November 2008
30 posts
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“I will be continue shopping (sic—he’s French) because shopping is part of life. ...”
– Jean Roukoz, average Westerner, and Steven Santiago, average American, as told to the NYT. (reblogged from catalogue)
Cultural automata.
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Black Friday
Consumerism in America hits its yearly peak today. Corporations are flooding our senses with highly selective and irrational advertising pitches. When not flashing and re-flashing scenes from “Terror in India” (the latest real-world movie airing on 24-hour cable news stations), much of the media is obsessed with cheerleading the shopping crowds and projections. More buying equals a...
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WatchIf you can stomach more absurd contradiction, this video fills out the Sarah Palin turkey incident a bit. Note that Palin calls herself a “friend to all creatures great and small”. Stay with it to the end for a poignant last shot.
Video via Anchorage Daily News
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Thanksliving
Matthew, Sam, and I traveled to Woodstock, NY, over the weekend to attend the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary’s annual ThanksLiving dinner/fundraiser. The event was sold out, and was by all accounts a great success. (Well, maybe not all accounts: my raffle ticket losing streak continues.)
A few celebrity vegans attended and spoke, but the rescued animals living at the farm were the stars...
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Banshees apparently do exist
The very important and serious Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute, which exists to prop up and celebrate conservative women, puts out a calendar every year, apparently.
Well, the unbearable wait for the latest installment is finally over. To give you a taste, here is the new Miss September — a heavily made up, airbrushed, and somewhat de-alien-ified Ann Coulter:
You can gag at the rest...
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Waxman wins
Progress.
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Consider the fall of the Berlin Wall commemorated.
Thanks to Klee and the people at Hi Christina for hosting us.
Photos by Klee and Jeremy.
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One confused DJ
You may have heard over the weekend that an animal rights activist threw flour on Lindsay Lohan outside a Paris nightclub Friday night.
As anyone who’s ever seen the incredibly disturbing videos of fur farmers caging, electrocuting, and skinning other animals alive knows, wearing fur for pleasure is either incredibly ignorant or profoundly vain. In comparison to those true horrors, Ms....
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Show this Sat, 11/15 @ 11pm
Our friend Klee is hosting a party commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall, complete with W. Berlin, E. Berlin, and a Berlin Wall to graffiti up and tear down. Plus, we’ll be playing a just-confirmed set at 11pm. Awesome.
DETAILS:
November 15th, 2008, 11pm (party starts at 9). “Hi Christina” Performance Art Space.
154 Orchard Street (mezzanine level) between Stanton and...
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UN scientists are party poopers
The world is having a totally crazy civilization party, and everyone’s invited!!!* “Noxious cocktail” drink specials as the night goes on!!!
*Some restrictions apply. “Everyone” may not actually mean you. Non-humans must somehow please humans to be potentially allowed in, and only some will get in alive (many others will be tortured, killed, and eaten). In addition,...
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SCOTUS majority: Marine life doesn't count
The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 today that the navy’s use of sonar in training exercises should not be restricted to prevent likely serious harm to marine mammals, who rely on undisturbed perception of sonar frequencies to communicate and survive.
The overall public interest tips “strongly in favor of the Navy,” [Chief Justice John] Roberts wrote.
Roberts’ vision of the...
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“…where I’m from, this is going to give them the right to be more...”
– Gail McDaniel, resident of Vernon, Mississippi, voicing her heightened fear of black people now that Obama is President-Elect, as quoted by the NY Times. The article explores the American South’s declining power and influence in national politics, a reality from which I derive much pleasure.
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Messaging
Meat = Flesh.
Meat-eating humans ~ Convention-obeying humans.
Convention-obeying humans = Zombies.
Meat-eating humans ~ Flesh-eating zombies.
No offense.
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Both surreal and unsurprising
An election that produced the first African-American president-elect also saw blacks in California vote 70-30 to deny marriage rights to gays, according to exit polls.
Homophobia is generally understood to be relatively pervasive throughout the African-American community, particularly in the black church tradition, so this is not exactly unexpected. Yet the complete internal contradiction of...
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The right choice
It turns out Obama really was the change candidate after all.
The other guy said he was going to cut some earmark spending, so it got confusing for a while.
(Article via SusanG)
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“The more we act with indifference and cruelty, the more pervasive and defining...”
– Gene Baur, in his recent book Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food.
Today only, you can download it for FREE.
H/t to Catalogue.
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“I am the luckiest girl in the world but am sad because African- Americans are...”
– Britney Spears, on stage at a Madonna concert.
Britney, I welcome your meaning, but please leave the sound bites to the folks who don’t make you and your co-believers sound stupid. Thanks!
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"Stop the violence"
From the NY Times:
Here in the cartel country of Sinaloa State, not far from the Sea of Cortez, [the hunters] had been promised some of the most bountiful bird grounds in the world. They had been told of abundant mourning and white-winged populations, mostly virgin each autumn, cast in flight against mesmerizing landscapes through the temperate winter passage.
Drawn for generations to the...
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Waxman challenges Dingell
Politico reports that Rep. Henry Waxman of California is angling for chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The current chairman, democratic Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, is basically a tool of the Detroit auto companies — who have repeatedly obstructed more stringent pollution regulation and refused to build more efficient cars — when it comes to energy and...
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Messaging
Leather = Skin.
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“When Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal [environmentally...”
– Barack Obama, as recorded by reporters for Newsweek’s Special Election Project at some point during the primary campaign. For once I’m not going to try to conclude exactly what he meant, in order to thereby determine whether or not his thought is sensible. But I’m mildly surprised...
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Robert Kennedy Jr. may head Obama's EPA →
Kennedy is an interesting figure, and maybe too much of a head-butter for Obama’s tastes.
But whether it’s Kennedy or someone else, it sure will be nice to have someone who actually cares about the environment leading the EPA for once.
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PROP. 2, QUESTION 3 PASS
Gestation crates, veal crates, and battery cages are illegal in California after 2015, while greyhound racing is illegal in Massachusetts.
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Putting the "lame" in "lame duck"
One of the great joys for me over the past several months has been to watch America finally wake up to the incompetence — both practical and mental, each extraordinary even when compared with the typical humanist tragedy — of the Bush Administration. This in turn has revealed the one thing that could get BushCo down about themselves: social rejection, middle school-style.
The guy who...
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Who gets taxed most?
For all the talk about taxes this election cycle — reinvigorated in the last few weeks by Joe (actually, Sam) the (unlicensed) Plumber’s inane and ill-informed “confrontation” of Senator Obama in Ohio — there is at least one form of taxation that hasn’t been mentioned by either candidate:
Human civilization regularly taxes tens of billions of its non-human...
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“One significant if gruesome study found that the leg-muscle tissue of laboratory...”
– Gretchen Reynolds, in a NY Times article about stretching.
“Significant if gruesome”? Ripping the muscles of rabbits to see how far they can stretch — all in the name of science, eh?
The religious nuts have a rare point when they say that science lacks morality. Many scientists...