inkbluesky

new year

Something obvious for the new year.

dance floor

Kind of a public service: if you’re hugging the dance floor because you’re afraid you might fall off the earth you may have had too much. If your tongue is stuck between the cracks you probably have alcohol poisoning.

Another list for the new year, The Bill of Wrongs The 10 most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006

8. Slagging the Media
Whether the Bush administration is reclassifying previously declassified documents, sidestepping the FOIA, threatening journalists for leaks on dubious legal grounds, or, most recently, using its subpoena power to try to wring secret documents from the ACLU, the administration has continued its “secrets at any price” campaign. Is this a constitutional crisis? Probably not. Annoying as hell? Definitely.

7. Slagging the Courts
It starts with the president’s complaints about “activist judges,” and evolves to Congressional threats to appoint an inspector general to oversee federal judges. As public distrust of the bench is fueled, the stripping of courts’ authority to hear whole classes of cases—most recently any habeas corpus claims from Guantanamo detainees—almost seems reasonable. Each tiny incursion into the independence of the judiciary seems justified. Until you realize that the courts are often the only places that will defend our shrinking civil liberties. This leads to …

6. The State-Secrets Doctrine
The Bush administration’s insane argument in court is that judges should dismiss entire lawsuits over many of the outrages detailed on this very list. Why? Because the outrageously illegal things are themselves matters of top-secret national security. The administration has raised this claim in relation to its adventures in secret wiretapping and its fun with extraordinary rendition. A government privilege once used to sidestep civil claims has mushroomed into sweeping immunity for the administration’s sometimes criminal behavior.

In forums on the “Internets” it is inevitable that someone will come along and say that progressive minded Jeffersonian liberals are exaggerating, hey after all you can still drive to work and spend your paycheck at Wal-Mart, have a beer, and watch the game. How sad that they measure the state of democracy in such petty terms. Freedom doesn’t disappear over night, it erodes in small steps until you wake up one morning and wonder why more people didn’t step up and say something.

used parts 

The Year in Culture 

Stanley Crouch, author, The Artificial White Man and Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz
As we are all aware, the technology of films has never been more convincing, but the human content seems to diminish with every advance in duping techniques. That is why I was absolutely startled by Little Children. It focuses on humanity as the most marvelous of all narrative enhancements and has in Kate Winslet an actress of classical cinematic greatness.

They start off with some guy who was dissappointed in the demotion of Pluto from being a real planet which in itself was almost enough to keep me from reading the rest. Pluto’s feelings were not hurt, it will keep orbiting our sun I promise.

Among the more serious and note worthy,

Azar Nafisi, author, Reading Lolita in Tehran
I can name a few amazing, as well as a number of disappointing, cultural events for 2006, but none can match my sense of outrage at the so-called Holocaust conference convened by the Iranian government. I felt outraged as a human being, because, like all the great human catastrophes, the Holocaust transcends its own time and place, concerning not just the Jews and those who tried to eliminate them but the rest of mankind, and when we deny it or remain silent about it, when we manipulate it for political purposes, we become complicit in the assault not only against the actual victims but against all that goes by the name humane.

While I think that Iran’s leaders as opposed to its general population talk a lot of smack just to piss off the west, even as far as propaganda goes Holocaust denial went to the deepest and darkest of places and it will come back to haunt them.

While you’re over at Slate reading the rest and making your own mental list of the cultural highs and lows of the past year this is also worth a read , Why Pardoning Nixon Was Wrong Ignore the cost-free magnanimity of Ford’s rehabilitators. You had it right the first time. 

No new information has emerged during the past 32 years that makes Ford’s pardon to Nixon look any more justifiable; indeed, what facts have dribbled forth make it seem less so. (More on these later.) Nor can the pardon plausibly be considered an example of the bipartisan spirit for which Ford is justly, if too extravagantly, praised by Washington insiders. The pardon may have had the long-term effect of tamping down partisan warfare between Democrats and Republicans over a possible criminal trial (obstruction of justice would have been the likeliest charge), but when a Republican short-circuits prosecution of a fellow Republican, you can’t call that bipartisanship. 

Division of labor wallpaper 

Gendered Division Of Labor Gave Modern Humans Advantage Over Neanderthals

“The competitive advantage enjoyed by modern humans came not just from new weapons and devices but from the ways in which their economic lives were organized around the advantages of cooperation and complementary subsistence roles for men, women, and children,” write Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner (University of Arizona).

Kuhn and Stiner note that the rich archaeological record for Neanderthal diets provides little direct evidence for a reliance on subsistence foods, such as milling stones to grind nuts and seeds. Instead, Neanderthals depended on large game, a high-stakes resource, to fuel their massive body mass and high caloric intake. This lack of food diversity and the presence of healed fractures on Neanderthal skeletons–attesting to a rough-and-tumble lifestyle–suggest that female and juvenile Neanderthals participated actively in the hunt by serving as game drivers, beating bushes or cutting off escape routes.

While some us still have rich fantasy lives where we bring down a giant mastodon and bask in the glory of the tribe around a giant pit fire under a twilight sky most us lead lives of quiet desperation and domestication. There is a lot to be said for domesticity - vegging out on the sofa, wind surfing,  pizza delivery, and enough energy at the end of the day for the occasional bedroom gymnastics. While I’m big on spontaneity myself, in order to enjoy all the bless of modern living arrangements you have to have a plan, Division of labor

As soon as you move in together, or even start thinking about it, you need to have an honest conversation about how you plan to manage the day-to-day maintenance of your household. You might not realize it, but you have implanted, preconceived ideas in your head about how a man and a woman should share the domestic duties.

If your mother was an old-fashioned housewife type, some part of you could assume that the woman will take on more of the cooking and cleaning than the man (with his role largely restricted to fixing, mowing and grilling.) But if your mom worked outside of the home every bit as hard as your dad did, you’ll probably expect an all-for-one attitude. And if your parents divorced when you were young, you might not know how these things are “supposed” to work.

After you’ve confessed your ideas about who should do what in the home, lose them and create a new, gender-neutral division of labor.

A little more detail at the link which includes my favorite part, “It’s OK to let him or her know how you feel, but as long as mold isn’t taking over your shower, is it really a big deal?”.

foggy morning tuscany 

Rodin Show Visits Home of Artist’s Muses 

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, Dec. 26 — In July 1906 Auguste Rodin went to the palace of the president of France for a garden party featuring the dancers of the Royal Ballet of Cambodia.

Paris was abuzz. King Sisowath of Cambodia was making his first state visit to France and had taken with him his troupe of royal dancers, girls with strange short hair and agile feet who had been performing to rave reviews at the Colonial Exposition in Marseille.

Rodin, 66 at the time and already famous as a sculptor, showed up with a ticket but no tie. He was turned away, furious. He managed to see the dancers perform in the Bois de Boulogne a few days later. What he saw was so pure and startling that it sparked in him a kind of fever he could only describe as love.

“I contemplated them in ecstasy,” he said at the time, according to the exhibition catalog.

Rodin followed the dancers back to Marseille so precipitately that he left his art supplies behind and had to buy butcher paper from a grocer to draw on. “I would have followed them all the way to Cairo,” he said.

From this brief encounter — Rodin spent less than a week in Marseille — came 150 of his most famous drawings. Forty are now on display for the first time in Cambodia at the National Museum here.

Besides the fact that NYT does as badly as I do at titling some of their articles, if you click the link for about the next thirty days you’ll see some nice reproductions of Rodin’s stretches. After that the article will go into archives and you’ll have to pay to read it.

Coffin Maker in Iraq Writes Article About His Sadly Busy Job 

A 36-year-old Iraqi man name Muhammad Abdel Kader wrote or dictated a first-person story published on Tuesday on the Web site of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. He explains how he has been making coffins for a living for about a dozen years, and was not particularly busy until the current war — but now has to make about 20 or more coffins a day.

His saddest moment? He had to make the coffin that would carry his brother, a bombing victim, to his grave.

I guess conservatives would say look on the bright side, think of all the economic opportunity that mass deaths can bring.