I think I'm in love with Justine Lai.
This is a bit of her 'Join or Die' series. In her words:
"In Join Or Die, I paint myself having sex with the Presidents of the United States in chronological order. I am interested in humanizing and demythologizing the Presidents by addressing their public legacies and private lives. "
(you can read the whole statement here)
I feel like I should be writing about the 'new era' ushered in today, with Obama's inauguration. Or maybe about the end of blackest era in american politics since McCarthyism. About how history must remember George W Bush as what he is, the worst president in american history, at least in terms of negative effects and failures.
But you know, I kind of feel like that job is getting done.
Meanwhile, it's all about me.
I'm starting my back piece at noon tomorrow. And I can't wait.
I don't expect to have much to post. This is going to take a long time, and we're not going to rush it. I don't like sitting for more than two or three hours when I'm getting tattooed (the endorphins run out after two and I start getting fatigued). This will be months in the making, then.
I don't know what part we're going to work on tomorrow. But the rough sketch I saw last week was fantastic. Klem understood exactly what I loved about the source drawing, and exactly what needed fixing, and nailed it all effortlessly, working together original feel with modern, personal touches. So whatever portion we attack is going to be great.
George Clinton, as usual, was thirty years ahead of the rest of us.
Click the image to play, if you didn't get the embedded player - props to m'man Carlos for this.
Lyrics after the cut.
America's fraud-in-chief is finally gone, eight years after he stole a presidency he never won. Eight years too late, with a legacy of death, tragedy, hatred, and economic ruin, we walks away a free man.
History will remember him - because we must not be tempted to forget - as one of the worst disasters every to attach itself, parasite-like, to the white house.
History will remember a stolen and fraudulent election, a series of disasters (natural and man-made) ill-handled, and willfully squandered goodwill. It will remember cronyism, wars fought over nothing, thousands of lives lost for nothing, and billions squandered and wasted. History will remember a death toll, a cost of billions, and and a smoking ruin of an economy.
Were the universe a fair place, we would now jail him for his crimes, and then he would look forward to a burning hell for the next thousand years.
Osama Bin Laden's death toll pales before that of George W Bush; who's the better extremist now? Who wins? Osama lives in caves and hides. Our outgoing president will carry an honorific and a pension and the titular respect of a nation. Yet he's done more damage to freedom and world peace than a dozen bin ladens could hope for, and he's done it in plain sight.
But I do not believe in a fair universe. I see one random and capricious, un-caring and utterly un-interested in tiny human inventions like good and evil.
The deserved punishment, then, can only be in how we remember. Because history is written by the winners, and the last four years of american history is an epic, resounding FAIL.
I hold hope, however.
I am not Barack Obama's greatest fan; we have profound philosophical differences. But he has the makings of a good president. He carries with him a kenedy-esque fervor and charm, much as Bill Clinton did sixteen years ago. Yet he lacks Clinton's smugness, and, if we can believe what we see, he also lacks Clinton's weakness as a leader.
The jury is far, far out on Barack Obama. He is un-tested, un-tried. Yet I cannot recall a man I've seen take office, since I first became aware of politics in 1972, about whom I've felt a greater sense of hope. He has an advantage no one since Ford has had; that is, following a leader universally reviled. But unlike Ford, who fell into leadership, Obama was chosen by a significant majority.
Certainly, many of those votes were not for, but against. They were cast against McCain's loose-cannot Behavior, his age, his anger, his obvious failure to understand the profound failure of the last eight years. And many more cast a vote against Sarah Palin, who single-handedly set women in politics back a decade or more. Those votes were not cast for a dynamic young black man, they were cast against a creepy old white one. So the landslide we saw cannot be credited entirely to Barack's dynamic speaking and appearance of leadership.
Still - he looks, already, the very image of a world leader.
He's earned an unenviable job; much like whomever is hired to coach for a disasterous team like the oakland raiders, he may have a swamp too deep to drain in the years he'll be given.
Personally though, in a month of absolute misery, this one thing feels like hope.
First, the truth of the last eight years needs to be written down. Not the populist lies, as became Reagan's legacy, but the hard, brutal, un-varnished truth. Katrina's wake, filled with talk, but not action or money. 9/11, to which we responded by stealing civilil rights, alienating the world, and then marching forth under a crusader's banner to take back the oil-laden holy land. A banking system in it's worst state since the great depression. And an election system, once trusted world-wide, now the subject of universal suspicion.
There are a hundred, a thousand more; some we know, some, certainly, only to be learned later if at all. But the hard truth needs to be set down now, while it's fresh, and while we hold hope. Otherwise we risk the rosy polish of a political machine, leaving our children with a notion that the last eight years were some heroic stand against an imaginary them.
Our teenagers must be taught to think, to read, to act politically. I see their fervor on facebook and myspace; they're flush with a battle won. But NOW is the time to instill memory of the battles lost. In four, or eight, or twelve years, they'll be casting ballots, and they must learn now, that today's world is entirely the result of ballots mis-cast in the recent past.
Get out and vote.
Your voting stub is your bitching licenses; if you're not making a move for change, you're outside the process, and you got no business bitching about how it all comes out.
I know I have readers outside the US; and sure this isn't your fight. Still, your friends over here need to vote to make a difference, so tell THEM. Today we can take down the most toxic and corrupt administration ever to squat in the white house, and make a profound change for intellectualism and reason over fear and evil.
My personal stand is at California's Prop 8, which does nothing less than amending the california constitution to facilitate bigotry. It's a profoundly wrong thing, and is a step back twenty or thirty years in terms of cilvil rights. Yet ordinary citizens have been fed lies and believe they're protecting something that's in danger.
This is a truly beautiful rant. It's long-ish but worth listening to every second (after teh cut so save having to load it every time you hit this page)
I submitted this to pundit kitchen. They have not yet posted it, but god knows they should.
IT's funny, because it's true.
BoingBoing posted this spot-on attack on what Fred Amoroso, Macrovision's CEO, calls an open letter to Steve Jobs.
Cory says:
The CEO of Macrovision has sent an open letter to Steve Jobs telling him off for speaking out against DRM. Macrovision is a company that makes abusive DRMs (the system that stops you from hooking up your VCR and your DVD player in series, the system that stops your TiVo from recording "accidentally" crippled Fox shows, etc), that had the great good fortune to get its technology mandated under the DMCA. That meant that it could charge anything it wanted to the entertainment industry for its nonfunctional anti-video-user technology, and it proceeded to hose the living hell out of Hollywood
And then quotes from Amorosos's nonsense:
DRM increases not decreases consumer value – I believe that most piracy occurs because the technology available today has not yet been widely deployed to make DRM-protected legitimate content as easily accessible and convenient as unprotected illegitimate content is to consumers. The solution is to accelerate the deployment of convenient DRM-protected distribution channels—not to abandon them. Without a reasonable, consistent and transparent DRM we will only delay consumers in receiving premium content in the home, in the way they want it. For example, DRM is uniquely suitable for metering usage rights, so that consumers who don't want to own content, such as a movie, can "rent" it. Similarly, consumers who want to consume content on only a single device can pay less than those who want to use it across all of their entertainment areas – vacation homes, cars, different devices and remotely. Abandoning DRM now will unnecessarily doom all consumers to a "one size fits all" situation that will increase costs for many of them.
As Cory says, this is utter nonsense. I don't think even Amoroso actually believes this; the idea that protected media will be cheaper has never been true, and there's no reason to think it will be true in the future.
What he's saying, simply, is this freedom stuff threatens my wallet.
Go check out Cory's post. As usual, he gives brilliant rant.
It's re-posting other people's links day. This one's more serious though.
My brutha-man Ray posted about a video that Gordon Soderberg made about Iraq Veterans Against War and the rebuilding effort in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
It's pretty compelling, and the intro set to Can't Bomb The World into Peace by Michael Franti alone has a huge impact.
Gordon's page on the video is here.
