Reading the coverage of Ted Kennedy’s death over the last couple of days, I was struck by two things: how much more human Mulroney’s comments are than the terrible statement given by Harper (especially compared to how Harper eulogized Reagan), and how much the surviving male Kennedys look like JFK.
Patrick Kennedy looks just like his uncle John’s portrait.
(Post title appropriated from Jeffrey Zeldman.)
There are a lot of things happening in my life that I’d like to write about, but my heart is heavy and my skin is raw. Instead, I’m going to write about this new contest from Electronic Arts:
Stay classy, EA.
I’ll give you a minute to re-read the ‘How To Win’ section a few times.
That’s right, EA literally wants you to sexually harass the booth babes at Comic-Con. You don’t have to settle for staring awkwardly at scantily-clad flesh and working up the nerve to brush your hand against an ass or two as you walk past them; their employer has actually posted a sexual bounty on them — so please feel free to grab a handful and get your money’s worth! And if your photos are the most ass-grabbingly great (keeping in mind step 3!) you’ll get to take them out to dinner in a fancy limo!
…
Goddamn it if EA isn’t the worst thing to happen to video games since Ultima Online. (Actually, scratch that. They published Ultima Online. I guess they’re just the worst thing.)
Every now and then I think about dropping everything and getting back into the video game industry, but then I am gripped by this fear, this panic, that somehow someday somewhere I would end up working for EA, and that’s enough to shake those dreams from my hair.
…
Oh, booth babes. Have we not yet visited enough ignominy and nerd germs upon you? Truly, you are the most underappreciated of all sex workers.
Corey & Vampirella. photo: roadkillbuddha
Today’s subject: Joe Arpaio!
If you’re lucky enough not to live in AZ, you might not know about Joe Arpaio. He’s the Maricopa County Sheriff signed a promise to serve only one term when he was elected in 1992. He’s still the Sheriff. When it comes to drug warriors, this guy doesn’t mess around. He’s got a self-propelled howitzer with “Sheriff Arpaio’s War on Drugs” painted on it, with some tasteful lightning bolts added for effect.
From a New Yorker profile of Sheriff Joe (pdf):
Arpaio ordered small, heavily publicized deprivations. He banned cigarettes from his jails. Skin magazines. Movies. Coffee. Hot lunches. Salt and pepper–Arpaio estimated that he saved taxpayers thirty thousand dollars a year by removing salt and pepper. Meals were cut to two a day, and Arpaio got the cost down, he says, to thirty cents per meal. “It costs more to feed dogs than it does the inmates,” he told me. Jail, Arpaio likes to say, is not a spa– it’s punishment. He wants inmated whose keenest wish is never to get locked up again. He limits their television, he told me, to the Weather Channel, C-Span, and, just to aggravate their hunger, the Food Network. For a while, he showed them Newt Gingrich speeches. “They hated him,” he said cheerfully. Why the Weather Channel, a British reporter once asked. “So these morons will know how hot it’s going to be while they are working on my chain gangs.”
Arpaio wasn’t kidding about chain gangs. Foreign television reporters couldn’t get enough footage of his inmates shuffling through the desert. New ideas for the humiliation of people in custody–whom the Sheriff calls, with pervasive disgust, “criminals,” although most are actually awaiting trial, not convicted of any crime–kept occurring to him. He put his inmates in black-and-white striped uniforms. The shock value of these retro prisoner outifts was powerful and complex. There was comedy, nostalgia, dehumanization, even a whiff of something annihilationist. He created female chain gangs, “the first in the history of the world,” and, eventualy, juvenile chain gangs.
Joe Arpaio is directly and personally responsible for stillbirths and miscarriages; and the deaths, brain damage, and severe injuries of newborn babies. Women who go into labor while in his jail aren’t allowed to hold or even see their babies after they’re born, even the ones who survive.
Arpaio has a reality show on Fox called “Smile You’re Under Arrest.” The premise of the show is to use big-breasted women and promises of a $300 prize to get people with nonviolent warrants to show up at a nightclub taken over by Joe for this purpose, and filled with paid actors and undercover cops (all at county expense). Then they have to participate- on national television- in either a fashion show or a dancing contest. Joe hides behind a curtain or under a covered table during all this; and after the fashion show or dancing contest is over, he jumps out and arrests them. Meanwhile over 40,000 felony warrants, many of them for rape or murder, go unserved and the homicide rate has jumped 167%. I’m not making this shit up.
( Much, much more, behind the cut… )
(Most of this post is courtesy of SA’s HidingFromGoro. )
Every year, over 90,000 women are raped in the United States.
If you’re an activist (or spend much time around activists), you might know this already. You might even talk about it, argue about why it happens, the effect it has on people, how to stop it.
What is less well-known is that every year, over 140,000 men are raped in the United States.
No one talks about it because it happens inside of prisons. No one cares about it because it happens to prisoners. On the inside, guards use rape (both implied and actual) as a form of prisoner control. On the outside, people joke about it. Worse even, they see it as a form of punishment prisoners should endure, even though rape inside of a prison is an order of magnitude more likely to transmit a disease than rape outside of one.
This is what 140,000 people looks like:
Generations from now, our treatment of criminals will be looked at with the same disgust and horror that slavery is viewed with today, and our society will rightly be condemned as cruel and barbaric for it.
Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan will be ordered to attack opium traffickers and drug facilities when there is proof of direct links to the Taliban, CBC News has learned.
The new order follows a heated debate among NATO allies over whether the attacks could be declared war crimes.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay told CBC News soldiers would indeed target drug traffickers and drug production facilities.
First, using military force on civilian targets — even if you don’t like what they do for a living — is a war crime.
Second, our military is in fucking Afghanistan fighting DRUG DEALERS WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK ASDFKASODFKOAWEF
For the first time in 60 years, police in Iceland have had to use tear gas as protesters riot over the handing of the financial crisis:
(Photos by -alp, hauxon, and vhallgrimsson.)
There were riots in Oakland last night over the New Years Day homicide of Oscar Grant, who was shot by BART transit police at point-blank range in the back while being restrained by officers.
When an unarmed man is shot in the back after police put him face down on the ground, it is the time for authorities to demand action, not patience. Days after the incident, the officer still has not been interviewed. The delay in this critical part of the investigation hints at the callousness to the worth of human life to a public that is all too familiar with racial profiling, police brutality and cover-ups. Whatever the final investigation reveals, the bottom line is that there is never justification to shoot an unarmed person, especially one who is restrained. It is an obvious violation of the most basic human rights standards, and a clear cut abuse of power.
(Photos by Thomas Hawk and The Inadvertent Gardener.)
Incredible photos of the Greek riots:
A statue of Rigas Feraios, a Greek writer and revolutionary who died in 1798, stands vandalized with an anarchy symbol outside the Athens University on December 12, 2008.
Mannequins burn during riots in the northern Greek town of Thessaloniki
(Thanks to a certain rabbit of the night.)
I’ve been hoping for a Liberal-NDP coalition government since Chrétien left office, but I never thought I would actually see it so close to actually happening.
If the opposition comes out on top when the dust settles, we might see a new era of coalition governments in Canadian politics, and — dare I say it — electoral reform to prevent the vote-splitting which allowed the Conservatives to take power in the first place. Blue sky thinking to be sure, but no more than a Liberal-NDP coalition was, five years ago.
I could go on for days about my dream cabinet, or the platform I think we’ll see, but all of that is secondary to what would be the most important consequence of a successful coalition: The destruction of Stephen Harper.
Scott Reid said it better than I would:
Stephen Harper is the most dangerous animal lurking in the jungles of Parliament. He is a threat to the future viability of the Liberals. A blood simple opponent of the NDP and the only serious contemporary challenge to the Bloc Quebecois. Without him, his party is an unlikely combination of Reform Party leftovers, Harris refugees and Red Tory desperates. They don’t matter or even exist without Mr. Harper. So before you think a moment longer, opposition leaders, think on that.
And if that’s not compelling enough, remember: He doesn’t play to win. He plays to conquer. Under his guidance, the public interest is always subjugated to his personal political advancement. And he poisons Parliament with an extreme, bare-fanged breed of partisanship that has no hope of repair until he is banished.
This becomes relevant because suddenly, he is weak. In fact, at this particular moment, he is almost unable to defend himself. Owing to a ridiculously ill-considered act of hubris, he has laid himself vulnerable to his opponents. Their imperative could not be more clear: kill him. Kill him dead. Do not, whatever you do, provide him with an opportunity to extend his hold on power. Because you can be damn certain he will never again be so reckless as to give you a chance to finish him off.
He’s right. Everyone involved has gone past the point-of-no-return; this is uncharted territory, and whoever gains ground will be salting the earth behind them.
restraint.org is a loose collection of writing, links, ravings, photos, news, fiction, and bad poetry by Jairus Khan. This website has been here (off and on) for ten years or so, and was around in various other forms for three or four years before that.
I spend most of my off-hours working (in Ottawa, Canada) to promote underground arts and media, and trying to keep independent music from being smothered by an anachronism popularly known as ‘the industry’. I DJ weekly, promote concerts/festivals regularly, make beep-beep noises in an industrial-metal band, and release CC-licensed albums for my industrial-slash-experimental-electronic project Ad·ver·sary, which sounds something like robots fucking to My Bloody Valentine.
When I’m not working with, promoting, listening to, or writing music, I design very angry websites, flyers, book jackets, and the sort for various arts projects. I supplement my music/design income (roughly enough to buy a pocketful of buttons a month) by developing counter-hacking courses and moonlighting as a web coordinator for the man.
I also bake very tasty cookies.
