Just this one then I promise to stop.

Weiner, leans long and hard to the left, but then goes soft the minute someone pushes back.

Bwahhaahaahaha.

(I’ve had a few drinks, sue me).

You, with your parties and your events and your “oh come and have drinks with us”ness are making it terribly difficult to be the layabout hermit type of writer.

Instead I will have to be the booze swilling social butterfly type of writer. If it worked for Dorothy Parker, well then…….

Kansas drought forces farmers to cut crops early. 

I’ve been thinking about books lately. Mostly mourning all the books I’ve lost, but also about what books radically shook my brain and made me a better thinker and/or person.

I’m about to repeat myself for about the thousandth time, but I wanted to get these bits down into one post so next time I go searching for them, I know where they are. Thank you internet for being the back up storage for my brain.

The first was a book about torture, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture by John Conroy. I read this when we first went to war in Iraq, and when the first torture pictures started trickling out on the web (long before Abu Girab became public) I immediately recognized the 5 Acts used by the KGB (and later everyone, including us) to torture without leaving marks. Recognizing torture as an institutional and not just an individual act is one of the things I learned to do from this book. But the most important thing I took away from this was in a single little chapter at the end about the one in 50 people who will intervene instead of join in. It taught me that the smallest acct of humanizing a victim in the midst of abuse can turn the tide of the Ordinary People and stop or mitigate the abuse. But there are a thousand ways and times we can humanize a victim that don’t involve the hard bright lines of torture but the everyday, common place injustice. So even if I don’t have spare change for the homeless guy on the corner, I treat them kindly because you never know if my acting decently will inspire the dude behind me who does have the spare change to give it out.

You want to hear about Swedish Socialists? Of course you do! I read a biography (which I now cannot find the name of) of Tage Erlander, Sweden’s first Socialist Prime Minister. A huge chunk of how I think about political economy comes from this book. But the most basic is that Business’ only purpose as far as the State is concerned should be the payment of taxes. If a business cannot either pay corporate tax OR pay its employees well enough that they pay income tax, then the business is a failure in the eyes of the State and should be allowed to fail. Think about that when you hear yet another story about how some mega-corp made billions of dollars and didn’t pay taxes.

I have to admit, I didn’t read all of John Rawls’ Theory Of Justice. But I read enough to get the Veil of Ignorance idea, and it is the most elegant way to think about social justice in any form. The idea is that in order to design a fair society, the designers (us) have to be ignorant (or imagine we are) of what position we will hold in the society of our creation. It’s this idea that makes me, a non-illegal drug user, so adamant about bodily autonomy for everyone.

And then there is Elizabeth Gaskell. A little Victorian Social Justice fiction writer in the same strain as Dickens. Best known for writing the books that became BBC miniseries like Cranford and North and South, she is perhaps a bit of a proto-socialist. She wrote the most profound thing about wages that I have ever read, and I’ve badly paraphrased here multiple times.

I say, our labour’s our capital, an we oughta draw interest on that. They get interest on their capital somehow a’ this time, while ourn is lying idle, how else could they live as they do?

You should go read the rest of the page. It gets into how steeply the price of land rises.

There is, of course, always more. There’s Gramsci’s prison diaries and (thanks to Montag)Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. There’s Frank Herbert’s Dune series, which yes is problematic and the older I get the more I see that. But it gave me my first understanding of the power of empire. Which of course leads me to David Spurr’s Rhetoric of Empire. I could keep going, but…

So dear readers, if you are still with me, what books rocked your melon in new and fabulous ways?

It’s my end of the month, so the cupboards are a bit scanty. But I’ve planned well. Or so I thought. Tomatoes were on sale, so I was going to make a giant batch of pico de gallo and then make things like arroz con pollo and tortilla soup to get us through till I do the BIG grocery shopping on Wednesday. Best laid plans and all that. We took the chicken out of the freezer to thaw last night and somehow the fridge went all wonky and froze everything. So arroz con pollo waits till tomorrow.

Tonight we are having some weird casserole. Oh look, we’ve got left over egg noodles going mushy, the tail end of some sharp cheddar, a half a cup of leftover alfredo sauce and a single piece of olive and rosemary bread that I threw in the freezer rather than throw out. Turn that stale bread into bread crumbs, throw everything else in a casserole pan with a lot of extra spices and top with the bread crumbs. Throw in oven at 450. Wait, hope. It can’t be bad with cheese sauce and noodles, really.

It seems appropriate that if I am going to abuse the song title by connecting it to douchebags in tacky blue suits, I should at least post the song.

Shutting down apologists for the elites (of either the red or blue flavor) and their “OMG THE DEFICIT/DEBT ELEVENTY11!” argument with “No country that is fiat in their own floating currency has ever gone bankrupt. Your argument is a red herring”. I MUST thank Lambert profusely for giving me that little talking point.

On that topic, did you all notice that Moody’s has resumed their “We’ll blackmail you with your credit rating” stance. Fuckers. As if they have any credibility.

Oh look, another sex scandal to keep us all from focusing on the actual important business of the country.

You know, mostly I don’t give a shit about who a (almost universally male) politician sleeps with, as long as they are above age and not a subordinate and it doesn’t fuck with their job of governing. It’s funny (not haha) when it’s a Republifucker who’s been spouting faux family values/homophobia shit, but really their sex lives aren’t at all relevant to my life. Though, when a lefty fucks up, it would be nice if they didn’t let their very important message hit the floor with their pants (like you John Edwards and your two Americas, and you Elliot Spitzer and Wall Street reform). And the ubiquity of these scandals, oh the fucking ubiquity.

I am tired of these over-entitled douchebags in tacky blue suits who can’t seem to go without sending crotch shots or knocking up their employees in exchange for getting access to a whole fuck of a lot more power and influence than the rest of us will ever be close to. If you want to be That Guy, go work on Wall Street and snort coke off the ass of whatever young coed (male or female) wants to take your “scholarship” money in exchange for naked party time. But stay the fuck out of politics. In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve got 4 wars going on and a huge population of broke, unemployed, hungry and homeless or about to be foreclosed on people who would like pols with a tiny bit of impulse control running our fucking country. For all the jokes they make about a woman deciding to hit the red button because of pms, I would like to flip the switch and say you tacky fuckers probably can’t be trusted near the Oval Office because you might hit the button while whipping out your schlong to take a cell phone pic for HawTGRL23.

Enough is enough. Pull your damn pants up, all of you, and do some fucking work. That’s what we’re paying you for.

Jay Smooth talks to white rapper Brother Ali about the “n” word.

Remember kids- the rule for language reclamation is you either have one (cunt, pussy, etc) or are one (bitch, slut, etc) or you DON’T get to use the word. Even ironically. There is no amount of social justice work, or other oppressions that you might have, that erase your privilege in another area.

(disclaimer- I don’t know who Brother Ali is, but I hope in his thoughts on oppression he includes us ladies too.)

And then RQ fell out of her chair laughing.

Thank god I didn’t have a drink when I read that. I might have needed a new laptop due to spit check. Now that I have (kinda) regained my composure, let’s get serious for a minute. (Starting with the disclaimer that the plural of anecdote is not data….)

For a long time I had your standard, patriarchy-approved and socially programmed views on sex acts, though I always had a decidedly slutty view on numbers and partners. I tried the whole “oh spank me big boy” shit, etc etc. And was left wanting (or more likely, giving instructions on the proper way to position your hand). I was, at best, meh on the whole “getting fucked” aspect of fucking. Sex was good, great even, but it didn’t get awesome till I discovered my innate toppy nature. Once I shrugged off all the porny “this is what a woman is supposed to want” shit and discovered that if someone is going to be doing the spanking, hair-pulling, bossing around stuff it really should be me- then sex became that existential floaty head space shit that we all imagine it’s supposed to be.

So yeah, if you ask a bunch of women who have grown up in a patriarchy full of porny images where the average sex act involves female submission to the all powerful cock, then your study is going to be skewed that direction. That’s not “hard-wired”, that’s social construction of a narrative to the benefit of the socially dominant class.

Are some women submissive? Yep. So are some men. Some people, both men and women, are a bit of both. And some people, both men and women, don’t want sex at all. And some people, both men and women, like sex but are neutral on the power play shit. And some of us women have some rocking skills with a whip. I’m just sayin’…..