Month: January 2011

Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt

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by Fiddler* Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt. (Exodus 22:21) In Arizona, where anti-immigration fever appears to be burning hotter among hardline Republicans than the Sonora Desert in August, the state legislature is considering yet another bill targeting illegal immigrants. This one is designed to deny citizenship to … Read more

Tea Party Decoder Ring, please

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by Doctor Science The NY Times article Tea Party Gets Early Start on G.O.P. Targets for 2012″ quotes Indiana Tea Party supporter Mark Holwager: “Heartland America doesn’t feel the same way as people in the cities,” he said. “We do believe in religion, we go to church all the time, we shoot and fish, and … Read more

We Can Haz Kitty Open Thread With No Guns!

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by Gary Farber

One Thousand and One Nights of no Open Threads it has not been, but let one begin! 

Tell your stories! 

One Thousand and One Nights (Arabic: كتاب ألف ليلة وليلة‎ Kitāb 'alf layla wa-layla; Persian: هزار و یک شب Hezār-o yek šab) is a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English language edition (1706), which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights' Entertainment.[1]

The work as we have it was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators and scholars across the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa. The tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian folklore and literature. In particular, many tales were originally folk stories from the Caliphate era, while others, especially the frame story, are most probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hezār Afsān (Persian: هزار افسان, lit. A Thousand Tales) which in turn relied partly on Indian elements.[2] Though the oldest Arabic manuscript dates from the 14th century, scholarship generally dates the collection's genesis to around the 9th century.

Let me frame that for you.  I foreshadow.  We are all unreliable narrators.

But some of us haz friends who are kitties.


 

Download We Can Haz Grooming Vid 2011-01-30 002

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the things that were not said

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by russell So, I listened to the State Of The Union speech last Tuesday on my way home from an early gig.  It was a good speech, full of grand 30,000 foot ideas for Moving The Nation Forward, delivered in the optimistic, avuncular style that Obama is so good at. Here are a number of … Read more

The Unbearable Triteness of Whiteness & Why The Term “Political Correctness” Must Die

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by Gary Farber

Always read Ta-Nehisi Coates.  He's one of the best.  In The Unbearable Whiteness of Pro-Lifers and Pundits, he reminds us of how Santorum became a Savage Google bomb.

And Rick Santorum is still running for the Republican plum.

Santorum has said he is considering candidacy for the Republican nomination for President of the United States in the 2012 presidential election. On September 11, 2009, Santorum spoke to a group of Catholic leaders in Orlando, Florida. He told the leaders, "I hate to be calculating, but I see that 2012 is not just throwing somebody out to be eaten, but it's a real opportunity for success." He also scheduled appearances with political non-profit organizations that took place in Iowa on October 1, 2009.

Santorum re-iterated his consideration of a 2012 run in a e-mail and letter sent on January 15, 2010 to supporters of his Political Action Committee saying, "After talking it over with my wife Karen and our kids – I am considering putting my name in for the 2012 presidential race. I'm convinced that conservatives need a candidate who will not only stand up for our views, but who can articulate a conservative vision for our country's future," Santorum also writes. "And right now, I just don't see anyone stepping up to the plate. I have no great burning desire to be president, but I have a burning desire to have a different president of the United States."

He gives me different burning desires. 

Coates: 

Last week Rick Santorum proved himself to be Rick Santorum:

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Desperation Is the Devil’s Work

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by Eric Martin While details of the story have been partially buried the piles of snow blanketing the northeast, the frenzy of attention paid to the State of the Union address and the draw of the potentially paradigm-shifting events in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world, in what should be a newsworthy event, Al Jazeera … Read more

Getting in your Face(book)

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21st Century Gary Farber presents:

A guest post by liberal japonicus:

I got pulled into Facebook when my horn teacher got into it and cajoled/threatened/ordered us to join. I did and immediately hooked up with a number of people who I had lost touch with, which was a gas. However, within a day of joining, I had friend requests from 3 people from my 1st grade elementary school class. At that point, I made the decision to not send friend requests. I'd still accept friend requests, (and still do) accept friend requests, but by drawing a line there, it makes it a bit easier to manage.

So I was curious who in the ObWi family is using Facebook and how they are using it.

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Introducing Fiddler: Paging Charles Dickens

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by Doctor Science

Your ObiWi front-pagers are doing some re-shuffling, again, as various people find they have less time for blogging than they’d hoped. I’d like to introduce a new candidate, “Fiddler”, and her first post.

I’ve e-known Fiddler under another pseud for years (since before the ’04 elections, IIRC) — she was long one of my main sources for news and links on politics, energy, art, feminism, and interesting stuff. She lives in the DC area, very broadly speaking, and has worked in the newspaper business (when there was one) and politics. She’s also a musician (guitar, cello, fiddle), hence the choice of pseud for Obsidian Wings. And of course, there are cats.

In terms of the political landscape, Fiddler is on the lefty side (as am I, of course), but with a *really* solid understanding of the nuts & bolts of policy — much of what I know I’ve learned from her. Give us your usual forthright yet civil feedback, and we’ll see how this works out. Herewith:

Paging Charles Dickens, by Fiddler

Back in the 1980s, I spent a time working for a daily newspaper in a small city in New York state. The newspaper was part of a media chain owned out-of-state, and the pay scale was set for the other state, which didn’t have New York’s higher taxes. Because of this, as a single working person, I was qualified to receive government assistance for food in the form of free cheese and other occasionally available food products. I won’t deny it came in very handy at the end of the month, particularly in midwinter with sub-zero temperatures and high heating bills. But at the next desk, the reporter was a man who made the same money I did and who was married and had children. He and his family were on food stamps in order to keep food on the table all the time, although he, like me, was working full-time. In a different industry, we might have been able to work overtime to make up some of the difference, but according to company policy none of us were allowed overtime except on election night, which didn’t pay for a lot of groceries.

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One Way To Connect

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by Gary Farber

ONE WAY TO CONNECT can be this:

This is America:

This is something we can do:

To Beat Back Poverty, Pay the Poor:

The city of Rio de Janeiro is infamous for the fact that one can look out from a precarious shack on a hill in a miserable favela and see practically into the window of a luxury high-rise condominium. Parts of Brazil look like southern California. Parts of it look like Haiti. Many countries display great wealth side by side with great poverty. But until recently, Brazil was the most unequal country in the world

Everything connects:

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The Fantasy of the Gun

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by Doctor Science

I’ve spent days now starting posts about the Tucson Massacre and then stopping because someone else was saying it better. Examples: Sady Doyle: “The Arizona shooting FAQ”; Esquire: “The Voices in Jared Loughner’s Head Shall Not Be Respected; Julianne Hing: Loughner, Lovelle Mixon, and Our Quest for Narratives; Conor Friedersdorf: Tone Versus Substance and many, many more.

I’m going to just talk about one aspect of the Massacre and the resulting discussion. In brief:

a) we have too many guns, and the guns are too big

b) a major reason for this is that guns are more important as fantasies than as tools

c) in particular, guns have starring roles in our filmed fiction (TV & movies), and those roles are what we think of when we imagine “guns”.

In not-so-brief:

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