Tout le monde a ses raisons
Ce qui est terrible sur cette terre, c’est que tout le monde a ses raisons. The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.
An oft-quoted line from Jean Renoir’s great film La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game).
A line that has been interpreted both as caustic and as one of the saddest, wisest, truest observations in all cinema. I’m inclined toward both interpretations.
“Everyone has their reasons” came to mind this morning in light of the weekend’s public airing of a sad personal rift between people who have been central to clusterflock.
Although I have come to know these dear folks outside of the site’s confines, I’ve not sought to learn what led to the breach. Like Casey, “I figure my knowing about the personal conflict isn’t going to do anyone much good.”
The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.
30 Photos of a Chinese Sex Toy Factory
dear clusterflock
So, clusterflockstock IV.
Now that we’re nearing March, I’m wondering if anyone has an idea for where the group of us could get together this year. Based on what we’ve learned from previous years’ plannings, the when tends to be less important than the where.
Everything is a Remix – Part 4
Kirby Ferguson saved the best for last.
R.I.P. Dory Previn (1925-2012)
Twenty-Mile Zone, the song I liked from that one Dory Previn album I bought when I was sixteen.
Ms. Previn rose to prominence as a singer-songwriter with a substantial cult following in the early 1970s and she enriched a period in pop music history that also saw the emergence of Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Laura Nyro.
She never became as widely known as they were (though she did record a live double album at Carnegie Hall), partly because her voice was never as big as theirs, but also because her lyrics — frank and dark, even when tinged with humor, and often wincingly confessional — were not the stuff of pop radio. They were, however, clear antecedents of the work of later balladeers like Sinead O’Connor and Suzanne Vega.
The Psychology of Death and Dying
That’s the name of one of the classes I’m taking this semester. So far it’s truly excellent. Beyond words, really. If I can find a way to post some of our readings without violating copyright, I’ll do it. In the meantime, have you read these? They’re a couple of my favorites.
The Long Goodbye
In those days, extended family cared for the oldest. Now, in an age when family members are separated by hundreds of miles, we leave it up to nursing homes and assisted-living facilities. And the need has never been greater. The fastest-growing age group in America is the eighty-five-and-older cohort. As the population ages, healthcare costs continue to outpace inflation. Many older people have seen a sharp decline in their retirement investments since the 2008 economic collapse and are rapidly losing value in their homes. American political leaders are not preparing adequately for the huge demographic shift caused by the aging of the boomers, who began turning sixty-five in 2011. Many of them are retiring at the same time they are dealing with parents who are still alive.
Costs for long-term care are skyrocketing because only 3 percent of adults carry long-term care insurance. As a result, middle-class people without Daddy’s pension income are bankrupting themselves and then applying for Medicaid to pay for a nursing home in which they may languish for years.
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.
The Unsayable
Last week I picked up The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma when I heard it was written by a disciple of Jacques Lacan. I’m not even halfway through this book, by Annie Rogers, PhD, and I cannot recommend it enough. Here are a couple snippets from the New York Times review:
Before they protect their predators, victims of trauma (defined as any experience “which by its nature is an excess of what we can manage or bear”) protect themselves by not consciously expressing what happened to them. To articulate, or to say, is to put together, to draw fragments of an experience into a coherent narrative, a potentially devastating process if the experience was so overwhelming as to have been, like the author’s own past, “shattering.” Before a thing is consciously (if not audibly) voiced, it has yet to be acknowledged or owned; it has yet to be believed.
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.
offer: 12 boxes of hamburger helper
Posted to Dubuque Freecycle list:
I have 12 boxes of hamburger helper flavors we didn’t care for. If interested please send contact info and time available for pickup in Dubuque.
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)
headline of the day, II
Paula Deen confirms that she has type 2 diabetes, unveils partnership with drug company
Simon Biswas, The Light of Day
A short documentary of brief interviews with elderly New Yorkers:
I don’t have answers, even at this stage of the game. I have no answers.
Beautiful and heartbreaking.
(thanks, Chris)
Cooking Up Change
They looked so young, the four college students who sat down and ordered coffee at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., on Feb. 1, 1960.
Legal challenges and demonstrations were cracking the foundations of segregation, but a black person still couldn’t sit down and eat a hamburger or a piece of pie in a store that was all too willing to take his money for a tube of toothpaste.
Those four freshmen at North Carolina A&T College — Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. and David Richmond — sat until the store closed, but they still didn’t get their coffee.
But that day helped spark other sit-in protests — led by young people like themselves — that spread throughout the South in 1960, energizing the civil rights movement. And the Greensboro Woolworth desegregated its lunch counter later that year.
It wasn’t the first time that food, or the lack thereof, figured large in the movement.
tweet of the day
With this weather, I’d consider Uggs.
— Chris Glass (@glass) January 14, 2012
Place the medieval techniques alongside those laid out in modern handbooks, such as Human Intelligence Collector Operations, the U.S. Army interrogation manual, and the inquisitors’ practices seem very up-to-date
The inquisitors were shrewd students of human nature. Like Gui, Eymerich was well aware that those being questioned would employ a range of stratagems to deflect the interrogator. In his manual, he lays out 10 ways in which heretics seek to “hide their errors.” They include “equivocation,” “redirecting the question,” “feigning astonishment,” “twisting the meaning of words,” “changing the subject,” “feigning illness,” and “feigning stupidity.” For its part, the Army interrogation manual provides a “Source and Information Reliability Matrix” to assess the same kinds of behavior. It warns interrogators to be wary of subjects who show signs of “reporting information that is self-serving,” who give “repeated answers with exact wording and details,” and who demonstrate a “failure to answer the question asked.”
A history of torture and interrogation in the Middle Ages, and how it compares to the standards applied in “The Global War on Terror”.
from the comments
Also, I learned a very important lesson: no beard jokes at web conferences. It’s like prodding at a shibboleth.
headline of the day
Pepsi Says Mountain Dew Can Dissolve Mouse Carcasses
What is the proper way to dispose of the American flag?
Found. December 31, 2011.
Dueling Banjos
If cool is a species of bullshit obscurity, culture is now divaricate enough that we can all be cool. It’s not gold anymore. More like corn.
— name (@georgelazenby) December 28, 2011
Taco Bell be having they shit look good on commercials but that shit is sick!!
— Te-Aria (@PEANUTBIOTCH) December 29, 2011
Photographs are neither true nor false
Errol Morris talks with The Guardian about his book, Believing Is Seeing.
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.
Damar, Mon Amour (out of context)
In context: Starlingo ii.
Damar torn from the flock.
What is Damar? Who is Damar? What is Damar?
from the comments
Now I know how it feels to be a guy who can only grow a scraggly beard.
GOP Clown College
(via @khoi)
