Scudmissile: The Aggregator

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Banning Abortion: The First Step Toward Theocracy | RHRealityCheck.org

"[...] avoiding the topic of religion in the reproductive rights debate has allowed anti-choicers to position themselves in a more sympathetic light than they deserve with the larger public. How often do you hear them described as people with deeply felt moral convictions? What if they were instead described as people of deeply felt religious convictions? If so, then those convictions would still be respected by the public at large, but they would be respected as an individual choice, and not respected if you tried to force someone else to live under your dogma."

Posted to Delicious/scudmissile 22 hours, 38 minutes ago

Why a Big Mac Costs Less Than a Salad - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com

Posted to Delicious/scudmissile 1 day, 2 hours ago

Menu with recipes for Casual Supper for St. Pat's at Epicurious.com

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Menu with recipes for Darina Allen's Corned Beef and Cabbage Feast at Epicurious.com

Posted to Delicious/scudmissile 1 day, 3 hours ago

The Difference Between Firefox, Opera, Explorer & Safari

media httploldwellcom jobhs.jpg.scaled500 The Difference Between Firefox, Opera, Explorer & Safari

via loldwell.com

Posted to Andy's shared items in Google Reader 1 day, 16 hours ago

WEEKEND ARTS SECTION: Nothing That Happened This Week Was Ever Going To Be As Important As The “Telephone” Video

It’s true. Like: do you remember when Michael Jackson died, and folks were lamenting the death of “monoculture?” They thought there would never again be the experience of knowing that everyone you met had seen the same music video that you had. This same thing happened when John Updike died, as I recall — like, it was thought that never again would there be a writer that everyone recognized as important, except for Phillip Roth, who is very old. The Internet was blamed a lot, in these discussions: it fragments our national discourse, it allows everyone to attend to their own little interests instead of allowing us all to have one big compulsory interest, it dissolves the human community and creates “communities” instead, etc. People talk about the Internet the same way they talk about the “divisiveness” of left-wing politics, sometimes, have you noticed that? Often on the very Internet itself, they do this! But also, these people seem to know very little about the Internet, or how the culture is going, because all Lady Gaga needs to do is show you her vagina in a YouTube video and the whole world stops to talk about it. It doesn’t even matter if they like Lady Gaga! Or if they listen to Lady Gaga! Some people will just post to be like, “so I don’t want everybody to keep talking about Lady Gaga!” BUT THEN THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT HER. That, my friends, is how the Internet creates “monoculture.” I have dropped a little science for you, this evening, it would appear.

So, the “Telephone” video! Have you perhaps… READ ABOUT IT ON THE INTERNET SOMEWHERE???? Or… SEEN IT ON THE INTERNET??????? Perhaps you have…. COMMENTED ABOUT IT ON THE INTERNET, ON THE POST IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING THIS ONE, PERHAPS?????????????? Well, too bad. This is YOUR Arts Section, Internet, and this week The Arts are pretty much the “Telephone” video. Let’s go, scene by scene, through The Most Important Film of the Year or Perhaps of All Time (Until Next Week Starts, Which Is Tomorrow).

The – N! S! F! W! – video is below the cut. Watch with caution.

1) Lady Gaga is being escorted to the “Prison for Bitches.” Man, I bet the lunch time cafeteria conversations at that prison are REALLY SUPER UNPLEASANT! At the Prison for Bitches, the Prison Guards for Bitches strip Lady Gaga down to, like, fishnets, and also heels, which outfit would seem a little too Agent Provocateur for a day at Bitch Prison, but whatever.

2) Hey, there’s Lady Gaga’s vagina. There is also a joke (“I told you she didn’t have a dick,” in a very deep voice which I suppose we are meant to hear as belonging to a trans lady) which strikes me as transphobic (I’m not liking how aggressively, I guess, “masculine” the trans ladies’ voices are presented as being — of course trans ladies all have different voices because HEY STEREOTYPES SUCK AT PREDICTING THINGS DON’T THEY, but one thing I will tell you is that I, a cis lady, have a deeper voice than like 4/5ths of the trans ladies I’ve ever hung out with, just as I have a deeper voice than most of my lady friends period, because I smoke and I drink bourbon basically; look, this is a long story, this thing where I explain my troubled reaction to Lady Gaga’s vagina reveal, but the point is that this stereotype is particularly offensive and unrealistic) and also part of Gaga’s ongoing project to own the transphobic shit said about her, and to reiterate it, in the form of defiant jokes. I mean, I like that project! But if she were just posing with enormous strap-ons and flashing her Good Stuff all over the place as if to say, “screw it, if you were ever wanting to see my Good Stuff for shitty transphobic and sexist reasons, I am now going to ensure that you see NOTHING BUT MY OWN PERSONAL GOOD STUFF ALL THE TIME UNTIL YOU ARE FRANKLY SICK OF IT,” I would be a lot more sympathetic. This is where you cross the line from talking about your own oppression to being unnecessarily invasive and clueless re: the oppression of others, Gaga. Just a warning.

3) Anyway, Lady Gaga’s vagina. There it is. Also of note is the fact that Gaga considerately put tape over her nipples, because I guess she knew they were going to strip her at Bitch Prison, but she FORGOT TO BRING UNDERWEAR??? Lady Gaga, you are not the world’s best at planning these things!

4) And now Lady Gaga is in the exercise yard. Also in the exercise yard: A really smoking-hot butch lady. The smoking-hot lady, or SHL as I guess we will be calling her, is also apparently very friendly. VFSHL introduces herself to Gaga by making out with her, and they have a little third-base over-the-pants action happening, and by this point another lady is being friendly to Gaga too. I thought this was a prison for bitches!

5) But also: I don’t want to be a straightsplainer here, but the fact is that special makeout times Between the Ladies almost always happen, in pop culture, between two very femme-looking individuals. So, like, how great is it that Gaga is putting the butch/femme dynamic out there, and saying that THIS is sexy ALSO? It gets a lot less performing-for-the-straight-male-gaze, a lot less “oh, honey, those are my special men’s magazines, for men’s interests, such as perhaps golfing,” and a lot more “hey, actual queer experiences exist and are hot for actual queer people,” at that point.

6) Also smoking: the lit cigarettes Gaga has just gone ahead and taped to her sunglasses. That is how you can tell these two ladies are so friendly: they are just grabbing Gaga’s junk and sticking their faces within kissing range of her face that has like 1.5 packs of lit cigarettes on it, despite the fact that they could probably receive serious burns from doing so, and also I bet her hair smells like ASS.

7) There is some wrestling, but by this point Beyonce has called Lady Gaga like 50 TIMES, and she STILL has not answered. Jesus! Pick up your damn phone! It’s not like you have a good reason to ignore all your friends’ calls and IMs and e-mails make them mad at you. It’s not like, for example, you are writing a BLOG POST ABOUT A LADY GAGA VIDEO for Feministe.

8) And now, Lady Gaga FINALLY opens her mouth to sing, and what she sings? Is the most ridiculous opening line for a song of all time. Of all time! It is this: “Hello hello baby you called? I can’t hear a thing. I have got no service in the club you see see!” I have got no service in the club? This is what we’re singing about now? How your phone service plan could be improved by switching to Verizon? Step outside the damn club, Lady Gaga! Go talk on the sidewalk! Did they not stamp your hand so you could get back in? I am just so infuriated by Lady Gaga’s bad phone manners at this point.

9) It goes on like this! Like the most tedious phone conversation ever, basically. But with Lady Gaga singing her end of it. “What what what did you say are you breaking up on me? Sorry I can’t hear you…” OH MY GOD JUST SWITCH TO GCHAT.

10) And now it’s just an underpants dance party with a bunch of girls. So: Here’s where we talk about, I guess, Queering the Text, or Queer Texts, in the example of the “Telephone” video. We have some time: these ladies will be dancing for a while, is my understanding. A lot of what is going on in this video, which some might perceive as “offensive” or “exploitative,” seems to me like a series of gestures about reclaiming. Lady Gaga gets to do the “Prison for Bitches” thing because she’s a girl; she owns that. Lady Gaga also identifies as queer, located in the B section of LGBTQI, and she has made a very girls-who-kiss-girls-centric video here. (It’s kind of the flip side of “Bad Romance,” which would seem to be her official girls-who-kiss-boys video. There’s a deep pessimism and fear regarding inequalities of power, in that video, and there is a presentation of her body as essentially monstrous, which: what girl does not get that metaphor, really? But then there is also a celebration of her body, and its power, and it gets violent but I guess if there is a War Between the Sexes, (a) they started it and (b) someone’s got to lose. I’m a pacifist, when it comes to that war, personally, but that’s not to say I didn’t find the “Bad Romance” video thrilling. A friend was talking to me, and she was like, “I can’t figure out why that video makes me so happy.” And I was like, “because it sets you up to see Gaga’s sexuality as a way that she can be oppressed or hurt, and then it tells you to see her sexuality as a way for her to be powerful and victorious, and the transition from one way of seeing to the other is really great.” And she was like “yes, probably, but also I think I like the outfits and dancing!” And that is why people make fun of me when I talk about Lady Gaga. But, let’s be honest: We can poke fun at Gaga, and her self-seriousness, and we can disagree with her feminist statements or her statements about sexuality, or say that they don’t quite work — I think the “Telephone” video does not quite work, personally — but we can’t say she’s not making statements. She is. And they tend to be, as statements by pop stars go, more interesting and smart and provocative than those of her peers.) So anyway, we could regard “Telephone” as the logical next step from the “Bad Romance” video, I suppose: there’s a mean boy, and a girl getting her revenge on him, and also some really ridonkulous revenge dancing, but this time, instead of one girl getting revenge all by herself, there are just so many women interacting with each other in so many ways — fighting, yes, and hurting each other, but also kissing and talking and making friends and touching each others’ crotches in a helpful manner and providing support. This video presents community between women as this very powerful, dangerous, thrilling space. And sex is included in that, as one of the ways women connect with each other; the connection is invariably eroticized, pretty strongly. Female space is also presented as something you can escape into and find strength from, specifically strength to resist dudes who treat you crapfully, and that strength to resist dudes (who you might also have sex with, it is implied) is tied to the eroticization of women, throughout. It’s all a little like that Adrienne Rich essay, which I do have some small problems with on the levels of essentialism and reliance on some not-so-great sources, but which is nevertheless really good. My point is, when was the last time you thought to describe a pop star’s music video with, “this reminds me of that Adrienne Rich essay?” Yeah. Stop trying to deny Gaga. Even when her videos are not that good — this one, for example, is not! — you cannot simply scoot her out of the discussion.

11) They’re still having the Underpants Dance Party! UNDERPANTS DANCE PARTY WOOOO.

12) Okay, so Gaga has served her prison sentence (“LADY GAGA, I SENTENCE YOU TO FIVE MINUTES OF HARD DANCING”) and she’s leaving, and Beyonce picks her up. Did you ever see Obsessed? I totally did. I saw Obsessed. In the theater! One of the things I learned from Obsessed was that Beyonce is seriously just not an actress. That is on display here also, as she informs Lady Gaga that she has been a “very bad girl.” Then Lady Gaga leans over and seductively eats Beyonce’s sandwich, in the manner of someone administering Oral Attentions to An Erect Member. I’m totally going to try that one on my next date. Just lean over and chomp into his food. (“And then he just stood up and LEFT! And his BLT wasn’t even that good EITHER. The lettuce was soggy.”) Then they drive away in a Tarantino reference, and that scene’s over.

13) Oh, no it’s not. They’re still talking. “Once you kill a cow, you’ve got to make a burger.” YOU GUYS! The song is not called “Various Kinds of Sandwiches!” It is called “TELEPHONE.” Should you maybe have worked harder to incorporate references to… telephones, perhaps????

14) And was it really necessary to subtitle the Asian woman’s thoughts in a different language than everybody else’s? No. No, it was not! I am not so cool with the ways that this video deals with race, I think. I mean, Beyonce’s there, and presented as an equal and partner. Sure. But I am thinking like, this Asian girl and her special “hey, have you noticed this chick’s Asian? Just thought I’d point that one out to you” subtitle, or the way the women of color in the prison are filmed. It makes me uncomfortable in the nebulous, tricky-to-pin-down way that Quentin Tarantino movies do — and, considering that this entire video is basically meant to be a Tarantino movie, that was kind of unavoidable, I suppose. Like: Okay, great, your video has some people of color in it. At least it’s not like you are pretending that those people aren’t on the planet, which is a creepy thing that white people do sometimes with their movies. However, I keep getting the sense that we are heading toward some (oy) “postmodern” treatment of race here, where race is just a toy or a text or a trope like everything else, that you get to play around with from your own privileged position, including and incorporating the stereotypes as it suits you because your IRONIC DISTANCE is just that powerful. It’s probably meant to demonstrate how smart you are about race, but it comes across as exoticizing and fetishizing, and thereby falls into the same pit as most “postracial” discourse, where by pretending to be above or beyond racism you really just wind up playing into it. “Postracial” is the new “colorblind,” basically: Like, if we just don’t talk about it, if we just ignore it, then of course racism it will get better on its own! Not ignoring the existence of racism makes YOU the Real Racist! And what ongoing problem is not improved when people go around consciously giving themselves permission not to think about or deal with it??? Oh: Pretty much all of them. Pretty much all problems are not improved by that course of action. Right.

15) Okay. We had like five seconds of actual telephoning in the “Telephone” video, and now…

I’M TELLING YOU. THEY WILL NOT LET GO OF THE SANDWICH THEME. Was everybody on the set for this video just really hungry? Or what?

16) Beyonce’s asshole boyfriend did not order a sandwich. He ordered eggs. And now he is dead. This message has been brought to you by the Sandwich Council. Sandwiches: Eat them, because everything else is poison!

17) Another lesson we can gain from the “Telephone” video: Do not take food away from Beyonce. It has happened like several times in this video and on each occasion she unleashes TERRIBLE RAGE upon the culprit. You take Beyonce’s food — let ALONE her favorite variety of condiment — and she kills a diner full of people. That is just how it goes. Beyonce does not fuck around.

18) The thing is, we can talk about how trans stuff is handled in this video (badly), and how race stuff is handled in this video (also badly), and we can talk about how Lady Gaga’s ongoing project of unpacking female sexuality like it is a suitcase the size of a train station is handled in this video (occasionally well??) but one thing we HAVE to talk about is how VERY INTERNET this video happens to be. You seriously cannot show this video on television! It was not designed to be shown on television, ever! It is ten minutes long, and it has more dialogue than music, and it has the “fuck” word and naked breasts and vaginas and girl-on-girl action and basically everybody gets murdered. At no point did anyone making this video think, “I’m still pretty sure we could get this on television, though.” No. It was made to be on the Internet. And you can tell because this affects the form itself, like the actual decisions of how to shoot and edit the damn thing. You can tell this video was meant to be turned into nine million animated GIFs, for example, because there are several parts of it that are shot to look like animated GIFs: you know that thing where there’s like two seconds of movement that loops back around on itself in a weird, jerky, headache-inducing way? That’s what this video looks like, a lot of the time. Gaga has now apparently incorporated not just an analysis of gender and sexuality into her work, she has apparently decided to take on the issue of new media. If her next video is about string theory, at this point, you just should not be surprised.

19) And now Lady Gaga is just dancing around looking like Brett Michaels. Beyonce looks like Wonder Woman. That’s why she is Beyonce: you can put the stupidest shit on that woman’s body, and people are suddenly like, “my, that bustier made entirely of ham is STUNNING!” It doesn’t even matter that she’s a bad actress. You point that out to people and they’re like, “fuck good acting! I never realized how much I hated good acting until this moment! I want what Beyonce’s doing!” Kanye West is a victim of many things, but one of the chief things he is a victim of is just saying what everybody is always already thinking about Beyonce. He succumbed to her power! As we all have! We cannot blame Kanye, just as we cannot blame a moth who draws too close to the candle flame and is burnt. Nor can we blame the candle, for burning! PS the flame is Beyonce. THE FLAME IS BEYONCE! And with that, I leave you.

Posted to Andy's shared items in Google Reader 2 days, 2 hours ago

Op-Ed Contributor - Algebra in Wonderland - NYTimes.com

"In the mid-19th century, mathematics was rapidly blossoming into what it is today: a finely honed language for describing the conceptual relations between things. Dodgson found the radical new math illogical and lacking in intellectual rigor. In “Alice,” he attacked some of the new ideas as nonsense — using a technique familiar from Euclid’s proofs, reductio ad absurdum, where the validity of an idea is tested by taking its premises to their logical extreme."

Posted to Delicious/scudmissile 3 days, 12 hours ago

The Democrats' scam becomes more transparent

(Updated below - Update II [Saturday])

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what seemed to be a glaring (and quite typical) scam perpetrated by Congressional Democrats: all year long, they insisted that the White House and a majority of Democratic Senators vigorously supported a public option, but the only thing oh-so-unfortunately preventing its enactment was the filibuster: sadly, we have 50 but not 60 votes for it, they insisted. Democratic pundits used that claim to push for "filibuster reform," arguing that if only majority rule were required in the Senate, then the noble Democrats would be able to deliver all sorts of wonderful progressive reforms that they were truly eager to enact but which the evil filibuster now prevents. In response, advocates of the public option kept arguing that the public option could be accomplished by reconciliation -- where only 50 votes, not 60, would be required -- but Obama loyalists scorned that reconciliation proposal, insisting (at least before the Senate passed a bill with 60 votes) that using reconciliation was Unserious, naive, procedurally impossible, and politically disastrous.

But all those claims were put to the test -- all those bluffs were called -- once the White House decided that it had to use reconciliation to pass a final health care reform bill. That meant that any changes to the Senate bill (which had passed with 60 votes) -- including the addition of the public option -- would only require 50 votes, which Democrats assured progressives all year long that they had. Great news for the public option, right? Wrong. As soon as it actually became possible to pass it, the 50 votes magically vanished. Senate Democrats (and the White House) were willing to pretend they supported a public option only as long as it was impossible to pass it. Once reconciliation gave them the opportunity they claimed all year long they needed -- a "majority rule" system -- they began concocting ways to ensure that it lacked 50 votes.

All of that was bad enough, but now the scam is getting even more extreme, more transparent. Faced with the dilemma of how they could possibly justify their year-long claimed support for the public option only now to fail to enact it, more and more Democratic Senators were pressured into signing a letter supporting the enactment of the public option through reconciliation; that number is now above 40, and is rapidly approaching 50. In other words, there is a serious possibility that the Senate might enact a public option if there is a vote on it, because it's very difficult for these Senators to vote "No" after pretending all year long -- on the record -- that they supported it. In fact, The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim yesterday wrote: "the votes appear to exist to include a public option. It's only a matter of will."

The one last hope for Senate Democratic leaders was to avoid a vote altogether on the public option, thereby relieving Senators of having to take a position and being exposed. But that trick would require the cooperation of all Senators -- any one Senator can introduce a public option amendment during the reconciliation and force a vote -- and it now seems that Bernie Sanders, to his great credit, is refusing to go along with the Democrats' sham and will do exactly that: ignore the wishes of the Senate leadership and force a roll call vote on the public option.

So now what is to be done? They only need 50 votes, so they can't use the filibuster excuse. They don't seem able to prevent a vote, as they tried to do, because Sanders will force one. And it seems there aren't enough Senate Democrats willing to vote against the public option after publicly saying all year long they supported it, which means it might get 50 votes if a roll call vote is held. So what is the Senate Democratic leadership now doing? They're whipping against the public option, which they pretended all year along to so vigorously support:

Senate Democratic leaders are concerned about the amount of mischief their own Members could create if or when a health care reconciliation bill comes up for debate. And sources said some supporters of creating a public insurance option are privately worried that they will be asked to vote against the idea during debate on the bill, which could occur before March 26. Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) acknowledged Wednesday that liberals may be asked to oppose any amendment, including one creating a public option, to ensure a smooth ride for the bill. "We have to tell people, 'You just have to swallow hard' and say that putting an amendment on this is either going to stop it or slow it down, and we just can’t let it happen," Durbin, who supports a public option, told reporters.

If -- as they claimed all year long -- a majority of Congressional Democrats and the White House all support a public option, why would they possibly whip against it, and ensure its rejection, at exactly the moment when it finally became possible to pass it? If majorities of the House and Senate support it, as does the White House, how could the inclusion of a public option possibly jeopardize passage of the bill?

I've argued since August that the evidence was clear that the White House had privately negotiated away the public option and didn't want it, even as the President claimed publicly (and repeatedly) that he did. And while I support the concept of "filibuster reform" in theory, it's long seemed clear that it would actually accomplish little, because the 60-vote rule does not actually impede anything. Rather, it is the excuse Democrats fraudulently invoke, using what I called the Rotating Villain tactic (it's now Durbin's turn), to refuse to pass what they claim they support but are politically afraid to pass, or which they actually oppose (sorry, we'd so love to do this, but gosh darn it, we just can't get 60 votes). If only 50 votes were required, they'd just find ways to ensure they lacked 50. Both of those are merely theories insusceptible to conclusive proof, but if I had the power to create the most compelling evidence for those theories that I could dream up, it would be hard to surpass what Democrats are doing now with regard to the public option. They're actually whipping against the public option. Could this sham be any more transparent?

UPDATE: One related point: when I was on Morning Joe several weeks ago, I argued this point -- why aren't Democrats including the public option in the reconciliation package given that they have the 50 votes in favor of the public option? -- and, in response, Chuck Todd recited White House spin and DC conventional wisdom (needless to say) by insisting that they do not have the votes to pass the public option. If that's true -- if they lack the votes to pass the public option through reconciliation -- why is Dick Durbin now whipping against it, telling Senators -- in his own words -- "You just have to swallow hard' and say that putting an amendment on this is either going to stop it or slow it down, and we just can’t let it happen"?

No discussion of the public option is complete without noting how much the private health insurance industry despises it; the last thing they want, of course, is the beginning of real competition and choice.

UPDATE II: Here's Chris Hayes, Friday night with Rachel Maddow, explaining who really killed the public option (while pretending, vociferously, to favor it):

As I've noted before, the column I've written which has produced the highest level of hate mail over the past year (in terms of volume and intensity) was when I compiled the evidence back in August that the White House was working to ensure there'd be no public option in the final bill at exactly the same time Obama was publicly insisting he favored it. The very idea that the President might be saying one thing in public and doing the opposite in private was outrageous and conspiratorial; a politician (or, at least, Barack Obama) would never do such a thing. Yet all along, that's exactly what the White House was doing, and it continues to do exactly that even though there is, at least, a significant chance that there are sufficient votes to enact the public option. That's the reason their explanations and excuses make no sense: because the real reason there's no public option -- they don't want one -- is the one they can't or won't admit.

Posted to Andy's shared items in Google Reader 3 days, 18 hours ago

It's On Like Donkey Kong: New York Doc Sets World Record | NBC New York

Billy Mitchell is probably very unhappy right now.

Posted to Delicious/scudmissile 4 days, 8 hours ago

Op-Ed Contributor - Sudden Acceleration Often Caused By Drivers - NYTimes.com

"In 1989, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration concluded that the incidents of unintended acceleration by the Audi 5000 were mostly caused by this kind of pedal error — not some electro-mechanical defect in the vehicle. To fix the problem, Audi designed something called an automatic shift lock, which, when the car is being started, keeps the transmission in park unless and until the brake pedal is depressed. If the driver should press the accelerator instead of the brake, the vehicle remains safely in park.

Audi ultimately gave the world’s other automakers the rights to the patent on the automatic shift lock and by the mid-1990s virtually all new cars had adopted the feature or some variant of it. Incidents of sudden acceleration when people started their cars dropped sharply. The shift lock not only made people safer but also provided evidence for the hypothesis that most of the problems had been caused by driver error."

Posted to Delicious/scudmissile 4 days, 8 hours ago

	Music/Movie Madness 1 For Advertising 312, we combine music and movies to create a new ad for a product or service. For my first assignment, I chose a famous scene from Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) and the song "Goodbye Little Darlin' Goodbye" by Johnny Cash (c. 1955).	From: scudtube Views: 1160 2 ratings
	Time: 00:31	More in Entertainment

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