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Nordic Crack [10 Dec 2009|09:33pm] [ mood | tired ] [ music | Michael Franti, M.I.A., and Lemon Jelly ] The Koran, according to writer haifa_zangana, forbids the killing of trees, which makes me wonder how the Fox "News" drones explain the fact that the "Muslim Marxist" President is keeping up the tradition of putting a Christmas tree in front of the White House--a real tree, a slaughtered tree. I'm kidding. I don't expect the Fox "News" drones to have that much knowledge about the Koran. And, of course, the fact that Obama attended a beer summit a few months back didn't seem to cause them much cognitive dissonance (nor does the unveiled First Lady*)--but maybe they were too busy being bothered by the fact that Sgt. James Crowley couldn't arrest Obama as well. Anyway, I'm not even sure why I'm rambling on this topic. I was actually planning to sit down and write something about the contradiction of people who look at multi-term Latin American leaders like Hugo Chávez as despotic--and speak of their multiple terms as the most damning single criterion that qualifies them as despots--but seem to lack even the slightest concern over the nearly limitless power of the "immortal collectivist persons" (Chomsky's words) called corporations. But I'm running out of mental steam at the end of the day, so maybe that's why I unconsciously chose the former topic. I've been reading Michael Parenti's Dirty Truths, and Parenti's thoughts on corporate power often become springboards for my own; but unlike his, mine don't often turn into anything coherent. ( For lack of a better conclusion to this entry, below is a comprehensive list of the books I read this year. ) post comment

quondam physics [06 Dec 2009|10:57pm] [ mood | good ] [ music | Lemon Jelly, M.I.A., and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club ] Below is a list of the last 20 books I finished reading. 1. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang 2. Letters from Lexington: Reflections on Propaganda by Noam Chomsky 3. World Orders Old and New by Noam Chomsky 4. This Is Nicotine by Karen Farrington 5. Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players by Stefan Fatsis 6. Breaking the Sound Barrier by Amy Goodman 7. Korea: Division, Reunification, and U.S. Foreign Policy by Martin Hart-Landsberg 8. American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by Chris Hedges 9. The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan by dahr_jamail 10. No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs by naomi_klein 11. The Winona LaDuke Reader: A Collection of Essential Writings by Winona LaDuke 12. The Gods Hate Kansas by Joseph Millard 13. A New Human: The Startling Discovery and Strange Story of the "Hobbits" of Flores, Indonesia by Mike Morwood and Penny van Oosterzee 14. The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome by Michael Parenti 15. The Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms Race by Michael Parenti 16. Behind the Invasion of Iraq by the Research Unit for Political Economy 17. Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers by Arundhati Roy 18. The American Presidency by Gore Vidal 19. University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education by Jennifer Washburn 20. Howard Zinn on War by Howard Zinn 2 comments|post comment

Evian flu [30 Nov 2009|04:38pm] [ mood | okay ] [ music | Gomez, Rae & Christian, and Lemon Jelly ] "U.S. commentators and government officials frequently warn of the dangers posed to the people of northeast Asia by North Korean militarism, in particular the alleged North Korean nuclear threat. But significantly, they generally omit that the United States introduced the nuclear threat to the peninsula when it threatened to use nuclear weapons against North Korea and China during the Korean War. Nor do they mention that it was the United States, in violation of the terms of the Korean War armistice, which first introduced nuclear weapons onto the Korean peninsula in 1957. And none mention that the United States regularized the nuclear threat when it began annual war games in South Korea in 1976. Moreover, they fail to call attention to the fact that it is the North, and no the United States, which consistently seeks to negotiate a peace treaty to bring the Korean War to a formal conclusion." --Martin Hart-Landsberg, Korea: Division, Reunification, and U.S. Foreign Policy "The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning." --Harold Pinter, "Art, Truth and Politics" (Nobel Prize acceptance speech) "The United States has the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world. It's the only country in the world to have actually used them on civilian populations." --Arundhati Roy, "Come September" 2 comments|post comment

Stove Slop Stuffing [25 Nov 2009|11:39pm] [ mood | good ] [ music | KRS-One, Paris, and Public Enemy ] clockworkalien lent me his copy of Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players by sports writer Stefan Fatsis. The first 100 or so pages only seemed mildly interesting to me, but now that I'm further into it, I'm about as hooked on the book as I am on Scrabble itself. Fatsis' character sketches of the players he met while he was submerging himself in the culture of competitive Scrabble are priceless. I saw a little bit of myself in Marlon Hill, a long-time living-room player who made an impressive debut in the competitive circuit. Marlon is a critic of Western society who harbors a lot of anger at the world around him, but who is rarely anything but amiable to the individuals who populate that world. Then there's Lester Schonbrun, a Communist who easily sums up the guilty pleasure of playing a Hasbro-owned board game: "Hasbro didn't even invent [Scrabble]. They bought it. They got rich off of producing it. It is an example of one of the absurdities the capitalist system creates." (The out-of-work architect who created the game that eventually evolved into Scrabble, Alfred Mosher Butts, did leave a modest inheritance to his family, but hardly a significant part of the many millions Hasbro and prior rights owners have made from the game.) I think a person could write a book on the politics of Scrabble. (Fatsis' book doesn't avoid the topic, but it's definitely not devoted to the topic; politics simply fall under the umbrella of Everything Scrabble.) There's the way the popularity of English-language Scrabble--even in nations where English is a second language and the first language has its own version of Scrabble--reflects the legacy of colonialism and the cultural imperialism of the English-speaking world. There's the separatism of North American Scrabble and British Scrabble from each other and from the international competitive circuit (which allows both British and American words and spellings). It goes on from there. Politics have been in the world of modern board games from the beginning. The first modern board game, according to Fatsis, was essentially nothing more than a propaganda piece in the class war: Playing cards had been made in America since colonial times, but board games didn't emerge until the middle of the nineteenth century. Leading the field was W. & S. B. Ives of Salem, Massachusetts, which in 1843 introduced the Mansion of Happiness, in which landing on a space denoted as a virtue (Piety, Honesty, Temperance, Gratitude, Prudence, Truth, Chastity, Sincerity, Humility, Industry, Charity, Humanity, or Generosity) advanced one toward the Mansion of Happiness, while landing on a vice (Audacity, Cruelty, Immodesty, or Ingratitude) sent one back toward the start. Sure, the wealthy became prosperous through virtue. Also, I have a pet unicorn and know Santa Claus personally. 12 comments|post comment

Your imam goes to college. [16 Nov 2009|01:13pm] [ mood | good ] [ music | M.I.A., Liz Phair, and Brian Jonestown Massacre ] Late last year, I commented briefly on the way class or political conflicts masquerade as religious conflicts. An addendum to what I wrote could be the way class differences manifest themselves as religious differences--and tensions between religious groups--in India. As economist Ha-Joon Chang put it, "we could say that, unlike many other cultures, Muslim culture does not have a fixed social hierarchy (which is why many low caste Hindus have converted to Islam in South Asia)" (emphasis his). Chang's book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism was the most recent book I finished reading. It's not easy making economics interesting and easy to comprehend for the lay reader, but he managed to pull it off, for the most part. I think the subtitle was a bad choice, suggesting the book would be little more than polemics and hyperbole, but he actually comes across as a thoughtful and careful writer. Before Bad Samaritans, I finished a book by the Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE, presumably pronounced like the Indian currency, since it's an Indian organization), Behind the Invasion of Iraq, which got a two-sentence, one-star review from one Amazon.com customer, under the nice little header "Blame America First": "Typical. Is there a Mad Magazine formula for this stuff?" I like that phrase, blame America first, because it really shows how vacuous the minds of some conservative critics can be. Why wait until the debate gets ugly? ( Just launch into your ad hominem attack by insinuating that progressives are just forming knee-jerk opinions, failing to actually think about the facts at hand. ) 5 comments|post comment

Big Brother is washing you. [01 Nov 2009|07:20pm] [ mood | good ] [ music | KRS-One, Mr. Scruff, and The Dandy Warhols ] "Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. Instead of all the workers being leveled down to low wage standards and all the rich leveled up to fashionable income standards, everybody under a system of equal incomes would find her and his own natural level. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people; but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income...and the really great in favor of equality." --George Bernard Shaw Shaw's observation, however true, could be a springboard for similar observations. As he puts it, those who lack gifts of character and intellect will cherish and defend their material gifts. The materially rich who have scant resources of "small minds and mean characters" will want an environment where it's safe for them to grow in net worth. ( Conversely, the people of strong character and sharp minds who don't have much in the bank won't be as concerned with protecting wealth they don't even have, but they will want an environment where it's safe for them to grow as humans. ) post comment

Where the Wild Flings Are [22 Oct 2009|09:54am] [ mood | awake ] [ music | Gomez, Milk Cult, and Public Enemy ] Last weekend I watched Ghostbusters with locakitty and speranzosa. I'm not sure if it was the first time I ever watched it or not.  If I've seen it before, I don't remember it--but I definitely knew the premise of the movie (who hasn't heard of it?).  The only thing that surprised me was the movie's barely veiled conservatism.  Three researchers at a university lose their funding for the time- and money-wasting research they're doing.  As they contemplate what to do next, one of them warns about working in the private sector: unlike the university that afforded them cozy, unproductive jobs, the private sector expects results! Despite the initial hesitation, they decide the private sector is exactly where they should take their work.  They start a business and suddenly become community heroes.  All is well until someone from the EPA comes along and ruins things by demanding that they shut down the power to the containment system for the ghosts they've busted.  Their technology was produced and put into use without any government regulation; its hazards were assumed rather than substantiated. Lacking much subtlety, I suspected a lot of other people have also noticed the movie's conservative slant. Sure enough, I searched the Internet a few days later and found it on a list of the best conservative movies of the last 25 years, compiled by the right-wing National Review. I guess it started with the right ingredients for a conservative movie: scary things and white men who save the day. It's an entertaining movie nonetheless. I wish I had something more interesting to write about. My contentment is good, but it produces very little that's worthy of mention. 13 comments|post comment

Batman and Christopher Robin [04 Oct 2009|10:14pm] [ music | Spindrift, Hive, and Mos Def ] I went to see Capitalism: A Love Story this afternoon. I asked locakitty and clockworkalien if they wanted to see it, too, but they weren't interested in seeing it today. So I went by myself. I suppose I could have waited for a day when I had company available, but I decided to heed an appeal from Michael Moore that appeared in my inbox: go see it this weekend; a strong first weekend will send Wall Street and Congress a clear message. Sure, I could just think of it as Michael Moore's way of promoting his film. I could also be a cynic and say that even if hordes of people went and saw it this weekend--and were moved by it--it doesn't mean they'll actually do anything to change things afterward. Instead of overthinking things, I just decided to go see it. I was thinking of another appeal from Moore (in the same message): "If we do well this weekend, the studio will expand the film to smaller towns next week." Having lived in small towns most of my life, I know how sorely needed dissent is in many of them. I can't decide if I agree with the critics who think this is Moore's best film so far. When the movie ended, I didn't feel as if the story was finished. I think Moore was just scratching the surface in a lot of ways. I won't go into details--well, maybe I will later, if I have time and feel like it. I guess the other reason this movie disappointed me a little bit was that Michael Moore proved, as he often does, to be simultaneously gutsy and chickenshit. Moore can't express anything that sounds very far to the left without giving it some feelgood, patriotic packaging. This time he did that and also added religious appeals--as if, after seeing people lose their homes, after seeing people sleeping in the streets, after seeing laborers denied their pay, you need a priest's or bishop's input to know for sure that there's something immoral about this system. In addition to the patriotic and religious packaging, the more lefty the message from Moore, the more indirectly stated it will be. Missing from his narration was any explicit suggestion that socialism might be a better idea than capitalism. Instead, you get a poll that shows socialism's surprising popularity, despite all of the fear-mongering and misinformation about socialism in the U.S. You also get a little bit of Bernie Sanders and some other stuff. I guess that's better than nothing. I guess I'm just impatiently waiting for someone who's a household name to say (and be heard) that socialism, too, is a mainstream idea. We truly live in an indoctrinated society when an ideology that is friendly to the wealthiest two percent of us is considered entirely mainstream, while an ideology that is friendly to the other 98 percent of us is fringe, something that no normal person openly supports. 10 comments|post comment

the opiate of the asses [22 Sep 2009|09:38pm] [ mood | full ] [ music | M.I.A., Eels, and Public Enemy ] Sure, my work is in smoking cessation, and I'm well aware of how our media affect health literacy, but I had to roll my eyes when I read that some people were bothered by Wolverine's cigar-chomping in X-Men Origins: Wolverine--enough so that Fox graciously agreed to include anti-smoking PSAs on the DVD. If Wolverine has superhuman healing, I think it follows that he doesn't have to worry much about emphysema, lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart disease, or any other adverse consequence of smoking. He can survive multiple wars and have his skeleton coated with a molten alloy. I don't think very many people who watch the movie are going to be convinced that they can get away with the same abuses to their own bodies. I'd like to poll people who have seen the movie to find out how many of them are interested in testing whether or not they can survive having a truckload of timber fall on them, or survive being shot in the head at close range with a bullet. Of course, I have my biases. I loved comic books before I ever loved health promotion. There are two books and one movie slated for release next month that are making me very impatient for next month's arrival: Amy Goodman's Breaking the Sound Barrier; Arundhati Roy's Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers; and Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story. On top of that, I think I'll get to hang out with speranzosa for the first time since June. 11 comments|post comment

Snot of This Earth [08 Sep 2009|09:01pm] [ music | Solex, M.I.A., and Mr. Scruff ] Guns, Germs, and Steel contains an anecdote about QWERTY keyboards, of all things (also bestiality, another surprising inclusion). Jared Diamond, as a way of illustrating that not all people decide to adopt the smartest technology available to them. The QWERTY keyboard is an example. It was designed for inefficient typing. Typewriters, when they were first manufactured, couldn't pound letters onto paper very quickly without getting jammed parts, so the first--and more user-friendly--keyboard layout was scrapped immediately. In the original layout, the most commonly used letters were in reach of the strongest and most coordinated fingers, which enabled operators to type quickly--at a speed faster than the typewriter could function. The QWERTY replaced the original layout so that typing would be a clumsier, slower task. Later, of course, typewriters were perfected, so the QWERTY was no longer a necessary evil; it was an evil that had outlived its necessity. But too many people, like business teachers and office workers, had invested their time and money to be trained on the QWERTY system. It stayed, unfortunately. I wonder what the impact would be if we switched now. I don't know enough about economics to judge whether it would be well timed or badly timed during an economic slump. Maybe the creation of a new "need" would create new jobs. I don't know. I also wonder how much better off we'd be now if the switch had been made long ago. Now I cringe at the thought of switching, imagining landfills accumulating obscene amounts of discarded keyboards, while resources and energy get sucked into manufacturing new ones. But if the switch had been made a long time ago--perhaps when people were switching from typewriters to computers anyway (and thus not adding much more to the waste stream than that switch, by itself, added)--I'd guess many of us would be using slightly less electricity today. It would take slightly less time on the computer to type our essays, articles, assignments--whatever the hell we have to type--and thus we'd have the lights on for less time (maybe). We might have also saved ourselves some waste from communication errors. I'm guessing the more user-friendly keyboard layout would have resulted in fewer mistyped orders, things of that nature. On a related note, I think the next time I have to buy a new keyboard, I'm going to buy one with the ten-key pad on the left instead of the right. Having them on the right side is stupid if you're right-handed. It puts too much stuff at the right side of your home row: (1) your Insert, Home, Delete, and other keys; (2) your ten-key pad; and (3) your mouse. If you're like me and have a small desk at home, it means you have to turn your body slightly to the left to type, all because of how your keyboard fits next to your mouse pad on your little keyboard tray. 13 comments|post comment

Earl E. Riser [07 Sep 2009|10:55pm] [ mood | good ] [ music | M.I.A., Lemon Jelly, and Forest for the Trees ] Lo que he leído más recientemente está más abajo. 1. Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq by Tariq Ali 2. The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan 3. American Power and the New Mandarins by Noam Chomsky 4. Terrorizing the Neighborhood: American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era by Noam Chomsky 5. The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature by Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault 6. Not One More Death by Brian Eno, John le Carré, Harold Pinter, Richard Dawkins, haifa_zangana, and Michael Faber 7. On Empire: America, War, and Global Supremacy by Eric Hobsbawm 8. Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran by Fatemeh Keshavarz 9. Smoking: The Artificial Passion by David Krogh 10. You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America by John R. MacArthur 11. To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton 12. Song for Uncle Tom, Tonto, and Mr. Moto: Poetry and Identity by David Mura 13. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi 14. Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader by Michael Parenti 15. Crackpot or Genius?: A Complete Guide to the Uncommon Art of Inventing by Francis D. Reynolds 16. The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media: Decoding Spin and Lies in the Mainstream News by Norman Solomon 17. Climate Change by Shelley Tanaka 18. Cigarette Wars: The Triumph of "The Little White Slaver" by Cassandra Tate 19. Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson by Gore Vidal 20. A Power Governments Cannot Suppress by Howard Zinn 2 comments|post comment

The Philadelphia Cream Cheese Experiment [24 Aug 2009|08:20pm] [ mood | tired ] [ music | Dj Rashed, Liz Phair, and The Dandy Warhols ] "So you have big cover stories in The Nation about 'The End of Socialism,' and you have socialists who all their lives considered themselves anti-Stalinist saying, 'Yes, it's true, socialism has lost because [the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics] failed.' I mean, even to raise questions about this is something you're not supposed to do in our culture, but let's try it. Suppose you ask a simple question: namely, why...people like the editors at The Nation say that 'socialism' failed [but] don't...say that 'democracy' failed?--and the proof that 'democracy' failed is, look what happened to Eastern Europe. After all, those countries called themselves 'democratic'--in fact, they called themselves 'People's Democracies,' real advanced forms of democracy. So why don't we conclude that 'democracy' failed, not just that 'socialism' failed? Well, I haven't seen any articles saying, 'Look, democracy failed, let's forget about democracy.' And it's obvious why: the fact that they called themselves democratic doesn't mean that they were democratic." --Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky There's no shortage of stupid arguments against socialism in the United States, but the worst one I've heard (so far) is that because "Nazi" was short for "National Socialist," that's proof enough of how evil socialism is. ( The only hard part about rebutting this one is deciding where to start. ) Having said that, I should probably face the fact that I'm too tired tonight to write anything but crap on this topic. But I acquired a partially punched book club card from Revolutionary Grounds, Tucson's Marxist coffee house and bookstore, so I'll no doubt be waxing socialist again soon. I have no idea how many more punches the card needs to be redeemable for a free (or discounted?) book; the card doesn't say, and there's no graphic indicator, like boxes, to clue me in. For now I should just worry about laundry. 10 comments|post comment

Happy Birthday, Tucson! [21 Aug 2009|09:11pm] [ mood | good ] [ music | Blue Scholars, Mos Def, and Public Enemy ] "I don't want to say that war is the same as football. But, the same spirit and ideology that football glorifies is also the spirit necessary for a successful military endeavor." --Steve Sabol, co-founder of NFL Films, quoted in Michael Parenti, America Besieged "You know, I remember in high school, already I was pretty old.  I suddenly asked myself at one point, why do I care if my high school team wins the football game?  I mean, I don't know anybody on the team, you know?  I mean, they have nothing to do with me....[I]t doesn't make sense.  But the point is, it does make sense: it's a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority, and group cohesion behind leadership elements--in fact, it's training in irrational jingoism.  That's also a feature of competitive sports. I think if you look closely at these things...they do have functions, and that's why energy is devoted to supporting them and creating a basis for them and advertisers are willing to pay for them and so on." --Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992) A little over a year ago, I found out about a book called Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports by Dave Zirin. I was convinced that it was the only book about sports that I could ever bring myself to read. ( Simply put, I hate professional sports. ) 7 comments|post comment

a gyro's welcome [16 Aug 2009|09:40am] [ mood | awake ] [ music | Lily Allen, Mr. Scruff, and Cut Chemist ] "What made early branding efforts different from more straightforward salesmanship was that the market was now being flooded with uniform mass-produced products that were virtually indistinguishable from one another. Competitive branding became a necessity of the machine age--within a context of manufactured sameness, image-based difference had to be managed along with the product." --naomi_klein, No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs No Logo is one of several books I've been reading off and on lately. While reading it a few days ago I started to wonder if branding--described by Klein as image management directed at consumers--has also, perhaps secondarily, been directed at employees of the brands themselves and the companies selling those brands. I think I had read the first 100 pages of No Logo when I last put it aside, so the answer still awaits. What sparked the thought was that while companies see a need to make products more meaningful to consumers, surely some of them must also see the need to make their products more meaningful to the people distributing and selling them (and, in some cases, manufacturing them, although No Logo does discuss the growing trend of outsourcing manufacturing, making it wholly inapplicable). Many critics of capitalism have talked about labor's alienation from the product of its toil--often echoing The Communist Manifesto: Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. What The Communist Manifesto says of manufacturing products could just as easily apply to distributing or selling those same products. What are those products to the truck driver other than bulk to load and unload? ( What are those products to the underpaid sales associate other than units to stock, show to customers, and ring up? ) 8 comments|post comment

Guitar Gyro [08 Aug 2009|12:52pm] [ mood | awake ] [ music | CSS, Mos Def, and Soulsavers ] I happened to be flipping mindlessly through a copy of Wired a few days ago (since I had nothing else to flip through mindlessly), when I came across this horrible print ad, picturing a little girl in her room in the top panel and a bunch of guys in some high-tech workplace in the lower panel. It was an advertisement for a computer technology company. I can't remember which one. Their message was that her clean room wasn't the same as their clean room; their clean room was the place where meticulous work was put into making the very best technology, untainted by slop or carelessness--not merely a room where the bed is made and the collection of toy ponies is neatly organized on a shelf. What bothered me was that they made the ad unnecessarily gendered. The girl's room was almost entirely pink, and the men in the lower panel (all men, as far as I could tell) were not only wearing blue lab outfits but also surrounded by various hues of blue in their lab. The ad was color-coded by gender and associated femininity with childlike simplicity, masculinity with technological sophistication. But I suppose the ad wasn't quite as bigoted as the "joke" T-shirts, until recently being sold by a merchant in Iowa, that featured messages like "My Indian name is 'Crawling Drunk'" or "My Indian name is 'Drinks Like Fish.'" 5 comments|post comment

NYPD Loo [26 Jul 2009|07:35pm] [ mood | amused ] [ music | Forest for the Trees, Blue Scholars, and Mr. Scruff ] I really like it when people show their stupidity while thinking they're the ones with the smarts. A week or two ago I checked out the book You Can't Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America by John R. MacArthur. Not very far into the book, there's a paragraph stating that with the exception of Kennedy, we'd never had a president who wasn't a white protestant. Some genius who had checked out the book before me wrote in the margin, "Black Protestant? Muslim?" Apparently this other reader thought the author had somehow missed the very historically significant election of Barack Obama (who is as much a Muslim as he is a socialist--but that's not going to stop idiots from calling him a Muslim and/or a socialist). What amazes me is this person took the time to find a pencil and write a note in the margin but couldn't be bothered to find the copyright page and see that the book was published last year--before the inauguration of our second exception to the rule about white Protestant presidents. But if it was too much trouble to look for that copyright page, the person could have looked at the spine and read "2008" beneath the call number. It surprises me that this person thought any writer who is competent enough to get a book published would just somehow miss that that Obama is our president--and that any major publishing house would have such idiot editors that they would let such an oversight go uncorrected. I erased the note, sparing the next lenders the need to roll their eyes or let out a sigh. ( I also had the joy this weekend of joining a thread on Facebook about Obama's health care reform. ) post comment

Reading Azar Nafisi in Tucson [24 Jul 2009|10:17am] [ mood | good ] [ music | Lily Allen, Gomez, and Public Enemy ] I finished reading Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran this morning. It's strange to me that of all of the recent memoirs about life in Iran, this one became, as far as I can tell, the most famous one. I think before this book, I had read six such memoirs (if the graphic novel Persepolis can be included), plus the anthology My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes: Uncensored Iranian Voices. Azar Nafisi's book is entertaining, but no more than the others--and less so than a few of them. ( A book about people reading books is about as entertaining as a movie about people watching movies. ) To be fair, I started off on the wrong foot with this book. Had I read it before knowing much about it, I might have enjoyed it more. But somewhere (I think in Targeting Iran) I had read that the neocon camp in the U.S. had been praising the book for exposing the evils of Iran, part of the trio they cleverly named the Axis of Evil. Other recent memoirs about Iran (at least the ones I've read) have done the same thing, but the others were perhaps too nuanced or put some of the Iranian government's oppression into context too well. The others failed to resonate with conservatives the way Nafisi's book did. Perhaps what really tickled the conservatives was Nafisi's love for Western literature. It must have flattered them to think how much better the West is, politically as well as culturally. The book also doesn't hold much hope for reform, for change from within, unlike a few of the other memoirs I've read (especially Lipstick Jihad and Iran Awakening), so it further strokes the egos of American conservatives by making them think that the U.S. is Iran's only hope (and, by gosh, that's good news for defense contractors!). At one point Nafisi completely dismisses the concept of Islamic feminism. I don't know enough about Islam to debate that intelligently, but my hunch is that both the Koran and the Bible could be used to justify almost anything. The latter has justified both slavery and the abolition movement, for example. One wonders if Nafisi would just as quickly dismiss the concepts of Christian or Jewish feminism. What's fascinating is not the book itself, but its success. 10 comments|post comment

crap and trade [22 Jul 2009|09:31am] [ mood | curious ] [ music | Blue Scholars, Lemon Jelly, and The Mission Creeps ] It's still early in the day, but the most interesting thing I've read so far was an article about the Israeli foreign ministry's efforts to fill the comment sections of online news sites with pro-Israel propaganda. They're doing this by "establishing a special undercover team of paid workers whose job it will be to surf the internet 24 hours a day spreading positive news about Israel." So far about $150,000 in funds has been committed to the effort, with plans for increased funding in the near future. According to a spokesperson for the operation, the undercover team "will speak as net-surfers and as citizens, and will write responses that will look personal but will be based on a prepared list of messages that the foreign ministry developed." ( I've often wondered, while reading the comments on some news stories, if this sort of thing happens. ) I'm going to guess a lot of this is just the amazing power of conformity among people who are reading the same right-wing blogs and "news" sites, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out that what the Israeli foreign ministry is doing is nothing new and nothing unique. 1 comment|post comment

Harry Potter and the Odor of the Phoenix [14 Jul 2009|08:01am] [ mood | awake ] [ music | Gomez, Public Enemy, and The Dandy Warhols ] I found out the comic book sale will be on August 15--just a one-day sale. Hopefully I'll be employed again by then, so I can feel free to spend money there. I can't think of anything else noteworthy to report right now, except that I have another interview later this morning. Being unemployed has given me plenty of time to read. ( Below are the 20 books I've read most recently. ) 4 comments|post comment

Tour de Franz [12 Jul 2009|09:40pm] [ mood | pissed off ] [ music | The Dandy Warhols, Hamsa Lila, and Common Market ] I think I've mentioned in here before something I read in one of greg_palast's books about the lower wages Walmart was once paying at its locations near reservations. But profiting from Native shoppers and giving nothing back in return isn't enough. Now there's a Native American historical site being destroyed for the sake of a new Sam's Club. It's in Oxford, Alabama. The site is a stone mound built 1,500 years ago, possibly used as a burial site. For developers, it looks like a convenient source of fill dirt. These corporate scumbags at Walmart and Sam's Club rake in shitloads of money from Native American shoppers. I was once told the Walmart location in Pinetop-Lakeside is jokingly referred to as "Apache Heaven" because of how many Apache shoppers frequent the place. I've been to two other locations near Native American communities, and the story was pretty much the same. I hope this new Sam's Club burns to the ground (but not with anyone in it). 7 comments|post comment

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