So Much For Posting

I started writing a BIG IMPORTANT(ish) POST about Roosevelt. But today is the day I get my bits cracked open with the jaws of life (speculum and cervix stabilizer) and I just can't concentrate long enough to get it right. I''ll think about it while I'm in the stirrups, for sure.

Actually, I am freaking the fuck out about this little gynecological adventure. Yes, I've had a baby. Yes I've had worse procedures done. But the idea of anything pain creating near my bits makes me nauseous. The plus side is, if this works- no babies, no more awful week long communist invasions. These are the good things that have kept me from just canceling the appointment altogether.

So enjoy this song by the Black Keys. Yes the video is problematic in that it does that overplayed and BORING love triangle, boys fighting shit. But I like the song. There's whistling!

Nightly-ish Song

You Can't Normalize This Shit

I know, I know. This administration has become the Adherents of the Repeated Meme

(They're from Doctor Who people! And spoilers- they turn out to be the empty suits delivering badness for the actual baddy of the episode)

Oh sure, tax cuts to get businesses to hire people. Yeah, that works., McDonald's, fucking Mickey Ds, was responsible for HALF of all the hiring done last month. Yay! Crappy minimum wage jobs. Things are looking up! Fuck that.

You can't normalize this shit. You can't put the blame on us poor jobless folks. There's a lot of us, we talk. We're kinda over the whole bootstrap shit.

I'm not even a tiny bit surprised that Obama and his crack economic team can't be assed to think about unemployed folks on the bottom. He never even hinted that he gives a flying fuck, and was the first Democratic president since FDR to NOT MENTION POVERTY ONCE in the state of the union. But just because I'm not surprised, doesn't mean I'm not angry as hell.

Now for the folks at the bottom just waking up to how bad the President is for them, lemme remind you of that when voting season hits again. They don't give a shit about us, because we're going to vote for them anyways. What other choice do we have, let the Republicans win? We are a sure thing for them. No need to even get us liquored up.

The only way we get a government that is actually less evil is by not voting for evil period. The longer it takes people to figure that one out, the longer this dark and mean period lasts.

Lupe Fiasco on Obama as the Biggest Terrorist

interviewer: What if no one voted? What would happen then?

Lupe Fiasco: I don't know. Let's try it out and see.

(FWIW, I still think we should just draw social security numbers out of a fucking hat. At least we have a chance of having a government that is actually representative of the population)

Shamelessly cribbed from Davidly

Fun With Haikus!

I posted this on Facebook

Oh second day hair!
Unwashed but not dirty
tomorrow oil slick

I'm worrying a bit about something, and can't quite concentrate well enough to form serious thoughts. So I'm writing haikus about random household shit instead. Like

Damn dirty kitchen
Cleaning is pretty damn dull
Domestic Goddess

Teenage boy funk reeks
Of hormones and promise
Buy air freshener

Care to share?

So last night

I had one of my little bouts of insomnia. They happen, less frequently since I've gotten awesome meds, but they still happen. I finally passed out about 3am while watching Dorian Grey on Netflix. I then proceed to have the most fucked up dreams, horrid nightmares of awful. I was being chased and hunted and oh just so many bad things.

This is why you shouldn't fall asleep infront of the compy, folks. At least if you are part of the non-cable class and you fall asleep in front of the tv you just dream about infomercials.

Link farming?

Lots o' blogs that I read do regular link farms. I quit doing them a few years back because it seemed like I was reading the same stuff in the same places over and over and just posting it again seemed BORING. And y'all know how I hate to be bored.

But maybe with a gazillion things in my google reader that are awesome I should be sharing the love here. Let's see how this goes and if you peeps like it, maybe I'll do it as a regular thing.

Found via Tata, this site is all about social psychology and it is ah-maz-ing.

More on France and feminists and DSK and chambermaids and protests

From McClatchy: Is high unemployment the new normal? we've been talking about this for a long time, but it's still nice to see a major wire service pick it up.

Also McClatchy: Climate change not just fucking with the price of bread, but also the price of cotton. What will us naked, starving peasants do with that. Pitchforks!

Jack Crow's Letter to Principal High Muckety Muck reminds me why I homeschool.

Sasha gives us another example of how just being poor is a criminal act.

What are you all reading, writing, or thinking about. Shameless self-promotion is always welcome. 

In which I enter another giant you tube hole thanks to Ouyangdan

Also, this is why she and I can NEVER live in the same city. You all would get daily My Drunk Kitchen videos from us.

Also, this was me a few hours ago. Shhhhhhhhhh.

Also, I have made jargaritas. And I may have a friend (or 3) who are only allowed to drink red wine out of coffee cups in my house now. You all know who you are.

Also, I am likeing this repeating also meme.

Funniest Weiner Joke Yet

Just this one then I promise to stop.

Weiner, leans long and hard to the left, but then goes soft the minute someone pushes back.

Bwahhaahaahaha.

(I've had a few drinks, sue me).

Dear Social Life

You, with your parties and your events and your "oh come and have drinks with us"ness are making it terribly difficult to be the layabout hermit type of writer.

Instead I will have to be the booze swilling social butterfly type of writer. If it worked for Dorothy Parker, well then.......

Climate Change! Now Making Bread Really Fucking Expensive!

Kansas drought forces farmers to cut crops early. 

You Are What You Read

I've been thinking about books lately. Mostly mourning all the books I've lost, but also about what books radically shook my brain and made me a better thinker and/or person.

I'm about to repeat myself for about the thousandth time, but I wanted to get these bits down into one post so next time I go searching for them, I know where they are. Thank you internet for being the back up storage for my brain.

The first was a book about torture, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture by John Conroy. I read this when we first went to war in Iraq, and when the first torture pictures started trickling out on the web (long before Abu Girab became public) I immediately recognized the 5 Acts used by the KGB (and later everyone, including us) to torture without leaving marks. Recognizing torture as an institutional and not just an individual act is one of the things I learned to do from this book. But the most important thing I took away from this was in a single little chapter at the end about the one in 50 people who will intervene instead of join in. It taught me that the smallest acct of humanizing a victim in the midst of abuse can turn the tide of the Ordinary People and stop or mitigate the abuse. But there are a thousand ways and times we can humanize a victim that don't involve the hard bright lines of torture but the everyday, common place injustice. So even if I don't have spare change for the homeless guy on the corner, I treat them kindly because you never know if my acting decently will inspire the dude behind me who does have the spare change to give it out.

You want to hear about Swedish Socialists? Of course you do! I read a biography (which I now cannot find the name of) of Tage Erlander, Sweden's first Socialist Prime Minister. A huge chunk of how I think about political economy comes from this book. But the most basic is that Business' only purpose as far as the State is concerned should be the payment of taxes. If a business cannot either pay corporate tax OR pay its employees well enough that they pay income tax, then the business is a failure in the eyes of the State and should be allowed to fail. Think about that when you hear yet another story about how some mega-corp made billions of dollars and didn't pay taxes.

I have to admit, I didn't read all of John Rawls' Theory Of Justice. But I read enough to get the Veil of Ignorance idea, and it is the most elegant way to think about social justice in any form. The idea is that in order to design a fair society, the designers (us) have to be ignorant (or imagine we are) of what position we will hold in the society of our creation. It's this idea that makes me, a non-illegal drug user, so adamant about bodily autonomy for everyone.

And then there is Elizabeth Gaskell. A little Victorian Social Justice fiction writer in the same strain as Dickens. Best known for writing the books that became BBC miniseries like Cranford and North and South, she is perhaps a bit of a proto-socialist. She wrote the most profound thing about wages that I have ever read, and I've badly paraphrased here multiple times.

I say, our labour's our capital, an we oughta draw interest on that. They get interest on their capital somehow a' this time, while ourn is lying idle, how else could they live as they do?

You should go read the rest of the page. It gets into how steeply the price of land rises.

There is, of course, always more. There's Gramsci's prison diaries and (thanks to Montag)Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. There's Frank Herbert's Dune series, which yes is problematic and the older I get the more I see that. But it gave me my first understanding of the power of empire. Which of course leads me to David Spurr's Rhetoric of Empire. I could keep going, but...

So dear readers, if you are still with me, what books rocked your melon in new and fabulous ways?

This Doesn't Count As An RQ Cooks Post

It's my end of the month, so the cupboards are a bit scanty. But I've planned well. Or so I thought. Tomatoes were on sale, so I was going to make a giant batch of pico de gallo and then make things like arroz con pollo and tortilla soup to get us through till I do the BIG grocery shopping on Wednesday. Best laid plans and all that. We took the chicken out of the freezer to thaw last night and somehow the fridge went all wonky and froze everything. So arroz con pollo waits till tomorrow.

Tonight we are having some weird casserole. Oh look, we've got left over egg noodles going mushy, the tail end of some sharp cheddar, a half a cup of leftover alfredo sauce and a single piece of olive and rosemary bread that I threw in the freezer rather than throw out. Turn that stale bread into bread crumbs, throw everything else in a casserole pan with a lot of extra spices and top with the bread crumbs. Throw in oven at 450. Wait, hope. It can't be bad with cheese sauce and noodles, really.

This Evening's Music is Provided By Joan Jett

It seems appropriate that if I am going to abuse the song title by connecting it to douchebags in tacky blue suits, I should at least post the song.

You know what is one of the best feelings ever

Shutting down apologists for the elites (of either the red or blue flavor) and their "OMG THE DEFICIT/DEBT ELEVENTY11!" argument with "No country that is fiat in their own floating currency has ever gone bankrupt. Your argument is a red herring". I MUST thank Lambert profusely for giving me that little talking point.

On that topic, did you all notice that Moody's has resumed their "We'll blackmail you with your credit rating" stance. Fuckers. As if they have any credibility.

I don't give a damn about your bad reputation

Oh look, another sex scandal to keep us all from focusing on the actual important business of the country.

You know, mostly I don't give a shit about who a (almost universally male) politician sleeps with, as long as they are above age and not a subordinate and it doesn't fuck with their job of governing. It's funny (not haha) when it's a Republifucker who's been spouting faux family values/homophobia shit, but really their sex lives aren't at all relevant to my life. Though, when a lefty fucks up, it would be nice if they didn't let their very important message hit the floor with their pants (like you John Edwards and your two Americas, and you Elliot Spitzer and Wall Street reform). And the ubiquity of these scandals, oh the fucking ubiquity.

I am tired of these over-entitled douchebags in tacky blue suits who can't seem to go without sending crotch shots or knocking up their employees in exchange for getting access to a whole fuck of a lot more power and influence than the rest of us will ever be close to. If you want to be That Guy, go work on Wall Street and snort coke off the ass of whatever young coed (male or female) wants to take your "scholarship" money in exchange for naked party time. But stay the fuck out of politics. In case you haven't noticed, we've got 4 wars going on and a huge population of broke, unemployed, hungry and homeless or about to be foreclosed on people who would like pols with a tiny bit of impulse control running our fucking country. For all the jokes they make about a woman deciding to hit the red button because of pms, I would like to flip the switch and say you tacky fuckers probably can't be trusted near the Oval Office because you might hit the button while whipping out your schlong to take a cell phone pic for HawTGRL23.

Enough is enough. Pull your damn pants up, all of you, and do some fucking work. That's what we're paying you for.

This Is How You Understand Reclamation and Intersectionality

Jay Smooth talks to white rapper Brother Ali about the "n" word.



Remember kids- the rule for language reclamation is you either have one (cunt, pussy, etc) or are one (bitch, slut, etc) or you DON'T get to use the word. Even ironically. There is no amount of social justice work, or other oppressions that you might have, that erase your privilege in another area.

(disclaimer- I don't know who Brother Ali is, but I hope in his thoughts on oppression he includes us ladies too.)

Women "wired" to Find Submission Arousing- Bwahahahahha

And then RQ fell out of her chair laughing.

Thank god I didn't have a drink when I read that. I might have needed a new laptop due to spit check. Now that I have (kinda) regained my composure, let's get serious for a minute. (Starting with the disclaimer that the plural of anecdote is not data....)

For a long time I had your standard, patriarchy-approved and socially programmed views on sex acts, though I always had a decidedly slutty view on numbers and partners. I tried the whole "oh spank me big boy" shit, etc etc. And was left wanting (or more likely, giving instructions on the proper way to position your hand). I was, at best, meh on the whole "getting fucked" aspect of fucking. Sex was good, great even, but it didn't get awesome till I discovered my innate toppy nature. Once I shrugged off all the porny "this is what a woman is supposed to want" shit and discovered that if someone is going to be doing the spanking, hair-pulling, bossing around stuff it really should be me- then sex became that existential floaty head space shit that we all imagine it's supposed to be.

So yeah, if you ask a bunch of women who have grown up in a patriarchy full of porny images where the average sex act involves female submission to the all powerful cock, then your study is going to be skewed that direction. That's not "hard-wired", that's social construction of a narrative to the benefit of the socially dominant class.

Are some women submissive? Yep. So are some men. Some people, both men and women, are a bit of both. And some people, both men and women, don't want sex at all. And some people, both men and women, like sex but are neutral on the power play shit. And some of us women have some rocking skills with a whip. I'm just sayin'.....

Keeping an Eye on Peru

Since spending 4 years saying "told ya so" regarding our own fucked up political system is boring, I'm much more interested in what other countries are doing (hello Spain, Greece, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, etc. etc. etc.) And I've had a big soft spot in my heart for Latin America since middle school Spanish classes.

Enter Peru, which just had an election Sunday and ballots are being counted.

Now my hard cynical eye is wondering, if Humala is ultimately declared the winner, is he a (not terribly)stealthy progressive who said toned it down during the election to get past the 50% post? Or is he more like Aristide, someone who started out truly progressive and won election(s) on the backs of the poor, only to become a great apologist for the wealthy elites once in office?

But hey, it's still way more interesting than the current 'Democrats suck but look over there it's a Republican they suck worse' politicking keeping us from doing anything real or important regarding fixing our broken system.

A Little Serious for a Sunday, But Let's Talk About Drugs

Drugs, the illegal kind, have been all over the news lately, from reports that The War on Drugs (or the war on some people who use drugs) has failed to reducing the discrepancy in sentencing between types of cocaine possession.

I'm gonna assume that most of y'all reading this are feminist/womanist and progressive, so when I say I believe in absolute bodily autonomy you might assume what I'm talking about is just reproductive freedom and the freedom from rape and gendered violence. But my commitment to bodily autonomy is much more than that. I believe that every single adult has the right to unrestricted liberty over their own person, and that children have damn near as much unrestricted liberty as well*. This means if you are an adult, I don't give a shit what you put in your own body. I don't care what you eat. I don't care what you drink. I don't care who you fuck (as long as enthusiastic consent is involved) or how you fuck. I don't care if you drink wine, smoke cigarettes, or shoot heroin. It's none of my business.

I do care that we are all fully informed on what we are putting in our bodies, whether it's prescription drugs and their side effects or ecoli-tainted spinach. Poisoning people, even unintentionally, for profit, is a violation of someone's bodily autonomy. Not providing someone with the full facts about things from potential drug interactions to stds is tantamount to lying. And lying removes a person's right to autonomy by altering their options for choice.

The most basic of freedoms is the right to control our own body, it every possible manner. It is not an accident that the bodies most likely to be punished for using drugs are brown (though rates of drug use are actually pretty even among different races). It's both a tool of the kyriarchy and one of those Gramscian hegemony/common sense of the elites things. It keeps certain people (women, poc, woc, lgbtqq, etc) from full freedom while positing these restrictions as "protections".

So end the war on drugs. End the illegality of drugs and the war on certain bodies. It's the most important freedom, and unfortunately it's not in our bill of rights.Changing how we think about bodies is one of the most critical acts of social justice and it turns the protectionist/charitable bullshit on it's head. Let people do to themselves what they want to do. Full stop. No ifs, ands or buts.

*regarding children, yes they absolutely deserve status as full human beings and the right to control their own bodies. But as they are children and their little neurological pathways aren't yet formed all the way, it is our job as adults to guide them towards things like eating vegetables and taking baths or needed medicine. It is also our job to punish those who would violate their autonomy via rape or abuse, specifically because children are not as equipped as adults to recognize those violations.