“Fuck the UAW”
This, and other observations, from Glenn Greenwald
I Love my 1996 Subaru and Schummer’s Super Sunoco
I just got a call from my mechanic that my car has passed inspection and is ready for pick up. This is great news, because I thought I’d be paying for some substantial repairs: we had some brutal potholes this summer and my brakes were feeling squirrelly even though they were replaced less than a year ago. As it turns out, the brakes are fine but I’ll need to replace a tie rod, which is neither urgent nor expensive: I’m putting that task off for another two weeks.
I want to take a moment, now, to express my deep love for my 1996 Subaru Legacy wagon. This car has a small patch of rust on the passenger side rear door, and sometimes it’s difficult to lock the hatch, but at 215,000 miles, the car has better pickup than my girlfriend’s brand new Honda Fit, it starts reliably, and while the AC isn’t as strong as it could be the heat works great. Selling my gas-guzzling-but-spacious Chevy Astro was probably one of the best decisions I made in my life. While the Legacy is a bit more crowded than the van, I can still fit my upright bass, a guitar, a fiddle, two coolers, a backpack full of clothes, a girlfriend and a 6-year old son in there, with room to spare.
i also want to take a moment to recommend Schummer’s Super Sunoco Servicenter for all my Philadelphia readers. I’ve been getting all my car repairs and inspections done there for at least five years, at the suggestion of Alex, who sometimes comments here. It’s well worth the trip from southwest Philly to their location in the Mayfair neighborhood. They get the job done right, they get it done quickly, they don’t play shenanigans with your bill, and they often go well beyond the call of duty. Their work on my timing belt was a good example: after replacing the broken belt, they couldn’t get the car started because you have to detach a dazzling amount of wires to get to the belt. I think it took them three more days before they got the job all the way done, but they cut me a break on the final price tag because of the delay on their end. that’s good customer service in my book, and I’m happy to recommend them to you as well.
No Shit, Sherlock Part Two
Another reason my blogging has tapered off is that so much of what’s going on in the world can be reduced to one post, over and over and over again: “No Shit, Sherlock”:
As Barack Obama appeared on television Tuesday to declare the end of the U.S. combat role in Iraq, were viewers happiest in Baghdad, Washington, D.C., or Tehran?
The obvious answer would seem to be Washington or Baghdad. In fact, some analysts believe the real winner of the war in Iraq is neither the Iraqis, nor Americans, but the Iranians…The spring’s election and its aftermath, Bazzi said, underscored how effective Iranian influence has been, especially with maneuvering between Iraq’s Shiite factions. “I’d argue that Iran started filling the political void that the U.S. has left in Iraq years ago, and now it becomes even easier with fewer U.S. troops,” he said, noting that the 50,000 U.S. troops that will remain on the ground concern the Iranians. “On a political level, Iranians have played politics in Iraq much more effectively than the U.S. Part of that is that all the Iraqi factions recognized that Iran is not going anywhere, but the U.S. was going to leave, but the Iraqis are stuck with their neighbors.” The Iranians, he said, are “getting a little concerned about the political stalemate in Iraq.”
Iranians, Bazzi said, are “keen on playing this role of the political broker.” To that end, they called almost the entire Iraqi leadership to Tehran right after elections. “The Iranians view their strategic interest in Iraq on several levels. Immediate, of maintaining a friendly government in Baghdad, because they don’t want to go back to the days of Saddam where there was an extremely adversarial threat next door. The Iranians will want a friendly, Shiite-led government in Baghdad, and they see that as the new reality.”
A weak Iraq is also in Iran’s interest, Bazzi explained. “If Iraq is not as dominate as it once was, if it is friendly and compliant, then it enables Iran to maintain regional dominance in the Persian Gulf.” Finally, he said, Iraq has become a “bargaining chip and a proxy in their conflict with the United States.”
You wanna know how many times people like me pointed this out this likely outcome? More fucking times than I can count. And you know, I’m not some kind of foreign policy genius. I’m not a diplomat or a career employee of the state department or an ambassador. I wasn’t educated at some ivy league school. I’m a common, run-of-the-mill idjit.
And it’s like this for everything: the economy’s not picking up steam? Well maybe the stimulus shouldn’t have been weighted so much in favor of tax cuts. People are pissed about the shitty health insurance reforms we got instead of the health care reforms we were promised? Ya don’t say: maybe you should have had that public option that 66% of the country favored. The Democrats are perceived as weak? Well gee, maybe it has something to do with letting the Republicans steamroll you without fighting back.
You watch these institutions makes predictably bad decisions over and over again, and you don’t care to write about it anymore. The fact that people like Tom Friedman and William Kristol still have jobs says all I need to about the state of our discourse and our national conversation.
In short, it’s one driven by dishonest hacks who may be smart but don’t seem to know anything about anything, abetted by a media that’s more interested in spinning stories and ginning up opinion debates than in reporting actual facts.
And that’s why it’s getting difficult to keep up a steady stream of bloggery: every post boils down to “duh gee, no shit, sherlock.”
Heckuva Job, George, Dick, Jay, John, Rummy…
The Bush administration insisted that “enhanced interrogation techniques” — torture — were necessary to extract information from prisoners and keep Americans safe from terrorist attacks. Never mind that it was immoral, did huge damage to this country’s global standing and produced little important intelligence. Now, as we had feared, it is also making it much harder to try and convict accused terrorists.
Because federal judges cannot trust the confessions of prisoners obtained by intense coercion, they are regularly throwing out the government’s cases against Guantánamo Bay prisoners.
A new report prepared jointly by ProPublica and the National Law Journal showed that the government has lost more than half the cases where Guantánamo prisoners have challenged their detention because they were forcibly interrogated. In some cases the physical coercion was applied by foreign agents working at the behest of the United States; in other cases it was by United States agents.
By the time you get done reading the whole thing, your desk will have a six-inch deep imprint of your forehead. And here’s one last paragraph to gt you started:
Even in cases where the government later went back and tried to obtain confessions using “clean,” non-coercive methods, judges are saying those confessions too are tainted by the earlier forcible methods. In most cases, the prisoners have not actually walked free because the government is appealing the decisions. But the trend suggests that the government will continue to have a hard time proving its case even against those prisoners who should be detained.
The Bush Administration fucked it all up, the whole ball of wax. Bin Laden’s still alive, we lost in Iraq, we’re going to lose in Afghanistan, and now we have one more reminder of what happens when you put an incompentent C+ legacy student and his CIA father’s corrupt chums in charge of the government: when you try to skirt the law and due process, you end up losing. The bit on Binyam Mohamed’s torture is classic: they got the guy to name another prisoner as a terrorist… after they’d cut up his dick, stuck him in a cat carrier (or hung him by his thumbs from the ceiling, that’s what they mean by “stress position”), and kpt him awake for days and days under music blasting from loudspeakers. Gee, I wonder why the judge didn’t trust the evidence? I wonder how ashamed the Obama DOJ lawyers feel pushing cases this obviously flawed and weak? Personally, I’d recuse myself out of embarrassment and disrespect for my employer.
All of this was, of course, predicted by the rational people. Not that it matters.
So my remaining question is, when do we hang Jay Bybee and John Yoo on national TV from RFK Stadium?
And I mean that seriously: someone should be swinging, at the state’s expense, for a fuck up this big, this predictable, and this easily avidable. How much have we spent on this fucking war now? Trillions? Kajillions? Let’s just call it a mega-shit-ton of money and lives, and with absolutely NO FUCKING BENEFIT AT ALL.
Bar AIDS: Drink Away the Virus!
Cross-posted at Suburban Guerrilla
I remember this commercial, which appeared about a week before the AIDS crisis exploded.
Action AIDS is one of the many non-profit human services organizations in Philadelphia, and their name is pretty self-explanatory. Like most non-profits, Action AIDS is under the gun due to the economic calamity we’re living in. (And may i add, the economic collapse as disproved the entire notion that the corporate sector, rather than the government, should be responsible for funding human services: when profits dry up, so do the donations).
Anyway, Action AIDS has a fun little fundraiser all over the city tonight: Bar AIDS. Here’s the description, via facebook:
On Thursday, Aug. 26, from 5:30 on to at least midnight, a dozen local coffeehouses and bars will donate a portion of their proceeds to the local fight against HIV/AIDS. Here’s a list of the places where every dollar you spend will make a difference — whether it’s on a cappuccino or a Coors lite. (We also added details of any other specials they have going that night.)
COFFEHOUSES
* Cafe Cret
* Small Oven Bakery at Tutti FruttiBARS
* Bike Stop
* City Tap House — $2 local beers, 5-7pm
* Fergie’s Pub
* Knock Restaurant & Bar — 1/2-price apps, including gourmet wings, sliders + flatbreads
* Tabu — $5 open bar, 9-10pm
* Tavern on Camac
* Westbury
* Woody’s — $5 Effen vodka, all nite long
* Uncle’s
* XIX at Hyatt Bellevue
You can easily find the addresses via Google, and you can find me at Fergie’s Pub after 6:00 PM, where I’ll be hoisting a pint or two in the fight against AIDS. I hope you’ll be there too! AIDS is a shitty disease to have, and you can help raise money to fight it by drinking beers.
Reflections on a Year in Bass
I’m coming up on a year playing bass for the Super Devils, a rockabilly outfit located in South Jersey. While my last post expressed significant ennui and dissatisfaction with the fact that life’s been in a holding pattern, my bass playing is probably the one area where i’ve made a LOT of progress, and very quick progress at that.
Frankly, after a few weeks of playing with those guys, i wasn’t sure i’d make it. that’s because my hand/wrist technique for slap was predicated thoroughly on adding accent to bluegrass songs. or to put it in layman’s terms, most bluegrass slapping is about accentuating the end of a line or a transition to a solo or chorus. You can hear what i mean in this clip of the Bluegrass Brothers:
The slap is on the upbeat, and it’s not sustained very long: just a few bappita-bappitas and you’re back to plucking.
With rockabilly, you’re slapping the whole time, so that slightly stiff hand posture I’ve used in bluegrass to good effect just hasn’t fit the bill. In fact, if it wasn’t for an impromptu lesson from another slap bass player, I probably would have said “the Hell with it” and moved on.
But I stuck with the new technique, and now i can do things on my bass i never thought possible. Stuff like this guy does:
Hi, I’m from the Government, and I’m Here to Ruin Your Credit Score and Help You Lose Your House
At the time we applied for the [US government-administered HAMP] modification process, we had paid back up to being about three months behind on the mortgage. We got put almost immediately in a temporary program while our paperwork was being processed. While we were waiting for things to be processed, we did get an occasional automated call about falling behind, but when we called back, we were assured that things were OK, and this was basically just a formality.
[...]
Around the 3rd week of April, we got a letter from Wells Fargo saying that the modification hadn’t been approved. I forget the exact wording, but the reasoning amounted to not having proved to their satisfaction that she had actually been laid off of her previous job.And oh yeah, they wanted the six thousand in back mortgage payments that we owed them in the next 30 days, unless we wanted to sign up for an in-house modification, which would enable us to pay off the loan in 6 payments, on top of the regular payments that we were going to have to make.
Simply awful.
Why I Haven’t Been Blogging As Much Lately
I want to take a brief moment to explain why this blog has been relatively listless lately, because i feel as if I’m letting some of you down with my lack of postings.
I articulated it fairly well in this post:
I’m just tired of everything. I’m tired of writing, tired of being broke, tired of working, tired of owning a house, tired of being a parent, tired of people, almost (but not quite) tired of music and definitely tired of playing music in Philadelphia, tired of not touring, tired of politics, tired to death of grants, tired of the East Coast and the US in general.
I’m at a point in my life where i simply don’t have any interest in engaging the stupid in debates about why they’re stupid. Oh, I get myself suckered in once in awhile, but I’m not interested in navigating the web of lies that right-wingers surround themselves with to prevent serious debate. These people are idiots, and utterly incapable of absorbing anything that challenges their worldview. why bother?
why bother, for that matter, writing about politics when you’re in the grip of an entrenched two-party duopoly who’s political message is “vote for us no matter what stupid shit we do because we’re not that other awful party.” It gets boring, ya know, to defend people who make promises they never intend to keep.
My life continues to be in a holding pattern: I was accepted to Drexel University to earn my teaching certificate, but declined due to the expense. I’m in the process of applying to Temple for Fall 2011, because it’s a LOT cheaper. At the same time, I really want to get into brewing professionally, but need to figure out the way forward.
So yeah, basically not a lot to write about right now. Wake me up when the world regains a semblance of sanity.
WNJN: Worthless Radio
Due to all the driving necessary to pick up and drop off Sam, to get to practice, and to get to gigs, i drive a lot more than i’d like to. because so many of these trips are long distance, I’ve acquired a strong taste for traffic and weather reports: I wish every state and highway would post the best stations for these resources at rest areas throughout the country.
Anyway, some stations do a better job at getting the information across effectively, while others do not. For example, KYW 106-0 in Philadelphia and WCBS 880 in New York City are reliable, easy-to-use stations. Philly broadcasts traffic “on the twos”: 1:02, 1:12, 1:22, and so on. WCBS reports road conditions “on the eights”. This schedule makes it possible to tune in for the news you want and need, and filling the spaces in between with music or programming of your own choice. I listen to KYW religiously in Philadelphia for this reason, and always tune into 880 when I’m driving into or around New York City.
New Jersey has its own traffic and weather station too: 101.5 WNJN. By all measures, the station is exactly what you’d expect of New Jersey: awful. First of all, the programming that’s not weather and traffic is piss-poor: the music selection is “classic rock”, which means buckets of “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog”, “Stayin’ Alive”, and “hits” by Springsteen and Bon Jovi, while the talk show programs boil down to “deliberately stupid and offensive right wing garbage by Casey Bartholomew” (recent topic: “have you, as a white person, ever experienced racism from black people?”) and “let’s wreck a marriage” by Michelle Jerson, who won’t be satisfied until the divorce rate in NJ is 100%.
And all of this would be fine, except the traffic reports are not tied to any particular time you can remember. They air every 15 minutes, so you would figure “traffic on the quarter hour at 1:00, 1:15, 1:30, etc.” But no. It’s more like “traffic at 1:03, 1:18, 1:33…” The end result is that it’s difficult to predict when the traffic report’s coming on, and so you end up sitting through Juice Newton sing “Morning Angel” followed by Batholomew hating on teachers while you wait impatiently to find out if you should take I-295 or the Jersey Turnpike.
It’s maddening and almost certainly a deliberate policy to force more people to listen to their shitty station. It’s the only one that covers the entire state, and by god, you’re gonna sit there and listen to casey bartholomew insist that white Americans are being victimized by black people when all you want is to know whether the 42 freeway’s backed up.
Philly Weekly Sinks to a New Low
Two weeks ago, the Philadelphia Weekly published a poignant and compelling story about women trying to escape prostitution.
This week, they published an article about which Chinatown brothels offer the best handjobs. I’m not linking to the article because I think it was exploitative, disgusting and was less a news and opinion column than it was an advertorial, like those Exxon-Mobil ads that appear in the print edition of the New York Times. One of the commenters at the Weekly’s latest low opined, “This is really gross. Congratulations on paying for sex from a most likely trafficked woman”, and I have to concur: sex slavery is an ,a href=”http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20100331_Massage_madam_s_Swan_song_.html”>ongoing problem in Philadelphia. It’s something to be ashamed of, not something to celebrate and enable.
I’m not a prude, and have no problem with the world’s oldest profession, which should almost certainly be legalized and regulated for the safety of the sex workers. I’m also fully aware of the financial problems facing the newspaper industry, especially the free alternative weeklies, and have no problem with the ads for brothels, prostitutes, chicks-with-dicks, and other assorted novelties in the back of the paper. And I understand that a column like Lush Life, which is typically about partying and getting drunk, is expected to be edgy.
But this is beyond the pale. The column rejoiced in, and normalized, the exploitation of women. That’s disgusting, and I’m embarrassed to have been associated with the paper.
