Rough day at the office

Not looking or feeling my best today.

It started as soon as I got to work.

But we managed to get our act together, and get some work done.

Hallowe'en

Neil Gaiman has an op-ed in the New York Times today.

He also commends this to your attention. I ... uh ... don't know how to describe it.

Bwahaha

Chris Sims offers some advice on constructing your secret supervillain lair.

Despite the fact that crushing walls have never succeeded even once in the entire history of deathtraps, no super-villain lair is complete without them, and they're considered by many villainous subcultures to be signs of good luck.

He also has some observations that are very funny if (and only if) you were reading X-Men in the early '90s.

Standards

Timothy Burke is a serious scholar of African history. He's dismayed about recent developments in the US.

For years, one of the most powerful arguments you could make about a lot of misguided, failed or actively dictatorial regimes and political actions would be to point to some of the guiding political ideals and official practices of the United States. When the Soviet Union or other adversaries might point to alleged abuses of human rights within the United States (say, in U.S. prisons), a lot of us could take observe in reply that the abuses described were unofficial, or in spite of the law.

That’s all changed now.

When I say in the future, “Government which bows to the universal rights of human beings”, I can’t really say any longer, “Like in the United States”.
....
The only thing that our official representatives will be able to say at these and many other such moments in the future will be, ”It is ok for us to do these things, or reject these ideals, but not you. We are allowed to torture. You are not. We are allowed to hold people in secret, you are not. We are allowed to give the executive unrestrained authority not subject to judicial or legislative overview. You are not.”

Either you stand for universal principals or you don't.

Risk, inequality, policy

If you're a social democrat like me, and think about political economy blah blah blah, then you may have heard about Yale professor Jacob Hacker's new book, The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement—And How You Can Fight Back . If not, the book's thesis is basically that in the last few decades the American economy has changed such that individuals are facing a lot more risk. Maybe you'll get laid off, maybe your entire industry will dry up, maybe your 401(k) will crash on you, et cetera. As with risk in many arenas, this greater risk also comes with better rewards for the winners ... but most folks would like more stability in their economic life, even if it means more modest rewards.

It's an interesting thesis, and certainly fundamentally in agreement with what I see looking out at the American scene.

Over at The American Prospect Online, two of my favourite policy wonk bloggers, Matthew Yglasias and Ezra Klein, are doing a roundtable discussion with Hacker about the ideas in the book. It's full of great social values and political economy stuff like this from Klien:

Jacob blames the country’s ills on risk and Matt argues for a stronger focus on inequality. Neither is wrong, but neither is right enough
....
by crafting a compelling narrative that universalizes economic hardship, he plays into a pernicious political instinct among Democrats to drop the specific problems of poor people for the more broadly palatable concerns of the middle class ...

Good stuff, and these days delicious just for presuming that talking about economic policy is talking about what kind of society we want to have.

Partisanship

What's at stake in the makeup of Congress? Consider this from Krugman, by way of Atrios:

Last year The Boston Globe offered an illuminating comparison: when Bill Clinton was president, the House took 140 hours of sworn testimony into whether Mr. Clinton had used the White House Christmas list to identify possible Democratic donors. But in 2004 and 2005, a House committee took only 12 hours of testimony on the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Think about that.

SoaP

Via DragonLadyFlame, I offer you Snakes on a Plane RPG, The Roleplaying Game of Personal Discovery, Dire Combat, And Motherf&*%ing Snakes, which actually has some elegant game mechanics.

The Left Field

Only for the serious Sorkin fans, still wondering what to make of Studio 60, Ken Levine answers the question, what if Aaron Sorkin did a show about baseball?

Friedman

If you happen to follow the political mediasphere such that you are exposed to the maddening half-truths of Thomas Friedman, you might have assumed that he was simply another journalist with atrophied analytical powers, drawn together with the rest of the herd to being an Iraq war hawk and boneheaded boosterism for economic globalization. Not so, says Marc Levy of Misanthropicity.

Friedman doesn’t write nonsense; he writes propaganda.

And why is this? Well, it turns out that he's not a journalist, if by “journalist” you mean someone who makes their living doing journalism. He's something else.

What he is, it turns out, is an extraordinarily wealthy man — living in a $9.3 million home, married into a family with an estimated worth of $2.7 billion — essentially working undercover as a shill, a beard, a stalking horse for his class, nine times out of 10 espousing cynically self-serving ideas in the guise of globalized idealist.

I find that this clarifies my reading of his work enormously.

Pluto revisited

I thought I was done with the whole Pluto question, but discovered that I could not resist the symposium: Pluto ~ Good or bad for the Jews?

Ignorance

Maybe you've heard that Jeff Stein has been quizzing our nation's leaders.

Take Representative Terry Everett, a seven-term Alabama Republican who is vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence.

“Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?” I asked him a few weeks ago.
....
To his credit, he asked me to explain the differences. I told him briefly about the schism that developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and how Iraq and Iran are majority Shiite nations while the rest of the Muslim world is mostly Sunni. “Now that you’ve explained it to me,” he replied, “what occurs to me is that it makes what we’re doing over there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area.”

Fortunately, someone saw fit to inform the President about this ... just a couple of months before the Iraq invasion.

January 2003 the President invited three members of the Iraqi opposition to join him to watch the Super Bowl. In the course of the conversation the Iraqis realized that the President was not aware that there was a difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. He looked at them and said, “You mean ... they're not, you know, there, there's this difference. What is it about?”

Since the President made the decision to go ahead and invade, I'm sure that he carefully considered the situation and concluded that Rep. Everett was mistaken, and this wouldn't present much difficulty at all.

Billmon at Whisky Bar has some additional analysis of this article, including a dark observation that a better-educated leadership wouldn't have made the invasion of Iraq a better idea.

The Brits, after all, had T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, and they still failed in the Middle East—although not as badly as Don Rumsfeld and Condi Rice.

Googlebombing for a purpose

Aha. I've been seeing this around lately, but didn't fully get it until Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise explained it to me.

Chris Bowers and the crew at MyDD have compiled the most damning news story about each of these Republican candidates. They are calling on all liberal bloggers to post the list, to maximize the visibility of these stories online ....

This is a googlebomb attack. The more folks make these links, the higher the linked pages rank in Google search results, helping to ensure that these stories are known to folks who google for information about those candidates. I had ignored it because I was past being amused by frivolous uses of this technique, but this is actually appropriate political propagandizing. So cruise on over to MyDD and get the source code for your blog today.

Links on the supporting page...

--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl
--AZ-01: Rick Renzi
--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth
--CA-04: John Doolittle
--CA-11: Richard Pombo
--CA-50: Brian Bilbray
--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave
--CO-05: Doug Lamborn
--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell
--CT-04: Christopher Shays
--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan
--FL-16: Joe Negron
--FL-22: Clay Shaw
--ID-01: Bill Sali
--IL-06: Peter Roskam
--IL-10: Mark Kirk
--IL-14: Dennis Hastert
--IN-02: Chris Chocola
--IN-08: John Hostettler
--IA-01: Mike Whalen
--KS-02: Jim Ryun
--KY-03: Anne Northup
--KY-04: Geoff Davis
--MD-Sen: Michael Steele
--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht
--MN-06: Michele Bachmann
--MO-Sen: Jim Talent
--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns
--NV-03: Jon Porter
--NH-02: Charlie Bass
--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson
--NM-01: Heather Wilson
--NY-03: Peter King
--NY-20: John Sweeney
--NY-26: Tom Reynolds
--NY-29: Randy Kuhl
--NC-08: Robin Hayes
--NC-11: Charles Taylor
--OH-01: Steve Chabot
--OH-02: Jean Schmidt
--OH-15: Deborah Pryce
--OH-18: Joy Padgett
--PA-04: Melissa Hart
--PA-07: Curt Weldon
--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick
--PA-10: Don Sherwood
--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee
--TN-Sen: Bob Corker
--VA-Sen: George Allen
--VA-10: Frank Wolf
--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick
--WA-08: Dave Reichert

Disease

Perhaps you've seen Michael J. Fox's gutsy and heartbreaking campaign ad for Missouri Senate candidate Claire McCaskill, in which his plea for stem cell research is punctuated by tremours from his Parkinson's medication.

Rush Limbaugh has tried to outdo his usual low standards by saying Fox was faking to try to win sympathy.

Olbermann, Tristero, Hilzoy, Lance Mannion, Shakespeare's Sister, and Jane Hamsher give Limbaugh the shellacking he deserves.

Torture and resentment

Lance Mannion has an excellent post about torture and the politics of resentment, if you're not getting enough of that stuff from me.

Occupation

Digby points us at a short video from the BBC protraying some of the day-to-day life of US soldiers in Iraq.

It seems that the soldiers depicted in the film are tasked with rooting out insurgents, who are of course bad guys because they are fighting the American presence in Iraq. A big part of how they go about this is the soldiers just hang around. Sooner or later, they get shot at an Iraqi. So then they shoot back and hopefully kill the guy who shot at them. Voilá! Insurgent eliminated.

I guess that the hope is that if they hang around long enough, Iraq will just run out of insurgents. US troops have to be in Iraq—until Iraq runs out of people who doesn't like that they're in Iraq. Then they can leave.

It's like a Beckett play.

It's not like they only spend their time waiting around to get shot at. There's also stopping cars to see if they're full of insurgents, breaking into people's houses looking for insurgents, interrupting locals to see if they know where there are any insurgents, stuff like that. Digby observes,

Those poor Americans fighting in Iraq seem like decent guys who are doing a thankless task. But if you were an Iraqi you'd hate their guts.

That was certainly the the feeling I got reading an account by Lt Adam Tiffen on The Sandbox at Slate's Doonesbury site.

She looks relieved, and then she continues hesitantly. Her hands clasped together as if in prayer. “What will I do? How long will he be gone? I cannot stay here alone. It is dangerous here. Please bring him back tonight. If you do not, where will I go? Who will protect us?”

Behind her, I can see that her daughter has tears in her eyes. I turn away from their stricken faces. Glancing at the soldier behind me, I can tell that this is as difficult for him as it is for me. In a quiet voice, I give instructions to the private standing behind her husband.

“Alright, take him back out to the vehicle, and let's get ready to go. Let the CO know that we are done here.”

Accompanied by the subdued young soldier, the man leaves the room and walks outside without so much as glancing at his wife or his children.

“Ma'am, do you have family you can go and stay with? Is there someone you can live with until all of this is resolved?”

She thinks a moment, and then replies: “Yes, my husband's family lives in Baghdad. I could take the children and go there.” I nod my head and attempt to look encouraging.

“I recommend you do that. I honestly don't know how long your husband will be gone.”

It's worth reading the whole account. Lt Tiffen is truly a stand-up guy: decent, polite, thoughtful toward the Iraqi family with whom he's having this encounter. In his situation, I'd be proud if I could handle it with half the grace and humanity he does.

But look at what he's being asked to do. A good man being put in a place where the very best thing he can do is politely afford a family as much dignity as possible as he takes the father away, perhaps never to be seen again. Even if every American soldier were like Lt Tiffen—and while I am sure that many are, I also know that some are not—how is it that this can make things better, either for Iraq or for the US?

Guilty pleasures

I expect that I have some Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter fans among my readership, and of those, one or two that may be interested to know that the nice people at Marvel are publishing a comics adaptation.

For folks unfamiliar with the intrepid Ms Blake, she's the star of a series of pulp novels. They're a mix of hardboiled detective story, romance novel, and monster horror, in a way that's surprisingly more witty than goofy. As the series progresses, the prose improves but the mix of tones becomes more awkward. Strongly recommended for folks charmed by the idea, strongly not for civilians.

Usually, adaptations from other media to comics are a waste of time. The only exceptions I can think of off hand is Bill Sienkiewicz' surreal “best of” Moby Dick and Chester Brown's scary Gospel of Matthew.

I've flipped through the first issue of the Anita Blake adaptation, and it really stinks. So you know. Lisa Fortune explains that this is because the style of the art is totally inappropriate to the story.

Good question

John Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey reports a dialogue about a vexing question.

Civil War re-enactments.
....
At what point do you think we'll finally be able to have Word War Two re-enactments?
....
Pretending to be gutshot for fun on Omaha Beach, or pretending to be gutshot for fun at Gettysburg—I know that one is morally unspeakable, and for some reason I agree that the other is socially acceptable, but for the life of me I cannot see the difference.

Can't pin that one down myself.

Oh, and it turns out that there are people who actually do WWII reënactments. Weird.

Sauron

Vile Republican Senator Rick Santorum alludes to The Lord of the Rings.

As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else. It's being drawn to Iraq and it's not being drawn to the US. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don't want the Eye to come back here to the United States.

I saw this a while ago, and the allusion gave me a chuckle, though the sentiment was a tiresome recapitualtion of the stupid “flypaper strategy” justification of the Iraq War. I didn't give it another thought, but Lance Mannion did.

I want to know. Who's Frodo in Rick Santorum's misreading of The Lord of the Rings?

While the eye of Sauron is focused on Iraq, who's carrying the Ring up Mount Doom to throw it into the pit and destroy it and end the war?

And is Santorum aware that Frodo fails?
....
The Ring gets to him in the end. It's an accident that it's destroyed. Does Santorum expect that Gollum's going to come along at the last minute?

Mannion's post is a cunning mix of Rings lore and politics. And then he follows up with an examination of what The Lord of the Rings is actually about.

The Lord of the Rings is not a political work. It has no political lessons to teach. It's a moral work. It's about the inner lives of individuals, not the public functioning of societies.

A very important way Santorum's allusion was wrong is that it uses Sauron as a stand in for an outside threat.

Sauron is an inner evil. That's why he has no body and no personality. It's why his armies are mostly anonymous.

Evil, in the Lord of the Rings, isn't an Other. It's a destructive force within ourselves that we bring to bear upon ourselves.

The bad guys are kind of a disappointing and unscary lot, just a bunch of fairy tale hobgoblins led by a yet another evil wizard, until they are seen for what they are ...

If you have any love of The Lord of the Rings in your heart at all, even a little bit, go read that second post. Likewise, my readers with no love of Tolkien but a love of transabyssal nondual awareness should check it out. (You know who you are.)

Really, go. It's lovely.

Gaze

Here I was just talking about the penetration of feminist ideas into mainstream culture without folks recognizing them as “feminist,” and I see another example making the rounds on the blogs.

It's an advertisement for Dove soap that's both compelling in its execution and a cracking good piece of feminist propaganda about our screwed up conception of “beauty.” I'm making it sound like eating your vegetables, but check it out, it's cool, I promise.

This is an ad with a cultural agenda. It's a feminist agenda, one that I favour, but I want to take a moment to remark on the squidgy frustrations I nonetheless feel with it.

First, as I said in the previous post, it's annoying to see feminist ideas being coöpted and not even recognized as feminist. Remember conservatives suddenly discover that Afghan women were oppressed by the Taliban? Having feminist ideas unrecognized as such is, in a certain sense, a victory, since it means those ideas have become pervasive. But it also is frustrating to feminists who know people around us who embrace feminist ideas but refuse to call themselves “feminists” because they somehow have it in their heads that feminists believe ... uh ... something bad ... about women being victims ... or something like that.

Second, it's disconcerting to see this in the context of advertising. Especially in the context of advertising for a company that's in the beauty products business. As Ampersand at Alas, A Blog observes about the earlier “Real Women Have Real Curves” Dove campaign:

The essential purpose of Dove’s campaign is the same as all ad campaigns for beauty or diet products: to make money by convincing people that they are unattractive and insufficient the way they really are. In Dove’s case, what’s being sold is “firming cream,” which as Lindsey at Majikthise points out, is just another word for snake oil. So Dove is trying to exploit women’s insecurities to convince them to waste money on products that don’t even work, but because they’re using models who are not actually anorexics, we’re supposed to see this as a feminist victory?

That, certainly not. But the fact that advertisers see speaking on feminist terms as a good way to reach people itself signifies that a victory has taken place in the culture.

Still, Ampersand is right on about flaws and limits in this feminist-influenced tactic, also criticizing the recent Nike print campaign that riffs on the way that buff women are a violation of common standards of beauty: “My butt is big.” “My shoulders aren't dainty.” “My knees are tomboys.” “I have thunder thighs.” Which is good, but buff women ain't the whole world.

Nike’s “my butt” ad features a picture of a butt that you could bounce a roll of quarters off of .... No loose, unruly fat running around here, no sir.
....
These ads aren’t about body acceptance, so much as they’re about regulating the borders of what bodies are and are not acceptable.

Roger that.

Still, let me rise in at least partial defense of these ads. There are interesting double-edged swords here. We get a physical standard offered, but it's an alternative to a pervasive and more destructive standard. We get nice big photographs of extraordinary-looking models, but we get copy that is an explict rejection of the judgements of the gaze of either gender. That ad says it in so many words.

My butt is big and that's just fine. And those who might scorn it are invited to kiss it.

And I think the “thunder thighs” copy is the wittiest, and takes us to a genuinely feminist perspective.

I have thunder thighs.
And that's a compliment
Because they are strong.

A woman's body not as an object for the gaze, but as something which serves the woman herself. Which brings us to another Nike ad, the “If You Let Me Play” TV spot which ran in '94, with images of little girls on the playground and a voiceover saying:

If you let me play sports
I will like myself more;
I will have more self-confidence,
If you let me play sports.

If you let me play,
I will be 60 percent less likely to get breast cancer;
I will suffer less depression.

If you let me play sports,
I will be more likely to leave a man who beats me.

If you let me play,
I will be less likely to get pregnant
before I want to.

I will learn what it means to be strong.
If you let me play sports.
If you let me play sports.

That's the case for Title IX right there. That's a vision of women and girls as something other than pretty dress-up dolls. Nike isn't exactly standing up for this across the board, but their advertising is selling the ideas.

Little victories, maybe, but good ones.

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Update: Adding to this 2006 post in 2012 with a new Nike ad in the spirit of “If You Let Me Play”:

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Update: Jenna Sauers at Jezebel finds a cosmetics ad featuring a bodybuilder and makes some interesting comments about the symbolism.

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Update: A new short video from Dove with some anti-Photoshop hacktivism.

Since the graphic designers who would see the results are only the point of the spear of systemic sexism, there's a level on which it's badly-targeted to deliver the message. But there's still some poetry to this.

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Update: Another new piece from Dove.

I find that one particularly well-executed; I cannot resist being moved by it. There's some juicy stuff in there about how women absorb the ideas that it's important for them to be beautiful, and an entire Insecurity Industry exists to ensure that women think that they don't measure up. And yet, at the same time, Dove is unmistakably a part of that insecurity industry, and the piece does not challenge at all the idea that having others perceive one as beautiful is important ... instead it reïnforces it.

This one has inspired a bunch of web commentary. A critical commentary on the “Dove Movement” campaign and sharp critiques of the Real Beauty Sketches ad from Jazz at Little Drops and Autumn Whitefield-Madrano at The New Inquiry.

Did you hear that, ladies? How beautiful you are affects everything—from your personal relationships to your career. It could not be more critical to your happiness!

Kate at Eat The Damn Cake expresses her ambivalence too.

We don’t do this because this is just how women are. We do it because we have learned that doing this is a part of being a woman. We’ve learned that beauty is really relevant and also it’s strict and specific and cannot reside in a face with a pronounced mole, so we agonize over the mole.

Meanwhile Smibbo provocatively suggests that critics have overstated the case against Dove for this pice.

For now, I’ll sum it up thusly: One beauty company decided to change their strategy from offensive and demeaning to just subtly pressuring. I can live with that.

A later, damning take from The Last Psychiatrist, The Dove Sketches Beauty Scam:

Dove, et al sympathize with your powerlessness, so since you can't get anywhere near those impossible standards, ads give you a chance of making some kind of progress: a little moisturizing soap and a positive message and maybe you get closer to the aspirational images of the women in the ad. "Those women are aspirational?" Of course: they're happy, Dad told them they're good. It feels like improvement, it feels like change, and I hope by now you understand it's only a defense against change.

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Update: Yet another from the folks at Dove:

I like that one's use of the tools of cinema to draw the connection between the beauty industry and women's self-image. It's still weird coming from a company that's part of that industry.

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Update: Another example, about double standards in the working world from ... Pantene.

That one's via Jezebel. And from later, I have another:

Found via Jessica Valenti's post Beauty companies now want women feel insecure about our insecurities at the UK Guardian, which expresses mixed feelings about it.

It's hard to disagree with the premise — it's true, these women have nothing for which they need to apologize (and yet many women still do in those situations). The same goes for Dove's incredibly popular “real beauty” campaign — yes, all body types should be accepted and loved. But there's something incredibly irritating, and crass, about beauty purveyors instructing women to “stop apologizing” or “stop hating their bodies” when many such insecurities stem, at least in part, from these very companies' advertisements.

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Update: Critiques of photoshopping have become familiar enough that they are a recognizable genre all their own. Here's a music video which plays it for whimsy:

BOGGIE: NOUVEAU PARFUM from studiolamb on Vimeo.

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Update: Another ad campaign in straight-up propaganda mode like “if you let me play”. I think it's a little on the nose, but you'd have to be made of stone not to be moved by the bit where the kids “run like a girl”.

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Update: Molly Crabapple reminds us that all photographs — all artworks — are lies.

Photoshop, the belief goes, takes a true record of a moment and turns it into an oppressive lie.

But fuck Photoshop. Photos are already lies.

I'm a former model and current artist. I've learned this every second I've stared into the camera's insect eye.

Anyone who's been at a photo shoot knows that even untouched photos bear only the scantest resemblance to a subject. A photo is frozen. A model sweats and bloats, ages, and dies. Framing is a lie. Lighting is a lie. Cropping is a lie. When you suck in your stomach, or turn your head so the light washes out your laugh lines, you're lying as much as any liquefy tool. Untruth is baked into the process: Photographer Syreeta McFadden writes how the chemical makeup of some films is biased against dark skin tones. Even snapshots often don't look like you, because you are not static. You are a three-dimensional being, torn by time. Photos are pixel ghosts.

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Update: A couple of music videos spend some time looking at women in ways that step outside the sphere of media conventions of “beauty”.

John Legend's song “You & I”:

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For Colbie Caillat's song “Try”, whose lyrics are about the burden of the artifice of femininity, we see women removing their cosmetics and shaking out their hair, reflecting the song lyrics. Though I'm confident that Molly Crabapple would remind us not to mistake this for artlessness: someone has made careful choices about lighting and film stock and countless other factors that shape what we see to what effect ... including choosing whom we will see.

Put your make-up on
Get your nails done
Curl your hair
Run the extra mile
Keep it slim so they like you, do they like you?

Get your sexy on
Don't be shy, girl
Take it off
This is what you want, to belong, so they like you
Do you like you?

You don't have to try so hard
You don't have to, give it all away
You just have to get up, get up, get up, get up
You don't have to change a single thing

You don't have to try ....

Get your shopping on, at the mall, max your credit cards
You don't have to choose, buy it all, so they like you
Do they like you?

Wait a second,
Why, should you care, what they think of you
When you're all alone, by yourself, do you like you?
Do you like you?

You don't have to try so hard
You don't have to, give it all away
You just have to get up, get up, get up, get up
You don't have to change a single thing

You don't have to try so hard
You don't have to bend until you break
You just have to get up, get up, get up, get up
You don't have to change a single thing

You don't have to try ....

You don't have to try so hard
You don't have to, give it all away
You just have to get up, get up, get up, get up
You don't have to change a single thing

You don't have to try ....

Take your make-up off
Let your hair down
Take a breath
Look into the mirror, at yourself
Don't you like you?
Cause I like you

This again reads as a little too on the nose for my sensibilities, but the fact that this reads as necessary and even radical for some people tells us something, doesn't it?

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Update: A friend on Facebook offers this comment:

You may be stunned to learn that I have some stuff on this. Here's how to cope: Get to know someone who works in advertising — as soon as they show you two different magazine covers of Angelina Jolie, in which her bones are literally in different places, you'll be over it. (Also, the war stories are priceless: Someone I know once got a note on a photo of a very famous actress which said, “Remove drool from corner of mouth. Fix stupefied expression.”)

Part two: Get involved with someone whose body is the walking picture of media-sanctioned perfection, and watch them lose their mind from the constant scrutiny, criticism, and perceived need to defend themselves.

Three: Cancel those magazine subscriptions, except for Allure and/or Vogue, because the Monica Bellucci Dolce & Gabbana cosmetic ads are spectacular. But see One, How To Cope, and don't buy that mascara. You know it won't make you Monica Bellucci.

Four, if you're into it: Actually, zero. This is critical: Surround yourself with people who truly love you and are into something other than all this. If you're me, that's the ladymonsters. Food, witchcraft, love, mental health, deep breaths, physical comfort, great books and movies, and tons of laughter are the best beauty treatments.

Back at four: Decide what you will and won't do. I love my dermatologist, but I'm never going to do an injectable. Remember that there are no miracle cures. Products will slow the process, but nothing halts the effects of time. You're more beautiful now than you were five years ago.

This from a self-professed former beauty junkie who has had to fight really hard to learn just this much.

It may be relevant to the reading of this comment that it comes one of the most glowingly beautiful women I have ever met. The Womens' Insecurity Industry remains very powerful, and the On The Nose responses remain relevant and powerful.

Olbermann

Better than ever. And ever more necessary. He is truly a Great American.

Go watch.

Tyger

Via DragonLadyFlame, Tyger, an absurdly cool animation. Burning bright, I tell ya.

Korean nukes

Want to do your homework on what's happening, and how we got here?

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings has the goods, going back to the Clinton administration. Fascinating and horrifying.

Buried underground

CBGB
Coolest club on Earth
1973-2006

How did this happen without anyone telling me?

Of course, I should have known. Last year, my soul sister told me a story from work. She's a high school principal, and some of the kids were speculating about what kind of music she favoured. No jokes about Lawrence Welk from them; I'm sure that they have never heard of him. Or of Cole Porter or Frank Sinatra, or of Trent Reznor or the Red Hot Chili Peppers, any of which would have been correct. She refused to answer, and one kid finally closed the issue with a snort, “She probably listens to rock ’n’ roll.”

Rock, the music of old people.

Just hearing that said will make a fella feel old, well before his time.

What can I say about CBGB that hasn't been said already? That I'm even qualified to say? I was there exactly once, in the company of a dazzling young woman who stopped by to say hello to friends who worked there. This was when I was very young so I hadn't heard of the place ... though I have a hazy memory of being stunned by the names of the bands on some old flyers that were posted somewhere.

I found out through James Wolcott, who was there.

It never occurred to any of us then that someday the CBGB's t-shirt would be a ubiquitous cultural signifier, Richard Hell's byline would grace the op-ed page of the NY Times, the Ramones' “Hey ho/let's go” would rev up car ads, Please Kill Me would be as much a classic of oral history as Edie or Studs Terkel's books, and Deborah Harry would achieve her dye-job dream of being a Warhol superstar in a post-Warhol world.

If that gets ya, he has more, as does Neddie of By Neddie Jingo!

Dream date

The very witty Biography Channel dating site offered me Frieda Kahlo, Mata Hari, and Agatha Christie. I was hoping for Dorothy Parker or Victoria Woodhull ... but still, that's a good list.

Bubble

If you loved that Saturn picture you might also like this bubble in space from Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Happy Hallowe'en

Echidne of the Snakes notices another sign of feminism's slow, creeping victory in America's ongoing kulturkamph, quoting from conservatives' discussion over at the National Review Online about little girls allegedly wearing slutty Hallowe'en costumes as a result of Those Nasty Feminists.

For the record, my daughter will be a princess this year. Last year she was a cowgirl. In the future she wants to be a “doggy-doctor,” a cowgirl again, and a witch. She has plenty of ideas on the subject and feminism hasn't entered into any of them as yet.

Being a cowgirl is not feminist? How many cowgirls do you remember from the old Wild West movies? How many female “doggy-doctors” were there before the second wave of feminism? Was it Jerry Falwell^* who said that feminism would make women leave their husbands and turn to witchcraft? You get the point. Mr. Goldberg doesn't seem to realize how very much his daughter owes feminism already.

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It was Pat Robertson. Thanks,mba.

It'd be nice if these folks didn't attribute their unwholesome Girls Gone Wild fantasies to feminism, but nonetheless, the transparency of key feminist cultural victories is a reassuring sign that, in some ways, it's inconceivable for us to go back to certain kinds of sexism that were pervasive within living memory.

Exhibit A

The President signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 today. Here's a picture.

These men have a date with the Hague.

Digby elaborates.

I don't ever want to hear anyone on the right talk about moral values again. They are concepts which they clearly do not understand. And if they dare to bring up the Bible or Jesus Christ after this I will laugh in their faces, knowing that by their own standards they are going straight to hell for what they've done.

Seconded.

Torture is a cancer

Vladimir Bukovsky reminds us that torture is not only evil, it's counterproductive—and hard to eradicate, once it get a foothold.

Every Russian czar after Peter the Great solemnly abolished torture upon being enthroned, and every time his successor had to abolish it all over again. These czars were hardly bleeding-heart liberals, but long experience in the use of these “interrogation” practices in Russia had taught them that once condoned, torture will destroy their security apparatus. They understood that torture is the professional disease of any investigative machinery.

Apart from sheer frustration and other adrenaline-related emotions, investigators and detectives in hot pursuit have enormous temptation to use force to break the will of their prey because they believe that, metaphorically speaking, they have a “ticking bomb” case on their hands. But, much as a good hunter trains his hounds to bring the game to him rather than eating it, a good ruler has to restrain his henchmen from devouring the prey lest he be left empty-handed. Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one's sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin's notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even Stalin could stop it at will.

Today's quote

From Krugman, via Tristero at Hullabaloo.

The claim that these officials hyped the case for war isn't a conspiracy theory; it's simply an assertion that people in a position of power abused that position. And that assertion only seems wildly implausible if you take it as axiomatic that Mr. Bush and those around him wouldn't do such a thing.

Tough guy

Via Christa Faust, a little noir tale, “The Last Kayfabe” by Ray Banks, about an aging wrestler who's down on his luck.

Mind you, “wrestler” now means something different than it did back in the days when noir characters wore fedoras.

“That time you fucked up New Jack,” says Monty. “That for real?”

They don’t always recognise me. This one can’t believe a white boy pinned a former bounty hunter with four justifiables. I stare at him, wish he’d move his ass and hand over the fuckin’ dimes.

“No,” I say. “Wasn’t for real.”

“Any of that shit for real?”

Shake my head. Apart from the blood. The blood was real. The pain. Shit, you wanna talk pain, we can talk pain.

Mmmm. Noir.