1. I fought the law (and the law won)
2. I shot the sheriff- Bob Marley
3. I predict a Riot- Kaiser Chiefs
4. Pledge of resistance-Saul Williams
5. Combat Rock- Sleater Kinney
6. Mediocrity Rules- LeTigre
7. 16 Military Wives- The Decemberists
8. Fight the Power- Public Enemy
9. War on War- Wilco
10. Kick in the ass or Big Fish – Moxy Fruvos

What’s on your gitmo playlist?

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And I can’t forget New Kicks by LeTigre. It’s got Amy Goodman, Susan Sarandon and Saul Williams speaking it. I get chills everytime I hear it.

Borderline conspiracy theorist that I am- I don’t trust anything out of the mouths of politicians. But it used to be that the everyday civil servants doing the job of running federal agencies like the FDA used science instead of religion as the basis for rule-making.
Not so anymore. You think all the stuff about the FDA approving Viox despite the possibility of death was bad, then the (dis)information they are putting out about birth-control and condoms should really freak you out.
This is one of the best, most comprehensive articles on the topic I’ve read in a while. None of it’s new to me, but it is very well put together. I may have to start reading girly mags again if this is the kind of articles I’ve been missing.

Wait, what’s that you’re saying? Oh you have a penis, this doesn’t apply to you. Bullshit. You need to know what kind of crap your girlfriend or wife is being fed because it directly impacts your sex life. Oh, I’m sorry, you’re a boy who sleeps with other boys- yeah check out what they say about condom use. You wonder why condom use is declining among young gay men- maybe because they are being told that condoms don’t work to prevent the spread of disease. If condoms don’t work against disease, and gay boys can’t knock up other boys then why would they need to use condoms at all?

I’m starting to think we live in some freakish hybrid of Orwell’s 1984 and Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.

I heard once that the real difference between the French and the Americans is that the French refuse to acknowledge race as an issue, while Americans refuse to acknowledge class as an issue.

Think about it. When was the last time someone you know admitted to being anything other than middle class? Even if you knew they were either poor or wealthy, most people would say they were middle class. A few might say they were financially “comfortable” or they were “in between jobs” but very few will admit to being rich or below the poverty line. Yet the number of people living under poverty level is increasing (35 million plus and counting).

From the little debate DeeK and I are having over immigration I am reminded that we have groups of poor people, separated only by race, that are kept fighting amongst each other for small change while the fat cats run off with the bags of cash. Poor whites are afraid of poor blacks getting an equal shot at jobs and education through affirmative action, poor blacks and whites are afraid of immigrants taking their jobs and using up precious resources for their children, and looming large over all of it is the threat of TERRORISTS coming across the border to blow us all up with dirty bombs. But in the end we all want the same thing, to be able to provide for our families and what is keeping us from doing that is not each other.

We can try to force businesses to provide a living wage for everyone, immigrant or citizen, though that has had no success so far. Or, we could go with an idea I first heard attributed to Nixon(I know – what the fuck?) called the mandatory minimum income. The idea is that you make bushiness as competitive as possible by eliminating the minimum wage and you offer everyone a monthly subsidy until their income reaches a certain point. After that point you progressively tax income received form employment or investments. Through this you eliminate social security, welfare, and unemployment (they would get the subsidy instead). Taxes would be substantially higher, but costs of goods and services would go down. And while wages would go extremely low at first, employers would have to increase them enough to entice employees out of the safety net.

It’s an idea that needs a lot of work, but it gives business what it wants (competition without minimum wages) and employees get a stable ground to negotiate from.

The Red Queen is down with the flu. Talk amongst yourselves.

The problem I see most frequently (even in your post DeeK) is that the idea that people coming into our country is in itself a bad thing. This is the fundamental flaw in the anti-immigration arguement.

Since the begining our country has evolved by the inclusion of new waves of people. The Germans, Italians and Irish all started as immigrant groups who were feared and loathed upon their arrival, but were eventually included into society and enhanced our culture. We wouldn’t even have labor laws had it not been for Irish immigrants who brought the solutions they couldn’t use in Ireland here where they could be implemented.

The current wave of immigrants are mostly brown people, which causes more antagonistic feelings because they seem so obviously “other” and there is the fear that our society will decline by the inclusion of these people into our culture. Same was said of the Irish.

We have the carrying capacity within this country to support a lot more people than we currenty do (not including oil- whole separate topic). We have the space, the economic ability, and the agricultural capacity to absorb and feed these immigrants. We also need them. One of the reasons that as an industriallized nation we are not seeing the decline in birthrates that England and Germany are is the immigrant population. We need the replacement rate to stay up so that programs like social security have enough workers in the system to support those drawing on it.

The deal with immigrants has been this- you come to our country, you work the crap jobs, and your children will have a better future. We get cheap labor and a source of tax revenue, they get education for their children and more freedom from persecution and abject (dollar a day) poverty. Each new generation improves their condition and increases the amount of taxes that they pay into the sytem. Yes, things should be done in their home country to improve conditions, but there will always be stratification and it is the nature of people to try to improve their situation.

Societies that are closed fail. Closing our borders and stagnating our culture with fundamentalist and eurocentric views will turn a dynamic country into a declining one. (I know there is the arguement that we are already declining- go with me on the positivist view here). Immigration is also a much better solution to population problems- it redistributes population from overpopulated countries whose resources are straining to countries that have the capacity to support those people.

The darling ReflectNaCl has made this comment
“I want to send the prosecuter a gazillion bags of ice”

Is there a way we could actually do that?

I know I shouldn’t watch the network news. It just pisses me off. And if you can’t tell, I’m in the mood to tear someone’s head off.

Today I was busily answering email with the 12:00 news on in the background. The newsreader (I refuse to call them reporters) started an interview with Dr. Misogyny on how to be a single parent. Some of his stuff was pretty basic: kids come first, don’t make any rash decisions, and have a support network. But then he went into how single mothers shouldn’t date- ever. He put on a shrill fake-girl voice (the one that only men use, real women never sound like that) “oh but I want a man to be there for my kids” (note- the quotes in this one are approximate since there is no posted transcript and I was too busy guffawing to type him word for word). Then he says something about having some class by picking up men in church rather than bars. But even that’s not good enough cause moms aren’t capable of choosing guys who are decent people.

I really hate it when fat, balding middle-aged men think they know what’s best for women. I also noticed that this guy never directed his advice towards single dads. Oh yeah- and let’s perpetuate the Madonna-Whore idea because women who have had children should never be sexual creatures again if their marriage fails. Things only go into the vagina until you’ve pushed something out of one.

No one thinks kids should have revolving daddies. But mothers teach their children nothing valuable by living like a sexual martyr after a failed relationship except that relationships fail and then your life stops being yours (if you’re a girl).

I don’t do that with The Kid. I have taught him that people date (including his mother) and that most of the time dating relationships don’t work forever but you enjoy the person’s company while they are there. And The Kid knows that no matter who mama is seeing, he’s always got me there for him. His ability to trust that I will always be there is unshakable because it’s true, not because all temptation to distract me from The Kid has been eliminated by not dating.

The best piece of advice I was ever given was shortly after I became a single mom. I was in that martyr stage and a single dad friend said “Nope- you gotta make sure you’re ok or The Kid never will be”. Part of my being ok is acting out those biological urges most of us have, getting to flirt and be charmed by cute boys, and getting to have that ping-pong zip of conversation with someone I’m attracted too. It makes me a lot less stressed out and a lot more fun as a mom. I don’t feel like I’m sacrificing my life for my kid. Because I am more than just his mom, he gets to have an example of a complete person as a role model, not just some patriarchal view of a “mother” who has blinders on to everything not child related.

I’ve been hanging around with my cousin for the last week or so. She’s in a wheelchair and rented a van with a ramp for her visit here to make it easier to get around. We were waiting in the drugstore parking lot for a handicapped space with the ramp area on the right side for at least 10 minutes this evening. The guy who was in the space (waiting for someone to come out of the store) made nice and was going to pull into the other handicapped spot so we could park. In the middle of playing Chinese firedrill with 2 large vehicles this asswipe cuts off the other guy and steals his space.

I can’t abide this kind of behavior. I tell people off when they cut in line. I pick on people who use handicapped placards for rock-star parking when they don’t need it (which is what the asswipe who stole the space did). I’ve told off a soccer mom in a yuppy grocery store parking lot for stealing spaces by telling her “It’s really good that you’re teaching your kids they don’t have to wait their turn if it’s inconvenient”.

So I told the guy that off that took the space. And he said something about how I should “be afraid of him cause he’s a black man” and that “we all can’t be privileged”. What. The. Fuck?

1. I’ve lived in the CD for years. My kid and I are the only white people in our building and I love all my neighbors. Not just “some of my best friends are black” but we loan each other bus money and sugar and look after each other. We cry on each others shoulders when shit hits the fan and share beers when it’s all good. The kid is one of only 2 white kids in his afterschool program. His best friend there is a black girl. So me, afraid of a black man cause he’s dark is the funniest thing ever.

2. Exactly when did being paralyzed from the waist down and getting to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair become a privilege? When did it become a privilege to know that in a parking lot of 50 spaces there is only one you can use and some scam artist is taking it because he’s to lazy to walk an extra 10 feet?

The asswipe said I was disrespecting my son because I told this fuckwad that he was “a bastard whose mama should have taught him some manners”. What I am teaching my son is that you wait your turn because living by society’s rules is not always convenient and that when someone else breaks those rules you tell them to fuck off. That’s not disrespect, that’s what you do when you have the strength to stand up when someone else can’t. Someone like a girl in a wheelchair who is just trying to get in the drugstore.