states competing for "race to the top" funds

so this is how we educate kids, right? hold an apprentice-style competition? seems reasonable. i'm sure that's how it's done by every country that's outperforming us, right? states go in and make their case to the bosses, competing for cash. which of course comes with no strings attached and is obtained by actual merit and no bribery is going on.....BWAAHAHAHAHA ...

my favorite part of this is the rhetoric from the state reps, they really do sound like people who just got fired by the donald and are talking about how they will be back, better next time, still licking the balls of the carrot dangled in front of them, to coin a metaphor.

what a load of chocolate-covered shit. i'm so fucking embarrassed to be american right now.

ass.

my daughter came home with this nugget for homework. i glance over and i say who is that character? looks like he belongs in an adult swim cartoon. Lil' Filth says, "it's S. Pudlover."

fuckin hell yeah.

jealous?

unless it's a government holiday. or they don't feel like it.

a woman in NJ went to the police because the father of her child had been behaving erratically and threateningly. it was president's day. they said come back when the courts are open, even though there is an on call.

what happened next became national news.

it looks like this guy lost his marbles, and the baby's mother tried to protect the baby as much as possible. the body was never found.

it also looks like this guy was tipped off, probably by police, that a protective order was going to be sought, prompting him to go kidnap the child himself. also, there was a very LONG delay in declaring an amber alert. ironically, the highway where he killed the baby has amber alert signs on it. they flash when there's an active alert, with a description of the child and/or the vehicle the missing child was last seen in.

politicians are involved, blowing smoke up our asses about investigating the delay in response, promising changes to the amber alert policy. no one is talking about how this guy knew what was about to happen, who he knew at the police department, and what's going to happen to them.

Mother of baby thrown from N.J. bridge says East Orange police rebuffed restraining order request

so it turns out that there is this organization of police, military personnel, veterans and firefighters who disagree with the erosion of our rights and are concerned by the fascist trend over recent years.

they're vowing to defy orders that violate the US constitution. they're refusing to seize property, impose martial law, perform warrantless searches, disarm people, blockade cities, detain americans as "enemy combatants," etc.

the video is a bit slow paced and dramatic but it gives the gist, and unfortunately illustrates its position with hurricane katrina.

i don't know what to think. i read about it in an article that was making the point that the popularity of this group is only one example of a population that's moving toward serious change, out of necessity. i don't know how popular this group is, but they do have patches which i guess is how we will tell them from the rest of the fuzz when the shit hits the fan.

the oath keepers.

discuss.

probably the death metal. actually i know it is. looking at the cover art made me wanna look at the shit that stuff is based on. cannibal corpse's artist also happens to draw for some comics i've liked.

but Mr Filth talked me into going to Brooklyn Museum, rather than the Met, which we both know has enough cool medieval shit to make a day out of that alone. but he was sick of the met, so he convinced me to go there.

well it had two neato religious paintings, so it was not what i went there for.

i'm like well, i'm here anyway, let's go to the next floor.

well guess what was there? a whole gallery of feminist art. the european paintings were sparse, but the feminist shit was fantastically curated. but that's not what i'm writing about.

i walk in the place and guess what's there. the fucking Dinner Party. the famous work from 1979 that pays tribute to women in history, and as the artist put it, its purpose was to "end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record."

i'd seen something on pbs about this and i was like yeah, nice idea. holy craparoo, seeing it in person is quite a different story. it's IMMENSE. and so amazingly detailed. you can spend hours there, reading over the names and looking at all the tokens that are placed at these womens' place settings. i'm not usually down with political art, so i wrote this one off, i was never interested in seeing it in person.

i won't try to describe it too much, i'm not down with interpreting art either. but go see it. if you live in the tri state area, do make time to check out that.

another piece that had me in stitches was "reception"
that wedding cake is made entirely of tampons.

i feel like i'm turning a corner. i walk to work in the bitter cold, but the sunlight hits me from a different angle, so it feels less dreadful. just as cold, but a happy cold, it reminds me of spring. then in the afternoon, the temperature is totally tolerable and i feel like i can do something with my day, rather than hole up at home until it's time to work again.

i turned around my kid's grades with flat-out bribery, and my own presence. it was hard work for me, but it's worth it, and she's resisting a lot less than i anticipated. i think she missed me when i was out all damn day. she earned -- get this -- a day of antiquing and a pair of shoes from 1940. her teacher is impressed.

i'm working shorter days, only because i have little choice. the kid is young enough to need someone supervising her homework, while old enough not to be helped by the after-school program they have at school. and the Mr is essentially here only on weekends. i can't work full days, then do 100% of the parenting and house work. i was actually starting to get jealous of him for the hours he gets to spend every day on the train. oh sure he gets up at 5 and gets home at 8, but he gets to stare out a window for two of those hours. i would love that. oh hell yeah i would love that. for the same reason i would be such a good prisoner and/or hospital patient. ahhh... the rest...

it was all i could do yesterday to come home and make bake potatoes. i knew dinner was bereft of protein, so i stood blinking in the store for a while trying to think of something.... nachos. because it'll reuse the seasoned beans i had for my famous Discreeto Burriots from last night. made sense at the time. and because of this, we had nachos and baked potatoes for dinner last night. fuck an a it was good. even the Mr who had his reheated commented on what an excellent choice it was for a winter night. reflux woke him up at 3 from it, but it tasted good.

i think that's it. spring is coming, job is good, i got that art gallery thing, and my sister and her two year old are coming to make pizza and sleep over and shoot the shit. lil' Filth is childproofing her room.

New Law Would Ban Marriages Between People Who Don't Love Each Other

a woman has recorded her husband's middle-of-the-night ramblings and made them into a blog called sleep talkin man

she's added audio. i think that actually takes away a bit from the comedy of it. i liked it better when she would just put up text quotes like "Don't leave the duck there. It's totally irresponsible. Put it on the swing, it'll have much more fun."

google sucks. remember when you could search for shit in a particular area by plugging in "art supplies" and a zip code or county? yeah, it's all advertising now. anyone who shows in the search results is there because they paid to be. stores that are in fact open, and still exist and sell what you're looking for, are nowhere to be seen unless you already know their full name and search for it in quotes.

google sucks for a variety of reasons, but their lynchpin was the fact that they turned up usable search results. and now they don't.

in the spirit of the tiny rant:

um, eighTEEEN inches of snow is coming tomorrow. every time it snows and i walk to work in my doc gibsons i think, well it HAS to be the last storm of the season. i mean, how many times can we get hit? i look at the long term forecast and see the warming trend and think aahhhh ..... spring is coming... surely this last time was the last time this season.

don't get me wrong. i love hot chocolate. and pancakes. and my kid getting so excited about a day off from school that she takes video of the snow falling. sled riding. and old houses with radiant heat and the cool smell that gives off. i am not a fan, however, of falling on my ass on icy sidewalks, landing with my metal water bottle jabbing into my back, breaking my lunch container, heating up the car to drive the kid to school, taking the dog for a shit in 15 degree weather, salt in my shoes, sludgy dirt tracked into the house, getting no sunlight, businesses closing, runs on bread and milk like it's goddamn 1940 and snowfall means a halt to the fucking food supply, having to work even when my kid is home, shoveling, having to wear like 7 layers of clothes to tolerate being outside.

i do love winter, but i am sick of this shit. i want a day off to sit home and enjoy it, not have to bust my ass to get through it. pfft.

the upstairs neighbors, students, are having a party. their guests are drinking and woo-ing to kid rock.

in case you needed reasons to be glad not to be me right now.

i'm consoling myself with vodka, cannibal corpse videos and the knowledge that i don't have to work in the morning. tomorrow i will make my daughter pancakes for salvaging her grades so that she got no less than a B on her report card, and stay indoors and watch the snow fall over hot chocolate and home made lady baltimore cake.

the best being the cannibal corpse videos... why didn't anyone tell me about them sooner?

oh and wish me luck... i think i MAY have scored a good gig at an art gallery. it'd be only a few hours a week but so worth it! i'll know in a week or so.

discuss.

The Depressing News About Antidepressants

Studies suggest that the popular drugs are no more effective than a placebo. In fact, they may be worse.

i did a dumb thing. i allowed an install of an automatic update without looking at what it is. turns out it was a phishing expedition by microsoft to find "pirated" versions of their software. i.e. old versions, installed several times over and upgraded. anyway, so i got snagged with this "your version of office is not genuine" shit, and i know i can dump my whole hard drive and reformat the whole damn thing and reinstall and get all the goddamn service packs... which i may do, but while i'm at it i may as well switch away from MS products, given that they are a scumbag company anyway. so. i know that there have been a lot of improvements in the last few years and i thought i'd ask if anyone is using them.

i'm particularly interested in hearing about the free ones, Sun's open office and IBM's Lotus Symphony. i freelance from home, so i have to be able to create spreadsheets taht can be opened by people who don't download the software. i'd like to hear from people who've tried them out and can give honest feedback from someone who really uses the stuff.

really all i ever work in is spreadsheets and word processing. the other stuff might be nice, but those are the two i need to make money.

we were sort of finding our groove, but neither of us had time for anything but work and shit surrounding work. i haven't played music or done any art, let alone read a damn book. not to mention that being at work most of my days, i started to take shit way too seriously there. to the point where my boss, whose management style includes a lot of "how's it going" meetings with everyone, mentioned in one such meeting, "it's just a job." which is all, imo, part of finding your groove. i just feel like i spend too much damn time there, as great a job as it is, i don't want to spend all my time anywhere.

then Lil' Filth's grades took a nosedive. my options for remedying that are limited. stay with her and supervise studying, or hire a tutor, and while the money is nice, i don't make anywhere near enough to pay a tutor. the after school program supervises children doing their homework, but they do not supervise the homework, per se. it's more about making sure no one hits anyone or steals anything. what she had with the freedom to self regulate was the option, it turned out, to skip assignments, do work with kids in the hall videos playing, munch away and get sidetracked, so that by the time i got home at the tail end of the day, she was often not even finished. her work would be all spread out around the computer, her email open, videos playing and crumbs in her books, and i would still have to comb over all her work and check it, investing another hour into reminding, arguing, that's done, no it isn't, it's good enough, no it isn't, and so on.

so i'm thinking the schedule has to change. maybe until spring. i think they'll go for it at work, they were going to hire someone else to help out anyway.

the kid will NOT be pleased. having me breathing down her neck after school will be sufficiently miserable as to give her incentive to work harder and show me i can leave her to do her work by herself for a couple hours.

i don't know, i'm a little ambivalent. part of me feels like i'm caving rather than rising to the challenge, that i can still make this work. then the other part of me says it's not worth my kid suffering for it. not that the kid feels that she's suffering, she's having a blast.

but i'm preparing to walk in and propose a 30 hour work week, rather than 40.

oh and don't tell, but i took a day off tomorrow. yep, i took a day off and the family doesn't know. if i told them, they'd put off the groceries and laundry till tomorrow "since you're home anyway," so i will tell them tomorrow night. i'm going to sleep, work out, write that proposal and bake. then i will surprise Lil' Filth when she walks in the door. ha.

Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction

Posted on Jan 24, 2010

By Chris Hedges

Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d’état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power. But it does not significantly alter the political landscape. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.

The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.

Much of the outrage expressed about the court’s ruling is the outrage of those who prefer this choreographed charade. As long as the charade is played, they do not have to consider how to combat what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of “inverted totalitarianism.”

Inverted totalitarianism represents “the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry,” Wolin writes in “Democracy Incorporated.” Inverted totalitarianism differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader, and finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, boast of replacing decaying structures with a new, revolutionary structure. They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power as to make democracy impossible.

Inverted totalitarianism is not conceptualized as an ideology or objectified in public policy. It is furthered by “power-holders and citizens who often seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inactions,” Wolin writes. But it is as dangerous as classical forms of totalitarianism. In a system of inverted totalitarianism, as this court ruling illustrates, it is not necessary to rewrite the Constitution, as fascist and communist regimes do. It is enough to exploit legitimate power by means of judicial and legislative interpretation. This exploitation ensures that huge corporate campaign contributions are protected speech under the First Amendment. It ensures that heavily financed and organized lobbying by large corporations is interpreted as an application of the people’s right to petition the government. The court again ratified the concept that corporations are persons, except in those cases where the “persons” agree to a “settlement.” Those within corporations who commit crimes can avoid going to prison by paying large sums of money to the government while, according to this twisted judicial reasoning, not “admitting any wrongdoing.” There is a word for this. It is called corruption.

Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influence peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America spent $26 million last year and drug companies such as Pfizer, Amgen and Eli Lilly kicked in tens of millions more to buy off the two parties. These corporations have made sure our so-called health reform bill will force us to buy their predatory and defective products. The oil and gas industry, the coal industry, defense contractors and telecommunications companies have thwarted the drive for sustainable energy and orchestrated the steady erosion of civil liberties. Politicians do corporate bidding and stage hollow acts of political theater to keep the fiction of the democratic state alive.

There is no national institution left that can accurately be described as democratic. Citizens, rather than participate in power, are allowed to have virtual opinions to preordained questions, a kind of participatory fascism as meaningless as voting on “American Idol.” Mass emotions are directed toward the raging culture wars. This allows us to take emotional stands on issues that are inconsequential to the power elite.

Our transformation into an empire, as happened in ancient Athens and Rome, has seen the tyranny we practice abroad become the tyranny we practice at home. We, like all empires, have been eviscerated by our own expansionism. We utilize weapons of horrific destructive power, subsidize their development with billions in taxpayer dollars, and are the world’s largest arms dealer. And the Constitution, as Wolin notes, is “conscripted to serve as power’s apprentice rather than its conscience.”

“Inverted totalitarianism reverses things,” Wolin writes. “It is politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash.”

Hollywood, the news industry and television, all corporate controlled, have become instruments of inverted totalitarianism. They censor or ridicule those who critique or challenge corporate structures and assumptions. They saturate the airwaves with manufactured controversy, whether it is Tiger Woods or the dispute between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. They manipulate images to make us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge, which is how Barack Obama became president. And the draconian internal control employed by the Department of Homeland Security, the military and the police over any form of popular dissent, coupled with the corporate media’s censorship, does for inverted totalitarianism what thugs and bonfires of books do in classical totalitarian regimes.

“It seems a replay of historical experience that the bias displayed by today’s media should be aimed consistently at the shredded remains of liberalism,” Wolin writes. “Recall that an element common to most 20th century totalitarianism, whether Fascist or Stalinist, was hostility towards the left. In the United States, the left is assumed to consist solely of liberals, occasionally of ‘the left wing of the Democratic Party,’ never of democrats.”

Liberals, socialists, trade unionists, independent journalists and intellectuals, many of whom were once important voices in our society, have been silenced or targeted for elimination within corporate-controlled academia, the media and government. Wolin, who taught at Berkeley and later at Princeton, is arguably the country’s foremost political philosopher. And yet his book was virtually ignored. This is also why Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney, along with intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, are not given a part in our national discourse.

The uniformity of opinion is reinforced by the skillfully orchestrated mass emotions of nationalism and patriotism, which paints all dissidents as “soft” or “unpatriotic.” The “patriotic” citizen, plagued by fear of job losses and possible terrorist attacks, unfailingly supports widespread surveillance and the militarized state. This means no questioning of the $1 trillion in defense-related spending. It means that the military and intelligence agencies are held above government, as if somehow they are not part of government. The most powerful instruments of state power and control are effectively removed from public discussion. We, as imperial citizens, are taught to be contemptuous of government bureaucracy, yet we stand like sheep before Homeland Security agents in airports and are mute when Congress permits our private correspondence and conversations to be monitored and archived. We endure more state control than at any time in American history.

The civic, patriotic and political language we use to describe ourselves remains unchanged. We pay fealty to the same national symbols and iconography. We find our collective identity in the same national myths. We continue to deify the Founding Fathers. But the America we celebrate is an illusion. It does not exist. Our government and judiciary have no real sovereignty. Our press provides diversion, not information. Our organs of security and power keep us as domesticated and as fearful as most Iraqis. Capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, when it emasculates government, becomes a revolutionary force. And this revolutionary force, best described as inverted totalitarianism, is plunging us into a state of neo-feudalism, perpetual war and severe repression. The Supreme Court decision is part of our transformation by the corporate state from citizens to prisoners.

the network rejected a similar ad last year, but this year it will air an ad suggesting that because the mother of some football player was advised by her doctor to abort, the world is better off that she didn't. funny how the mother's medical condition is not even mentioned, nor is how she fared, how she is now. i guess it's all irrelevant.

i guess it's also irrelevant that the super bowl is hands-down THE most expensive advertising you can buy, and that the network that airs it is hands-down THE most powerful network at least on that day, and has final say on what gets on and what doesn't.

i had to look it up, but that network is CBS.

oh, and the group who slapped that shit together, "focus on the family" is mainly opposed to gay marriage.

read this good article about it:
Mixing a Super Bowl of manipulation

The teenager will reportedly receive 90 lashes in front of her classmates, as well as a two-month prison sentence, following her conviction at a court in the city of Jubail on Tuesday.
...

Turning King’s Dream Into a Nightmare

Posted on Jan 17, 2010

By Chris Hedges

Martin Luther King Day has become a yearly ritual to turn a black radical into a red-white-and-blue icon. It has become a day to celebrate ourselves for “overcoming” racism and “fulfilling” King’s dream. It is a day filled with old sound bites about little black children and little white children that, given the state of America, would enrage King. Most of our great social reformers, once they are dead, are kidnapped by the power elite and turned into harmless props of American glory. King, after all, was not only a socialist but fiercely opposed to American militarism and acutely aware, especially at the end of his life, that racial justice without economic justice was a farce.

“King’s words have been appropriated by the people who rejected him in the 1960s,” said Professor James Cone, who teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York and who wrote the book “Martin & Malcolm & America.” “So by making his birthday a national holiday, everybody claims him, even though they opposed him while he was alive. They have frozen King in 1963 with his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. That is the one that can best be manipulated and misinterpreted. King also said, shortly after the Selma march and the riots in Watts, ‘They have turned my dream into a nightmare.’ ”

“Mainstream culture appeals to King’s accent on love, as if it can be separated from justice,” Cone said. “For King, justice defines love. It can’t be separated. They are intricately locked together. This is why he talked about agape love and not some sentimental love. For King, love was militant. He saw direct action and civil disobedience in the face of injustice as a political expression of love because it was healing the society. It exposed its wounds and its hurt. This accent on justice for the poor is what mainstream society wants to separate from King’s understanding of love. But for King, justice and love belong together.”

Malcolm X, whose refusal to appeal to the white ruling class makes it impossible to turn him into an establishment icon, converged with King in the last months of his life. But it would be wrong to look at this convergence as a domestication of Malcolm X. Malcolm influenced King as deeply as King influenced Malcolm. These men each grasped at the end of their lives that the face of racism comes in many forms and that the issue was not simply sitting at a lunch counter with whites—blacks in the North could in theory do this—but being able to afford the lunch. King and Malcolm were deeply informed by their faith. They adhered to a belief system, one Christian and the other Muslim, which demanded strict moral imperatives and justice. And because neither man sold out or compromised with the power elite, they were killed. Should King and Malcolm have lived, they would have become pariahs.

King, when he began his calls for integration, argued that hard work and perseverance could make the American dream available for rich and poor, white and black. King grew up in the black middle class, was well educated and culturally refined. He admitted that until his early 20s, life had been wrapped up for him like “a Christmas present.” He naively thought that integration was the answer. He trusted, ultimately, in the white power structure to recognize the need for justice for all of its citizens. He shared, as most in his college-educated black class did, the same value system and preoccupation with success as the whites with whom he sought to integrate.

But this was not Malcolm’s America. Malcolm grew up in urban poverty, dropped out of school in eighth grade, was shuttled between foster homes, abused, hustled on city streets and ended up in prison. There was no evidence in his hard life of a political order that acknowledged his humanity or dignity. The white people he knew did not exhibit a conscience or compassion. And in the ghetto, where survival was a daily battle, nonviolence was not a credible option.

“No, I’m not an American,” Malcolm said. “I’m one of 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the … victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver—no, not I! I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare!”

King, especially after he confronted the insidious racism in Chicago, came to appreciate Malcolm’s insights. He soon began telling Christians that “any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that cripple them, is a spiritually moribund religion in need of new blood.”

“King began to see that Malcolm was right in what he was saying about white people,” Cone told me. “Malcolm saw that white people did not have a conscience that could be appealed to to bring justice for African-Americans. King realized that near the end of his life. He began to call most whites ‘unconscious racists.’ ”

The crude racist rhetoric of the past is now considered impolite. We pretend there is equality and equal opportunity while ignoring the institutional and economic racism that infects our inner cities and fills our prisons, where a staggering one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 are incarcerated. There are more African-American men behind bars than in college. “The cell block has replaced the auction block,” the poet Yusef Komunyakaa writes.

The fact that prison and urban ghettos are populated primarily with people of color is not an accident. It is a calculated decision by those who wield economic and political control. For the bottom third of African-Americans, many of whom live in these segregated enclaves of misery and deprivation, little has changed over the past few decades; indeed, life has often gotten worse.

In the last months of his life, King began to appropriate Malcolm’s language, reminding listeners that the ghetto was a “system of internal colonialism.” “The purpose of the slum,” King said in a speech at the Chicago Freedom Festival, “is to confine those who have no power and perpetuate their powerlessness. … The slum is little more than a domestic colony which leaves its inhabitants dominated politically, exploited economically, segregated and humiliated at every turn.” The chief problem is economic, King concluded, and the solution is to restructure the whole society.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were, as King and Malcolm knew, meaningless slogans if there was no possibility of a decent education, a safe neighborhood, a job or a living wage. King and Malcolm were also acutely aware that the permanent war economy was directly linked to the perpetuation of racism and poverty at home and often abroad.

In a speech titled “Beyond Vietnam” he gave at Riverside Church a year before his assassination, King called America the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” a quote that won’t make it into many Martin Luther King Day celebrations. King’s strident denunciation of the Vietnam War and economic injustice at the end of his life saw many white liberals, members of his own staff, as well as allies within the political power structure, turn against him. King and Malcolm, in the final days of their lives, were lonely men.

“There are many ways in which Malcolm’s message is more relevant today,” said Cone, who also wrote “A Black Theology of Liberation.” “King’s message is almost entirely dependent on white people responding to his appeals for nonviolence, love and integration. He depends on a positive response. Malcolm spoke to black people empowering themselves. He said to black people, ‘You may not be responsible for getting yourself into the situation you are in, but if want to get out you will have to get yourself out. The people who put you in there are not going to get you out.’ King was appealing to whites to help get black people out. But King gradually began to realize that African-Americans could not depend on whites as much as he had thought.

“King did not speak to black self-hate and Malcolm did,” Cone said. “King was a political revolutionary. He transformed the social and political life of America. You would not have Barack Obama today if it had not been for King. Malcolm was a cultural revolutionary. He did not change the social or political structures, but he changed how black people thought about themselves. He transformed black thinking. He made blacks love themselves at a time when they hated themselves. The movement from being Negro and colored to being black, that’s Malcolm. Black studies in the universities and black caucuses, that’s Malcolm. King never would have done black studies. He taught a course at Morehouse on social and political philosophers and did not include a black person. He didn’t have W. E. B. Du Bois or Frederick Douglass. None of them. He had all the white figures like Plato and Aristotle. Malcolm helped black people to love themselves.”

King and Malcolm would have excoriated a nation that spends $3 trillion waging imperial wars in the Middle East and trillions more to fill the accounts of Wall Street banks while abandoning its poor. They would have denounced the liberals who mouth platitudes about justice for the poor while supporting a party that slavishly serves the interests of the moneyed elite. These American prophets spoke on behalf of people who had nothing left with which to compromise. And for this reason they did not compromise.

“You can’t drive a knife into a man’s back nine inches, pull it out six inches, and call it progress,” Malcolm said.

“I’ve decided what I’m going to do,” King preached at one of his last sermons at Ebenezer Baptist Church. “I ain’t going to kill nobody in Mississippi … [and] in Vietnam. I ain’t going to study war no more. And you know what? I don’t care who doesn’t like what I say about it. I don’t care who criticizes me in an editorial. I don’t care what white person or Negro criticizes me. I’m going to stick with the best. On some positions, cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when a true follower of Jesus Christ must take a stand that’s neither safe nor politic nor popular but he must take that stand because it is right. Every now and then we sing about it, ‘If you are right, God will fight your battle.’ I’m going to stick by the best during these evil times.”

How Haitian writer Richard Morse gave an hourly account of earthquake through Twitter

pat robertson claims haiti earthquake is the direct result of them making "a deal" with satan

there are people, who are put on tv, who actually think this kind of thing.

i need some advice. a lot of the recipes i use for frostings, confections, cakes and whatnot call for corn syrup. lately it's been getting really hard to find good corn syrup in the stores. i used to get a brand called "wholesome sweeteners" in teh organic section of my grocery store, but no more. all the stores seem to carry only agave and sometimes brown rice.

i need a syrup that will react and behave the same way to achieve the same results as corn syrup, so agave won't do. rice is alright but expensive and doesn't really taste right.

i just made caramels with the last bottle of real corn syrup on the market shelves, and if i'm going to continue making tasty shit i either need:
1. a source of real corn syrup, preferably organic
(karo has artificial flavors and high-fructose corn syrup even in its plain variety)
or 2. an alternative that behaves like corn syrup does.

any sweets-making mamas know anything about this?

a couple years ago we got this kitty. i've bitched about her before. she started out so nice, turned out that was starvation and illness. we brought her back to health, and since then she's all smug and too good for us. when we walk in the room, she leaves, or goes under some furniture. oh, she'll YOWL for food, but she won't watch tv with us or play with yarn while we knit, nothing that cool cats do. the kid gets to snuggle in bed at night. for some reason a sleeping girl is ok but not wakeful engaged people. unless they're giving her food.

but she loves the dog. i mean L-O-V-E. he can't walk from one room to another without her following and walking under his snout, and rubbing her head against him. he gets sick of it, especially if he's trying to sleep while she is trying to snuggle. he'll snap at her to tell her to get lost.

i'm thinking this kitty has issues, self esteem or otherwise. she only seems to like those who can't stand her. if Mr Filth just looks at her she runs away.

here's the thing. i have this cool little pantry in my new house, which i don't use as a pantry because there's no light. the litter box is in there, and her food bowl is on a shelf, high away from where the dog can steal it. well don't you know she LOVES going into that tiny room? in that little cluttered room where i have my file cabinets and sundries that i don't knwo what to do with, where there is no room and no light, she goes and purrs. she gets on a shelf and sticks her head around teh doorjamb, looking at me. and when i go pet her, she acts like a normal cat. she purrs loudly, leaning into my hand and licking. it's like she feels safe in there.

i'm just curious if this is something that's seen with rescues. in teh old house she didn't have a spot she could go to be away from everyone. now it's like she has her own space and she's alright having us visit.

i know this lady and her show has been a hit here with the hipmamas, just thought you'd like to see she made it to the daily show. she's in a john oliver piece. a really good one, by the way.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/tue-january-5-2010-george-lucas

is it "twenty ten" or "two thousand ten?"

my daughter informed me that if i say "twenty ten" she will be too embarrassed to talk to me in public.