Rockn'roll weekend.

Tilt thine cups!

Give this a readsky: "The Fumes of Wine Doth Rise" from The Awl.

n this edition of John Dunton's "Athenian Mercury," which, as the first advice column in English, was once the go-to source for wisdom for many a muddled 17th-century Londoner, the city's citizenry writes in with booze-related questions. Why red eyes? Double vision? How does God feel about it all? Why can you scare a drunk man straight? And why, above all, does drinking unfit you for the, ahem, “combats of Venus”?

For certain elements of early modern England, drinking was subversive. Marika Keblusek (whose article “Wine for Comfort” provides a fascinating overview of exiled literary boozehounds around the time of the English Civil War) describes drinking as “an integral part of friendship, conviviality and mirth.” Drinking to a friend's health represented a real effort, especially among exiled Royalists, to symbolically unify a once-vibrant drinking group that had since parted ways. Drinking someone's health could constitute an act of Royalist resistance against the Parliamentarians, who had won the Civil War (and yes, banned toasts).

In 17th-century London, knowing what someone drank and with whom could offer a rough indication of their politics. For the first half of the century, wine-drinking correlated to Royalists and Cavaliers, whose wine-flushed cheeks were “as starred as the skies.” Beer-drinking and teetotalling were more typical of Parliamentarians (also called, delightfully, Roundheads).

Depressing journalism builds character!

Check out "Generation Fucked" from AdBusters. Worth a read.

Bwaahahahaha! I was right all along! Embrace the red http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifwave of change!

Take a gander at this: Nouriel Roubini posits: "Maybe Karl Marx was right?"

So Karl Marx, it seems, was partly right in arguing that globalization, financial intermediation run amok, and redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital could lead capitalism to self-destruct (though his view that socialism would be better has proved wrong). Firms are cutting jobs because there is not enough final demand. But cutting jobs reduces labor income, increases inequality, and reduces final demand.

Forget the bit about socialism not being better. Come on, sounds good, eh?

Interesting! Jungles! Ruins!

From the New Yorker, this is a truly incantatory account of several party's searches for a lost city in the Amazon: The Lost City of Z.

The expedition expected to find little more than bones—yet even discovering those would have been a revelation. When he vanished, Fawcett and his party had been trying to uncover a lost civilization hidden in the Amazon, which Fawcett had named, simply, the City of Z. In the next seven decades, scores of explorers had tried and failed to retrace Fawcett’s path. Some nearly died of starvation, while others retreated in the face of tribes that attacked with poisoned arrows. Then there were those adventurers who had gone to find Fawcett and, instead, disappeared along with him, swallowed by the same forests in the Mato Grosso region which travellers had long ago christened the “green hell.”

It is good, long and proper journalism. Excellent.

Riffage.

Off to the races!

From McClatchy:

Obama does have an advantage over several potential Republican rivals:

• He leads Romney 46-41, a 5-point lead.
• He leads Pawlenty 49-36, a 13-point lead.
• He leads Bachmann 52-35, a 17-point lead.
• He leads Perry 52-33, a 19-point lead.

A key reason for Perry being the weakest opponent is that he's weakest among independents.

I deplore the whole elections as a horse race thing as much as anyone, but in truth, I'm as guilty of it as anyone. I blame my political addiction to Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign trail '72. And you know, I don't really mind. It's a fine book, quite possibly the best political reporting ever written.

Things to read

Digby brings us a very effective illustration of the shift rightward and the moving of the political goalposts in this country over the last two decades. Link.

The Good Old Days

by digby

Who said this?

I'm sure you've been watching this mess in Washington.

I'd like you to know how I feel about it.

I haven't voted for one of these lousy budget packages for years and I won't vote for this one.

It would raise taxes on the wrong people.

Unlike some folks around here I think everyone should pay their fair share. Including the rich.

We need to protect our seniors from Medicare cuts too.

I don't care if the President or Congressional leaders twist my arm. I won't support any deal that isn't a fair deal for the working families.

That was Mitch McConnell 20 years ago. That's right, boys and girls, that used to be the way Republicans talked in this country. The reason there used to be bipartisanship is because they used to agree with Democrats on some of those basic values and they don't anymore. In fact, a lot of Democrats don't believe it anymore.

There really isn't a better illustration of just how far the Republican Party has moved to the right in the last 20 years. I've watched it happen, and it's still startling. People who would reject such commonplace political bromides as "everyone should pay their fair share" can't be said to be in the mainstream. And yet they are dominating American politics.

She's right. I wonder if this shift rightward is do to anything so much as right wing hate radio and Fox news...

Brains for breakfast, brains for brunch!

Wow! Sense from Megyn Kelly!

Fox is usually suspicious, Ailes/Koch bullshit. But recently, they let Megyn Kelly speak truth! Shock! Awe! Kelly explains the absurdity of US maternity leave policy, from ThinkProgress:

Fox News' Megyn Kelly Gets it Right: "The United States Is In the Dark Ages When it Comes to Maternity Leave."

Kelly is spot-on. As the Project on Global Working families found during a survey of 173 countries, the U.S. is in some bad company when it comes to paid maternity leave:

Out of 173 countries studied, 169 countries offer guaranteed leave with income to women in connection with childbirth; 98 of these countries offer 14 or more weeks paid leave. Although in a number of countries many women work in the informal sector, where these government guarantees do not always apply, the fact remains that the U.S. guarantees no paid leave for mothers in any segment of the work force, leaving it in the company of only 3 other nations: Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland.

The U.S. hasn’t required paid maternity leave even though such leave results in “a decrease of complications and recovery time for the mother and [a decrease in] the risk of allergies, obesity, and sudden infant death syndrome for the child.” So it seems that even a Fox News host can be sensible when personally faced with the implications of government policy.

Never thought I'd see the day, but apparently Fox is worth watching occasionally. Who'da Thought?

Slang!

Apparently "feeding the pigeons" is Irish slang for jerking off. Mime it; you'll see.

Read this.

Important reading material!

How America turned poverty into a crime:The poor aren't just struggling during the recession; they're being actively hounded by urban officials, By Barbara Ehrenreich.

Shit. This doesn't sound good.

From Steve Kornacki: The market meltdown and the hopeless politics of 2011: Wall Street is sending a message that the Tea Party Republicans who control the House are sure to distort.

The good news about the carnage on Wall Street -- another 634 points on Monday, with signs overnight pointing toward even more decline on Tuesday -- is that we pretty much know what's causing it: The market has decided that the prospect of meaningful economic growth in the near future is bleak.

The bad news is that we may be powerless to stop it.

This is the bottom-line of life under the 112th Congress. The current majority party in the House is at the mercy of rank-and-file members who, either because they believe it themselves or because the constituents they will answer to in their next primary election do (or both), approach every issue with the assumption that President Obama, even if what he is saying or doing actually meshes with what once passed for Republican orthodoxy, is totally and completely wrong. Thus do we now have the spectacle of Obama trying to calm the markets and goose the economy by calling for an extension of a payroll tax cut -- and one of the most influential Republicans in the House suddenly declaring that a tax cut isn't a good idea because it would increase the deficit.

Basically, what he's talking about is the fact that no one in Washington seems willing or able to admit that the deficit fetish currently going around is not only a fucking waste of time but actually quite harmful to our economic health. Obama is now a moderate Republican and the Tea Party has made the GOP completely batshit insane. Nixon would have been a Democrat now.

Fuck.

As usual, Noam Chomsky has a good point.

Read this Chomsky transcript: Public Education Under Massive Corporate Assault.

Economist Doug Henwood points out that it would be quite easy to make higher education completely free. In the U.S., it accounts for less than 2 percent of gross domestic product. The personal share of about 1 percent of gross domestic product is a third of the income of the richest 10,000 households. That's the same as three months of Pentagon spending. It's less than four months of wasted administrative costs of the privatized healthcare system, which is an international scandal.

It's about twice the per capita cost of comparable countries, has some of the worst outcomes, and in fact it's the basis for the famous deficit. If the U.S. had the same kind of healthcare system as other industrial countries, not only would there be no deficit, but there would be a surplus. However, to introduce these facts into an electoral campaign would be suicidally insane, Henwood points out. Now he's correct. In a democracy where elections are essentially bought by concentrations of private capital, it doesn't matter what the public wants. The public has actually been in favor of that for a long of time, but they are irrelevant in a properly run democracy.

College is a scam. Who knew?

So. This was just on facebook.

This seems very Lynchean or perhaps Cronenburgesque.