Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. — James Baldwin
Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else. — Tennessee Williams
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little. –Edmund Burke
Aside
What is the difference between the actual problem posed by my situation and my perception of and feelings about my situation?
Experienced Leaders
“I’m an experienced leader! I don’t need a goddamn arrow telling me which way to proceed!”
The Kaepernick Encounter
I was pumping gas at a local station when I noticed another guy pumping gas wearing a Colin Kaepernick jersey. It may add something to the story to know the race of the guy in the jersey so I’ll tell you that he was a black guy.
“You got a problem with the jersey?” the guy asked me.
I was actually just trying to get a clear look at the name on the jersey so I could read it, but the guy was apparently on a hair trigger to begin with.
“Not with the jersey or you wearing the jersey, but Nike probably paid someone in Vietnam a dollar a day to stitch that jersey while Kaepernick himself gets paid millions to complain about inequality. You see the disconnect? Let him stitch his own jerseys, I mean what the hell else is he doing? He’s not playing football.
“Did that answer your question?”
Is Christmas a Joyous Day? (A Movie Review)
SPOILERS AHEAD!
The central character in this movie is a Buddhist monk who has achieved immortality, he looks about 50 but he no longer ages.
There is, however, a prophecy that a girl born in the same town that he was born in, but 100 years later, will kill him. [SPOILERS START HERE] So for the last 14 years, he has had his disciples locate and murder every girl born in that city in the year 1999. In most cases, the bodies were disposed of so the cases were treated as missing persons, or in some cases, as accidents.
(As I write this, it does seem like the police should have been able to connect the dots a little sooner.)
When you see it in a movie like this, it seems grotesque and inhuman that a religious leader would order a mass murder of children in order to preserve his own legacy.
But the parallel is to the Massacre of the Innocents accompanying the birth of Jesus, in which King Herod ordered the murder of every male infant two years old and under in the vicinity of Bethlehem.
“Is Christmas a joyous day?” one character asks another, referring to the fact that we celebrate the birth of Jesus, while sweeping under the rug the resulting mass murder of infants, presided over by an approving Christian God.
(I don’t think it suffices to say that an omniscient, omnipotent being could not have known about or prevented the slaughter.)
Rating: 
Svaha: The Sixth Finger
Pastor Park works to expose suspicious religious groups. He's hired to look into the cult group Deer Mount. Meanwhile, Police Captain Hwang investigates a murder case and the main suspect is a member of the Deer Mount cult.Director: Jang Jae-hyun
Cast: Lee Jung-jae, Park Jeong-min, Lee Jae-in
IMDb rating: 6.3 (5978 votes)
My Boyhood Sports Icons Are Dying: J.R. Richard
Houston Astros icon J.R. Richard, whose career was cut short by stroke in 1980, dies at age 71 — espn.com
We had a couple of catchers, one came with his arm in a sling and another came on crutches. There was something called J.R.-itis which was an incurable disease when you’re scared of J.R. Richard.
It was like J.R. was only throwing from about 50 feet. With his reach and he was all legs, you didn’t have much time to make up your mind. … You didn’t really feel comfortable at the plate. He was the toughest guy I ever faced.
Another Reason I’m Not a Christian
One of my nieces had a seizure, was taken to the hospital and diagnosed with a brain tumor.
The last report I heard was that one doctor thought the situation was very dire, while another thought since she had no history of seizures, the prognosis was not so bad. We don’t know yet.
This woman is a good person, religious person, faithful churchgoer . . . why do things like this happen if the world was created by a good, omnipotent God? As a purification for sin? In that case, why am I not the one getting a brain tumor? I haven’t been to a church in decades.
It’s another reason I’m not able to believe in God. You have to spend too much time finding excuses for pain and misery in this suffering world.
Sometimes our fate resembles a fruit tree in winter. Who would think that those branches would turn green again and blossom, but we hope it, we know it. — Goethe
Will $5 Billion Solve LA Homelessness?
Rep. Lieu seeks to fight homelessness with a $5 billion federal program — smdp.com
Rep. Lieu is Ted Lieu, who represents California’s 33rd District, encompassing the coastal areas of Los Angeles from Palos Verdes through Malibu, including Santa Monica, where I currently live.
Who’s going to pony up the $5 billion, Ted? You, or you’re going to stick it to the taxpayers?
The bill would authorize $1 billion in grants annually for five years for local governments to spend on supportive housing models with comprehensive services and intensive case management.
Are there examples of this kind of plan actually working somewhere? Because I can give you examples of plans that don’t work right here in your district. There isn’t a Republican elected official for 100 miles. The LA mayor is a Democrat, every member of the city council is a Democrat, any proposal they want to implement, there’s no one to block it, but homelessness continues to decimate our communities.
And your idea is to give $5 billion to idiots who have no workable ideas to solve the problem?
Putting a homeless person in a home doesn’t fix the underlying reasons that they were homeless in the first place, which is usually that they’re mentally ill and/or drug addicts.
Granted, it will give them a roof to do drugs under, until they strip everything from the home that’s not permanently affixed and sell it for drug money.
A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both. -– Milton Friedman
Sad, Tumultuous Middle-Age Years
Divorce, abandonment, the unacceptable and the unattainable, ennui filled with action, sad. tumultuous middle-age years shaken by crashings, uprootings, coups, desperate renewals.
That Is the Way to Get Attention
Divorces and separation — that is the way to get attention. Everyone examines his own state and some say: Strange, they were much happier than we are. There are streets in the East 90’s where youngish couples on the wave of success buy town houses and do them over at great expense, uncovering old wood, taking off the stoop so that drunks cannot loiter, making a whole floor for the children to be quiet on. The strain and the cost and the house, a mausoleum with both names on it waiting for the dates to be filled in, drives the couple to separation. The streets are called Death Row.
The 5 Strengths
The 5 strengths are: strong determination, familiarization, the positive seed, reproach, and aspiration.
How you conduct yourself is important. When you are dying practice the 5 strengths.
Bye Bye Berkeley
UC Berkeley’s Kroeber Hall was stripped of its name earlier this year because the building’s namesake — Alfred Louis Kroeber, born in 1876 and the founder of the study of anthropology in the American West — is a powerful symbol that continues to evoke exclusion and erasure for Native Americans.
I hope I’m not being too cynical when I say that I don’t believe there are more than a handful of Native Americans in the country who could actually say anything of substance about Kroeber. I’d never heard of him myself. Granted I’m not a Native American or an anthropologist, but I’m well-informed.
It turns out Kroeber was quite an accomplished scholar, a pioneer of American anthropology, author of more than 500 publications, a co-founder and president of the American Anthropological Association, presided over the American Folklore Society and founded the Linguistic Society of America.
Among the key reasons highlighted in the Building Name Review Committee’s unnaming recommendation was that Kroeber collected or authorized the collection of the remains of Native American ancestors and curated a repository of them for study. While the research practice was not illegal then, the review committee wrote, “it was immoral and unethical, even for the time.”
It seems obvious that there was no significant push at that time for Kroeber to stop what he was doing on moral or ethical grounds, or not to name a building after him. I can also say, as noted in this article about the unnaming, that the UC Museum of Anthropology was a repository for ancestral remains before Kroeber ever got there.
I’m not a fan at all of the practice of people setting themselves up as exemplars of human perfection and judging what dead people did 100 years ago based on the standards that they themselves maintain today.
We do things that seem run-of-the-mill today but who knows how others might judge us 100 years from now? I hope you’re not famous. Are there statues of you? Is your name inscribed on anything? Good luck.
Wait! I saved the best for last!
The UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library “recognizes that UC Berkeley sits on the territory of Huichin, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people, the successors of the sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and other familial descendants of the Verona Band.” (link)
(“Unceded” is a euphemism for “stolen.”)
In light of this, I can see three options:
- Make a principled decision to bulldoze the entire campus and give the land back to the Indians.
- Every member of the Berkeley community who has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land should remove themselves immediately, and renounce their participation in the theft.
- Every member of the Berkeley community who has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land should continue to make holier-than-thou pronouncements about Alfred Louis Kroeber (and John Boalt and John and Joseph LeConte, and David Prescott Barrows), send them all to Hell, while continuing to ignore any and all facts that might make them personally uncomfortable or culpable.
Caveat Lector (Pinned)
This is not a blog.
It’s a website populated by fictional characters, whose writing should not be taken as expressing the opinion of any real person, company or organization.
It’s a work of entertainment. If you’re not entertained, read something else.
Even when the author of a post is a real person, fact and fiction are intermingled, and are not always clearly labeled, so don’t spend a lot of time trying to figure it out.
Well first of all, tell me: Is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course, none of us are greedy, it’s only the other fellow who’s greedy. — Milton Friedman
Following the Science on D*ck Pics
Recently, mounting anecdotal reports – mostly by heterosexual women on Internet-based dating platforms – have drawn attention to the frequency of men sending unsolicited photos of their own genitals (i.e., “dick pics”).
In a U.S. sample of 2,045 women of all sexual identities and 298 gay/bisexual men, among those who had ever received a “dick pic,” nearly all (91%) had also received an unsolicited “dick pic.”
Women had a predominantly negative reaction to unsolicited dick pics — about 70 percent negative — but the math on that tells us that for every three dick pics you send out, you’re likely to get at least one positive reaction.
I’m not making any recommendations on what you should or should not do, but that’s science, folks, and everybody knows by know that you’ve got to follow the science.
A couple of other findings from the study: older women responded more positively to dick pics than younger women, and almost all gay and bisexual men responded positively.
Hiding the Facts from Readers Is the Opposite of a Journalist’s Job
From the National Review:
As you may have heard [I actually didn’t hear, for reasons that will soon become clear], on Friday night there was a mass shooting in Austin, Texas, in the Sixth Street entertainment district. Fourteen people were shot; as of this writing, one has died. This apparently wasn’t one of those loser-shoots-up-his-school mass shootings, but one of the more common shootings involving “some kind of disturbance between two parties,” as the police put it. So the shooter didn’t kill himself or wait around for the police and force them into shooting him. He fled, and the police, naturally, put out a description of him.
The Austin American-Statesman, the local daily, refused to publish that description. Instead, it put this editor’s note at the end of its report:
Editor’s note: Police have only released a vague description of the suspected shooter as of Saturday morning. The American-Statesman is not including the description as it is too vague at this time to be useful in identifying the shooter and such publication could be harmful in perpetuating stereotypes. If more detailed information is released, we will update our reporting.
Some of you will have guessed that this “vague description” did not involve a MAGA hat or a Confederate-flag T-shirt.
In fact, the description put out by the police was that of a black man with a skinny build and dreadlocks. Vague? Maybe. But nonetheless useful, and the Statesman is obviously wrong — and must know it — to claim otherwise. Black men compose about 4 percent of the population of Travis County. Skinny black men with dreadlocks (or braids — witnesses sometimes say one when they mean the other) make up an even smaller share of the population. In a county of 1.3 million people, eliminating 96 percent or 99 percent of the population is useful.
A suspect, a minor, was arrested over the weekend. A second suspect remains at large as of this writing. The local newspaper won’t tell you the relevant information about him, either.
What are newspapers for?
Newspapers exist to tell people about what is happening. . . .
If you believe that doing good necessitates keeping things from readers — or willfully misleading readers, as the Statesman did — then you have no business being in journalism. You should go do something else — join a cult, or seek out work in Amazon’s book-banning department, which amounts to much the same thing.
There are many complex issues touching the situation of African Americans vis-à-vis crime, police, and incarceration. None of them will be improved by adopting superstitious speech norms that prevent newspapers from reporting the facts about a given crime, including descriptions of the suspects. And the silly way the Austin American-Statesman did it — Gee, I wonder which stereotype was on their mind? — is as destructive as it is ridiculous. They may as well have written: “He’s black, okay? According to the description, anyway. You’re thinking he is, we know you are, and we’d rather not talk about it, so don’t make a big deal about it, alright?”
If you think the way to address our thorniest and most sensitive problems is to not talk about them — and to go out of your way to hide unwelcome facts related to them — then, for goodness sake, don’t become a newspaper editor. Go sell hotdogs.
