March 20
March 17
V for Vendetta may be--why hedge? is--the most subversive cinematic deed of the Bush-Blair era, a dagger poised in midair. Unlike the other movies dubbed “controversial” (Fahrenheit 9-11, The Passion, Munich, Syriana), it doesn’t play to a particular constituency or polarized culture bloc, it’s working on a deeper, Edger Allen Poe-ish witch’s brew substrata of pop myth. Cultural conservatives will loathe it without seeing it (they love not having to leave their houses to lament the latest installment of civilization’s decline and fall) once they hear of and read about the movie’s disturbing political parallels (a fascistic TV host with a witty resemblance to Berlusconi, fertilizer explosives a la Timothy McVeigh; torture, renditions, and subway bombings; black hoods that will be forever associated with Abu Ghraib). Yet lots of cultural liberals with educated tastes will find it anxiety-producing and irresponsible too, not only because they’re more comfortable with humanistic stories and documentary techniques than with pop spectacle (as Kael discovered whenever she praised upstart movies like DePalma’s Carrie or The Warriors and received letters from profs and Ph.D couples complaining about her soiling the New Yorker’s space on trash), but because V for Vendetta doesn’t just depict a 1984’s dystopia--it advocates radical remedy, and illustrates what it advocates with rhapsodic, operatic, orgasmic flourish. It follows the course of its own logic to its Kubrickian conclusion, but this isn’t a clinical exercise, like Kubrick at his most voyeuristically detached.
March 13
Here's a short synopsis of what I've seen:
24: They killed Edgar (you bastards!) and Tony and that hobbit guy! And 40 percent of CTU....Noooooooooooooo! ("C-Chloie? Ack!")
Sopranos: You shot fat Tony! You bastards!.... Noooooooooooooo! (They didn't show a preview of the next episode so I found spoilers on the Internets...)
Battlestar Galactica: You stole an election (you bastards etc etc), but you admitted it and then let the rightful winner take his place at the helm! Nooo---hey. Wait a minute. Guess this is a case where I prefer fantasy to reality. Best line for us vote theft theory conspiracists: "I've taken part in a lot of elections, fair and fixed, and the fixed ones never make any sense." Really? You don't say?
March 6
March 6
LONG DELAYED SON OF REVENGE OF AROUND THE INTERNETS: THE QUICKENING
It turns out, we missed more than a few of the dirty tricks Karl Rove, Ken Blackwell and their GOP used to get themselves four more years. In an election won with death by a thousand cuts, some that are still hidden go very deep. Over the next few weeks we will list them as they are verified.
One of them has just surfaced to the staggering tune of 175,000 purged voters in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), the traditional stronghold of the Ohio Democratic Party. An additional 10,000 that registered to vote there for the 2004 election were lost due to "clerical error."
As we reported more than a year ago, some 133,000 voters were purged from the registration rolls in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) and Lucas County (Toledo) between 2000 and 2004. The 105,000 from Cincinnati and 28,000 from Toledo exceeded Bush's official alleged margin of victory---just under 119,000 votes out of some 5.6 million the Republican Secretary of State. J. Kenneth Blackwell, deemed worth counting.
Exit polls flashed worldwide on CNN at 12:20 am Wednesday morning, November 3, showed John Kerry winning Ohio by 4.2% of the popular vote, probably about 250,000 votes. We believe this is an accurate reflection of what really happened here.
Wait, there's more:
Ohio election history would indicate that the elimination of 175,000 voters in heavily Democratic Cleveland must almost certainly spell doom for any state-wide Democratic campaign. These 175,000 pre-2004 election eliminations must now be added to the 105,000 from Cincinnati and the 28,000 from Toledo.
Therefore, to put it simply: at least 308,000 voters, most of them likely Democrats, were eliminated from the registration rolls prior to an election allegedly won by less than 119,000 votes, where more than 106,000 votes still remain uncounted, and where the GOP Secretary of State continues to successfully fight off a meaningful recount.
There are more than 80 other Ohio counties where additional pre-November, 2004 mass eliminations by GOP-controlled boards of elections may have occurred. Further "anomalies" in the Ohio 2004 vote count continue to surface.
In addition, it seems evident that the Democratic Party will now enter Ohio's 2006 gubernatorial and US Senate races, and its 2008 presidential contest, with close to a half-million voters having been eliminated from the registration rolls, the vast majority of them from traditional Democratic strongholds, and with serious legislative barriers having been erected against new voter registration drives.
Stay tuned.
Stay tuned for what exactly? I wish this was a show I could turn off but I can't...Horrifying.
And now for some links I can't comment more about because my undisclosed location is about to close:
Steven Barnes, one of the world's most dangerous men and prolific science fiction writer, has a new blog out. (I highly recommend his novels Lion's Blood and Charisma...)
Philly kids build incredible soybean based car. Love this quote on why Big Auto can't do what they did:
"We made this work," says Hauger. "We're not geniuses. So why aren't they doing it?"
Kosi thinks he knows why. The answer, he says, is the big oil companies.
"They're making billions upon billions of dollars," he says. "And when this car sells, that'll go down — to low billions upon billions."
Interesting Article on Self Publishing
Interesting Online Video Viewer
Very Good Robot Blog That I'll be Permalinking Soon
This is old, but this Dean Kamen idea sounds a lot better than the Segway. It looks like he's building a water purifier and a cheap energy device. Could use that here in the states by the way.
The most beautiful computer generated girls in the world...And as computing power increases they're looking better. They seem to express levels of emotion.
Nice roundup of battery advances by Worldchanging.
Rob, now that he's retired I guess, is giving Wordsmith a run as most literate, wideranging Pittsburgh blogger. Look at how vast and deep his quick links are.
March 5
Feb. 27
OCTAVIA BUTLER: I'm going to read a verse or two. And keep in mind these were written early in the 1990s. But I think they apply forever, actually. This first one, I have a character in the books who is, well, someone who is taking the country fascist and who manages to get elected President and, who oddly enough, comes from Texas. And here is one of the things that my character is inspired to write about, this sort of situation. She says:
"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery." (Ed: Reminds me of someone..)
And there's one other that I thought I should read, because I see it happening so much. I got the idea for it when I heard someone answer a political question with a political slogan. And he didn't seem to realize that he was quoting somebody. He seemed to have thought that he had a creative thought there. And I wrote this verse:
"Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see. Repetition and pride are the keys to this. To hear and to see even an obvious lie again and again and again, maybe to say it almost by reflex, and then to defend it because we have said it, and at last to embrace it because we've defended it."
AMY GOODMAN: On that note we'll have to leave it there, but we'll continue it online at Democracy Now.org. Octavia Butler.
Feb. 22
I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
-- Frederick Douglass (He Was An Escaped Slave)
"I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes-- a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Where I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me...I...hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land."
[Frederick Douglass, "After the Escape"]
"Once, in a heated controversy over the wisdom of giving the
Bible to slaves, he asserted that it would be 'infinitely
better to send them a pocket compass and a pistol.'"
[Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass]
This just in! Breakin' news on your stolen election front! Covered here first! Because the corporate media doesn't think this stolen presidential thing is all that important despite unrebuted books here, here and here....That's life in your fucked up excuse for a Democracy. So, here's the scoop from Kathy Dopp, originally covered here and only here, in the Free Press. She's pretty certain that she can prove, with this thing that they call "Math", that the votes were altered in Ohio.
In June 2005 The Election Science Institute (ESI) and pollster Mitofsky issued a paper “Ohio 2004 Exit Polls: Explaining the Discrepancy” which asserts that an exit poll error explanation “is much more likely than the fraud accusation theory to account for most, if not all, of the observed discrepancy between the exit polls and the actual results.” Precinct-level exit poll data released with ESI’s report shows that the overall average discrepancy between Ohio’s exit poll and certified vote count margins between Kerry and Bush was 11.7 percentage points. However, In October, 2005, the National Election Archive released a paper which gives counterexamples to show that the Election Science Institute’s analysis is based on an invalid premise. On January 17, 2006 the National Election Archive released its own scientific Ohio exit poll discrepancy analysis, “The Gun Is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount” . This analysis concludes that Ohio’s exit poll discrepancy pattern is consistent with outcome-altering errors in vote counts.
Two things are certain in this controversy about U.S. exit poll accuracy:
1. The Election Science Institute and the National Election Archive cannot both be correct, and
2. Any university mathematics department in America could evaluate the two conflicting studies and decide which analysis is mathematically correct.
The National Election Archive challenges every journalist interested in discovering if outcome-altering vote miscounts or exit poll error is the more probable cause of Ohio’s exit poll discrepancy; to help resolve this critical question. The answer may make the difference as to whether Americans take steps to ensure vote count accuracy in future elections or not. The National Election Archive urges the National Election Pool media consortium to accept this “math challenge” by sharing these two conflicting election studies with mathematics faculty at any university to determine which analysis is mathematically correct.
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/OH/Ohio-Exit-Polls-2004.pdf and http://electionscience.org/reports/view_reports.org
http://electionscience.org/Members/stevenhertzberg/report. 2005-07-19.7420722886/report_contents_file/
The survival of democracy and the future of our civilization may depend on taking steps to ensure the accuracy of elections. As the Election Science Institute said, “The public has a right to know exactly how elections work and to verify for themselves that the voting and the counting is done right.”
Here's an excerpt from this big solar story:
In a scientific breakthrough that has stunned the world, a team of South African scientists has developed a revolutionary new, highly efficient solar power technology that will enable homes to obtain all their electricity from the sun.
This means high electricity bills and frequent power failures could soon be a thing of the past.
The unique South African-developed solar panels will make it possible for houses to become completely self-sufficient for energy supplies.
The panels are able to generate enough energy to run stoves, geysers, lights, TVs, fridges, computers - in short all the mod-cons of the modern house.
| Nothing else comes close to the effectiveness of the SA invention |
The new technology should be available in South Africa within a year and through a special converter, energy can be fed directly into the wiring of existing houses. New powerful storage units will allow energy storage to meet demands even in winter. The panels are so efficient they can operate through a Cape Town winter. while direct sunlight is ideal for high-energy generation, other daytime light also generates energy via the panels.
One of the things that always annoyed me about the USS Clueless crowd who insisted that you could never replace delicious tasty oil is they refused to think scientists could come up with something better. We live in an age when half the world is science fictional. Of course, you could do better if you wanted to. And, now, as the rest of the world watches as the US tries to put a noose around the energy supply they're not just going to watch. They're going to do something better and smarter. Then there's the problem with the noose...Gee, I sure hope these devices are legal in the United States. Where's my copy of the Water Engine...?
By the way, I ran this by Randall Parker (see comment 22 or thereabouts) of the pro nuke not sure about global warming crowd but knowledgeable, and he wasn't able to punch holes in this story. So I'm feeling hopeful...
Feb. 16
Item: Two Good Cheney Pics, from 2 Political Junkies and Steve Gilliard respectively:
The second pic alludes to what may be the more serious scandal: Scooter Libby is squealing like those really really guilty and oddly self-incrimination prone perps in every episode I've ever seen on Law and Order: Criminal Intent. Actually, I kind of have an off opinion about the stop snitchin' trend in the black community. If its clear that the main plan they have for black citizens is imprisonment for nonviolent offenses (it certainly isn't massive investment in the public schools), then I don't have a problem with it. Its silly to keep playing by the rules when the game is stacked against you. I mean, if you're a black person who shoots another person then I'll guess I'll snitch. But if its drugs like grass or dvds, I see nothin'. I'm just like a Republican looking at all those Gitmo pics: nothing to see here move along. If there was a real black press that spoke with one voice, then Jury Nullification would be a more popular concept. And no Oprah doesn't count as the black press, or at least a conscious one.
Item: Speaking of Oprah, I see that the Boondocks characters tried to kidnap her last week. The Boondocks, while uneven, is one of the most interesting shows on television. So, of course, Al Sharpton wants to kill the show, written and conceived by one of the most interesting black writers in the country. Meanwhile, he's still silent about Soul Plane, worst movie ever...Fuckin' idiot. Personally, I don't think he's mad about the depiction of MLK (best episode so far..he even threw in an alt timeline riff.) but the line about "hustlin preachers" He should know...If you ever wanted to know what was wrong with black leadership...And watch the Boondocks...
Item: Really talented artist I discovered on the Internets...
Feb. 14
I wrote this about five years ago. It answers a question I've long had: why doesn't the Democratic Party fight for its base?
5-6-01
Months after the coup, I’m still debating the merits of the Ralph Nader presidential run. On the Ralph screwed us big time side is Katha Pollitt at the Nation and Todd Gitlin and Sean Wilentz at Dissent. On the other side supporting Saint Ralph is Mike Moore and Ellen Willis over at Dissent. (Dissent, allegedly a “left” outfit, makes it very difficult for me to link directly to the very fine Gitlin/Wilentz vs. Willis debate over there. So you have to go to the main page and search it out for yourselves.) Personally, I took a pragmatic view and voted for Gore, although I’m a huge Nader fan and in fact probably owe him my life in that I have survived a number of car crashes and breathe much better without second hand smoke.
After reading through all the briefs I have come to the conclusion that perhaps there was merit to the Nader run. Willis points out that as a leftist I’m playing a losing game that I have to watch being played in front of my horrified eyes. She makes the point that when the Republicans win, they fight relentlessly and ruthlessly for their loathsome, swinelike base. That, by the way, makes tactical sense. You want to give your base a reason to go to the polls. Where, during the long eight year reign of the DLC Clintonistas the left got nothing or we got stuff that we really didn’t want. He didn’t even do little things like fully funding public television. We got welfare reform, aspiring trillionaires and NAFTA, which might as well be called a corporation rights bill. I might add that all of these things undermine the Democratic Party base. Clinton didn’t even fight for the courts. We’ve seen where that led us. Tactically, this makes no sense. Why would you pursue policies that undermines your base? But there’s a point in the Willis argument that sheds some light on this where she states:
“Conservative Republicans hang together, stand up for their beliefs, and police the “moderates” in their ranks, while the Democrats’ every impulse is toward compromise and appeasement. If anything, their behavior suggests that they are threatened by the potential power of such mass constituencies as labor, blacks, and women, and would rather lose than risk unleashing it.”
This brings up a point that no one has thought about or at least brought up in public, but that someone should bring up: If you were a white man and you represented a party whose constituency represented parties that for better or worse believed in a future that lessens the power of the white man, would you enthusiastically support that party? Especially if it turns out that your opposition party foes are for the white man’s privilege, the whole white man’s privilege and nothing but the white man’s privilege. You might say that you’re open minded about sharing power consciously, but what about unconsciously? Maybe, secretly, you really want the other side to win.
Right now, the last remnants of the Great Society are in the hands of the 50 or so Dem senators, many of whom like Breaux and Miller seem to be Republicans in drag, in the US Senate. So far, they haven’t used the filibuster once. If the situation was reversed, the Republicans would be using their filibuster powers every, oh, four seconds or so. I can only conclude, being that they’ve totally “bought” into the Tony Coelho We Can Be Republicans To Big Money mantra, that they want the other side to win. Let’s give Bush a big tax cut. Let’s rollover on those judges. I think Willis uses the word “supine”. How appropriate. (Actually, the Dems haven’t rolled over just yet. I sure hope they get some spine…)
Yet another salient point that Willis brings up is that we’re kind of in a no-win situation. We lose slowly with Gore and quicker with Bush. And even though I agree with many of the practical points put forth by Gitlin/Wilentz everything revolves around globalization, which Gore supports. He would have been better than Bush on many issues, but economically those trade agreements undermine the union base, arguably the most powerful arm of the Dems, and everything else we stand for. Again, why do that unless you want the other side to win.
Just to add to that, I might point out that it’s the structure of the winner take all system that makes any kind of progressive change almost impossible. The lack of a progressive, left-wing media makes this difficult as well. Part of the problem revolves around the conundrum presented by the old Orwell quote: “They can’t be conscious until they’re free and they can’t be free until they’re conscious.” Likewise, we can’t have freedom until we have modern working democratic institutions, but you can’t have working democratic institutions until you have freedom. I don’t see how we win the puzzle.
Frankly, I don’t think the left will win in the United States. In fact, we might not even win on Earth. That’s why I think I’m the only leftist on Earth who is not only pro technology, but pro space exploration. Instead of playing this game on Earth, where the Casino has decided for us to lose, we should think about playing some new games here, in either artificially created nations like Sealand or offworld. My personal preference is Mars. More on this when I finally complete A Left Argument for Technology.
Feb. 9
Feb. 9
Revenge of Around the Internets
Item: Bill Boichel, a man who should be forced by some merciless Kafkaesque regime (or the United States) to blog, sent me this cool toon:
Item: Here's some animation that features the late Seth Fisher's work in Will World. Here's Seth's personal web page by the way..
Item: Evil Telcos Want To End Internets As We Know Them. Or turn Internets into that high quality commodity known as "Cable". This would screw Google, but Google can fight back, and it should, by becoming a telco themselves, or so I prays to the all powerful flying spaghetti monster (the one true God or else) in my mind...
Item: Comparison between South Africa and Israel... Related: The difference between anti-semitism and anti-zionism.
Item: I will be permalinking the science activist.
Item: I can't stop thinking about Million Dollar Baby....probably because HBO keeps rerunning it every hour or so. Here's one guy's depressing assessment of the gal's fight game. I actually disagree with him. I've seen some very skilled female fighters. They used to show female fighters every week on some off off cable channel I used to get. No more. Actually, I think women should skip boxing and go right toward mixed martial arts...which, in theory, would allow them to compete with men...
(Also was very impressed with the film Kinsey, a man who didn't just run the company but was a client.... More on that later when I have time....)
Green Lantern: Will World
Writer: J.M. DeMatteis
Artist: Seth Fisher
Price: $24.95
Publisher: DC Comics, ISBN Number: 1-56389-782-2
Now if you’re looking for a comic that’s worth 25 dollars, then I highly recommend picking up the Green Lantern graphic novel Will World.
The story involves a spectacularly surreal rite of passage that Green Lanterns (Hal Jordan here) have to go through in order to more effectively wield the power of the ring. He also recites the Alfred Bester penned Green Lantern oath at least once or twice. But the star of this show isn’t the story but the incredible pencils of Seth Fisher. The only thing I might compare it to is that New York gallery level Dr. Strange annual that P. Craig Russell drew those many years ago. There are out and out homages/thefts of Man Ray, Escher, Magritte and Dali that burst from the page, not to mention the continuous suggestive ooze of Bill Plympton's animated mutations. It features a squealing zoo of bizarre images, such as: Giant Floating Heads, tiny people, people with six arms, flying carpets, flying saucers, architecture gone mad (Indian palaces mixed in with future organic skyscrapers mixed with Chinese houses standing beside a rundown tenement building, etc.) pipe smoking gorillas, zeppelins and of course Alien Grays. It has just a small touch of Moebius dappled with the sensibility of the Beatles Yellow Submarine Cartoon. It’s the kind of thing that would make Windsor McKay fume with jealous anger. And that’s just the first splash spread on pages 8 and 9 of this 96 page epic.
Stunning stuff. Not unlike walking through a living, acid tinged dream. I mean, I don’t do drugs, but there are times when you’re reading or listening to something where you get the faint sense that you’re missing out by not being under the influence of, well, something. Every panel screams jarring and disorienting: a floating pixie here, giant levitating heads, a Joker card that features the Joker, towering 20 story clowns with lamprey-like arms, not to mention Green Lantern’s head occasionally exploding into figures of people or a great twisted swirling cacophony of alien faces and organic vinelike strands…
Highly recommended. In fact, when computer pundit Robert Cringley's predicted cheap foldable plastic displays are a reality, this is the kind of art that I’d like to upload on my walls.
(On hold) This week (or weeks) we celebrate the work V for Vendetta. Here's an explanation of the very complicated comic..
Jan. 26
Item: I guess I should be shocked that Bob Jr. backs Alito, even though as Atrios points out he really didn't have to. And I see that Fast Eddie has given me a reason to not vote for him as well. Actually, Atrios makes kind of a funny point: he would have preferred that Bob Jr. lie to him and then sell him out later in the Senate. I mean, you didn't see this coming? Of course, if the leaders of Pennsylvania's labor movement are pro life then these are good positions all around for the Powers That Be. Then there's my Crazy Conspiracy Theory that Jewish American Democrats have sold out the party for Israel. If you were Jewish, as Schumer and Rendell are, and you wanted to reward the Republicans for murdering for Israel, then rolling over on judges and supporting either a weak nominee against Santorum (or someone with very little differences with him) might be something that you would do. Of course, I'm hoping that's just a crazy conspiracy theory. My eyes and head are telling me something else.
I might also note that if the courts are ruined then I have very little reason to vote Democrat. If you guys are just going to roll over on Bork II then there's very little reason to keep working for or with you guys. I'm kind of glad ACT is out of business right now. I can't imagine registering voters for Bob Casey Jr., Christ. I might also note that half the population (or gals) will be extremely angry about being transported to 12th century Iran. And it won't just be abortion, it will be contraception as well. Those crazy fuckin' theocrats...we need science heroes and we need them now.
Item: If you're looking at the future of American Civil Liberties under Alito, then please check out this comic by Joe Sacco.
Item: Yet another note for Atrios: if you really wanted to rebel against Bob Casey Jr., then you would tell your zillions of readers to give money to Chuck Penn's candidacy. He just doesn't need a lot of money to be competitive against Casey Jr., but he needs some. Atrios could help.
Item: I’m adding Technovelgy, Truthdig and Steve Gilliard to the links and plan a full link overhaul when I get some time.
