Super Bowl Party Checklist
Michael Smith: Meatless chili (some ground meat substitute, beer, espresso, broth, spices, peppers, tofu, onion, and garlic).
Deron Bauman: Gluten-free vegan nachos.
Sheila Ryan: Refreshing lemon dessert.
Or: New England vs. Manhattan clam chowder.
Concerning events in and around Anoka, MN
This is so depressing/infuriating that I actually recommend putting off reading until you have time to decompress afterward. I took it in two chunks.
“This isn’t something you kid about, Brittany,” her mom scolded, snatching the kitchen cordless and taking it down the hall to call the Johnsons. A minute later she returned, her face a mask of shock and terror. “Honey, I’m so sorry. We’re too late,” she said tonelessly as Brittany’s knees buckled; 13-year-old Sam had climbed into the bathtub after school and shot herself in the mouth with her own hunting rifle. No one at school had seen her suicide coming.
Now what?
2011 was the ninth-warmest year on record:
The finding continues a trend in which nine of the 10 warmest years in the modern meteorological record have occurred since the year 2000.
from the comments
Kelsey Parker quoting an article from Foreign Policy:
As it turns out, Western advisors and researchers, and Western money, were among the forces that contributed to a serious reduction in the number of women and girls in the developing world. And today feminist and reproductive-rights groups are still reeling from that legacy.
The story begins in the mid-20th century, when several factors converged to make Western demographers worried about global population growth. Thanks to advances in public health, people were living longer than ever before. Projections released by the U.N. Population Division in 1951 suggested what the sum of all those extra years of life could be: Rapid population growth was on the horizon, particularly in the developing world. As pundits forecast a global “population explosion,” anxiety mounted in policy circles, and the population control movement that coalesced brought together everyone from environmentalists to McCarthyites. Viewed through a 1960s Beltway lens, mounting numbers of people meant higher rates of poverty, which in turn made countries more vulnerable to communism.
Read more here.
It’s a Girl!
It’s a Girl! is a documentary about the systematic killing and suppression of girls in South Asia and around the world.
In India, China and many other parts of the world today, girls are killed, aborted and abandoned simply because they are girls. The United Nations estimates as many as 200 million girls are missing in the world today because of this so-called “gendercide”.
Girls who survive infancy are often subject to neglect, and many grow up to face extreme violence and even death at the hands of their own husbands or other family members.
The war against girls is rooted in centuries-old tradition and sustained by deeply ingrained cultural dynamics which, in combination with government policies, accelerate the elimination of girls.
Speechless.
(via kottke)
Warning: Grenade Splasherz
This from my friend TigErrrrrrrr:
It’s funny how when you buy these 2-packs of Grenade Splasherz @ Von’s Grocery Stores (impulse items next to the GIANT $4.49 each size of Red Bull!!!) they carry this warning across the top label: “Do not aim or throw at anyone’s face.”
Much more fun is what it says across the bottom of the label: “Squeeze’em, Soak ‘em, & Throw ‘em!” :^) YAY !!!!!
Not my super-heroine persona,
but I am thinking that somebody should assume the mantle of The Sanitizer.
There’s really one reason,
and one reason only, that I put this photo here on clusterflock.
Joel, I love you, man, but that photo out of context was beginning to make my tummy sad every time I stopped by.
Besides, I know you love Culver’s.
headline of the day
Swedish Government Recognizes File-Sharing Faith as a Religion
Occupy Portland has developed a tactic to keep a park when the police decide to enforce an eviction
Occupy Portland stumbled on a way to use the tactical superiority of the local police department, and by extension, the fluidity of the crowd, against them.
On December 3rd, we took a park and were driven out of it by riot police; that much made the news. What the media didn’t report is that we re-took the park later that same evening, and the police realized that it would be senseless to attempt to clear it again, so they packed up their military weaponry and left. Occupy Portland has developed a tactic to keep a park when the police decide to enforce an eviction.
The tactical evolution that evolved relies on two military tactics that are thousands of years old — the tactical superiority of light infantry over heavy infantry, and the tactical superiority of the retreat over the advance.
The whole article is worth a read, and nicely summarizes Occupy Portland’s serendipitous tactical breakthrough.
(thanks, Joel)
Funk songs from Vietnam GIs
If you didn’t get a Christmas present from me, it’s because I’m waiting till the New Year to buy you East of Underground: Hell Below. (Thanks to Valerie for the tip.)
In 1971 the US was pulling troops out of Vietnam, and its bases in Germany were full of draftees at a loose end. “You were painting shovels, picking up cigarette butts – it was a lot of busy-work,” remembers former serviceman Lewis Hitt. “There was a longing by everyone, especially the draftees, to get home and go back to what you were doing before.”
This was the crucible in which were formed scores of raucous funk bands made up of servicemen, four of which have just been compiled by Now-Again Records. Adoring crowd noise was crudely dubbed on top of their records, which were then distributed in recruitment centres. These bands were used by the army to present service as varied, even hip. But the songs they cover – the bitter, suspicious likes of Backstabbers and Smiling Faces Sometimes – undermine any potential propagandising.
I am posting this post
because to now I have posted 1964 posts. So this will be 1965. And that was a beautiful year. I was just old enough to know that I wanted to be a grown-up woman. In 1965.
At least one of those grown-up women in the movies. Or to have a hit record.
Police fire tear gas at protesters in Oakland
(thanks, Sarah)
headline of the day, III
World’s Largest Sperm Bank Says They Don’t Want Your Ginger Sperm
(Im)possible Chicagos is a series of hallucinatory joyrides through one hundred and twenty five asynchronous Chicagos.
Alexander Trevi‘s first joyride through (Im)possible Chicago traversed Acer Necropolis.
Trevi recently completed his nineteenth, wherein:
At night when you’re out driving, you can tell which neighborhood you’re in by the light of the streetlamps, because each ward basks in its own different hue. For instance, if the streets are all aglow in azurite, you’re definitely joy riding around Marquette Park.
Zoning codes require that windows are tinted according to the neighborhood’s chromatic identity, so no matter how the interiors are lighted, houses, skyscrapers and 7-Elevens do not give off wayward wavelengths.
Even your car lights beam out the same color. But when you cross over into another ward, they instantaneously switch filter to match that ward’s assigned spectrum.
headline of the day, II
FDA warns of strangulation with massage machine
“They are tearing out part of the heart of Buenos Aires”
The interior of the historic Cafe Richmond was gutted a couple of weeks ago; a spot once frequented by Jorge Luis Borges and Graham Greene may be replaced by a Nike Store.
The plight of the Richmond has dominated local media since the cafe’s insides were gutted last Monday morning. Apparently to ensure it could not be returned to its former splendour even if the local government rules against the Nike shop, the Richmond was emptied of its historical interior, right down to its grandiosely comfortable Chesterfield wingback leather armchairs, in a 3am raid. The movers took the precaution of pulling down the security camera on the front of the building first.
“It’s against the law,” said Monica Capano of the city’s Heritage Preservation Commission. “The Richmond is one of the city’s emblematic landmarks.”
For a personal view: Oh, no: La Richmond by my friend Charlie.
the birth of a nation, part two
We have this horrible contemporary phenomenon in the Tea Party – a real menace not only to America but to the world. Because if it goes on like this, they will destroy our economy and they will destroy America. They have no democratic vision, and I don’t mean with a capital “D”, I mean with a small “d”. They frighten me. They’re like the early followers of Adolf Hitler, and I’m willing to be quoted on that. They are a sickening phenomenon. That is because they have not read deeply and widely enough. But then maybe they’re not to blame, because American education – even in elite universities – has become a scandal in my opinion. It has committed suicide.
Harold Bloom on the state of American democracy.
Previously, on clusterflock.
the birth of a nation
The majority of Republicans in the United States do not believe the theory of evolution is true and do not believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. This suggests that when three Republican presidential candidates at a May debate stated they did not believe in evolution, they were generally in sync with the bulk of the rank-and-file Republicans whose nomination they are seeking to obtain.
I don’t see how this isn’t a fundamental problem for the future of American democracy.
(via @fivethirtyeight)
quote out of context
While many of the Spears generation remained sans pubic hair (but with jobs), the younger generation was, arguably, the first generation in history to have more pubic hair than their predecessors.
headline of the day
NM Mayor: I Was Quite Drunk When I Signed Those $1 Million Contracts
quote out of context
The tension, as I see it, is that if free will is a myth then it’s not clear why we should have an ethical goal of changing people as little as possible.
Don’t Forget the Motor City Lawndale
I was looking at pictures of Detroit (from my Flickr friend Jan Normandale and from the archives of the Reuther Library at Wayne State University), and now I have to stop looking for a while.
I’ve visited Detroit a couple of times, and in truth there’s a lot I like about it, but I can’t think about it anymore. This afternoon I’m recollecting a blisteringly hot afternoon in Chicago, late July, when I thought to avoid the expressway and take a parallel route down Roosevelt Road to where I was going.
Read more
It Gets Even Worse
From a recent NYT editorial:
If you thought the do-it-yourself anti-immigrant schemes couldn’t get any more repellent, you were wrong. New laws in Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina are following — and in some ways outdoing — Arizona’s attempt to engineer the mass expulsion of the undocumented, no matter the damage to the Constitution, public safety, local economies and immigrant families.
The laws vary in their details but share a common strategy: to make it impossible for people without papers to live without fear.
Las Reinas Chulas: “Que Suave Patria”
Please don’t turn aside take a look even if no hablas español (not even dumbass texan spanish).
¡Las Reinas Chulas reglan!
Dozens of plastic foam heads rain onto the stage. Four drug traffickers in fringed jackets and sparkly pink cowboy hats bat them into the audience with toy AK-47s. All the while, the cast croons, “Let them slit our throats, let them pack us up . . . let them not ask any questions, let them not investigate.”
This is cabaret, Mexico style. Las Reinas Chulas, or the Beautiful Queens, parody drug violence in a show the women first produced in 2005 and that still fills nightclubs around Mexico, including a performance in the tourist town of Taxco this weekend.
