All Hail Stephen Colbert...

...He's got balls. Big'uns. Dude went up at the White House Correspondant's Dinner in front of the President and did his schtick, and eviscerated the administration. You might make of the President, but not to his face. And it wasn't gentle ribbing, it was biting sarcasm in the form of his smarmy "conservative" commentator character. Naturally, we can expect the backlash on Monday. Stephen Colbert is so getting auditted this year.
Video here.
It occurs to me that it was at this same event (traditionally a venue for making fun of the prez and official Washington) last year that President Bush showcased his partucular bit of comedic genius: a video where he walks from room to room in the Whitehouse looking for those darned missing WMDs. Oh, man I keeled over laughing! I mean, the subversive humor of a brilliant and concerned citizen is offensive in the extreme when it mocks the POTUS because he's above the law and the polity after all. But that same POTUS chuckling from his position of inscrutible political power at the fact that 2300 American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis died brutal, bloody deaths because of the fact (admittedly farcical) that he just can't seem find those darn WMDs, well that's just good family fun!

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The Undeservedly Obscure Dead

William Dudley Haywood (1869-1928) better known as Big Bill Haywood, was a prominent figure in the labor movement. He was blind in one eye and he was born in Utah and spent time as a homesteader, a cowboy, and a miner in Idaho and Utah and Colorado. Big Bill was ten American men rolled into one, on account of every thing he did was more than one man could do. Haywood was a leader of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), and he went to Chicago to become a founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and a member of the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of America. During the first two decades of the 20th century, he was involved in several important labor battles, including the Lawrence textile strike, the Colorado Labor Wars (which culminated in the Ludlow massacre), and textile strikes in Massacheusetts and New Jersey. Haywood was frequently the target of prosecution. His trial for the murder of Frank Stuenenberg in 1907 (of which he was acquitted) drew national attention; in 1918, he was one of 101 IWW members convicted of violating the Espionage Act of 1917.
The IWW was founded in Chicago in June 1905 at a convention of two hundred socialists, anarchists, and radical trade unionists from all over the United States (mainly the Western Federation of Miners) who were opposed to the policies of the American Federation of Labor.

Let's read about Big Bill, who fought for working folk and never gave up the fight, from his time in the mines to his time as an organizer and a labor leader, let's read what the Rude Pundit has to say about Big Bill and the world we live in now.

"So, on this great force of the working class I believe we can agree that we should unite into one great organization--big enough to take in the children that are now working; big enough to take in the black man; the white man; big enough to take in all nationalities--an organization that will be strong enough to obliterate state boundaries, to obliterate national boundaries, and one that will become the great industrial force of the working class of the world."

Yeah, that's in 1911. He was already advocating for racial integration, before there even was a Civil Rights movement, there was a Labor movement, advocating brotherhood for all folk.

From the current Preamble to the IWW Constitution:

"The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth. ... Instead of the conservative motto, 'A fair day's wage for a fair day's work', we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, 'Abolition of the wage system'."

That's fairly radical, more radical than I am, labor union supporter though I am. But that sort of rhetoric is what got us the minimum wage, the 40 hour week and two weeks of vacation and some time off for a new mother without her losing her job. And that's all on account of Big Bill. Read some of John Dos Passos The 42nd Parallel, wherein Big Bill makes an appearance in a labor camp. So we salute you Big Bill, you went out and stood up, like a man does, for a man's dignity and his labor, and his right to be man itself and not a tool of the boss. Good on you, Big Bill...I have a slug of whiskey for you.

But better than I, let's hear Clarence Darrow (my fellow alumnus) defend Big Bill and the Western Miners in 1907:

"I am here to say that in a great cause these labor organizations, despised and weak and outlawed as they generally are, have stood for the poor, they have stood for the weak, they have stood for every human law that was ever placed upon the statute books. They stood for human life, they stood for the father who was bound down by his task, they stood for the wife, threatened to be taken from the home to work by his side, and they have stood for the little child who was also taken to work in their places--that the rich could grow richer still, and they have fought for the right of the little one, to give him a little of life, a little comfort while he is young."

UPDATE: Enjoy the new Pretty Girls Make Graves album, Elan Vital, featuring the labor song "Parade": "Been talking in the brake room/ Been talking in the parking lot/ Of labor and unrest and eyeing the clock/ Are you okay with what you've got?

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Keeping it on top

Make sure you don't miss the newest Undeservedley Obscure Dead...Meso-America edition!

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Hey, Dems, want to win the Mountain West and cinch national political domination?

Then full-throatedly support abortion rights.



See, you weren't going to win Utah or Idaho anyway, they're "red"er than the Deep South--lots o' crazies out there. But the rest of the West is suprisingly more liberal on civil liberties than "blue" states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are going to vote for Dems because of labor and anti-war sentiment. Hell, you're not that far away in Nevada and Arizona (and I'm not talking about this map, I'm talking about middle-class people feeling the squeeze and a conservationist streak). Why have they gone "red" in the past? Taxes and war. But war is flagging as a reason (on account of the cluster fuck), and all you got to do is tell them the truth, we want to repeal tax cuts for rich people and give them to middle class and working people. Also, stop talking down. Seriously.

Let's not forget the point of this map. If Dems don't wise up, put the internal squabbling aside, and get to it in '06 and '08, we could lose Roe v. Wade, and 200,000,000 people might be living in no-abortion states. The social repercussions of that would be disastrous.

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The US should be held to a higher standard

Read this from Lawyers, Guns, and Money:

...[T]here really is a difference between the US government engaging in torture and Saddam Hussein engaging in torture, and that the former, for international human rights law and practice, is much, much worse. China, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea are all dictatorships whose governments employ or employed various degrees of tyrannical means, including torture, in order to remain in power. They are not, however, considered role models for compliance with international human rights. No one points to China as a model for emulation in respect for human dignity. Although we can quibble as to the degree to which "freedom is on the march" and democracy is replacing autocracy, I think it's fair to say that China and Iran are not typically understood as representing the wave of the future. In other words, we expect that autocratic states will maintain torture regimes, we decry it, and we hope that international law, NGOs, and international regimes will put pressure on these states to modify and reform their policies.

I'm gonna lose my hate-America-first card for this but the US really is the best country. It's the best damn country ever and I love it for a variety of usual and unusual reasons. (Number's one and two? Music and the Rocky Mountains.) And the reason that the US should be held to a double standard regarding human rights (that is to say, always wearing kid gloves in these matters) is not the international legal argument, but a moral one. America is not a "beacon on the hill," but the promise of America, the real American dream is that we can try to make it so. We have the best chance of doing it, and it is morally incumbent upon the American people to do so. And the argument that we have to torture and such to keep out way of life because the terrorists will destroy us is so much horseshit. We liberalized civil rights during the Cold War, and the Soviet Union was an actual threat to the very existence of the nation. We signed the various human rights treaties that concern torture and we passed the laws outlawing warrantless wiretaps in the face of existential threats from Russia, Germany, Japan, etc. But a bunch of douchebags in ass-county southwest Asia have the dumb fucking luck to commit murder successfully and we go retarded and instead of concentrated global effort to stop religious terrorism we...invade one of the few secular countries in the region, thus ensuring we lack the reesources to engage in the actual countries that harbor terrorists...oh, and we betray the very freedoms we hold out as those things that set us apart from the murderous douchebags. Super.

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The Undeservedly Obscure Dead

Today's instalment of The Undeservedly Obscure Dead features a truly obscure man--though at the time of his death 530 years ago he was arguably among the most powerful people on the planet. I give to you: Tlacaelel, the Cihucoatl of the Mexica Triple Alliance.
[Real quick: T'lah-cah-ell-ell the See-hoo-koh-ah-tel of the Mey-shee-kah]. Or, if you prefer, the Prime Minister of the Aztec Empire. Born in 1398 (10-Tochtli by the Mexica calender) to a Mexica noble family, he acted as the supposedly less powerful, domestic affairs oriented member of the two-person executive of the Triple Allinace (a more correct term for the Aztecs, as they themselves did dot refer to the polity as an Empire, or their people as Aztecs). His counter-part, the Tlatoani, or (at least to the Europeans) "emperor" was the foreign affairs and millitary ruler--as such he is the one that Europeans naturally dealt with, thus they assumed he was supreme--was first his uncle Itzacoatl.

Tlacaelel was something of a political genius. And his track record would make Machiavelli shrink like a modest little girl. Among other things, he thought up and organized the 10,000 memeber civil work force that kept Tenochtitlan, the Mexica capital at the center of a lake (Where Mexico City now stands), the cleanest, safest city in the world. When Cortes came upon a metropolis bigger than Paris, that was sparkling clean (no ankle-deep raw sewage in the street!) he was dumfounded.



Tlacaelel also secured the public works, and handled things such as assuring a steady maize supply and the like. More importantly, Tlacaelel was the animating genius of the Alliance. He came up with the Manifest Destiny-like argument that the Mexica were destined to rule a vast empire that would bring peace to the Earth. To that end Tlacaelel did two brilliant, nearly Orwellian things:
First, he had burned all the historical codices of the Mexica, and invented a new past where they were imperial descendants of the ancient Toltec people north of the Mexica lands. He went so far as to have noble families marry women from the Toltec's area.
Second, he promoted the blood cuilt of Huitzilopochtli (Weet-zee-lo-pokt-lee). Huitzilopchtli was the martial god who was currently winning the cosmic struggle with his celestial brothers, and because of this temporary preeminence was responsible for fueling the sun and keeping the world going. (Thus the Meixca Long Count--a suppliment to the cyclical calendar which only keeps track of 52 year periods--is divided into extremely long "suns" when a differnt brother succeeds in gaining the advantage and the previous sun is extinguished. We, and the Mexica, are in the Fifth Sun; it ends December 23, 2012.)
The Mexica, Tlacaelel said, were responsible for providing the maize and blood Huitzilopochtli needed to sustain. Thus, their national mission: conquer the world and sustain the cosmos through blood sacrifice of prisoners from said conquest.
Oh, and it almost worked. The Triple Alliance was a volitile empire and it was only the combination of small pox and rebellious provices that defeated the Mexica, most assuredly not any alleged superiority of Spanish arms or tactics (the conquistadores quickly laid down their steel armor and guns when native armor and weapons proved lighter and more effective, and their military training was nil.)

Pretty bad ass, no?

We salute you, Tlacaelel architect and Cihucoatl of the Triple Alliance, and we know that if you hadn't been long dead when the Spanish came, things might have been different because you were hardcore.

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Game: Blouses

I just finished law school.
Bitches.

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Welcome to Evolution

That black and white image of a pretty girl is Death. You'll see her later in the video below. In 1859 Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (usually abbreviated to The Origin of Species). That volume did not contain the phrase "Survival of the fittest." That phrase was coined by Herbert Spencer. He (Spencer) was a Nineteenth Century social theorist. He was a very influentional theorist, a contemporary of Thomas Huxley and John Stuart Mill. As part of the post Enlightenment project he sought scientific explanations for social behavior. But his evolutionary scientism was wrong. He imposed nascent biological theory on more complecated social phenomena. But that was taken up in the new science of evolutionism...and anthropology was its foot soldier. So Lewis Henry Morgan became the new face of social evolution. The idea that human societies evolve in the way that species do and that eventually they would make it to the "peak" that Victorian American society had reached. Such an idea is, of course, absurd. The body of scholarship on the silliness of social and cultural "evolution" is too great to mention. Just go to the library, or ask your local social scientist. But the video I've provided has a great summary of social evolutionary theory...that's what you get. Were social evolution to be real, and taken to it's logical end progression; then we would end up with the product of this video. Fortunatley, this is the not the way human societies work...unless of course, American political economy forces its hand.

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So, it begins...the rain of fire is next.

I share a birthday with the Antichrist.

Indeed, the locusts have come with the many plagues of the wrath of God and the sounds of the lamentations of the many sinners shall accompany the 144,000 saved as they ascend over the sulphrous pits that the Beast hath made for their assoult on the city of God, and in that time the tribulations of the faithful shall be heard unto the...[blah]
It is also the 1ooth anniversary of the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906...coincidence? No. There are no coincidences.

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Happy Easter

But watch out for The Bunny. He didn't give you the eggs, he lent them to you. And he wants 'em back. With interest, motherfucker. Easter is cancelled!

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Man, those were the days

It's 2000 all over again with new albums out from:

Calexico
Rainer Maria
Built to Spill
Pretty Girls Make Graves

And I'm excited--it's like sophmore year.

Am becoming that 35-year-old dude that still thinks Pearl Jam is the greatest band ever?

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Putting away terrorists...or, um, journalists working for CBS.

I'm late to this, but still...via Washington Monthly:

A DANGEROUS JOB....Over at the CBS News blog, Brian Montopoli writes about the case of Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, a CBS cameraman who was shot by a sniper while covering a car bombing in Baghdad:

Hussein was taken to a military hospital, where he was treated — and arrested. The film in his camera, the military later said, suggested he might be involved with insurgents....The fact that Hussein was taping the event, it was alleged, suggested he had previous knowledge of the attack. And the tape in the camera was said to be damning; there were suggestions it showed four incidents that proved he was involved in insurgent activity.

[Time passes. After a year in Abu Ghraib, Hussein finally gets a trial.]

Normally Iraqi trials take ten or fifteen minutes, but the presiding three-judge panel knew this one was under intense scrutiny, and it lasted over an hour. The news was good for Hussein: The Iraqi attorney general, whose job it was to prosecute Hussein, said there was no evidence to support the prosecution. He was cleared.

....The tape that was in Hussein's camera, which was supposed to have been so damning, turned out to be less than 20 seconds long. The multiple pieces of evidence against Hussein on it did not exist. The tape shows debris in a road, according to Linda Mason, CBS News Senior Vice President, Standards and Special Projects, and a faint voice can be heard shouting "Allahu akbar" — God is good. "Ameer had been accused of chanting this, but he was holding the camera and the microphone was right near the camera, so if he were the one chanting this, you would have heard it," Mason told TV Week.

Hussein's lawyer thinks this is an example of the U.S. military sending a message to the press corps: there are certain things we don't want you to tape. Hussein himself, unsurprisingly, has decided he no longer wants to be a journalist.

That's super. That's what's up.

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Just in time for Easter

I have a head-ache so until further notice...look at the bunny. It's so cute you will lose your shit.

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Three Versions of Judas

Jorge Luis Borges, writing about the views of a fictional Swedish theologian, in his 1944 story Three Versions of Judas (he often used made up scholars to make his points) wrote the following:

"The book’s general argument is not complex, although its conclusion is monstrous. God, argues Nils Runeberg, stooped to become man for the redemption of the human race; we might well then presume that the sacrifice effected by Him was perfect, not invalidated or attenuated by omissions. To limit His suffering to the agony of one afternoon on the cross is blasphemous. To claim that He was man, and yet was incapable of sin, is to fall into contradiction; the attributes impeccabilitas and humanitas are incompatible. […] [F]or Runeberg, [Isaiah 53.2-3 is] the detailed prophecy not of a moment but of the entire horrendous future, in Time and in Eternity, of the Word made Flesh. God was made totally man, but man to the point of iniquity, man to the point of reprobation and the Abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosen any of the lives that weave the confused web of history: He could have been Alexander or Pythagoras or Rurik or Jesus; he chose an abject existence: He was Judas."

Of course. It makes a sort of perfect sense.

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Best. Show. Ever.

I got the "Homicide: Life on the Streets" Season 3 DVDs and they're great. It's really the best show ever. In the early '90s, it [along with The X-Files] touched off the movement of excellent, "gritty," hour-long crime/sci-fi dramas that later birthed The Sopranos, Carnivale, Battlestar Galactica, Deadwood, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, etc. It's just he best shit ever. But it's even better if you imagine it on NBC in 1993--amazement is the only way to describe the impact of such a show and it's content on network TV 13 years ago. It was on Friday nights, and it still stayed on for 7 years simply on the force of voluminous critical acclaim (nobody watches network TV on Friday nights). Anyway, there's this line from the episode I watched tonight ("Crosetti" episode 6) about one of the homicide cops' suicide (the unit had to deal with it themselves as "murder police") that's really cool.

Lt. Giardello: In the old days, the Italians wouldn't bury a suicide in a graveyard or consecrated ground. They'd take the body out of the village and dig a hole at the point where two roads crossed. Il cruce de duo camini. The crossroads. The Italians believed that if someone should come to the crossroads and choose to end his life then he should be burried where those who had the strength to go on could walk over him.

Dectective Bolander: The Italians are an unforgiving lot.

Lt. Giardello: I know. But we make great pasta. It balances out.

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A Critique of Pure Cookies

Immanuel Kant said: "Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature." It's part and parcel of his categorical imperitive, the idea that one must behave in a certain moral fashion, often boiled down to "I ought, therefore I can." So I shall act as if the bag of oreos I plan on polishing off for lunch (perhaps washing them down with a beer) shall become, through my will, a healthy meal becuase I'm too lazy to go to the store and that's all I have in my apartment.

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Relationship Advice

From the Marc Maron Show the other day.

I've actually been able to convince [my wife] that this mix of hostility and need is passion. And that's founded in a deep fear of abandonent. And that triad works as love.

Yep. That sounds about right.

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Fashion

I'm going to shave a lightning bolt into the side of my 6-day-old beard. Then people will know that I am both fast and powerful.

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More on immigration

Read this column by Fareed Zakaria. It's good stuff.
He also distills the issue into the perfect political soundbite:

Compared with every other country in the world, America does immigration superbly. Do we really want to junk that for the French approach?

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I'm certain that its intentions are pure...pure evil.

Me, I like, Chordata. Preferably Gnathostomata, (on account of a deep and abiding mistrust of hagfish and lamphreys--they burrow into the cracasses of fish and whales for food, and they lack lower mandibles, they have leech-like rottary jaws). But the thing is, I can handle Chordata, I can get past agnathic chordata like lamphreys, but I hate arthropods, invertibrates. Having either more or less than four limbs is just gross. Worms, spiders, sea-slugs, termites, caterpillars, they all freak me out. (I'm okay with chordates that have less than four limbs, like snakes and whales becuase I know that they once had them, and some even possess vestigal limb and pelvic bones). So without further ado, I give you CLOSE UP PICTURES OF BUGS.

they're coming for us. The bugs will force us to toil in their sugar fields.

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