mushinnoshin

@AuntB pointed out this revealing article. Apparently xenophobes protesting whenever the scary foreign people want to build a new church is a proud Rutherford County tradition:

This plan to construct the county’s first Catholic Church was the target of a local KKK protest march. Woods was only 7 or 8 years old when he and his brother watched the “torch light” KKK march through downtown Murfreesboro.

This wins the internet for the whole year, and it isn’t even April yet (via Mack)

Where ya been, guy? Well, anyway good to have you back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBuG2TdgMn0

Basically, it’s 140 to 1, and he mops the floor with them all, including local favorite nitwit Marsha. Basically, don’t bring a knife to a gunfight, and don’t use “truthy” talking points to attack a guy who actually knows what the fuck he’s talking about.

so here we go;

sorry I haven’t written much here lately. I have no greater excuse than simply not having been in the right frame of mind.

Well. Don’t know when I’ll be back, but I’m here. And it’s Saturday night, after Christmas. It’s been a decent one. Thursday with the dad, brother, and brother’s family, at Granny’s house, which Dad has now inherited. I think I hit a home run with the Fart Machine I gave my nephew. And another, with a most politically incorrect documentary in which the esteemed civil libertarian boundary-pusher Larry C. Flynt chronicles the accomplishments and exploits of an Alaskan pin-up queen gone rogue. We’ll leave the rest to your imagination or google-fu.

Saturday, pizza, party, and presents with the sister and her husband, which rocked. Never doubt the badassedness of four fresh diced jalapeños and a smattering of mushrooms taking a Digiorno to the next level, especially when you wash it down with a steady flow of a brew-kit bitter and a back supply of the same brew-kit’s dark ale. We backed the food with the Mr. Hankey’s Chrismas Classics dvd, and the beer with Weird Al’s videos dvd, which culminated in the main event of Christmas at Ground Zero. Then to the living room for presents, with Koyaanisqatsi muted, just for the visual, and the TSO playing on on the PC/stereo. Good Times. As far as the gift, my & my sister and I have this long running calendar gag, and I won’t bore you with the details but I think I rocked it this year.

So then today I guess is xmas for me. Cleaned up from the party, then spent the day in lazy, beer-sipping play and exploration. I finally opened up the School of Rock dvd that’s been sitting on my coffee table for months. I can’t tell you how much I love the hell out of that movie. It’s stupid, it’s sappy, but goddamn it it rocks and I love it. Of course I’ve seen it too many hundred thousand times on TBS, so I didn’t need to watch it, but watched it with the commentary from Jack Black and the director, then went back and just watched the “one hell of a rock show” chapter. Man, for a stupid movie song, they nailed it. Just enough Yes, Kiss, Bowie, and Floyd all mixed up and dished out over a plate of AC/DC — fuck yeah. And yes, I fucking cry every time when Turkey Sub struts up to the mike and belts out loud and clear how happy she is to be who she is in a glorious declaration. And though I’ve got my issues with the keyboard kid — I would have liked to have seen a little less Rick Wakeman, a little more Ray Manerik with a helping of Jon Lord (that just would have been more rock and roll to me) — I understand better after the commentary that yeah, Wakeman was probably the perfect archetype given the actor/pianist’s true to life classical upbringing and utter unfamiliarity with rock. And even still I did always like the somewhat-Wakemanesque, but almost more Come Sail Away-era-Denis DeYoung sounding portamento-drenched monotimbral solo he does there. My kinda shit, actually.

Had an awesome dinner (yellow saffron rice, with red onions, fresh jalapeños, and mushrooms, well seasoned and sautéed with a Morningstar Veggie Italian Sausage, if you give a damn), then put on Naqoyqatsi, another dvd I’ve owned for a while but been waiting for the right time to watch. Except that I still haven’t watched it, I’ve just been listening as I typed this post. Well, it *is* Glass, it needs at least one listen by itself without the visual.

And it just ended. Guess I should grab another beer and watch it for real this time.

I haven’t had much time to pontificate here lately, and haven’t said much about the health care bill, despite it being the only thing anyone’s really talking about.

Anyway, Kevin Carson nails a few key things:

[...] The point, Welch said, is not that a socialized system is better than a private system. The point is that their honestly socialized system is better than our socialized corporate system masquerading as a “private” one. He’d prefer a genuinely free market system to either the French or American system. But enemies of Obamacare need to drop the bullshit about the American healthcare system being “the best in the world,” and defending it as “our free market system.” Anyone with direct experience of foreign healthcare systems will be more than happy to expose such lies.

[...] The fact that we’re dealing in the U.S. with a choice between two or more alternative state-private mixes is one reason I haven’t gotten too worked up about the whole Obamacare debate.

I especially don’t understand why the public option, of all things, is where self-described opponents of a “government takeover of healthcare” chose to draw a line in the sand. [...] the public option would actually have represented a net decrease in statism. The major components of the healthcare “reform” that everyone agreed on were a naked power grab by a state-enforced cartel, forcing the entire population to purchase insurance at cartel prices and taxing the public to buy it for those who can’t afford it. The public option, on the other hand, would have been entirely self-financed after the initial seed money of a few billion, and nobody would have been forced to buy it. But it would have offered price competition to members of the insurance cartel.

The only other thing I’ll say is that I agree with Freddie, I think the Wyden-Bennet plan has a lot of potential, and I’d probably be less ambivalent about the whole issue if that plan was getting more consideration, particularly in its provisions towards getting us out of our employer-based scheme.

Commenter njmccune nails it on the fairgrounds controversy:

If this place had been maintained properly and attention had been paid to landscaping and maintenance it would be a local icon and would continue to operate.

If it was making lots of money and still looked as bad as it does it would be a local icon and would continue to operate.

But it is neither… it is simply a hodge-podge collection of dilapidated buildings on un-maintained property that is at the heart of the blight in South Nashville. It looks like an old shuttered industrial complex badly in need of demolition.

Nostalgia aside… it is time for this property to become a symbol of the resurgence of South Nashville.

And in the category of Most Ludicrous Argument Ever, oh how I wish I had a link, but the current chair of the Davidson County Libertarian Party argues that we have to keep the fairgrounds open because otherwise property taxes in the area might go up. Think about that for a second. Why might property taxes go up? There’s one and only one reason — because property values might go up.

So, apparently Libertarians today believe that government should maintain ownership of rundown property in order to operate a revenue losing business on said property, because otherwise the neighboring property owners might see their property values increase, and that would be a bad thing. Yay for government intervention to make sure we keep our slums intact! Now that’s good laissez-faire capitalism!

Between that and the frothing comments you see on most articles on the subject, what’s clear is that when conservatives are presented a dilemma whereby their self-proclaimed belief in small government and fiscal responsibility conflict with their underlying and deeply psychological fear of change, you can guess which one wins.

Now, all that said, I’m not super keen on having the property sold off to HCA or other private developers. The land is a public resource, and it would be ideal if the site could be re-purposed in a way that benefits all Nashvillians while becoming a vibrant part of a revitalized South Nashville. BUT, we have to work within the parameters available, and when we can’t even get Metro to upkeep the islands in our central intersection (great thanks are due to the neighborhood volunteers doing what they can on their own to keep them looking presentable), hoping for something like a Centennial Park South is probably a pipe dream. But perhaps if some of the land can be sold in order to finance a Brown’s Creek Park project, or perhaps better yet sold on condition of the owners taking on the maintenance of such a park…

Forgotten children, conform a new faith,
Avidity and lust controlled by hate.
[the] never ending search for your shattered sanity,
Souls of damnation in their own reality.

KN@PPSTER writes about the rise of “peckerwood populism” among libertarians (I would go farther and call it the morphing of libertarianism into this movement, as they’ve done their best to drive out libertarianism’s better angels along the way).

Meanwhile, Kleinheider points to a discussion of the rise of pseudo-libertarianism among Republicans now that the GOP is out of power.

I would posit that these phenemomena are related, and converging. I don’t have the time or wherewithall to explore that assertion in depth at the moment, I’m just sticking up something like a post-it note on the topic.

Awesome…

For anyone looking to understand this weird obsession I have with the economics of land and natural resources, and to explore the idea that capitalists and communists are both half-right, both half-wrong, and both making the exact same mistake — well, the bible has always been Progress and Poverty. The awesome part is that now, for anyone not masochistic enough to read Henry George’s 599 page economic treatise, you can now read the cliff notes in a quick 39 page pdf.

via Menace of Privilege

His current woes regarding pay-to-play accusations notwithstanding, those of us who think it’s anathema for the state to commit murder (and unless you think the state is infallible, you can’t escape the reality that it sometimes does) still have to love this guy:

Richardson, a Democrat who formerly supported capital punishment, said signing the bill was the “most difficult decision” of his political life but that “the potential for … execution of an innocent person stands as anathema to our very sensibilities as human beings.”

[...]

“Faced with the reality that our system for imposing the death penalty can never be perfect, my conscience compels me to replace the death penalty with a solution that keeps society safe,” Richardson told a news conference in the state Capitol.

[...]

“If you’re going to put somebody to death, the … criminal justice system has to be perfect, and it isn’t,” he said.

Thanks to jaxn for the alert.

A nice shot across the bow on both geonomic and anti-corporate issues, via The Progress Report:

Today the citizens of Shapleigh, Maine voted at a special town meeting to pass a groundbreaking Rights-Based Ordinance, 114 for and 66 against. This revolutionary ordinance give its citizens the right to local self-governance and gives rights to ecosystems but denies the rights of personhood to corporations. This ordinance allows the citizens to protect their groundwater resources, putting it in a common trust to be used for the benefit of its residents.

(more at afterdowningstreet.org)