MNF

The country music synopsis of the weekend's football action set to "I Like It, I Love It, I Want Some More Of It" could be the most flawless musical turd ever sqeeezed out of America's collective cultural ass. It's so terrible, so painful, so laughably bad that there's nothing left but to admire it, like a perfectly formed, gently floating shitlog of a rich and even hue. Thankfully continuing the metaphor, each week's iteration of the "Nashville Update" spirals away into oblivion as each week of football news becomes old and stale. That is, at least you don't have to hear it more than once. There are probably people who actually enjoy listening to some session vocalist belt out this crap, but then again, some people like the Cleveland Steamer too.

Rape And Shame

Here's a great article about what I believe to be the single most important aspect of the fight against rape. After a physical sexual assualt, a survivor is then the victim of a second rape, a spiritual and emotional assault as society attempts to force upon them shame for the crime. If we are ever to completely stamp out the "it wasn't her fault, but..." baggage that nearly always accompanies sex crimes, survivors of sexual assault are asked to be courageous enough to pass one more test of their will. They must catagorically and unapologetically refuse to feel any shame. This refusal requires tremendous strength and may be too much for some emotionally exhausted survivors, but every woman and man who is able to speak openly and honestly about sexual assualt speeds the corrosion of the existing cultural mechanisms that protect rapists from reprisals. Any progress at all on this front must be enthusiastically supported.

Hat Tip: TheaLogie

Sopranos 'N Tha 'Hood

Looks like the Gottis might have been the ones that shot 50 Cent back in 2000. I half expect smoke to start coming out of the ears of all the racists out there who like to put black gangsta thugs in the "evil incarnate" box and white mafia killers in the "dangerously cool" box. Admiring the ass-kicking goomba-ness of the Sopranos while simultaneously recoiling in disgust at the behaviour of "violent rappers" is about as racist as it gets.

UPDATE: Picture of Irv Gotti is below. Clearly not Italian. I, however, am clearly a dork. My point is still valid though.

UPDATE 2: Having picture problems...

Echidne

If posting's been a little light over here at Shape Of The Universe, it's because lately most of my mental energy has been going into commenting on this post on Echidne of the Snakes, fellow LC member and one of my all time favorite blogs.

Check it out.

Sunday Random 12

1. Strangelove (Depeche Mode, Music For The Masses)


2. Plateau (Nirvana, Unplugged In New York)


3. Bukowski (Modest Mouse, Good News For People Who Like Bad News)


4. Breadcrumb Trail (Slint, Spiderland)


5. Message In A Bottle (The Police, Regatta De Blanc)


6. Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell (The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots)


7. Prototype (OutKast, The Love Below)


8. Subway Train (New York Dolls, New York Dolls)


9. Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses (U2, Achtung Baby)


10. Rose Rouge (St. Germain, Tourist)


11. Time For Livin' (The Beastie Boys, Check Your Head)


12. I Can't Quit You Baby (Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin)

A lot of solid records on this twelve.

War On TV

The armor-piercing Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake posts about a whole new level of wartime journalism. What's that, you say? Well, instead of the journalists taking pictures of bombs falling all around them, they get to take pictures of bombs streaking directly towards them!!! What fun!

Al-Qaida supposedly hates all freedom. Good thing our president limits his hatred to freedom of the press. Perhaps that's a bit over the top, but seriously here. If we take the president at his word and, his inability to execute said word into action notwithstanding, buy into the idea that we are "democratizing" not just Iraq, but indeed the ENTIRE MIDDLE EAST, don't you think that, at the very least, tolerating institutions like al-Jazeera would be towards the top of the to-do list? Even if they are an organization that mainly produces propaganda, doesn't this still apply? In a free and democratic country, one is free to produce propaganda, right? How else to explain Fox News? One might go so far as to say that to stay true to the democratization program, we would be committed even to defending al-Jazeera from attack. Perhaps even host some of their reporters in our battalions. Then, if they did anything stupid like give away troop positions, we could have them arrested. That way, we could weed out all the agenda-driven reporters, if any. Why didn't we think of this earlier?!?!

But no, easier to just fire a missle and shut them up. Just more evidence that however simple Bush tries to make this, his policies toward Iraq are incoherent.

The Vatican

Pope Benedict, sporting a 1982 San Diego Padres jersey to symbolize his "throw-back" policy on gays, has made public his approval of a policy banning "practising homosexuals" from the priesthood. Excuse me here, but what the heck is a practising homosexual? Is that like when you accidentally walk into the wrong hotel room and there are people actually practising homosexuality right there on the queen size bed spread? Would those guys be the practising homosexuals they're talking about? And couldn't you say the same thing about heterosexuals? "Ahem, yes, an announcement please. Tap, tap, is this thing on? OK. Carrying on now, if you are actually having sex with a woman at the very moment you apply to the seminary, we will be unable to consider you for acceptance. Thank you." Maybe there was a reason behind this document other than needlessly alienating a group of people who already shoulder more than their fair share of scorn, but if there was, I'm not picking up on it.

The Vatican’s directions on homosexuality do not affect those who are already ordained.

Oh really? Why don't we ask them, just to make sure. You can't play all nice with people, tell them what kindhearted people they are, broadcast to everyone that you have gay friends too, and then turn around and sign on with those who say that homosexuality is a defective condition just south of graverobbing on the morality scale. Lying under oath is a mortal sin too, in case anyone remembered. You don't see any documents being circulated stating that anyone who is a practising liar under oather Need Not Apply. It's time the Vatican get it through their thick skulls that the priest abuse scandal happened not because of "gayness in the ranks," but because cowardly, selfish, conceited men allowed it to continue for literally decades. I'd like to see the flipping document on that.

O-Ring

Isn't every ring an "O"? And when I say every ring, I mean every ring that has ever existed.

TOP 5 MOVIES THAT ARE SO BAD THEY'RE GOOD

1. Con Air


2. Dumb And Dumber


3. Army Of Darkness


4. The Three Amigos


5. Notting Hill

TOP 5 MOVIES THAT I HATE

1. Titanic


2. Seabicuit


3. Gangs Of New York


4. The Godfather Part III


5. Sleepless In Seattle

And no movie hate list would be complete without mentioning how much I loathe Matthew McConaughey.

Poem

Alone in mourning, sorry for myself
Tender, calculated words are presented to me
Like smooth flat stones on a beach
Nice, harmless
I feel no anger towards a rehearsed speech
I rehearsed one myself this morning as I put on my black bow tie
Short, definite, with a period at the end
I will utter it today and other days no doubt
People will walk by me and be sorry
As I am
I will have to say something
As will they
What else can one expect?
What else is one supposed to say?
There’s nothing except the words
When you want and don’t want the exact same thing
Stow it away until you can be sure?
The smooth flat stones
I remember stepping on them
When I walked in wet bare feet around the beach house
Built on ancient wooden stilts driven into the dunes
I must have
They covered the beach
We never could skip them because the water was too rocky
It was a laugh we had
Too sharp and rocky for smooth stones
But there they were
A waste, I suppose

Don't Mess With The Bull, You'll Get The Horns

This started as a comment, but then it grew into a post. Aren't you lucky.

I know some of my readers find it pleasing to feel superior, but many of them couldn't have more completely misunderstood what I said. And by the way, Caca, rolling out tired "communist" BS is about as far from cracking skulls as a My Little Pony movie. I didn't mean "pass out ice cream" to be some Medicare/Welfare program on steroids. If you read what I wrote, you'll find that I was speaking of the HOW, not the WHAT. I didn't mean to actually hand out ice cream. Or hand out anything for that matter. The idea was to make your policy proposal, ANY policy proposal (even a cut!), feel like the greatest thing in the world to voters. The GOP used this exact technique to bamboozle everyone into Iraq. You know, greeted as liberators, oil pays for everything, cakewalk, all that crap. They made it seem like to oppose their idea was akin to opposing a Fourth of July parade. They believed it, they talked it up, they sold it, and you bought it. This is precisely what Democrats never do. And it's also precisely what Democrats must start to do. "Passing out ice cream cones" is the outlook that Democrats must have on their own ideas to make anything happen. No matter what policy is, they have to be resolute in thinking a) it's the greatest policy of all time and b) anyone who opposes it is an idiot. This kind of thinking is basically how the GOP wins elections. I'm just trying to photocopy their playbook. Some liberal policies might make you cringe, like Guaranteed Health Care For All Americans (even though I'm still not sure why that one does), and some others might not, like election reform and immigration reform. But my point is, no matter what position the Dems take, they have got to stop apologizing for taking it. Instead of acting like a guilty mother trying to get her unwilling child to take his medicine, Dems have got to believe that they're behind the wheel of the neighborhood ice cream truck.

And pleeeeeaaase cut it out with the crap about liberalism being somehow anti-capitalist. I am as capitalist as they come. Where there is a functioning market (that part is important by the way), that market should be allowed to function. Correct me if I'm wrong, but most competition squelching subsidies have found their genesis on the right side of the aisle. From where I sit, the chump change that gets handed out via welfare (to guvmint-hating Red State folks mostly) pales in comparison to the billions in handouts given to industry each year. And what's so capitalist about our propping up the freeloading American sugar industry? Has it ever occurred to you guys that competition is a consumer oriented phenomenon? Don't you realize that when businesses are allowed to draft their own laws, like the oil companies did Cheney's energy bill, that this is inescapably and by its very nature anti-competition? But then again, why should you? "Penny wise and pound foolish" has been the mark of the right wing for about 25 years now.

Screwed

The noises you hear are rivets popping out of the corrupt Republican machine. And yes, I can barely conceal my glee.

Ice Cream

Kid Oakland is right on here. Democrats have to remember that even with much of the bad stuff that's still plaguing Bush today, the guy won the presidency in 2004 with close to record turnout and solid gains in virtually every county in the U.S. Not that there's been a swelling chorus of "Bush stole the vote" in the recent weeks, but it's helpful to banish from our minds even the sneaking suspicion that this is what occurred. All Democrats should repeat it to themselves: In 2004, President Bush, with sub 50% approval numbers, BEAT US FAIR AND SQUARE.

Because, to paraphrase Carlyle, talk that does not end in some kind of action is better suppressed altogether, what do we do about it? Well, Democrats have to adopt what I like to call the ice cream cone theory of politics. What's that? It's framing your policy proposals so that it seems the political equivalent of giving each and every citizen of this country a perfectly scooped ice cream cone of their very favorite flavor. And, while we stretch out our hands to present these wonderful gifts to our constituents, what do we say our opponents are doing? They are trying to take that ice cream cone away.

When it comes to explaining policies or campaigning for office or holding a press conference or speaking directly to voters, we're not compromising or trading votes or if/then-ing or defending our positions or trying to justify ourselves or even trying to convince anyone. We're passing out ice cream cones. The most important thing, though, is that we believe it to be ice cream. Because if we truly believe, the ice cream cones will require no explanation. There is no debate about whether an ice cream cone is good. If someone asks us if we're sure it's a good idea to be passing out all this ice cream, we simply laugh, shake our heads, and KEEP PASSING OUT ICE CREAM.

Monday Random 12

1. The Nearness Of You (Norah Jones, Come Away With Me)


2. Mine's Not A High Horse (The Shins, Chutes Too Narrow)


3. What's The Matter Here? (10,000 Maniacs, In My Tribe)


4. Conduit For Sale! (Pavement, Slanted And Enchanted)


5. Saturday Sun (Nick Drake, Five Leaves Left)


6. Grade 9 (Barenaked Ladies, Gordon)


7. In A Future Age (WILCO, SUMMERTEETH)


8. I Could Never Take The Place Of You (Prince, Sign O' The Times)


9. High 5 (Rock The Catskills) (Beck, Odelay)


10. Outdone (Uncle Tupelo, No Depression)


11. Thru The Eyes Of Ruby (Smashing Pumpkins, Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness)


12. Blasphemous Rumours (Depeche Mode, Some Great Reward)

In general, I'd like to see more punctuation in song titles.

Minesweeper

Just set a personal best of 59 seconds at the Intermediate level. I was very impressed with myself until I looked on-line and saw that the world record is under 30 seconds. Locating all 40 bombs in such a short amount of time is just absolutely ridiculous. What's your best time?

"Honor" Killing

I'll never understand how anyone could consider sex, any sex, more dishonorable than violence. Put simply, a culture that condones this is an inferior culture.

Heshu returned safely to her London school that autumn but told friends that her father had put a gun to her head and demanded to know whether she had a boyfriend, and then forced her to have a gynecological exam to prove her virginity.

Unfortunately, the nightmare wasn't over for Heshu.

Heshu Yones, a West London teen, fought off her father for a frantic 15 minutes. She ran from room to room in her family home one Saturday afternoon until he cornered her in a dingy bathroom, held her over the tub and slit her throat.

Remember Heshu.

Separated at Birth?

Let's Just Leave Iraq And See What Happens

I really think we should just pack up and leave Iraq. What'll happen? Beats me, but I think we should do it anyway. Seems a bit reckless maybe, but wasn't that sort of our thought process when it came to invading the place?

In all seriousness, if it's true that the overwhelming majority of insurgents in Iraq are indeed Iraqis, then that's about as good a reason to leave the place tomorrow as any I've heard. If the insurgents are largely or even just somewhat foreign, then I can see it being a problem if we leave. All these guys with guns, here they are, might as well pick something to shoot at. But if they really are 95% Iraqi, than most likely if we disappear, so will their reason to shoot at us. They'll just go back to being regular old run-of-the-mill violent assholes just like you'd see anywhere else you'd go in this world. The violence wouldn't stop immediately, of course. There might even be 4 murders per 100,000 people each year and even more violent crime, just like there is right now in the U.S. No, the insurgency wouldn't come to grinding halt. I'm sure some wackos would still want to attack their government in hopes that it would fail. But I bet it'd hurt recruiting. And if it doesn't, well, we had a civil war, too, and look at us. We're the better for it. It happens to the best of nations.

Selling The Product

What's so discouraging about the current administration is not just that they allow oil industry executives to lie, Rafael Palmeiro style, directly to Congress's face, it's that they so clearly couldn't care less about it. Lautenberg asks if they met with Cheney to discuss the energy bill and they lie and say no. Of course they were at the meeting. Of course the oil companies wrote the energy bill. We all "knew" that already, and now we actually know it. Cheney is the President of the Senate. You'd think he'd care if someone were telling a bald face lie to the body he heads. But he doesn't.

Here's what I can't understand. Why can't these guys just sell an idea on its merits? Just say to the American people, "We think it's a good idea to let oil companies write the laws and award themselves billions of dollars in subsidies." At least that point could be argued. If someone honestly wanted to make a case for why this was the way to do things, I'd at least listen to him. But that's not the way these guys do things. Meeting? What meeting? Did our consultants write the bill? Not a chance! Didn't I just say we weren't at any meeting? Riiiight. Same thing with huge tax cuts for the wealthy. Don't say, "well, they're no really huge tax cuts for the wealthy, they're this other thing." Instead, talk about how great tax cuts for the wealthy are for a) the economy and b) the wealthy. I'd actually listen to the guy saying that. After all, he may have a point.