Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Well, it's not exactly an early 1970s Thanksgiving night at Roosevelt Auditorium, but here's something pretty-sounding for Gurlitzer's purfoot of happineff by a gentleman who used to perform at that same venue, but on Halloween night, during that same timeframe.



I think Zappa secretly adored his own beautiful, emotive compositions and performances, but publicly disowned that side of his musical personality for some twisted, unnecessary reason. Unexpectedly, this is a cut you need to turn up to 11 after you jam your little earbuds into those holes in either side of your head. There's lots of understated studio magic going on, from the round, lazy driving of the bass to the effortless use of gentle acoustic and aggressive electric guitar sounds side by side in a big, ethereal acoustic domain. The idiosyncratic time signatures that he cuts in here and there further enhance the loveliness instead of pushing it off balance. And if you don't listen closely, you might miss the marimba fluttering underneath it all, rolling and arpeggiating like butterflies. It's hard for me to understand why Frank didn't push a few tracks like this out into the AOR FM "product channel." Would damage his cred as a Freak, I guess.

Zoot Allures, Frank Zappa (1976, "Zoot Allures," 1990 reissue, RykoDisc RCD 10160), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Mayor Pennypacker Comes Out For Equality

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Let's give in and all do the "brotherhood" bit.
Just make sure we don't make a habit of it.



The First Thanksgiving, Stan Freberg (1961, from "The United States of America: The Early Years," Capitol W/SW-1573), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

"National standard of care"

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Hey---guess what I have a 2 cm full-thickness tear in my left one of!

Answer: the only functional supraspinatus I have left in my body!

I may have mentioned a biking accident I had several months ago. At that time I requested my attending physician to order an MRI considering my previous bad luck with rotator cuffs and impromptu dismounting of a bicycle. The doc wrote the order, but muttered that the insurance company might not approve payment. That led me to postpone the order to avoid being hosed by my insurer. To abbreviate the story, I then went to a physical medicine guy who was very helpful but told me to call him if the pain didn't go away after a few courses of prednisone. It didn't, so I did. And the scan he reordered showed exactly what I felt: torn supra with some other mild collateral damage. Not like my disaster 4 years ago, but a surgery-grade impairment.

Naturally I expressed great irritation for having to wait for the MRI until retraction of the tissues began (fortunately no muscle retraction, unlike previously). The doctor, a nice gentleman who nevertheless felt defensive about my ire (which was actually aimed at my primary, not him), told me that a 3-month wait-and-see approach to this type of injury was the "national standard of care" before an expensive test was ordered. I asked him where this "national standard of care" was codified, and he told me "nowhere." He said it's something that doctors learn as part of their practice.

Yeah, I bet. But I wonder who teaches them.

When a 57-year-old man walks in and tells a doctor that he's flown over his handlebars and deflected the fall with one arm and fast thinking, I'd think the "national standard of care" would be to exercise some fucking professional discretion and carry out a complete diagnosis.

I think what we have now in this country is a "national standard of don't-care."

1963 [updated]

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I considered embedding the Zapruder film today, but I just can't do it. If you have the stomach to watch it, here's a narrated version of it that includes other film from the heinous moments and sound imposition from two Dictabelt recordings that were made concurrently with the assassination. And here is a close-up (cropped and restored or enhanced) version. Both are upsetting, possibly more so to people who were alive at the time than to people who relate to it mostly as a remote 20th century historical event.

Over the years I've become baffled by the drumbeat of polemic to the effect that only "nuts" believe that there was a conspiracy involved in gunning down President Kennedy in his November 22 motorcade. Acknowledging that we don't have all the facts, and that reasonable people can disagree, it seems incredible to me that anyone could accept uncritically that Oswald was the lone gunman. As the narrator of this clip indicates, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1976 that four shots were fired from two different directions and that, consequently, the crime was an act of conspiracy.

The anti-conspiracy drumbeat has really ramped up over the past 15 years or so. Die-hard proponents of the Lone Gunman Theory must rely on absurd concepts like the "magic bullet" that injured Texas Governor John Connally (in the front seat of the limo) before wounding the President. They also must rely on arcane ideas about intracranial pressure and questionable ballistics analysis (black-box concepts that are not testable by the average person, significantly) to explain why the President's head violently snaps in the opposite direction from where the fatal shot was supposedly fired... and in the same direction as the erstwhile contents of JFK's cranium. They also rely heavily on discrediting the whole idea of conspiracy because many people have advanced absurd ideas about who did it and why. Along these lines, Oliver Stone probably did more to discredit previous legitimate conspiracy investigations than any ten other lunatics. But an idea is not invalidated simply because crazy people talk about it.

If I had more time on my hands I'd consider checking the ages and political affiliations of the most prominent rabid anti-conspiricists. The analysis might turn up nothing, or it might turn up something interesting, I don't know. But I'm just plain stmped about why so many people (a loud crew, but still a minority of the U.S. populace) are so obstinately closed-minded about the idea of a conspiracy to assassinate the President of the United States. It was, after all, the U.S. crime of the century.

Update: I apologize to younger readers for glossing over several basic Dealey Plaza details in this post, the absence of which leaves several of my thoughts to appear incomplete. Dealey Plaza, in Dallas, is the general location of the motorcade when the assassination was committed. In the Zapruder home movie, which unintentionally documented this watershed event in U.S. politics, you can see the effects of two shots on the President. The first effect is when he clutches at his throat, with the First Lady and Governor Connally turning to see what is happening. It is commonly, and non-controversially, understood that he was hit in the back of the neck from Lee Oswald's 6th floor perch in the Texas School Book Depository. The second effect is 2 or 3 seconds later, when the right-front portion of the President's head explodes and he falls violently to his left, onto the First Lady. To any observer not previously "educated" to the contrary, it seems very clear from the evidence of one's own eyes that this fatal shot was fired from the front and right of the limousine, from the infamous "grassy knoll" or at the back edge where it abuts a residential district. Conspiracy deniers, and others undoubtedly in good faith, have developed an opaque, complex, and untestable theory about how a bullet fired from above and behind the president might have produced the appearance captured by Zapruder. This theory of dumdum bullet ballistics and intracranial pressure effects is absolutely necessary to explain away the hypothesis (observation, many would say) of a gunshot from across the knoll. Without acceptance of this theory, which seems highly improbable to many, many people, we are forced to conclude that shots were fired from two different directions on that morning. Two people making arrangements to shoot at the same motorcade would constitute a conspiracy.

Schneier and Marshall on TSA security theater

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Bruce Schneier is a renowned authority on "all matters security," including cyberwar, physical security, and domestic antiterrorism procedures. If you don't have much exposure to Schneier or airport security, it may be worthwhile for you to read his summary of the current backlash against TSA. At very least, read the fifth paragraph and then skip down to the graf beginning "Common sense from the Netherlands" and read the rest. But do read it all if you have time.

Josh Marshall, whose cred and authority have been rapidly falling in my view for a year, thinks the outcry is "a crock" because the people he thinks are complaining the loudest are politicians and pundits who gave full-throated support to two insane wars and the associated abridgments of our civil liberties. Well, it's not the backlash that's a crock; the crock is Marshall not doing his homework before he writes an inane post on the subject. It's also a crock that the backlash is politically motivated just because Obama's enemies are criticizing him about it. The right wingers are correct about this, even if it is exclusively for hypocritical and exploitative reasons. Maybe Josh should turn his little "muckrakers" loose on the airport security hypocrites, compiling a database of the complainers and cross-referencing their names with their previous votes or positions on draconian national security measures that don't catch terrorists and hurt only innocent Americans.

Piss Christ, what an asshole!

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I wonder where President Barack Hussein Obama with regard to the TSA's ongoing regime of government-sanctioned sexual assault and systematic humiliation of American citizens at U.S. airports. Just wondering.

That is, I'm wondering why he hasn't ordered "Homeland Security" secretary Janet Napolitano to immediately fire the TSA chief "John Pistole," put an immediate stop to these unconscionable airport assaults, and give reason why she shouldn't follow Pistole out the door within 48 hours.

Meanwhile, I wonder where Libertarians and Tea Partiers are on this issue. I'd think it falls into the category of 'treading on them.' I'd find it easier to have some sympathy for those misguided individuals if they spoke up on matters that really do encroach on their "freedoms."

I wish the President would show something other than a willingness to work with Blue Dog Democrats (e.g., Napolitano), and across the aisle with the crypto-fascists who aren't happy with our little constitutional democracy we've had going here for a coupla centuries. How about appointing lame duck senator Russ Feingold the new head of Homeland Security? Obama can do this by exercising his authority as the Unitary Executive, after all, can't he?

Oh, Olympia Snowe wouldn't hear of it. I see....

One giant leap for Mankind

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Mick Foley has always been a favorite in the RubberCrutch household. The puppet master for demented WWF/WWE wrestling alter egos Mankind, Cactus Jack, and Dude Love, Foley is an authentic badass in the most praiseworthy sense of that term. He is the auteur of countless past jaw-dropping feats of self-endangerment in the ring, the most legendary of which are collected and retold in the 1999 sports documentary Beyond The Mat (still worth renting, in my opinion). That film reveals Foley to be a highly intelligent, sensitive family man (with his lovely wife and adorable kids in tow for portions of the documentary)---an inexplicably genial berserker who is at the core an Everyman and a guy you'd love to have as a neighbor.

A published author many times over (although, admittedly, I think he should consider one more 15-foot dive into a pile of thumbtacks for penning Mick Foley's Halloween Hijinx), Foley has appeared on The Daily Show expressing support for gay rights, and even showed up at a high school with a gay student earlier this year to "threaten" homophobic bullies. He also was  recently a recipient of Jon Stewart's "Medal of Reasonableness" at the recent Sanity/Fear rally in DC.

Now TPM reports that Foley is joining rape survivor advocates to push for federal legislation to move the huge backlog of "rape kits" out of police evidence rooms and through the testing process, where DNA evidence from sexual assaults is analyzed and documented for victims and prosecutors. Activist Julie Weil, with whom Foley is working to promote this legislation, told TPM, "You can't get justice without DNA, it's just the way the world works now. Everyone expects to see DNA."

So hooray for Mankind! I wonder how much more humane and relevant our public discourse might be if, like Mick Foley, America's most hardcore athletic badasses were capable of sincerely and aggressively promoting political causes rooted in basic decency.

But, yet, serious questions are bound to emerge. How will we pay for this Nanny State legislation? Won't it contribute to the bankruptcy of our grandchildren? And, most importantly: if rape victims have no right to terminate pregnancies caused by invasive sexual assault, then what justification can there be to increase the deficit to investigate crimes that the victims probably "asked for," anyway?

Editor's note: this postscript is included to confirm that the previous paragraph is written with satirical intent apropos of certain fundamentalist "Christians" and "social conservatives." Please make a note of it.

Tea and crumb pits

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Apropos of the Phil Ochs lyrics The 59er has been sharing with us in the comments threads, most recently here, I think of this doke I saw on the web comic Married To The Sea awhile back:



It's easy to sling around idealism, whether just misguided or cynically manipulative, until we do a few thought experiments about the potential logical outcomes.

In my analysis, the followers are angry, all with more than enough reasons. Based on media coverage (which is what most of us have to go on), most of them blame the wrong people for their problems. They are preoccupied with the "undesirables"---fellow victims, all, incidentally, but living further downhill toward the pit where all the "shit" ultimately rolls---instead of the Nobility. Our homegrown aristocracy busily continues to socially engineer a nation mired in distrust, fear, and absolutism, and Tea Partiers will glide down the slippery slope toward the pit with the rest of us Commoners. So what can I say about these Tea Partiers? Some are earnest but misguided, many are True Believers, and the rest are just "dipshits." The instigators, though, are a whole 'nother class of entities.

Editor's note: I recommend that everyone visit Married To The Sea every day. These shorties who produce this clip art web comic demonstrate to all you geezers out there that there are plenty of "millennials" who know where it's at. They just stay away from our neighborhoods.

It's Bedtime!

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After you kids are done watching this, you need to pop right into bed, and I don't wanna hear another peep outta ya! Because I want to talk with the grown-ups.



"Greedy Humpty Dumpty" is a 1936 Fleischer Studios masterpiece that had a deep impact on my semisolid brain back in the mid and late 1950s. Flesicher cartoons were a major source of kids' fare in the early decades of television, readily available through syndication services to fill local programming holes on independent stations and network affiliates. Most of us who grew up with them assumed that all of them were black and white; even us shorties could recognize that these were "old-fashioned" cartoons as compared with things like Ruff 'n' Ready, Crusader Rabbit, or even Tom Terrific. (Little Me always preferred the old-school cartoons, and I had little use for the modern junk until Rocky and his Friends came along.)

Anyway, little did I know until the 1980s that this short was produced in color. Although color adds a lot to the presentation, the ghostly grayscale rendering on a 1950s 15-inch cathode ray tube produced its own unique impact, almost verging on horror (to my delicate sensibilities, at least). The fully expressed insanity of Humpty Dumpty inside his vault (with cash bags ominously resembling piled skulls), his stupidity, his greed and cruelty---so pointless since he was already The King Of Wealth---that laugh of his, and finally, the fury of the violated sun (echoing the vengeful Old Testament god of the Fleischers)---these images and sounds left a lasting dent in my 4-year-old psyche. Seeing GHD periodically, later while growing up, always gave me a bit of the willies as I experienced them at the time of my premier viewing.

As I say, this cartoon is a masterpiece of storytelling, even if it is based on one of the oldest archetypal tales known to human civilization (greed plus covetousness leading to insanity and ruin). With it's cute fairy-tale visual design and insipid toddler-oriented music bed, the story operates on multiple levels according to viewer maturity and perceptiveness. To semi-engaged parents who early learned the babysitting prowess of television, the cartoon was "kid stuff," with its treacly score piping into the kitchen or laundry room before Dad was home from work (or awake on the weekend). To the target audience, GHD was a story with a moral, sort of like the parables they presented to us in Sunday School, but much more entertaining and convincing thanks to the visuals and the absence of plump, warty matrons wasting our morning in a classroom environment.

Many YouTube commentators correctly draw parallels between this cartoon and our present financial sector disaster, and others have pointed out that a sentient 1936 adult may have interpreted this cartoon as social commentary related to the roots of the Great Depression. Myself, I think it also encapsulates much more profound esoteric knowledge---the type that mystery religions conceal behind an infrastructure of myth, legend, history, and pedagogy to occupy followers who are not ready to access deeper levels. I know this may sound pseudo-intellectual, but I feel that "Greedy Humpty Dumpty" rewards repeated viewings, disgorging new details of literary merit and even an allegory of how civilizations and immortal souls fail.

Greedy Humpty Dumpty, Dave Fleischer [Director]; David Tendlar and William Sturm [Animators] (1936, Fleischer Studios), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Lemme ask you this:

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Why do the conglomerate media and national politicians of both parties keep pretending that the public is obsessed with the federal deficit when post-election polls show that only 4 percent of Americans consider it a priority?

That's up, by the way, from a total of 1 percent from the same CBS poll in January 2007---so I guess by that measure you could truthfully say that concern about the budget deficit has quadrupled in 3 years! (Also note from the screenshot in Krugman's post that citizen concern about illegal immigration has fallen by 2/3 from the level reported by the same CBS poll in January 2007, that is, from 6 percent to 2 percent!

Editor's note: "Lemme ask you this:" is a brand new copyrighted feature of this blog! It is sort of like the interrogative conjoined twin of "Wise sayings".

Migrating a computer

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I've been non-posting because of demands related to migrating internet accounts to a new computer, and also dealing with a change in Blogger login requirements that is confusing me. I'm almost back, though. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Progressives *still* didn't win the midterms, but...

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...two more Blue Dogs look like they're being targeted by the Shit-Hammer of Destiny.

Blue Dogs, as others of you may agree, are a breed of spineless Democrat (there are other breeds, too) that thrives as a parasite on the body of the progressive political tradition. They subsist by devouring Blue Dollars, which they rapidly metabolize into Red Dollars. Blue Dogs excrete Red Legislative Compromises that empower a minority of regressive political bosses to turn our democratic republic into a feudal domain.

No, progressives didn't "win" Tuesday

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But....

Big Hussein Otis pointed me to a plucky column by Karen Dolan, an activist and fellow at the liberal Institute for Policy Studies, which merrily proclaims that progressives "won" yesterday's national midterm elections. That's a farfetched interpretation, obviously, and she certainly must be using it to attract the attention of dispirited liberals. But the analysis in back of if conforms to one of my own conclusions.

I am part of Dolan's target audience even though I'm not a Democrat and never will be. Since high school I've identified with the ideals of the political heroes of the progressive era in U.S. politics: Teddy Roosevelt, "Fighting Bob" LaFollette of Wisconsin, and the muckraker journalists, for example. Democrats are supposed to be the heirs to and stewards of the American progressive political tradition. But Democrats became lukewarm toward, and even ashamed of, their responsibility to promote progressive policies and programs. I assume this abdication of responsibility---cowardice, let's say---is the result of being vilified for liberalism during 30 years of rhetorical assault by a minority of loud, hateful political and corporate thugs. Well, too bad---"politics ain't beanbag. Abandoning the practice of your core principles while publicly implying that you still fight for them on behalf of ordinary Americans an ugly failure of character. That should have consequences. In the Tuesday midterms, it did. And my conclusion is: good!

Over half the members of the House Blue Dog caucus lost their seats to Republicans, by Dolan's count. And, says Dolan, almost two thirds of the conservative House Democrats who voted against HCR---Blue Dogs and others---also lost. Meanwhile, only three members of the House progressive caucus lost. So, as I say: good!

"Blue Dogs", as you know, are a caucus of congressional Democrats who use the party label, its past reputation, and its resources to win their elections so they can use their office to undermine their own party and thwart progressive legislation in concert with the regressive political minority. In other words, Blue Dogs are a critical component of the American regressive movement, and turn that minority into a majority. They do their dirty work in Democrat drag, pretending that they're "centrists," and party leadership permits this situation to continue. The party has gotten what it deserves.

So even though progressives would be silly to consider Tuesday's results to be a win, some bad karma accounts were settled. Will the party learn its lesson? I don't think so. I think it's more likely the party will die from it. So that will leave room for a new progressive party to push its way into the game. If we still have a functioning democracy by then.

And meanwhile, the new Republican coalition is flimsier than a Walmart card table. How can Rand Paul preach to his Libertarian congregation that Government doesn't create jobs when it's just created one for him and each member of his new staff?

Wise sayings

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In the 1960s and 1970s, Americans did not like radicals and were afraid of them, but in the 21st century we elect them to consitutional offices in the federal government.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.