Mother of Pearl

Once again the New York Times, that punching bag rag, really wants to tell you about their latest personal growth, a newly acquired taste that anyone with a throbbing member in search of a non-reproductive mate swinging between their legs has been licking for years.

Yoo Can Do Whatever You Want!

Interesting insights into the world of highbrow legalistic inhumanity.

Red Words From the Little Black Book

I'll support this Lady Gaga if it's what the people want. - Sen. Scott Brown

Sure my constituents were upset when I killed the public option, but I was promised 30 years of margarine and I will have it if I have to walk over a river of boys. - Joe Lieberman

Moose! Indians! - Jimmy Carter on his deathbed

"Nothing in the world is desirable, yet everything is so bitterly fought over." Even Markel on the BBC television series The Office

Why let a secret prison go to waste? - Pres. Barack Obama

No Hungarian will ever truly be happy! - Bela Tarr

I will flesh search all the communists!- Sen. Joseph McCarthy

Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs. - Jay Leno

Qu'est-ce que c'est?

Sam Tanenhaus wrote a if blundering article in the NYT (truly our dependence on the NYT is the most disgusting aspect of this blog) about the cultural implications of Harvard PhD biologist Amy Bishop's senseless murder of her colleagues. The article is most interesting for its disturbing insight that "Dr. Bishop... provides an index to the evolved status of women in 21st-century America", that is, the fact that sexual victimization and gender-based discrimination are no longer necessarily the most likely reasons that a woman might become a pyschopathic killer. Now, thanks to the advancement of women in the workplace and universities, women have the privilege of potentially becoming psychopaths for the same reasons as any normal (male), potential psychopath: social alienation, economic marginalization, prolonged work-related stress, professional failure, and a dash of neurological imbalance. Tanenhaus astutely points out the way that the macho bias of our collective imagination (and crime fiction in particular) has foreclosed our ability to imagine this insidious development of (particularly middle-class) female emancipation. However, if all Tanenhaus' demand for equal representation for "normal" female psychopaths amounts to inscribing this new development into "ancient figure[s]" of the "mother lioness" protecting her cubs, as Tanenhaus approvingly quotes crime writer Chelsea Cain, then it seems we've made no progress at all. Dr. Bishops achievements will prove for naught.

Bad Leftenant

"In the most recent turn of the dialectical screw, there seems to be emerging a trend of European art film directors making Miramax-level sequels to macho American crime films. First there was Herzog's brilliant "reimagining" (as the marketing vampires say) of Abel Ferrera's Bad Lieutenant, and now rumors are circulating that Danish provocateur Lars von Trier has been talking to Martin Scorcese about making a sequel to the latter's 1976 film Taxi Driver. The rumor is that the film would feature the now-sexagenarian Robert DeNiro reprising his role as the homicidal loner Travis Bickle. I've always regarded Taxi Driver as the most interesting example of a fundamentally repugnant cinema. Scorcese's early work, with its machismo and depoliticized narratives of urban poverty, can be reduced to a thought experiment: what if we took the revolutionary political consciousness out of Italian neorealism? Taxi Driver is certainly his most critical film, by which I mean, since Scorcese is the Enemy, his most self-critical film, even if it is so in a merely 'unconscious' way, that is, in a way that is only real for me as I project my beliefs onto the film. One would think that the only reason von Trier would take on a classic of American (sorry, "United Statesian") cinema would be to destroy the cinema of this country which he so openly reviles from the inside, as he attempted more modestly in his "Land of Opportunity" films Dogville and Manderlay (the misogyny of which is probably the only thing Scorcese and von Trier have in common: can you imagine them having a conversation?). But maybe not. Perhaps von Trier, like Herzog, is genuinely drawn to that one really transcendentally great thing about American crime cinema: its misanthropy."

- Roger Ebert

Bathetic Fallacy

"Thanks to man-made climate change, the bathetic fallacy--the literary technique of using inclement weather to suggest an atmosphere of dread, corruption, amorality, or impending doom (eg the heatwaves in Kurosawa's Stray Dog or Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing)--can no longer be considered a mere poetic contrivance. The volatility of local weather patterns not only provides the perfect metaphor for the state of terror and moral anarchy we live in today, it is a causal result of the latter, of our gluttonous consumption of hydrocargons and our lack of desire or political will enough to limit our decadent ways."

- Al Gore, in a speech to the National People's Congress of China

One Divides Into Two

When trying to know your enemy, don’t look to where you disagree. This is why they are your enemy, and you know all this already. Look to where you agree.

This article, about widespread bipartisan support for food stamps, states pretty clearly (though, as always, by accident) why the right and the liberal left can agree on funding food stamps.

Wisconsin’s former governor, Tommy G. Thompson, a Republican, boasted of cutting the cash rolls, but advertised the food stamp rise. “Leading the Way to Make Work Pay,” a 2000 news release said… In a given month, nearly 90 percent of food stamp recipients still have incomes below the federal poverty line, according to the Department of Agriculture. But among families with children, the share working rose to 47 percent in 2008, from 26 percent in the mid-1990s, and the share getting cash welfare fell by two-thirds.

Force people into low paying jobs and then make sure they can eat. A hungry worker is a revolutionary; a dead slave is useless.

- No Innocents