sascha baron cohen is god

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3681938.stm

If anyone takes Borat seriously...well, that's their problem.

Check out all these progressives!

http://www.democratsforlife.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=172&Itemid=54

But hey guys, make sure to vote Democrat! We wouldn't want the right winning, let's preserve:

death penalty
three strikes
war in Iraq, upcoming war in Iran
war on drugs
ignoring the immigrant population
barring same sex marriages
patriot act

To be fair, the Greens aren't doing much. Tiny steps, but it's hard in a two party system. And I don't think it'll necessarily be the Greens (though European success keeps me from losing all hope) (and truthfully, I don't know that they're the ones I want...) who will bring the real left to the table...but it's the first step in the process, and it needs dedication. And there's no way I could in good conscience vote for a party that doesn't represent the left. A party that's moving more and more to the right every time I hear a speech, a party who's presidential candidates have been calling for more war...

Statistically speaking, my opinion will almost surely change in a few more years. But then again, I've enjoyed defying statistics a few important times.

But, I have more pressing issues. Such as Leo. Looks like I owe one ridiculously adorable little guy a nice cuddle.

Leo

I promised Mark a picture of the little guy, but still no camera to take one with...so here's a video from the girl who gave him to me, from when he was 4-5 weeks old....he's almost nine weeks old now, and only cuter!

financial irresponsibility

Fellow Californians,

Am I the only one who is steamed that the legislature is throwing us a bunch of BOND initiatives?

People always talk about how they support Republicans because they are fiscally responsible (in my experience, these are the people that don't know much about economics beyond sound bites). So why all the bonds?

Bonds often double (or more) the amount of money spent...and put it off so that me and my children can pay for your roads that you couldn't raise taxes for. Here's my all time favorite:

Proposition 1B

Pro-car...real sustainable...so lets pass on the debt for a couple of generations! Let's have our kids pay 38.9 billion for 19 billion dollars to help out the cars that shouldn't be so prevalent when they would use these "improvements."

But what really gets me...the "liberals" who decide how to vote based on the name they see when they get to the polls will vote for "transportion."

Fucking California.

download festival

Another great festival that people have got to go to...

http://www.downloadfestival.com/2006/sflineup.html

Between Beck, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Shins...and Muse ain't bad...$29.50 is a pretty good price.

freedom loving country, eh?

39.2% of the 1,745,712 drug arrests in 2004 were for marijuana possession.

Is it just me, or does this seem like a ridiculous waste of law enforcement?

To begin with, there's the often used arguement for marijuana legalization that alcohol seems to have worse effects than marijuana. In my college town, I can't begin to count the incidences of vandalism fueled by alcohol consumption...from stealing public signs to smashing windows of cars. If the cops are looking for marijuana possession, why aren't they at least equally walking into frat parties and cracking down on underaged drinking? For that matter, why aren't they walking into frat parties in houses with frequent reports of date rape?

But it doesn't matter what you think of marijuana as a drug. The point is, use doesn't tend to affect the public much, so why is so much time (and tax dollars) devoted to cracking down on simple possession? And why are lives ruined (the justice system has a tendency to do so) over something so trivial?

on a COMPLTELY different note

You gotta love QC

existential crisis

followed by:

genetic imperatives

Today started out as usual. Well, the kitten woke me up at 6 in the morning to play, which was cute but not particularly exciting when you were going to sleep till 7:45, and needed every hour of that sleep...but nothing out of the ordinary. Got up, showered, grabbed a breakfast bar for the road, and biked to work.

A few hours into my work day, I walked to the back and heard an NPR reporter talking about 9/11. Which is fairly common, so I thought nothing of it...unitl I heard the words repeated about a dozen times.

And I finally remembered that it's the fifth anniversary of the attacks.

I had forgotten.

Truthfully, it doesn't surprise me all that much. I remembered on that day, my entire class was rattled and wanted to talk about it at every moment. I separated myself from all the talk. I don't quite know why, but it just didn't hold my interest. Sure, it rattled me a tiny bit, but it didn't touch me. I don't quite know why. Of course I was upset for all the lives lost, but no more so than for any other tragedy. Maybe because it happened in New York, a place which I've never even been to...I feel more connected to Israel. I've never felt strongly tied to being american, so that didn't do anything for me. Maybe it's because I'm terrible at internalizing tragic events...sure, when I'm scared of them, I'm stressed to a ridiculous point, but once they've happened...I suppose I just move on. Who knows. Anyway, I wasn't touched by what happened enough for me to feel comfortable about further discussion or introspection about the event. It'd feel fake.

I guess that makes me a pretty bad human. I can't help longing for half the humanity displayed by this

so long and thanks for all the fish

Taking another vacation from the internet this weekend for...

another Green Party plenary. At least this one's in Tahoe, not that horrible Ventura county!

ps

Holy crap who's going?

Elvis Costello. Billy Bragg. The Austin Lounge Lizards. And, for all the deadheads out there, Bob Weir.

still mad at 85...

http://www.ucsf.edu/castd/toolbox/ConfidentialityToolkit.pdf#search=%22california%2C%20confidentiality%2C%20age%22

But abortion is different...not a medical procedure, no, it's a dirty evil thing that should be stopped by the law.

I don't get it...all this could possibly do is increase teen pregnancy and ruin lives.

Why do so many people think that their morals should apply to everybody and be enforced by law? There are things that I personally am not completely comfortable with...truthfully, abortion is one of them...but the law can not be based on individuals feelings. In order to restrict a person's freedom in areas that do not affect others, it seems to me that there had better be a factual/scientific reason. In this case, science tells us that most abortions "kill" something that's about as advanced as the fly that would be mindlessly swatted.

And don't get me started on birth control...pharmacists are allowed to not dispense birth control because they don't like it?!

Until reproductive health is treated with the same acceptance as the rest of health care, America will be home to double standards that prevent us from calling ourselves free.

bloody distortion

Two of my housemates are metalheads. I love them, but man do they need to get some taste. Don't get me wrong, I myself listen to a fair bit of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden...even newer stuff like Metallica and even Isis...but how can that and much grittier variations take over so much of one's repetoire? Distortion is fun...but how could somebody live without the intensity of Comfortably Numb, the warmth of folk rock, the tantalizing movement of Iron & Wine (if you're used to his more passe stuff, get Woman King and listen especially to Evening on the Ground)?

One of them has the nerve to say that rock is even more limited than metal. Just cause we don't have gay wizard music doesn't mean that at least feelings in the different sub-genres aren't wildly different. And then he says that rock doesn't have the complicated intricacies and is too repetitive.

Who the hell cares? It's about what you make of it and how you feel. Some of the most simple riffs and melodies can take you to a place that are just...out of body (and I swear, even though I'm a Green, it's not drugs talking). Even in normal circumstances...it just feels right...the way a good home or a good relationship or a good culinary favorite (garlic bread, anybody?) feels. So take that, technical death metal!

Christ, I just compared relationships to food...great ones to garlic bread. Wow, I wonder what a bad one would be.

Anyway, I get the last laugh. Since I'm moving in first, I get to decorate the place. That means Bob Dylan is in our living room.

"justice"

Note: for the purposes of the internet, I'll probably still be dropped off the face of the planet for a few days.

Spending time in a courtroom is downright depressing. You see people slipping through the cracks as you watch. Black man after black man after black man...sure, the numbers might indicate that poverty is more widespread among minorities, and crime is more widespread among the impovershed...but that sort of disproportionality really makes me wonder. Public defenders who probably get too many cases to remember a single client's face mumbling with indifference, the judge looking at a stack of papers for a few minutes before making a decision and moving on...and what's this all for? Justice, apparently. It seems to only hurt. It also angers me that rapes occur every day, and where are the cops? Looking to see if they can find drug users and dealers.

Too much was running through my head, and I still haven't sorted it all out.

On a completely unrelated note...do males ever learn tact? Is it just something that seems absent in the early years, or is it (as I am suspecting more and more) something that is never learned? A couple of friends of mine recently broke up because one moved accross the country for college. He managed to move on, I guess, because within a week he found a new girl. Sure, it seems odd too me, and the girl is still upset and nowhere near moving on...but I can't really fault him for it, and anyway it wasn't like he was actively looking for anything. What can I fault him for, though? He broke the news by saying "I found someone to replace you."

Teenage boys...at least we can laugh at them.

not written under the influence

I was reading To Kill a Mockingbird today, and at some point thought of the book survey, and realized that perhaps I'm not reading enough contemporary novels. I did just recently read Everything is Illuminated, but still...not very much. Yet I still feel that I need to firm my base in the classics...this is the first time I'm reading To Kill a Mockingbird (I'm in college), and I still haven't read Catcher in the Rye...I'd like to read more Dostoyevsky...and anyway, Naked Lunch put me off contemporary writing. I mean, just because you're on acid and a half million other drugs doesn't mean that you have the right to publish nonsensical garbage. I swear, 99% of people who bought that book bought it to look intelligent. Now that I think about it, some of the shittiest stuff I've read has been written under the influence...sure, many greats in writing (the beatniks), music (duh) and the rest of the arts have been on drugs, but for a good majority of people, they just make them stupid. And then they think their works are so great...man did I get sick reading poems and listening to songs by my stoner friends with egos too large for what they were producing.

The lesson here is...I have a lot of reading to do! And unfortunately, somewhere in there I have to waste my time reading Lord of the Rings because I promised a kid I would...though, she doesn't seem to be keeping to her word about reading an actual work of literature. I think I'll put it off.

bizarre

I don't know how to feel...

Pluto loses planetary status

meme

Sigh...I was tagged. I blame Mark for this source of procrastination.

1. One book that changed your life?
The Stranger, by Albert Camus

2. One book you have read more than once?
This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

3. One book you would want on a desert island?
the complete works (particularly short stories) of Mark Twain. He's got it all...funny, poignant, beautiful.

4. One book that made you laugh?
Anything by Kurt Vonnegut, or Oscar Wilde

5. One book that made you cry?
East of Eden by John Steinbeck

6. One book you wish had been written?
something great about why people shouldn't take themselves so seriously

7. One book you wish had never been written?
whatever the first book is on organic chemistry...grrr ochem

8. One book you are currently reading?
The Island by Aldous Huxley

9. One book you've been meaning to read?
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

from the lebanese point of view

Lebanese civilians talk about life in southern Lebanon during and after the war

There are points in this where I feel sympathy, and there are points that are utterly ridiculous. You really can see the power that Hezbollah has over the people of Lebanon.
For example:

Q: Is there widespread bitterness towards Hezbollah for using civilians as human shields resulting in many needless deaths?
Lina: Hezbollah never, never used civilians as human shields. It was a matter of pride for us; they were fighting for us. Everything they did was for us, so we could live in dignity and freedom.
--
It is Hezbollah who stopped Israel invading our country any more than a few hundred metres. And it liberated the south from Israel in 2000.
--
Fairuz: The reason we are happy about our martyrs is because we know there is a price for everything and we are willing to pay that price. If you want water you have to pay the price for it. Our blood is the only thing we have to pay with for what we want.
--
Q: Could Rim and Fairuz explain why they are reluctant to show their faces in the photographs?
Rim: At the slightest occasion Israel will be ready to display our photos and call us terrorists. They would probably put us on a list of terrorists, because Israel lacks democracy and freedom, unlike us.

a bit old...

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/DyeHard/story?id=2288095&page=1

It's pretty strange stuff. I was talking about it with my boyfriend last week, and he asked me if my personality was already affected, what did I think of that. While it is a tad creepy, I suppose we are, on top of our genetic makeup, the sum of our life experiences...and what's worse about a parasite affecting how I think than the environment I was raised in?

Still, even with the rationalization, it's pretty creepy. PARASITES IN MY MIND!

Lafferty suspects it may account for cultural differences. Boring men in the middle east might not be a bad idea at this point...

Green wisdom

Yesterday I spent quite a bit of time with one of my favorite Greens. Late fifties hippie, miraculously mentally intact considering the ridiculous amount of drug use (had a really bad addiction to cocaine, now just a pothead with the occassional use of psychedelics), was a CO during Viet Nam...everyone knows the story. He now lives on a nice bit of land in the forrest, working his way off the grid. He's been active in the Green Party since for a good amount of it's history in America.

And he's a Zionist.

Still fairly critical of the Israeli government, mind you (though not so critical of the recent Lebanon conflict), but just will never shake off the nice Jewish upbringing. And very much in the closet about it. Anyway, in talking to him about the left's anti-Israel stance and bias against us pro-Israel folks, and he said something that I found very poignant. I'll end with it:

In order for peace to be reached in any situation, we need pro-peace people on both sides.

except for that whole slavery and racism thing...

When forced to put a name to my politics, I often say "Jeffersonian."

"law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual."
--Thomas Jefferson

I've been gone awhile. Some Zionist stuff was done. Some tormenting Nessie was done. Actually, after Thelma...I mean Tia...and I left some literature at his workplace, he called us "self confessed member[s] of a murderous death cult." Gotta love paranoia.

In my "what's pissing me off today" segment:

CA prop 85
73 failed. Can we be done with this? OK, to be fair, it was by a narrow margin and perhaps some of those voting no were fiscal conservatives who were voting no on everything because they were angry that their tax dollars were being wasted for an unnecessary special election.

But...I'm angry at the measure itself. We seem to have medical confidentiality at the age of 14 for just about everything else. This is just an effort to make abortion stand out and seem "wrong." And, it could easily tear families apart. Not that anti-abortion advocates care about the living or anything like that.

So...San Francisco. Saturday August 12, 9:30 AM. Civic Center. Be there or else!