quote out of context
“We deal with these guys all the time, especially the clergy. It’s amazing how many of the clergy are involved in those lies to build that flock up,” said retired SEAL Don Shipley. Shipley also speculated the waterboarding and kitchen details came from the action depicted in “Under Siege.”
in defense of flogging
An amusingly obnoxious essay — in defense of flogging as a counter-argument for America’s ineffective prison system — that actually does a pretty good job of framing the larger problem:
America now has more prisoners, 2.3 million, than any other country in the world. Ever. Our rate of incarceration is roughly seven times that of Canada or any Western European country. Stalin, at the height of the Soviet gulag, had fewer prisoners than America does now (although admittedly the chances of living through American incarceration are quite a bit higher). We deem it necessary to incarcerate more of our people—in rate as well as absolute numbers—than the world’s most draconian authoritarian regimes. Think about that. Despite our “land of the free” motto, we have more prisoners than China, and they have a billion more people than we do.
(via the browser)
Tweet of the Day
unless you want it on vinyl
A rarity might be less popular; it might be less interesting. But it’s no longer less available the way it once was. If you have a decent Internet connection and a slight cast of amorality in your character, there’s very little out there you might want that you can’t find. Does the end of rarity change in any fundamental way, our understanding of, attraction to, or enjoyment of pop culture and high art?
Christopher Hitchens on good taste and kindness
‘It’s considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don’t see why that’s considered a normal thing.’ His voice rises in indignation. ‘They’re allowed to roam the wards. They tried it on me. I know people old and young who’ve been terrified by attentions of this kind.’
He has been thinking of making a short speech along precisely these lines, to the effect that he, Harris and Dawkins may set up a secular equivalent of hospital visitors. ‘We’d go round – “Hope you don’t mind, you said you were Catholic? Only three weeks to live? Well, listen, you don’t have to live them as a mental slave, you know; you could have three weeks of freedom from fear of the priest. Don’t be a mug all your life…” I don’t think it would be considered in very good taste.’
I don’t think it would be a kindness either, I say.
‘I think it would,’ Hitchens says. ‘Absolutely.’
Mick Brown interviews Christopher Hitchens.
Deadbeat Diary, 2
Izabella arrived in July of 2008. Budgets were adjusted. 800 dollars a month was set aside for her daycare. We bought a second car. Our life didn’t just look good on paper, we were happy. This was the plan. We were in Hawaii in February of 2010 when we found out there would be a second baby.
Budgets were resistant to adjustment.
For six or seven months we calculated expenses and income. Expenditures were vetoed. We cut non-essential services and tallied the contents of our savings account. We decided to sell our house.
The decision wasn’t easy. It wasn’t just about the money. When all the debits and credits were added up and our final monthly budget was calculated, owning the home or not, we were in about the same place. The choice, for us, was about how we wanted to raise our kids. We could both work to pay a mortgage and $1600 in daycare expenses or we could rent and one of us could stay home with the kids.
By this time, September of 2010, our house was worth just over 50% of what we’d paid. A sale would mean a short sale and a short sale would be the end of our excellent credit scores and, more difficult for us, an adjustment to our values.
We talked to a Realtor and put the house on the market.
headline of the day
Facebook will soon share users’ phone numbers and addresses with 3rd parties
Dear Clusterflock
If you found a wallet in a fast-food restaurant, would you be inclined to just turn it in or try to return it to its owner yourself?
dear clusterflock
Do you pirate?
How well we have loved
Are you hearing this, dear clusterflock? Are you listening to Barack Obama’s speech?
I am as hopeful for our nation as ever in my life.
My God, what have we done?
As atrocious as the event is, it is the years of vitriolic hate that created the cesspool of politics and the near total collapse of social interaction which terrify me more. No longer do people of differing opinions come together to break bread; instead, they demonized each other as traitors and worse. No longer do people look for common ground; instead, they covet the differences as a wedge to divide and conquer their opponents.
Coupon Code
(Thanks to Erin T.)
quote out of context
I’m now going to go roust a bear from hibernation and make him eat my kidneys.
Father Christmas fucked my pussy (Christmas pussy song)
(thanks, Aaron)
quote out of context
When I pointed to each of the healed-up gashes on his fists and asked what they were from, he replied, “Teeth. Teeth. These are all from teeth.” He charges $1,000 for every one that he knocks out of a person’s head. It’s the same price for each bone he breaks in a face, a practice that’s cost him a couple of knuckles.
High Society
With the illicit drug trade estimated by the UN at $320 billion (£200bn) a year and new drugs constantly appearing on the streets and the internet, it can seem as if we are in the grip of an unprecedented level of addiction. Yet the use of psychoactive drugs is nothing new, and indeed our most familiar ones – alcohol, coffee and tobacco – have all been illegal in the past.
From ancient Egyptian poppy tinctures to Victorian cocaine eye drops, Native American peyote rites to the salons of the French Romantics, mind-altering drugs have a rich history. ‘High Society’ will explore the paths by which these drugs were first discovered – from apothecaries’ workshops to state-of-the-art laboratories – and how they came to be simultaneously fetishised and demonised in today’s culture.
High Society exhibition. 11 November 2010 – 27 February 2011 at the Wellcome Collection, London.
Two Memories I
I have had two memories in my head for about a week. I wanted to write well about them, but right now I just want them out of my head.
When I was younger, perhaps 12 or 13, my dad brought home a used dirt bike in the back of our old Ford Taurus wagon with the faux wood panel sides. It was yellow. He said it just needed a couple of repairs and some paint, it’d be good as new. He was just taking it down to a friend’s auto shop to do the work. We didn’t have much, but he was good with his hands.
I’m not sure if it was sold or if it had never been purchased to begin with. Maybe it was a wreck not worth fixing and I wouldn’t notice, or borrowed from some other boy I didn’t know. Maybe he was trying to postpone my disappointment until after my birthday, keep that expectant hope alive a little longer. All I know is that I never saw that bike again.
That’s pretty draining. I’ll have to tell the other story later.
Our chameleon was named Jasper,
and sometimes we found money in there with our peanuts.
I remember getting chameleon “brooches” at the State Fair of Texas when I was a kid. The chameleon had a string around its neck, with a safety pin on the other end to anchor to your clothes. Our chameleon was named Jasper, and he lived 3 years.
That’s my Dallas friend Susan Sanders Wansbrough talking. She confirmed my memory of State Fair chameleons and told about Jasper.
I recall girls arriving at school bright and early with limp chameleons pinned to their blouses. The chameleons would grow ever more limp and finally succumb around mid-afternoon. Susan said that her father had agreed to buy her a chameleon only because he assumed it would expire the next day, but “a diet of mealworms kept it going long past the usual lifetime for chameleon brooches.”
We shared more bizarre memories of childhood in Dallas.
Read more
from the comments
A friend once found in her closet a grackle killed by her cat and placed inside a shoe.
I don’t think it was lying, apart from lying within a shoe.
The Cooler Bandits
My friend Bruno is producing this:
Maybe you can help?
Quote of the day
But what if it’s really, as Baldwin kidded-on-the-square, ALL FAILURE? There’s no leveling off to a point where you’re finally “successful” and it’s smooth sailing and sunsets because shit happens, your career tanks, the public tires of you, your marriage crumbles, so, yes, NYU student, failure is not only a possibility, it’s a certainty. Bad things, they will happen. Some of them will be financial. Some of them will not. The only thing you ultimately ever have control over are your choices about what kind of person you want to be. So what if the alternative to noble failure isn’t ignoble success? What if it’s just ignoble failure?
photo out of context
Dear clusterflock
Last night I dreamt of petty thieving and the redistribution of assets. These days, are you more of a rebel in mind or in action?
Ground Control to Major Tom
“Getty Images steals public domain NASA image and will ‘license’ it to you for money,” re-twitters archival colleague Kate Theimer, pointing to this HiLobrow post:
. . . images gathered in the course of NASA missions belong to the American people; they’re born in the public domain, part of our cultural commons. On what basis does Getty claim the image?
EVIL PEOPLE IN MODERNIST HOMES IN POPULAR FILMS
Alexander Trevi (he of my longtime favorite Pruned) twittered about Ben Critton’s Evil People in Modernist Homes in Popular Films, then followed up by linking to these snaps of said publication.
