Tag: politics

a contract signed with a kiss like the x of an illiterate pirate


powerbooklounging
Originally uploaded by pinkbelt.
  • Societies worse off ‘when they have God on their side’. (original study here).
  • A proposed bill hopes to make criminals out of unmarried women in Indiana who conceive
    “by means other than sexual intercourse.”

    • I hesitated at the front of the walk, a flitting bit of pained imagination painting another woman in his bed, but I walked forward anyway. This is my place to do so, I thought, this is my entreaty, my voice, my bloody pain. I am allowed whatever I say I am. Nervously, I tapped on his window and went to the porch. I watched his confusion melt into welcome as he opened the door. “Were you knocking? Come in, please.” I settled in like I was home. The house knows who I am, it tells me hello. The other moving pieces, the western world, they like me.

    We stayed up late. Appleseed on screen and our legs eventually tangled on the couch. My knife edged feeling of assumption dulls when I see that he’s as aware of the placement of my hands as I am of his. His breathing is a give-away, a prize win understatement of I’m the right number of customers. Coughing confetti, coughing something I’m used to. I hold my hand on his chest and don’t flinch anymore. He is going to die, just like we will, but maybe quicker. In the bed he coughs too, my body holding itself rigid in sympathy, letting his body subside before relaxing back into a doll-like pool of blood and closed glass eyes, but we sleep. Our first real sleep in months.

    The morning was an adventure in boundary lines, roommates, that one’s in a housecoat yet I’m in my underwear, where’s the coffee? Fine details lined under eyes, the newsprint, oh we missed it. There’s a good write-up in here somewhere. Lean over and read. My hand sprouts a silver spoon, nothing I was born with and neither were they. The comments are complimentary, which is gentlemanly, and comfortable. Breakfast cuts itself in half to soothe the hungry hearts that exhausted themselves in the previous night while errands start to thicken out of gossiping fog. Head of the house, heed the commands. It’s too late. I’m already lying in the sun on the porch, one arm around a dismembered leg and a forbidden book page one hundred thirty-two. The neighbors look then look away and I haven’t had a chance at the internet yet.

    Sitting in the back of the minivan feels like the television expected childhood I never had. We buy chain and rope and try to find shelves, daughter to my lover, daughter to the inevitable opposite, and sister to my rockabilly friend. We let the parents bicker over music and pretend to dance, letting conversation drift. Leaves on a stream, coloured and dropped from only modern trees. The beat comes from Bollywood, the lyrics hate our guts. I buy wings at the second hand clothing store. Black ones, feathered, they scratch the air when I put them on like a record skipping sound behind me.

    The angel was unexpected. Not a dream, not entirely solid. She pulled his hair. “This was supposed to be prose, what are you doing here? Get out.” From his throat poured heterodyne modulations of voice and information static. “This paragraph can’t start with you here. I need you off my page.” His hands tore from the paper, shredding metaphor, leaving behind crumpled, stained ideas. Frustrated, she kicked them. “These are broken now. Look at the point of view! Ruined.”

    mocking my taste in music

    As a pleasant lead up to our local production of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead that Beth is organizing, I’ve found Hamlet as a text based adventure game:

    It’s so unfair! You’re in trouble again, just because you called your uncle – or rather, your new stepfather, Claudius – a usurping git. It’s true, though. Your real dad was SO much better than that guy. Too bad he was found mysteriously dead in the orchard a couple of weeks back. Anyway, your mother (who was, incidentally, looking quite something today in a sparse leather number, er…) sent you to your room, and here you are.

    Bedroom
    You are in your luxurious palatial boudoir, all of ten feet square. There is a four-poster bed, and not much else. A portrait hangs on the wall. An exit leads north.

    Also found on the internet today, Soviet space monkey pants for sale on eBay and a gallery of vintage toy rayguns, (I remember playing with number 70 once. The frontispiece was that strange dry metal that reminds me of badly melted tin.). The news is less futurist and more dystopian. In addition to the unrelenting Katrina clusterfuck, there’s loyalist riots in Belfast and Typhoon Khanun flattened 20,000 houses, and destroyed large swathes of crops, industrial units and infrastructure in Zhejiang province. This puts my wake-up “we’re going to cut off your electricity” phone-call in a bit of perspective. I may be too broke for reliable groceries, but at least I’m not swimming to the store.

    However, if I had a dime to spare, I would support Planned Parenthood, Philadelphia, in a heartbeat. They’ve come up with a rather choice way to deal with protesters called Pledge-a-Picket. (Click on the link to take part.)

    Every time protesters gather outside of our Locust Street health center, our patients face verbal attacks from them. They see graphic signs meant to confuse and intimidate. They are sometimes blocked from entering the building and occasionally they are videotaped. They are offered anti-choice propaganda and free rides to the closest “crisis pregnancy center.”

    Staff and volunteers are also seen as targets. We are all called murderers, are lectured to about committing sins, and are told we will pay the “ultimate price” for our actions.

    You can stand with others in the community against these acts of intimidation and harassment.

    Here’s how it works: You decide on the amount you would like to pledge for each protester (minimum 10 cents). When protesters show up on our sidewalks, Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania will count and record their number each day from October 1 through November 30, 2005. We will place a sign outside the health center that tracks pledges and makes protesters fully aware that their actions are benefiting PPSP. At the end of the two-month campaign, we will send you an update on protest activities and a pledge reminder.


    which as is east?

    Scientists in Australia’s tropical north are collecting blood from crocodiles in the hope of developing a powerful antibiotic for humans, after tests showed that the reptile’s immune system kills the HIV virus.

    Putting the crunch of a piece of metal against my skull, I wake up. The people are gone, there have been no voices or music for hours. I breathe, thinking I don’t like silence. My clothes are tangled in the bed, and I put my glasses on to see. The sky is a dull blue, obscured from a cutting edge by a pretence of clouds. I work this evening, and for some reason I want to say I’m sorry. A general apology to the world for existing, like if I were to talk, my voice would quaver with a thick underlying bass note.

    New Orleans is finally getting rescued, what’s left of it. Estimates say the city will have to be abandoned for at least nine months. (Of course, bloody Halliburton gets the rebuild contract, bastards.) People are still shooting, people are still dying and standing knee high in corpses, (they refused to let people leave the Dome), and there’s barely anywhere to put the survivors, but a start has been made, hopeful clans of organized humans are coming to light, fundraisers are getting properly underway, and the Red Cross is finally being let in, no thanks to the White House. (The presidential being what stood in the way of almost all rescue operations that were stalling.)

    My mother rang yesterday, left a message. When I gave her a call back, my brother Cale picked up. “I got my lip pierced.” He’s all of fifteen, really the age for this sort of thing, I figure. I told him that just that day I’d been discussing how unattractive they are, and from there we degenerated into an arguement about who spits and who swallows. “I’ll bet you deep throat”, he said, and I replied, “Course I do, brat, I’m a good girlfriend. Not like you.” “I do too! Oh, wait. Fuck. You caught me. You suck, Jhayne.” “Yes dear, put mum on the phone” His girlfriend was listening on his end and kept dissolving into laughing fits. “You’re sick Cale.” “But my sister says she doesn’t swallow! It’s a crime!”

    My best quote, “Oh come on mum, it sounds bad that I’m working in a sex shop, I’m best friends with my cheating ex, and I’m taking up with someone with a cokewhore sister, but it’s not. I’m the most stable I’ve been in a long time.”

    I may not attend Korean Movie Night this evening. It depends. Are you planning on going?

    blessed, the way, it is


    for kentucky megachurch;)
    Originally uploaded by sucitta.

    “The U.S. government has chartered three luxury cruise liners for the next six months to provide temporary housing for victims of Hurricane Katrina, Carnival Cruise Lines said Saturday.”

    You are what I haven’t written about yet. Stability and comfort, two unexpected islands ringed by eye-liner, shored by language and anchored with glyphs in the middle of the night. That you’ve never seen me naked means something for once, like it did when I was younger, before I began to try and discard romance because everyone around me had grown out of it years before I was born. You are what I haven’t questioned, because it won’t matter, because what you are thinking is enough for me. I watch you and it’s like I can see a mist around you, an aura of intelligence that I can walk into and feel safe. It should be uncomfortable, but instead I feel like I could fit like a smaller matryoshka. Nest inside, curled like fingers over the keys of an ivory piano, and sing with you, creating chords with the words you haven’t learned to say yet and yours that I never thought to know. You are slender fingers poised artfully and laughter longer than your hair. You are interesting in a new way and I’m hoping you come home to me. I like your smile. By the end I’ll owe you so much time, I’ll owe you so much effort and attention and missing you more that I worry a little at the deficit I might be wracking up this month in my time of tasting peculiar dust. You don’t see how strange this might be from my eyes. This city’s been a bloody cage, bars of people and relegation, since I walked out into the desert, saw visions, and never found my way back. My house has been cursed this last while and my luck brought out from under me to be thrown on a pyre of miniature disaster – who are you to stand by my side? You’re the closest thing to freedom that I’ve held by me in quite some time. That you’re mild, it’s fresh spring water. Something clear, something to carry in my cells after standing dry so long. I’m hoping somehow that it doesn’t matter that I’m hanging by threads, that the ink used to write on my heart was just bitterly burned, a frostbite scorch needing too long to heal, and threatening to scar in complicated knots. I won’t claim you’re the only person on my mind, but you’re patient. Like stones in fairy-tales I said, and it’s true. It will be enough.

    New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin speaks openly and candidly about the current situation in New Orleans. Transcript here.

    From unquietmind, “One of my jobs in monitoring the Associated Press photo wire. I see hundreds of images that will never be published, but I think these photos are worth sharing with you. Even though some of these images are sad and harrowing, I take comfort in them. They remind me that people are inherently compassionate and caring. I hope you draw strength from them, too. All images by The Associated Press in New Orleans, Biloxi and the rural Gulf Coast.“

    Topography of the flood

    article link from domystic

    Link
    June 23, 2005

    The Defense Department began working yesterday with a private marketing firm to create a database of high school students ages 16 to 18 and all college students… The new database will include personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying. The data will be managed by BeNow Inc. of Wakefield, Mass., one of many marketing firms that use computers to analyze large amounts of data.

    …”The purpose of the system . . . is to provide a single central facility within the Department of Defense to compile, process and distribute files of individuals who meet age and minimum school requirements for military service,” according to the official notice of the program.

    …Under the new system, additional data will be collected from commercial data brokers, state drivers’ license records and other sources, including information already held by the military. “Using multiple sources allows the compilation of a more complete list of eligible candidates to join the military,” according to written statements provided by Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke in response to questions.

    …The Pentagon’s statements added that anyone can “opt out” of the system by providing detailed personal information that will be kept in a separate “suppression file.” That file will be matched with the full database regularly.

    …Officials at BeNow did not return several messages seeking comment. The company’s Web site does not have a published privacy policy, nor does it list either a chief privacy officer or security officer on its executive team.

    According to the Federal Register notice, the data will be open to “those who require the records in the performance of their official duties.” It said the data would be protected by passwords. The system also gives the Pentagon the right, without notifying citizens, to share the data for numerous uses outside the military, including with law enforcement, state tax authorities and Congress.

    Straight Update, oct 10th

    Province To Review Newspaper Tax Exemption Policy

    Ministry of Provincial Revenue – Press Release October 10, 2003

    VANCOUVER – The province will review the existing policy regarding sales tax exemption for newspapers, said Provincial Revenue Minister Bill Barisoff.
    “The provincial sales tax includes an exemption for books, magazines and newspapers,” Barisoff said. “One objective of this policy is to exempt from sales tax those publications that are generally considered to be newspapers.

    If this objective is not being met, it needs to be changed.

    “It was never our intention, or the intention of the previous government that implemented this policy in 2000, that newspapers should be taxed.

    Clearly the Georgia Straight is a newspaper, yet it is not treated as a newspaper under the current policy. Accordingly, the Premier has asked me, together with the Minister of Finance, to review this policy and how it is applied, in order to solve this problem.

    “We will consult with the newspaper and publication industry, and act to fix this problem,” Barisoff concluded.

    Ministry of Provincial Revenue
    Oct. 10, 2003

    We must save the Geaorgia Straight

    Hello Musical and Artistic Community,

    The Georgia Straight is being fined by the Liberal Government, in a move that could potentially put them out of business. Please check out the article below. You can read more online as well, at www.straight.com

    If you are opposed to what the Liberal Government is doing (and you should be) please let them know by sending an e-mail to the premier at premier@gov.bc.ca

    The Georgia Straight is such an important media outlet for those of us who are in the arts. We cannot afford to lose them!

    Thanks for your time,

    Joyelle Brandt
    www.sonicjoy.ca

    P.S. Please forward this e-mail to anyone who might care about this issue.

    B.C. Liberals Hit Straight With Million-Dollar Fine
    By Dan McLeod

    The Georgia Straight is faced with the biggest threat in its 36-year history.

    Following a visit from a provincial-government auditor, the Straight has been stripped of its status as a newspaper under provincial sales-tax legislation and assessed fines and penalties that will total more than one million dollars by year’s end. This fine must be paid immediately and can only be reversed through a difficult and expensive appeal process that could tie us up in court for several years to come.

    (For a more detailed explanation of this bizarre misuse of power, see Questions and Answers about the B.C. Liberals’ Plan to Terminate the Straight.)

    At the same time, community newspapers that are dumped on doorsteps unsolicited and laden with so many advertising flyers that a big elastic is often needed to hold them together are still considered official newspapers and therefore exempt from this legislation. Is it any coincidence that the owners of most of these papers are friends of the B.C. Liberals?

    The Georgia Straight thus becomes the only newspaper in Canada to be classified as less than a newspaper under provincial legislation. No other newspaper need fear such a threat. Because of the Straight’s uniqueness, the Liberals have found a way to target us without affecting any other paper in the province. In other words, this has all the earmarks of a witch-hunt.

    Appeals of the crushing million-dollar assessment must first go to the Minister of Provincial Revenue. Chances of success at this stage are very slim, so our best chance for any justice is to take the matter to the B.C. Supreme Court. The Liberal minister, however, has the power to hold up the matter for months, even years. By that time, the Georgia Straight could be out of business.

    The ruling harks back to the Straight’s beginnings, when we were prosecuted frequently under a wide assortment of trumped-up charges. In 1967, a crusading mayor and chief prosecutor conspired to use the city licence department to close down the paper. When that attempt was overruled by the Supreme Court, they had us thrown in jail for criminal libel, a charge that had only been used twice in the history of Confederation. And on and on it went, until the harassment ended around 1972.

    Using the Revenue Ministry to close down a newspaper is a ploy well-known to political leaders such as Gordon Campbell. For example, it is documented that Richard Nixon used the IRS to harass political opponents. As the only independent newspaper in Vancouver–and, indeed, the only local newspaper that consistently publishes articles critical of the government–we find this move not only discriminatory in the extreme but a politically motivated attempt by the government to silence one of its harshest critics.

    It is also a direct attack on all the arts and cultural and business life of the city. The Straight is appealing to arts and entertainment organizations, nonprofit groups and charities, as well as small-business owners, to speak out against this decision and help by swearing affidavits in our defence if and when it comes time to take the government to court. If a court battle does ensue, we intend to fight vigorously and to the bitter end.

    The need to fight this battle would stop now if we were to abandon our Time Out listings guide. This we refuse to do. The guide is a free public service that is based on one of this paper’s founding principles: to encourage and foster the growth of a healthy and lively arts and cultural scene in our city.

    By successfully closing the Straight, Gordon Campbell will have destroyed the only independent media outlet left in this city. He can then take credit for finishing the job that his namesake mayor, Tom Campbell, began more than 36 years ago. It appears that driving our province’s social structures into a ditch is not good enough for the premier. Now he must silence the only newspaper that dares to criticize his mean-spirited policies. Making him accountable for his actions is our journalistic duty, even though our very existence is at stake.

    Britney isn’t as evil as THIS.

    Here’s the gimmick: Take a weird, modern conservative revisionist New Testament and wrap it in faux-hip fashion-mag duds and hawk it to unsuspecting young maidens who otherwise wouldn’t get within ten low-rise jean lengths of the gray-bearded dust-choked finger-wagging dogma of King James and all his hoary misogynistic machismo. Clever indeed.

    It’s called “Revolve: The Complete New Testament” and it’s apparently racing up the Amazon.com sales charts — whatever that means — as it sucks up all the accoutrements of a teen fashion rag and rams them through the cute Christian grinder of humorlessness and sexual rigidity and homophobia, and regurgitates them as kicky dumbed-down slightly numb virginal tidbits of advice and admonition and, yes, Biblical storytelling.

    “Revolve” takes a decidedly conservative view of the Bible, condemns homosexuality, encourages virginity until marriage, and informs girls that excessive makeup and jewelry and revealing clothes are to be avoided and chastity is to be rewarded because, well, Jesus really loves baggy sweaters and granny underwear.

    Add onto that: Never call a boy, it’s sinful – date rape happens to bad girls – only let the boys lead the relationship – and… oh. Just throw away all those silly thoughts you had about gender equality. They’re wrong.