy diet. But baboons don't have these 'lifestyle factors' and yet increased mortality in the lower ranks is still seen.
Besides, the effects are seen even when the people lower in the hierarchy aren't particularly poor themselves. A researcher in London who spent decades studying civil servants found that the mortality rates for the lowest-paid were three times that of their highest bosses. That's far worse than the baboons, and the baboon-bosses have fangs.
Most of the people reading this blog already know that income equality stinks, and now there's another reason to add to the long list. Worse, we seem to have perfected it:
As Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky, who led much of the research in stress in African baboons, once told me: "When humans invented inequality and socioeconomic status, they came up with a dominance hierarchy that subordinates like nothing the primate world has ever seen before."
Great, so, even the freaking baboons have us beat.
Here in Edinburgh, we have a tiny little occupation doing its bit for the worldwide movement. They have maybe twenty tents pitched in one of the many public gardens, and they haven't attracted much press. I haven't been able to join them, since I'm fortunate enough to have a job where I need to be, so a few days ago I bought about £15 in cheap goods—a couple of wind-up flashlights, a couple of blankets, some bread and peanut butter—and took it down to them.
A student (he said he's studying painting) guided me to the right tents, where I added my loaf of bread to the pile of donated bread, and my blankets to the pile of donated blankets. And then I left, glad to have done something, but nagged by the sense that it was hardly anything at all.
There's this one band of baboons, out there in the Savannah, that's been mentioned on Shakesville before, and Szalavitz brings them up here again. They're called the Forest Troop. Twenty or thirty years ago, the baddest of their badasses fought off big males from another group for the right to feast on some tainted garbage from a nearby restaurant. As a result, those alpha males got sick and died, leaving only the lower-class males and all the females and young. This remainder made a whole new society for themselves, an entirely new culture unheard of among baboons where kind behaviour was rewarded and bullying frowned upon. New males coming into the group learned the new customs, and now, long after the original males have died off, they're preserving this new, more egalitarian culture.
It's no coincidence—not by a long shot—that the first article about them here focused on the way the sexual violence and coercion that's normal in other baboon groups have been all but eliminated in the Forest Troop's new regime. Because, as we see over and over, this shit is all connected.
And according to Szalavitz, amongst the Forest Troop, "rank appeared not to affect stress and health."
All that worry about status? All that bullying and violence? Not much of an issue any more. And everyone—everyone—is better off for it.
As Eric Michael Johnson, author of the earlier article, puts it, "what we're ultimately after is social change."
So I drop off my little blankets at Edinburgh's little protest. The Occupy movements collect and grow like little drops of water, and slowly, slowly, we all start talking about it. People start noticing. Politicians start referring to "the 99%."
The Congressional Budget Office has found that, between 1979 and 2007, income grew by:
● 275 percent for the top 1 percent of households,
● 65 percent for the next 19 percent,
● Just under 40 percent for the next 60 percent, and
● 18 percent for the bottom 20 percent.
In addition to after-tax income having grown more for the highest-income households, the CBO also found that market income shifted toward higher-income households, and that government transfers and federal taxes became less redistributive.
In other words, yes, there's class warfare going on all right—but it's the upper classes, with the help of the government, waging war on the lower classes.
Which, of course, everyone with functioning grey matter in their brainpans and a modicum of resolve to embrace facts has already known for quite some time.
Here's some of the other stuff I've been reading this morning...
New York Times—New Poll Finds a Deep Distrust of Government: "With Election Day just over a year away, a deep sense of economic anxiety and doubt about the future hangs over the nation, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, with Americans' distrust of government at its highest level ever. ... Almost half of the public thinks the sentiment at the root of the Occupy movement generally reflects the views of most Americans. With nearly all Americans remaining fearful that the economy is stagnating or deteriorating further, two-thirds of the public said that wealth should be distributed more evenly in the country. Seven in 10 Americans think the policies of Congressional Republicans favor the rich."
Washington Post—European leaders head for financial summit with no solution in sight: "German Chancellor Angela Merkel told her parliament ahead of a key vote on Wednesday that deep changes must be made to Europe's economy if the euro is to hold together as currency. ... But underlining how many issues remain unresolved, Merkel said that she would not commit any more Germany money to supporting Europe. She called for private investors to make a 'large contribution' to ease Greece's debts. European leaders have been frustrated in their efforts to craft a response to the continent's debt crisis by Wednesday's self-imposed deadline. In Italy, meanwhile, a political stalemate in Italy over austerity measures has further diminished hopes for a quick resolution."
Inside Bay Area—Ousted protesters marching back to Frank Ogawa Plaza: "Occupy Oakland demonstrators clashed all over downtown Tuesday night with police who lobbed tear gas at least three times in futile attempts to fully disperse the more than 1,000 people who took to the streets after the early-morning raid of the movement's encampment. ...Following the predawn raid, about 500 protesters met at the main branch of the Oakland library at 4 p.m., chanting that they would 'reclaim' what they now call Oscar Grant Plaza, named for the unarmed man who was killed in 2009 by a BART police officer."
Greg Sargent at the WaPo—It's on: Republicans slam Elizabeth Warren for embracing Occupy Wall Street: "Wow, this is going to be good: Occupy Wall Street is now officially an issue in what may be the highest-profile and most polarizing Senate race in the country. National Republicans are now attacking Elizabeth Warren for embracing the protests, seeking to make a liability out of the fact that Warren, a longtime critic of Wall Street excess, has now aligned herself with the movement's intellectual underpinnings. What this means: The conservative effort to turn blue collar whites and independents against the protesters and their broader populist message—exploiting a traditional cultural fault line in our politics—will now unfold in the context of a high profile political campaign."
Richard Cohen reports that he does not find any anti-Semitism at Occupy Wall Street, but he does find "the usual zaftig young women doing the usual arrhythmic dance, somehow missing the beat of many drums." Yiiiiiiiiikes.
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to leave links in comments to good (or troubling) stuff you're reading.
We've done this one before, but it's always a fun one: What's your favorite soup?
Space Cowboy and I are both professional soup aficionados and can very nearly talk about soup for hours at a time. (Sign up for our Soupology 101 course at the Shakesville Learning Annex!) I'm not sure anything I've ever done has impressed him as much as figuring out the secret ingredient in his Favorite Chicken Soup of All Time.
(It was ketchup.)
As for my favorite soup, give me pretty much anything with "bisque" or "chowder" in the name, and I'm a happy lady.
US President Barack Obama appears on 'The Tonight Show With Jay Leno' at NBC Studios on October 25, 2011 in Burbank, California. [Getty Images]
I'm posting this for two reasons: 1. To give a heads-up to anyone who might want to see the President start working what will be his 2012 general audience election material; 2. Because I love this picture, which reflects one of the things I have always liked and admired about President Obama: He is a statesperson with an infectious grin. And if anyone believes that to be a superficial attribute of a president, I would ask you to recall living for eight years with the sneering visage of a small-minded nincompoop as the face of our nation.
Welcome to Shakesville, a progressive feminist blog about politics, culture, social justice, cute things, and all that is in between. Please note that the commenting policy and the Feminism 101 section, conveniently linked at the top of the page, are required reading before commenting.
