Emma Goldman Will Not Raise Your Taxes

Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being. Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free.

If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.

Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world.

Idealists are foolish enough to throw caution to the winds. They have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.

The motto should not be: Forgive one another; rather understand one another.

Only when human sorrows are turned into a toy with
glaring colors will baby people become interested - for a while at
least. The people are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every
day.

Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.

Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous
germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the
poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed.

--Emma Goldman

Gods Problem by Bart Ehrman (excerpt)

Many people in our world take a smorgasbord approach to the Bible, picking and choosing what suts them and their views without acknowledging that the Bible is an extremely complex and intricate concatenation of views, perspectives, and ideas. There are millions of people in our world, for example, who suffer social estrangement because of their sexual orientation. Some of this social alienation originates among simpleminded Bible believers who insist that gay relationships are condemned in Scripture. As it turns out, that is a debated issue, one on which serious scholars disagree. But apart from that, this condemnation of gay relations "because the Bible condemns it" is a case of people choosing to accept the parts of the Bible they want to accept and ignoring everything else. The same books that condemn same-sex relations, for example, also require people to stone their children to death if they are disobedient, to execute anyone who does any work on Saturday or who eats pork chops, and to condemn anyone who wears a shirt made of two kinds of fabric. No special emphasis is placed on one of these laws over the others--they are all part of the biblical law. Yet, in parts of society, gay relations are condemned, while eating a ham sandwich during a lunch break on a Saturday workday is perfectly acceptable.

--God's Problem

Making The Nature Scene

Business is dead. I’m in my office and Joe’s oiling the lanes. Now he’s standing in the doorway. “You’re gonna want your camera. The ducks are out front again. This time they’re in between the double doors.” I search through my backpack, grab my Minolta 110 SLR and head for the doorway. Joe’s standing on the concourse shaking his head. “They’re gone.” I looked out the entranceway, where one glass door is stuck open by about a foot. The sun is shining. Something unpleasant occurs to me. Just then two ducks fly off from left to right across the doorway angled toward the sky, slightly apart, in a pose from an Audubon drawing. I grab a towel and walk between the double doors where I carefully wipe up two fresh splotches of duck droppings.

Death Mask Tuesday (Don't Look Back ed.)

The first mature work which launched his fame, by today's mask man, was a sculpture of Orpheus looking back into Hades. Hopefully our look back at the neo-classical sculptor Antonio Canova won't have such dire consequences.


Antonio Canova was born in Passagno, at the base of the Venetian Alps in 1757 to a family with generations of stone cutting and monument building behind them. His father died and his mother abandoned him at a young age, but Canova was well-tended to by his paternal grandparents and his talent with the chisel soon earned him a Venetian patron. His Daedalus and Icarus, which might cause a stir in modern day Cincinnati, sculpted during this period, boosted his repute enough to prompt a move to Rome, where he was to do his most accomplished work.

Among those where Cupid and Eros:



the remarkably defeated Magdalene


and the epic Perseus and Medusa (which New Yorkers can see at the Met)


Canova was ambitious in his work and seemed to be charitable in his life. He died at the age of 64 in Venice, according to the 1911 Brittanica from a disease "caused by the continual use of carving-tools, producing a depression of the ribs." Sounds like either one hell of a case of carpal-tunnel or some 19th century mis-diagnosis.

In the Minority...

Here are the results of a poll I got from my congressman John Boehner. My responses were solidly in the minority, even though the questions make those answers seem very wrong...

Thank you for participating in the short Constituent Opinion Survey. I appreciate you taking the time to give me your feedback on the important issues facing Congress. If you signed up to receive regular e-mail updates from me, you will see those beginning Tuesday when I send my weekly eBulletin. That e-mail will include, among things, a link to my weekly column, information on what is coming up in Congress as well as other helpful information.

I thought you might be interested in the results of the survey in which you participated. This was not a scientific “poll,” but rather an opportunity for me to hear from my constituents. Below are each question and the number of people who answered that they “strongly agree,” “agree,” “disagree” or “strongly disagree.” There were a total 6,373 respondents. Please note: The number of respondents to each question may not add up to the total as some people may not have answered all the questions.

1. The national average for gas is $3.50, which is $1.19 more per gallon than you were paying in January 2007. Congress should open up land in the U.S. for oil exploration so that we can increase our domestic supply and decrease our dependence on foreign suppliers.

Strongly Agree: 3,752
Agree: 926
Disagree: 441
Strongly Disagree: 938

2. The U.S. House recently voted three times against a bill to stop the largest tax increase in American history – a total of $683 billion that will affect every single tax payer to pay for more government spending. With costs of living continuing to rise (gas prices, food prices, etc), there shouldn’t be any talk of increasing taxes.

Strongly Agree: 4,389
Agree: 717
Disagree: 451
Strongly Disagree: 499

3. I believe we should seek market-based solutions for problems such as rising fuel costs and the current housing situation rather than advocating for more government regulation.

Strongly Agree: 3,431
Agree: 1,205
Disagree: 575
Strongly Disagree: 553

4. Some people say that immigration reform efforts in Congress are just an effort to issue amnesty and full citizenship to these illegal immigrants. We should not be rewarding those who broke the laws of our country by coming here illegally.

Strongly Agree: 4,328
Agree: 866
Disagree: 493
Strongly Disagree: 347

5. What is your biggest economic concern? (please choose one)

Gas Prices: 2,491
Food Prices: 467
Healthcare Costs: 1,665
Job Loss: 740
The mortgage situation and its impact on housing: 412
Other: 594

Death Mask Tuesday (Tropical Fish Hobbyist ed.)

Luis Agassiz 1807-1873



Because I was a big tropical fish hobbyist in my youth, I recognized this guy's name right away; he's got a dwarf cichlid named after him. He's also got a pretty satisfied look which makes me think this could be a life mask.
Swiss born, Agassiz moved to America in 1848 and was probably the last Harvard professor to ascribe to the theory of natural theology, which absolutely rejected evolutionary theory.
Agassiz moved the practice of scientific classification forward, but his view was extremely hierarchical, placing human beings,for example, at the top of one of his four classes of life. This hierarchical tendency also led to his anti-evolutionary (and anti-biblical) theory that all races did not come from a single source (or pair of humans as in Genesis), but that God had placed many people of each race in different parts of the world simultaneously. This theory of polygenesis was most comforting to slave owners of the mid-nineteenth century.
Perhaps Agassiz' most profound impact on science was his work on proving that the earth had undergone a great Ice Age, although he believed it was an instant occurrence brought on by God to shake his big etch-a-sketch of creation.
Agassiz helped create the National Academy of Sciences at the behest of Abraham Lincoln.

Ferguson Friday (Speaking Nonsense to Power ed.)

Craig Ferguson White House Correspondents Dinner pt.1

Craig Ferguson - 2008 Correspondents Dinner - Part 2

Craig Ferguson White House Correspondents Dinner pt.3

Citizens of Hamburg Take Note...

...as well as Bohemia, Frankfurt, Cologne and Turkey.
Lesbians are mad as hell and won't take it anymore. I see their point; I was very disappointed during Greek Week at college--no spanakopita, just a bunch of drunk frat boys.

Ruth Buzzi Lives

H/t to Bob

Death Mask Tuesday (My Kind of Founding Father Ed.)

Of all the founding parents this guy is my favorite. It could be because he never sold out. He didn't run for President, was kicked out of public office, and, after being made an honorary citizen of France (while at the same time being convicted in absentia for libel and sedition in England) and named as a representative to it's National Convention, was jailed and came within a hair of being executed.
Or maybe because he did not believe in the revealed texts of formal religions :

The creation speaketh an universal language,
independently of human speech, or human language, multiplied
and various as they be. It is an ever-existing original, which
every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be
counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it
cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will of man
whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from
one end of the earth to the other.

Maybe it's because at 37, after proving himself a failure in England, he came to America and wrote Common Sense which half a million people read and which did much to spur the American and French Revolutions. He was one of our first countrymen whose life had a second act.

Death Mask Tuesday (Glove in the Face ed.)

We resume our death mask dalliances with one of Beauty's top promoters, the German playwright, poet, historian and philosopher, Friedrich Schiller.
While working as a military doctor, he published his first play, The Robbers, which was a big sensation and resulted in his separation from the military.
While Schiller continued to write successful plays as an integral part of the German Sturm and Drang movement, he turned his attention to history, publishing an account of the Dutch revolution, which in turn won him a position, upon recommendation of his great friend Goethe, as a history professor.
Schiller went on to write poetry (his Ode To Joy is included in Beethoven's 9th Symphony) and eventually turned to philosophy, becoming a champion of culture and the aesthetic as the true path to freedom and a moral life.
His life ended as a result of tuberculosis at 45.

Below is a seemingly simple and traditional poem that ends with a very modern twist:

THE GLOVE

by: Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805)

EFORE his lion-court
Impatient for the sport,
King Francis sat one day;
The peers of his realm sat around,
And in balcony high from the ground
Sat the ladies in beauteous array.
And when with his finger he beckoned,
The gate opened wide in a second
And in, with deliberate tread,
Enters a lion dread,
And looks around
Yet utters no sound;
Then long he yawns
And shakes his mane,
And, stretching each limb,
Down lies he again.

Again signs the king,--
The next gate open flies,
And, lo! with a wild spring,
A tiger out hies.
When the lion he sees, loudly roars he about,
And a terrible circle his tail traces out.
Protruding his tongue, past the lion he walks,
And, snarling with rage, round him warily stalks
Then, growling anew,
On one side lies down too.

Again signs the king,--
And two gates open fly,
And, lo! with one spring,
Two leopards out hie.
On the tiger they rush, for the fight nothing loth,
But he with his paws seizes hold of them both
And the lion, with roaring, gets up, - then all's still,
The fierce beasts stalk around, madly thirsting to kill.

From the balcony raised high above
A fair hand lets fall down a glove
Into the lists, where 'tis seen
The lion and tiger between.

To the knight, Sir Delorges, in tone of jest,
Then speaks young Cunigund fair;
"Sir Knight, if the love that thou feel'st in thy breast
Is as warm as thou'rt wont at each moment to swear,
Pick up, I pray thee, the glove that lies there!"

And the knight, in a moment, with dauntless tread,
Jumps into the lists, nor seeks to linger,
And, from out the midst of those monsters dread,
Picks up the glove with a daring finger.

And the knights and ladies of high degree
With wonder and horror the action see,
While he quietly brings in his hand the glove,
The praise of his courage each mouth employs;
Meanwhile, with a tender look of love,
The promise to him of coming joys,
Fair Cunigund welcomes him back to his place.
But he threw the glove point-blank in her face:
"Lady, no thanks from thee I'll receive!"
And that selfsame hour he took his leave.

OOC Sunday Comic

Let The Prying Begin...

Vestigial Fortune

You look smart today
But we know better

It's Sunday morning
You find a pile of empty bottles
Around your favorite tree

You say, I don't believe in kindred spirits
But you believe in luck
In luck, you say, I believe

You look smart on Sunday morning sorting empty bottles,
but we know better
We're lucky that way

You say, I don't believe
I've had the pleasure
But we know better

You lean against your favorite tree
You lean between two piles of empty bottles
You say, you better believe it
You say, welcome kindred spirit
You say, I'm lucky that you're smart that way

Housekeeping

Things have quieted down on this space lately while I have been dealing with other creative and non-creative enterprises. I expect to get back up to a more prolific pace next week.

In the meantime, Kinks fans should check out Ray Davies' new album. His first solo effort was praised by critics but bounced off me completely. This new one, Working Man's Cafe, on the other hand combines simple but effective lyrics with some real catchy music. "Imaginary Man" and "Morphine Song" are particularly stuck in my head. I'm sure my family is delighted that I walk around the house singing, "Listen to my heartbeat lalalala lalalala
Yeah, listen to my heartbeat lalalala lalalala"...

To Quote a Norwegian...

Publius decides whether to go Mac. I've been thinking about the same thing for a little while now, so I read the comments with some interest. Nothing ther convinces me to make the shift, but I did find my commenter of the month:

To quote a norwegian comic strip:

"Gentoo for you and Ubuntu for your granny!"

Posted by: Harald Korneliussen | March 29, 2008 at 03:06 PM

Don't know what it means, but it makes me happy...

The Real Story of Wolfman Jack and Mexican Radio...

TV comedy writer Ken Levine tells how he filled in for Wolfman Jack on Mexican radio. The post describes the wild beginnings of the Wolfman south of the border on pirate radio:

At one point the Mexican government tried to take back the station and there was an actual gun battle as Jack and the staff held down the fort. Picture the Alamo except Davy Crockett wins and they play Screaming Jay Hawkins records.

Read more about Bob Smith here and here and Mexican radio here.

Got No Time For Western Lessons...

He is Damo Suzuki:

Oh Yeah from the Can album, Tago Mago


Mushroom (also from Tago Mago)

Woodrow Wilson Will Raise Your Taxes....

Here's an excerpt from Woodrow Wilson's Message to Congress, April 2, 1917:

It will involve the organization and mobilization of all the material resources of the country to supply the materials of war and serve the incidental needs of the nation in the most abundant and yet the most economical and efficient way possible. It will involve the immediate full equipment of the Navy in all respects but particularly in supplying it with the best means of dealing with the enemy's submarines. It will involve the immediate addition to the armed forces of the United States already provided for by law in case of war at least 500,000 men, who should, in my opinion, be chosen upon the principle of universal liability to service, and also the authorization of subsequent additional increments of equal force so soon as they may be needed and can be handled in training. It will involve also, of course, the granting of adequate credits to the Government, sustained, I hope, so far as they can equitably be sustained by the present generation, by well conceived taxation. I say sustained so far as may be equitable by taxation because it seems to me that it would be most unwise to base the credits which will now be necessary entirely on borrowed money.

You'd Think I'd Learn

Someone stop me before I challenge myself to complete this.

h/t DaRK PaRTY ReVIEW

Death Mask Tuesday ("He who cannot, blogs" Edition)

Today's death mask is the only person ever to win both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize, George Bernard Shaw.
Shaw not only produced works which inspired movies which I will never see, but he advocated the abolition of personal property and left provision in his will (his personal property was abolished posthumously, it seems) for the creation of a new alphabet.
Shaw's socialism was attached to Britain's Fabian Society, a somewhat more intellectual counterpart to the British Marxists.
Known chiefly as a playwright for Pygmalion, Man and Superman and Major Barbara, he was a popular music critic, political writer (The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism), and, less successfully, novelist.
A vegetarian who famously said "I do not eat my friends", Shaw lived to the ripe old age of 94.
Since he was an avid aphorist ("I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation") here are some of his most famous and clever:

• A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
• Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.
• Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.
• Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.
• Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
• He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
  
• I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.
  
• I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.
• If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.
• If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.
• Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
• Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
• Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability.
  
• Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.
• Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.
  
• Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
• Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not?
• The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
  
• The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.
• Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
• Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
• You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

Kill Yr Idols (the early years)

When I was a kid I was fortunate enough to have a father who was close friends with the assistant head coach of the hometown Miami Dolphins. Not only did we have season tickets, but when the Dolphins were at home, we’d go to the Saturday Morning practices at the Orange Bowl and afterwards have lunch with the coach at a nearby Lums.

My favorite player in those early days of the franchise was Paul Warfield. The Dolphins were a running team, but when they passed, it was Warfield who brought the excitement. After five running plays in a row, there was a great thrill when Bob Griese spiraled the ball fifteen yards down the field to the swift and sure-handed Warfield.

My dad let the coach know about my Warfield worship and one Saturday I was ushered into the locker room. I walked through a valley of big sweaty men and the deep raucous rumble they made to the locker of Paul Warfield. Coach introduced me to Warfield and he smiled as he offered one of the big graceful hands that caught all those passes. I wish I could remember what he said, but the sad fact is that all I can remember is my mortification at the thin high pitched voice that greeted me. I never imagined a hero could sound like that.

It didn’t change the fact that Paul Warfield was my favorite football player, but that slight bit of dissonance showed me that heroes were not as simple as my imagination expected. Since that time, my heroes have become more and more complicated as I have embraced the dissonance. Maybe it’s a stretch to credit Paul Warfield with my affinity for anti-heroes in adulthood, but it amuses me to think so.

In My Opinion

I find that as I get older, I am less compelled to have opinions. My interest in the world has grown, but it seems that my desire to pin it down has decreased. When it’s useful or necessary I can strike out a position, but the impetus is usually external.

While I don’t condemn those whose default position is to have a position on any subject, I rarely find it refreshing when I come across someone who is compelled to speak his or her mind. They’re usually not reasonable, but if they are, seem to have more regrets than I.

Death Mask Tuesday (Sick Christian Edition)

"Sickness is the natural state of Christians." So said Blaise Pascal as he rejected treatment for his lifelong ailment, which even an autopsy could not identify.
Born a math prodigy, he died a Christian mystic. He invented the hydraulic press, the syringe and, when his father became a tax collector, the Pascaline (which was a terrifically expensive calculator).
Pascal became deeply engaged with Christianity sometime around his 23rd year when he was exposed to the austere sect of Jansenism. He lapsed for a while, but an epiphanic religious experience in 1854 focused completely on theological philosophy.
He also contributed the concept of Pascal's Wager, which said you've got nothing to lose if you bet there is a God, and there isn't, while you could lose eternally if you bet the other way and are wrong. Fortunately I don't enjoy gambling so I won't play.

Happiness Is Getting Cut Off

Today a tricked-out monster of a pickup cut me off as I was driving my boys home from work and I burst into laughter. For some time now I have been feigning amusement, occasionally slipping into sarcastic applause as a substitute for road rage, but in this case my laughter was spontaneous and hearty. The boys picked up on my light hearted response; one joked about the inverse size ratio between penis size and vehicles, the other replied that in that case his brother had no penis since he had no car and it went on from there.

While driving later that day, I realized that angry responses had brought me much less pleasure and certainly no more reward. Plus, I thought, it might have done the boys good to see a different response to rude behavior. Maybe I was making peace with this world little by little. As I slowed to stop at a red light, a car cut across my lane to get into the middle lane, forcing me to stop pretty hard. I smiled but there was no joy in it.