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Who is to Blame for America’s Budgetary Woes?

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Just two policies dating from the Bush Administration — tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — accounted for over $500 billion of the deficit in 2009 and will account for $7 trillion in deficits in 2009 through 2019, including the associated debt-service costs. [7] By 2019, we estimate that these two policies will account for almost half — nearly $10 trillion — of the $20 trillion in debt that will be owed under current policies.[8] (The Medicare prescription drug benefit enacted in 2003 also will substantially increase deficits and debt, but we are unable to quantify these impacts due to data limitations.) These impacts easily dwarf the stimulus and financial rescues, which will account for less than $2 trillion (less than 10 percent) of the debt at that time. Furthermore, unlike those temporary costs, these inherited policies (especially the tax cuts and the drug benefit) do not fade away as the economy recovers.

Posted via email from Subversive Soapbox

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What are you doing to save Oakland’s libraries?

Ms Brunner:

I would like to know what your office is doing to stop the closure of FOURTEEN of Oakland's 18 libraries. If the state of California has reached the point where we can't even have libraries, what is sacred? Surely they cost much less than schools, and are an equally necessary resource to our youth. Can you deny this? 

Is there nothing sacred? Honestly, I would rather give up mandatory schooling than libraries. They are the sort of thing that is expected in a functioning democracy. Do we no longer have a functioning democracy? If I were in your position, and the governor put forth such a ludicrous idea, I would demand that the budget be posted publicly so that we could see for ourselves why this is truly necessary. I understand that we are facing hard times (due to the tremendous money hole in Iraq, let's not pretend spending sixty percent of the budget on defense is not an issue here!) but if we can't even afford to have LIBRARIES what is the point? What have we come to? Are we on the absolute precipice of disaster? It would seem so to me if we cannot afford to keep a few librarians and a security guard around so that thousands of people can have access to books. 

Moreover, what nonsense is this, that among the 14/18 libraries slated for closure, among them is the Tool Lending library?! When I am speaking of the greatness of California and telling my friends why they should move here, the Tool Library is just such an example that I share with them. If we destroy everything that makes us great, why will people want to move here? Imagine how many projects every single year will be thwarted by the loss of this amazing community resource. Think of all the homes that won't be renovated, decreasing the value of Oakland's properties. All the school parks that won't get new benches built. All the amazing large-scale art projects–something Oakland is known for!–that will live only in the artists minds.

I urge you to do everything within your power to fight the closure of these libraries. I am not a politician, and I do not feel powerful, but I will do everything in my power to stop this.

By the way, I will be posting this email on my blogs. I hope your response will quell not only my own wrath, but that of my readers.

Sincerely,

KB
Oakland, CA

Posted via email from Paperback Pusher

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RIP Gil Scott-Heron

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Gil-scott-heron

There was a time in my life when I only wanted to listen to political music. It was then that someone passed along to me a cassette of Gil Scott-Heron. This was around 1999; tape players were already hard to come by. But I managed to wear out that tape in several months.

He was more than a musician, he was a poet that happened to be a multi-instrumentalist. He was a radical agitator with piano and bongo to sweeten his message. He was a visionary, but then again, in some ways he wasn’t: It wasn’t his intention to foster the forthcoming genre of rap. He created poetry set to music, in the tradition of Bob Dylan. He created poetry infused with Jazz in the tradition of Amiri Baraka. His style was never pretensious but always bold. I couldn’t believe that this amazing and diverse poet was undiscovered by most of the people in my social circle. I tried to impose it on everyone with the fervor of a newfound love.

Well, time passes and new loves come to you.  I just found out that Gil died this week. I don’t know what to tell you except that I hope you can take some time out of your day to listen to some of his work.

I know he recently released an album but I want to share with you some of the songs that inspired me when I was a teenager. I’ve also included one of the recent songs that Kanye West sampled him on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gil_Scott_Heron_-_Whitey_on_the_Moon.mp3 Listen on Posterous

Gil_Scott_Heron_-_Whitey_on_the_Moon.mp3 Listen on Posterous

Kanye_West_-_lost_in_the_woods.mp3 Listen on Posterous

Posted via email from Like Dancing About Architecture

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A Feminist Click Moment

Or: How Feminism and A Love of Drink

Saved Me From the Perils of the Devil

I was a teenage satanist. Under the tutelage of Anton LeVay's The Satanic Witch, I didn't think women needed equal rights. Women were already the most powerful creatures in the world because they could get whatever they wanted through the subtle, irresistible guile of a woman's sexuality. You could not convince me that men got all the jobs and the money because Satanism had taught me that for one sniff of a woman's musk a man would change his mind about foreign policy and hand over the keys to his Porsche. We didn't need to be in charge, at least not officially. Of course by this view, the men immune to the stuff between a woman's legs, gay men, should've been at the pinnacle of the power pyramid. Nor did this view take into consideration how complicated sexuality and attraction are, nor numerous other aspects of inequality like vaginal mutilation, domestic abuse, etc. Satanism didn't address the subtle messages that young girls receive telling them they are princesses in need of rescue. Doubtless the message that all I needed to succeed was a cunning mind and a short skirt was ripe fodder for a cherry bomb raised on fairy tales. If Marilyn Monroe didn't need feminism why would I?

Going to Women's Center meetings in college didn't shake the feminism into me. On the contrary, the women present were all extremist stereotypes and I relished disagreeing with them. They told me women were silenced but so far no one had managed to shut me up. They spoke of empowerment but I didn't need to be reminded that women could be capable and strong because my mother told me I was these things and I was still only a girl.

No, the feminist seed was watered by copious alcohol. Specifically the game Asshole. If you haven't played it, a key aspect is that the winner of the previous game could tell anyone else to drink whenever they wanted to for the entire next round. As a Freshman at one of the leading party schools, I'd become an adept and frequent President, dishing out sips to jolly drunks. Many men who could game amiably threw temper tantrums when I came to the President position. It had happened enough times to become predictable, til it got to the point that I avoided playing the game with any man I was dating.

Back in class we were studying the feminist implications of M. Butterfly and Ibsen's A Doll's House. My feminist “click” moment came during one of those discussions where it was theorized that abusers were actually, deep-down-inside, insecure. I was rolling my eyes because that particular reversal of thinking has always struck me as a stinking cliché. It was right up there with “bullies are just scared” and “he pulls your hair because he likes you.” As if cruelty were perpetuated by helpless cute puppies. Such claims were brought with no evidence save wishful thinking. Yet where was I left but without any lunch money and an aching scalp? I'd seen domestic abuse up close and if those guys were insecure, they weren't any more so than plenty of other guys that don't beat the shit out of people.

We read an essay on the topic. It was either by Judith Butler or it began with a quote by Judith Butler (I regret that my googling was not able to come up with the essay or quote). It surmised that the insecure abuser has been taught that he is inherently superior to all women. What does a man do in this position when a woman bests him? How does it make him feel? It wouldn't be the same as being bested by a man. If you believed that women were inferior to all men then to be outwitted by a woman was in essence to be put not only beneath her but beneath all men. Either she was not truly a woman (or she couldn't have surpassed you) or he was not truly a man—and cognitive dissonance would lead most men to the former conclusion.

This rang true for me. It explained why otherwise ordinary men couldn't handle losing at Asshole. They were acting out the same seething rage the essay described. It wasn't merely that they didn't like being told what to do by a woman, it was that the orders were coming about because they had lost to one. I actually played with one guy who, gaining the presidency in a later round, insisted I shotgun an entire beer for every penalty sip. Of course I'm not suggesting this gent was a wife-beater, but his anger was real, tangible. He wanted to punish me for winning.

Why was this the “click” moment for me? Why did this essay linger with me and transform me into the totally bad-ass feminist writing here before you today? I think mainly, it felt fair in a way none of the Women's Center rhetoric had. Most of the feminist arguments I had previously heard made men out to be villains. It was easier for me to believe that women were secret satanic goddesses than to believe that half the population consisted of dickheads going out of their way to fuck over the other half. Besides, I'd met some dudes in my two decades and they weren't terribly menacing. Compared to my own foreboding demeanor, most of them were downright pansies.

But it was the quote that stuck in my brain. Again, regrettably I cannot reproduce it, but the gist of it was this: simply because men are the enforcers of oppression doesn't mean they aren't subject to its rules. Maybe men didn't want to be better than women. Just because they were born into the role didn't mean they had any desire to perpetuate it. Superiority is a lot of work, especially when it is a lie. And there were so many incompetent men out there! How exhausting must it be to be forced to interact with woman after superior woman? Here we satanic sex goddesses come along, minding our own business but being awesome all the same, and this guy has to feel like dirt just because it is so painfully obvious that he's our intellectual inferior. Surely it wasn't too unreasonable to think some of these guys would get angry at some of these women eventually. It was all very sad for all parties and the only cure I could see was for the men to somehow learn that it was OK for a woman to be better than a man. I had to recognize that as an inherently feminist position.

What is striking to me about the epiphany that led to me to entering the fight for women's rights was an interest in what is best for men. Perhaps the truth in the argument appealed to my sense of integrity (e.g. it was not about my self interest as a woman gaining something for women). The basic idea that men may not relish their role could be applied to many circumstances besides the domestic abuser. What of men who wanted to stay home with the kids? What of men who wanted to knit and sew? What of men who wanted to be pursued, protected, nurtured? Which is not to say that they had it worse than women—anyone could plainly see they got the sweet end of the candied apple. And if the system wasn't even in the best interest of men, who was it working for? The musky supermodels, turning themselves inside out to fit a generic high-impact sexuality? Hardly. When the final piece clicked into place, I could see that the whole framework of gender rules was at best unnecessary. Ah-ha and then some: feminism will liberate everybody.

Posted via email from Subversive Soapbox

All, Bay Area, San Francisco

The Day Of the Tsunami

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My mom awoke me at seven this morning. The first thing she said was, “I just want to hear your voice before you die.” She was a theater major in college so she has a flair for drama. She explained about the terrible earthquake in Japan and that CNN said a tsunami was likely to hit the West Coast in the next fifteen minutes.

What to do? At that point I was thoroughly awake, so I said, “fuck it.” We got in @Mirrorshade’s car and we drove to Lawrence Berkeley Lab, high in the Berkeley hills. There wasn’t a wave in site, but the vista made me realize something: even if there’s a hundred aftershocks and I die under the crash of a terrible wave, I will never regret moving to California.

I wish this photo taken with my camera could capture the beauty.

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I Do Nothing To Stop the Blaze II

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Very Busy People by The Limousines Listen on Posterous

I had a strange sensation the other evening. Riding on the Bay Bridge at night always makes me think of the time that tanker truck blew up and I saw a section of the freeway melt. The bridge is covered, so we couldn't see the tanker fire until we were right on top of it, flames suddenly shooting fifty feet into the black starless sky. That stretch of the bridge makes me metaphorical because it reminds me that there are situations where even if the fire you're facing is enormous, it is possible not to see it until it is too late. It is possible to be barreling down the metaphorical freeway, going 80, with few signs of the catastrophe ahead. I was reminded that the empire I was born into is riding the crest of a crashing wave, a tsunami taking down with it the salmon and the sturgeon and the grizzly bears and the polar bears, etc. 

I turned to the driver and in a dry voice I began to monologue about how lucky we are, not only to be born comfortably into the stack of nuclear weapons and Wal-marts that is the foundation of this nation, but also so lucky to have been born into this generation. To be born a hundred years ago in America would be to live before there were unions and women, men and children worked in unbearable conditions with no weekends for no end in site. But to be born a hundred years from now would be even worse: millions of environmental refugees, widespread ecological collapse, severe droughts and floods, starvation, famine—not to mention the largest extinction event in the history of the world. 

As he was agreeing we had won the time-and-place-of-birth lottery, I was thinking of an unfinished poem I wrote years ago. The poem, like the bulk of my work, is about the contrast between privilege and the knowledge that one's privilege comes at the expense of other creatures' suffering. It isn't surprising. I spent the first fifteen years of my life, for as long as I could remember, wanting to be a writer. Then I went to college, and, as my favorite professor Larry Isaacs put it, I "stopped living my own personal narrative and started living history." I felt a real imperative to change the world, even if it was at the expense of pursuing my dreams. Unfortunately, I'm not very good at changing the world. It seems my only real gifts are impractical things: writing, dancing, drawing. Despite that, I spent the next section of my life raising my fist at marches, running social justice campaigns, meeting influential activists, and generally being a hell-raiser. Now I've circled back to focusing on my writing. I live in a state where my vote is irrelevant, because everyone thinks the way I do. I'm happy and life is easy. But I still feel the pull. I still know the fire is coming. And this conflict is what I try to capture in my fiction and poetry. 

The poem that was running through my head ends: 

The indymedia headline reads: THE ELECTION WAS HACKED. I read it and cry and then corporate radio machine plays "Video Killed the Radio Star" and I dance in the sweet happy-face sunshine that I know is melting the polar ice caps.

And then an odd thing happened. I realized the song playing on the radio was my favorite song from 2010. Immediately I perked up, yanked on the volume nob and started to sing. The very thing that I had written about in the poem actually happened: I was distracted from contemplating the terrible situation we've gotten ourselves into; it was a mere abstraction compared to the immediacy of a simple luxury: a song I loved coming on the radio. What was even stranger was that the song itself epitomizes my life of luxury. The song, "Very Busy People" is about the endless stream of pleasure and distraction I was contemplating:  

We'll end up numb from playing video games and we'll get sick of having sex. And we'll get fat from eating candy as we drink ourselves to death. We'll stay up late making mix tapes, photoshoping pictures of ourselves while we masturbate to these pixelated videos of strangers fucking themselves.

The metaphor had become real. I was caught in a tangle of irony. I was caught in a loop, wherein no matter how hard the universe attempted to send me the message: Your luxury is an illusion, temporary at best, the message was always carried on the back of the illusion itself, ZOMG, I love this song, turn it up! Or perhaps it is the reverse: every moment I'm enjoying myself—knitting scarves, scrubbing my feet soft and masqueing my pores smooth, alphabetizing my CDs, laying in the orderly grass and drinking Saki—all of these things are clouded by the knowledge of my privilege. Even the passion for working in publishing is tarnished by the knowledge of the production cycle that produces millions of books every year. The experience was a reminder that no matter how hard we try, we cannot contemplate anything without seeing it through the frame of reference of our worldview. I felt like the cavemen of Socrates, realizing my reality was cast through the distorted lense of the shadows on the cave walls. And all this time, with the knowledge that I'd slipped back into the comfort of my lifestyle, I kept singing: my shoulders dancing, my mouth smiling, and the shimmering skyline of Oakland baring herself before me as we disembarked the bridge. I felt that I was wearing a mask. But which was the mask? The sulking me, that had so easily turned off when my song came on the radio? Or the smiling me, that dances in the sweet happy-face Oakland skyline?

Posted via email from Future is Fiction

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Fleet Foxes

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Fleet Foxes have a new song, Helplessness Blues. I’m not excited about it yet, but it’s as good an excuse as any to share some Fleet Foxes themed material.

(OK, really I’m testing my Posterous connection to Tumblr, but isn’t that excuse enough?)

The New Fleet Foxes track, Helplessness Blues

My favorite thing about Fleet Foxes is the harmonies, which this Oh Land cover of White Winter Hymnal lacks, but it has a lovely girl singing. And everyone likes that.

Here’s Fleet Foxes covering Bob Dylan.

There are several new Fleet Foxes remixes, but I think this one from the Twelves is still the best around. Maybe the new album will deliver the DJs some better material.

OK, more best of 2010 stuff on the way!

Posted via email from Like Dancing About Architecture

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Southern Baptists Spamming Google: A Search Query WTF

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While not especially shocking nor deliberately weird, this is perhaps the most perplexing thing I have ever discovered through a search query. For novel research I googled “asthma drugs coma.” I at first thought the page I clicked on was for one of those stupid spam search pages that exist to put ads in your face because it was just a long list of search queries for abortificants. Even a list of fetus flushers is weird, but that’s only the beginning. There were no ads, and the queries weren’t hyperlinks, just ceaseless words in a list. Gems like:

  • medications to help induce miscarriage
  • powerpoint presentation of acute cholelithisis operation induced acute renal failure and ards
  • french bulldog induce vomiting
  • can salt baths induce my period
  • creatine induced cholestitis
  • anxiety induced asthma
  • wake induced lucid dream tips
  • libs laser induced breakdown spectroscopy fundamentals application ppt
  • particle induced x ray emmision system fendi ppt

But that’s not the weird part. The weird part is that the website is run by “Waco Baptist Church.”

Yes, you read that right.

About halfway down this very long list, is a different font that says:

Welcome to the Waco Baptist Church web page.  We hope that you find something here that blesses you today.

My best guess is that they are using their site exactly as the search spammers do, as a lure. But instead of flashing ads in your face they are hoping to snag wayward women in order to save their souls, or burn them as witches. This theory is supported in that, sandwiched between “how to self induce a miscarriage using medicine at home” and “alchohol induced dimentia anger” it offers their email address and:

We want this web site to serve the needs of those viewing it.  In order to better do that we need to hear from you.  Thanks.

Can you just imagine a bunch of Southern Baptist church ladies sitting around in their fancy hats, practical heels and serious faces, brainstorming this list of search queries that potential baby-stranglers would search for? Or more likely it’s some graying pastor with a determined face, running his own google searches into the wee hours of the morning, learning about the ways of wicked women who have induced miscarraige using the dangerously effective abortificant, acupuncture. You know, for research.

But even if the list sought to induce gals who’ve induced miscarraige into the church, who the fuck would find such a list useful? They’re not even hyperlinks! If anyone can shed some light on this weirdness, I’d appreciate it.