VAGUE SPACE

You as You Were

I had surgery on my foot on December 7th, which turned out to be my own personal Pearl Harbor.  And yes, I just compared my travails over the past 2 months with the attack that started America's entrance into World War II.  Which might be worse than me weaving the story of my upcoming surgery with a review of 127 Hours. But this is my blog and fuck it, the last 7 fucking weeks have been absolute hell.  So let's just move on.  Shit happens to arlot of people but when you've been relatively healthy your whole life and you're young (or think you're young) you really kind of ignore any sort of "at least you have your health" statement, or at least I did, and I realize this was in some ways elective surgery -- and in retrospect, one of if not the worst decisions I've ever made in my life -- but I just spent the past 7 weeks waking up every day in pain, limping around in pain, drugged up to alleviate the pain, stuck inside, unable to drive, unable to do much more than watch TV or read for many or most of those weeks, not even able to sleep.  But... but, finally, in the past week, the pain has started to go away.

Vote for GOP = Vote for 1%

The title of this post couldn't be more evident than in this chart of the % share of tax cuts by income proposed by each of the leading GOP candidates for president.  Disregarding the economic reality that cutting taxes during a recession is insanely idiotic and goes against every economic principle of every sane human and disregarding what this loss of revenue for the government would do to the deficit that the GOP claims to care so much about (only when they are not in the presidency), what's so tragically sad is that the GOP's plans to revive a failing economy that has only provided wealth for the richest 1% of Americans is to -- get this -- give huge chunks of money to the 1% of us who aren't suffering in this economy and who haven't been suffering and who, in all analyses, helped bankrupt the economy, and who aren't creating jobs in this economy as it is.  Seriously, if you vote for a candidate espousing these beliefs on the most important issue in 2012, you just -- I can't -- there are no words...

■ Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s $18.1 trillion tax plan would give the richest one percent of
Americans an average tax cut of $391,330, which would be over 190 times as large as the average tax cut of
$1,990 that the middle fifth of Americans would receive.
■ Texas Governor Rick Perry’s $10.5 trillion tax plan would give the richest one percent of Americans an
average tax cut of $272,730, which would be over 270 times as large as the average tax cut of $1,000 that the
middle fifth of Americans would receive.
■ Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s $6.6 trillion tax plan would give the richest one percent of
Americans an average tax cut of $126,450, which would be over 100 times as large as the average tax cut of
$1,220 that the middle fifth of Americans would receive.
■ Former Senator Rick Santorum’s $9.4 trillion tax plan would give the richest one percent of Americans an
average tax cut of $217,500, which would be over 100 times as large as the average tax cut of $2,160 that the
middle fifth of Americans would receive.

Some Mitt-specific data after the jump...

Pity the Billionaire

Pity the Billionaire by Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank, the best-selling author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, the book that explores why voters in southern and rural states vote against their economic interests by voting for Republican economic policies, is back with a new book that explores the more recent phenomenon of the Tea Party rise and how the collapse of the economy in 2008 resulted inexplicably in a populist surge that celebrated an extension of free-market policies that actually caused the collapse, instead of a reversal of policies toward more economic regulation, taxation, and governmental intervention as happened after the Great Depression.  For me, this book went a long, long way to explaining this shocking diconnect in American discourse (and worldwide, for that matter, as Europe has followed the same austerity-based destructive path to recovery as we did) and helped explain the "why" of the Tea Party's rise and why there continue to be a large swath of the American public so disenchanted with government that they have actually bought the Republican talking points of lower taxes and less regulations and "job creators" hook-line-and-sinker, even though these prescriptions are in fact anethema to economic growth (because, and I've said this a million times, without demand from the poor and middle class, the job creators ain't going to create jobs no matter how low you make their taxes...)  The book was written before the Occupy Wall Street revolution that came this fall, and if Frank had waited, he would probably say that was exactly the rebellious movement that would have been expected after the collapse of the economy in 2008, the protests against the people and corporations who collapsed the economy, not the protests against the government that the Tea Party represented and that millions of misinformed middle and lower-class Americans continue to thrust their misplaced anger (or on each other, the other poor "living high on handouts with their cell phones and nice sneakers", one of the most BS attack lines created by the wealthy so we don't notice how the government has stacked things so nicely towards them and not the actual poor, who, you know, are fucking poor).  But I think Frank would say Occupy came too late at this point and even as it's changed the narrative of some in the media, it's not enough outrage and, crucially, there's no political party in the country and very few actual politicians (Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are a couple exceptions) who are giving voice to the 99% in the halls of power.  One wonders what it will take to change the narrative or to actually fix things in this country from the state that they are in.  But understanding how we got to this point -- the rise of far-right economic fervor in the face of a massive economic collapse predicated on policies proscripted out of far-right economic theory-- makes this informative book a must-read for all Americans.

Noise

I read Darin Bradley's 2010 novel Noise in a single day, not just because I remain housebound and bored in the aftermath of my hellish foot surgery.  No, I read this book in a single day mostly because it was an incredible read, brimming with imagination and characterization and a distorted vision of our near future, not quite a dystopian story, not quite a zombie tale (there are no zombies) but it reminded me of one of my favorite movies ever, 28 Days Later, in its story of the immediate aftermath of the collapse of society and how "ordinary" citizens like a small group of college kids attempt to survive.  The story is told in first person, by "Hiram", a name the narrator takes as part of the plan to survive, a plan written out by he and his friend "Levi" (nee Adam) in The Book, a Bible of sorts of survival narrative, spelling out what they needed to do before, during, and after The Collapse, written largely from instructions by Salvage, an underground radio and video network using analog signals after the U.S. went fully digital, which has been loudly advocating anarchy and may or may not have actually sparked or perhaps simply prodded The Collapse -- an economic collapse in which the U.S. government was forced to declare bankruptcy, a run on the banks ensues, and then -- basically, according to Salvage, it's every man for himself.  And Hiram and Levi are ready.  A fascinating and thrilling novel I highly recommend.

Hiram is quite an appealing narrator, written in an imaginative style that flips between the chaotic present-day events and flashbacks to key moments of a suburban adolescence that included the Boy Scouts and T-ball and lots and lots of Dungeons & Dragons but which oddly prepared him for the conspiracy theories and the end-of the-world survival instincts that kick in the moment they hear from Salvage that the Collapse has begun.  Passages from The Book - a combination Bible / Constitution / Survival Guide -- mix in with the narrative and help explain the graphic violence that Hiram and Levi partake in, defending heinous acts with a mindset of "us vs. them", "Outsider vs. Group", the theory that when Order collapses, you're going to need to kill and you're going to need to kill "innocents", because if you stop and render help to some poor soul, someone else will attack you to take your stuff.  Of course, the novel brings up doubt as to whether the Salvage edicts in favor of anarchy that the boys are following is a necessary last act of desperation in a world without order or if it helped spur the world without order in the first place.  The details of the story are told in delicate, yet adrenaline-pumping style, and although the transformation of some characters from mild-mannered citizens to cold-blooded killers is probably unrealistic, there is no excess violence for violence's sake and there are consequences to all of their actions, particularly their decision to take a National Guard Humvee by force.  Through it all, in fact, the author spends time to focus on the characters and what they are going through -- particularly Hiram, without any introspective bullshit you'd find in more mainstream tales because - fuck, these kids don't have time for that shit.  The world is coming to an end.

Really, really impressive debut novel.  You'll fly right through it.  I did.  And in the author's notes at the end of the paperback copy I had, Bradley admits that much of the background of the narrator comes from his own life (as is often typical, particularly in a first novel) and that the fictional town of Slade is based on the real city of Denton, Texas.  A city I wrote about on here before.  So that was kind of cool.

• Buy Noise

New Music Tuesday

The Dirty Three has a new album coming out, their first new album since 2005's Cinder, a long break for the Melbourne trio who play violin, guitar, and drums, no singing, just brilliant music, the first and maybe only rock band to feature violin so prominently, or so impressively.  The new album is titled Toward the Low Sun and is coming out in February followed by a tour of Australia and New Zealand in March and some festivals in the UK and Europe over the summer.  No word yet on an American leg.  But here's the first single.

• Download Dirty Three - "Rising Below".mp3

Speaking of great bands with new albums after long hiatuses (hiatii?), Guided by Voices' first album in years (didn't they "retire" not too long ago?) is the first in decades reuniting Tobin Sprout with Robert Pollard and has only been mildly disappointing, as there are actually a bunch of really good throwback tracks, including the masterpiece below.

• Buy Let's Go Eat the Factory
• Download Guided by Voices - "Waves".mp3

Recall Walker

Last winter in Wisconsin, we saw the start of a pushback by the middle class against the rich overlords who had just abducted our government by proxy, a theme that continued later that year on a national level with Occupy Wall Street and all its local derivations.  Finally the Americans who were being hurt by the right-wing policies of our government the past 10 or 30 years (depending on how far back you want to go) were speaking up en masse about the inequality of opportunity and the tilt in our political system that gives all the tax breaks and all the wealth to the people who are already rich and have just gotten richer.  But it all started in Wisconsin, a politically middle-of-the-road cheese-loving state that unwittingly voted in Scott Walker as governor in the tea party wave of 2010 (by a bare margin) and had some severe buyers' remorse almost immediately.  One of Walker's first acts -- with a Republican State Senate and State House eagerly rubber-stamping his actions -- was a massive tax cut for corporations.  His next act -- eliminating 100 years of collective bargaining rights for public employees.  Yeah he also cut education funding by $800M and has tried to gut environmental legislation and tried to supress voters' rights -- you know, standard Republican governing -- but it was the collective bargaining rights for teachers and other public employees that began the outrage, particularly since it was a fight being repeated all across the country.  Ohio recently voted to repeal their collective bargaining elimination law enacted by its brand-new Republican governor.  Indiana is having a fight right at this moment between protestors and Republicans in charge who are trying to pass the "end the rights of all public unions to break them and any and all opposition against GOP corporate power" (in fact, some Republicans are even coming out against Mitch Daniels' draconian bill this week).  In Florida the same fight is happening under its new governor.  A fight between the people and the far-right kleptocrats they (and the rich people supporting them) elected in 2010.  And all of these governors are horribly unpopular, polling at massive unfavorables in their states, and all their policy positions are universally disdained, even among Republican voters.  All kinds of buyers' remorse.  But again, it all started with Wisconsin.  And last week, United Wisconsin handed in 1 million signatures in a petition to recall Scott Walker just a year after he was elected.  Bravo, Wisconsin, bravo.

There are about 4.3 million voting age citizens in Wisconsin.  They got 1 million signatures to recall the governor, or about a quarter of all potential voters in the state.  The million signatures is 46% of the total that actually voted in the election in 2010, or just shy of the 1.1 million that voted for Walker.  Without even an election, he's got close to the number of people who want him out of office as who actually went to the ballots to vote him in just on year ago.  That's how hated this slimy fucker is.  And how dedicated the signature-gathering force was, these dedicated citizens who literally stood out in the freezing cold of Wisconsin the past 2 months and collected 1 million signatures in 60 days to end the reign of this horrible governor. 

This is all on the heels of an impressive reversal of US Senate opinions on PIPA and SOPA by a single day of protest from Wikipedia and Google and other Internet sites.  Seriously, when you think of the great strides that Americans are making to take the country back from the powerful and the moneyed and the downright evil that have controlled our policies for at least the last decade, these past few months are quite heartening to see.  Congrats, Wisconsin.  If it weren't so damn cold there, I'd fly out and give you all a big hug.

Random Music Friday

Song:  "(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan"
Artist:  Dentl (with Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie)
Year:  2001
Album:  Life is Full of Possibilities

In 2001, my interest in music underwent a great and wondrous revival that started with my first listen to Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane over the Sea, continued with my discovery of Modest Mouse and Godspeed! You Black Emperor and by the time the year was over, I was a full-fledged devotee to this thing called "indie rock" that I didn't really know existed before but was alive with incredible music being made by underground bands following the traditions of Superchunk and Pavement and Built to Spill and the Pixies and Guided by Voices, one decade after most of those bands had their start.  And at the end of 2001, there was no band I fell for more than Death Cab for Cutie.  The O.C. was still two years away from premiering and introducing the world to the indie rock underground through Seth Cohen's obsessions with bands like the weirdly named Death Cab for Cutie, but by then I was already a huge fan of their first three albums, including their 2001 release The Photo Album, which might not have been as perfect as We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes but was one of my favorites of 2001/02.  Along the way, lead singer Ben Gibbard appeared on Jimmy Tamborello's 2nd album of electronic stylings under the Dntel moniker, singing the 9th track on Life is Full of Possibilities.  The success of this song led to a full album collaboration between Gibbard and Tamborello where Tamborello would mail electronic beats to Gibbard, who would throw lyrics and sing on top of the tracks and eventually they had enough music for an album.  They called themselves Postal Service in honor of the "old-school" way to exchange data (this was before true Internet file sharing I guess) and that album was called Give Up and became one of the most successful indie rock albums in history, selling over 1 million copies to date on Sub Pop records (the most since Nirvana's debut Bleach) and more by far than any individual efforts by Gibbard or Tamborello at the time.  Death Cab went on to sell-out success as their albums after The Photo Album got less and less interesting and more and more popular among teenage girls, while Tamborello waited until 2007 for a follow-up Dntel release, an incredible album called Dumb Luck that didn't come close to charting.  I lost interest in Death Cab somewhere around 2005's Plans and didn't even buy or listen to a single track from their 2011 release Codes and Keys, certain I wouldn't like it.  I'm not entirely sure whether their sound changed or my interest in their sound faded -- while I still have fondness for the tracks on Something About Airplanes and We Have the Facts..., I don't listen to them much anymore and I can't really say I like The Photo Album anymore.  But I still like the Postal Service, successful album that it was -- "The District Sleeps Tonight" and "Such Great Heights" are really great songs.  And I still love "Evan and Chan".  Too bad Jimmy and Ben have not gotten together for a collaboration since. 

• Download Dntel - "The Dream Of Evan And Chan".mp3

Oh, and there's also Owen Pallet's riff on the track regarding his then-bandmates in Arcade Fire called "This is the Dream of Win and Regine", which remains one of my favorite Owen Pallet tracks.  Of course, Arcade Fire's success eventually enclipsed even the mainstream success of Death Cab for Cutie but somehow they're still great in my mind.  Sometimes not selling out is a good thing for your music.

• Download Final Fantasy - "This is the Dream of Win & Regine".mp3

Paradise Lost 3

HBO aired last week the final part of the Paradise Lost documentary trilogy covering the West Memphis 3 and the murders of Christopher Byers, Michael Moore, and Steve Branch, a trio of 8-year-olds, back in 1993.  The whole sordid affair is a true tragedy on multiple levels -- the unbelievable death of these young boys, the sham of a trial of three teens for "Satan worshipping" that led to their conviction for the boys' murders, and then the gross incompetence and/or malice of a criminal justice system that spent the past 15 years denying the wrongly accused any chance at a re-trial despite the complete lack of evidence and a public outcry over the results after the first Paradise Lost documentary appeared in 1996.  But finally, in August of 2011, after a series of fortuitous twists including new evidence, strident supporters, celebrity involvement -- particularly of Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks -- and most importantly, this movie shows, the election of the original trial judge to the Arkansas State Senate, allowing his position to be replaced by a new judge who didn't feel it as a personal affront to ever grant an appeal to the West Memphis 3, the wrongly accused Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jesse Misskelley, Jr., were finally, belatedly, after 17 years in a prison cell for a crime they almost definitely didn't commit, set free.

SOPA STRIKE

OK, I'm clueless about HTML and website design shit even though I've been blogging for like 6 years now.  I probably should have read a book or something.  But I couldn't figure out how to black out this website for a day to support the strike.  If I could have, this is what you would have seen:

Unfortunalely, as I said I'm clueless, but in case you don't know what's going on, read my post from yesterday or the excellent description by BoingBoing about what we're trying to fight and why:

Boing Boing could never co-exist with a SOPA world: we could not ever link to another website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site. So in order to link to a URL on LiveJournal or WordPress or Twitter or Blogspot, we'd have to first confirm that no one had ever made an infringing link, anywhere on that site. Making one link would require checking millions (even tens of millions) of pages, just to be sure that we weren't in some way impinging on the ability of five Hollywood studios, four multinational record labels, and six global publishers to maximize their profits.

 If we failed to take this precaution, our finances could be frozen, our ad broker forced to pull ads from our site, and depending on which version of the bill goes to the vote, our domains confiscated, and, because our server is in Canada, our IP address would be added to a US-wide blacklist that every ISP in the country would be required to censor.

This is the part of the post where I'm supposed to say something reasonable like, "Everyone agrees that piracy is wrong, but this is the wrong way to fight it."

But you know what? Screw that.

Even though a substantial portion of my living comes from the entertainment industry, I don't think that any amount of "piracy" justifies this kind of depraved indifference to the consequences of one's actions. Big Content haven't just declared war on Boing Boing and Reddit and the rest of the "fun" Internet: they've declared war on every person who uses the net to publicize police brutality, every oppressed person in the Arab Spring who used the net to organize protests and publicize the blood spilled by their oppressors, every abused kid who used the net to reveal her father as a brutalizer of children, every gay kid who used the net to discover that life is worth living despite the torment she's experiencing, every grassroots political campaigner who uses the net to make her community a better place -- as well as the scientists who collaborate online, the rescue workers who coordinate online, the makers who trade tips online, the people with rare diseases who support each other online, and the independent creators who use the Internet to earn their livings.

The contempt for human rights on display with SOPA and PIPA is more than foolish. Foolishness can be excused. It's more than greed. Greed is only to be expected. It is evil, and it must be fought.

SOPA Strike is compiling a list of sites that are also going dark for Jan 18. If you want an Internet where human rights, free speech and the rule of law are not subordinated to the entertainment industry's profits, I hope you'll join us on it.

Go here.  Join the fight by writing your Congressman.  They really do listen, a bunch of minds have already been changed on one of those rubber-stamp style bills that politicians on both sides really haven't read and don't care about but now that we are fighting back, they are taking notice.  The MPAA isn't stopping, though, we need to keep fighting. 

Wikipedia, Reddit, WordPress, et. al. to Go Dark Tomorrow

Some of the most popular websites on the Internet are shutting down tomorrow as part of a nationwide day of protest against censorship online. 

On Jan. 18, the English version of Wikipedia will go down for 24-hours to protest the U.S. anti-piracy laws - Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA). FYI, that's midnight tonight. [...]

Wikipedia joins sites like MoveOn, Reddit, BoingBoing, Mozilla, WordPress, TwitPic and the ICanHasCheezBurger network. Google, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr will not be joining the day of protest, however, all have expressed their stance against the bills.

This action comes on the heels of a tremendous amount of momentum for opponents of SOPA and PIPA. The DNS portions of the bills have been removed, SOPA has been effectively shelved, the White House came out against the bills as currently written, and opposition to PIPA is mounting ahead of a scheduled Jan. 24 vote.

For your reference, SOPA and PIPA were pushed by the large media companies like Universal and Disney and Fox and Warner Brothers (owners of NBC, MSNBC, Fox, FoxNews, ABC, and CNN), among others, to try to stop the piracy of their movies and music on the Internet through draconian measures that would allow a rights holder to get the government to shut down an entire website at its request if a copyrighted material appeared on that site.  The law as written was so ridiculous that little kids singing along to the radio on YouTube or Facebook would be violating it.  But you probably haven't heard anything about it because the major media companies own all the major television news stations (see above) and are the ones pushing this legislation.  Fortunately, blogs and other non-corporate websites like Wikipedia and Google have drummed up support to try to stop this legislation from moving forward.

The passage of these two bills once seemed like a foregone conclusion. However, a transpartisan tech coalition has fomented a widespread online revolt that might result in not just the defeat of SOPA and PIPA, but also in the emergence of a powerful new constituency that will play an important role on all future public policy affecting the internet.

Please, contact your senators and tell them to oppose PIPA.

10:19 AM PT: Google will not be participating in the blackout, but will have an action link on its homepage.

10:57 AM PT: A complete list of websites participating in tomorrow's blackout can be found at sopastrike.com.