Kymerica makes me happy.

So firstly, thanks to MuzikMan‘s embedded playlist thingie, I’m suddenly a fan of The Books. This track in particular. I really wish their website wouldn’t resize the browser window, however.

And secondly, hairlessmunkee talks about farting around and Kurt Vonnegut and Kurt Vonnegut getting tired of farting around and being suicidal. Towards the end, he talks about how men lead lives of quiet desperation, which of course comes from Thoreau, which leads to Walden and Civil Disobedience and all that…

Which leads me to realize that I meant to recommend the current issue of Orion Magazine. It’s got an article by Rebecca Solnit called ‘The Thoreau Problem,’ which talks about how Thoreau is shoehorned into being seen as a hermit and very political. But of course what he did when he got out of jail was to hike up the hill and eat berries with his friends.

Unfortunately, that article isn’t available on the web version, but some other really good stuff is. ‘The Ecology of Work‘ sends me into a tizzy, because it seems to be exactly the kind of environmentalism-as-transcendent-religion riff that, well, sends me into a tizzy. But it’s good to think through what pisses me off about it, since sometimes those things are, well… Shall we say ‘not wrong.’

There’s another article called ‘Polymers Are Forever,’ which is about plastic in the oceans. The various horse lattitude gyres are full of the stuff, and in too many places bits of plastic outnumber krill. Polymers take forever to photodegrade, especially under the surface of the water, and bacteria have not yet evolved to break them down. What to do, what to do…

Which leads us to ‘The Consolations Of Extinction,’ from someone whose job it is to try and understand whether we’re in the midst of a mass extinction. See the cool artwork, too.

The last issue of Orion had really wonderful photographs by a Russian photographer whose name escapes me, but they’re not on the web site. So you’ll have to settle for some deconstructed Ansel Adams.

Some desktop wallpaper I just shot in the yard:

Click on through.

The Corpus is not dead after all, it turns out.

There’s a move to restore habeus corpus as a rider on a Defense Department authorization bill. If that’s not a comment on our sad state of affairs, I don’t know what is.

But regardless: Christy Hardin Smith over at Firedoglake wants you to call some Democrats and tell them to include that rider. If you’re reading my ‘blog, you already know the argument.

Can mine drainage sediments be used as pigment?

Yes, it turns out. And what can you paint with this pigment? Your Vanagon, of course.

This is interesting because it means that if you’re a miner, you can keep the iron oxide and use it, rather than washing it down the river. Now if painting cars orange would just come into fashion, it’d all work out nicely.

I also gotta say that the Assuan Brown (AKA orange) color in the ‘before’ picture is my favorite Westy color. The runoff-tinted new coat looks just that more baddass. If ‘badass’ is a word that can be used to describe a Westy. For the non-Westy Vanagon, it’s gotta be Wolfram Gray:

And I might as well mention that I did a tune-up today. Oil change w/ filter, air filter, new spark plugs. Removed the belt for the power steering because the 20-year-old high pressure line decided to act its age. I’ll replace the line eventually, about the same time I rebuild the power steering pump. W00t.

Tomorrow: Brake shoes in rear.

Turns out there’s a movie called ‘Where Are We?’

It’s a road-trip documentary, and it came out in 1992. I’ll view it as soon as I can rent it.

Update: OK. Rented it. Watched it.

The basic form is that some guys spend 18 days traveling the country, mostly through the south and southwest. They talk to people along the way, often beginning by asking “Where are we?”

The first people we meet are some young men working at a drive-in restaurant in Mississippi. They ask the filmmakers where they’re from, and the answer is San Francisco. “What’s your perception of people from San Francisco?” “Well, uh… Mostly the faggy kind of life.” And so begins the gay subtext of this film.

Increasingly, we hear from people who are malcontented for whatever reason, and they head west. People who wanted to make it big gambling, so they went to Las Vegas, or who want to be movie stars, so they’re on a train to LA, or the stoners from Mississippi who want to go to Eugene, Oregon, to find something better.

But most surprising to me, mostly because I wasn’t expecting it, was the gay bar near the military base. Populated by off-duty soldiers and advertised on-base with fliers that include both the message that it’s banned, and explicit directions to get there.

There’s lots of good stuff here. The emphasis is on meeting people and talking to them while traveling, which is something I’m really terrible at doing, and so for me, watching this film is tourism into tourism.

It’s just some stories, told in extremely abbreviated form by other travelers. The filmmakers don’t add much narrative, and by the end we know less about them than the people we meet. I kind of wish they’d started interviewing each other, or that some of their subjects had turned the tables on them.

Not the greatest documentary in the world, but certainly worth watching.

And because it was in the same section as ‘Where Are We?,’ I rented ‘This Is Nowhere,’ which is a documentary that’s ostensibly about full-time RVers and their relationship with Wal-Mart. My problem with it is that the subjects end up as stand-ins for ironic statements about the craziness of the American cultural and economic landscape. They’re allowed to keep most of their dignity, but the editing and juxtaposition offers a sort of opaque way to preach to the choir. It never goes for the jugular, though you know it really, really wants to. So either more kindness or less, and I could recommend it.

I do want to mention that some of the music for the film came out of the mind of Ned Mudd (on myspace), who fills an interesting musical void: avant garde folk American radical mysticism. His vocals sound like Wall of Voodoo meets Joe Frank, which makes me happy.

I was reading back through the ‘where we are’ series, and at one point desertvet responded this way:

That goes for both parties Ira…

This all begs the question, gentlemen, how do we fix it, and whats the solution?

I like the two of you am tired of the status quo, I am tired of partisanship. Our differences in politics aside, what can WE do about it?

And I’m not trying to pick on desertvet, really, just to address this kind of assertion, because it’s so pervasive.

It’s not ‘both parties.’ It’s the right wing. The dynamic in American politics is for the right to make fun of their critics, to jeer at them, to call them names. That’s all there is to right-wing politics, in fact. It’s just saying that liberals are traitors, or that colleges are too liberal and indoctrinate students into ‘left-wing thought,’ (as if anyone who has leveled that criticism against American colleges has ANY FUCKING IDEA what ‘left-wing’ really means). The right says that people who think science is worthwhile are godless heathens who should be stamped out of public life.

The reason we’re in the polemic predicament we’re in at the moment is because ‘the left’ hasn’t been partisan enough. ‘The left’ (which is to say anyone who’s not a right-winger) has accomodated, allowed for, given room to, and otherwise entertained the radical right-wing based solely on the hope that if we let them yell enough, they might run out of steam.

Except no, they don’t. Give an inch, they take a mile. Give a Florida, they take Iraq. Give a hearing on creationism, they take the school board. There’s nothing like the give and take of other societies, though ‘the left’ has tried. They want schoolkids to learn that God made evolution, in science class, all because liberals know about science and that’s bad.

Partisanship is good. Partisanship means that I get power, and if you want something I don’t like, you lose power to me. That’s the game the right-wing has been playing for thirty years, and it’s really impressive that they’ve been able to do it. But it’s bad for America, and that’s all there is to it.

Republicans have ruined America. And if our society hadn’t been so tolerant and non-partisan, it wouldn’t have happened.

So the answer to your question, desertvet, is this: How do we fix it? We push Republicans out of power. We teach Democrats to be political street fighters. Or perhaps ninjas. Ninjas are a better metaphor, I think. We must restore balance.

On a related note: The NRA finally figured out that the Global War On Terror is ‘arbitrary.’ Glad they could finally figure it out. It took Bush coming after their guns for them to start caring.

Part of an ongoing series.

The Utah GOP ends its convention by debating the influence of Satan on illegal immigrants:

Utah County Republicans ended their convention on Saturday by debating Satan’s influence on illegal immigrants.

The group was unable to take official action because not enough members stuck around long enough to vote, despite the pleadings of party officials. The convention was held at Canyon View Junior High School.

Don Larsen, chairman of legislative District 65 for the Utah County Republican Party, had submitted a resolution warning that Satan’s minions want to eliminate national borders and do away with sovereignty.

In a speech at the convention, Larsen told those gathered that illegal immigrants “hate American people” and “are determined to destroy this country, and there is nothing they won’t do.”
Illegal aliens are in control of the media, and working in tandem with Democrats, are trying to “destroy Christian America” and replace it with “a godless new world order — and that is not extremism, that is fact,” Larsen said.

At the end of his speech, Larsen began to cry, saying illegal immigrants were trying to bring about the destruction of the U.S. “by self invasion.”

[..]

A member of the audience moved that the convention suspend its rules to allow the “objectionable part” of Larsen’s resolution to be stricken, retaining only the final paragraphs of the resolution, which condemn illegal immigration. Eventually party officials counted all delegates in attendance, only to discover that, with 299, they were about 30 short of a quorum and could take no action.

It’s Washington Native Plant Appreciation Week.

Plus, Saturday will be Prairie Appreciation Day down in the south end of Puget Sound.

I picked the right day to be curious about Nature Conservancy reserves in WA.

Glenn Greenwald tells us.

I’ve been saying this stuff for a while, and frankly I got tired of saying it and having people try to attack what I’ve said on the facts. It’s simply plain to see: The Republican party is the party of lawlessness. They believe that the President should not be restrained by the law.

Greenwald, of course, puts the legitimacy on the message. And I hate to be a ‘me too!’ and just link to him, but that’s what I’ll do.

His point of departure is an op-ed that appears in the Wall Street Journal, which says things like this: “Much present-day thinking puts civil liberties and the rule of law to the fore and forgets to consider emergencies when liberties are dangerous and law does not apply.”

One item he points out, and which I agree is absolutely necessary, is that Presidential candidates should be asked if they agree with this sentiment:

That is why — as jarring as it is — it is actually necessary to ask presidential candidates whether they intend to exercise the power to imprison American citizens with no charges of any kind. The dominant political movement in this country believes in that power and has defended and exercised it. Mansfield’s beliefs may be twisted and tyrannical and radical and profoundly un-American. But they are also the beliefs that have propelled our government for the last six years and — absent some serious change — very well may continue to propel it into the future.

So do you know where your favorite candidate stands on the issue of…. THE CONSTITUTION??